This election season, the left is at war. With itself.
It’s not the mayoral race that has divided ultra-progressives, but real estate. Specifically, four land-use reforms on the ballot.
The far left’s split on proposed City Charter revisions is a major reason that their candidate for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has been so hesitant to take a position, unlike on all other issues.
Left-wing writer Michael Kinnucan explained the socialists’ split in the publication Jacobin, a bible of the far left: Some tenant organizations oppose the reforms because they would reduce individual City Council members’ leverage to demand more affordability.
The problem with that argument is that some use their leverage to stop projects entirely, either for NIMBY reasons or by demanding too much affordability.
That’s one reason Kinnucan did the right thing and endorsed a “yes” vote on the ballot questions, which will tweak the rezoning process to modestly increase housing production, including affordable projects in the neighborhoods most resistant to them.
The headline: “You can’t have social housing without building housing.”
Seems obvious, no? But even obvious facts about real estate are hard to see for people wearing ideological blinders.
“Loosening the city’s anti-housing regime is essential if we ever want to build social housing at scale,” he wrote, wisely focusing on subsidized housing to appeal to his readers, even though privately funded housing is at least as important to solving today’s supply crisis and preventing future ones. (See the Minneapolis Fed’s study on filtering.)
Longtime advocacy group Tenants PAC outright lied to its followers about the charter proposals, telling them “there is no affordability mandate whatsoever.” Reality check: With rare exception, the proposals only work with Mandatory Inclusionary Housing or the even deeper affordability required by Department of Housing Preservation and Development or housing finance agency term sheets.
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The rare exception is in the R1 to R5 “Elurp” action because those zoning designations don’t include affordability. The charter cannot magically add it any more than a frog can grow wings.
Tenants PAC also claimed that Proposal 3 lets some projects grow in size by 30 percent “on top of the 40 percent granted by City of Yes earlier this year.” City of Yes (which passed last year) allows those projects a 20 percent increase, not 40 percent, and only if they have enough affordable units.
The Jacobin article called the opposition “an odd coalition, uniting conservatives who systematically oppose virtually all construction, including affordable construction, with tenant activists who support massive city investment in social housing.”
Kinnucan added that Mamdani’s social housing plan would be “near impossible” without the charter revisions.
“If the city’s social housing program is subject to the unappealable veto of every individual city council member, every development will require months of negotiation over building heights and parking minimums, and much of the city’s land area will be quite simply off limits,” he wrote.
Why is rezoning even necessary? Because we can’t build our way out of the crisis without it when 40 percent of the city is zoned for single- or two-family housing and 30 percent is low-density multifamily.
The member-deference system, Kinnucan told his fellow lefties, has produced “a crippling housing shortage that gives landlords the upper hand against tenants.”
Why Tenants PAC wants to preserve it is baffling indeed.
