Upzoning Harm: The 2025 Harvard Housing Report, Mamdani’s NYC Win & Cambridge

Above image credit: AI generated.

Reflecting on the 2025 Housing Report and the Mandami Moment in NYC we also see clearly why the Housing Cost Crisis in Cambridge Won’t Be Solved by Building More Luxury Towers.

Mandami’s striking victory in NYC resonates in many ways here in terms of failed housing policy and the newly released State of the Nation’s Housing report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies by Chris Herbert. In keyways this housing report couldn’t be more timely. It paints a stark picture of a U.S. housing market buckling under extreme pressures: home prices and interest rates at historic highs, homeownership out of reach for most renters, surging homelessness, and a rental market where half of tenants are officially cost-burdened.
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But if there’s a throughline that cuts deeper than the data, it’s this: our housing policy has been captured by a failing market ideology, one that assumes that simply building more—especially at the luxury end—will eventually solve affordability for everyone else.
This week’s victory by Zohran Mamdani in New York City, running a campaign that explicitly rejected this supply-side status quo, underscores the political shift underway. Mamdani’s win wasn’t just about rent control or anti-gentrification—it was a rebuke of a system that treats housing as a commodity first and a human right second.


🧨 Affordability Crisis by the Numbers
Chris Herbert’s State of the Nation report lays out the trends across the U.S. with clarity and urgency:

• 22.6 million renters (half the market) now spend over 30% of income on housing; 12.1 million spend over 50%.
• Homeownership is slipping—only 6 million renters out of 46 million can afford a median-priced home.
• Developers completed 608,000 new multifamily units last year—the most since the 1980s—but most of these were high-end.

This is the crux: we are building more, but not for the people who need it most. Inclusionary zoning, often touted as a solution, only requires 10–20% of units be set aside as “affordable”—and even those often exceed what working families can pay.
The rest of the units are priced for the wealthy, or for investors looking to park capital in “safe” U.S. real estate. That’s not filtering down—it’s pricing out.


🏘️ The Supply Myth and the Politics of Displacement
The housing report notes that despite record multifamily construction, affordability has worsened. Why? Because trickle-down housing doesn’t work when what’s being built is disconnected from actual community needs.
Mamdani’s campaign seized on this contradiction. In Queens, where the median household earns $74,000, “affordable” often means units priced for households making twice that. Luxury development in working-class neighborhoods drives land costs up, not down.
The assumption that supply at any price level will stabilize the market is increasingly discredited. Instead, it entrenches inequality and fuels displacement. The report even hints at this, noting that “new construction remains concentrated at the upper end,” while federal supports shrink and homelessness explodes.


🔥 Austerity Meets Climate Disaster
Adding insult to injury, families are now contending with rising insurance premiums, property taxes, and climate risk. From 2019 to 2024, insurance jumped 57%, particularly in wildfire-prone areas. Property taxes increased 12% in just two years.
As cities prepare for more disasters, they’re also seeing key federal housing supports reduced—at exactly the wrong moment. Meanwhile, tariffs on building materials and reduced immigration are making construction slower and more expensive.


🛠️ What’s the Alternative?
As Mamdani’s win shows, there is growing political appetite for public, social, and cooperative housing solutions—strategies that don’t rely on market incentives to serve low- and middle-income households.

We need a New Deal for Housing, not a continuation of the Reagan-era dogma that the private market will fix itself if we just get out of the way. That means:

• Massive public investment in affordable and non-market housing.
• Tenant protections to prevent displacement and rent gouging.
• Climate-resilient housing that prioritizes the vulnerable.
• Tax policy reform to shift incentives away from luxury development.

🧭 Conclusion
The 2025 housing report should be a wake-up call. The status quo isn’t working—not for renters, not for aspiring homeowners, not for cities battling climate and displacement. The Mamdani moment is not just a footnote—it’s a signal that voters are tired of policies that trickle nowhere.
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We don’t need more supply in the abstract. We need the right kind of housing, in the right places, for the people who live there now. That’s not just a housing policy—it’s a democracy policy.


Original data and insights from “Unease in the Housing Market Amid a Worsening Affordability Crisis” by Chris Herbert, Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (June 24, 2025).
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