New York City’s Mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, will be leaving his modest rent-stabilized apartment in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria for the palatial Gracie Mansion shortly after he is sworn into office in January.

In a post on X Monday morning, Mr. Mamdani, 34, posted a photo of a miniaturized Gracie Mansion from the New York Botanical Garden’s Holiday Train Show, calling it “our new home” for him and his wife, Rama Duwaji. 

“This decision came down to our family’s safety and the importance of dedicating all of my focus on enacting the affordability agenda New Yorkers voted for,” Mr. Mamdani said in an accompanying statement. 

He will be leaving his $2,300-a-month, one-bedroom Astoria rental, which he found on StreetEasy in 2018 while earning $47,000 a year as a foreclosure prevention housing counselor. His cohabitant, the fiercely anti-Israel Ms. Duwaji, whom he met on the dating app Hinge in 2022 and married earlier this year, makes a comfortable living as a working artist.

“I was looking for an apartment that I could afford on my own,” Mr. Mamdani, who also owns a verdant four-acre, $250,000 property in Uganda, said of his Astoria apartment during an interview with the New York Editorial Board in February. 

Mr. Mamdani’s parents, Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani and the celebrated filmmaker Mira Nair, also own a luxury estate in Kampala, Uganda, where Mr. Mamdani was born and raised until moving to New York City at age seven. Ms. Nair also owned a Chelsea loft that she sold for nearly $1.5 million in 2019. 

Rent-stabilized apartments are somewhat unique to New York City’s Byzantine real estate system. Under state law, apartments that are rent-stabilized (usually apartments built before 1974, which is a majority of NYC apartments) can only see their rents increased each year by an amount approved by a city board.

During the mayoral race, his opponent, Andrew Cuomo, proposed creating “Zohran’s Law” to prevent “high-income” individuals like Mr. Mamdani, who earned $142,000 as a New York State Assemblyman, from occupying rent-stabilized apartments. 

“My priority, always, is serving the people who call this city home. I will be a mayor for the line cooks on Steinway, for the children swinging at Dutch Kills Playground, for the bus riders waiting for the Q101. While I may no longer live in Astoria, Astoria will always live inside me and the work I do,” he said in his statement on Monday.

Very few American cities have official residences for their mayor. Gracie Mansion, situated in Carl Schurz Park, in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood, the 11,000 square-foot residence has been the official home of New York City mayors since Fiorello H. La Guardia moved there in 1942.  The only New York mayor in recent history who did not live at Gracie Mansion, Michael Bloomberg, New York’s richest man, chose to remain in his own mansion uptown and use Gracie Mansion for formal events.

As residents of the Upper East Side, Mr. Mamdani and his wife will be living in a neighborhood that, in 2023, had the 4th highest median income in New York, according to the NYU Furman Center. Though the neighborhood has long been known as the home of some of the country’s wealthiest residents, the high density of apartments in the eastern part of the neighborhood — which includes many small, rent-stabilized homes — brings down the average income.