When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani donned a race bib last week and hit a high-school track in The Bronx, it wasn’t to compete in a sprint, but to profess concern about the problem of vacant housing.
He proudly announced a set of reforms for the city’s affordable-housing lottery, aimed at taming the bureaucratic morass that keeps apartments built with city financial support empty and unoccupied for months at a time.
The new Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development plan — SPEED, hence the track-and-field theme — is meant to make it quicker for lucky low-income housing-lottery winners to move into some 10,000 subsidized units, thus easing the city’s severe housing crisis…