NYC Mayoral Candidate Brad Lander On Housing, Office Conversions and Rezoning

Brad Lander comes from common enough political stock in New York. He dabbled in residential development in the 1990s while remaining an urban planner at heart. Then, hoping to resolve that conflict, he ran for public office, taking over Bill de Blasio’s seat to represent Park Slope in the City Council.

That was 15 years ago. These days, Lander, the city’s comptroller, is the leading progressive critic of Mayor Eric Adams, who has grown peevish in return.

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Lander is also Adams’s most formidable opponent in next year’s mayoral race. He launched his campaign July 30. Now the two Brooklyn Democrats are off to the races, with Adams immediately chiding the comptroller for his poor timing and for trying to block “the second man of color from being the mayor of the City of New York.”

On the fundraising front, Lander has a long way to go to catch up with the more than $4 million that’s poured into Adams’s 2025 campaign so far, according to financial disclosures. Lander has raised $651,707.

None of this is lost on Lander, who before succeeding in his 2021 bid to be the city’s comptroller was an original co-founder of the council’s Progressive Caucus. (Today, its 19 members stand for more affordable housing, a progressive tax code, living wages and an end to solitary confinement at Rikers Island, among other things.)

He’ll take any opportunity to pitch you on his plan to spur New York City’s economy or just chat about the 2021 rezoning of Gowanus, which adds thousands of new housing units near a Brooklyn industrial canal once so rancid that it appeared to boil from “the rising and breaking of sludge bubbles,” as The New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell observed in 1950.

Like many New Yorkers, Lander isn’t from here but arrived pretty much as soon as possible from the heartland — Missouri — a fact he doesn’t always work into the storyline. The comptroller spoke to Commercial Observer on Aug. 28 about all he’s been up to as New York City’s chief accountability officer, and what kind of stuff he’d like to get done if elected mayor. 

(The interview was conducted before news broke that federal agents on Sept. 4 had seized the cellphones of several top Adams administration officials and aides, moves apparently separate from a federal investigation into alleged campaign fundraising corruption tied to the mayor.)  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Commercial Observer: Let’s start with the national political scene. What do you feel most pumped up about from this year’s Democratic National Convention?

Brad Lander: The convention was great, super exhilarating. The attention to housing was unmistakable. To have both President Obama and Vice President Harris talk specifically about housing as a critical national issue — I’ve been working in housing for 30 years, and I don’t remember it being such a meaningful issue on the national stage.

We’ve heard a lot from Vice President Harris on housing. She’s promising to build 3 million new homes in her first term and offer down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers. What do you think?

Federal incentives to encourage localities and states to build more housing is absolutely the right idea. But the details will matter.

We have strong tenant protections here in New York, but many states around the country do not, and tenants are vulnerable. I like the commitment to strengthening home ownership. Harris’s proposal to provide $25,000 toward a down payment would be huge. Here in New York City, I’ve proposed a program that would invest pension fund dollars in homes for New York City employees like teachers, firefighters and cops.

Did you know the average cost of a home in New York now is just a little shy of $800,000? A teacher can’t afford that. But if the teacher puts up $400,000 and the city pension funds invest $400,000 to own the other half, and the down payment is 20 percent, coming up with $80,000 as a teacher is still hard. But, if the federal government puts up $25,000, we could have a new generation of homeowners in New York City. So I was excited about that.

Housing and economic development have been big themes in your audits the past few years. What’s your general picture of how the current administration is managing the city?

We’ve audited many of the things that are most pressing in the city. We recently released our audit of the DocGo contract, a $432 million no-bid contract to a vendor with no experience providing shelter services for asylum seekers. We said from the start that this is a mistake. They plowed forward with it anyway, and what the audit showed was that 80 percent of the expenses were not supported in the contract. There were thousands of nights of hotel rooms with no one in them. The city was paying for subcontractors that hadn’t been vetted or approved — just systemic mismanagement.

But one that sticks out for me the most is the audit we did of the homeless sweeps program. In the time we looked at it, that program forcibly removed 2,308 people from where they were sleeping and only three of them got connected to stable housing. The others are just right back on the street. That means we’ve spent a lot of money and achieved essentially nothing.

Say more about your relationship with the mayor. Is Eric Adams getting stuff done in New York City?

He promised to get stuff done, but he’s not getting the stuff done that matters to New Yorkers.

He promised to focus on affordability, but the rent is higher than ever, and it takes longer than ever just to place a New Yorker in an affordable housing unit.

He promised a safer city, but people feel more unsafe, and violent crime is coming down more slowly than in some other cities. He promised child care seats for every 3- and 4-year-old, but thousands of families are on waitlists.

Was there a particular moment when you decided to throw your hat into the primary race?

It’s been a step-by-step process, but a few moments stand out where this administration substituted cruelty for good management. The homeless sweeps are one example of that.

And at Rikers Island, even [attorney and former Giuliani administration official] Randy Mastro said he’d advise the mayor against using his emergency powers to overrule the council’s legislation banning solitary confinement.

But maybe the final straw, from my point of view, was these 30- and 60-day shelter limits for asylum seekers.

No one wants to be in a shelter, and we can’t afford it. But it takes months for folks to file their asylum application, get work authorization, get their kids settled in school and get a job, which is what folks want so they can move out into stable housing. No one can do those things in that amount of time. This substitutes cruelty for effective management that could get people on their feet.

When you see that pattern over and over, it led me to say our city deserves better. And I can do it better.

Say more about what you’ll do as mayor. What’s your 60-second pitch for the job?

I hope to do for New York City what I did for Gowanus — setting the table for genuinely inclusive growth that produces a more thriving and affordable city.

When I was a council member, I championed the city planning effort to do that for Gowanus. And it was unique in a way. I think Gowanus is the only neighborhood where we raised our hand to put together a vision for the kind of growth that we could see. That means opportunities for housing that don’t exist otherwise. That means investments in public housing so that it’s not crumbling. That means new arts and industrial space, new open space, better infrastructure to make growth work.

Our community planning process was what created that support. Gowanus has the only Mandatory Inclusionary Housing zone that the community board voted in favor of with a substantial majority.

And the proof is in the pudding. Builders have permits for 7,500 units already. Lots of it is under construction right now, lots of it affordable, lots with artist studios. And work is getting underway to modernize two New York City Housing Authority developments.

How would you translate the lessons from the Gowanus rezoning into a vision for the rest of the city’s future?

I think Gowanus gives us a model to use for the city as a whole. I mean, to confront the affordability crisis, we need more housing. But I don’t know if the take-your-medicine approach will work in the long run. We need it at scale.

That could mean a significant reboot for homeownership. If people believed that new development in their neighborhood would be an opportunity for them or their kids to be able to afford to buy a home, think about it.

Think about the old Mitchell-Lama program. Those buildings were bigger than anything that previously existed in those neighborhoods, but working families knew they would be able to afford homes in them. We’ve got a much better shot at building a coalition for that kind of growth. The city needs that.

The “Yes in my backyard” movement has been on the ascent, and it’s now more urgent than ever for cities to add more housing supply. Do you think this debate is shifting?

The zeitgeist is definitely moving, and you see that in groups like Open New York. But to see President Obama and Vice President Harris talk about the need to build more housing as a Democratic Party value — I think there is a shift. And I think it’s good.

What we need to do is have a conversation with New Yorkers that helps them see themselves benefiting from the kind of growth that takes place, not in an abstract way with supply and demand curves.

Maybe the most tangible way is to pivot to affordable homeownership. New York City has half the homeownership rate of the rest of the country. So that’s a much more durable way to build a long-term coalition for the kind of growth we need.

How are the city’s central business districts faring four years out from the pandemic?

The team of economists here watches subway ridership and office occupancy very closely. It looks like we have hit a kind of new normal, or a plateau. Subway ridership is at about 60 percent of where it was pre-pandemic. And the number of office jobs is actually above its pre-pandemic peak.

We have more private-sector jobs as a whole and more office workers than before — it’s just that people are in the office only three days a week.

That’s fine from the point of view of the broad regional economy, but it’s a problem if you’re in the shoeshine business downstairs, or the lunch counter, or you own a Class B or C office building. The real issues remain there.

Meanwhile, new commercial real estate is doing great, like One Vanderbilt, a new trophy building. And Hudson Yards is producing more than predicted for the city. But Class B and C portfolios continue to face real challenges. Vacancy rates are approximately double what they were before the pandemic. There’s some reason to think that’s plateauing, and maybe even turning, but certainly not turning rapidly. We’re going to need some new and creative strategies.

Some conversions are taking place already, and that’s good. Some buildings are pivoting. Some are being renovated to provide more flexible office space through the M-CORE program. But more is going to be needed.

What else can the city do to help those Class B and C commercial owners repurpose their properties?

I think we’ll probably need a teardown program. It’s hard to renovate those old buildings, especially on Third Avenue in Midtown where buildings have such a big core. A teardown program would let owners build taller residential buildings instead. We’ll need some creativity.

If we can keep the city safe and clean and activate the public realm so that people want to be here — workers, residents and tourists — we’ll see adaptive reuse of a lot of that office building space.

The most important thing is to generate a thriving city where people want to be. That’s the role of the public sector. And then owners and businesses will come up with some additional creative ideas for how to use that space. It’s going to take some time.

Part of your job is to keep a close eye on the city’s pocketbook. How do we score on fiscal responsibility after this last — as you called it — “budget dance?”

Four years ago, there was existential anxiety about the city’s future. Would people ever want to live, work, ride the subway, go to a Broadway show or a club in New York ever again? And where would the money come from? In August of 2020, the urban doom loop hypothesis seemed very real.

Four years later, compared to that, there is really long-term reason for a lot of optimism for New York City. People do want to live and work and go to Broadway shows and go to nightclubs and do the things that you can only do in New York. Jobs are at the highest ever. So there’s a lot to be optimistic about.

But we need better fiscal management to take advantage of it, and we’re not getting it from this administration.

The budget dance of the last year was just a good example. First there was scapegoating — blaming asylum seekers. To blame our budget crisis on asylum seekers in the greatest immigrant city the world has ever known, that was just scapegoating.

Then to pivot from there to closing the libraries and the cultural institutions? You cut the libraries, and then you restore the libraries, and then you say, “Hooray, we did something useful.” Whether that was always a bluff or not, it’s like the only problems the mayor is solving are the ones he’s creating.

What do you think should change to make the budget process easier and ward off fiscal cliffs?

We recently proposed a modernized fiscal framework for the city. Next year will be 50 years since the 1975 Financial Emergency Act. That’s the act that helped save the city from a fiscal crisis. And it gave us our fiscal framework, a modern one at the time.

We proposed five steps to strengthen the city’s fiscal management formula, including deposits in the rainy-day fund, a standard approach to savings and efficiencies, making sure our debt stays below 15 percent of our operating expenses, paying our vendors on time, and, lastly, a better framework to invest in infrastructure through our capital budget.

Unfortunately, the mayor’s charter revision commission did not propose any of those things. But we’ve got the foundation for a thriving and inclusive and sustainable future. We just need better fiscal management to realize it.

What else would you highlight about your impact as comptroller? Have you tried using the tools of this office in any particularly innovative ways?

I’ve tried to be creative with the tools of the office. We do bond sales all the time, but we did the city’s first social bonds, which generated about $2 billion for over 7,000 units of affordable housing. That hasn’t been done before.

And we worked with our pension fund trustees to adopt a historic new set of responsible property management standards for our real estate investments. That has not been done before.

Maybe my favorite investment of all is the $60 million we invested in Signature Bank’s defaulted mortgage portfolio with the Community Preservation Corporation and Related Fund Management on about 35,000 mostly rent-stabilized units in New York City.

It’s doing extremely well as an investment. We’re targeting 11 percent net internal rate of return on that, and, so far, we’re exceeding it. And, at the same time, we’re preserving the affordability of the units. The office has a critical role, whether it’s bond financing or the audits or the pension fund investing. How do we do that in a way that generates the returns New Yorkers need?

Do you think the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act played a role in Signature’s collapse?

Obviously, the bank was distressed, but most of the buildings are not.

I think Signature’s portfolio had a heavy concentration of buyers who were over-leveraging their buildings, and then got caught when the 2019 law strengthened tenant protections.

You have all these buyers who paid a premium thinking that they would be able to significantly increase rents by exploiting loopholes in the rent laws. What the 2019 law did was close loopholes.

So, yes, there were buyers who specifically targeted buildings because they thought they could significantly increase rents by taking advantage of weaknesses in the laws. The law closed those loopholes, and owners — or lenders — who were over-concentrated in that kind of investment were left holding the bag, yes. That doesn’t mean the buildings were in distress.

Where was your first New York City apartment and how much did it cost?

I moved here in the late fall of 1992. My then-girlfriend, now wife of 25 years, was a first-year student at NYU Law School, and we lived in a brand-new building at Houston and Mott, not rent-stabilized. It was a nice, big one-bedroom with two sunny windows on a corner, and I think the rent was $1,200 — an insane price.

We lived there for a year, and then we moved to the garden apartment of a brownstone in Park Slope and we paid $900 in rent.

A few years later, we bought a two-bedroom co-op in the North Slope for $125,000 in what had been the carriage house for the Borden Dairy on Sterling Place, a milk factory. We were both young, working people, and that’s the kind of opportunity that doesn’t exist now.

It really does speak to the homeownership issue. We had a clear path to find a great rental we could afford, then to buy a co-op, which meant we had stability here. That just doesn’t exist anymore, and it needs to be a significant part of our housing policy.

Abigail Nehring can be reached at anehring@commercialobserver.com.