Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral inauguration was fast approaching. His closest advisers knew they had only weeks to make their case.
So at the beginning of December, they found themselves working the phones, trying to stop the City Council from passing a series of bills that would shift some of the mayor’s power on housing development to the Council — potentially making it more difficult for Mr. Mamdani to fulfill his promise to build 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade.
The effort created something of a stir in the Council. Many members expected the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, the Council’s chief antagonist, to try to stand in their way. The bills chipped away at housing measures he had successfully backed during the election. But several council members were known allies of Mr. Mamdani. How hard would he move to shut them down?
On Thursday, the bubbling conflict will come to a head, as the City Council meets for the final time this year with a chance to reclaim some of their power over housing. The bills under consideration could make it more expensive to build affordable housing by requiring, among other things, bigger units and cheaper rent just as Mr. Mamdani takes office.
The situation has become something of a test for the mayor-elect on one of his core issues. His team and his allies have made phone calls. They have sent letters. They have debated the bills with housing officials and advocates, according to conversations with more than a dozen council members, housing officials and members of Mr. Mamdani’s transition team. But they have also stopped short of some of the heaviest-handed tactics: During a meeting late last week between Mr. Mamdani and Adrienne Adams, the Council speaker, the bills did not come up as they talked about year-end legislation.
“The mayor-elect has concerns about this legislation, which holds the potential to make it more difficult to build housing at a time when so many New Yorkers are struggling to afford a place to call home,” Dora Pekec, a spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani, said before Thursday’s Council meeting. “He looks forward to working with the City Council to advance the affordability agenda and address the housing crisis head-on.”
The conflict, in some ways, can be traced back to the morning of Election Day last month, when Mr. Mamdani arrived at his polling place in Astoria, Queens. A reporter asked him how he would vote on the housing proposals backed by Mayor Adams, several of which would diminish the power and influence of council members over developments in their districts.
Affordable housing subsidized by the city, in particular, could bypass the City Council’s approval entirely.
Throughout Mr. Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, he had remained mum on his position about the proposals. But he revealed that morning, at the last possible moment, that he would be voting yes, despite opposition from the Council.
“We urgently need more housing to be built across the five boroughs,” he said during an impromptu interview outside the polling place.
The measures passed.
That was the day the City Council “lost a lot of power,” said Councilwoman Sandy Nurse, a Brooklyn Democrat who supported Mr. Mamdani but opposed the ballot measures. It was also the day that she and her colleagues became determined to have the last word, she said.
Benjamin Fang-Estrada, a spokesman for Ms. Adams, said, “The city’s public dollars should be used to support housing development that best meets New Yorkers’ affordability needs.”
With support from the speaker, Ms. Nurse began pushing a bill that would require half of the apartments in developments subsidized by the city to be affordable for lower-income residents, such as a family of four earning less than $81,000.
“We wanted to guarantee deeper affordability,” she said.
Councilman Eric Dinowitz, a Democrat representing parts of northwest Bronx, introduced another bill that would require affordable developments to have a minimum share of two- and three-bedroom apartments.
“This isn’t about power,” he said. “This is about building a city that works for everyone, and right now we are not incentivizing that.”
In Mr. Adams’s City Hall, top officials initially thought the bills had zero chance of passing, according to senior housing officials. Days later, hearings were scheduled. It soon became clear that the City Council meant business.
From the perspective of City Hall, the bills would significantly narrow where and how affordable housing could be built. By requiring bigger units and greater affordability in some cases, it would also make affordable housing development more expensive, especially if the city were to see any federal budget cuts, the housing officials said.
Furious negotiations ensued, including at least four hourlong conversations with Council staff members, where housing officials and advocates pleaded their case. One bill introduced by Councilwoman Crystal Hudson, which would have imposed new requirements on affordable housing for older people, was pulled back. The bills from Ms. Nurse and Mr. Dinowitz were changed slightly, but not enough to satisfy all of City Hall’s demands.
The conversations continued until 11 p.m. last Wednesday, an hour before the bills’ text would be finalized.
“We want deep affordable housing; we want family units,” said Rachel Fee, the executive director of the New York Housing Conference, an affordable housing advocacy group leading many of the conversations. “But legislating these things just boxes in a new mayor, and makes it harder to build an affordable housing plan.”
The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development estimates that even the pared-back bills could add at least $600 million in annual costs, according to internal modeling, translating to more than 3,200 fewer affordable units.
“There is a lot of outreach being done by a number of affordable housing organizations across the city,” said Carlina Rivera, who resigned from the City Council earlier this year and is now the president of the New York State Association for Affordable Housing, a nonprofit trade group. Ms. Rivera is also a member of Mr. Mamdani’s housing transition committee.
Like Ms. Rivera, many of the members of the transition committee are also part of housing advocacy groups. At least 10 of the housing-focused organizations represented on the committee have publicly objected to the Council’s moves, including by signing a letter sent on Tuesday to Ms. Adams.
“Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has proposed an ambitious housing plan that will take record levels of investment,” the letter reads. “But it will also require streamlining processes and finding ways to be much more efficient. We should be looking for ways to make housing production cheaper and to remove barriers and red tape.”
Ms. Nurse, however, disagrees. She pointed to several rezonings, both citywide and in neighborhoods, that the City Council passed over the last few years that would allow private developers to build a lot more housing for middle- and upper-income people.
“We are in a good place,” she said.
As a final twist, the bills’ fates may come down to the current mayor, who has feuded with both Mr. Mamdani and Ms. Adams. The mayor could choose to veto any of the bills before he leaves office at the end of this month, forcing the decision of whether to override the veto onto the next Council speaker, who is expected to be Councilwoman Julie Menin, a Manhattan Democrat.
A spokesman for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Matt Rauschenbach, said the Adams administration would “continue to urge the Council to reject” the bills that impose new requirements on subsidized housing. But he declined to comment on a veto.
A veto could create a whole new set of political considerations for Mr. Mamdani, and for the City Council.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Mr. Dinowitz said.
Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.
Mihir Zaveri covers housing in the New York City region for The Times.
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