Mamdani's housing plan finally has names attached to it — and underground, the numbers say one thing while riders feel another. Today we get into both. This is New York City Politics and Urbanism Daily, Tuesday. We've got an outside-counsel read on the zoning specifics, a coalition forming around 200,000 homes, and a subway-safety metric we haven't used yet. For three days I've been asking who's actually leaning on this thing. Today the names show up — so now it's grading time, not setup time. Hold that energy, Devin. Let's start with what the lawyers say the rules actually allow. Cole Schotz gives us the first outside read this week on the small-lot reforms — and it's a useful gut-check on whether City Hall's Block by Block framing holds up in practice. And City Hall left the key thing buried: Cole Schotz names the City Council as the vehicle. So all that executive-order framing? Wrong. This is a legislative fight, and that changes who has to deliver. On the coalition, today's Mayor's Office item names Public Advocate Williams and four Borough Presidents backing the plan. Plus labor. That's a partial answer to the political-support question we've been asking. Now the subway. The Step Back segment gives us a sharper number — crime per rider is down 30 percent since the Subway Safety Partnership launched. From Daniel R. Garodnick at New York City Planning:
New York City is facing a severe housing shortage that makes homes scarce and expensive. Outdated, restrictive, and complicated zoning laws limit opportunities to build new homes and make those that do get built more expensive. The rental vacancy rate is 1.41% – the lowest since 1968 – and more than half of renters spend over a third of their income on rent.
April 2024. This illustrated guide is from April 2024, and here it is again in today's rundown. The 1.41 percent vacancy rate, the cute Alfred Twu drawings — all of it is two years old. Right, and at this point it works more as context than news. It's the reference doc you put next to the Block by Block announcement — the City Planning playbook everything traces back to. Sure, but show me the page where ADUs actually got built. The guide's got a whole section on accessory units — and we both watched community boards eat that alive. That's the tell, right? The 1.41 percent vacancy rate — lowest since 1968, per City Planning — is the most honest line in the whole document, and it's the one number nobody's moved since they printed it. NYC Mayor's Office writes:
The plan charts a path to create 200,000 new affordable homes over the next decade, including through direct investment in affordable housing for low-income New Yorkers, innovative financing tools and process reforms to help public dollars go further. It also advances an ambitious land-use agenda to create more housing of all kinds across New York City.
This is where the story actually moves forward: Block by Block now has names attached. Public Advocate Williams, four Borough Presidents, labor. The coalition question we've been circling all week has a partial answer. Partial's the word, Sarah. Four Borough Presidents — which four? Because if the holdouts are the outer boroughs where you'd actually swing a bulldozer, that endorsement list is a guest book, not a vote count. Exactly where to press. The release doesn't name them. And on the speedup story, Mamdani's now welding his process reforms to a hard number: 200,000 homes over a decade. Third straight day that 200,000 shows up, and I still haven't seen a single permit count next to it. Nearly five billion over two years is real money — show me what it bought before I clap for the slide. Fair. Though remember who's endorsing — the same real estate money that spent millions during the race warning his housing plans would scare off investment is not at this table. Labor and tenant groups are. That tells you which coalition he built. Built it on the people who don't sign the construction loans, though. Labor leans, Borough Presidents lean — none of them run DOB. The pledge clears once an inspector signs off, and not one name on that list works that desk. Cole Schotz, with Gwendolyn Goodyear:
The New York City Council has announced proposed reforms to the City’s Construction Codes to encourage the development of small, underutilized lots across the five boroughs. As noted by Council Speaker Julie Menin, these lots “have the potential to deliver tens of thousands of new homes, but outdated rules and unnecessary red tape are standing in the way.”
Okay, finally something with a mechanism. The Council's talking 35,000 units on almost 3,000 small lots — and the key phrase is no zoning changes. We're in Construction Code territory, outside ULURP. Right, and Cole Schotz is our first outside read here — a real estate firm parsing what the small-lot reforms actually allow. Lots fifteen to twenty-seven feet wide, the skinny parcels that were too expensive to build on under the old safety rules. And the week looks different once you notice whose name is on this: Speaker Menin's, not the mayor's. We spent three days framing Block by Block as an executive push. The thing with an actual lever attached is a Council bill. Then I want to know this: are the small-lot reforms and ELURP moving on the same accelerated track, or are these two separate timelines City Hall is letting people blur together? Separate. Has to be. Menin's running her own Advisory Group on Housing Affordability now — that's the Council planting its own flag instead of echoing the mayor's press release we already heard this hour. If subway crime really is at a sixteen-year low, why are so many riders still nervous down there? Are the official numbers missing something? The numbers are real. They're also incomplete in ways that matter. Governor Hochul announced in December that overall subway crime is down 14.4 percent compared to 2019, and that crimes per rider have dropped 30 percent since the state and city launched the Subway Safety Partnership back in 2022. So the trend is genuine. But the friction point is obvious: Vital City notes that the crimes people hear about most — the pushings, the homicides, the high-profile violent incidents — get covered intensely and stick in people's memory, even when they're statistically rare in a system carrying close to two billion passengers a year. And there was a real blip early this year. Gothamist reported that major subway crimes spiked 17 percent in the first five weeks of 2026, which the NYPD attributed to cold weather driving more people underground. Then News 12 talked to commuters in April and heard a split: some riders said things feel better, others said the improvement doesn't match what they're seeing on their own line. So you can have a real downward trend and still have high-salience violence, a cold-weather bump, and uneven conditions across the system that the big aggregate number smooths right over. So if the numbers can swing 17 percent in a single cold month and then get explained away as weather, how much should we trust the month-to-month figures officials tout at press conferences? I'd be careful with the monthly stuff. Vital City has specifically flagged that those crime announcements can mislead, because short-term volatility gets spun in whichever direction is convenient that week. The more durable signal is the multi-year per-rider rate, and there the improvement holds up. What I'd watch now is whether the state's additional $77 million for NYPD subway patrols through 2026, plus the platform barriers going into 100 stations, actually push that rate down further — or whether the gains plateau once the extra enforcement dollars run out. Nicole Gelinas, writing in Manhattan Institute:
After more than a year of full and partial economic shutdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, violent subway crime has become a serious concern for New Yorkers who rely on public transit. As the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) reported in April 2021, just 26% of riders feel safe from crime and harassment on the trains, down from 65% in the final quarter of 2019, pre-pandemic.
This is a 2021 Manhattan Institute brief — 26 percent of riders felt safe from crime that April, down from 65 percent in late 2019. That's the fear baseline everyone's been arguing off of. And it's a useful contrast to the Step Back number we just hit — crime per rider down 30 percent since the Subway Safety Partnership. The 2021 panic was a perception number; the rate per rider gives you the honest denominator. What jumps out at me is the brief's actual thesis — safety came from crowds before it came from cops. Ridership at 42 percent of normal back then meant fewer eyes, fewer deterrents. The trains police themselves when they're full. So if you want safer subways, you fill the cars. And nothing fills cars like people who can afford to live near them — which loops us straight back to the housing fights we spent the whole morning on. Right — a five-year-old transit brief and a Block by Block coalition are making the same point from opposite ends. If New York City Politics and Urbanism Daily helps you keep up with the city, take a moment to subscribe and leave a review wherever you're listening. It really helps other New Yorkers find the show.
You'll find links to everything we covered today in the show notes. If a story stuck with you, the links are there for a closer read.
That's New York City Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Tuesday, June 9th. This is a Lantern Podcast.