In Eric Adams’s waning days as mayor last year, he agreed to a deal with Related Companies, one of the biggest and most powerful developers in New York City, to have taxpayers finance a $2 billion platform over a Manhattan rail yard to support mostly luxury housing.
But the agreement was only as good as the mayor’s commitment to it, and his successor, Zohran Mamdani, had been noncommittal as a candidate. Now, as mayor, Mr. Mamdani is signaling that he does not consider the project a particular priority.
A spokesman for the mayor said that the administration was “not actively engaged in negotiations to move this project forward at this time.”
The spokesman, Matt Rauschenbach, said on Wednesday evening that the mayor’s immediate goals were “building new affordable housing across the five boroughs, protecting tenants, creating good-paying jobs and building a city that every New Yorker can afford.”
The administration’s tepid view of the $2 billion platform comes as some of the mayor’s closest allies plan to start a campaign to convince Mr. Mamdani to kill the deal.
As part of that campaign, New York Communities for Change, a coalition of 20,000 largely Black and immigrant members who backed Mr. Mamdani when he began his long-shot mayoral campaign, plans on Thursday to endorse City Council candidate Lindsey Boylan. According to Olivia Leirer, the executive director of New York Communities for Change, Ms. Boylan came out against the project in a candidate interview.
Ms. Boylan, who did not respond to a request for comment, also recently won the mayor’s endorsement.
The coalition’s endorsement of Ms. Boylan is part of a larger, multiweek campaign that is expected to involve rallies, news conferences and reports and op-eds critiquing the project.
“We hope and believe that Mayor Mamdani will not want to invest in these kinds of projects, but we also know that we cannot take it as a given,” Ms. Leirer said. “We think that it’s important to elevate this issue and get a commitment from him to not do this.”
The Related deal came together at the tail end of the Adams administration, as the developer searched for a way to fund the costs of a $2 billion platform to complete the second phase of Hudson Yards, a forest of skyscrapers on Manhattan’s Far West Side that now boasts some of the country’s highest office and apartment rents.
Related has spent years trying to solve the platform funding puzzle. Last year, it argued that the only way to build the platform and complete the project would be to use the proceeds from a proposed casino. When neighborhood opposition killed the casino idea, the company turned to the city for help.
Related ultimately succeeded in convincing the Adams administration and the City Council that the expensive platform, and the housing and office buildings that would sprout from it, were only feasible with government support.
The agreement, which came together so quickly that the comptroller’s office complained it was “rushed,” called for a city entity to issue debt for the new development and for Related to pay discounted taxes that would go toward paying down that debt. The expectation was that the development’s property values (and property tax proceeds) would increase over time, and the project would ultimately pay for itself.
Related also agreed to increase the number of below-market-rate apartments it would build from 420 to at least 625, or about 16 percent of the 4,000 total apartments.
But the political environment has changed under Mr. Mamdani, whose ascension was opposed by the company’s leadership, and a new City Council speaker, who via a spokesman on Wednesday said the fate of the project rested entirely with the mayor.
The city routinely subsidizes developments that have affordable housing units, though real estate experts debate whether it makes sense to put so much public money behind Hudson Yards, when more apartments could theoretically be produced elsewhere on a cheaper per-unit basis.
The platform would cover rail tracks from West 30th to West 33rd Streets between 11th and 12th Avenues, with unobstructed views of the Hudson River.
Related’s critics noted that the deal came on top of billions of dollars in existing subsidies for the first half of the Hudson Yards project. They pointed out that Related financed the platform over the eastern half of the rail yards on its own, at a time when the development was more speculative. They balked at the city’s willingness to also cover Related’s rent to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which last year was $36 million and is slated to rise. They also took issue with the notion that the city would assist in the long-promised construction of a school and park on the site.
Alicia Glen, the former deputy mayor for economic development under Mayor Bill de Blasio, argued that the deal’s finances needed to be re-evaluated.
“More low-cost capital should either generate significantly more affordable housing than was originally contemplated or actual revenue to the city if the project is profitable,” Ms. Glen said. “Unless it’s also prepared to share in the upside, the private sector should not expect the public to step in whenever market conditions change.”
The deal, however, is not fully baked. The structure of the agreement requires several approvals from the mayor and from the entities he controls.
Natalie Ravitz, a spokeswoman for Related Companies, declined to comment. But she has argued that the transformation of the underdeveloped site into thousands of homes via a public-private partnership “is not only viable, but proven to work.” She has also said that the subsidies were necessary because city lawmakers requested more housing on the site.
Opponents to the deal strenuously disagree. Sumathy Kumar, the executive director of Housing Justice for All, whose former executive director, Cea Weaver, now works for Mr. Mamdani, said, “New Yorkers are tired of real estate giveaways.” She added, “This past November, more than a million of us voted for a different approach to solving our housing crisis, one that centers the 70 percent of this city that are tenants.”
Ms. Leirer also argued that the deal makes little political sense, given the efforts by Jeff Blau, the chief executive of Related, to defeat Mr. Mamdani last year, and Mr. Mamdani’s democratic socialist ideology, which tends to look askance at such corporate deals.
She said that her group’s pressure tactics were necessary because Mr. Mamdani and his team were “just getting their feet under them and getting their head around all of the different issues that they are needing to take positions on.”
The goal, she said, is to not let this deal “slip under the radar.”
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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