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The reason the right are so anti Mamdani is obvious: they don’t want you to see what your tax dollars being put to work the right way would actually look like. Then everyone would want it everywhere. (thelemmy.club)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/workreform@lemmy.world
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[–] 76 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Having trouble finding any real info on this, but it appears that the city isn't actually performing the work, just changing rules and providing incentives to do the conversion.

So the "no cost" is really just that the city isn't paying for it.

https://www.metro-manhattan.com/blog/which-manhattan-buildings-are-office-conversion-candidates-under-mamdanis-housing-first-agenda/

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  • [–] 10 points 2 days ago*

    Seems like the setup is that the developer gets paid back via the market rate housing revenue, while the city gets a guarantee a minimum number of the new residences are rent controlled. So the developer self funds (or take loans) to start the project, it seems. And the city is still the landowner as far as I can tell, so the developer pays the city a share, which is how the city funds getting new office buildings for agencies to replace these.

    https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mamdani-administration-advances-plan-to-build-nearly-4-000-new-h

    I had to dig into what they mean by cross-subsidy to figure that out

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    So do they sell off sections of the building to developers, who do the work and then sell units back to owners at a price cap?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    They rent a building to a property-developer/manager (eg Hines, Douglas Elliman, etc) that converts to residential and rents apt units to individuals, with a guaranteed portion of them affordable and rent stabilized.

    It’s like if the city had a fleet of commercial vans they let a local taxi cab company lease at a submarket rate and convert to taxis. In exchange for the deal on the fleet, the taxi company sets aside a certain number of cabs dedicated to shuttling New Yorkers whose disabilities make public transit hard to use.

    This property development business model is common, as is the affordable housing stock deal developers make with the city for things like tax breaks. What’s unique here is that the mayor’s office addressed the problem of perpetually lagging housing stock creation and skipped past years of slow property development and construction by offering a large building in the city that’s already built and ready to convert to residential. The city will then use the lease revenue to construct a new office. In the meantime, New Yorkers have more places to live.

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