Mamdani Chose Her to Manage City Housing. Then She Had to Find a NYC Rental

by Samantha Maldonado

This article was originally published on February 11 at 5 a.m. EST by THE CITY

One Sunday in January, Dina Levy stood with Mayor Zohran Mamdani in The Bronx, where he announced she would be the commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

The very next day, she began another massive task: searching for an apartment within city limits.

Levy, a New Jersey native, has spent most of her career working in housing policy in New York, but she never called the city home. She lived in Jersey City for 20 years, but city agency commissioners are required to reside in the five boroughs.

The apartment hunt proved to be “a lot to do very quickly while also really trying to be focused on the job,” Levy said.

Like 70 percent of New Yorkers, Levy rents her home, and she is the first HPD commissioner to do so while in the role in at least a decade. 

Her status as a renter has particular resonance given HPD’s work: The agency manages the affordable housing lottery, administers Section 8 rental vouchers, finances new and preserves existing income-restricted housing, enforces the housing codes, and holds landlords accountable to make building repairs.

Though there’s no shortage of horror stories about nailing down a decent New York City rental, Levy’s search was smooth, by her account. She encountered no scams or game-playing, and locked down an apartment in just three weeks.

“It would have been very challenging to do this if I did not have the resources or if my husband didn’t have flexibility,” Levy said. 

She scoured StreetEasy and RentHop, and asked friends to keep an eye out. Her husband, who has a more accommodating schedule and a remote job, spearheaded the effort, sending her videos and listings.

They set their sights on Harlem, downtown Brooklyn, and Williamsburg, hoping to find a two-bedroom apartment with outdoor space and good light, ideally near the water. Levy declined to specify her budget, but said she looked for places that would cost around $6,000 per month: “a little below, a little above.”

Levy toured six of the top contenders, including apartments in a few tall high-rise buildings that she said didn’t feel “homey.” She researched the property management companies to ensure they had good reputations, knowing that the entity managing the building can have an outsized impact on a tenant’s day-to-day experience.

Levy and her husband settled on an airy two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with a patio on the top floor of a building in Williamsburg. 

“It’s modest, but it’s nice,” Levy said. “You can see the sky. You can see the river. That was important to me.”

The apartment is rent stabilized, but only for another year, thanks to the 421-a tax incentive that ends in 2027, Department of Finance records show.

Levy and her husband signed the lease to the Williamsburg apartment, and they picked up the keys on February 1. They’re trying to figure out whether they will pay a fee to break their Jersey City lease, which goes until June, or try to sublet it.

Levy said she’s looking forward to continuing to take a ferry to work and to be in a neighborhood more walkable than any she’s been in before.

“It’s exciting now to finally be like, OK, now I can say I am actually a New Yorker,” Levy said.

Molly Franklin, a real estate agent with Corcoran, said Levy and her husband seemed well positioned to find an apartment to their specifications, given their level of preparedness and price point. She also noted the harsh winter weather has warded off other would-be movers.

“It’s not a small budget in that particular neighborhood, but it’s well above what most people can afford,” Franklin said.

The median two-bedroom in Williamsburg is about $5,300, Franklin said, and so finding something similar on a more limited budget would be tricky. If there was a two-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood priced under, say, $3,000, there would be “a line around the block,” she said.

Levy acknowledged the speed and relative ease with which she found her new home in New York City was a rarity, one made possible by her family’s circumstances.

“No pets, no kids. We’re DINKs,” she said, referring to the acronym that stands for “dual income, no kids. “If you’re doing this and you’re on a very restrictive budget, I can imagine it is harder, but I think that speaks to the need for production, making units more affordable.”

New York City is facing a housing crisis, with less than 1 percent of apartments priced under $2,400 vacant, according to the most recent city survey. Availability increased for units with rents on the higher end. As part of his mayoral platform, Mamdani promised to construct 200,000 affordable apartments over a decade — and Levy fills a key role in achieving that goal.

Levy witnessed a massive housing boom in Jersey City during her two decades there, where she lived in two different apartments in the same building.

“Growth was important, but there needs to be a lot of emphasis on affordability,” she said. “There are so many programs in New York dedicated to making sure that some, if not all, of what’s getting built is affordable.”

Steven Fulop, the former mayor of Jersey City and current president of the Partnership for New York City, pointed out that restricted housing growth in the boroughs put pressure on Jersey City — and for New York City to grow, city officials would have to make tough decisions.

“If you’re going to really build at scale, New York City is going to face those challenges of choices,” he said. “Where do you prioritize affordable housing and inclusionary zoning? Where do you prioritize density and supply?”

Throughout her career, Levy’s work centered around keeping subsidized homes affordable and securing improvements for tenants’ living conditions.

Levy previously served as senior vice president for homeownership and community development at New York Division of Housing and Community Renewal, the state housing agency. There, she oversaw the mortgage division, federal and state grants, programs to advance homeownership for low-income households and to make housing more resilient, and an effort to create modular homes upstate.

She also worked for former state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and led organizing and policy at the nonprofit Urban Homesteading Assistance Board [UHAB], which worked to turn rentals into tenant-owned cooperatives. 

Levy’s former boss at UHAB, retired executive director Andrew Reicher, said she proved to be a skilled organizer. He said she not only solved problems in buildings, but fought for and achieved structural changes in large part because she understood how programs and systems worked.

“That serves her really well in trying to oversee and solve the city housing problem,” Reicher said, adding that she can balance competing interests.

When Reicher hired Levy almost 25 years ago, he encouraged her to move to New York City, but she insisted on staying in the Garden State — in no small part because she liked her ferry commute, he recalled. When Levy more recently called Reicher to seek his opinion about the HPD role and noted she’d have to move, he teased her, saying she should’ve moved to the city back then when he’d asked.

Levy’s status as a renter makes her something of a rarity in her position. Several HPD commissioners in the recent past have rented homes in their lives, but by the time they became head of the agency, they were homeowners. Levy said she has no interest in buying property for the foreseeable future. 

“I like being a tenant. I like that somebody will come fix it,” she said. 

Ritti Singh, communications director of Tenants Bloc, said it was notable that HPD’s leader is part of a majority group in New York City — renters — and has a background in tenant organizing.

“The reality is that often when you are a tenant you don’t have basic control of what happens in your home,” Singh said. “That’s why we’re organized and try to change those conditions. It really cuts across income.”

Levy said that being a renter and her years of tenant organizing means she is mindful of the tension that can be at play between tenants and landlords.

“It’s a weird dynamic, I think in housing generally, that the people who are paying the bills sometimes don’t feel empowered,” Levy said. “That’s weird because there’s no other framework I can think of where you’re the customer, where you feel a bit vulnerable to who owns your building. I’m not sure why that’s true in housing. Whether you’re a tenant or whether you’re an owner, your home is like your sanctuary, and you need it to feel like a safe space.”

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• How New York City Can Create Genuinely Affordable Housing

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