Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his deputy mayor, Leila Bozorg, get solid grades for addressing the biggest issue in New York City: the lack of housing.

The Block by Block report is a comprehensive approach covering market-priced units, affordable apartments, rent-stabilized dwellings, distressed properties and NYCHA and even the possibility of using Sunnyside Yard for homes. Of course there’s much more to do, but it’s a decent start and shows that Mamdani was smart in appointing Bozorg, a nonpolitical expert who was the top housing official under the man Mamdani likes to blame for a lot of problems: Eric Adams.

Mamdani is promising to build 200,000 new affordable housing units over the next 10 years while preserving the same number, aiming to tackle the city’s defining contemporary crisis as vacancy rates hit record lows and NYC stares down a middle-class exodus.

Ultimately, the proof will be in the units produced, but the contours, objectives and steps outlined in the plan are a blueprint to work off of. We have to appreciate that Mamdani’s proposals straddle out-of-the-box thinking like the notion of engineering an entirely new neighborhood over the empty Sunnyside Yard — the sort of big-ticket ideation that, even if it doesn’t fully pan out, gets leaders to think about significant problems in a different way — and more nuts-and-bolts recognition of obstacles to affordable housing, like soaring insurance costs.

Putting city funding behind a new insurance program that could potentially help mitigate the enormous costs of necessary insurance might not sound quite as slick as the promise of raising a new neighborhood, but it is these more boring systemic issues — also including zoning and regulatory clunkiness — that often throw the biggest roadblocks against resolving the housing crisis.

This framework aims to address every piece of the puzzle, from the many kinds of rentals, as well as homeownership, an oft-overlooked aspect of the city’s housing panorama. All of these efforts would be backed by set-aside financing, ensuring that the city would put its money where its mouth is.

The report’s title acknowledges a basic reality of the crisis, which is that it is a crisis for the city as a whole, not any one borough or neighborhood or population. Mamdani intends to build on some of the housing successes of his predecessor and use tools granted him by the same city voters who elected him to speed up approvals and get zonings through and housing built all around New York, including in neighborhoods that have been recalcitrant to do their part to keep the city’s housing stock fresh.

Even for a mayor to just make clear that they won’t cave to the political pressure from well-connected NIMBYites in wealthy or semi-suburban neighborhoods is already a great start.

These plans bear the fingerprints of Borzog. She knows the complexities of the city’s intractable housing problems and understands the need for practical fixes that combine strong government oversight and regulation — including a focus on making sure that negligent landlords face consequences — with the understanding that the city must work with private partners, such as those that would manage NYCHA properties under the PACT and Housing Trust programs.

For this all to work, fellow leaders at all levels of government must also get on board. The Council’s local veto might be dead but we still don’t need members trying to derail projects in their districts for inane reasons. We will need support from the state and, crucially, the federal government; Donald Trump and Mamdani may not see eye-to-eye on almost anything, but Trump cares about NYC and he cares about building.

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