Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled “Block by Block,” a 112-page affordable housing plan, in late May, promising what he calls “two of the most ambitious housing targets in modern New York City history”: 200,000 new affordable homes built and another 200,000 preserved across New York City over the next decade.
Mamdani’s executive budget for fiscal years 2026 through 2030 allocates $22 billion in capital funding to back the plan: $7 billion for new affordable housing development, $4.9 billion for preservation, and $5.6 billion for the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), the city’s public housing authority. The plan also promises what it describes as “some of the strongest and most expansive tenant protections” in the United States and a “transformative” investment in public housing.
At 112 pages and eight chapters, “Block by Block” addresses the different constituencies that carried Mamdani to Gracie Mansion: tenants, immigrants, and younger New Yorkers who can’t afford to rent or own, alongside the moderate-income homeowners, labor groups, and developers whose cooperation he’ll need to govern, according to Hellgate’s June 8 analysis of the plan.
Hellgate’s analysis describes balancing those constituencies, during state austerity and federal uncertainty, as a “Philippe Petit-level high-wire act.” The analysis frames the $22 billion figure as a starting point rather than a final commitment.
That capital figure does not include non-capital city contributions such as tax breaks and public land, state and federal subsidies, or the private debt financing that large-scale housing development requires. Hellgate notes that counting apartments not yet built is “a little bit like science fiction,” with too many variables, like tariffs and wars, to accurately predict the near future of apartment construction.
Mamdani would need to win reelection and negotiate a new round of capital funding with a newly seated City Council to finance the plan’s second half.
Hellgate places “Block by Block” in the lineage of New York City housing plans running through de Blasio and Bloomberg, noting that Mamdani’s development and preservation targets are more ambitious than either predecessor set. The analysis’s main critique: the plan does not establish a public development mechanism that could maximize the city’s role in how affordable housing gets built, pointing to Seattle’s nascent Social Housing Development Authority as a model the plan does not pursue. Without something similar, Hellgate argues, New York risks staying on “the hamster wheel of private development that has failed to fully deliver for New Yorkers since Koch’s housing plan.”
Hellgate credits the plan’s emphasis on existing tenants: the renters who organized, doorknocked, and turned out for Mamdani. The analysis identifies this as the innovation: improving conditions for people already in the city rather than centering on development.
Featured image: Courtesy thenyhc.org
