Deputy Mayor promises to “build more, faster, across New York City”

Leila Bozorg, New York City Deputy Mayor for Housing and Planning, told the audience at The World Around Summit 2026 that the Mamdani administration is pairing policies to control the cost of housing with measures to increase its supply, lowering barriers to enable developers “to build more housing, faster, across the city.”

Mayor Mamdani was elected on a promise to “freeze the rent” for around one million regulated apartments, home to about a quarter of all New Yorkers. But he also committed to addressing the shortage of affordable places to live by building more housing, proposing 200,000 permanently affordable units over the next decade. Towards delivering on this commitment, the Deputy Mayor said: “Our goal is to build on the momentum of recent years, while coupling that with strong tenant protections and addressing housing quality issues. We’ll be focused on both sides of this.”

Borzog offered insight into City Hall’s approach to New York’s housing crisis during the final session of the Summit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, when she was joined by  Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena and renowned architect Tatiana Bilbao, for a panel discussion moderated by the New York Times’ architecture critic Michael Kimmelman. The group discussed the political, economic, and moral question of how modern societies should house their populations. Bozorg grounded the conversation in the program’s host city, shedding light on the realities of housebuilding in New York.

“We have set up almost Kafka-esque systems to get through when we want to build more housing,” she said. “These processes result in the types of housing people hate most, because it costs so much to get through them.”

The panelists gathered as Governor Kathy Hochul announced a provisional agreement on the state budget for the 2027 fiscal year, which included significant reforms to the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), a 1975 law that mandates environmental impact assessments for all projects requiring approval in New York. Under the governor’s modernization proposals, modest housing developments would be exempt from often prohibitive environmental review processes, which research suggests costs an additional $82,000 per unit in the city. “These are the types of projects that decades of studies show do not have significant environmental impacts,” said Borzog.

If the state-level reforms pass, City Hall has committed to reassessing its own systems to speed up approvals for eligible projects. The Deputy Mayor said changes to the City Environmental Quality Review (CEQR) process would quarter review times to six months: “It will have a big impact: not just on time, but on cost,” she added. 

When asked how much say the public should have in these developments, Aravena described the origins of participatory planning in Chile as a means to mollify opposition to subsidized housing. When Kimmelman raised the pattern of these processes stalling or altogether killing projects in the American context, Bilbao argued that the issue with our current models of public participation is their focus on delivery, rather than occupancy. “We think of these processes as a means to produce the building,” Bilbao said. “But housing has to hold lives and evolve with them; it exists in much longer terms.”

The Deputy Mayor also spoke to the Mamdani administration’s approach to redressing the uneven distribution of housebuilding. Last November, New Yorkers voted for a ballot measure to create an expedited approval process for projects delivering affordable housing in the neighborhoods that had built the least in the previous five years. In October, 12 community districts will be identified for an “affordable housing fast track,” in which projects proposing to set aside a share of residential floor area—typically 20-30%—at regulated rents will be subject to a much shorter review process, ending with the City Planning Commission, rather than the City Council. “Historically, [the Council] has had this practice of ‘member deference,’ where whatever the local member wants, the whole city council will vote for,” the Deputy Mayor explained. “It has allowed districts to just block housing altogether and contributed to inequality in our housing landscape.” 

“Many of the districts won’t be a surprise,” Bozorg added. “There’s going to be parts of Staten Island and Manhattan that will be in the bottom 12.”

Though the measure aims to expedite the construction of affordable housing, the Deputy Mayor maintained the importance of building stock with a mixture of tenures. “There’s a lot of research showing that you need units of all different types to be able to bring your rents down, and you see lower-cost units crowded out by people with greater means when you don’t,” she said.

While expanding on the city’s plans to increase housing supply, the Deputy Mayor also offered insight on its initiatives to expand another constrained resource in New York’s housing market: choice. “The idea that you might need different types of housing at different points in your life is hard to achieve in New York,” she said. As part of an effort to build on zoning reforms implemented through former Mayor Eric Adams’ City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, the Mamdani administration is “unlocking” sites across New York for smaller-scale residential development. This includes the launch of a new platform designed to help homeowners add Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs, to their lots, which Bozorg described as “a form of incremental housing at the household scale,” referencing the model Aravena’s studio first devised for a social housing scheme in Quinta Monroy, Chile. “Now, people can decide if they want to have a second unit in their backyard to keep family close, or even to rent out,” she said.

“Getting out of this supply-demand issue we have is a long term endeavor,” the Deputy Mayor said. “But we’ve put ourselves on a much better path as a city.”

Last week, the Mayor’s Office released its financial plan for 2027, of which around 19% was allocated to its housing agenda. As the executive budget moves into a final round of review by the City Council, New York decides whether it will continue on its path.