Mamdani's DOB Head: City Needs To 'Get Out Of Our Own Way'
Even though some of Mayor Zohran Mamdani's first actions as New York City's chief executive have effectively antagonized the real estate industry, his Department of Buildings commissioner, Ahmed Tigani, is trying to strike a more helpful tone.
Speaking in front of a crowd of real estate professionals at Bisnow’s New York Conversions and Building Upgrades conference Wednesday, Tigani emphasized the city’s commitment to working with private industry, specifically on how to speed up development.
Tigani, who was acting commissioner of the Department of Housing Development and Preservation under Mayor Eric Adams before Mamdani named him DOB chief last month, said collaboration with the industry is key to achieving the administration's ambitious housing goals.
Adams focused on cutting red tape as well, assembling an advisory board stacked with real estate development, urban planning and legal expertise, identifying 111 specific ways the city could streamline processes to “Get Stuff Built.”
On his first day in office, Mamdani signed an executive order instructing city agencies to find even more of the bureaucratic holdups that make housing harder and more expensive to deliver, using the same “cohort of agencies, plus more,” Tigani said.
“It put us in gear to think, ‘What can we do to get out of our own way?’” he said onstage at Convene One Liberty Plaza. "As government, get out of our way, work with you, who is trying to deliver housing.”
Mamdani is aware that the city’s long-running agency staffing problems need to be addressed to deliver on the ambitious goal of producing 200,000 new homes during his tenure, Tigani said.
“We actually saw some additional staff lines in the [preliminary] budget that was released, which is not something that happens in a prelim budget,” he said. “Normally, your real investments don't actually come until you get to the executive budget. So I was giddy.”
But Tigani, a longtime civil servant whose career has focused on housing and urban planning, said the administration wants to make it even easier for projects to get over the finish line.
One of the ways he hopes the DOB can meet that goal is by expanding an existing program offered through the agency's online portal, DOB NOW. The Major Projects Development Program, launched in 2022, offers developers city coordination and consultation services at key junctures for large-scale, complex projects.
“Part of what my effort will be over the next couple of years is to take this model that's been successful, the [Major Projects Development Program], and expand it to the borough offices,” Tigani said.
Meanwhile, the state and city's recent pro-development policy initiatives — the 467-m office-to-residential conversion tax abatement, the Midtown South rezoning and the combined city and state push to get City of Yes across the finish line — have set the stage for an explosion of housing development, he said.
The DOB has received 255 conversion project applications since 2020, Tigani said, and his department has approved and permitted about half of them. He assured the crowd that the remainder is largely also close to approval.
“Almost the entire pipeline of project applications that we're seeing is moving through,” he said.
Conversion projects in Manhattan hit their highest level in 20 years in 2025, with 5M SF of office slated to be turned into housing, according to Cushman & Wakefield.
The 467-m program made that number of conversions feasible, STO Building Group Senior Vice President for Building Repositioning Brooks McDaniel said onstage. It eliminates the vast majority of property taxes for 35 years if a certain number of units are kept affordable.
But the city's alacrity to approve those projects has also made a difference. While change of use permits sometimes take years in other cities, New York City developers can get them within six months, McDaniel said.
“Every conversion that I'm looking at is a 467-m project,” he said. “New York is far and away the best place to do a conversion.”
