New York is the greatest city in the world. But last year, one in eight public school students was homeless at some point. If we want to live up to our name, we must address the affordable housing crisis.
Working families are being pushed out of the neighborhoods where they grew up. Young people can’t imagine ever owning a home. Every night, 50,000 of our neighbors sleep in shelters, thousands more on the streets. This is what a housing crisis looks like.
Mayor Mamdani just launched a plan to do something about it: Build 200,000 new homes. Protect tenants from eviction. Create pathways to homeownership. Help people get off the street. Invest massively in rapidly-deteriorating public housing.
It’s a good plan, but one thing is missing: a strong partner in Washington to help finance and support it. I’m running for Congress to help him win a city all New Yorkers can afford.
Right now, financing costs are strangling affordable housing construction before it starts, even where developers have the zoning and permits. As comptroller, I issued New York City’s first-ever “social bonds,” generating more than $4 billion to finance more than 15,000 units of affordable housing. So why not do the same at the federal level?
In Congress, I have a plan for the Treasury Department to issue long-term social bonds dedicated 100% to permanently-affordable housing, including new homes for low-income families and a big investment in fixing public housing. I will also push for federal incentives to cut zoning and permitting red tape.
The mayor announced his new plan in Gowanus, and I was proud to give him a walking-tour beforehand. In the City Council, I led the Gowanus Neighborhood Rezoning. Now 8,500 new housing units are rising there, 3,000 of them genuinely affordable to working-class families — a model for the kind of growth New Yorkers deserve: new affordable homes, small businesses, open space, arts space, infrastructure investments, and environmental cleanup.
As part of that rezoning, we won $200 million to fix up every nearby NYCHA unit, because building new homes means nothing if we keep losing the ones we have. In his new plan, the mayor is committing more than $5 billion to renovate NYCHA citywide. But repair needs are far larger than that. My federal social bonds proposal can provide tens of billions more.
When Signature Bank failed and 35,000 affordable rental units were suddenly at risk, I led the investment consortium that saved them. As comptroller, I also established the first-in-the-nation “Responsible Property Management Standards” for investor-owned housing, creating strong nationwide tenant protections. In Congress, I will fight to make those standards national, covering housing backed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or HUD.
Finally, we must show up for those school kids sleeping in shelters, and for all our unhoused neighbors. Federal “housing first” vouchers helped cities across the country end veterans street homelessness. But thousands of people with serious mental illness are still sleeping on our subway platforms and sidewalks, and Washington has done nothing. My Street-to-Home Voucher proposal would bring the same housing-first model to unhoused Americans — roughly 2,500 vouchers for New York City and 70,000 nationwide. The scale of suffering is enormous. The solution is not.
Our mayor needs an ally in Washington, not an adversary in his own backyard. Our current member of Congress wouldn’t even endorse Zohran when he was the Democratic nominee for mayor. He takes money from the private equity firms driving up the cost of housing. He is a creature of our rigged, unaffordable system. The affordability crisis calls for change.
In Congress, I will be the housing champion New Yorkers need to win a city that everyone can afford.
Lander is running in the Democratic primary for the 10th congressional district covering parts of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan.