Mayoral Candidate Jim Walden Releases 100-Page Housing Plan

New York City mayoral candidate Jim Walden — a political newcomer running as an independent — released 100 pages of material detailing his plans to fix the city’s housing crisis and boost housing production, Commercial Observer has learned.

A core tenet of Walden’s plan includes making deals with developers to allow them to build housing on city land and offer tenants fixed rents for five years, based on 25 percent of the area median income for the borough it’s in, Walden said. Walden believes his plan could produce between 50,000 and 90,000 new units per year.

But that won’t come cheap, and Walden estimates it could cost the city about $20 billion per year, but the lawyer may have that figured out as well.

“My goal is that this is a yearly plan, and that we actually have the degree of planning that we need to land this plane every single year,” Walden told CO in an interview. “There are going to be years where it’s going to be tough, particularly in my startup year, but if we just restore the warehoused, rent-stabilized and NYCHA units, we could get as many as 90,000 units in my first year, if the aggressive calculations of the number of warehoused apartments are true.”

Walden joined the crowded race to replace Mayor Eric Adams last year, running as the only independent at that time. That solo status changed when Adams shifted to the independent line earlier this month.

Walden has never held public office but has worked on numerous political cases in the city for decades, helming his own firm, Walden Macht Haran & Williams. Still, he lacks the name recognition of some other candidates, as the New York Times reported.

Walden’s housing plan entails creating a new model in which the city, developers and tenants sign contracts prior to a new building going up on city-owned property. In exchange for offering fixed, affordable rates, builders could use the land on a zero-cost basis and avoid paying a pricey ground lease to the city.

The zero cost of the land is one benefit to the real estate industry, but Walden also plans to allow individualized tax abatements for each project of 90 percent for 40 years, as well as an easier spot-rezoning process that does not require approval from community boards except when it is in a less dense part of the city.

Walden’s potential administration would also have to find a way to raise the $20 billion per year for land acquisition, modular housing, NYCHA and rent-stabilized capital improvements, upfront capital financing and workforce expansions to expedite bureaucratic processes.

Several methods of funding such a plan include a production tax of three-quarters of 1 percent, generating about $16.5 billion per year, and an upfront tax on transfers of all air rights, which he says could provide the city with between $4.2 billion and $8.8 billion.

But leveraging city-owned land to tackle the housing crisis isn’t a unique idea. Mayor Adams started a push for that in August 2024.

While Adams directed all city agencies to create an inventory of developable land under their control, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which acts as the city’s real estate broker, listed a database of nearly 17,000 properties owned by the city. The city has already identified several city-owned sites ripe for housing development, including an 80,000-square-foot spot on Surf Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn, the Financial District office building at 100 Gold Street and a Department of Sanitation garage on Staten Island.

This was part of the mayor’s City of Yes for Housing Opportunity zoning overhaul, which aims to create 500,000 new units over the next decade. City of Yes has been criticized by other mayoral candidates in the crowded race as not doing nearly enough to meet the demands of the housing crisis.

And Walden is far from the only mayoral candidate with his own housing plan.

Zellnor Myrie, for example, released a proposal in April to build 1 million new housing units over the same period, with 85,000 being in Midtown alone.

Brad Lander said in March that if he wins the election, he will use emergency powers to build 500,000 housing units over 10 years, 50,000 of which would be on redeveloped public golf courses.

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo released a housing proposal earlier this month to build 500,000 units over 10 years, but details were few and the focus mainly fell upon his campaign’s use of artificial intelligence to explain the plan. (An AI-checker website CO used did not find that Walden used AI for his plan.)

The other candidates running in the Democratic primary include former city Comptroller Scott Stringer; state legislators Zohran Mamdani and Jessica Ramos; former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson; former Bronx Assemblymember Michael Blake; and New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams.

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