What Trump, the Experienced Builder, Can Teach Mamdani About Affordable Housing at New York City

The surprisingly cordial Gracie Mansion meeting between President Trump and Mayor Zohran Mamdani may have reassured New Yorkers that political differences between the two will not threaten the federal aid on which the city budget relies. Yet for those who see Gotham’s housing crisis as one that government has caused and is not likely to solve, the meeting between Mr. Trump, the experienced builder, and Mr. Mamdani, the housing policy leftist, was a missed opportunity for the president to use his leverage but to push back against the city’s dysfunctional status quo.The discussion between the president and the mayor centered, they said, on Mr. Mamdani’s hope for federal help in realizing another subsidized housing mega-project — an envisioned 12,000-unit complex on the site of the Sunnywide, Queens rail yards. It’s expected to rely on $51 million in federal assistance.Mr. Trump, the experienced builder, advised the neophyte mayor that such plans had been floated for more than 30 years, to no avail. In a post-meeting press conference, though, Mr. Trump, almost as if he were a builder who might bid on the project, went along with the Mamdani view that the project would need federal aid and have to include a variety of “affordable” — that is, income-restricted — apartments.“Well, I know a lot about affordability because I did that housing,” Mr. Trump asserted. “I did many, many low-income and moderate-income buildings over the years and had great success with it. We have, we really were, it was very important. I would think that Sunnyside would have to have a component, at least a pretty substantial component of exactly that. So yeah, we discussed that. If you do Sunnyside, I think you’re going to have to have that kind of a component.”Such is housing in New York, where a handful of big developers accept city tax deals and subsidies in exchange for agreeing to social engineering, in which the government decides who lives where. Mr. Trump himself relied on tax abatements and zoning variances in his role as a builder in such deals as his famous Grand Hyatt hotel renovation project at Grand Central.Yet these arrangements have distorted the city’s housing market. Setting aside some units as “affordable” drives up the price of “market” units, and helps a fortunate few who get a good deal. In the same way, rent regulation of some 960,000 apartments lets wealthy tenants stay as long as they want at a cheap rent. The housing “market” at New York is more like a game of musical chairs, where winners get a place to live and others are either left standing or have to share a chair with roommates squeezed together. As president, Mr. Trump is in a position to pressure the city for change. Federal housing aid, whether for Sunnywide or in the form of the hundreds of millions in community development funds the city receives from Washington every year, could be made contingent on phasing out rent regulation. That would mean, say, reversing Mr. Mamdani’s rent freeze rents and liberating small landlords from the toxic combination of level rent, rising operating costs, and property taxes. Any Sunnywide aid should be for a market-based development. Any increase in housing supply will, Mr. Trump might have advised Mr. Mamdani, lead to lower prices for existing supply. So, too, might he have urged the Mayor to push for change in New York state’s antiquated “scaffold law,” which imposes strict liability on builders for “gravity-related” accidents, even if they were not negligent. No other state has as stringent a law, which drives up builder insurance costs and thus raises new housing prices. Then there are “project-labor agreements” which limit competitive bidding to renovate the city’s dangerously dilapidated public housing. The Housing Authority relies on annual federal operating subsidies — and Mr. Trump’s HUD could make that aid contingent on allowing both union and non-union contractors to bid for work. Mr. Trump the builder used both union and non-union labor.It was disappointing to see Mr. Trump at Gracie Mansion revert to his New York builder persona, in which supplicant developers acquiesce to city rules and demands. As a president with housing experience, Mr. Trump could provide Mr. Mamdani with a reality check: regulations, through rent controls and tight zoning, are a tourniquet on New York City housing and have helped produce an artificial shortage. Mr. Mamdani, for his part, did not shrink from pressuring the president on a core issue — protected status revocation for the thousands of Haitians on whom, per the mayor, the city’s economy, notably its hospitals, relies. The president should have pressured the mayor as well, using the leverage of federal aid to upend the dysfunctional housing market of the city he clearly continues to think of as home. If Mr. Trump wants Mr. Mamdani to be a great mayor, he has to help the DSA member change course.

What Trump, the Experienced Builder, Can Teach Mamdani About Affordable Housing at New York City

What Trump, the Experienced Builder, Can Teach Mamdani About Affordable Housing at New York City

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