A long-running campaign fight over New York City’s soaring housing costs reignited this week around an unlikely spark: the $2,300-a-month rent-stabilized apartment occupied by Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor.
It began Friday afternoon, when his leading rival, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, unexpectedly attacked Mr. Mamdani, who makes $142,000 as a state assemblyman, for occupying an affordable unit in Astoria, Queens, that he said should go to a needier New Yorker.
By Tuesday, the broadside had escalated into a multiday war of words that put Mr. Mamdani, the front-runner in the race, on the defensive and highlighted the candidates’ competing visions for how to bring down runaway costs in one of the world’s most expensive cities.
The particulars were bitterly personal. Mr. Cuomo accused Mr. Mamdani of “callous theft” and proposed a new law named after him to means-test who can live in the city’s roughly 1 million rent-stabilized units. Mr. Mamdani called it “petty vindictiveness” and blamed the former governor and the real estate developers who fund Mr. Cuomo’s campaigns for the city’s housing shortage.
Yet the barbs also pointed to more fundamental differences that could shape November’s general election over who should benefit from government regulation of housing costs and assistance to those in need.
A 33-year-old democratic socialist, Mr. Mamdani handily defeated Mr. Cuomo and other Democratic rivals in June’s primary with proposals to raise taxes on the rich to expand the city’s social services. He wants free universal child care, buses that are free for all riders, a rent freeze on stabilized units and new housing construction financed by the city.
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The post Cuomo’s Attack on Mamdani’s Apartment Struck a New York Nerve appeared first on New York Times.
