New York’s Mayoral Candidates Firm Up Their Commercial Real Estate Pitches

Trouble was brewing for New York Mayor Eric Adams, a favorite of the commercial real estate industry, well before the FBI dropped a five-count corruption indictment in September.

Rumors and indictments against high-ranking members of Adams’s administration in late 2023, and finally the damning moment when his alleged straw donor scheme surfaced, were followed by the announcements of several candidates looking to unseat him in the 2025 election.

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Those charges against Adams, to which he has pleaded not guilty, are under review by the Trump administration and could be dropped, according to The New York Times, after a series of meetings between Adams and Donald Trump.

Whether other candidates — including former city Comptroller Scott Stringer, current Comptroller Brad Lander, and state legislators Zohran Mamdani, Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos — smelled blood in the water beforehand is unclear, but one thing is for sure: The competition for Adams’s job heated up after the indictment. 

Other names who may not be as recognizable in the political world include attorney Jim Walden, former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson and former Bronx Assembly member Michael Blake. That’s nine candidates for the June Democratic primary alone.

While these candidates — at least the ones we spoke to — are looking to unseat Adams, what they don’t seem interested in unseating is the mayor’s City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, which in their books is good, though not good enough. Adams’s plan to clear a path for more than 80,000 new homes over the next 15 years is minuscule compared to what New Yorkers need to meet the demand caused by the housing shortage, they say.

And a few of them already have their own plans to fill that need. Lander wants to create an Airbnb-like site for affordable housing, Myrie has a proposal to create 70,000 units per year, and Stringer wants to turn unused city-owned properties into affordable housing.

“We want to follow up on the City of Yes, a little more housing in every neighborhood, but we’re going to need a lot more housing in some places like we did in Gowanus, and I’ll be rolling out plans to talk about where that will be and how we’ll get it,” Lander said in an interview.

To put those plans into place, they’ll have to beat out not only an incumbent mayor (who hinted at switching parties if he loses the primary) but also another potential dark horse candidate — one who’s already polling well and might be the powerful real estate industry’s favored candidate. That would be former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Adams, however, seems preoccupied. There is no official campaign website for the June primary, and Adams will not be getting assistance through the New York City Campaign Finance Board’s matching funds program. The CFB routinely awards qualified candidates $8 for every $1 raised from New York City residents.

The Adams campaign raked in $10 million from the program in the election cycle leading up to the 2021 election, something that the CFB said would not happen again due to the federal investigation into Adams’s fundraising as well as noncompliance with inquiries from the board.

It represents a significant disadvantage compared to his opponents, with Lander and Stringer having collected $2,157,123 and $2,977,758, respectively, in matching funds so far. Ramos had up to 50 percent of her matching funds claims denied due to a high number of errors in her filings, among other issues.

Adams trails Mamdani, Walden and Tilson in public funds at $270,000, leaving behind the natural advantage held by incumbents, according to analysis from City & State.

Yet, if you set aside ramifications of a potential conviction for his alleged crimes, Eric Adams and the other candidates have another huge problem on their hands: Andrew Cuomo.

The former governor who left the executive chamber under criticism from what seemed like every corner of the political spectrum has not announced his candidacy for mayor. But he already has a major lead in polls.

The cases against Cuomo, such as sexual harassment and negligence regarding nursing home regulation during the height of the COVD-19 pandemic, which caused him to resign the governorship in August 2021, seem to have done little to harm his political prospects.

A Bold Decision poll of Democratic voters released Jan. 22 showed a staggering lead for the Democrat, establishing him as a potential front-runner in ranked-choice voting, with Cuomo showing a 55 percent favorability to 40 percent unfavorability rate among the three candidates with the highest name recognition.

Those other top two contenders by name recognition trailed significantly behind Cuomo. Adams has a 23 percent favorability to 73 percent unfavorability rating, and Stringer has 42 percent favorability to 21 percent unfavorability.

Cuomo also leads by demographic in the same poll: 46 percent of Black voters prefer Cuomo to the 18 percent in favor of Adams, the city’s second Black mayor.

What’s more, Charlotte Bennett, a former executive assistant to Cuomo and one of the lead accusers in the sexual harassment allegations against him, voluntarily dropped the case in early December, followed by the former governor launching an effort to sue her for defamation. 

Not everything will be smooth sailing for Cuomo, however.

The congressional Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic determined that Cuomo knowingly made false statements to Congress about New York State’s response to COVID in nursing homes.  The subcommittee sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice in October, which appears to still be under review.

A spokesperson for Cuomo said he hasn’t ruled out a mayoral run.

“This is all premature, but Andrew Cuomo will always be a Queens boy who loves New York and will do everything he can to help it succeed,” Rich Azzopardi said in a statement. “New Yorkers know it was Gov. Cuomo who fought successfully to raise wages for millions of workers; actually built infrastructure projects that politicians merely talked about, like the Second Avenue Subway, the Moynihan Train Hall and the new Kosciuszko Bridge and LaGuardia Airport; and delivered progress where Washington faltered, including passing the strongest gun protections and paid family leave in the nation, and codifying Roe v. Wade in state law before the Supreme Court overturned it, all while cutting taxes and reining in spending.”

Politics aside, candidates’ positions on policies affecting commercial real estate are becoming clearer. Voters will be under no illusions about what contenders support.  

Tilson has backing from Bill Ackman, his former colleague at hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, and Tilson was for 18 years also an executive at Kase Capital Management, which shut down in 2017 after a period of heavy losses. A fan of Warren Buffett, Tilson has authored tomes on the topic of investing too.

Tilson ranks third in overall fundraising compared to the other candidates with over $420,000 propelling his efforts, closely following Walden who has $630,000 total raised ($500,000 of that a personal loan to his campaign).

Crime seems to be a top priority for Tilson — he recently had a bike stolen — and he talks about red tape and bureaucracy disincentivizing housing growth. Tilson says there are about 40,000 empty rent-stabilized apartments due to the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, which made it harder to deregulate units through upgrades, and changes are needed to get landlords to invest in those properties to get them back on the market.

“The big levers are new construction, but also getting rid of these perverse disincentives to maintain our existing housing stock,” Tilson told Commercial Observer. “Over and over again, it’s good ideas taken too far. … You want to protect individuals from sudden rent hikes, but, when the individual is gone, you’ve got to allow people to invest and earn a return on their capital.”

While Adams’s City of Yes rezoning is a step in the right direction, Tilson, like other candidates, wants to fast-track the 80,000 homes in 15 years expected through more aggressive rezoning policies and add even more housing to the pipeline.

“City of Yes is 10 percent of what is necessary, and one of my highest priorities will be to go fight for the other 90 percent,” Tilson added. “I think we can double the rate of construction of affordable housing in the city easily if we just reduce some of these obstacles and barriers.”

Brad Lander recently proposed a centralized platform for people to get an easy roof over their heads while putting money in other people’s pockets. “HomeShare NYC” would connect those looking for housing with homeowners who have a little extra space.

It would replace apartment-sharing sites such as Airbnb since the city clamped down on short-term rentals in 2023 through Local Law 18 — restrictions that the New York City Council is currently revisiting — and could provide housing to up to 10,000 New Yorkers, according to Lander.

Lander has worked in the nonprofit development space before, and said he understands the needs of builders. He also championed the push to rezone Gowanus, Brooklyn — which he represented on the City Council prior to his 2021 election to comptroller — in the final moments of Bill de Blasio’s administration. 

Lander wants to replicate the success of Gowanus, where somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 housing units are being built.

“[As comptroller], we helped save the 35,000 units of rent-stabilized housing that were put at risk when the Signature Bank portfolio failed. We’ve done the city’s first social bonds — $2 billion to finance low-income housing,” Lander told CO. 

Lander also wants to establish programs for homeownership. These would include helping city workers invest pension funds to boost their purchasing power, meaning that a teacher who would normally be able to afford only a $400,000 home would qualify for an $800,000 one, according to Lander.

“We will be proposing to integrate affordable homeownership into our upzoning policy, which basically doesn’t currently exist,” Lander said. “[Mandatory inclusionary housing] and upzonings produce affordable rental housing, but we’ll be proposing a model that would focus on affordable, co-
operative home ownership.”

While Adams’s City of Yes aims to create 5,300 new housing units per year, Brooklyn state Sen. Zellnor Myrie’s Rebuild NYC proposal sets the bar a little higher. It would create 70,000 units per year in a decade, in part through adding 95,000 units to the New York City Housing Authority’s portfolio, 85,000 units to Midtown by lifting the density cap for individual plots zoned for residential, and another 85,000 through allowing multi-
family developments on the edges of industrial zones.

“I think City of Yes was an important first step, but not nearly as big and bold as we need to solve this crisis, but we are aiming to create close to 700,000 units over the next 10 years and to preserve another 300,000,” Myrie said in an interview with CO. “The goal is to do that over the next decade. … I want to have war rooms in City Hall that track the progress to see how many units we are creating and preserving, really marshaling all of the resources that we have at City Hall to solve the most pressing part of our affordability crisis.”

Myrie is also looking to address city regulations that put roadblocks in the paths of developers, something he plans to fix by beefing up the staff that oversees construction projects as well as focusing on retention. He also aims to increase funding for the city’s Right to Counsel program for renters and homeowners facing eviction, foreclosure or deed theft.

Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s priorities include a freeze on rent increases for the city’s approximately 1 million rent-
stabilized apartments. The Rent Guidelines Board, which votes on whether landlords can increase the monthly cost of housing, last summer approved a 2.75 percent increase on one-year leases and a 5.25 percent increase for two-year leases. Combined with previous hikes, that means there have been approvals for rent hikes amounting to 9 percent since Adams took office.

Mamdani, who raised north of $640,000 in the October-to-January disclosure cycle, would also like to create a chain of city-owned and subsidized grocery stores focused on keeping prices low for shoppers impacted by inflation.

The stores would not pay rent or property taxes, according to Mamdani, and the program will have its own warehouses and distribution networks. Meanwhile, shoppers would be getting fed at wholesale prices.

Stringer’s name will ring familiar to anyone following politics over the decades, since the former state legislator, Manhattan borough president and city comptroller also ran in the 2021 mayoral race. It was a crowded field then, too, with Stringer’s candidacy seemingly doomed due because of sexual harassment allegations. He sued an accuser for defamation near the end of 2024.

But now he’s back with a housing plan that isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel.

Calling it “Mitchell-Lama 2.0,_,” Stringer says he wants to take “thousands” of vacant or unused city-owned properties and develop them into affordable housing, and to create a $500 million revolving loan fund available to nonprofits and minority-  and women-owned businesses to build housing.

“Piecemeal development is the old way of thinking about how to build the housing that we need,” Stringer said. “When you look at the vacant land that the city owns, which is about 1,000 parcels… and you start to give small developers who build affordable housing, not-for-profit, this land, you start to create a real housing plan for working people. And that was basically what the Mitchell-Lama housing program was all about.”

How many units could Mitchell-Lama 2.0 produce? Stinger isn’t keen on making estimates but off the cuff thinks 50,000 units in just a few short years is within the realm of possibility.

“Why don’t we just put a plan together that works and go forward from there now?” Stringer said.

Stringer also said he wants to take back what he described as mismanaged rental buildings through eminent domain and transfer the properties to more trusted landlords. He also wants to invest $40 billion to revitalize NYCHA housing units.

Michael Blake seems to be on Stringer’s level with revisiting Mitchell-lama upon the housing hungry people of New York City.

“We will [relaunch a Mitchell-Lama] to address affordable housing head-on and will need partners to improve the quality of existing units,” Blake said in a statement. “I will appoint respected leaders to top government posts and work tirelessly to restore the faith New Yorkers have in government. It is time for an adult to enter the room and manage our city.”

Walden, Ramos and Mamdani did not respond to requests for comment, while a spokesperson for Adams referred CO to the mayor’s State of the City address in early January.

Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.