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Zohran Mamdani surged to a historic victory in Tuesday night’s election for New York City mayor, riding a campaign that was laser-focused on halting soaring rents, improving mass transit, and rebuking President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration in a metropolis where more than one-third of the population is foreign-born.
The city’s skyrocketing electricity prices, however, received scant mention — even as utility rates animated races around the country, including Democrat Mikie Sherrill’s gubernatorial victory in New Jersey. Despite kicking off his career as a state lawmaker in 2020 by fighting to close the city’s fossil-fueled peaker plants, Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, made little hay about climate change at all during the campaign.
Yet the next mayor of the nation’s largest city inherits a world-leading experiment in retrofitting buildings to slash emissions, open questions about how to transition to cleaner power sources, and a patchwork of adaptation efforts meant to protect aging infrastructure from mounting deluges.
The most significant climate policy under the mayor’s purview is a statute called Local Law 97. Passed in 2019, the law requires buildings over 25,000 square feet to slash emissions 40% by the end of this decade and to reach net-zero by 2050. To do so, the nearly 50,000 buildings that qualify must swap oil- and gas-fired heating systems for electric heat pumps.
When the first phase of the law came into effect last year, just 8% of the buildings covered needed to make upgrades to comply, estimated the Urban Green Council, a nonprofit focused on building decarbonization. But more than 50% of buildings will need to make changes to hit the 2030 emissions target.
“That’s a lot,” said John Mandyck, the Urban Green Council’s chief executive. ​“There’s a lot the next mayor is going to have to do.”
Among the law’s biggest opponents were co-op buildings, condos, and landlord associations that said compliance would cost too much. One anti-Mamdani PAC, as New York Focus reported, sought to make the law a defining issue in the race, saying the candidate from Queens would only raise the price of bringing buildings into line.
In a policy proposal, Mamdani said he would lobby Albany to extend a general tax break that helps middle-income co-op and condo owners pay for building renovations, and to reduce the fees to apply. He also vowed to staff up the agencies in charge of helping building owners navigate the rules. He said in a mid-October debate that he’d heard ​“from so many” that ​“it’s cheaper to pay the fine than to actually get into compliance.”
The city could also lower costs by finding a way to purchase heat pumps and other appliances in bulk, Mandyck said. Last year, the New York City Housing Authority agreed to buy 10,000 state-of-the-art induction stoves for apartments in the nation’s largest public housing system, and the state kicked off a new contest shortly after for heat pumps. At the debate, Mamdani said he would look to NYCHA as a model.
But Mandyck said, while the NYCHA programs are ​“off to a great start,” they’re still only pilot projects.
“That can be part of the solution,” he said. ​“But there needs to be some new entity, whether an authority or something, that would find a way to do bulk purchasing to aggregate to the market. This is a huge market.”
Yet the buildings covered under Local Law 97 represent just about 5% of the city’s total skyline.
“There’s 950,000 other buildings in New York City,” Mandyck said. ​“We’re going to have to think about how we help the smaller buildings decarbonize, too.”
To electrify the entire city without spiking emissions, New York will need more clean power plants.
Right now, the city depends on fossil fuels for more than 90% of its power. The mayor has limited say over the electrons that flow into the five boroughs, and the dense urban landscape leaves little space for solar and wind installations within the city. Mamdani’s one major clean-energy plan is aimed at adding solar panels to the roofs of schools, but even that would likely require approval from Albany while only meeting a fraction of local demand.
City Hall does, however, play a role in negotiating contracts for the city’s public institutions with the New York Power Authority, the state-owned utility.
Roughly one-fifth of the power NYPA sells statewide goes to public customers in the city. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, directed NYPA in June to work on building at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear reactors in the state in the coming years, and the Mamdani administration could play a part in brokering a deal for those electrons. At the final mayoral debate, Mamdani said he considered a new nuclear plant ​“something worth exploring,” though he’s remained mum on nascent efforts to reconstruct the Indian Point power station that once provided about a quarter of New York City’s power.
Mamdani will also inherit a climate problem with more immediately tangible stakes than decarbonization: the need to update New York’s aging infrastructure to deal with increasingly extreme weather.
Routine rainstorms regularly overwhelm the city’s stormwater systems and cause deadly torrential flooding. Just last week, two men died in basements in Brooklyn and Manhattan amid heavy rains.
Since the devastation of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the city has begun a series of adaptation projects totaling billions of dollars — but some less glamorous work has been underway for decades.
Take the New Creek stormwater project on the East Shore of Staten Island as an example. The project, championed by outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, is part of the Bluebelt Program that started on Staten Island in 1996 and transformed the city’s least populous borough into a testing ground for water-management infrastructure. The Department of Environmental Protection now plans to apply those solutions in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. Five of the 19 project sites are fully complete, and the rest are on track to be finished in the next five years, said Robert Brauman, deputy chief of Bluebelt operations at the agency.
On a sunny Wednesday morning, roughly 12 hours after Mamdani delivered a trumpeting victory speech, Brauman stood atop a concrete structure overlooking the large freshwater stream known as New Creek. Just a few years ago, it was a trickle running through a corrugated culvert under a quiet stretch of the Midland Beach neighborhood that would, in bad weather, turn into a torrent. Today, however, the water travels through a carefully regulated S-shaped pipe system, allowing New Creek to keep stormwater from flooding the surrounding neighborhoods. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection combed over 19th-century botanical records to select plants native not just to the five boroughs but to Staten Island specifically to flank the body of water.
“That prevents flooding downstream, and it gives all the plants we installed time to clean the water, so the native wetland vegetation can suck up nitrogen and phosphorus and everything else and clean the water before it goes out,” said Brauman. ​“That’s perfect adaptation.”
After walking the perimeter of the project, he arrived at the dead end of Mason Avenue and stopped on the sidewalk. Between the curb and the asphalt of the street was a concrete path that looked like a hard version of the polygreen foam popular on children’s playgrounds. When Brauman poured a sip of coffee from a McDonald’s cup, the liquid spread for a moment, then started to disappear. The specially made porous pavement absorbs fluids, reducing how much liquid flows into storm drains during heavy rainfall.
“This is one of the first ones on Staten Island,” Brauman said. ​“The city is trying to incorporate it into more projects.”
Mamdani has yet to announce whether he’ll keep Rohit Aggarwala as the Department of Environmental Protection’s commissioner. But Brauman said he’s confident projects like this will continue either way, even if Mamdani had little to say about adaptation on the campaign trail.
Mandyck said the Urban Green Council plans to think through potential policy proposals in the coming months for how to better organize and grow the city’s efforts.
“It’s clear we need to take adaptation more seriously,” he said. ​“There are a lot of good things going on right now in New York, but they’re a little decentralized.”
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