Photo: Kena Betancur/Corbis/Getty Images
With only seven weeks to go until Primary Day, ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo holds an enviable lead in the race for mayor. His desperate adversaries, looking for some way to compete, are focusing more and more on what is arguably the city’s single most important political issue: New York’s affordable-housing crisis.
The latest Siena College poll shows Cuomo with support from 34 percent of registered Democrats, nearly 20 points ahead of his nearest competitor, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. Victory is not assured for Cuomo — under New York’s ranked-choice law, candidates must collect enough second- and third-place votes to reach 50 percent — but other candidates are running out of time to catch up.
Cuomo’s rivals have moved from rehashing the controversies that forced him to resign as governor to challenging him on the substance of what the next mayor must do for New York tenants. Cuomo regards housing as one of his strongest areas of expertise — long before being elected governor, he served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Bill Clinton — but other mayoral candidates are tagging him as part of the problem, not the solution.
“Cuomo is bad for housing,” State Senator Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn said at a recent political rally. “This is someone who has eliminated far more affordable housing than he ever created or preserved,” said Brad Lander, the city comptroller. According to Mamdani, “He is working with those profiting from the inequality of today.”
“He touts a 40-year career in tackling this crisis. And yet there is today more homelessness in New York than we have ever had before,” State Senator Jessica Ramos told me. “So I’m here to say that there is such a thing as the wrong experience. Yes, you could have been wrong for 40 years. You could have had the wrong priorities for 40 years. You could’ve had the wrong approach for 40 years. And it’s time for there to be a new era of leadership.”
The rest of the field no doubt remembers the crowded 2013 Democratic primary for mayor, when the candidates competed over who would get the most affordable housing built if elected. Christine Quinn proposed 80,000 units and Bill Thompson pledged to build 120,000. But Bill de Blasio, mired in fourth place well into the summer, surged into the lead and ultimate victory by promising the biggest number of affordable-housing units — 200,000 apartments to be built or preserved over a ten-year period — and offered creative ways to deploy the city’s capital budget, zoning rules, and the assets of pension funds to get it done.
There were a lot of issues at play during that campaign, from the chaotic candidacy of Anthony Weiner to Quinn’s tricky alliance with Mayor Bloomberg, but de Blasio’s pledge to build the most housing unquestionably contributed to his ultimate victory. (And as mayor, he was able to announce that the full 200,000 was financed in 2021, shortly before the end of his second term.)
No doubt inspired by the de Blasio experience, today’s candidates are currently in a bidding war of promises, with Myrie posting the largest pledge: 1 million units over the next decade, 700,000 of them new construction on city land and in a rezoned midtown. Lander’s plan calls for 500,000 units over ten years, with much of the new building happening on four of New York’s publicly owned golf courses.
Mayor Adams is promising 500,000 units over a ten-to-15-year period: More than 80,000 apartments have been funded so far. Ex-Comptroller Scott Stringer’s call for 20,000 apartments in five years translates into 40,000 over the next decade, built with the help of a $500 million revolving loan fund and a “Robin Hood” plan to seize buildings from landlords who fail to keep up their properties. Mamdani wants to build 200,000 over ten years, using a $70 billion bond issue and other public financing.
Cuomo’s housing proposal would build or preserve 500,000 new housing units over the next ten years, using a joint state-city capital fund of $5 billion and $2.5 billion in pension-fund investments, with new units going up in Midtown South and on land owned by faith-based institutions.
In addition to promising a boost in housing production, some candidates are vowing to freeze rents on the city’s nearly 1 million stabilized units. By coincidence, the next Rent Guidelines Board public hearing will fall on June 17 — exactly one week before Primary Day and three days after the start of early voting. That means New York’s high rents will be center stage in the final days before the Democratic nominee is selected.
The rent board recently voted to approve potential increases of up to 4.75 percent for one-year leases and 7.75 percent for two-year leases, with a final decision expected after the June hearing. Credit or blame for what happens will fall on Mayor Eric Adams, who is seeking reelection in November as an independent candidate and appointed seven of the board’s nine members (two are holdovers appointed by Bill de Blasio). Adams has more or less signaled support for a rent hike, though he warned that “an increase as much as 7.75 percent is far too unreasonable of a burden for tenants.”
Several of Adams’s rivals have grabbed the low-hanging fruit of promising to freeze rents. Mamdani was first to make a freeze-the-rent pledge last October. (“It is not inflation that has driven a lot of these policies over the last few years. In fact, what it’s been is mayors deciding whether or not they want to stand firmly with real estate,” he told me.) Ramos and ex-Assemblyman Michael Blake have also vowed to keep rent increases at zero.
That’s a simple way to try and pick up votes. As Cea Weaver, director of the New York State Tenant Bloc, put it, “If Adams won’t freeze the rent, we have the power to elect a mayor who will.”
By contrast, Cuomo has a big enough lead that he doesn’t need to make extravagant promises. His campaign website describes talk of a freeze as “a politically convenient posture, but if landlords — small landlords in particular — do not receive rent increases that reflect their costs, they will be unable to maintain their buildings.” Lander, Stringer, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, and Myrie have all similarly expressed sympathy for renters without committing to a freeze. Ditto for Republican Curtis Sliwa and independent candidate Jim Walden.
But all the big numbers and big promises won’t necessarily get New York out of our current mess. Since the Great Recession in 2008, rents have increased by 25 percent, while incomes went up only by 17 percent, according to the NYU Furman Center. We got a short reprieve that began shortly before the pandemic struck, but the gap between income and rent levels is wider than ever.
And anyone promising to build hundreds of thousands of units will have to address New York’s unenviable spot as the most expensive place to build in America. The $624 per square foot that it costs to build here is more than 61 percent higher than in Chicago and more than double what it costs in Houston. Some of that is inevitable — installing elevators, emergency stairwells, and sprinklers in our vertical city explodes the price of building a high-rise — but getting expenses under control will make all the difference in how many apartments actually get built.
The next mayor will also have to grapple with the ongoing funding issues at the New York City Housing Authority, which needs an estimated $78.3 billion in capital upgrades and repairs over the next 20 years, at a time when federal funding is being slashed. Some smart reinvestment programs like the Public Housing Preservation Trust have created public-private alliances that will provide upgrades to about half of all NYCHA developments, but the Furman Institute estimates there is still no identified reinvestment strategy for 87,000 public housing units that collectively need $40.3 billion in physical repairs.
New Yorkers shouldn’t be fooled by candidates throwing around pretty words and a number on the campaign trail. We are in for a long, hard slog to get out of the city’s housing crisis.
