Mamdanis fast track to NYC neighborhood destruction

Watch out: The ham-handed Mamdani approach to the housing market is about to impose chaos on select neighborhoods in the name of social justice.City Hall just flagged a dozen, mostly higher-income community districts across the five boroughs as shirking their duty to “produce” more affordable housing; they’ll now be fast-tracked for new projects as Mayor Zohran Mamdani ensures they start doing their “fair share.”But the Mamdani analysis ignores the reasons these nabes lag on one particular statistic, which guarantees the “solution” will be anything but.The fast-tracking means expedited land use review with less meaningful community input and an override of the traditional City Council veto-option on local development; the whole approval process gets cut from seven months to 90 days.Yet the Department of City Planning chose these ‘hoods simply because they had the lowest rate of “affordable housing” added these last five years, as if each community district is supposed to “produce” such units at the same rate and some, like the entire Bronx or the Lower East Side, are overfulfilling their quota, while others, like suburban-style Queens Village or the South Shore of Staten Island, have been lazy and unproductive.But neighborhoods don’t build; developers do; worse, this “collective responsibility” approach also confuses subsidized housing with affordable.Consider two of Mamdani’s targets: The Upper West and Upper East Sides both already have a lot of subsidized housing, but are densely populated, with high demand for scarce land, so recent housing starts have mostly been market-rate — because the market can bear it.In The Bronx, where land is cheaper, developers rely on tax credits and federally backed low-interest loans to build permanently affordable housing, so it’s easy for these areas to score well on this one statistic.In short, the city’s refusing to consider where it makes sense to focus the fast-tracking, virtually ens...