Mamdani And Cuomo Spar Over Affordable Housing

With a little over three months left until New York City elects a new mayor, two of its most prominent candidates in Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo are verbally clashing. This time, Cuomo is attacking the frontrunner over his platform message of adding affordability in housing for citizens, questioning why he’s living in a rent-stabilized apartment in Astoria, Queens, while making a $140,000 salary.

While appearing at the National Dominican Day Parade on Sunday (Aug. 10), Cuomo attacked Mamdani and said he would create a new law to highlight the Democratic candidate’s alleged hypocrisy. “I think rent stabilized units when they’re vacant should only be rented to people who need affordable housing, not people like Zohran Mamdani, and I’m gonna call it Zohran’s law, because it is an abuse of the system,” he said to reporters.

Mamdani fired back on Monday (Aug. 11), saying: “What Andrew Cuomo is proposing, be it the rent control he cited, the rent stabilization, he intends to speak about, is in many ways reflective of the fact that I live rent free in his head.” He added that he had a salary of $50,000 at the time he moved into his apartment. The state assemblyman did express that he was against needs testing and income limits for housing. Incidentally, Cuomo currently resides in an apartment on the east side of Manhattan for $8,000 a month.

The exchange is the latest between Cuomo and Mamdani, with Cuomo opting to deliver barrages against the candidate who defeated him soundly in the Democratic primary months ago. Cuomo, who served as the former governor of New York until stepping down in 2021 over sexual harassment allegations, was blasted by Mamdani campaign spokeswoman Dora Pekec, who called his comments “desperate” before adding: “If Mr. Cuomo really cared for working people in New York City, he’d commit today to reimburse the taxpayers the $60 million we are spending on his personal legal defense — which could pay for thousands of affordable housing units instead of probing the gynecological records of women he harassed.”

Currently, the first poll released by Siena about the mayoral race shows that Mamdani still holds a strong lead of 19 percentage points over Cuomo, also holding a good share of potential Democratic voters. Cuomo still has an edge, however, over Mamdani as well as Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa and the incumbent Eric Adams among Black and Jewish voters.