As Andrew M. Cuomo tries to regain his footing in the race for mayor of New York City, he has embraced an increasingly combative approach, sniping on social media at his biggest opponent, Zohran Mamdani, sometimes multiple times a day.
This weekend, that approach drew widespread attention after Mr. Cuomo, the former governor, took aim at a particularly sensitive issue: Mr. Mamdani’s rent-stabilized apartment.
In a post on X that drew more than 26 million views, Mr. Cuomo wrote that “a single mother and her children slept at a homeless shelter” because Mr. Mamdani, a state assemblyman, was “occupying her rent-controlled apartment.” Mr. Cuomo accused Mr. Mamdani of being “rich,” pointing out that assembly members make more than $140,000, and called on him to “move out.”
In replies to his own post, Mr. Cuomo was more inflammatory, calling Mr. Mamdani “disgusting,” and accused the assemblyman of “callous theft.”
Mr. Cuomo was referring to Mr. Mamdani’s one-bedroom, rent-stabilized apartment in Astoria, Queens, which the assemblyman has said he rents for $2,300 a month. Unlike apartments that rent at market rates, rent-stabilized units tend to be cheaper, with regulated rents that have increases limited by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board. Rent-stabilized tenants basically have a right to renew their lease, meaning they can often stay for as long as they like.
The notion that anyone — including wealthy New Yorkers — can secure those coveted apartments has long been a source of controversy in a city in the throes of a housing crisis.
Still, it may have been notable that Mr. Cuomo was the one to deliver that attack on Mr. Mamdani on the subject — Mr. Cuomo is a multimillionaire who moved to the city only a year ago, pays around $8,000 in monthly rent and has a contested record on housing himself.
Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, is the Democratic nominee and front-runner, having handily defeated Mr. Cuomo and others in the primary. Mr. Cuomo is running as a third-party candidate in the general election in November, but so is the incumbent, Mayor Eric Adams.
After facing criticism for his low-energy primary campaign, Mr. Cuomo is trying to convince wealthy donors that he is in the best position to defeat Mr. Mamdani and create pressure for Mr. Adams to drop out.
The post on X, among the most confrontational of Mr. Cuomo’s to date, generated immediate controversy online, drawing thousands of comments from allies of both Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Cuomo. It resonated in a race that has turned in large part on questions of affordability and Mr. Mamdani’s pledge to freeze rents for the city’s roughly one million rent-stabilized tenants.
“It’s good to see you fighting,” Shaun Maguire, a prominent venture capitalist who has attacked Mr. Mamdani, wrote on X, referring to Mr. Cuomo’s post.
The attack and spate of comments that followed came as Mr. Cuomo sought to turn the page on a week that was dominated by questions about his relationship with President Trump. In a closed-door meeting on Wednesday with some of the city’s biggest business leaders, Mr. Cuomo said he was not “personally” looking for a fight with the president and compared their yearslong relationship to a “dysfunctional marriage.”
Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that Mr. Trump and Mr. Cuomo also spoke directly about the mayor’s race on a recent phone call, according to several people briefed on the conversation. Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Trump have denied doing so.
In a statement on Saturday, Dora Pekec, a spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani, compared Mr. Cuomo’s social media behavior to that of Mr. Trump.
“Evidently Andrew Cuomo’s call with Donald Trump was not just to conspire on the New York City mayoral race, but also an opportunity for the disgraced former governor to learn the art of the Twitter crash-out from a fellow corrupt, serial sex-harasser,” Ms. Pekec said. “Cuomo is not only learning from Trump, he’s becoming him — the only thing missing is a red hat.”
In February, Mr. Mamdani told the New York Editorial Board, a group of journalists who interviewed mayoral candidates, that he found his apartment on StreetEasy at a time when he was earning an annual salary of only $47,000. He added that he planned to move out of the apartment.
“In that time since, I’ve become an assembly member and I’m now able to pay for that apartment and able to also move out of that apartment, and I plan on doing so,” he said. “I don’t plan on living in that apartment for perpetuity.”
The post, which Mr. Cuomo fired off just hours before he appeared at a private fund-raiser for his campaign in East Hampton on Friday, one of the state’s richest summer enclaves, drew immediate and forceful blowback from Mr. Mamdani’s supporters.
Brad Lander, the city comptroller and an ally of Mr. Mamdani, said on X that landlords removed tens of thousands of apartments from rent-stabilization, most turned over to market rates, during Mr. Cuomo’s tenure as governor. He added that Mr. Mamdani has been a supporter of building affordable housing, and likened Mr. Cuomo’s attack to “petty bullying.”
Mr. Cuomo has told The Times that he pays about $8,000 in rent each month for his Manhattan apartment. After he resigned the governorship in 2021 at the height of a sexual harassment scandal, Mr. Cuomo moved from the state-owned mansion he had occupied for a decade to live with family in a compound in Westchester County.
The former governor is also closely allied with the city’s real estate development industry, and his campaign has been financed heavily by such groups, many of which oppose rent stabilization and Mr. Mamdani’s pledge to freeze the rent.
In response to questions about the post, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, said that Mr. Mamdani and his campaign had “evaded scrutiny” and that Mr. Cuomo would promote “real affordability.”
Mr. Cuomo offered his own explanation in another post on X, writing: “Welcome to the heavyweight bout.”
New York City’s roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments have become a de facto source of affordable housing.
Tenants tend to be from nonwhite backgrounds and have lower incomes, according to the most recent city housing survey.
The median household income in a rent-stabilized unit was $60,000, according to the data, compared with more than $90,000 in market-rate apartments. The median rent-stabilized monthly rent was about $1,500, compared with $2,000 for market-rate apartments.
Still, there are no requirements for rent-stabilized units to be given first to people with lower incomes. In fact, many rent-stabilized units built in recent years, many under special tax incentive programs for developers, can be quite expensive: The citywide median rent of apartments registered with the state in 2024 was $3,105, according to city data.
Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.
Maia Coleman is a reporter for The Times covering the New York Police Department and criminal justice in the New York area.
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