Mamdani's Comprehensive Affordable Housing Plan Sets Big Goals for New York City

The mayor's Block by Block report approaches lower-cost construction and housing preservation

Lower Manhattan Skyline — Photo by Kidfly182, CC 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Mamdani administration released a 112-page report last month detailing a wide range of strategies for increasing the amount of affordable housing in New York City.

The Mamdani administration is tackling a wide range of strategies for increasing affordable housing in New York City. The Block by Block report released last month announced initiatives but also outlines existing work and ideas the administration hopes to develop. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani hopes the 112-page report moves the needle towards the city’s goal of building 200,000 affordable homes in the next decade and preserving just as many in the same timeframe. For comparison, 28,000 affordable units were created or preserved in 2025, according to the mayor’s management report for that fiscal year.

“This is the most detailed plan that I can remember that the city has put out,” says Jesse Batus, senior vice president of real estate development in New York for The Community Builders Inc., a nonprofit housing developer.

New York City Expedites Affordable Housing Development

Batus says his team weighed in on some of what the report discussed via industry groups, like the Regional Plan Association and the New York State Association for Affordable Housing, that the mayor’s office reached out to for input, adding, “Everything we’ve been hoping for has been addressed here.”

Carlo A. Scissura, president and CEO of the New York Building Congress said, in a statement, its members are ready to with city officials and communities “to move quickly, build boldly, and deliver the homes New Yorkers need across all five boroughs.”

Block by Block outlines a range of tactics for finding the funds and the space, as well as ways to make the construction process cheaper. The report debuted the idea of a publicly-backed fund called the Subordinate Market Rate Revolving Term Loan, the revenue of which the administration says will go towards further housing development. The Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses will be the first to rely on the program, according to the report, though litigation from tenants against the demolition and reconstruction of the NYCHA houses is still ongoing.

The Dept. of Housing Preservation and Development is also giving $1 million to Enterprise Community Partners so that the organization can offer predevelopment aid to faith-based organizations, particularly those that own property with space for housing.

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The administration also wants to build further on the roughly 47,000 acres owned by the city. To speed this process up, NYC HPD will start the Neighborhood Builders Fast Track, which will have a pre-qualified list of community developers and a modified bidding process for particular city-owned sites.

Additionally, a $100 million fund will be set aside for a city-backed insurance program for rent-stabilized homes, a plan that eventually will translate into construction cost savings. “Currently, for every $100 increase in annual insurance costs, the City must invest $1,200 in additional City capital subsidy when completing a new affordable housing project,” according to the report.

Some plans are more niche. The city has bulked up staff in the Asbestos Technical Review Unit, for example, so that candidates for office-to-residential conversion running into the material can move faster through the remediation approval process. Speeding up the Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plan review process also makes it into the document. “Nobody leads with stormwater review as one of their major bottlenecks;” Batus says, but the review process is long enough that it’s one of The Community Builders’ largest concerns as a project gets closer to closing.

The mayor’s office would also like to permit single-occupancy housing again, a kind of unit that city council members introduced legislation to approve last year, along with finding city-owned land that can become staging areas for modular construction.

The report also calls for supporting jobs in construction. Proposals for more city-backed construction will overlap with the Construction Justice Act, a bill passed by the City Council in December—it sets a wage-and-benefit floor of $40 per hour for workers building publicly-funded housing. For projects where the policy will apply, HPD aims to make the expectations of the law clear to developers early on, like during the financing and closing processes. The administration would also like to see city-funded affordable housing use project labor agreements. A working group with the Deputy Mayor for Housing and Planning and the Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice will look into how this might work.

“The implementation of fair wages, family-sustaining benefits, and labor standards on city-financed projects, along with the opportunity for project labor agreements, will help ensure housing development happens efficiently and provide hardworking tradesmen and tradeswomen with more pathways to a stable, middle-class career,” said Gary LaBarbera, president of the NY Building and Construction Trades Council, in a statement. “The Building Trades and our members are eager to work with City Hall, the City Council, and our community partners to continue to play a role in pushing more key projects across the finish line."