The Big Apple’s dire need for more affordable housing is one of the top issues on the minds of New York City voters this election year.
The prominent candidates running in the 2025 Democratic mayoral primary have taken notice. Many of them have already rolled out plans to tackle various aspects of the city’s daunting housing crisis, which has seen rents skyrocket and led to a 1.4% vacancy rate.
Some candidates’ plans focus on significantly growing the city’s housing supply, others are geared toward keeping tenants in their apartments, and many seek to accomplish both. Nearly all of their proposals will require a vast amount of buy-in from the City Council, Community Boards, and private developers.
Below, amNewYork Metro breaks down the housing plans of each of the big-name Democratic candidates who have announced them.
Eric Adams
Mayor Eric Adams has not been actively campaigning for re-election thus far. Instead, he has been touting his purported accomplishments from his past three years in office and promising to build on them in a prospective second term.
Adams made tackling the city’s housing crisis one of the central focuses of his first term. Early on in his tenure, the mayor set a “moonshot goal” of building 500,000 new units over the next decade.
Adams’ most significant step toward reaching that goal came last year when the City Council passed his City of Yes for Housing Affordability plan, a massive overhaul of the city’s zoning regulations, which had not been updated in decades. The zoning changes make it easier to build housing in many corners of the city where new development had previously been tightly restricted.
Along with the zoning changes, the council negotiated a $5 billion commitment from Adams’ administration to fund affordable housing construction and infrastructure improvements. The plan is projected to net 82,000 new units of housing over the next 15 years.
After the plan’s passage, Adams called it the “most comprehensive housing reform in the history of the city.”
Adams, in his State of the City speech earlier this month, also pledged to build 100,000 homes in Manhattan over a decade, which would add a new neighborhood roughly the size of the Upper West Side. However, his office did not provide many details on how he plans to reach that benchmark.
Michael Blake
While former Bronx Assembly Member Michael Blake has yet to release his own housing plan, his campaign shared with amNewYork Metro many of the policies he has floated at a series of mayoral candidate forums.
Blake is considering using the “True Cost of Living” rather than the Area Median Income (AMI) to set prices for affordable units, which he says would make apartments more attainable for those in the lowest income groups. Where AMI measures the mid-point of a geographic region’s income levels, the True Cost of Living assesses the amount of income needed to meet the basic needs of a family in a particular area without government assistance.
Furthermore, Blake floated the idea of using vacant city-owned land to build affordable housing, an idea several candidates are considering. He also suggested offering incentives to developers to rehabilitate vacant units and rent them at affordable prices.
The former Assembly Member wants to take a more proactive approach to working on housing policy with Albany lawmakers, who have an outsize say in how and where housing gets built in the city. He wants to host “bi-weekly and bipartisan standing working sessions” with state lawmakers to “fix” laws that have contributed to the city’s housing shortage.
Blake proposed introducing legislation to protect tenants. The legislation would bar property owners from denying a renter’s application for an apartment based on their source of income.
Brad Lander
Current city Comptroller Brad Lander has rolled out three main proposals to address the housing shortage so far, with more on the way, according to his campaign.
One of those plans, dubbed “Safer for All,” is aimed at stemming street homelessness by providing housing for roughly 2,000 severely mentally ill New Yorkers who cycle on and off the streets and subways. Lander’s scheme would use what’s known as a “housing first” model, which would place homeless people with severe mental illness into vacant single-room-occupancy units combined with “wrap-around” support services.
Another one of Lander’s plans, “Homes for City Workers,” would see the city help purchase homes for municipal employees by using its pension funds to pay half the asking price. The program would not require public dollars, Lander argues, because the city pension funds would own half of the homes’ values.
The third idea Lander has floated would be an alternative to current attempts to roll back restrictions on short-term rentals facilitated by apps like Airbnb in the five boroughs.
The proposal, coined “HomeShare NYC,” promises to connect city homeowners who have empty rooms with people who may want to rent those spaces on a monthly basis. The city would partner with “shared housing matching apps” — similar to Airbnb, but geared toward housing New Yorkers instead of tourists — to match homeowners with renters.
Zohran Mamdani
Queens Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist, has made freezing rent increases on stabilized tenants one of the three core pillars of his campaign. In practice, that would mean Mamdani appointing members of the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, the body that controls rent increases for the city’s roughly 1 million stabilized tenants, who would refuse to raise rents during his tenure.
Mamdani is also pledging to build 200,000 new units of housing financed directly by the city instead of private developers over the next decade. He says those homes will be permanently affordable and built with unionized labor.
“This vision puts the public sector first and commits city government to delivering measurable outcomes as opposed to simply relying on the behavior of private developers,” Mamdani told amNewYork Metro.
The Assembly Member also wants to increase staffing levels at the city’s housing agencies and lobby the state to require rent-stabilization of all new housing built in the city.
He says the city could raise the $100 billion necessary to fund the plan by securing $70 billion in municipal bonds. Those dollars would be in addition to the $30 billion the city has already earmarked for housing production.
Mamdani also proposed implementing zoning changes to fill in areas of Adams’ City of Yes plan that he felt did not go far enough. That includes dropping the mandate that developers build new parking with new housing across the five boroughs, as opposed to just in designated parts of the city.
Zellnor Myrie
State Sen. Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn has perhaps the most ambitious plan of any candidate so far to tackle the city’s housing crisis.
Myrie’s proposal, Rebuild New York City, would see the city construct and preserve 1 million homes over the next decade. It calls for using a combination of nine core initiatives to build 700,000 new housing units and preserve another 300,000.
The nine initiatives include upzoning Midtown to build far more housing in the city’s center, constructing “new neighborhoods” on “under-utilized” land, opening up industrial zones “sandwiched” between residential areas for new development, and using funds allocated for new homeless shelter construction to build housing for voucher holders instead.
On a recent episode of the FAQ NYC podcast, the senator said that while some corners of the city may resist new development in their neighborhoods, it is something everyone has to contribute to.
“We all have to share this burden, ” he said. “I’m centering my campaign on housing because we’re gonna have a political mandate to say, this is what the voters elected me to do, and we’re gonna get it done.”
Jessica Ramos
State Sen. Jessica Ramos of Queens has several proposals for tackling the city’s housing shortage, according to her campaign website. However, the lawmaker did not list a target for the number of units she wants to build or preserve and her proposal only outlined topline ideas without going into many specifics.
Among Ramos’ proposals are a “Green New Deal for Public Housing,” making it easier for New Yorkers to own a home, continuing to convert vacant office space into housing, and promoting a model known as module housing. At mayoral forums, she has also floated freezing the rent for stabilized tenants, reforming the city’s property tax system, and building “workforce housing.”
Ramos’ campaign spokesperson said she will soon be releasing a more in-depth housing plan.
Scott Stringer
Former city Comptroller Scott Stringer has a four-pronged approach to addressing the city’s housing crisis.
The first plank of Stringer’s plan, dubbed Mitchell Lama 2.0, calls for building roughly 20,000 units of affordable housing on vacant or underutilized city-owned land over five years. Its name is in reference to the Mitchell Lama affordable housing model, which originated in New York State in 1955.
Mitchell Lama 2.0 consists of an audit of city-owned land to identify properties that can be developed, designating those areas for at least 50% affordable housing construction for low- and middle-income New Yorkers, and fast-tracking those projects to build as quickly as possible.
“We need to have an affordable housing plan that meets the needs of poor people, working people, front-line workers, and this is an actionable plan to take advantage of the vacant lots,” Stringer told amNewYork Metro.
The other three tenants of Stringer’s plan involve using eminent domain to purchase properties from “negligent” landlords; creating a $500 million loan fund for nonprofits and community organizations to build housing; and securing the necessary funding to revitalize the city’s crumbling public housing stock.
