{"id":92080,"date":"2026-01-07T08:22:19","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T08:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/92080\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T08:22:19","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T08:22:19","slug":"mamdanism-without-guarantees-samuel-stein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/92080\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdanism Without Guarantees | Samuel Stein"},"content":{"rendered":"

This essay is\u00a0part of a series<\/a>\u00a0in which writers reflect on Zohran Mamdani\u2019s inauguration as the mayor of New York City.\u00a0<\/p>\n


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\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Illustration by Stuart Davis<\/p>\n

In an age when all of planning discourse has been reduced to a choice between YIMBY (\u201cyes in my backyard\u201d) and NIMBY (\u201cnot in my backyard\u201d), Zohran Mamdani dodged the binary and offered something different. In his affordable housing plan<\/a>, he criticized the city\u2019s dependence on neighborhood rezonings, which channel growth toward particular locations, while calling for \u00a0more housing development across the board. \u201cFor decades,\u201d his campaign wrote, \u201cthe 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.\u201d And yet a top bullet point in his plan to address affordable housing production is \u201cIncreasing zoned capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n

One might reasonably ask: How can we increase zoned capacity without neighborhood rezonings? The campaign\u2019s answer is \u201ccomprehensive planning,\u201d an alluring and longstanding\u2014if Rorschachian\u2014goal in New York City politics.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

If the details are prosaic, the goals are poetic\u2014yet it is hard to know whether to invest one\u2019s faith in the staid specifics or the soaring generalities. The campaign decried our \u201cdisjointed planning and zoning process\u201d and promised to \u201cproactively plan for the health and needs of the city\u2014in housing, transit, education, and other areas.\u201d Rather than letting developers lead, it pledged to \u201cgive the public a firmer hand in guiding housing development across New York\u201d \u2014language 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s housing promises: \u201ccomprehensive property tax reform,\u201d 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<\/a> to even the burden across city neighborhoods (phasing in increases over time to prevent sudden leaps), and revise the city\u2019s 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\u2019s, 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\u2014but no one can yet say exactly whom or where.<\/p>\n

This contrasts strongly with Mamdani\u2019s pledge of a four-year rent freeze for rent-stabilized tenants. There, it is quite clear who will cheer\u2014every single resident of the city\u2019s 996,000 rent-stabilized apartments\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n

Will Mamdani\u2019s 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\u2019s best interest rather than the developer\u2019s? 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\u2019 behalf? We don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This essay is\u00a0part of a series\u00a0in which writers reflect on Zohran Mamdani\u2019s inauguration as the mayor of New…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92081,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[20624,2907,6721,9,24,11,10,49,51,50,9516,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-92080","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-city-planning","9":"tag-housing","10":"tag-housing-crisis","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-new-york-headlines","14":"tag-new-york-news","15":"tag-new-york-state","16":"tag-new-york-state-headlines","17":"tag-new-york-state-news","18":"tag-urban-planning","19":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}