New York City’s deputy mayor for housing and planning, Leila Bozorg, laid out the Mamdani administration’s strategy for confronting the city’s housing crisis in an interview with the news outlet THE CITY, describing an agenda built around new financial tools for developers, changes to land use rules and property tax reform.

Bozorg’s office oversees housing and planning under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on a promise to freeze the rent and who, according to THE CITY’s account of the interview, believes the private sector has a key role to play in building more housing. The deputy mayor framed the administration’s approach as an attempt to make the city more affordable by spurring construction while reshaping the rules that govern where and how new housing gets built.

The administration is pursuing that agenda against what THE CITY described as a severe shortage. The outlet reported that the city is facing a 1.4 percent rental vacancy rate, the lowest since 1968, and that more than half of all renter households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. The administration’s stated goal, per the interview, is to ease those pressures through the combination of developer incentives, land use changes and property tax changes that Bozorg outlined.