New York City can do better than Andrew Cuomo

Zellnor Myrie is the pro-housing candidate the city needs

I’m not saying the woman from Southeast Queens with the oversized cowboy hat and gold plated front teeth speaks for everyone voting in the upcoming mayoral election. But when I asked her about New Yorkers’ seemingly inevitable decision between incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and former Governor Andrew Cuomo, her answer captured a sentiment I heard from many others:

“They’re both scoundrels, but I’m probably for Cuomo.”

In many ways, the YIMBY movement feels ascendant. While we at Slow Boring have long championed abundant housing and transit, new books on the subject are generating buzz and earning widespread acclaim from Democratic leaders and policy thinkers.

Yet, the city that could perhaps most benefit from a leader aligned with the growing abundance movement is on the verge of electing someone wholly opposed to it.

New York City’s biggest problem is that there isn’t enough housing. Between 2010 and 2023, the housing stock grew by just 4% while jobs increased by 22%. The result is that a third of New Yorkers now spend half their income on rent. In 2023 alone, 78,000 people fled the city, taking hundreds of millions of tax dollars along with them.

With the right policies, New York could showcase Democratic competence, harness its agglomeration effects, and remain a place where people want to live. But Andrew Cuomo's policies epitomize the stagnant governance of the past and are representative of the very politics the abundance movement seeks to leave behind.

As governor, Cuomo could have taken meaningful action to address the housing shortage — tackling exclusionary zoning in the city suburbs or lifting the Floor Area Ratio (FAR) cap to allow for more dense building. But while he did push the 421-a tax credit to incentivize housing development in the state, none of the housing policy analysts or NYC political experts I spoke with had any confidence that Cuomo would meaningfully address the city's projected 500,000-unit housing shortage by the end of the decade.

His mayoral plan signals that he’s interested in boosting supply, but it isn’t particularly ambitious or detailed. He’s already calling for union labor construction mandates — exactly the kind of restriction that will limit new development since 80% of construction workers in the city aren’t unionized. And his stance on public transit doesn’t bode well; as governor, he starved the MTA.

To his credit, Mayor Eric Adams helped pass City of Yes, which made some necessary reforms to the city’s zoning code. But due to his own scoundrel-like behavior and very public mortgaging of his political career to Trump, it’s hard to imagine him, upon reelection, morphing into an avatar of competent governance.

This brings us to Zellnor Myrie.

The state senator and NYC mayoral candidate is well-known across his central Brooklyn district (and nowhere else), but he’s put forward the most ambitious plan to solve the housing crisis in the race. Myrie wants to build 700,000 new housing units and preserve 300,000 more, adding a million homes to New York’s housing stock over the next decade. The number sounds ambitious, but it’s less than what New York built annually in the 1920s or even what Tokyo builds today.

He says the city needs an “all-of-the-above” approach to housing, which, in his plan, features proposals long backed by housing advocates: new neighborhoods, fast-tracked development on industrial land, and looser restrictions on the construction of smaller apartment buildings. Achieving it will take more than a mayoral directive, but Alex Armlovich, a senior housing analyst at the Niskanen Center, told me it’s “a serious plan devoid of the usual NIMBY pandering he normally expects from a New York mayoral candidate.”

On paper, Myrie seems like the perfect abundance candidate.¹

Unfortunately, he’s also currently polling in the low single digits. So, I went to New York City last month to chat with Myrie and to see if voters are actually showing any interest in the YIMBY dreamboat running for mayor.

Who wants to build?

The fashionable thing to say when running for mayor of New York is that the city is in a housing crisis and desperately needs to build more. It’s equally fashionable to follow that statement with a plan so riddled with regulation it’ll result in hardly any new housing at all.

I thought I’d hear the phrase “housing crisis” more often at the mayoral forum hosted by Transportation Alternatives, an NYC urbanist non-profit, in an ornate Gothic church in downtown Brooklyn.² But as I listened from my perch in the back to the candidates preach about pedestrian-friendly intersections and beefed-up bus routes, the housing discussion was notably sparse.

What did come up was lackluster, mostly driven by the moderator’s question about each candidate’s experience “standing up to special interests.” Former city comptroller Scott Stringer responded by highlighting his record of pushing back against developers and expanding community input in the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). He also dropped a familiar NIMBY dog whistle: “People talk about how housing is good, but we also have to talk about neighborhoods.”

Current Comptroller Brad Lander, who also participated in the mayoral forum, spoke about his work fighting for more housing around the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. A few weeks later, he released a detailed housing plan and agreed to speak over the phone about it. During our conversation, he seemed particularly excited about the prospect of converting four of the 12 city-owned golf courses into housing developments — the only problem being that all of them are in outer-borough subway deserts. He also proposed circumventing Council approval by creating a randomly selected citizens’ assembly to develop a city zoning plan. He emphasized that while he takes the supply problem seriously, he values community buy-in.

But I was sitting in the pews on that cold Friday night in Brooklyn in large part because I wanted to see Myrie separate himself on this issue.

And he did have a few nice moments. Once, he spoke about his plan to spend political capital in communities to overcome opposition to home building. Later, he got in a nice jab at the more experienced candidates, “The leaders of the past are not going to get this done. You know how we know? They haven’t done it.” What I had really hoped to see, though, was Myrie forcefully defending his “all of the above” approach to housing to this crowd of Brooklyn urbanists, who (at least those I spoke with) did support increased supply, but also backed counterproductive policies like rent freezes.

Unfortunately, he left halfway through the forum, and the biggest applause line of the night went to Zohran Mamdani for his call to transfer NYPD’s traffic enforcement capabilities to the Department of Transportation.

A certified pro-housing candidate

Later in the week, I did get a chance to chat with Myrie more extensively. We were tucked into a narrow hallway in the back of another church, this time in Jamaica, Queens, where another mayoral forum was set to begin in an hour.

Myrie began the interview forcefully, arguing that, “We have to build more and we have to build everywhere, and that is not popular in all spaces. People often tell me about reasons why we cannot get it done. If you want to be a naysayer, then great, you stay in that corner and be a naysayer. But we have to do tough things, and I’m under no illusions that it’s going to be easy.”

Candidates often embrace the pro-supply label when it’s convenient, but ultimately fall back on old tropes to appease the loudest anti-development constituencies.

In our conversation, though, Myrie insisted that market-rate housing lowers overall housing costs and spoke fluently about lifting height limits for single-staircase buildings. I asked him what he thought about the moniker he had received in some progressive circles, “the pro-developer Democrat.” He responded that he is “a pro ending the affordability crisis candidate. It is going to be all hands on deck for us to get this done. And that will include developers.”

I would have liked more detail on how he planned to reduce costs for publicly built housing, but his proposal to allow for more mixed-income development on New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) land offers a realistic path to addressing the agency’s $80 billion funding deficit. It’s also far more viable than Zohran Mamdani’s plan to fund NYCHA with $70 billion in bonds and build 200,000 units of public housing — an impossible proposition, considering the city has roughly $30 billion left in it’s constitutional borrowing capacity.

As mayor, Myrie couldn’t unilaterally change city zoning, but he could appoint City Planning Commission members, leverage city land for housing, and push the Council for denser development. His idea to allow for privately built housing on former industrial land sandwiched between residential neighborhoods is smart. Reflecting his broader housing ambition, he doesn’t just want one-off projects like Gowanus³— he wants sandwich development “everywhere it’s economically viable.”

When I asked Myrie about his plan to overcome opposition, specifically in NIMBY neighborhoods, he was resolute: “If we keep nibbling on the edges, we're just not going to get to the solution… if we don’t say some things that are tough to say and that not everyone is going to agree with.”

I think it’s important to note not just to what Myrie is saying but what he's not saying. Regulations like union labor requirements or strict affordability mandates that could constrain housing growth are notably absent from his remarks.

Some have questioned the sincerity of Myrie’s housing beliefs. His housing work in the state senate was focused primarily on tenant rights. Ironically, his first state senate campaign video in 2018 derided his opponent for being in the pocket of developers, an accusation the “pro-real estate Democrat” now faces himself. In our conversation, he proudly affirmed his past work, but said his emphasis has shifted. “Then, there was a deep imbalance between tenant protections and the political power of the real estate lobby.” But now it’s fixed, so he wants to “ensure we get more on the supply side.”

The other issue on New Yorkers’ minds

On public safety, Myrie was firmly on the left-flank of this party. After he was pepper-sprayed and handcuffed during a BLM rally in 2020, he tweeted that police brutality “was in the DNA of this country.” He later introduced a bill in the state legislature that would end qualified immunity.

His mayoral campaign isn’t an explicit disavowal of that work — he introduced another bill to end qualified immunity in the most recent legislative session and includes more NYPD oversight in his public safety plan — but he now places a greater emphasis on hiring more police officers and maintaining a more visible police presence on the subways.

Myrie explained his thinking:

We think that [voters] cannot hold multiple things in their mind at this time. New Yorkers want to feel safe. That includes police officers. They also don't want them pepper spraying indiscriminately. You can hold two things together that police officers are necessary, that when we had a headcount that we had in 2018 and 2019, we had some of the lowest crime crime rates ever. And that we can also hold them accountable when they step over the line.

I ran the plan by Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow focused on public safety at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute. He seemed receptive to Myrie’s focus on fixing discovery reform, hiring more officers, and investing in NYC’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), all of which align with evidence-based crime reduction strategies. But he noted that SYEP would be subject to diminished marginal returns and was skeptical that increasing oversight of the NYPD would help retain officers, instead arguing that a shrinking force is a bigger problem than a lack of accountability.

Notably, Myrie supports the NYPD’s Criminal Groups Database. “The gang tracker,” as it’s referred, has split city Democrats; moderates argue that it’s a necessary tool for tracking criminal activity, while left-leaning criminal justice advocates see it as a form of racial profiling. So Myrie’s public safety plan may not align entirely with conservatives like Lehman, his support for the database signals where he falls within city Democrat’s factional divide.

Myrie also has a unique advantage here. He was raised by Costa Rican-born immigrant parents in rent-stabilized housing in Brooklyn. If he were to challenge a more liberal candidate or a city nonprofit on the gang tracker or the necessity of building market-rate housing, he could do so with credibility that would be hard to dismiss.

The path forward

After Myrie and I wrapped up our interview, two women working at the church led us to a conference room. Plates were set, and chicken wings and green beans were ready to be served. Several other mayoral candidates were present. Not in the room, but on everyone’s minds, were Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo.

This was a familiar pattern throughout my time reporting for this piece.

I had expected to hear some Myrie buzz at the The Center for New Liberalism’s mayoral happy hour, but few attendees knew he was running and seemed resigned to Cuomo. I chatted about the race with protestors at an “Adams Resign” march in Soho, but most wanted Cuomo because he, unlike Adams, would stand up to Trump. I spoke with attendees who watched the mayoral forums, and a fair amount seemed interested in Myrie, but most dismissed his candidacy as a long-shot.

And, to be fair, it is a bit of a long-shot.

But long-shots also have a history of making surprising runs in the New York City mayoral race. In 2021, then-sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, rose from 2% support in March to nearly beating Adams in the late June primary. In 2013, de Blasio won despite initially polling in fourth place. Right now, Cuomo has a sizable lead, but polling shows that when voters are reminded of his previous scandals, his support drops precipitously. Several outside groups with big pockets are prepared to launch ad campaigns that will do exactly that.

The New York Times is also potentially reversing it’s non-endorsement policy. If that happens, Myrie’s technocratic politics and compelling background could make him an intriguing candidate for the endorsement. And that sort of boost to his profile could allow him to build a coalition of moderate Black and Hispanic voters and white liberals, much like de Blasio and Adams before him. He’s already one of the few candidates to secure public matching funds and recently received the endorsement of lower Manhattan Congressman Dan Goldman.

All he needs now is more attention.

1. Notably, he did receive the endorsement of Abundance NY

2. Sans Cuomo, who had not yet announced, and Adams, who other candidates told me was in hiding

3. Gowanus is a formally industrial neighborhood in NYC that was redeveloped over vehement local opposition.