A smiling Mayor Mamdani was in full cheerful-salesman mode when he invited journalists to City Hall to discuss “Block by Block,” his administration’s 112-page housing plan, which he describes as “the most ambitious plan for affordable housing the city has ever seen.” Our sit-down took place shortly after a campaign-style rally in Brooklyn to announce the plan. But behind the cheers, slogans, and can-do pleasantries, the mayor is in for a fight.

“We’re talking about 200,000 new truly affordable homes being built over the next ten years; 200,000 affordable homes being preserved over that same period of time; an investment of $5.6 billion into the New York City Housing Authority, the largest city investment in NYCHA in decades,” he told me. “And all of this while investing in tenants across the city, ensuring that code enforcement is not seen as a suggestion, but rather a requirement. That’s what tenants can expect, and they can expect it from a city government that is serious about delivering on the housing crisis.”

Getting 200,000 new apartments built in the next decade will be a monumental achievement; it’s more than the total number of housing units in New Orleans, Cleveland, Tampa, or San Juan. Mayors Mike Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, and Eric Adams made comparable promises, setting the city on an impressive, decades-long building spree that is often taken for granted. More than 34,000 new apartments were completed in the five boroughs in 2024 alone, according to the Furman Center at NYU, the greatest one-year total since 2010.

“Since the early 1990s, we’ve built 700,000 new units of housing,” author Nicole Gelinas told me earlier this year. “700,000 new units of housing is pretty much building an entire city. That’s a........

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