Mamdani, looking to boost number of affordable units, unveils NYC housing tracker

With New York City under one of the nation's most severe housing shortages — a shortfall that is even worse on Long Island — the Mamdani administration is undertaking creative ways to rush new homes onto the market to meet the demand.

Among them: Stacking apartment units atop new library branch buildings, which are on city-owned land; building units within existing green spaces throughout the city’s public housing complexes; and offering the public access to tracking technology to find more affordable places to live.

“We are delivering on a promise of our housing plan block by block,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Thursday, leading reporters and mayoral officials on a double-decker bus tour through the Bronx. The stops are among the more than 100 publicly owned sites that will eventually have 50,000 apartments, including homes just over the Queens-Nassau border, with more to come.

The city, which, with a record-low residential rental housing vacancy rate of 1.4%, trails other large cities, such as Seattle, Boston and Washington, D.C., by permitting a fraction of housing than those cities, despite surging demand, according to a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

On the Island, Nassau and Suffolk permitted less housing per capacity from 2013 to 2022 than all but one county, in Ohio, among the United States' 100 biggest counties, according to Bloomberg News.

The shortages drive up costs everywhere, Newsday has reported, and Mamdani’s insurgent mayoral campaign focused on driving down costs.

Mamdani has built on a signature program of Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, called City of Yes, that will set out to cut red tape and build 80,000 new homes.

Mamdani’s housing tracker, which he announced on the bus, is one of the ways he said the city can help address the shortage. It’s a component of his Block by Block Housing plan, which aims to create more than 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade.

Mamdani stressed the city’s need for more housing and lamented how New Yorkers have left the city for more affordable living elsewhere. “What pushed them to make that decision is that they couldn’t afford the cost of rent,” the mayor said, standing at a lectern on the top level of the double-decker bus.

The units on the tracking technology, called LIFT, or Land Inventory Fast Tracker, displays where housing is being built.

In Jamaica, on Farmers Boulevard, 40 units will be built west of Floral Park, Elmont and Valley Stream. Nearby, in Rochdale, 250 units will be built on Guy R. Brewer Boulevard at Linden Boulevard, which continues into Elmont.

At the libraries, which can get housing at sites that are undergoing major remodeling, are being rebuilt or are not landmarked, there are at least two projects in development, on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Those sites could have as many as 963 apartments once the projects are completed, according to Melissa Grace, a spokeswoman for the New York Public Library. The projects await groundbreaking, but one, in Inwood, has been completed and has 174 apartments.

Building housing on Long Island — affordable or market-rate — beyond single-family houses has long faced hurdles.

That’s especially true for affordable housing, which is typically priced below market rate and draws thousands of applicants for what typically are just a few dozen units at the few locations that wind up being built, Newsday has reported.

Renters typically spend years seeking housing that they can afford.

In addition to rules restricting who qualifies for that housing, there are zoning restrictions, local opposition and high construction costs.

Newsday's Matthew Chayes contributed to this story.