Happy post-Memorial Day Tuesday in NYC, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani is in Gowanus today to announce his long-awaited housing plan — and it comes with some serious ramifications for the city.

Let’s start with the Mamdani-est agenda item: targeting bad landlords. According to the housing plan, City Hall will deploy a team of enforcers to take away housing ownership from some of the city’s most negligent landlords. They will be informed by a grassroots reporting system of new tenant unions that the city plans to establish in at-risk buildings.

“We want to proactively connect tenants to each other in order to build networks of solidarity that are required to fight retaliation,” Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, told Hell Gate.

Last week, we covered how rezoning initiatives in areas south of Prospect Park could bring thousands of affordable homes into Brooklyn’s housing network. Now, it appears Mamdani will bring the same philosophy to a few wealthy neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs, including Park Slope and Bay Ridge, where current zoning laws allow for minimal housing construction. 

“When communities don’t build new housing, rents stay high, housing choice stays limited, and many New Yorkers are locked out of neighborhoods where their families can thrive,” the housing plan reads. 

Then there’s the most seemingly out-of-character move from the mayor: rubbing elbows with private developers.

In order to address the city’s collapsing public housing ecosystem, overseen by the New York City Housing Authority, Mamdani plans to enlist help from the private sector to renovate about 25,000 occupied public apartments and 4,500 vacant ones. NYCHA tenants often complain of critical infrastructure failures, mold, heat outages and pests. 

“We think this is a holistic approach to really try to chip away at the issues facing NYCHA, including the backlog that residents deal with each day,” Leila Bozorg, the deputy mayor of Housing and Planning, told the New York Times. 

There are a number of other notable provisions in the housing plan, such as lowering rent for some of the poorest New Yorkers in city-subsidized apartments and exempting certain distressed landlords from his proposed rent freeze.

But unfortunately, the plan mentions nothing about my broken window screen. Guess I’ll have to trek to the hardware store after all.

Last fall, NYC Parks announced a shift in the way it plants street trees, moving to a systematic approach in the hopes of planting more efficiently and equitably. The new Neighborhood Tree Planting program aims to plant a street tree in every available location across the entire city by 2035.

Over the next nine years, in three-year cycles, NYC Parks’ forestry team will go up and down every single block in each neighborhood, planting empty beds, creating new tree pits when possible, and replacing dead and dying trees.

Learn why this effort is vital to a growing city.   

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