Image by BeyondDC licensed under Creative Commons.

Zohran Mamdani’s election was remarkable in many ways. For one, he broke the coalition of “aging car-reliant homeowners” that has long dominated New York City politics by turning out the “commie corridor” and simultaneously winning over much of the city’s broader liberal coalition.

Ever since Mamdani clinched the primary, some Washingtonians have been casting about for a candidate like Zohran in DC. Meanwhile, urbanists have long desired a mayor who will immediately get to work building a dense, transit- and people-first DC.

Mamdani’s win demonstrates that pro-tenant and pro-housing-supply factions can be mutually reinforcing; his agenda is likely the biggest swing any contemporary leader of a major American city has taken to prove that protections and production complement each other. His transformative success broke coalitions that have upheld the NIMBY status quo for decades, and his early housing-related actions reflect the new possibilities he has unlocked in doing so.

Here’s a review of the Mamdani playbook, free for DC candidates’ taking.

A campaign that spoke to city people

New York City’s last mayor, Eric Adams, relied on older and more conservative voters concentrated in the less-dense, more car-oriented outer boroughs in his 2021 election. In 2025, that base found its natural candidate in the Dodge-driving, suburb-dwelling Andrew Cuomo, who abused progressive language to court those who don’t want new housing, or new people, in or even near their backyards.

Mamdani, by stark contrast, is a bikeshare rider and subway commuter who authentically connected to working-class immigrants, native New Yorkers, and the generation of affluent, mobile Millennials who now command a sizable share of the electorate. In any city, to have a mayor like Mamdani who doesn’t just pay lip service, but actually embodies urbanism, is exciting, meaningful, and refreshing: Neither those most concerned with tenant protections or with housing abundance need to clamor for the mayor’s attention. Mamdani really believes in both, and has the courage to take risks to change the housing status quo in New York.

Mamdani’s campaign foregrounded popular policies that could immediately address affordability concerns, like promising to freeze the rent of rent-stabilized units, while also promoting the shibboleths of the pro-homes movement, of which GGWash has long been a part. The latter is engaged in a nationwide pursuit of policies enabling the necessary legalization of more housing for all income levels, primarily by increasing density in wealthy neighborhoods. Allowing more and smaller homes throughout a city’s urban fabric, while simultaneously maximizing the potential for transit-oriented development are fundamental prerequisites to solving the housing crisis—and perhaps much more. Mamdani’s transition team notably included the executive director of Open New York, GGWash’s NYC peer.

A platform that grew with the candidate

Mamdani’s platform promised to pair public investment in 100%-income-restricted, subsidized (“affordable”) housing with policies that encourage the construction of housing at all income levels, especially in wealthy neighborhoods. He has acknowledged that his appreciation for enabling private-sector construction to advance public-sector investment in housing is something he only came to recently.

What a similar platform could mean for DC

Mamdani has promised to triple New York’s production of income-restricted, subsidized housing by building 200,000 such units in 10 years. In the District, whose population is one-twelfth of New York City’s, this would be like promising to build about 17,000 units in 10 years using Housing Production Trust Fund (HPTF) dollars. That’s doable: There have been about 10,500 income-restricted, subsidized units built here since 2019, when Mayor Muriel Bowser pledged to build 12,000 affordable units by 2025.

HPTF, and the Department of Housing and Community of Development, are sorely in need of a reboot, which—in the interest of protecting our public dollars and effectively delivering income-restricted, subsidized housing—should be at the top of any new mayor’s list. But subsidy only gets one so far if you can’t build something in the first place, and the majority of affordable units are in multifamily buildings. Accordingly, Mamdani’s platform proposed a comprehensive plan for New York that would upzone “areas that have historically not contributed to citywide housing goals” as well as areas around public transit, and eliminate minimum parking requirements.

Lucky for candidates in the District, the rewrite of the 2006 Comprehensive Plan, which was amended in 2021, is not likely to be finalized until after a new mayor takes office in 2027. Bowser’s current rewrite is looking tragically unambitious, suggesting yet-to-be-specified density increases within 10 minutes of rail stations or five minutes of bus stops. The District is only 69 square miles; “affordability” is going to require a lot more than marginal transit-oriented development (the primary means by which production here has trudged along since the 1990s). Even though doing so will require the politically uncomfortable end of exclusionary zoning, the candidate who pledges to build more rowhomes, duplexes, and small apartment buildings is likely to capture the votes of those who bemoan the lack of “family-sized housing” in good faith. Rebooting the Bowser Comp Plan to legalize missing-middle housing should be a no-brainer plank in any serious candidate’s platform.

As for parking requirements, we’ve been lapped in eliminating them by Richmond and Baltimore, cities with way fewer people and way less transit that are way less walkable. A serious candidate shouldn’t dither on eliminating parking requirements.

How to make real change as mayor

On his first day as mayor, Mamdani moved forward with his intertwined campaign promises of protecting tenants and increasing housing production. Ahead of his expected appointments to the city’s Rent Guidelines Board that will facilitate his promise to “freeze the rent,” Mamdani signed an executive order reconstituting the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Then, he visited an apartment building whose landlord has left tenants in grossly substandard conditions.

It’s easy to imagine a mayoral candidate in the District expanding rent stabilization and standing with tenants. More notable is how Mamdani has explicitly tied tenants’ rights to enabling the construction of new homes, even if those homes are built by private developers. Two additional executive orders (all three were packaged together in a single press release) underscored Mamdani’s appreciation for new supply as just as critical as tenants’ rights to ensuring safe, affordable, and accessible housing.

One executive order creates a centralized task force, LIFT, to quickly find public land on which new housing can be built. By this summer, LIFT must identify enough city-owned sites suitable for housing to accommodate 25,000 new units over the next ten years. The order requires most relevant city agencies to flag any major capital projects to the task force, preventing potential sites for housing from falling through bureaucratic cracks. Critically, the task force is led by the city’s new deputy mayor for housing and planning, Leila Bozorg, who was a key architect of Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” rezoning plan, the most significant land-use change in New York in decades.

Political interference has pushed many of the District’s rockstar public servants aside, so mayoral candidates should start identifying the sharp, hardworking, and innovative people they’d like to recruit and empower to build thousands of new homes on the District’s publicly owned land. Right now, the city has no actionable plan to develop pretty much anything that’s not near a sports stadium. In addition to the vast swaths of industrial land in Ward 5, there are libraries, rec centers, schools, and government offices that can and should have housing alongside them. To use our public land (and acquire more of it) to build homes, a new executive will need to bring on board deputies and staff to manage that portfolio, and mandate that they do so with a relentless focus on production.

The third executive order creates SPEED, a task force charged with reforming permitting. In 100 days, SPEED must identify bureaucratic slowdowns in construction approvals, financing, and marketing, and develop strategies to fix them. Talking about “cutting red tape” may spook some who are skeptical of the language of “deregulation.” But cleaning up codes and permitting processes will require careful work, not slashing and burning. SPEED is jointly led by Bozorg and deputy mayor for operations Julia Kerson, who criticized the Adams administration for secretly killing bus lane projects.

Mamdani-style progress in the District could look like developing pre-approved home design templates, digitizing more of the permit process, permitting shot clocks and more aggressive deadlines for interagency coordination between the Department of Buildings and the District Department of Transportation, or legalizing new (old) building types likesingle-stair apartment buildings, which Mamdani has cited as an example of how to use bureaucratic reform to improve residents’ quality of life.

From a place of love, toward a future vision for the city

Candidates should be envious of Mamdani’s broad and grounded enthusiasm, and ought to recognize that much of that support comes from his palpable love for New York City. Those running for office here who want to cultivate the same energy need not be self-described urbanists, but they should be proud to be urban Washingtonians.

The urbanist base will flock to a mayor who means it. That requires no balking when faced with opposition to neighborhood growth, indulging supply skeptics, using “there’s not enough affordable housing” as an excuse to slow or stop a project’s construction, or suggesting growth is at odds with redistribution.

Good thing residents here overwhelmingly support building more housing, and know that entails neighborhoods growing and changing. Building homes, while protecting residents, is a winning, future-looking formula, and necessary to break from the paradigm of building a certain type of housing where it isn’t hard to do so. As the Washington Post recounted in 2018:

“But building in Washington is a bureaucratic slog and a political nightmare. “As mayor,” [Tony] Williams said, ‘I couldn’t push for more density in Northwest because those are the voters who brought me to the dance.’ Near Southeast was a developer’s dream — an area with hardly any residents to rise up against the addition of people and traffic.”

While politically pragmatic, this was a generational error. Since then, progressives and liberals have been too distracted duking it out over gentrification in Shaw, NoMa, and Bloomingdale to focus on the amenity-rich, transit-proximate neighborhoods like Crestwood, Cleveland Park, Capitol Hill, and Chevy Chase. But that’s yesterday’s war.

Mayoral hopefuls who are serious about lowering costs and bringing a multiracial working class back to the District will build not just a coalition, but places for its members to live—in every neighborhood.