#housing

on his first day in office he created two taskforces aimed at creating new development: one will review city-owned land to see if it is suitable for construction, another aims to “identify and remove bureaucratic and permitting barriers” which slow down the building of homes.

A highlight, and a thumb in the eye to those who said Mamdani would be thwarted by the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, came when that pair released a plan on Thursday to provide free childcare for two-year-olds in New York City.

Elsewhere, Mamdani has been conducting small but meaningful fixes. Thousands of people cycle across the Williamsburg Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn every day, yet for years cyclists have been forced to negotiate a skatepark-esque dip at the Manhattan exit.

Pleas to fix the ramp have gone unheard for years, but on Tuesday Mamdani simply popped up at the Manhattan side of the bridge, with a spade and a crew of department of transport workers, and had the aggressive dip smoothed into a nice, gentle incline.

But the collective consciousness is shifting. Research is revealing that walkable cities make people happier, less lonely, more satisfied with life and physically healthier. Movements are afoot around the globe toward sustainable urbanism, slow travel and 15-minute (or less) cities – such as Nordhavn in Copenhagen and superblocks in Barcelona.

Kind of a shitty, misrepresented framing for this article, but those that bother to read may see that his positions are more nuanced and dare we say open-minded than the title might lead one to believe. Just like any media coverage of a politician, the media reports on the most extreme things you can probably find an inflates them. Yet if you see the guy speak in an interview or even bother to read beyond the sound bite you see he’s quite well informed.

During a lengthy interview on the Odd Lots podcast, Mamdani went into more detail about the kinds of deregulation he supported to enable more housing construction, such as ending parking minimums and two-stair requirements. He also criticized the New York City Council's practice of "member deference," whereby the Council will reject housing projects that are opposed by the councilmember whose district they'd be built in.

It would go much too far to say that Mamdani has had a deeper ideological shift to a more market-oriented perspective. He has continued to insist that rent freezes and faster permitting of new housing can coexist as complementary policies.

While on-time mortgage payments are known to increase one’s credit score, many renters don’t have any history of credit. Esusu reports on time rent payments to credit bureaus so renters can build their scores. Over 50 million Americans lack a credit history with the three major credit bureaus: Experian, Equifax and TransUnion.

HENRY GRABAR: Parking is the largest single land use in many American cities. If we were designing society from scratch, would we have placed car storage on the pedestal that it now occupies?

You know, one of the things that immediately jumped off the page for me when I was reading your book is the fact that, by square footage, there is more housing for each car in this country than there is housing for each person. And on its face, I have to say that statement feels incredibly problematic, but is it?

GRABAR: I don't think it's that surprising when you start to think about it. I mean, there are more - we build more three-car garages in this country than we build one-bedroom apartments. Almost every jurisdiction in this country requires parking as a part of every single building type, whether you're building a school, an apartment building or an office or a restaurant, the law requires a certain number of parking spaces. So we have parking minimums in every jurisdiction in this country, whereas for housing, we often have maximums. We say, on this plot, you can only put one unit of housing. You can only put two units of housing. So the fact that we've ended up with a surplus of parking and a shortage of housing is no surprise. In fact, it's by design.

For a $400,000 mortgage at a 6.5 percent interest rate, the monthly payment on a 50-year mortgage is $2,254.87 compared to $2,528.27 for a 30-year mortgage. And yet, this modest decrease in monthly payments will be offset by a dramatic increase in interest payments: from $510,177.95 on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage to a staggering $952,920.53 on a 50-year mortgage.

The reality is that even 30 year mortgages don’t make sense and never did. A 30 year fixed rate mortgage would never be offered by private markets without government incentives. They nearly masked the fact that Americans couldn’t save and couldn’t afford housing. They went onto exacerbate the problem by making Americans primary if not so retirement investment in their home. This incentivize homeowners to value scarcity in housing as lower supply will create scarcity and drive up the price of their “investment”, but in this case, the investment is housing for others.

The 50 year mortgage is a scam. I’m just not sure if the administration actually knows that or not.

By the numbers: Consider someone taking out a $500,000 home loan. The current rate on a 30-year mortgage is 6.22%, per Freddie Mac. For these calculations, let's assume that a 50-year loan's interest rate exceeds the 30-year by the same margin that the 30-year rate exceeds a 15-year rate.

That translates to a 6.94% rate on the 50-year loan — which would then have a monthly payment of $2,985, only $83 less than the 30-year mortgage. Zoom in: In the early decades of the loan's repayment, the 50-year borrower's payments would almost entirely go to interest, paying down the debt much more slowly.

After five years, for example, the 30-year borrower would have paid off $33,481 of the loan balance, versus $6,707 for the 50-year borrower. After three decades, when the 30-year mortgage is fully paid off, the 50-year borrower would still owe about $387,000.