New Yorkers can’t afford to live where they work. Public school teachers in Brooklyn, autoworkers in Buffalo, mechanics in Mount Vernon, nurses in Syracuse, laborers in Hempstead. It is not just a city problem. It is an everywhere problem. And it is beyond a crisis — it is a total failure of our politics, our government, and the so-called free market to address such an obvious and desperate need.
Those with power need to use it.
New Yorkers have long looked to their mayors and their governor for answers. Some look to “the market.” But no one — and I mean exactly zero people I’ve met since announcing my candidacy for New York State Comptroller — looks to the Comptroller. And yet the Comptroller has vast powers to address this crisis.
The Comptroller sits on two massive levers of power — money and audit authority. Yet New York is short 1.4 million affordable homes and is the sixth-highest-cost state to construct one.
The Money
The Comptroller is the sole trustee of a $300 billion pension fund — the third-largest pool of capital in the United States — representing the retirement savings of 1.2 million New Yorkers: public school teachers, firefighters, social workers, and sanitation workers. And yet their own pension fund is doing nothing to solve their single biggest problem: an affordable place to live. In fact, their pension fund is enriching Wall Street investment managers instead. The current Comptroller gives 664 fund managers billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded fees to “beat the market” — and they haven’t even come close.
And what’s more: 95% of every dollar the pension fund has invested in real estate has left New York State. The fund that belongs to New York’s workers and is funded by New York’s taxpayers has been financing luxury condos and office parks in other states while those same workers and taxpayers are being priced out of the communities they built.
Instead of giving away billions to Wall Street, we could invest $20 billion to create the largest affordable housing fund in the United States. The fund will deploy capital through a mix of lower-cost equity and debt — offering financing at rates meaningfully below what private equity demands, in exchange for permanently affordable units.
We are not talking about money for nothing — we are talking about an asset class with sky-high demand, all-time low vacancies, and next-to-no new supply. Exactly the type of investment that will earn a solid return meaningfully higher than the pension fund’s own 5.9% target rate of
return. This investment will generate 200,000 permanently affordable homes across New York State and unlock tens of billions of dollars more of private investment in the process.
The $20 billion fund has three core components:
Centering tenants and permanent affordability. The plan prioritizes tenants and long-term affordability at the center of New York’s housing response. Investments would focus on permanently affordable housing, preservation of existing affordable homes, anti-displacement protections, and supportive housing — ensuring public resources create stable communities rather than temporary affordability that disappears after subsidies expire.
Investing in every region of New York State. New York’s housing affordability crisis extends beyond New York City. Our proposal would ensure communities across Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, the Hudson Valley, Long Island, and communities in between are invested in equitably — with $10 billion of the housing fund specifically marked for regions outside New York City – communities that have historically been underinvested in.
Building trust through transparency and accountability. The housing fund would operate through a transparent, competitive, and publicly accountable process designed to maximize both financial responsibility and community impact. Investment decisions would include clear reporting standards, public transparency, and direct stakeholder participation to ensure housing resources are deployed fairly, effectively, and in the public interest.
The Audit Authority
The second lever is the Comptroller’s audit authority.
We will flex this power to attack the skyrocketing cost to construct virtually anything in this state by auditing every major building code administered by local governments across New York and proposing a model code that we estimate will strip out 15% of construction costs through basic changes — single staircase standards, optimized sanitary plumbing ventilation, affordable elevators, right-sized water pipes. We will perform a detailed, track-changed comparison from this model code to each of our outdated, gold-plated local building codes — the silent killer of home construction in New York.
Beyond the cost of construction, we can use this audit authority to attack skyrocketing operating costs such as property insurance and utilities through audits of the state regulators that oversee these massive and broken industries.
We Already Have the Mandate
We won’t create some special division or new bureaucracy to execute this. We already have the mandate. We just need to use it.
I ran the largest affordable housing nonprofit in the country. I helped rebuild the World Trade Center after years of dysfunction. I helped develop and finance solar power plants at a time
when that was thought of as too risky. So I know something about building. And we need to get to work.
What we need is a Housing Comptroller – one who will flex the full powers of the office to attack this crisis from every possible angle. The housing crisis is ultimately a choice. It is not inevitable. Let us choose differently. Because the current way isn’t working. It’s time for urgency and imagination to take powers that already exist and use them for the working New Yorkers who are crying out for leadership.