Heard Around Town
Cuomo’s housing pitch: ‘Creative’ financing, not a rent freeze
The mayoral candidate and former governor says financing actions in his first 100 days would add 80,000 new or returned units to city housing stock.
Andrew Cuomo held a press conference to tout his housing plan on Tuesday. Annie McDonough
Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo is back with a “first 100 days” plan for building and preserving affordable housing – this time, without any footnotes giving away a chatbot’s research assistance.
A four-page summary handed out to reporters at a midtown press conference on Tuesday runs through several of the independent New York City mayoral candidate’s proposed strategies. Cuomo called the plan the product of creative financing ideas, including bonding more money from Brookfield Place’s extended ground lease at Battery Park City and expanding pension investments into affordable housing.
Aspects of the plan, like using “carrots and sticks” – or subsidies and oversight – to get landlords to bring vacant rent-stabilized units back on the market, are repeated from his housing plan released in the spring. Cuomo said Tuesday that he projects they could bring back roughly 50,000 of the vacant units for $40,000 each.
Altogether, Cuomo said financing actions taken within his first 100 days in office would result in 80,000 new units of affordable housing being developed or brought back on the market.
At the press conference, Cuomo attempted to distinguish his approach from front-runner at Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s marquee housing platform: a rent-freeze for rent-stabilized units. “‘Freeze the rent’ is a fraud on the public,” Cuomo said Tuesday, alleging that Mamdani’s platform is misleading to voters who don’t understand that if a rent-freeze did occur, it would only be for rent-stabilized units, which accounts for just under 1 million units of housing in the city. A spokesperson for Mamdani did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The totality of Mamdani’s housing plan is not just a rent freeze: he has pledged to build 200,000 new affordable homes over 10 years.