Zohran Mamdani is making a big bet on turning city-owned property into affordable housing.
The New York City mayor plans to oversee the construction of 200,000 affordable homes across the five boroughs. It’s a significant undertaking that will require new builds, hotel and office building conversions, and widespread rezoning.
To control costs and limit red tape, the Mamdani administration is encouraging new development on existing public land, like converting libraries into mixed-use buildings or building on unused parking lots. If successful, a supply boom could help lower-income New Yorkers access housing and put downward pressure on overall prices.
The administration’s goal is to identify public sites to support at least 25,000 new affordable housing units over 10 years. Ten projects — which are likely to yield a few thousand apartments — are currently in planning and development stages.
Building on city-owned property is “not a silver bullet,” said Jake Krimmel, senior economist at Realtor.com. But it’s one lever City Hall can pull.
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City-owned land could be a piece of the affordable housing puzzle
A majority of New Yorkers spend more than 30% of their income on housing, the threshold economists define as unaffordable. Business Insider has heard from single moms who moved in together to save on rent, parents who are making just above the threshold for benefits, and six-figure earners struggling to make ends meet.
The city owns and leases a staggering amount of land, but not all of it is suitable for housing. “A lot of the city-owned land is not necessarily the easiest thing to build on because of zoning rules or parcel sizes and shapes,” Krimmel said.
An analysis by the New York University Furman Center found that about 10,000 of the 15,000 plots in NYC’s portfolio are currently zoned for residential use. A third of city-owned lots are overseen by the Department of Parks and Recreation, suggesting they may already be in use as parks, open public spaces, or sports facilities.
Buildable space is also a consideration. Krimmel said a very limited number of vacant lots in the city clear both the size and zoning bar for housing. That means the city will need to get creative with existing developments; Krimmel suggests stacking housing on top of civic buildings where possible.
He added that a public land construction push won’t solve all of NYC’s housing woes, but “if you’re trying to make good policies, you need to leave no stone unturned.” The city turning to existing public land is a great idea, he said, though selling it to developers for affordable housing use could be another financially-smart option.
“The city has valuable assets on its books,” Krimmel said. “The question is whether it deploys them by building itself or whether it attaches affordability requirements, upzones, and lets other developers carry the financing and operations.”
To reach its goal of 200,000 new affordable units, the Mamdani administration will also need support and resources from City Council, Albany, private developers, and taxpayers. As my colleague Juliana Kaplan reported, part of the reason New York is so expensive is it’s a desirable place to live — which is unlikely to change anytime soon.
The Mayor’s Office hopes its proposed rent freeze, universal 2-K childcare program, fast and free bus pitch, and other affordability initiatives will help lower New Yorkers’ cost of living in the meantime. These initiatives go hand-in-hand with housing access, the mayor said.
As he told a crowd in Queens last month: “We will no longer speak in the language of promise. We will speak in the language of the present. We will build more homes.”
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