Would you rather vote for a candidate who credibly defends a position or one who is, well, chicken shit?
It’s a loaded question, but relevant when it comes to real estate.
When Republican Kristy Marmorato defeated Democrat Marjorie Velázquez for an East Bronx City Council seat in 2023, some feared that Velázquez’s support for a controversial development would make other Council members hesitant to defy NIMBY activists in their districts.
Then Marmorato herself lost on Tuesday, falling to a Democratic challenger. Pro-housing group Open New York had endorsed her challenger, but in all likelihood, the incumbent’s defeat had little to do with her anti-development stances, such as her insistence on preserving parking minimums in the rezonings around planned Metro-North stations.
Anti-Trump fervor just made this a bad year for Republican candidates, just as 2023 was a good one. Marmorato won her seat because of fortuitous timing, not because she opposed the rezoning of Bruckner Boulevard.
Marmorato’s subsequent loss should put to rest the notion that city voters reward politicians for being anti-development. They simply don’t. In another example, neighborhood NIMBYs tried to oust Democrat Shahana Hanif from a Brooklyn Council seat in June and failed miserably.
The Bronx seat’s flipping to a Republican and then back to a Democrat had far more to do with voters’ feelings about inflation (2023) and about President Donald Trump (2025) than with development issues.
Generally speaking, city voters favor development, even if the loudest voices in a room don’t. The results of this year’s City Charter ballot questions speak to that.
That said, rarely do development issues decide candidates’ fates. Eric Adams has been the most pro-development mayor in memory (yes, including Mike Bloomberg), but because of unrelated scandals, his re-election campaign never got out of the starting gate.
Had Adams kowtowed to NIMBYs, he would have little to show for his mayoralty. At least he can look back and say he paved the way for growth and housing affordability.
For me, the lesson for elected officials is not to be paranoid and reactive on real estate issues, but to take positions based on what is best for the city. It’s almost certainly not going to hurt you in the next election — and if you make a strong case for your stances, voters will appreciate it.
What we’re thinking about: Commercial broker Scott Panzer was fired by JLL for comparing Zohran Mamdani to Hitler, TRD’s Rich Bockmann and Kathryn Brenzel reported. Separately, a former New Yorker now in Texas told me he would never return to the city because of Mamdani’s election, which had left two of his New York City friends in tears. Are people overreacting? Send thoughts to eengquist@therealdeal.com.
A thing we’ve learned: Building four Metro-North stations in the East Bronx is not the hard part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Penn Station Access project. “The hard part is a massive rehabilitation project on Amtrak’s Hell Gate Line … which is in rough shape,” the MTA’s latest construction newsletter explains. It identifies the “central tension” as Amtrak’s ownership of the right-of-way and its inability to provide enough service outages, support staff or operational resources to keep work on schedule.
Elsewhere…
The impact of Mamdani’s election on the “Construction Justice Act” is worth watching. The bill would set a higher minimum wage for workers on city-funded affordable housing projects. That’s the kind of thing socialists support, because they want the government rather than market forces to decide workers’ pay and benefits. And I would think the Council would prefer to let Mamdani sign the bill than to override a veto by Mayor Adams.
Another factor is that Mamdani likes unions, and unions like the bill because the government would be raising wages — saving organized labor the trouble, or achieving what labor has been unable to through organizing and negotiating.
The Council did the same thing last month for security workers on behalf of 32BJ SEIU, using the killing of a guard at 345 Park Avenue to defeat the real estate industry’s lobbying efforts.
But the mayoralty isn’t the only office changing. Council Speaker Adrienne Adams will have to decide whether to push the construction bill through before her tenure ends. Then she could take the credit, while leaving the inevitable legal challenge for her successor to deal with.
The obvious conflict for Mamdani is that the bill would make affordable housing more expensive to build.
Closing time
Residential: The top residential deal recorded Thursday was $9.5 million for a 2901-square-foot, sponsor-sale condominium unit at 50 West 66th Street in Lincoln Square. Beth Benalloul and Hilary Landis of The Corcoran Group had the listing.
Commercial: The top commercial deal recorded was $26.4 million for a 16,937-square-foot property at 160 West 74th Street on the Upper West Side. The previous owner tied to Bayrock Capital purchased the property from The Calhoun School for $14 million in 2023.
New to the Market: The highest price for a residential property hitting the market was $30 million for a 6,600-square-foot, single family townhouse at 4 Staple Street in Tribeca. Jeremy V. Stein and Kat Trappe with Sotheby’s International Realty have the listing.
Breaking Ground: The largest new building permits filed were for two 14-story buildings at 335 and 345 West 25th Street in Kips Bay. They will have a combined 197 units (98 and 99). David West of Hill West filed the permits on behalf of Timber Equities.
— Matthew Elo
