Mamdani’s biggest early opportunity is hiding in plain sight
How a new Charter Revision Commission can accelerate Mamdani’s affordability agenda
Mayor-elect Mamdani should convene a Charter Revision Commission (CRC) to jump-start progress on reducing housing costs, improving bus service, and strengthening the capacity of New York City’s government.
In essence:
CRCs propose structural changes to the city government, which get voted on directly by New Yorkers.
Historically, NYC voters tend to say “yes” to CRC proposals. Over the past 20 years, more than 90% of charter amendments proposed by CRCs have passed.
This gives Mamdani a powerful lever: by putting proposals directly to voters, he can push through popular reforms and build momentum to implement his agenda.
Why Changing the Charter Matters
The City Charter is New York City’s foundational law. It defines which agencies exist, how power is distributed, what procedures govern land use, budgeting, staffing, and more.
What a Charter Revision Commission Does
A mayoral Charter Revision Commission (CRC) is a group appointed by the mayor to review the Charter and propose changes. Those amendments go directly to voters at the next election, bypassing the City Council entirely. If a majority of voters support a proposal, it becomes law. Because the mayor appoints the CRC’s commissioners, the mayor has significant sway over what ends up on the ballot.
This gives the mayor an alternative pathway for major reforms that the City Council might slow-walk or block. And even before a CRC publishes its proposals, the mere threat of charter revisions often accelerates action by the Council.
The success of prior CRCs
New Yorkers have voted to approve 20 of the 22 charter amendments put forward by Charter Revision Commissions since 2005.1
Across housing, governance, policing, land use, and budgeting, New Yorkers reliably say “yes” to clear, focused proposals. Just this year, outgoing mayor Eric Adams secured major improvements to housing policy at the ballot box. And even the two proposals that failed lost only narrowly.
The record in New York is clear: focused ballot proposals that target issues New Yorkers care about are very likely to pass.
Mamdani’s Opportunity
A Mamdani-appointed Charter Revision Commission would have broad latitude to propose amendments to any part of the Charter, in order to achieve Mamdani’s goals.
The biggest opportunity is to advance a focused set of pro-abundance structural reforms that connect directly to Mamdani’s platform: housing affordability for renters, better buses, and a more capable city government.
Here are some illustrative charter revisions which could be achieved through charter revisions, without Mamdani needing to wait for the City Council, Albany, or Washington to act.
Housing & Property Tax
The Problem: New York’s property tax system makes renting more expensive than it needs to be. Rental buildings typically pay much higher tax rates than condos, co-ops, and small homes – even when they’re worth the same amount. Those higher taxes get passed directly into rents. Some of this is baked into state law, but the City still has meaningful authority it barely uses.
I’ve written about property tax issues previously:
How a CRC Can Help: Charter amendments can reduce housing costs by making the property tax system fairer and reducing the burden on rentals:
Reduce unfair tax gaps between rental buildings: Require the Department of Finance to narrow the huge differences in how similar rental buildings are taxed and to publish simple, public metrics showing progress each year.
Fix how condos and co-ops are valued: Make DOF use a clearer, more accurate, more transparent method for valuing condos and co-ops so they aren’t systematically under-taxed.
Redirect subsidies toward people who actually need help: Phase out or redesign the condo/co-op tax abatement, which now mostly benefits owners in high-price neighborhoods, and shift those resources toward renter relief or need-based protections for low-income homeowners.
While full reform needs state action, a CRC can force New York City to use the tools it already has, and move the tax system closer to fairness and easing costs for renters.
Faster Buses
The Problem: Bus speeds in New York are among the slowest in the country. Riders lose millions of hours each year to blocked lanes, poorly timed signals, and fragmented street management. Yet fixing New York’s streets is fully within City Hall’s power; the Department of Transportation (DOT) just needs a clearer legal mandate to prioritize buses.
How a CRC Can Help: A Charter amendment can hardwire bus priority into the city’s street grid:
Bus Priority Network: Create a legally defined network of streets where buses must come first. Require DOT to install protected bus lanes, transit-signal priority, and camera enforcement on a fixed timeline.
Office of Bus Rapid Transit: Establish a dedicated office within DOT charged with designing and delivering true world-class bus priority street layouts across the city.
These reforms would create a binding legal obligation to give riders faster, more reliable bus service throughout the city.
A More Capable City Government: Hiring Faster and Smarter
The Problem: Abundance requires a functioning city government workforce. Right now, NYC’s civil service is struggling with big staffing vacancies at many key city agencies. As a recent Vital City piece highlighted, the City’s hiring system is outdated: year-long recruiting timelines, infrequent hiring exams, thousands of outdated job titles, and rigid rules that discourage skilled outsiders from joining.
State law sets some hard constraints to civil service hiring, but much of what slows the system down is within NYC’s own control.
How a CRC Can Help: Charter reforms can modernize the City’s hiring machinery so the city can actually execute:
Evergreen Exams & Hiring Timelines: Mandate regular exams for high-vacancy roles, require scores and eligible lists to be released faster, and impose time-to-hire standards across agencies.
Modernize Job Titles: Require a full rewrite and consolidation of titles every few years so the city can hire “software engineers,” “data analysts,” “housing inspectors,” and “project managers” instead of generic “analyst” or “manager” roles.
Mission-Critical Hiring: Allow more flexible hiring for essential roles in housing, inspections, transit, finance, and technology by fully using the exempt and noncompetitive authority NYC already has.
These changes don’t rewrite state civil-service law, but they dramatically improve what the city can control. This is critical to staffing the teams needed to build housing, run buses, fix taxes, and deliver core services.
Time is of the essence
Mamdani will need to appoint a Charter Revision Commission in early 2026 if he wants its proposals on the ballot in November. Waiting too long risks the CRC missing key deadlines and having to delay until 2027 or 2028 to put the proposals to a vote.
Of course, many of these reforms could also be tackled by the City Council, if they choose to act. But if Mamdani is serious about delivering on his top campaign promises, a Charter Revision Commission is the most reliable way to independently make progress on these key structural reforms.
A CRC is the ideal tool for New York’s new mayor to start his term with an impactful bang.
See the breakdown below of the results of NYC’s charter revision ballot proposals from 2005 to 2025.
New York City already gets many more miles of bus lane every year than it actually needs. And the buses do not use those bus lanes.
Bus speed statistics in New York City are massively skewed. On main thoroughfaires outside Manhattan, the buses move at a brisk clip. But New York City is one of the few cities that insists on routing bus lines through small residential streets, in order to minimize the distance riders have to walk before getting to a bus stop. A sensible Transit hierarchy would result in riders, walking to to a main avenue, getting on a bus, taking that bus to a Subway, etc. or transferring to another bus. Instead, we have buses causing traffic on residential streets, slowing down for double parked cars, having difficulty making sharp turns, etc. and these on-time performance numbers skew the results for the system as a whole.