In New York, one of the toughest challenges that Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani faces will be preserving and increasing the supply of affordable housing. Same story in Boston, where I live and where our progressive mayor, Michelle Wu, is constrained by similar forces.
The immediate obstacles are a scarcity of buildable land and subsidy dollars. In both cities, higher taxes to support more housing requires the approval of state government.
New York has a form of rent control, known as rent stabilization, but most New Yorkers do not live in rent-stabilized apartments. Boston once had rent control, but the state legislature took it away in 1994. Local option rent control will be back before voters next year via a ballot initiative.
But behind all of these challenges is the sheer political power of developers. Let me give a couple of emblematic examples
Thirty years ago, Boston had massive tracts of vacant developable land in a part of the waterfront that was a jumble of parking lots, warehouses, and piers. It had not been developed partly because its ownership was patchwork, and partly because Boston was still emerging from a prolonged recession.
The land area totaled about 1,000 acres, only slightly less than Boston’s entire historic downtown. It represented the city’s last large-scale building opportunity.
The Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) gradually got control of the land, rebranded it as the Seaport District, then as the Innovation District, and in 1999 began working with private developers to create a whole new section of the city with hotels, office buildings, restaurants, and luxury housing. Number of affordable housing units: fewer than 500.
Why? Because the BRA and the two mayors of that era, Tom Menino (1993–2014) and Marty Walsh (2014–2021), were close allies of developers, and luxury pays. The total public subsidy for the Seaport/Innovation District is hard to calculate, because it is a mix of land assembly, roads, infrastructure, and tax breaks, but it easily runs into the billions. Think of the affordable housing that might have been built.
In addition to being a case study of how not to develop affordable housing, the Innovation District is a case study of how not to do transportation and climate remediation. It is exactly at sea level, and the city imposed hardly any building standards to protect against sea level rise. Thus its nickname: The Inundation District. And no subway line was extended to the new district, creating parking problems.
This all occurred not because planners are stupid. It occurred because of the political power of developers.
Now, Boston finally has a mayor who is not in the pocket of developers, Michelle Wu. But that one last giant tract is pretty well filled up.
Developers were so anxious about not having an ally in City Hall that they poured money into the campaign of billionaire Josh Kraft, a carpetbagger from the suburbs whom Wu so thoroughly trounced in the September preliminary election that he dropped out before the November final.
But winning an election overwhelmingly is not the same as having adequate resources. And even if developers no longer control City Hall, they pretty well control the legislature. So Boston is unlikely to get the taxing resources that it needs to build more affordable housing.
IN NEW YORK, THERE IS NOTHING QUITE COMPARABLE to the Seaport District, but a wasted opportunity on a smaller scale is the development called Hudson Yards on the far West Side of Manhattan. Built on giant platforms over rail lines, the heart of Hudson Yards is a giant indoor mall plus luxury housing.
Think about New York City for a minute. One of its many great qualities is the street-level retail of all kinds. New York needs a suburban-style indoor shopping mall like the proverbial bull needs proverbial teats. Plus, the region already has them: It’s called New Jersey.
But there was money to be made, so in 2005 the city cut a deal (finalized by the city council in 2013) with billionaire Steve Ross and his Related Companies to develop Hudson Yards with a total of 13,500 housing units, of which some 4,000 were to be affordable. In the end, only about 600 affordable units were produced. The average Hudson Yards condo in 2025 has sold for $7.4 million.
At the time, the mayor was (of course) Michael Bloomberg, a civic liberal in some respects but the ultimate ally of real estate developers.
Here is another telling irony. One of the nearby public amenities that makes Hudson Yards and the surrounding areas so commercially valuable is a wonderful quirky walkway called the High Line. It began life as an abandoned elevated railroad track. When I lived in West Greenwich Village as a young writer, it went right through my neighborhood.
In the 1990s, a local group, Friends of the High Line, came up with the improbable idea of developing it into a greened pathway. They persuaded very skeptical city officials to let them try, and the idea has succeeded spectacularly. The High Line is now a charming elevated park. It is so attractive that luxury housing has been built all along it, and it is one of the attractions of the nearby Hudson Yards.
So something that began as a loving, volunteer civic endeavor has become one more subsidy to billionaires. The ghost of the economist Henry George would understand. He proposed a tax on the unearned increment in land values.
There is a second phase of Hudson Yards still in the planning stage. The original developer bailed out, and various city agencies are still in final negotiations with the latest developer. The city has spent billions in various subsidies for Hudson Yards. Here is where Mayor-elect Mamdani comes in. He could demand a lot more affordable housing.
THERE IS ONE MORE WAY THAT DEVELOPERS have choked off the supply of affordable housing in places like Boston and New York. That is by converting subsidized apartments intended for low- or middle-income people into luxury housing. Many federal programs allow this to be done as soon as the original mortgage is paid off.
In New York, many moderate-income complexes built with tax subsidies, such as Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, have been converted to luxury housing. Likewise for many New York apartments built as middle-class housing under a city-state program that used tax-exempt bonds and loans with low interest rates, called the Mitchell-Lama program.
One of the prime offenders, who got very rich converting Mitchell-Lama apartments, was a developer named … wait for it … Steve Witkoff. Yes, the same Trump crony who sold out middle-income New York renters is now reborn as Trump’s foreign-policy guy in charge of selling out Ukraine.
These conversions could not have been done without the approval of city officials. This is another reflection of the same political power of developers. The big developers were huge campaign contributors to the opponents of Mamdani because they appreciated that he could put a stop to this thievery. Let’s hope that he does.
Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle.
