Toward a Rent Freeze for New York City

The Faculty Digital Archive (New York University) · 2026-02-01

This working paper makes the case for a rent freeze as an immediate, high-impact affordability measure in New York City, where rising rents are driving a growing share of renters to spend more than half their income on housing. Building on long-standing tenant movement demands and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 campaign platform, it argues that a rent freeze for rent-stabilized apartments can stabilize housing for roughly one million households while returning billions of dollars to renters and the city economy over the next four years. The paper responds directly to landlord and real estate industry opposition by testing their claims against available evidence. It separates myths from realities, showing that the central threats to affordability are not tenant protections but speculation, landlord abuse, and property mismanagement. Finally, it frames the rent freeze as a consequential first step in a broader housing agenda aimed at securing permanent, dignified, and affordable homes for current and future New Yorkers.

Affordability, Dignity, and Democratic Control: Towards Transformative Municipal Governance In New York City

The Faculty Digital Archive (New York University) · 2026-02-01

This working paper series grows out of an extraordinary political opening in New York City: the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani on a mandate to treat housing, transit, care, and education as social goods. The papers collected here offer “Real Utopian” designs for institutions and policies that are both transformative and feasible, with an eye toward durability, scale, and egalitarianism.

The Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants

Faculty Digital Archive (New York University Florence) · 2026-02-01

This working paper translates Executive Order 3, “Revitalizing the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants,” into an actionable blueprint for rebuilding tenant power inside city government. It argues that MOPT should function as the administration’s coordinating hub for tenant protection, designed to strengthen tenants’ rights and embed tenants’ voices in housing policy and enforcement. The paper proposes a program of work organized around four core tenant rights: affordability, habitability, collective power, and housing security (including freedom from harassment). To deliver these rights, it lays out specific actions that integrate tenant organizing support, cross-agency enforcement coordination, anti-speculation strategy, and pathways to transfer distressed buildings into social housing. Finally, it makes a capacity case: to be effective, MOPT must be built as a robust institution, recommending a minimum $8 million annual budget and a staff of at least 35.

Building Blocks of a Progressive Building Agenda for New York City

The Faculty Digital Archive (New York University) · 2026-02-01

This working paper argues that New York City can no longer outsource housing policy to private real estate markets that absorb public subsidy while failing to deliver deep affordability. It situates the Mamdani Administration’s early housing executive orders, including the SPEED Task Force, the LIFT Task Force, and the revitalized Office to Protect Tenants, as a mandate to treat housing as a social good and to rebuild public capacity in planning, finance, and development. The paper outlines a first-year municipal building agenda centered on four moves: re-empowering NYCHA as a public developer, launching a city-run Revolving Construction Loan Fund, activating a public land bank, and expanding the NYC Public Housing Preservation Trust as a vehicle for large-scale preservation and green retrofits (with state approval where needed). Together, these measures would establish the institutional architecture of a city-led social housing system, create revenue streams that can be recaptured for affordability, and reduce the role of rent hikes and evictions in project underwriting. The core claim is political as well as technical: durable public ownership and investment can center dignity and the human right to housing, shifting power toward tenants and unhoused New Yorkers and reshaping the city’s broader political terrain.

Implementing Mass Governance in New York City

Faculty Digital Archive (New York University Florence) · 2026-02-01

This implementation memo translates the mass governance framework into concrete institutional reforms and policy pilots for the Mamdani administration. It begins from a core diagnosis: New York City already has extensive participatory infrastructure, but much of it remains shallow, fragmented, and disconnected from real decision-making power and resources. The memo proposes upgrading community boards and other civic bodies from advisory venues into at least partially binding forums over capital budgets, transit priorities, housing preservation, and social infrastructure, supported by agency participation teams, clear response timelines, and public-facing dashboards. It then details first-wave pilots across four domains: the transition period (borough town halls and forums linked to early governing decisions), transit (community-driven bus corridor priorities and “Map My Ride” data campaigns), housing (tenant-driven enforcement, RGB democratization, and “How’s My Building?”), and food access/childcare (community-governed groceries and participatory childcare design). Across these initiatives, the memo positions mass volunteerism as a permanent civic engine, mobilized to gather information, staff assemblies, and convert popular priorities into binding decisions.

The Moral Work of Participation: Disillusio, Expertise, and Urban Planning Under Neoliberalism

Qualitative Sociology · 2024-08-08 · 1 citations

Behind Gentrification’s Gloss

Contexts · 2022-05-01

Policy and scholarly debates on gentrification have mainly focused on displacement or improvements to neighborhood amenities. Less attention has been paid to actively worsening conditions for residents who don’t leave and for whom poor housing conditions are a perverse consequence of gentrification. Mapping city data on apartment code violations, we find that substandard housing conditions are surprisingly concentrated in gentrifying areas and not just low-income neighborhoods. Drawing on ethnographic observations our research finds that in gentrification while bringing new amenities to neighborhoods, can also give strong incentives to landlords to mistreat tenants in an attempt to drive them out intentionally.

A posteriori comparisons, repeated instances and urban policy mobilities: What ‘best practices’ leave behind

Urban Studies · 2021 · 47 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Sociology

Urban studies scholars have engaged in a lively debate on how to reformat comparative methods in the face of critical scrutiny of the discipline’s purported universalism. We share the enthusiasm for a reformatted urban comparativism and, in this paper, we turn to the thorny and more pragmatic question of how to actually carry it out. While traditional comparisons in urban studies have sought to find variation among similar cases by selecting a priori, in this article we propose to compare the findings of different researchers through a posteriori, that is, after the research has been done. We also argue that urban researchers need to focus on urban processes rather than cities; on repeated instances rather than on controlling for difference; and on mid-level abstraction rather than on grand theory or descriptive empirical cases. We put this strategy to work by comparing empirical research previously carried out by the authors on how two Latin American cities became international urban ‘best practices’: Bogotá as a sustainable transport model and Porto Alegre as a model of local participatory budgeting. The comparison highlights the tension between the simplified policy narratives that were mobilised to circulate Bogotá and Porto Alegre as international ‘best practices’ and the broader multi-scalar institutional reforms that these ‘best practice’ narratives have left behind in their global circulations. In doing so, we show the potential of a posteriori comparisons to analyse contemporary global urban dynamics and provide some explicit methodological tactics on how to do comparisons in a more systematic way.

5. Making Space for Civil Society

Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

Acronyms and Terms

Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31