Mamdanis race to solve NYCs housing crunch masks his true goal

When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani donned a race bib last week and hit a high-school track in The Bronx, it wasn’t to compete in a sprint, but to profess concern about the problem of vacant housing. He proudly announced a set of reforms for the city’s affordable-housing lottery, aimed at taming the bureaucratic morass that keeps apartments built with city financial support empty and unoccupied for months at a time.The new Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development plan — SPEED, hence the track-and-field theme — is meant to make it quicker for lucky low-income housing-lottery winners to move into some 10,000 subsidized units, thus easing the city’s severe housing crisis.But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the scope of the housing problem.If Mamdani is truly concerned about filling empty affordable apartments, he should support the ongoing lawsuit brought by small rental-property owners that could get up to 50,000 “zombie” rent-stabilized units back on the market.The suit, brought by the Institute for Justice on behalf of the Small Property Owners Association, aims to undo the 2019 state law that’s caused those vacancies.Under Albany’s draconian Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, rent-stabilized landlords must essentially eat the cost of repairs, even as the city’s Rent Guidelines Board keeps rents for stabilized units artificially low.But renting a unit requires landlords to make improvements mandated by the city’s housing code — improvements that cost more than restricted rents can cover.Ergo, vacant apartments.The lawsuit, which was joined this month by the US Chamber of Commerce, is currently before Second Circuit federal Judge John Cronan.The defendants, the state and city of New York, are set to make their arguments June 5.If Mamdani really wants to ease the housing crunch, he could simply switch sides in the lawsuit — and lobby Albany to lift this shortsighted law.But we know that’s unlikely.F...