Title: Evening Roundup: NYC Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani Unveils Transition Team, and Mayor Adams’ Housing Legacy

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Elizabeth Shwe: New York City's mayoral elect, Zohran Mamdani, announces his transition team and chats with WNYC's Brigid Bergin, and a look back at Mayor Eric Adams' legacy on housing. From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Elizabeth Shwe. If you haven't already heard by now, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani has won the race for New York City Mayor, easily defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa on Tuesday night.

Zohran Mamdani: The poetry of campaigning may have come to a close last night at 9:00, but the beautiful prose of governing has only just begun.

Elizabeth Shwe: WNYC senior politics reporter, Brigid Bergin, caught up with Mamdani to speak about the mayor-elect's transition team and his immediate plans after taking office.

Brigid Bergin: Hello, Mayor-elect.

Zohran Mamdani: Hello. How's it going?

Brigid Bergin: Great. Congratulations. Thank you so much for taking some time. We really appreciate it. You're running on fumes, I'm guessing?

Zohran Mamdani: [chuckles] Yes, I am. Thank you so much for the conversation. I'm happy to be on.

Brigid Bergin: [chuckles] Your victory last night came the same night we saw two Democratic women elected governor in New Jersey, in Virginia. Do you see a common thread there?

Zohran Mamdani: Yes, I think it is exciting to be part of a big tent that is looking to not only take on an authoritarian administration but also to deliver on time. I had the chance to speak with soon-to-be Governor Sherrill, and I'm looking forward to what it can look like to have partnership at the core of so much of our politics, which has sadly been missing for quite some time.

Brigid Bergin: Mayor-elect, we often hear about new administrations setting goals for that first 100 days. Can you say anything about what yours are?

Zohran Mamdani: My goal at this time is to spend the next 57 days of the transition ensuring that my first day in office is not one of preparation, but rather one of execution. I'm excited that we began today with the announcement of our four incredible co-chairs of our transition: Grace Bonilla, Mel Herzog, Lina Kahn, and Maria Torres-Springer. That is the kind of team that will help us shape and fill out our City Hall such that those first 100 days are ones where we are taking concrete and substantive actions to deliver on the cost-of-living crisis that is pushing so many New Yorkers out of the city.

Brigid Bergin: Do you think that there is a way for the city, and through your office, to do more to regulate corporations and maybe even get into more regulation of the crypto industry?

Zohran Mamdani: I don't believe that the Adams administration has set the highest bar for what regulation can look like for taking on corporate greed. I also have spoken to many a small business owner who are at a loss for why they seem to face more regulations than the most profitable companies in the city and in the world. It is time to showcase our ability to take on that corporate greed while also streamlining the processes within City Hall so that businesses cannot just open, but stay open. We will do that through the appointment of a mom and pop czar, by cutting fines and fees by 50% across the board, and by ensuring that we start to streamline some of the processes by which these businesses are receiving their permits and their licenses.

Brigid Bergin: Mayor-elect, what should New Yorkers expect when it comes to one of your key priorities, universal childcare, next year?

Zohran Mamdani: The governor has said that 2026 is the year of childcare. I have appreciated her continued focus on universal childcare, and it is one that I share. We will be building out a timeline to fulfill our commitment for universal childcare and to do so by not only reckoning with the ways in which the Adams administration has made it harder to afford raising a child in the city, but also by going beyond that to the final point of having every child from six weeks to five years of age, receiving that childcare.

Brigid Bergin: When you started this campaign, you were out there in the streets listening to voters. You also are known for quoting Mayor Koch. One of his favorite expressions is "How am I doing?" How are you going to continue to get that regular input from New Yorkers?

Zohran Mamdani: The outreach that characterized our campaign, the transparency of it, that is one that will not only continue to animate my work in City Hall, but even in the transition on our way to City Hall. It is our responsibility to bring politics to the people, as opposed to ask ourselves why the people are not coming to politics. That will be through conversations I'll have directly with New Yorkers, it will be through meetings that we schedule, it'll be through all wide variety of outreach, all of it to ensure that we understand the strength of a democracy can be measured by just how many of its people are involved in it.

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Elizabeth Shwe: That's WNYC's senior politics reporter, Brigid Bergin, in conversation with newly elected New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

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Elizabeth Shwe: Up next, housing was one of Mayor Eric Adams' biggest challenges, from rising rents to stalled affordable projects. What kind of legacy is he leaving for Mayor-Elect Mamdani? We'll take a look at that after the break.

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Elizabeth Shwe: One of the biggest questions facing Mayor-Elect Mamdani's administration is housing. It was a centerpiece of his campaign, and it's also a big part of what current Mayor Eric Adams leaves behind. WNYC's housing reporter, David Brand, joins us for a look back at Mayor Adams' legacy on housing, what he accomplished, what he didn't, and the work Mayor-Elect Mamdani has cut out for him once he takes office. Hey, David.

David: Hey, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Shwe: Eric Adams called himself the most pro-housing mayor in city history. When we look back, what does he actually leave behind on housing?

David: It's kind of been a joke among journalists that every single press release from the City Housing Agency, every single news conference that Adams has about housing, he's always saying, "This is the most pro-housing administration in city history." When he says that, he's mainly referring to rule changes that he has shepherded for future housing development, and those have been significant.

Most recently, a charter revision commission that he appointed proposed these ballot questions that could make it easier to build a lot of housing around the five boroughs. On Tuesday, voters headed to the polls and approved those by a wide margin. Before that, there was the City of Yes zoning plan, which was this pretty sweeping plan to change land use rules in every part of the city to allow for slightly more housing development, whether that's in suburban style sections of the city like Northeast Queens, Staten Island, or places like Central Brooklyn, Manhattan, to just allow for a lot more housing to be built. Then there are these neighborhood rezoning.

Right now, these two proposals for rezoning Long Island City and Jamaica in Queens to potentially add tens of thousands of new apartments are working their way to a final city council vote. His administration proposed and accomplished this big rezoning along Atlantic Avenue and Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights. Then there was this major plan to turn the Garment District in Manhattan into a new residential neighborhood, like what we've seen in FiDi in Lower Manhattan Financial District. I spoke with Maria Torres-Springer about all this, and she helped steer a lot of these proposals.

Maria Torres-Springer: When future generations look back at this time, the last four years of the work on housing, that they might say that this was the moment that New York stopped just managing a housing crisis and really started solving it.

David: She's now actually co-chair of Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani's transition team, and so she'll have a role in shaping these policies going forward, too.

Elizabeth Shwe: Housing was also a centerpiece of Zohran Mamdani's campaign. How did those promises line up with what Adams left him?

David: This is one of many contradictions of Adams' tenure. He put forth a lot of proposals and plans for easing housing development and, ideally, easing affordable housing development down the road, but during his time in office, New York City has just continued getting more and more unaffordable. Rents are at record highs. So are home prices. They're out of reach. The vast majority of New Yorkers who couldn't even dream of buying a place here, about 90,000 people, are staying each night in city homeless shelters. Affordability was really the issue that animated the campaign to replace Adams. Mamdani will now benefit from the reforms and the new housing rules that he's inheriting from Adams.

Elizabeth Shwe: You mentioned the ballot questions that voters approved on Tuesday. Adams appointed that commission that proposed those measures. Remind us what those measures are and what that vote tells us.

David: These were four questions meant to speed up the review process for new housing or to challenge the city council's authority to block housing projects. At their core, these questions kind of took aim at the city's land use review process. The way things have worked for many years is there is this pre-certification phase that can take many months or even years. Then once an application becomes official with the city to make changes to land use rules, that's followed by a seven-month review that ends in a city council vote.

Just to summarize what these measures are that voters approved, one speeds up the approval process for 100% affordable housing projects everywhere in the city, and also any new housing in neighborhoods that have so far produced the fewest new units. Another will shorten review times for some apartment and condo complexes that are slightly larger than current rules allow. A third will allow developers and city planners to appeal rejections of their land use applications by the city council. There's going to be a three-member board now, and that will include the mayor, the city council speaker, and borough president in the borough that the project's located in.

Then a fourth measure will allow the city to digitize its official paper maps for the purpose of streamlining rezoning proposals. These were controversial, and there was a pretty compelling campaign to block them on the grounds that they're going to limit community input, especially for major rezoning plans that are initiated by the city itself. Those neighborhood plans to change the rules and big swaths of the city, but voters approve them anyway. I think that shows how important the housing crisis is, that it's really top of mind to a lot of people, even if they were uncomfortable with some of these proposals, might have held their nose and voted for them anyway.

We were seeing that a lot on Tuesday because Mamdani had been kind of cagey about his own opinion on these proposals until he went to vote Tuesday morning and said he was a yes. That seemed to sway a lot of voters. We heard a lot of callers to the station. I talked to a lot of voters who said, "I was on the fence, but I want to give Zohran the tools that he needs to build affordable housing," and so they voted yes.

Elizabeth Shwe: David, supporters say the city now has rules to build more housing, and critics say nothing is guaranteed for people who are struggling the most. What should we expect to see in the coming years?

David: Adams oversaw a lot of reforms around zoning that we've been talking about. Basically, changing rules for what can possibly be built on a specific lot or in a whole neighborhood, but zoning itself isn't a housing plan, and it doesn't really guarantee anything. It just gives the possibility to build. I talked with Howard Slatkin about that. He runs the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, and he used to be a city planning official making some of these rules and proposals under the Bloomberg administration and then under Mayor de Blasio.

Howard Slatkin: Great, ambitious accomplishments have been achieved by this administration on housing. The second thought is there's no end zone dances at this stage of the game, though.

David: Basically, he says that Adams' real legacy will be defined by Mamdani and his successors as mayor. It'll come down to how they invest in housing and what their priorities are. Then a lot of it, it'll be outside their direct control anyway. There's state policy and tax incentives that make it easier to build more housing. There's what happens in a chaotic Washington, DC, right now, especially under the Trump administration.

Then there's these unpredictable market forces that can make development cheaper or much more expensive, and that can lead to more housing or to less housing. The new rules will allow for more housing to get built, but only time will tell if that new housing does get built. If so, is it affordable, or is it just more homes out of reach to most New Yorkers?

Elizabeth Shwe: That was WNYC's housing reporter, David Brand. Thank you so much for joining us.

David: Thank you.

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Elizabeth Shwe: Thanks for listening to NYC Now from WNYC. I'm Elizabeth Shwe. We'll be back tomorrow.

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