New York Governor Andrew Cuomo lost a big margin to Zoran Mamdani in the Democratic primary for New York City, and is now competing as an independent, but is second in the race to win mayoral title in the largest city in the United States.
Mamdani won the affordable message, but Cuomo accused his plan of extreme and unworkable. Al Jazeera conducted an analysis of Cuomo’s economic policy to see what he has to offer to New Yorkers.
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housing
Cuomo has only moved to New York City in September 2024 after living in Westchester, a suburban community north of the city, and has pledged to build 500,000 new apartments over the next decade. The plan will provide tax incentives to private developers to build more housing developments. He also said it would loosen its zoning laws to promote conversions from office to staff.
But much of what he promotes is already urban policy.
New York launched its office-to-housing program in 2020 under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, reforming last year, speeding up conversions under incumbent Eric Adams.
And according to a report by mayor Brad Lander, who ran in the primary but has since supported Mamdani, the initiatives have already produced 44 transformations. The finished or ongoing project is expected to create 17,400 units (mainly studios and one-bedroom apartments) across the city, including one of the nation’s largest offices to home-based conversions in the lower Manhattan area.
Cuomo’s plan to expand housing options in the city uses publicly owned land, including vacant lots, to enable the development of new homes and mixed-use developments.
Cuomo hopes to invest $2.5 billion in public housing over the next five years. This is a 75% increase from the city’s current funds. For housing protection, he hopes to add lawyers to the city’s housing court system to help renters with issues such as tenant harassment and illegal evictions, and provide more housing vouchers to deal with homelessness.
However, Cuomo’s history says that is not the case. When he was governor, he urged the state to cut funding for a rental voucher program called Advantage. Cuts from the state’s capital, Albany, had no choice but to leave city hall and cut the program completely.
One of Cuomo’s few new ideas, who was previously the US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is called “Zohran’s Law,” the most likely mayoral jab in New York. The new law will place income restrictions on people seeking rent-stabilized apartments across the city, which account for about half of rental housing stocks.
Cuomo said the law would not be punished by people who see their income increasing while already living in the rent stabilization unit.
New York City’s Rent Stabilization Program has never been designed with certain income levels in mind. It was intended to regulate the wider housing market and protect residents from the surge in rent prices that residents face when housing scarcity is.
“I think it’s been a playbook all along, choosing a kind of fight, stealing ideas, providing it so ambitious that New Yorkers really needed or didn’t deserve.”
Transit
Cuomo’s most ambitious proposal is to put the New York City transport system under the control of the city itself. The Metropolitan Transportation Agency (MTA), which oversees subways, buses and commuter railroads, has been under the jurisdiction of the state since its establishment in 1968.
Shifting control to city hall is a sudden challenge as much of its funding comes from taxes and income collected by the state. And even if that’s what happens and Cuomo wants to raise the city’s tax rate to pay it, he will still need buy-in from the governor who accepts or dismisses the city’s proposed tax rate.
That funding dynamic is an important reason why Mamdani’s free bus proposal has elicited skepticism. Implementing that requires Albany coalition building and leverage. This is what critics say is most commonly used for other pressing issues like universal child care.
As a state legislator, Mamdani was able to support the free bus pilot program, but expanding citywide initiatives without managing the MTA, a key weakness of the Mamdani campaign Cuomo tried to capitalize, is much more complicated from the mayor’s office.
Meanwhile, Cuomo doesn’t want free transportation like Mamdani, but he suggests that he consider some free routes. He also said it would expand access to what is called the Fair Fare Program, which offers discounted rates for low-income New Yorkers.
Cuomo’s promotion of asserting the MTA’s urban management also has a rather checkered political history.
As governor, he was frequently accused of weaponizing the state’s authority over transport over Mayor de Blasio at the time, and praised his success while distracting responsibility for the collapse of service to city hall. The tug of war over responsibility for transit performance was the point of competition between Albany and City Hall.
Cuomo has a proven track record of providing major transportation projects. Under his surveillance, the subway line expanded, and construction of another subway line began, with Penn Station, one of the city’s largest transport hubs, beginning to effectively activate. He also oversaw the reconstruction of Laguardia Airport.
Lencher proudly praised these victories, but when the city’s subway system faced widespread delays in 2017 during construction, colloquially called hellish summer, with certain equipment breakdowns and performance at the worst point in the world – Cuomo said it was “city mta.”
work
Cuomo has pitched a hiring plan that summoned the $1.5 billion Five-Borough Economic Transformation Capital Fund, which funds city-wide projects. He also proposes an innovation hub that provides grants to start-ups and offers tax exemptions if they can prove they can provide employment growth opportunities for cities.
He also adds a 90-day “First Track Regulation Review.” This is a promise to reduce the deficit for business development. Both his competitors have similar promises, but Mamdani focuses on small business economies.
CUOMO’s workforce training and development program plans include expanding existing training and apprenticeship programs for those who want to pursue their work in areas like healthcare.
He offered to promote more training programs that would help “preparation for jobs that do not require a university degree,” but he has not provided details on what it is. Cuomo representatives did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for details.
tax
In 2021, Cuomo was one of the biggest tax increases of ultra-targeted tax increases in New York State history. His administration has raised the corporate tax rate by 0.75%. He also raised taxes on those making between 8.82% and $1 million to $2 million to 9.65%, and incorporated two new tax ranges. For those who make $5 million to $25 million, 10.3% and 10.9% of people earn more than $25 million a year.
His new plan as mayor does not include taxes on restaurant workers’ tips and does not include eliminating the income tax for New Yorkers who earn below 200% of federal poverty levels for New Yorkers. A single household costs $31,300 a year, and a family of four costs $64,300.
For the wealthy New Yorker, he said he would increase the apartment tax threshold, an additional tax on real estate transactions, to $2.5 million, from the current level of $1 million.
His planned tax cuts raise questions among experts about how he will pay for his proposal.
Unlike Mamdani, Cuomo does not provide detailed plans for how to pay for his platform. Adams has his own existing records to point out his own existing records, including increased tax revenue and reduced spending.
“They (Mamdani’s campaign) are always asked how you pay for it (Mamdani’s policy proposal). Cuomo and the people on his right are not facing the same line of interrogation,” Kaivan Shroff, a representative of the Democratic National Committee and a senior advisor to the Institute, told the senior advisor to the Institute of Education.
“The reality here is that (the Cuomo campaign) came up with a plan to make plans.”
