On May 26, New York City’s democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani released his administration’s 100-page Block by Block housing plan. The headline numbers are impressive: $22 billion in capital investments, 200,000 new affordable homes, and 200,000 existing affordable homes preserved. The plan doesn’t mince words: affordability is aggressively and clearly defined as housing that “costs about one-third or less of residents’ incomes.”

The plan provides a detailed summary of the steps the city will take to achieve these goals, which revolve around an “all of the above” approach. Block by Block includes some of the usual suspects, including zoning reform and various private sector incentives. However, these policies, which are frequently centrepieces of Canadian housing initiatives, are treated as supplements to the city’s new, central approach.

The primary method through which affordable housing will be preserved and built is the publicly-owned New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The NYCHA, which is the largest public housing authority in North America, will take on its old mantle and build new public housing on public land. The city expects to add 8,000 new subsidized affordable housing units next year alone. What’s more, the city plans to build new low-cost housing cooperatives designed to create ownership opportunities for citizens. Municipal investment will allow for the repair and modernization of existing public housing stock without passing those costs on to the people who lives in city-owned buildings.

Yet, the primary focus of Mamdani’s plan isn’t developers or new units—it’s tenants. The first section of the policy framework, titled “Empowering Tenants and Strengthening Enforcement,” puts the 70 percent of the Big Apple’s residents who rent front and centre in the city’s vision of the future of........

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