Zohran Mamdani, the socialist assemblyman from Queens, has won the election to become New York’s next mayor. But on his home turf, many residents are wary of the policies he supports.
Among those policies is Local Law 97, which will require more than 50,000 buildings to reduce emissions by 60% by 2035. For large buildings, complete compliance requires full electrification, and millions of dollars in drastic infrastructure overhauls. The alternative is to pay hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars in annual penalties.
And here’s the kicker: even if buildings follow through with electrification, there is currently inadequate electricity supply to support the electrification mandates, and the city has no credible plan to provide it.
Mamdani has stated he will enforce the law fully, with no adjustments. To him, Local Law 97 is about taking on the real estate industry and achieving climate justice. The reality of implementation, however, will exacerbate the same affordability crisis Mamdani has pledged to alleviate.
The financial burden to convert buildings from natural gas infrastructure to electric heat will ultimately fall on both tenants, co-op and condo owners in the form of large rent and maintenance increases. Those who will struggle the most are the middle- and working-class shareholders who are already grappling with the ever-increasing cost of living.
Alicia Fernandez, the treasurer of a 726-unit co-op building in Mamdani’s state Assembly district, makes this crisis clear:
“We had a full feasibility study done for our building and the costs came to 60 million dollars for our 726 apartments. That is $60,000 per one-bedroom and over $125,000 for our three-bedroom units.”
The looming implementation deadlines of the law have her residents on edge.
“People don’t know if they can send their children to a certain college,” Fernandez said. “Should they reduce their 401(k) contributions? Can they afford to help their parents when their parents need help? Their lives are affected by this on a daily basis.”
The costs of converting these buildings is not simply speculation. In a pilot program, the New York City Housing Authority converted a project in Frederick Douglass Houses. The project took two years and cost $28 million to convert 159 units. The total came to more than $176,000 per unit, just for the heat pump conversion.
In a report for West Side Rag, New York Power Authority spokesperson Paul DeMichele said: “Each apartment [we renovated] had a story. We quickly realized that while we like the [heat pump] technology, we couldn’t possibly scale that across our portfolio.”
But even in the face of data, lawmakers have failed to amend the law to accommodate financial facts and time constraints.
Glen Oaks Village, a middle-class co-op with 2,904 units and more than 10,000 residents, is representative of the hundreds of thousands of shareholders facing this crisis. Bob Friedrich, the president of Glen Oaks, has been speaking out on behalf of his shareholders since Local Law 97 was first drafted in 2019.
“A clean environment and affordable housing is not a binary choice,” Friedrich noted. “You can have one without destroying the other. A mayor must understand this and unfortunately, Mamdani does not.”
Mamdani has often presented New York City as a town of the haves and have nots, the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor. Most of his solutions revolve around the redistribution of wealth: tax the rich and offer more services to the poor. That feel-good narrative has propelled him to the national spotlight.
But it’s an incomplete picture. There are numerous communities — many of them in the outer borough neighborhoods Mamdani represents — where a middle-class co-op community has been able to thrive.
Members of these communities say that Local Law 97, and politicians like Mamdani, hurt them by misrepresenting their concerns and ignoring their existence. They have nothing in common with the real estate lobby Mamdani claims to be targeting, but LL 97 is designed to punish them the same way.
As we approach 2030, community leaders say they are ready to escalate the fight over Local Law 97. They say lawmakers must make adjustments or else doom New Yorkers to impossibly-high housing costs in the name of climate justice. Our next mayor claims to care about both — hopefully he is prepared to listen.
Menton is the director of New Yorkers for Affordable Reliable Energy (newyorkersare.org).