Mamdani will learn that you need to be friends with the people your voters hate to get things done.
Developers are the single most important players in lowering housing costs, but they are part of the "landlord" contingent in voters minds.
If he doesn't learn that, the city is going to be in bad shape. Impossible to get an apartment unless you want to get an illegal sublet at regular old $4500/mo prices.
The market isn't going to function ideally in a place like New York.
In other cities, a significant market-based response to high rents and housing demand is to increase supply with another ring of suburbs. Is there anywhere within reasonable commute radius left to develop around NYC at scale?
Uncapping rents might trigger some refurbishment of idle or marginal space by dangling enough money in front of landlords, but you're not going to pull another 500,000 units out of your rear that way.
We can acknowledge that NYC housing is a finite and desirable resource, but we can also say that we don't want to turn it completely into an auction for the highest bidder. Rent control helps encourage diverse and vibrant communities, part of what makes the city compelling in the first place.
> Is there anywhere within reasonable commute radius left to develop around NYC at scale?
I get the challenge of existing property/buildings other states, etc - but it always seems weird to me that you can have single story buildings less than one mile from Manhattan in Hoboken, etc. (as the crow flies, I get transit, etc).
Feels like the big problem is we can't change anything easily anymore.
Hoboken has the fourth-highest population density of any municipality in the US. Although it is mostly low-rise in character, there aren't many single-story buildings there at all.
A good chunk of Hoboken was originally swampland; you can't exactly put in skyscrapers there. And even if you could, the other infrastructure (roads, water mains, sewers, trains, parking) absolutely could not support that level of development. You would basically need to bulldoze the entire town and build much wider roads etc... which would then cut into how much land could be devoted to housing.
Edit to add: genuinely baffled by the downvote. I lived in Hoboken for 7 years, and regardless of any personal opinions on the pros and cons, the town indisputably has infrastructure problems at its current density level: frequent water main breaks, flooding, over-crowded trains, buses that are too full to take on passengers, sink-holes, constant traffic jams at the few exits to town, double-parking / obstructed bike lanes, waiting lists for municipal garages (one of which is literally falling apart). The density level is objectively quite high relative to the US [1] and it's quite simply factually incorrect to list Hoboken as an example of insufficiently-dense housing in the US.
I did not downvote, but I think your comment is a good example of the "Yes We Can't" feeling that I mentioned in it being too hard to change things.
Manhattan wasn't exactly easy land to build on either.
Manhattan also has an inherent economy of scale that Hoboken lacks; Hoboken is barely over 1 square mile of land.
Meanwhile the lower-rise neighborhoods of Manhattan have roughly the same population density and building height as Hoboken. So why are you calling out Hoboken? What single-story buildings are you even talking about there, and why are you ignoring the presence of single-story buildings in Manhattan? They're rare but they absolutely do exist -- I just ate lunch in a single-story Manhattan building literally yesterday.
Left wing type policies can be very effective at producing housing in places like China where the government just says we are going to have 10,000 flats here and here and maybe contracts the construction to developers but deals with all the regulatory and permitting issues. Even in capitalist places like Singapore and Hong Kong a lot of the housing was built like that.
You build up. Which is expensive, so developers will want assurances and no "20% affordable units" bs.
There also is always going to be pain. NYC has incredible global draw, so demand runs deep. It might be that you can never build your way under $2k/mo apartments there.
A huge chunk of the plan is converting unused office space into housing in Manhattan, mostly in neighborhoods that were already mostly commercial, so there's relatively little NIMBY pushback.
It's easier than most people give it credit for. A lot of the complaints are from attempts to loosen the building code. There's savings of many millions on the table per refit if they manage to pass those, but they're not as needed as people say. For instance you lay down a raised floor to run utilities, and you can push sewer away from the core for relatively cheap and without shared bath/kitchen.
That being said, a return to allowing boarding house style housing would also not be the worst thing in the world for some buildings, and would probably do a lot to reduce homelessness. Hell, if I were still in my early 20s I'd be into the idea of a room to rent with shared bath/kitchen to save some money even not necessarily requiring the reduced in unit amenities.
> unless you want dorms with communal bathrooms and kitchens.
I personally wouldn't want to live in a space like that (maybe when I was younger), but I'm not convinced this sort of thing is so bad. Some people might like it, if it would cost less than a more traditional home.
Others whose housing situation is marginal, or who are homeless, might find it much preferable to the alternative. That's not an ideal reason for doing it, but perfect is the enemy of the good.
> Others whose housing situation is marginal, or who are homeless, might find it much preferable to the alternative
I lived in an illegally-sublet room with no window when I first moved to New York. I worked on Wall Street, and could afford something better. But I preferred to save money versus having a window I would look out of given my work (on the weekdays) and party (on the weekends) schedule.
Communal bathrooms are fine. Communal kitchens are fine; I know plenty of New Yorkers who might occasionally use their hot plate. (This changed post Covid, for what it's worth.)
This has the same energy as "but if you tax the billionaires they'll just leave!"
I say the same thing to that: good. If you don't want to participate in society (or in this case, your job) out of political beliefs, lets get in talent that will.
>Impossible to get an apartment unless you want to get an illegal sublet at regular old $4500/mo prices.
That's already the situation, and that was with a mayor who was openly bailed out by Trump. About as hand rubbing as you can get.
I think that's why these "radical" solutions stick. When you've hit rock bottom, you don't want the status quo.
This is another example of a little radicalism is a dangerous thing. You don't need to be friends with landlords if you're prepared to simply seize all their property.
I'm not sure if he can do that. I feel like eminent domain needs to be performed by a governor or federal. People need to remember that a Mayor isn't a "president of city that can do whatever he wants".
I'm pretty radical myself and I also just don't think it's necessary. There's more than enough unusued buildings to rebuild upon or renovate than a need to seize property. Even a place as dence as NYC still has a lot of land to utilize.
Developers are the single most important players in lowering housing costs, but they are part of the "landlord" contingent in voters minds.
If he doesn't learn that, the city is going to be in bad shape. Impossible to get an apartment unless you want to get an illegal sublet at regular old $4500/mo prices.