November 2025
Vote No on Ballot Proposals 2, 3, and 4
Zohran Mamdani and
the NYC Housing Crisis
Not Democrats or Republicans – For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks with NYC business leaders at event of the Partnership for New York City, July 15. (Photo: Don Eim / The City)
On the eve of the New York City mayoral election, Democratic Party candidate Zohran Mamdani has maintained and even widened his double-digit lead over former governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa. The race between Mamdani, a member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the widely despised Cuomo and the vigilante/talk-show jockey Sliwa has gotten huge national attention, particularly as President Donald Trump has threatened to take reprisals if the “communist” is elected mayor of the center of world finance capital. The frothing hostility from Trump has no doubt won Mamdani votes, but the Democratic candidate is no communist, or even a socialist, but a liberal capitalist politician.
That hasn’t stopped the sky-is-falling doomsayers in the bourgeois political establishment, both Republican and Democrat, from pulling all the levers in a frantic “Stop Mamdani” drive. During the October 22 candidates debate, Cuomo’s campaign posted an AI-generated “Criminals for Zohran Mamdani” ad, then took it down while the subliminal message remains. The ex-governor has also spewed vile Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani, a Muslim, and tried to smear him as antisemitic for saying Israel’s war on Gaza is genocide. Over $26 million was raised from billionaires by political action committees, which spent some $40 million in the “anyone but Mamdani” drive (compared to the Mamdani campaign’s total expenditure of $9.8 million).
While the mayoral race heads to the finish line, detentions of immigrants and provocations by ICE and Border Patrol storm troopers continue to escalate in NYC. If Mamdani wins, Trump threatened, the city will have “big problems,” and not just a cutoff of federal funds. But while the president has declared “war” on “sanctuary cities,” Mamdani responded to a New York Times (15 October) questionnaire about how candidates would handle Trump, saying he would be “happy to work with him” on issues like “cheaper groceries”! Hello?! If Trump floods NYC with federal agents and sends in troops, workers and students should shut the city down!
Today, the fight to unchain labor’s power from the Democratic Party is more urgent than ever.
As a competent political operator, Mamdani has systematically tried to “reach out” and win support from older Jewish voters (his support base already includes many younger Jews), courted African Americans who earlier backed ex-cop mayor Eric Adams, announced he is keeping Jessica Tisch (of the multi-billionaire Tisch family) as NYC police commissioner, etc. And after saying in June that “we shouldn’t have billionaires,” the DSA Democrat has spent the last four months making nice with Wall Street, including a sit-down with fellow Democrat Michael Bloomberg (net worth $110 billion), who spent $8.3 million trying to stop Mamdani in the primary, but then stopped. In fact, after Mamdani’s upset victory in June, the smart money stopped donating to stop him, leaving that to the “dumb money.”
Earlier stages of this were analyzed in our article “NYC Mayoral Primary: No Vote for Democrats, or for Any Capitalist Parties or Politicians!” (23 June). After the Democrats’ debacle in 2024, in good part due to the support of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for the U.S./Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, and attacks on pro-Palestinian protesters in the U.S., as well as their administration’s anti-labor policies (banning a rail strike), a lot of people had had it with the Democrats. The lead back-page article in the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth’s newspaper Revolution (No. 22, October 2022), “No Way – You Can’t Fight Trump with Democrats,” spells out how the Mamdani campaign has brought many young people back into the deadly grip of that party of imperialist war and racist repression.
While Mamdani has campaigned on the theme of “affordability,” proposing reforms like free buses (why not free mass transit?), universal pre-kindergarten childcare and one (!) city-owned grocery store per borough – nothing that hasn’t been done elsewhere – the establishment Democrats and Republicans reject them all as “unaffordable.” In reality they are a drop in the proverbial bucket, deliberately avoiding any real challenge to the power of Wall Street. Meanwhile, the DSA Democrat has sought to connect with the money men over his pledge to build 200,000 “affordable” apartments over the next ten years. And new housing construction is definitely of interest to real estate barons.
New York City’s current Democratic mayor Eric Adams is now a “lame duck” as his reelection bid flopped, largely due to the multiple corruption cases against him and his pals – and to acting as Donald Trump’s toady as a quid pro quo for dropping those prosecutions. But one of his campaign planks is on the ballot for the November 4 elections, namely three propositions that would revise the NYC City Charter on “affordable housing” construction. The measures would ostensibly allow certain publicly financed construction projects to be “fast-tracked” for approval – by undermining or cutting out the City Council from the approval process.
On typical winter nights in New York City, over 100,000 people are in city shelters and thousands more sleep in the subway or on the streets. (Photo: Ben Fractenberg / The City)
New York City is in the midst of a huge housing emergency. Most renters pay over 30% of their income to their landlord, and a quarter pay over 50%. Average market-rate rents are $3,500 a month, some of the highest in the country; the vacancy rate is barely 1.4%, and an estimated 350,000 people are homeless, either sleeping in shelters (over 100,000), on the streets or doubled-up in overcrowded apartments. Some 154,000 NYC public school students have no stable housing, an all-time record. Adams and his allies in the Real Estate Board of New York have said that 500,000 new housing units are needed.
There is certainly an urgent need for massive, quality housing construction for working people in New York City. But that is not what Ballot proposals 2, 3, and 4 are about. Behind the deceptive talk of “fast-tracking” projects, they want to eliminate any semblance of democratic control, in order to maximize profitable market-rate housing while tacking on a small percentage of “affordable” units. Under existing procedures, typically 70% of new housing would be for “free market” rates. Even the term “affordable” is misleading, as the rents in some projects built in low-income areas are higher than most residents could afford.
On the ballot, Proposal 2 would “fast-track” projects with 100% affordable housing and housing in 12 community districts (out of 47) with the least amount of affordable housing built. Proposal 3 would “fast-track” housing and infrastructure projects that do not require an environmental review. In both cases, the speed-up is by cutting out the City Council entirely. If the City Council did reject or amend any project, Proposal 4 would allow a board of the mayor, Council speaker and borough president to override them with no appeal. (Under the current system, the mayor can veto a City Council decision, but the City Council can override the mayor’s veto).
A coalition calling for a “no” vote on the ballot measure, consisting of the City Council, construction trade unions and the Central Labor Council measures has emphasized that it is through City Council review that it has been possible to secure requirements to use union labor, to secure higher percentages of “affordable” housing, and to require that developers build schools, playgrounds, mini-parks and include space for grocery stores. Supporters of Props 2, 3 and 4 claim that the City Council defers to NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) members opposing projects in their districts, but opponents say that the Council has approved 93% of the projects it reviewed.
The process the ballot measures would amend is called the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), which applies to any housing or infrastructure project that requires a zoning waiver. The ULURP was instituted in 1975, in response to decades of construction by bureaucratic, centralized fiat, primarily under racist “urban planner” Robert Moses, who ran roughshod over working-class, African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods – for example, tearing down and polluting a huge swath of the South Bronx with the Cross-Bronx Expressway instead of putting it underground.
In the election campaign, Mamdani’s program for building 200,000 units of “affordable housing” over the next ten years is hardly radical, let alone socialist. New York City built or renovated 27,000 such units in 2024. He says his plan would be “fast-tracked,” “union-made” and “100% affordable.” It would be paid for by a $100 billion capital plan, paid for with $70 billion in new municipal bonds, which would certainly please the Wall Street bankers. Mamdani has come under fire (including in the second mayoral candidates debate) for not taking a position on the ballot measures, saying this is a “hard question.” Since the questions are considered likely to pass anyway, ducking the issue won’t cost him labor votes.
Moreover, by staying mum, the reputed “socialist” candidate of the Democratic Party that is one of the two pillars of U.S. capitalism can offer a carrot to the real estate and banking interests who stand to profit from shared interests in pushing his housing program. One leading capitalist who is pushing for that is Robert Wolf, the former chairman and CEO of UBS America, the leading Swiss bank on Wall Street and an influential member of the Partnership for New York City (PNYC), a coalition of 300 leading corporations, investment firms and real estate developers, with which Mamdani met in July.
Wolf, who was a major contributor and fundraiser for Barack Obama, serving on several presidential advisory panels, as well as a member of Eric Adams’ 2021-22 corporate-sponsored transition team, had a lengthy call with Mamdani following the PNYC meeting and declared in an interview with The Hill (1 October): “I applaud that he’s reaching out to business leaders and that business leaders are reaching out to him…. It’s imperative that the public and private sector work together.” And that is what Mamdani is calling for, notably through the OneNYC coalition of businessmen supporting his campaign, to “Drive private-sector investment and public-private partnerships.”
Today mass homelessness is a crisis across the United States and throughout the capitalist world. In June 2024, the Supreme Court ruled, in the same session in which it declared that the U.S. president has immunity for any official act, that the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, and by extension all U.S. cities, counties and states, could ban homeless encampments, even if people have nowhere else to go. This recalls the ironic quote from the great French writer Anatole France, who wrote in 1894 that, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
Internationalists in July 2020 demonstration outside Housing Court in Manhattan protesting threatened cutoff of pandemic rent moratorium. (Photo: Pix11)
Today, as the Trump administration carries out its horrific campaign of mass deportations of immigrants, spearheading its drive to erect a police-state regime, it is gearing up to drive homeless people out of the cities and into concentration camps, as Salt Lake City, Utah is now preparing to do. Already under the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton in the 1990s, many of the public housing projects built from the late 1930s through the ’70s were demolished in many cities after decades of deliberate neglect. This is a graphic expression of the terminal decay of the capitalist system as public services are slashed and hunger and homelessness spread.
A real plan to address the housing emergency facing working people would have to defeat the powerful forces that milk trillions of dollars annually in profits from real estate holdings valued at a staggering $654 trillion worldwide, and $137 trillion in the U.S. alone. Such an effort, in addition to maintaining and extending rent controls and slashing sky-high rents, would have to fight to expropriate the real estate barons, occupy the estimated tens of thousands of empty housing units in NYC, and undertake a massive program of construction of new public housing – and to fully repair existing deteriorated units – with union control of construction and worker-tenant control of buildings.
The Internationalist Group underlines that ultimately the housing emergency cannot be solved under capitalism. The bottom line is that capitalists do not provide high-quality housing that poor and working people can afford (which is far less than current “affordable” rates) because there is no profit in it. As Friedrich Engels wrote back in 1872 in his pamphlet The Housing Question (1872) on “how the bourgeoisie solves the housing question in practice”:
“The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere! The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place also. As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labor by the working class itself.”
A 70-page
pamphlet analyzing the organizational and political history
of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America. To
read PDF online click here or on image. To order a copy go
to www.internationalist.org/orderhere.html, or write to
Mundial Publications, P.O. Box 3321, Church Street Station,
New York, New York 10008, U.S.A. Price: US$5 including
shipping.To read PDF online click here or on image.
Needless to say, for forthrightly stating this fundamental point, Engels would today be condemned as a hopeless “sectarian” by most of what passes for “the left.”
In short, what is required is a struggle for socialist revolution, here and internationally, led by revolutionary workers parties. That is the housing program that genuine socialists fight for. The Democratic (Party) Socialists of America, on the other hand, have long opposed the call to expropriate the capitalist class (see “The ABCs of the DSA,” in the Internationalist pamphlet, DSA: Fronting for the Democrats [February 2018]).
No vote for any capitalist candidate or party! Vote “No” on NYC Ballot Proposal 2, 3, and 4! Quality housing for all! Expropriate the banks and real estate barons through workers revolution!