Feb. 12, 2026 – New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has argued forcefully for an increased municipal government role in the construction of affordable housing and has paired that call with two other principles: (1) more housing should be built independent of, and protected from, the profit motive of a private developer (“social housing”); and (2) government, when it is placed in the role of providing services (including housing), should be able to perform those services not simply adequately but outstandingly.
Some early-days discussion has focused on ideological disagreements as to what public versus private development can achieve (although it seems hard to argue against market failure in the context of a household earning, say, 60 percent of area median income); some on critiques of how much subsidy is actually thrown into the creation of each additional affordable unit; some on the abysmal track record of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA); and some on the question of how much housing volume Mamdani will be able to generate – and an awful lot of attention has been diverted to the war between those trying to freeze rents of rent-stabilized apartments (and insisting all landlords are doing fine) and those seeking rent increases for rent-stabilized landlords across the board (who would set increases as though all landlords – even highly profitable ones – were in distress).
All these questions are important, but I think that perhaps the most important thing – both modest and radical in its way – is proof of concept of things the City either hasn’t exploited fully, hasn’t tried, or hasn’t tried in a very long time. Let’s start with one that is easy in every way (except politically).
Leveraging school property
For all the local politicians talking about looking everywhere possible to find City-owned sites on which to build housing, there is startlingly little talk about looking at a resource available throughout the city: elementary, middle, and high schools. It’s not as if leveraging that property is a brand new idea – the New York City Education Construction Fund (ECF), “as a financing and development vehicle of the New York City Department of Education, provides funds for combined occupancy structures including school facilities in New York City.”
But when you look at ECF’s website, you see only three completed projects since 2000, all in Manhattan. There are also four proposed projects. Neither list shows any project developed or being developed in Queens since the 1974 completion of P.S. 99 in Kew Gardens. The lists show one early childhood center completed in Brooklyn in 1974 and two large projects in the proposed stage in downtown Brooklyn.
Not exactly a robust pace of development.
What is even more striking than the paucity of projects is the extent to which the site-selection process has mirrored the traditional New York City rule of avoiding affordable housing development in resistant and exclusionary areas of white Queens and of white Brooklyn.
New section 197-f of the City Charter, approved by voters last November, creates an affordable housing “fast track” in the “twelve community districts which, during the preceding five years, had the lowest rate of affordable housing development, as measured by the total number of new affordable dwelling units in a community district as a percentage of the total number of housing units located in such community district at the start of each five-year cycle.” In other words, the worst performers. This designation must be made by City Planning, in consultation with the Department of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD) by October.
Not surprisingly, most of these 12 will turn out to be community districts populated by relatively few black New Yorkers.
There can (and will) be arguments about the income mix for the housing element of combined school-housing development (or redevelopment) projects, but surely the Mamdani administration can identify one appropriate such project in each of the resistant dozen community districts (test 1); get at least one to the finish line by the end of October, 2029 (test 2); and have made substantial progress on eight of the others in that time frame (I’m assuming three sites ultimately fall through for reasons good and bad) (test 3).
New or renovated schools are good. New housing, especially including affordable housing, is good. Segregation is bad. This mix should inspire action, not fear and avoidance.
City as developer: trading condo profit for affordable housing units
You can’t help but have noticed over the last dozen years (actually longer, but let’s stick with the de Blasio and Adams administrations), luxury condo after luxury condo going up. What percentage of units are affordable rentals embedded within the condo? Zero. To the extent legislators did not want to provide tax breaks to luxury units in order to facilitate the construction of affordable units, I understand; to the extent that no mechanism was figured out to require a set-aside without subsidy, I don’t.
But, looking forward, there is another way of proceeding, one that I raise in the context of a variety of ideas about financing new housing that are being discussed. (For example, the idea of union pension funds being invested and then for the housing to be available to those union members – an interesting idea, that, unfortunately, depending on the composition of the union’s members, could risk the creation of an illegal racially disparate impact in eligibility for the housing.)
There is nothing, to my knowledge, barring New York City itself from purchasing a site in a wealthier neighborhood that is suitable for luxury condominium development (in some circumstances, the City might have foreclosure or eminent domain opportunities not available to other entities). Let’s say that 70 or 75 percent of those units are in fact sold as market-rate condos. Unlike a developer who is looking to make a windfall, the City is not looking for profit per se. Like the developer, though, the costs of construction are rapidly recouped (or at least the lion’s share given that it’s 70-75 percent of units being sold).
Rather than profit, the City is looking for cross-subsidy. 25-30 percent of units would be owned by the City and would be dedicated to being affordable housing rentals. Tax abatements? Nothing for the market-rate units; completely abated for the condos to be used as rentals. And all cross-subsidy allowing the creation of those affordable units.
A provision of the Real Property Law allows common charges to be lower for the affordable housing units held under a regulatory agreement than those charges are for market-rate unit owners. Having to bear proportionally higher costs is a risk that prospective market-rate units owners would have to consider. In turn, rental charges for affordable units could be set initially to be “actually affordable” (yes, big arguments as to “affordable to whom”), with predictable rental increases over time (sustainable for occupants) built in.
Capital reserves can be created from initial and subsequent market-rate unit sales to handle such building-wide and individual-units capital needs that arise anywhere in the building in the future.
Unrealistic you say? Well, first, it’s simply tapping the power of cross-subsidy, not even getting into the question of other subsidy streams (though foregoing property taxes, even on units used for affordable housing, does obviously impose a loss of revenue on the City.) Second, a design very similar to this was passed into law at the state level last year. The Affordable Housing Retention Act had a different focus: solving the problem in existing buildings of affordable rental units that were not created under a “permanent affordability” model and where the end of the affordability regime was nearing.
The solution, a six-year pilot, traded giving the building owner the ability to more easily convert the building to condo in exchange for the creation of permanent affordable housing for those income-restricted and rent-stabilized tenants already in occupancy who chose not to purchase. I wrote about the new law last Spring.
At the least, this is a promising idea to which the administration should commit (test 4). It should confirm (and enhance, if necessary) the existing legal and regulatory framework under which to proceed (test 5), acquire an appropriate property (test 6), and have shovels in the ground on one such project by the end of October, 2029 (test 7).
Traditional public housing – where it’s never gone before
A disclaimer first. Funding public housing should not be a burden that falls on local governments. This is a responsibility of the federal government that the feds have shirked for decades. An ambitious and praiseworthy sense of municipal responsibility cannot make up for the staggering absence of any federal capacity being brought to bear.
That doesn’t mean we’re stuck sitting on our hands.
But, with the decades-long failures of NYCHA fresh in nearly everyone’s mind, the question is, “How will new public-housing development be different?” More specifically, how will adequate streams of maintenance funding (so new development does not fall into disrepair) and capital funding (one needs to think not about what’s happening to a building’s systems in five years, but in 15 years, 30, 50, 75) be created from the outset? How will the quality of construction be better in the first instance? How will maintenance work (even if funds are available) be handled efficiently and effectively?
One administrative answer is to avoid saddling the new initiative with either the reputational or financial liabilities of NYCHA and for it to become either part of a different City agency or to become a new City agency.
One locational answer retains this article’s theme: build where there hasn’t been building before. If you look at a map of NYCHA developments, you’ll see vast areas of New York City where there are none. This was not an accident.
Go to a community district with zero NYCHA developments and, if the chosen site is in a low-density neighborhood, build a 24-unit development. If the chosen site is in a medium-density neighborhood, build a 48-unit development. Can one of each can be completed by the end of October, 2029 (test 8)?
So, what will the impact be?
Unless the Mayor is interested in gratuitous self-harm, affordable housing development programs begun or expanded during the de Blasio and Adams administrations will continue, perhaps with modifications, but still pumping out thousands of units (not enough, but far from nothing). Other Mayoral initiatives will add to the total. The ideas I’ve been writing about here don’t have the virtue of immediate volume. But they would help break the taboo on where affordable housing is built. And, critically, they would provide proof of concept of what works (or, to take the view of pessimists, what won’t work). One way or another, that will empower whoever is elected in 2029 to have concrete information on which to base a decision to double down on these new initiatives, modify them, or abandon them, as warranted. (Like government is supposed to work over time.)