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PROGRESSIVE MAYORS VS. DEVELOPERS  
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Robert Kuttner
November 25, 2025
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_ Why don’t we have more affordable housing? It’s the power of
developers, stupid. _

New York City has spent billions in various subsidies for Hudson
Yards. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani could demand a lot more affordable
housing., Credit: Andrea Renault/STAR MAX/IPx

 

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._

 

* affordable housing
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* real estate industry
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* sabotage
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