Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has vowed to tackle New York City’s affordable housing crisis by building on thousands of vacant city-owned lots. But a NYCity News Service analysis shows a geographic mismatch that could complicate his housing pledge.
New York City owns more than 2,400 vacant parcels, city data shows. Many of the highest-vacancy districts are in the city’s least populated areas, including the Far Rockaways, southern Staten Island, and large stretches of eastern Queens. These neighborhoods have ample open land but limited transit access and low-density zoning — major obstacles for large-scale affordable housing construction.
The most realistic opportunity for Mamdani’s pledge to build 200,000 new, permanently affordable units lies in neighborhoods with both high vacancy rates on city-owned property and high rent burden among residents.
There are 17 such communities concentrated in three boroughs. Four of those districts are in the Bronx — including Melrose, Mott Haven, and University Heights — where more than 40% of residents spend a third or more of their income on rent. Five are in central Brooklyn neighborhoods like Flatbush, where rising costs have pushed thousands into rent stress. Eight are in Queens, including Ridgewood and parts of western Queens, where public land is more limited but vacancy rates remain high relative to population density.
Mamdani has not yet detailed where new construction will occur. Julie Menin, the likely City Council Speaker, echoed the mayoral-elect’s strong support for using publicly owned land to speed up development, calling for the city to “utilize vacant or under-purposed buildings to build affordable housing.”
But experts warn that simply having vacant parcels does not make them ideal for new housing projects.
“For a piece of land to work for housing, it has to not have very strange site conditions,” said Jerilyn Perine, former executive director of Citizens Housing and Planning Council. “Just because something is on a list as city owned doesn’t mean there isn’t a title dispute that is ongoing or some other litigation. Everything has to be checked carefully.”
Still, several dense neighborhoods like Flatbush, Ridgewood, and the central Bronx contain clusters of city-owned vacant properties that could have community buy-in to be developed quickly because of the high rent-burden. These districts may become the initial proving grounds for Mamdani’s public-land strategy.