Zohran Mamdani will get new mayoral powers to build housing thanks to Adams-backed ballot measures but will he use them?

He’s inheriting a solid foundation for housing — if he builds with it.Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is poised to reap the benefits of housing-related ballot measures approved by voters on Election Day — but the socialist pol has given few concrete signs about whether he’ll actually use them.The proposals crafted at outgoing Mayor Eric Adams’ behest — and over the objections of angry City Council members — aim to turbocharge the Big Apple’s notoriously slow process for approving new housing by offering up more power to the mayor’s office. “You need an ambitious mayor who uses it because if you just sit back, then the measures don’t facilitate ambitious regulatory reform,” said Alex Armlovich, senior housing policy analyst at Niskanen Center.“But you have to actually use them.”Mamdani, however, has largely stayed quiet over the potentially game-changing new mayoral powers, even as he promises 200,000 new, union-built units of affordable housing.The affordability focused Mamdani positioned himself as a pro-housing YIMBY — “Yes In My Backyard” — during the mayoral campaign, promising bold action to juice the city’s dwindling affordable housing supply and bring sky-high rents back to earth.But the smooth-talking socialist pointedly stayed silent on whether he supported the housing-related ballot measures until Election Day itself, when he revealed he voted for them.Mamdani also mostly kept quiet on “City of Yes” pro-housing rezonings pursued by Adams — a conspicuous silence that extended into Wednesday when he said nothing about the City Council approving the administration’s plan to bring 15,000 new homes to Long Island City.Adams’ deputy mayor for housing Adolfo Carrion crowed Wednesday that Mamdani can run with what the soon-to-end administration left him — including 50,000 expected units from rezonings in LIC, Midtown South, Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue corridor, Jamaica and the East Bronx.“I think we’ve set up t...