Zohran Mamdani Wants to Build Housing. He Should Build Green.
After his White House meeting last week, Zohran Mamdani has a tentative plan to build 12,000 units of affordable housing in Queens. It’s a chance to tackle the climate and affordability crises simultaneously by building green.
As the Zohran Mamdani administration turns toward ambitious new construction proposals, it has an opportunity to advance green industrial policies as it delivers large numbers of affordable housing units. (Kyle Mazza / Anadolu via Getty Images)
It’s not every day that a democratic socialist has the chance to make a pitch for social housing to the president, but that’s exactly what happened last week. When Mayor Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump met for a second time in the Oval Office, they came away with a possible plan to build 12,000 units, half of which would be cooperatively owned and subsidized, atop the Sunnyside railyard in Queens. Their conversation opened the possibility of new federal investment to take on the housing crisis in New York by building a huge number of units of affordable housing and delivering thousands of high-road union jobs in the process — a significant shift away from the federal government’s longtime approach of housing policy focused on single-family home ownership or private investment in rental units.
If enacted, this could put the mayor one major step closer toward his ambitious goal of 200,000 new affordable housing units, a key plank of his vision for a more affordable New York and corollary to his administration’s commitment to freezing the rent for 2.4 million New York tenants in rent-stabilized housing. The project, which would be the largest housing and infrastructural investment in New York City in five decades, would directly intervene in the escalating cost-of-living crisis driven by rising rents and housing unaffordability and allow working class families to stay in the relatively high-density, low-emission borough of Queens rather than be pushed out into sprawling, higher-emission suburbs. The administration has compared the scale and affordability structure of this proposal to the visionary project of Co-op City in the Bronx, which is the largest social housing complex in North America, built by union labor nearly sixty years ago and home to over 43,700 New Yorkers who receive limited equity for an apartment share in exchange for long-term affordability.
But for this groundbreaking public project to truly live up to its potential to be a Co-Op City for the twenty-first century, it must also deliver green, healthy, decarbonized units that tackle the housing crisis and climate crisis together. The details of the potential deal — including how it will be constructed and how affordable the homes will be — are still yet to be confirmed, giving the administration an opportunity to advance one of the most ambitious visions for permanently affordable, energy-efficient, durable high-road housing that the United States has seen in generations.
Housing in New York is a key sector for climate action, and also where climate impacts are acutely felt. Seventy-one percent of carbon emissions in New York City come from buildings, with residential buildings contributing the most. And residential development, from manufacturing to transportation of materials and construction, relies on fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the climate crisis is fueling housing unaffordability citywide in the form of rising insurance costs and higher utility bills during increasingly hot summers. The climate and economic crises are converging in our homes.
The Mamdani administration has already indicated a commitment to addressing the climate and affordability crisis together. As the administration turns toward ambitious new construction proposals, they have an opportunity to advance green industrial policies for housing, creating a blueprint for innovative pathways to advance green affordable housing development.
The framework for green industrial policy for housing is based on the need for an affirmative public role in investment, coordination, and alignment of the building sector in the direction of bold green improvements. A green industrial policy for housing is how we bring down the costs of key inputs for housing construction; build coalitions across government, labor, and residents; and coordinate interventions to get things done at the speed and scale that cost-burdened households need.
How to Do It
What would this look like in practice? First, the administration could leverage its role as a primary development stakeholder to advance clean energy systems and low-carbon living at a massive scale. The city could colocate its own clean energy generation on site by direct purchasing of solar panel arrays, investing in neighborhood-scale thermal energy networks, which are a network of underground pipes that transfer energy from a variety of clean energy sources across a neighborhood to buildings, which can reduce the strain on the energy grid and disseminate nongas heating and cooling at scale. Through direct bulk procurement of clean energy technologies, the administration could create an economy of scale that drives down the cost of renewable technologies to create on-site electric and heating cooling systems at a lower price point.
The city has already been part of successful bulk procurement in the residential sector that could serve as a precedent for this type of investment through competitions like the recent Clean Heat for All Challenge, in which the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) partnered with the New York Power Authority and the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority to launch an industry competition that aimed to spur heating and cooling equipment manufacturers to produce a new, innovative heat pump designed to better serve multifamily buildings.
The recent induction stove challenge, in which the state and city released a joint call to manufacture new stoves that would reduce indoor air pollution for some of the city’s poorest residents, also paved the way for a commitment to produce ten thousand energy-efficient stoves that can be used in affordable housing. The scale of NYCHA’s holdings and the standardized building types across its portfolio allow the authority to create large influxes of standardized demand that spur manufacturing investment and bring products to market.
Second, the administration could invest in industrialized construction methods, or the creation of prefabricated building components off-site, which could reduce construction time by 20–50 percent, reduce construction costs by 20 percent, and deliver housing with superior energy performance. There are opportunities to learn from international methods for expediting the construction of high-quality green social housing, like Sweden’s Kombohus program, in which the public housing agency put out a competitive call for an archetype apartment structure that it then scaled construction of to deliver over 11,000 apartments. It was able to cut costs significantly by systematizing the construction process and making bulk orders for unit types. While these methods have had slower uptake in New York, a project of this size would have the demand volume necessary to experiment with this model, to the benefit of residents and the city budget.
The Co-op City Example
New York City has a history of deploying the tools of union labor and industrial policy to build some of its biggest affordable housing projects, including at Co-op City itself, the inspiration for this new proposal. Home to over 43,700 New Yorkers in the northeast Bronx across thirty-five high rise buildings and seven town houses, Co-op City is the largest social housing complex in North America. This limited equity housing cooperative broke ground in 1966 and was created on the premise that “housing should provide shelter, not a speculative opportunity.”
Residents are given low up-front limited equity stakes and charged affordable monthly carrying charges, creating a comparatively affordable entry point into housing that stays affordable over time. Members can sell their unit at a specific rate to maintain affordability over a longer time period. Co-op City was built with union labor and public financing through the Mitchell–Lama program during an era of intense highway expansion and suburbanization. The mixed-use environment of Co-op City, by contrast, encouraged a low-carbon lifestyle from the outset by colocating schools, homes, restaurants, and shopping malls side by side.
As the climate crisis has escalated in recent years, the resident-led board that oversees Co-op City’s on-site power generation for its complexes switched to a steam-fueled heating and cooling system. This helps the community save money on fuel costs and reduced emissions by 51 percent over a two-year period. Co-op City has also installed solar panels and renewable energy batteries to reduce electric bills, cut down on emissions, and reduce pollution.
Not only are these approaches good for the environment, but they also are a model for how affordability, labor standards, and climate justice can be achieved simultaneously. Even as the federal government dismantles essential environmental regulations and guts key investments in clean energy, cities can still be sites of innovation and progress when it comes to green, permanently affordable housing development.
These site-level projects can also build the public sector, labor, and industry muscle necessary to realize larger visions for social housing, like the state-level New York Social Housing Development Authority that legislators and organizers are seeking to advance at the state level. This legislation, coled by state senator Cordell Cleare and socialist state assembly member Emily Gallagher, would create new tools for the acquisition, rehabilitation, and construction of thousands of units of energy-efficient, permanently affordable union-built housing statewide.
Should the Mamdani administration get the federal support it needs for this ambitious project, New York City should seize this chance to write an ambitious new playbook for addressing the climate and housing crisis through the delivery of public investment.