Why can’t we all just get along

Tab 1

Are props 2/3/4 evil developer money grabs? Or long-awaited intervention to build more housing?

Daniel Chandross

@dannychantom on socials

A piece that will eventually migrate to substack but I wanted to get it out first

TLDR: you should vote yes on Proposals 2/3/4. There have already been so many excellent guides explaining the intricacies of how these proposals change the Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP), so for details I’ll link you to the League of Woman Voters, New Kings Democrats, or AbundanceNY for their write ups, but that’s not really what I want to talk about here. Even if you read all the nitty gritty details, you might still feel... icky... about the proposals. Let’s figure out why.

If you’re a young progressive in NYC, you’re likely voting for Mamdani. This is likely not a hard decision for you, and I’m confident most of your (politically aligned) circle is in agreement. But they may not be in agreement around Proposals 2,3, and 4 on the ballot this year. softpower on instagram came out against them. hot girls for zohran endorsed them. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Working Family Party (WFP), are both silent. The WFP-endorsed City Council Speaker is extremely opposed. The Mamdani-and-WFP-endorsed Comptroller Brad Lander is extremely in favor.

Anecdotally, many of my friends are anxious, feel underinformed, or are worried about being misled about these proposals. In the primary, everyone on the progressive-planet was aligned in saying ABC - Anyone But Cuomo. All of a sudden, that coalition seems to be fracturing. The question I want to answer here is what is it about these proposals that creates such an abnormal political fault line, and why are left leaning organizations not universally in favor?

Credit Paul Williams on X

How do you solve a housing crisis?

Everyone agrees New York City has a housing crisis - the simplest measure being that our vacancy rate is 1.4%. But how do you solve it? Among the socialist / more “traditional” left, the answer is (A) limit how much landlords may charge in rent and (B) use government funds to subsidize the creation of new housing. This approach is not new, and I want to be clear that it’s been incredibly successful in keeping people in their homes. Over 44% renters in NYC are in rent-regulated apartments of some sort. And between 2010 and 2020, we have built roughly 55,000 new units specifically for low-income families (4+ people & 80% or-less of median income) .This has been accomplished both with government funding, and through negotiations related to also allowing market-rate units.

Gowanus rezoning, credit NYT

But it’s also true that this approach has not, historically, provided “enough” regulated housing. In 2024, there were 6 million applications for 10,000 units. One for every six-hundred applicants. We literally call the system a housing lottery. Mamdani channeled this well-known frustration into one of his very first policy commitments, $70B of public money to fund 200,000 new rent-regulated apartments.

In recent months, he’s also given a voice to a newer (and perhaps less socialist) model of thinking on housing. When asked by the New York Times for any one thing he’s changed his mind on, he specifically called out “the role of the private market in housing construction”. He has said we need to make it easier and faster for the private sector to build housing". He has supported the City Of Yes, a landmark NYC rezoning passed last year that aims to add 80,000 new units over the next ten years, mostly built by the private sector. Mamdani is on record opposing parking mandates in new private construction that drive up costs. Time and time and time again studies show that building any new housing, even market rate housing, slows market-rate growth and can even reverse it.

Just this week, he spoke on Jon Stewart’s show about the need to build taller in general. If the rumor-mill is to be believed, Dan Garodnick, one of the chief-planners of City Of Yes, may end up being Mamdani’s First Deputy Mayor - his second in command. These positions strike me as actions of a candidate that understands the nuance of how the private sector and the public sector can work together to build more housing, and frankly it’s why I'm voting for him.

While I think it’s pretty clear that this would be a less-socialist + more-capitalist approach, I push back significantly on it being described as “moderate” or “right-leaning” or “conservative”, or most importantly “a developer give-away”. “Moderate” candidates like Andrew Cuomo, do not believe we should increase zoning in the outer-boroughs. Curtis Sliwa, the republican, goes even further and opposes City of Yes broadly. I believe it is a deeply progressive argument to say that we need to radically re-evaluate our land use policy to allow for more mixed-income units. I believe it is a deeply progressive argument to say that predominantly-white areas like Staten Island need to contribute their fair share to affordable housing.

And to be clear, this sliding scale of “how much should the private sector build vs the public sector” is by no means solved! It's nuanaced, and complicated, and there's no one magic answer. But what I can say is that it is not as simple as “letting developers build = republican = bad”. And that brings us to the charter amendments.

The Players

I want to quickly establish a few more players in the system, and then I promise I’ll tie it to the amendments.

City Council

NYC City Council significantly opposes the measures, going so far as to spend $2M of taxpayer money on borderline-electioneering flyers. These flyers assert typical left-anti-building talking points, and (fwiw, cleverly) tie them to the incredibly corrupt Eric Adams - despite the fact his term is ending and he has long since ended his campaign for re-election.

I want to avoid getting too far into the weeds of the specific proposals (again, read the guides on top for more), but currently Council members are deeply involved in projects in their districts. Through a process called Member Deference, the entire council will “defer” to the local councilmember for developments in their district, even though all 51-members have an equal vote. This process is sometimes able to extract concessions from developers for the projects that pass that improve neighborhoods in exchange for adding density. The council claims this will happen less under the new system (I would dispute that claim, but read the linked guides!). Critically, I want to highlight that the new system is no less democratic, and elected officials (often mayor and borough presidents) continue to be the stop-gap against unwanted development. The city council is rejecting these proposals not because they are bad for the city, but because they are bad for city council.

The Unions

Trade unions are also significantly opposed to these revisions. This is likely because one of the concessions often extracted during affordable housing discussions is a mandate to use union labor during development. It’s possible that if these proposals pass, it will be easier to build with and without union labor. Mamdani has referenced this when he discusses the proposals, saying that we need more housing but that the jobs created by that development need to be "good jobs". He has to walk a very fine line. A ton of unions have endorsed Mamdani. They also have counter-endorsed the proposals. He appears to be signaling that he plans to comment on the proposals on election day, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Moderates / Conservatives / “Preservationists”

A recent poll broke down support of the charter revision questions by mayor choice, a proxy for political ideology. Far and away, the more left someone is the more likely they are to approve the proposals. And since this chart doesn’t count undecided voters, the net numbers under represent the overall demographic. With 12% undecided (see link for source, it’s on another graph), Proposal 2’s +71 among Mamdani voters shows that 88% of mamdani supporters that have an opinion on Proposal 2 are in favor.

However, conservatives aren’t ignoring the fight! Vicky Paladino, a republican council member from Queens who said Mamdani should be deported, is spending her own campaign dollars begging her constituents to vote no. Sliwa spent the debate encouraging his voters to vote no. Vicky says the quiet part out loud, saying it would ruin the neighborhood to “fast track low income housing projects”. Many of us don’t have social circles involving these people, but I want to make it abundantly clear that voting yes is absolutely the left-leaning thing to do, despite what your bubble may say.

Finally, while not quite a “conservative” group, "preservation" groups are equally opposed. Unlike the conservatives, preservation groups claim to be supporting “affordability”. But this same group opposed the Haven Green Project, which would have added 123 fully affordable and rent regulated apartments to SoHo. Their affordability demands are a guise to freeze our city in amber, and should not be trusted.

None of that answers why my groupchat is confused

OK. So here’s my best guess on what happened -

City Council sends out a ton of flyers. With such a high-salience mayor’s race, the average voter isn’t thinking super hard about the proposals race, and doesn’t investigate further. Their negative feelings towards Adams (successfully) mildly polarize parts of the electorate negatively.
Due to the Unions issue, Mamdani avoids talking about the proposals. As the most-trusted voice by many voters, his absence creates a vacuum the flyers continue to fill.
Left leaning social media accounts, but critically not elected officials, start amplifying the concerns of the council. By preying on voter’s (sometimes out of date) philosophy that new construction = bad, these accounts attempt to paint the proposals as “moderate”. Critically, they don’t at all attempt to address (A) the deep inequality and risk of doing nothing, (B) the fact they’re actually helping republicans in doing so, or (C) the fact the council’s framing is inherently biased towards protecting its own power.

Now, the week before the election, your group chats are split between people who are trying to be so-left that they’re in the 12% of Mamdani supporters not approving the proposals, and others who feel like they’re “swinging to the right” if they support the proposals, which again, Republicans are fighting tooth and nail and on which they poll 50% LOWER than Democrats.

And if you’re in this 12%, and you think I'm doing a terrific job shilling for developers and hiding a massive change that will ruin the neighborhoods of NYC, I would strongly urge you to at least wait until election day to see what Mamdani says. My significant hunch is that even he believes these are good for the city. He’s just in between ̶a̶ ̶u̶n̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶n ̶a̶f̶f̶o̶r̶d̶a̶b̶i̶l̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶m̶i̶s̶e̶ a rock and a hard place 🙂

Please feel free to DM me with feedback / notes / pushback, I’d love to chat. @dannychantom on all the socials

Tab 2

what is it about these proposals that creates such an abnormal political fault line, and why do left-leaning institutions that usually agree, not.