There’s over a dozen candidates vying to replace incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who has dropped out of the Democratic primary. In an effort to stand out, many mayoral candidates are showcasing their bold ideas for solving the city’s housing crisis.
Adams’ massive City of Yes for Housing Opportunity (CHO) proposal, launched in 2023, called for a citywide overhaul of all zoning districts in an effort to produce more housing in every neighborhood. It was met with some pushback from elected and communities, but most agreed that more housing needed to be built citywide and that it was a good idea.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, one of the candidates for Mayor, proposed a complementary City for All housing plan in 2024. Her plan was in response to the Mayor’s zoning proposal to address the “lack” of “affordability, infrastructure, and housing protections”. A modified version of City of Yes and City for All were approved last year.
This year’s mayoral candidates are picking up the gauntlet from the Mayor and Speaker, pitching their ideas for how to accomplish building more housing that people can afford.
“We understand that housing and childcare are the two fundamental expenses that families are dealing with,” said former State Assemblymember Michael Blake, a candidate for Mayor, at his press conference at City Hall on Thursday, April 17.
“From my family to yours, every single day. And so we want to make sure we’re focused on what we’re doing to have truly affordable housing,” he continued.
Blake’s housing plan is called the ‘Welcome Home’ initiative. The plan is to build up to 600,000 more units of housing in the city, under the Mitchell Lama program, with a portion targeted towards returning veterans, recent college graduates, and native New Yorkers. The plan also calls for an end to using credit scores on rent and homeownership applications, replacing the problematic area median income (AMI) with a Local Median Income (LMI) to better reflect a neighborhood’s true cost of living, and raising income thresholds for housing eligibility.
State Senator Zellnor Myrie, also a mayoral candidate, spoke this week about his plan for 100,000 mixed-income housing on public land — part of his plan to deliver one million homes as Mayor. This means repurposing public buildings, like the Inwood Library in Manhattan, to include housing, community services, and social benefits for their residents.
“New York City has dragged its feet and put up artificial barriers that stop or slow down new projects. Meanwhile, publicly-owned buildings are underutilized — and often crumbling before our very eyes,” said Myrie in a statement. “Put simply, the government has stood in the way of opportunities to lower costs and revitalize our communities. I’m here today to say that, when I’m Mayor, things are going to change. Big time. We’re going to be in the business of building.”
City Comptroller Brad Lander, another mayoral candidate, has proposed building 500,000 new units of affordable housing in the next 10 years. This includes building on four of the City’s 12 municipal golf courses and other state and city owned land. His plan also calls for enabling co-living and co-housing models, reviving the original City of Yes proposal and putting it on the ballot to voters, and investing city capital to develop new affordable housing through New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and the NYCHA Preservation Trust.
A huge supporter of a rent freeze, State Assemblymember and mayoral candidate Zohan Mamdani’s housing plans call for 200,000 new publicly-subsidized, affordable, union-built, and rent-stabilized homes over the next 10 years. He wants to expand on housing programs like New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD’s) Senior Affordable Rental Apartments (SARA) and Extremely Low and Low-Income Affordability (ELLA), and rental programs like City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement (CityFHEPS) and Human Resources Administration (HRA’s) Master Lease Program. He’s also proposed building on underutilized areas of NYCHA land, fast tracking planning reviews, supporting climate sustainability and accessibility, and eliminating parking minimums.
Former Governor Andrew Cuomo continues to be a front runner and dominant force in the mayoral race at present, having picked up Adams’ would be votes, according to an April poll from Honan Strategy Group and five New York City Chambers of Commerce.
He recently released a Comprehensive Housing Plan that called for building or preserving 500,000 homes over the next decade by incentivizing the 485-x tax abatement program and leveraging the city’s pension funds as a source of capital, among other things. A few of his fellow candidates immediately banned together to slam Cuomo on his housing record as Governor, and the media highlighted that his housing plan was sourced by ChatGPT.