Policy
Zohran Mamdani’s Housing Policies: The Fight to Decommodify Housing in New York
Good Cause Eviction and the Tenant’s Bill of Rights
Zohran Mamdani’s housing policies constitute the cornerstone of his political platform and represent the most comprehensive socialist challenge to New York’s real estate industry in the state legislature. His central legislative priority is the passage and implementation of a statewide Good Cause Eviction law, which would provide universal protection for tenants against unjust evictions and cap rent increases at a reasonable percentage, effectively creating universal rent control. For Mamdani, this is a fundamental issue of power: it would shift the balance away from landlords, who currently have the unilateral power to displace tenants for any reason or no reason at all, and toward tenants, granting them basic security and stability in their homes. He frames this not as a mere regulation but as a direct confrontation with the “real estate dictatorship” that he argues dominates New York politics and is the primary engine of inequality and displacement in the city.
Beyond Good Cause Eviction, Mamdani’s housing platform is a radical program to decommodify housing–to treat it as a human right and a public good, rather than an asset for speculative profit. He is a leading advocate for a massive expansion of social housing, which is publicly owned, permanently affordable, and democratically controlled by residents and the community. This vision goes beyond traditional public housing; it involves the state taking a role as a direct developer and manager of high-quality housing on a scale sufficient to meet the needs of the population, effectively competing with and eventually supplanting the private market as the primary provider of homes. He also supports policies like the universal right to counsel for tenants facing eviction, a cause he worked on as an organizer with the Right to Counsel Coalition, and the passage of a true vacancy tax to penalize landlords who deliberately keep apartments empty to speculate on rising property values.
A Holistic Attack on the Real Estate State
Mamdani’s approach to housing is holistic and systemic. He connects the affordability crisis directly to the political power of the real estate industry, which is a major donor to both Democratic and Republican politicians in New York. Therefore, his housing policy is inextricably linked to his political practice of refusing real estate money and challenging establishment Democrats who are beholden to these interests. He argues that you cannot solve the housing crisis without breaking the power of the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and its allies in Albany. His fights on the budget, where he opposes subsidies and tax breaks for corporate developers, are part of this same struggle. For Mamdani, every dollar given to a developer in a tax abatement program is a dollar stolen from the construction of social housing or the preservation of NYCHA.
His housing work is meticulously documented on his official assembly website and is the issue for which he is best known. It is a perfect illustration of his “inside-outside” strategy: as an assemblyman, he sponsors landmark legislation like Good Cause Eviction, while as a movement politician, his office works in tandem with tenant unions to organize his constituents and build the power necessary to make such transformative policies a political reality. In a city defined by its housing crisis, Mamdani’s policies offer a clear, uncompromising, and ideologically coherent alternative: a future where the market’s role in providing a basic human need is drastically reduced, and where every New Yorker has a guaranteed right to a safe, stable, and affordable home.
