Mamdani Housing Plan Courts Developers, Targets Landlords

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday introduced a sweeping housing plan that looks to private developers to deliver and rehabilitate apartments while escalating pressure on negligent landlords through new enforcement initiatives.

The housing agenda, a 112-page initiative dubbed “Block by Block,” doubles down on the mayor’s campaign pledge to build 200,000 affordable housing units over the next ten years. The blueprint also details strategies to preserve 200,000 existing homes over the same period as many building owners struggle amid skyrocketing costs.

“This plan meets the housing crisis with the urgency it demands,” said Mamdani during a Tuesday news conference. “We have the resources, the talent and the will to achieve this.”

The two main levers Mamdani is pulling to jumpstart building new housing are land use changes and new financing mechanisms. Under the plan, City Hall will pursue zoning changes to catalyze new development in neighborhoods with some of the city’s lowest affordable housing concentrations, while advancing broader zoning reforms to allow denser apartment construction near transit hubs.

One part of Block by Block is an extension of a 2023 City Council initiative called the Fair Housing Growth Strategy, which aimed to set housing growth targets for every neighborhood. Toward that end, housing officials will rely on a condensed version of the city’s land use reviews to greenlight affordable housing projects approved by voters in November.

Money is another major component of the plan. The mayor’s executive budget boosts housing capital spending by $5.4 billion over the next five years, though the increase still falls well below his campaign pledge to ramp up annual housing investment to $10 billion.

The Mamdani administration will also explore making a new fund to boost mixed-income housing creation. The initiative would dedicate capital funds to attract matching investment into a revolving loan fund to finance “shovel-ready developments that are struggling to assemble the necessary financing,” the housing plan states.

That fund will also assist projects that would not have otherwise been feasible because of difficult or unique site conditions such as odd-sized lots or developments that are on a steep grade. The idea is to offer the financing as an alternative to higher-cost private equity.

In a similar vein, the city on Tuesday unveiled the Subordinate Market Rate Revolving Term Loan for certain mixed-use developments. The SMARRT loan is geared specifically toward developments that would replace NYCHA units through the Permanent Affordability Commitment Together, or PACT, program, a federal initiative to renovate or replace public housing through partnerships with private and nonprofit developers.

Related Companies and Essence Development are poised to become the first recipients of financing from the fund for their controversial redevelopment of the Fulton Houses and Elliott-Chelsea Houses. The city declined to disclose the size of the financing package, which would support the replacement of 2,056 units across 19 buildings in the NYCHA complexes.

Revenue generated from market-rate units would flow back into the revolving loan fund, providing capital for future affordable housing developments, under the structure outlined by the Mamdani administration.

The new financing and land use initiatives to ramp up building come as the Mamdani administration works to grapple with distressed building, in part, by ratcheting up enforcement against “a small group of persistent ‘bad actor’ landlords,” the plan states.

The city’s Housing Preservation and Development will launch the so-called Fix the City initiative later this year to conduct roof-to-cellar inspections scheduled with tenants in targeted buildings and aggressively use the 7A Program, through which the city can initiate legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers from day-to-day management.

HPD will direct its anti-harassment unit to coordinate with Department of Buildings officials and the Law Department to pursue criminal charges and engage with lenders to force compliance or immediately begin foreclosure proceedings when landlords refuse to comply.

This summer, the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants plans to convene industry stakeholders to overhaul the city’s Housing Maintenance Code, focusing on owner transparency and stepped-up enforcement. The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is also expected to push for an expanded list of “rent-impairing violations” that would allow tenants to withhold rent in escrow accounts, alongside a tenant education campaign spearheaded by MOPT.

“We will go after the worst landlords,” said Deputy Mayor of Housing and Planning Leila Bozorg, “because landlords who were notorious to tenant organizers more than a decade ago should not still be neglecting conditions today.”