New York, New York - Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently unveiled his new plan to transform housing in New York City.
On Tuesday, Mamdani's office released the plan titled "Block by Block," which included several new initiatives such as spending $22 billion to build affordable housing, $5.6 billion to enhance the New York City Housing Authority, and a $40-per-hour minimum wage for construction workers on city projects.
In an interview with NBC News, Mamdani described housing as "the No. 1 driver" of the nation's affordability crisis and said his plan will "deliver the kinds of investments that, for too long, New Yorkers have been denied."
"Too often in conversations around housing, there is a sense of a choice that has to be made, a choice between fighting to build more housing or fighting to organize to preserve the housing that we have," the mayor said.
"That doesn't have to be the case any longer."
He added that his goal is to "reckon with the multifaceted nature of the housing crisis and deliver on all of it at once."
In February, Mamdani met with President Donald Trump to request federal funding for a housing project in Queens, and though they agreed to talk "in the weeks ahead," Mamdani says they haven't spoken since.
"I shared my interest with the president directly, and the president shared his interest, and obviously... it will be a conversation that will go over many months, given the nature of the scale of commitment that we're talking about," he explained.