The Candidates for Mayor On Housing, Zoning and NYCHA

Early voting is underway. City Limits has the details on where the candidates stand on rent stabilization, affordable housing production, zoning reform, and NYCHA.

After months of campaigning and two heated debates, early voting for New York City mayor is underway.

Housing has taken a central role in the campaign since the primary. Renters, who make up a majority of New Yorkers, have been at the center of the policy debate. Over half of New York renters are rent-burdened, meaning they pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent.

“We see that, especially in the lowest income households, that is where the rent burden is the heaviest,” said Chris Walters, senior land use policy associate at the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development. “But I think this is something that transcends a lot of voters’ and people’s experiences in New York.”

City Limits reviewed the candidates’ plans and watched the debates to tell you where they stand on four key issues: freezing the rent, housing production, zoning reform, and public housing.

Freezing the rent

The mayor appoints nine members of the city’s Rent Guidelines Board (RBG). Each year, its members take into account costs for landlords and incomes for renters and set the allowable rent increases for the city’s 2 million rent stabilized tenants. 

The mayoral candidates disagree about how they would use the RGB:  

• Zohran Mamdani captured the issue early in the campaign, promising a four year rent freeze for rent-stabilized apartments—a move he said will provide relief to millions of New Yorkers who have a median income of $60,000, while finding other ways to help some rent stabilized buildings in distress because of high insurance costs and high property taxes. He says he can appoint a Rent Guidelines Board that will freeze the rent, saying that the data has justified rent freezes in the past. Critics have said that the RGB is an independent body, and the New York Post reported Friday that Mayor Eric Adams can still appoint members to new terms before he leaves office, which could jeopardize Mamdani’s chances of making a rent freeze happen in year one. 

• Andrew Cuomo has said that Mamdani’s rent freeze proposal is not possible, and that it will defund buildings that need higher rents in order to keep up with repairs. He’s also campaigned on a proposal to means-test rent stabilized housing, which would require new rent stabilized leaseholders to have annual incomes so that they are paying at least 30 percent of their earnings in rent.
• Curtis Sliwa wants to get empty rent stabilized units back in use, calling for a vacancy tax on large landlords who he says are holding units off the market (which some building owners say is due to costly repair needs that too-low regulated rents don’t cover). The number of vacant rent stabilized units is disputed, but one recent estimate puts it at 26,000. Sliwa’s website also calls for repealing the 2019 rent laws that increased tenant protections and limited the ways landlords could increase rent or deregulate rent stabilized units (though that’s something state lawmakers would have to take on).

Tenants have been raising the alarm for years about how their income can’t keep up with rising rents, but advocacy groups have also begun to draw attention to significant financial distress in the city’s affordable housing stock.

“We know that people are rent burdened in New York. It’s not very different in the rent stabilized stock,” said the New York Housing Conference’s Executive Director Rachel Fee. “We need to think about additional solutions for these buildings that are in distress.” 

Building new affordable housing

With available apartments at a record low, there isn’t enough housing to go around in New York. At the lowest income, there are even fewer options: just 0.4 percent of apartments priced below $1,100 were vacant in 2023.

“If we want to bring rents down, we need to build more. We need to build more at every income level,” said Fee.

• Mamdani wants to triple affordable housing production and build 200,000 “truly affordable,” union-built apartments. At Thursday’s debate he said he wants those units “built with the median household income in mind, which is $70,000 for a family of four.” He has also called for fully funding the city’s Department of Housing, Preservation, and Development (HPD), to build housing faster and take advantage of programs that create low income apartments for seniors and extremely low income New Yorkers. His plan would require more funding for housing development, which he hopes to get from raising taxes, which would require collaborating with the state legislature and the governor.
• Cuomo has called for building 500,000 units of housing over 10 years, two thirds of which he says will be affordable to low- and moderate-income New Yorkers. He has championed his experience as U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary and building infrastructure, saying that he wants to work with private developers, nonprofits, and unions to start a building boom on thousands of sites right away, including city-owned properties. He has also called for shakeups at HPD to make the organization more efficient and get housing built faster.
• Sliwa’s plan calls for prioritizing housing for seniors and working families instead of “corporate developments.” He has also called for reforming New York City’s property tax system to lower the burden on multi-family housing, and for protecting homeownership and tax increases on working class and senior homeowners. He wants to convert more office spaces to residential, arguing that development should not overburden existing infrastructure, particularly in the outer boroughs. He has not set a housing production goal.

On HPD, Fee added: “I agree that we need reforms at the agency, and I also think we need to add staff if we’re increasing production.”

Changing zoning

Mayor Eric Adams’ City of Yes zoning reform, passed in December 2024, was designed to build “a little more housing in every neighborhood,” by increasing residential density across the city, especially near transit. While it faced pushback in many neighborhoods, experts suggest it will help boost the supply of housing and temper rising rents. This election, voters are also being asked to weigh in on four ballot measures that seek to modify the process for permitting new housing. You can read more about the ballot measures here.

• Mamdani has called for comprehensive planning that would increase zoning capacity, eliminate parking minimums, build near transit, and fast-track review for affordable housing. He has not taken a position on the ballot measures, which would reduce some of the City Council’s power over land use decisions. But in a June candidate questionnaire from the Citizens Budget Commission, he said he wants to “move away from member deference”—when the Council defers to the vote of the local member on projects in their district—in favor of citywide planning that “will allow Council Members to set long term goals for their districts instead of only weighing in” when specific projects trigger public review. 
• Cuomo has called for accelerated residential development in Midtown South (which was recently rezoned to allow for it), manufacturing districts, and other places. He has also called for the expansion of transfer of development rights, which lets owners sell off excess zoning floor area to neighboring lots. He has said that he supports the ballot measures that will fast track affordable housing and create a new review board that can override the Council’s decisions on development projects.
• Sliwa has called for repealing the City of Yes and focusing on local control over development. He does not support the housing-related ballot measures. He has called for increasing office to residential conversions in Manhattan to create new housing, an approach that he says will not overburden the residential neighborhoods in the outer boroughs.

New York’s housing groups are split on the housing ballot proposals. The City Council is firmly opposed, with lawmakers saying it would limit their ability to negotiate neighborhood benefits from developers. NY Tenants PAC said in a statement Monday that the ballot measures will “disempower working class tenants and will accelerate displacement.”

But other housing advocacy groups say it will help empower the next mayor to tackle the housing crisis by making it easier for city agencies to build affordable housing, particularly in neighborhoods where local opposition makes it politically impossible.

“Voters now have a unique opportunity to leverage the power in their own hands to equip the city government with the tools we need to actually solve this problem,” said Amit Singh Bagga who heads the Yes on Affordable Housing campaign and PAC supporting the measures.

Some, like the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development have taken a middle road, endorsing ballot measure two, which creates a fast track for 100 percent affordable housing projects and affordable housing projects in areas of the city that have produced the least. They declined to weigh in on the others. 

“For our interest of increasing the supply of affordable housing and the equitable distribution, we feel like two is the one that speaks most directly to that,” said Walters.

Helping NYCHA

NYCHA, home to almost 400,000 New Yorkers, has a $78 billion backlog of repairs after decades of federal disinvestment. 

Some developments are undergoing comprehensive repairs by converting them from the federal Section 9 program to Section 8 through the city’s PACT and Preservation Trust programs, which you can read more about here.

• Mamdani has pledged to double the city’s capital investment in major renovations for NYCHA, and he wants to push Albany to invest more. He has also called for activating underutilized storage areas on NYCHA campuses, like parking lots, for affordable housing development. He has not weighed in on converting NYCHA to private management under the PACT program.
• Cuomo has called for an additional $500 million in city capital funding for NYCHA (a 75 percent increase). He called for identifying sites suitable for redevelopment for more affordable and workforce housing, or retail and mixed use development. He also proposed investing in management changes to improve safety, governance, and open space. He wants to accelerate conversion projects through PACT and the Trust, while calling for increased resources for Section 9 at campuses where conversion is not a good fit.
• Curtis Sliwa has called for filling NYCHA’s 6,000 vacant units. He has not weighed in on new development on NYCHA land or converting public housing under the PACT or Trust.

Even after a NYCHA building partially collapsed in the Bronx earlier this month, NYCHA has gotten little attention in the mayoral race.

“I actually think it’s really deplorable,” Sharon Stergis, a resident at NYCHA’s Riis Houses on the Lower East Side, said of the scant focus on public housing. “I also think that it’s the way it is basically, you know—that’s how it’s been.”

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact [email protected]. To reach the editor, contact [email protected]

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.