Cuomo accuses Mamdani of being a very rich person ”, “requires that he” moves immediately “from his stabilized apartment in rent

“I call you to move immediately,” Cuomo wrote in a publication of social media widely visible this weekend, in casting Mamdani as “a very rich person” occupying an apartment that could otherwise be used by a homeless family.

The attack line has attracted tens of millions of views online and has relaunched a long -standing debate on who should have access to the highly sought -after stabilized units in New York, which represent around 40% of the city’s rental stock and are currently open to people from all income.

He also illustrated the rhetorical durations to which Cuomo is willing to go while he mount an independent offer for the mayor against Mamdani, a democratic socialist who has easily defeated him in the Democratic primary on a platform which was centered on the affordability and freezing of the rent on stabilized units.

Mamdani, who earns $ 143,000 a year as a state legislator, said he paid $ 2,300 a month for an apartment in a room in the Queens he shares with his wife – a life situation that Cuomo called “disgusting”.

On the other hand, Cuomo, a multimillionaire who was previously governor of the state, spends about $ 8,000 a month in an apartment in Midtown Manhattan which he moved last year in the county of Westchester, a rich suburb.

In recent weeks, Cuomo, 67, has adopted a more aggressive presence on social networks, gaining both praise and mockery for its use of the millennium on the Internet and repeated references to the “privilege” of his opponent. Mamdani’s mother is a successful independent filmmaker and her father is a professor of Columbia University.

On Monday, Cuomo went further, releasing an official proposal, which he nicknamed “Zohran’s law”, to intervene to owners to rent stabilized units in rent to “rich tenants”, defined as those who pay less than 30% of their income to the existing rent.

The rent regulation program, which caps the quantity of owners can increase the rent each year on approximately 1 million apartments, currently does not include any income restriction – which opponents have long prompted.

Although the average stabilized rent of rent earns $ 60,000 per year, it is not uncommon for New Yorkers to medium or higher income to live in the units, which sometimes rent several thousand dollars per month.

But Cuomo’s idea attracted the rapid skepticism of certain housing experts, which noted that the ceiling would mean, by definition, to indicate that all the new tenants of stabilized rent would abandon a substantial part of their income.

“The idea that we should only have people living in apartments that they cannot afford seem to put people to fail,” said Ellen Davidson, lawyer for housing at Legal Aid Society. “It is not a proposal from someone who knows anything on the housing market or in New York.”

The New York real estate council, a group of owners whose members massively supported Cuomo in primary, did not respond to an investigation as to whether they supported the proposal. But in an email, the group’s president James Whelan said that “the advantages of the rent regulations are not well targeted” and that a certain form of means of means should be taken into account.

Under the law of the state, hikes on the units stabilized to the rent are decided by a board of directors appointed rather than by owners.

“The stabilization of rents has never been tested because it is not an affordable housing program, it is a program on the stability of the neighborhood,” said Davidson, the housing lawyer, adding that the proposal would probably present a “bureaucratic nightmare”.

A spokesperson for Cuomo’s campaign, Rich Azzopardi, said in a text message that “ultra rich and privileged should not benefit from a program intended to work on New Yorkers”, adding that income threshold standards would rest in the same system that governs other city programs for low-income housing.

Mamdani’s spokesperson Dora Pekec said the proposal had proven that Cuomo was both desperate and disconnected.

“While Cuomo is only careful about the well-being of its republican donors, Zohran thinks that the work of the government of the city is to guarantee a life of dignity, not to determine who is worth it,” she added.