Alongside the tenant protection office, Mamdani announced the creation of two task forces with bluntly functional names: LIFT and SPEED. The LIFT Task Force is charged with identifying every underused parcel of city-owned land that could be transformed into housing. Parking lots, vacant buildings, forgotten lots—nothing is off the table. The idea is simple and radical: if the city owns the land, the city should use it to house people, not sit on it while rents skyrocket.
The SPEED Task Force tackles a different problem—the bureaucracy that has slowed housing construction to a crawl. Permits, zoning reviews, environmental assessments, and overlapping agencies have turned even modest housing projects into decade-long ordeals. Mamdani’s directive is to cut through those delays, not by weakening safety standards, but by eliminating redundancy and political bottlenecks that serve no purpose beyond protecting entrenched interests.
The response was immediate and polarized. Tenant advocates and housing activists celebrated in the streets and online, calling the first executive orders a long-overdue correction. For them, Mamdani’s actions validated years of protest, organizing, and warnings that the city was becoming unlivable for anyone without wealth.
On the other side, landlords’ associations, real estate executives, and billionaire investors reacted with alarm. Some warned of capital flight, claiming that aggressive tenant protections would scare away investment and freeze development. Others framed the moves as an ideological crusade—proof that democratic socialism, once dismissed as symbolic, had arrived with governing power. Continue reading…
