This essay is part of a series in which writers reflect on Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as the mayor of New York City.
Illustration by Stuart Davis
In an age when all of planning discourse has been reduced to a choice between YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) and NIMBY (“not in my backyard”), Zohran Mamdani dodged the binary and offered something different. In his affordable housing plan, he criticized the city’s dependence on neighborhood rezonings, which channel growth toward particular locations, while calling for more housing development across the board. “For decades,” his campaign wrote, “the City has relied almost entirely on changes to the zoning code to invite and shape private development, with results that can fall short of the promises.” And yet a top bullet point in his plan to address affordable housing production is “Increasing zoned capacity.”
One might reasonably ask: How can we increase zoned capacity without neighborhood rezonings? The campaign’s answer is “comprehensive planning,” an alluring and longstanding—if Rorschachian—goal in New York City politics.
What would comprehensive planning entail? Mamdani calls for upzoning low-density neighborhoods and areas around transit stops, eliminating parking minimums (something the Adams administration attempted but did not entirely accomplish), and advocating for the state to once again place new, tax-incentivized housing under rent stabilization. The first three items are standard liberal planning goals; expanding rent stabilization seems more radical until we realize that this was the practice as recently as 2024, when the state replaced one developer tax break with another and stopped requiring that nearly all of the apartments it subsidized, including the most expensive, be stabilized.
If the details are prosaic, the goals are poetic—yet it is hard to know whether to invest one’s faith in the staid specifics or the soaring generalities. The campaign decried our “disjointed planning and zoning process” and promised to “proactively plan for the health and needs of the city—in housing, transit, education, and other areas.” Rather than letting developers lead, it pledged to “give the public a firmer hand in guiding housing development across New York” —language that could imply either deeper public participation in planning or its opposite: greater latitude for planners to determine what is best for the city. Either way, it promised a break with the status quo.
Just what kind of break, however, remains to be seen. When we discuss comprehensive planning today, we often do so alongside another of the Mamdani campaign’s housing promises: “comprehensive property tax reform,” which would move away from piecemeal tax breaks and rebalance the scales between all property tax classes. Citing severe inequities in the present system, Mamdani promised to even the burden across city neighborhoods (phasing in increases over time to prevent sudden leaps), and revise the city’s formula for assessing condos and coops (which treats such apartments as if they were rentals and assesses them as such, leading to overtaxation in poorer neighborhoods and undertaxation in richer areas). In both planning and taxes, New Yorkers tend to believe they will land on the winning side: that the former will shift development elsewhere, and the latter will lower their bill (or their landlord’s, which is paid with rent money). These programs are popular, in other words, in part because they are vague. Of course, someone must pay more if others pay less, and some neighborhoods must grow if others are reprieved—but no one can yet say exactly whom or where.
This contrasts strongly with Mamdani’s pledge of a four-year rent freeze for rent-stabilized tenants. There, it is quite clear who will cheer—every single resident of the city’s 996,000 rent-stabilized apartments—and who will gripe: every owner of said housing. I can scan through my personal rental history and imagine all my former neighbors who will gain a newfound stability, and all my former landlords who will curse their rent rolls for staying flat month after month.
Will Mamdani’s planning and tax policies rebalance responsibility for growth and revenue, lifting burdens from working-class neighborhoods and tenement housing and placing them squarely on exclusionary areas and private homeowners? And if so, will tenants in areas slotted for growth welcome new construction, trusting that it is in the city’s best interest rather than the developer’s? If their neighbors complain about rising property taxes, will tenants likewise turn against the policy, aligning themselves with the homeowners they might wish to become, or will they side with a mayor who aims to speak on renters’ behalf? We don’t yet know the answers. Perhaps this is the beauty of a comprehensive plan, as well as its humility: it is first and foremost a promise of a process.