Five ways to make Zohran Mamdani’s housing plan even better

Zohran Mamdani, a State Assemblymember from Queens, has won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. His platform includes rent freezes for 2 million New Yorkers in rent-stabilized apartments, 200,000 new affordable housing units, fare-free buses, and municipal grocery stores. Mamdani supports the creation of a new Social Housing Development Authority in Albany that would use state capital to finance public and cooperative housing. 

A detailed map by The New York Times showed that the renter class predominantly voted for Mamdani, a socialist, while homeowners and landlords favored Andrew Cuomo, who lost by a substantial margin in rank choice voting, despite generous backing from Trump donor Bill Ackman, former mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the real estate lobby more broadly. Mamdani’s victory has already been hailed as historic, and a bellwether for the future of U.S. politics.

AN spoke to Mamdani and other New York City mayoral candidates last November about how they plan to fix the housing crisis, and then again in April, when it came to light that Cuomo used Chat GPT to write his housing plan. In The Nation, leading economists recently endorsed Mamdani’s affordability plan, which emphasizes the need for social housing and rent freezes. 

Below are some other good ideas for the Mamdani campaign to consider in the run-up to the general election in November, where Mamdani will be running against incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, now an independent, and potentially Cuomo should he run.

1. Build Social Housing on City-Owned Golf Courses

Golf courses take up lots of land and drain water, two increasingly precious resources these days. New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander proposed building 50,000 new homes on four of New York City’s 12 municipal golf courses. The idea was met with pushback by conservatives in Queens, and elsewhere.

The proposal isn’t without precedent; it’s been done in Queens already, and it can happen again. Electchester, a trade union-based cooperative housing complex in Queens, was built atop a golf course in 1953, later added onto by Herman Jessor. Today, golf courses around the world are being transformed into nature reserves, and housing campuses. New Jersey is doing it, and even red states like Texas have adopted the concept. 

Should the Mamdani campaign include this in its housing platform, it would certainly put a dent in the 200,000 benchmark number it strives for.

2. Determine “Affordability” Based on Local Median Income, Not Area Median Income

Michael Blake, a former New York state representative from the Bronx, floated another strong and viable idea in his mayoral run. Blake pledged to “replace the outdated Area Median Income (AMI) formula with a Local Median Income (LMI) standard to ensure housing affordability is tied to the actual wages of New Yorkers—not inflated regional averages.”

Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) is the current system, passed by the de Blasio administration in 2017, to ensure that certain amounts of “affordable” units get built in every residential project. With MIH, a 100-unit apartment building will typically have 70 market-rate flats, and 30 “affordable” flats. But what does “affordable” even mean? 

Today, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) bases affordability on area median income, meaning that the median income of the entire Tri-state area is taken into account when determining what an affordable unit looks like, leading to exorbitant rates that most working class New Yorkers simply cannot afford.

Blake’s proposal would shrink this distance to a local basis, a major benefit for the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods, like Blake’s in the South Bronx. This is another idea the Mamdani campaign should consider in relation to its proposal for a “Comprehensive City Plan” that would give the public “a firmer hand in guiding housing development.”

3. Jumpstart “Mitchell Lama 2.0”

Former New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, in his housing plan, supported creating “Mitchell-Lama 2.0,” an upgrade to the 1955 program that provided affordable rental and cooperative housing. Mitchell Lama delivered almost 70,000 cooperative units between 1955 and 1981, such as Co-op City in the Bronx, Rochdale Village in Queens, and elsewhere.

Given federal crackdowns on HUD spending, cuts that will severely impact Section 8 and Section 9 residents, jumpstarting Mitchell Lama is a potentially useful idea from the Stringer platform that the Mamdani campaign should consider. 

Building “Mitchell Lama 2.0” is in line with previous calls for the construction of a new Social Housing Development Authority, a bill rolled out in February 2024 that would empower the state to build copious amounts of publicly owned rental units from Brooklyn to Buffalo using 100 percent union labor.

The Canadian government has dedicated $1.5 billion in federal spending toward cooperative housing. The next mayor of New York City should try and follow suit, despite limited powers at the state level.

4. Save Section 9, and Reject RAD/PACT and the Preservation Trust

RAD/PACT is a NYCHA program that privatizes public housing, as is the case today at Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses. Zellnor Myrie, a fellow mayoral candidate, supported RAD/PACT, as did Andrew Cuomo, and Mayor Adams.

Assemblymember Jessica Ramos of Queens caught flak for endorsing Cuomo after her lackluster performance in the first mayoral debate. But she has, admirably, also taken the staunchest stance against RAD/PACT, which earned her an endorsement from the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club. 

“I think candidates should challenge RAD/PACT and the Trust,” New York City Councilmember Christopher Marte told AN last November. “Human Rights Watch and the Comptroller’s office have done independent analysis on this. A report released not long ago showed eviction is much higher in RAD/PACT buildings than anywhere else in our city, whether you’re a Section 9 tenant, rent stabilized tenant, or market rate tenant. And that should be shocking.”

Marte also said he is “disappointed in any candidate that supports RAD/PACT” and in “any candidate that sees what’s happening at Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses as a gold star example.”

A number of NYCHA campuses have voted against RAD/PACT, including ones in Coney Island and the Lower East Side, at Jacob Riis Houses. It appears the tides are turning against the controversial privatization program, which the Mamdani campaign, and remaining mayoral candidates for that matter, should take into account.

5. Launch a Cooperative Housing Competition for City-Owned Sites

Lander and Mamdani cross-endorsed one another in a sign of solidarity. Indeed, the pair is aligned on many issues. They, along with other local representatives, believe that every residential project that gets built on city-owned land should be 100 percent social housing, rather than a mix of market-rate and affordable housing, like what Myrie, Stringer, and Mayor Adams vie for, albeit to varying degrees. 

The Small Lots-Big Impact competition in Los Angeles, helmed by Dana Cuff at cityLAB, showed what an ideas competition for new housing can look like in a major metropolitan area. Can New York City get behind a similar version for its municipal properties?

A city-wide ideas competition calling upon architects to design cooperative and public housing on municipal sites could go a long way in helping jumpstart the affordability movement, still in its nascency.