Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Getty
As you are probably aware by now, the residency requirements to become mayor of New York City are quite lax. You can sort of live in New Jersey or spend years mansion-surfing between Westchester and the Hamptons and still legally become mayor as long as you live in the five boroughs come Election Day.
So where do our would-be mayors live this time around? With the Democratic primary less than three weeks away (and a debate on Wednesday), we wanted to take a look at how the candidates live. Do they rent or own? Which neighborhood? Perhaps most tantalizingly, How much do they pay? The subject is also particularly relevant this year: Housing and affordability have been among the top issues in forums, interviews, and debates, and candidates have promised everything from freezes for rent-stabilized tenants to paring back zoning restrictions to encourage construction and building affordable housing on public golf courses. Also, we’re nosy.
Here’s what we’ve put together based on campaign and property records, social-media posts, and information from the candidates, whose accommodations range from rent-stabilized apartments in Queens to a Fifth Avenue co-op.
Party: Independent (registered Democrat)
Address(es): Gracie Mansion, 181 East End Avenue; 936 Lafayette Avenue, Bedford-Stuyvesant; and 1530 Palisades Avenue, Fort Lee, New Jersey
Rent or own? Own
How much does it cost? Adams paid $250,500 in 2003 for the Bedford-Stuyvesant townhouse, though the current value is something closer to $1.3 million, according to nearby sales. The Fort Lee co-op, which he purchased with his partner in 2016, is worth somewhere between $250,000 and $499,999.99, according to disclosure forms. Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor, is free.
For nearly four years now, Eric Adams has “lived” at Gracie Mansion on the Upper East Side. But has he? Just where our nightlife-loving, Trump-befriending mayor actually sleeps has been a mystery of his own making: Federal prosecutors investigating Adams in his now-dismissed corruption case wrote that, based on his cell-phone data, the mayor’s time at Gracie Mansion may be more part time than anything. Adams “regularly spends the overnight hours of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday” at the Federal-style mansion and “occasionally does so on other days as well,” per their findings. When a 20-year-old filmed himself breaking into Gracie Mansion just before 4:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day 2025, it just so happened Adams wasn’t home then, either. (Are the ghosts keeping him away?)
Before taking office, then–Brooklyn Borough president Adams couldn’t shake people’s suspicions about where he actually lived either: His co-op across the Hudson River in Fort Lee, which he shares with his partner, Tracey Collins? Brooklyn Borough Hall, where he brought in a mattress during the pandemic and was still staying overnight a year later? A tour of his one-bedroom duplex in his very bachelor-coded Bed-Stuy townhouse only added to the ever-expanding web of conspiracies (and a stakeout offered few answers). Come November, however, it may not matter.
Party: Democratic
Address: 144-20 109th Avenue, Jamaica
Rent or own? Own
How much does it cost? $85,000 in 1987, per her campaign, but comparable homes nearby are selling for anything between $600,000 and over $1 million.
Adams, the New York City Council Speaker, lives with her husband of 35 years, Joseph Adams, in a two-and-a-half-story Dutch Colonial Revival home complete with a white picket fence encasing a stretch of lawn. It’s quite the suburban Queens dream. According to property records, Joseph purchased the unit in 1987, and it is tucked away in a corner of Jamaica where some properties have fetched nearly $850,000 in recent years and are now on the market for over $1 million. (Adams helped pay off the mortgage after moving in, per her campaign.) During testimony last year supporting legislation that would require the city to boost affordable-housing production, Adams stressed how purchasing the home had enabled her family to “stay in our community and to be part of investing in its success.”
Party: Democratic
Address: 420 East 54th Street
Rent or own? Rent
How much does it cost? Around $8,000 a month
After resigning as governor in 2021, Cuomo was rumored to have crashed on a friend’s couch in Southampton and eventually registered to vote at the $22 million mansion in Purchase that belonged to his sister Maria Cuomo Cole and her husband, designer Kenneth Cole. But in late 2023, he signed an 18-month lease at the Oriana on East 54th Street in Sutton Place and began very publicly plotting his return to power. During that time, his daughter Cara also was staying in the $8,242-a-month two-bedroom, two-bath that comes with a Gachot Studios–designed bathroom and custom Italian oak kitchen cabinetry. (She apparently got the boot when Cuomo properly launched his mayoral campaign; Cuomo’s dog, Captain, whom the former governor might or might not have tried to foist onto staffers during his Albany exodus, is currently in Westchester with a family friend despite the building’s pet-friendly policies.) People have also been skeptical about whether Cuomo really lives where he claims, but the neighbors we spoke to in March said they have seen him around.
Party: Democratic
Address: 837 Washington Avenue, Melrose
Rent or own? Own
How much does it cost? $440,000 in 2021
Blake moved into a sublet in a Melrose condo building while gearing up for his successful 2014 race for the 79th District seat in the state assembly. The eight-story redbrick behemoth, constructed in 2008, has interiors reminiscent of a Holiday Inn, including brown-carpeted communal hallways and earth-tone lobby tiles, plus a sparse amenities package with an outdoor patio, a gym, and a brutally lit community rec room. The apartment itself is at least sprawling — a three-bedroom, two-bath isn’t bad! Blake, a former Obama aide who runs a nonprofit and is an associate pastor at a Bronx church, purchased his unit for $440,000 in September 2021, marking one of the most expensive sales in the building.
Party: Democratic
Address: 32-15 35th Street, Astoria
Rent or own? Rent
How much does it cost? $2,000 a month in 2018
The lone Democratic Socialist running for mayor lives in a rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment in a prewar building in Astoria. (Is it on the nose? Sure.) Relatably, Mamdani found the apartment in 2018 on StreetEasy. “I was looking for an apartment that I could afford on my own,” he told the New York Editorial Board, adding, “I found that in this apartment.” At the time, Mamdani told the outlet, he was making $47,000 a year working as a foreclosure-prevention housing counselor for a Queens nonprofit. (Before he moved to Astoria, per City & State, Mamdani, the son of film director Mira Nair and Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, had been living rent free with his parents in Columbia housing on Riverside Drive.)
According to a former listing for Mamdani’s Astoria apartment, the place has a king-size bedroom with two closets, plus a windowed eat-in kitchen and hardwood floors. He wrote in 2019 that his $2,000-a-month setup was “theft” compared with tenants who paid $290.60 a month — or roughly over $901 in today’s dollars. Perhaps accordingly, the state assemblyman representing Astoria and Long Island City has campaigned on a promise to institute a rent freeze on all the city’s roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.
But he dodged a question from the New York Editorial Board about whether a lawmaker like himself, earning a six-figure salary, actually needs this sort of financial help. “If I was able to put in a rent freeze, I wouldn’t be in a rent-stabilized apartment. I would actually be on the Upper East Side, in a new apartment,” he said, referencing Gracie Mansion.
Party: Democratic
Address: 25 Broad Street
Rent or own? Rent
How much does it cost? $5,485 a month in February 2017; comparable units are going for between $6,500 and $7,500 now
Stringer’s political brand is the Upper West Side: His failed 2021 mayoral campaign aped Zabar’s orange logo for its merch. In January, he launched his current campaign at Blondies. Stringer reportedly moved to the neighborhood in 1982 and fielded locals’ gripes while working as district coordinator for then-assemblyman and now-congressman Jerry Nadler. He went on to fill his former boss’s seat in Albany from 1993 through 2005. This is all to say the former Manhattan borough president and ex–city comptroller has held tight to his uptown credentials despite the fact that he and his wife, Elyse Buxbaum, have been living in the Financial District for almost a decade. In 2017, the pair signed a nearly $5,500-a-month lease for a gut-renovated two-bed, two-bath icebox in the Broad Exchange Building, which also got them a concierge, a doorman, and a golf simulator. In an interview with Metro New York about a so-called “residential renaissance” in Fidi, Stringer attributed his family’s downtown relocation to needing more space for their two kids (sounds familiar) and wanting a shorter commute to the office. “We have more time as a family,” he said, “which is truly the best perk.”
Party: Democratic
Address: 256 13th Street, Park Slope
Rent or own? Own
How much does it cost? $655,000 in 2002; comparable units have sold for between $2.4 million and $2.7 million this year
Like Stringer, Lander is another center-left kind of guy whose political identity is very much tied to the neighborhood he has called home for years. The difference is that Lander is of the Brownstone Brooklyn sort and he’s still living there. The current city comptroller and earnest fedora wearer — who for eight years represented the 39th District covering Park Slope and Gowanus on the City Council — purchased a two-family brownstone on leafy 13th Street in Park Slope, paying $655,000 in 2002. He and his wife, Meg Barnette, raised their two children there. His residence has also been the source of some mild controversy: Like many other City Council progressives in the early days of the pandemic, Lander called for landlords to cancel rent; except, as a landlord himself who had been renting out one of the units in his brownstone, Lander kept charging his tenant. (Dora Pekec, a campaign spokeswoman, told the Daily News Lander was leasing his extra unit to an Afghan refugee for below market rate — $1,625 a month; that’s quite a deal for the neighborhood but still more than zero dollars.) Pekec tells me Lander is currently renting out the second unit for an even cheaper rate of $1,500 a month, this time to a Ukrainian refugee he and Barnette met through organizing work.
Party: Democratic
Address: 37-15 79th Street, Jackson Heights
Rent or own? Rent
How much does it cost? $2,480 a month, per the campaign
Ramos is also a rent-stabilized tenant, which she has said is the reason she has managed to stay in the city and raise two kids in the same apartment for over a decade. Her two-and-a-half-bedroom in a five-story 1927 complex in Jackson Heights has had some hairy structural issues in recent months, such as a rainstorm in December that caused the ceiling to “burst” and flood her apartment. Ramos posted a video on Instagram of the damage, along with tarps covering her bookcase and a man mopping her floor, with a campaign promise to fund retrofitting the city’s aging housing stock “to keep rents down and tenants dry.”
Party: Democratic
Address: 10 Maple Street, Prospect–Lefferts Gardens
Rent or own? Rent
How much does it cost? $1,300 a month, per the campaign
Myrie considers his primary residence to be the two-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment in Prospect–Lefferts Gardens where his single mother raised him (and where she still lives). Per a campaign spokesperson, the state senator, who represents Central Brooklyn neighborhoods including Crown Heights and Prospect–Lefferts, pays the unit’s $1,300-a-month rent. The apartment looms large in his political work. “I defended my mom in housing court — because her rent-stabilized apartment means the world to us,” per a post on his campaign’s Facebook account. As for where he actually lives with his wife, former state assemblymember Diana Richardson? They’re apparently splitting time between his childhood home and her childhood rental in a Mitchell-Lama complex in Crown Heights, which she took over from her parents. Honestly, incredibly relatable behavior for kids whose parents have good rent in the city.
Party: Democratic
Address: 1165 Fifth Avenue
Rent or own? Own
How much does it cost? $2.1 million in 2002; comparable units are going for around $2.7 million now and carry nearly $6,000 in monthly maintenance fees
If you still don’t know who Tilson is (fair), he has been pitching himself as the “only change candidate” in the Democratic primary because (a) he’s not a career politician and (b) he’ll bring his business acumen from running a hedge fund for 18 years to City Hall. Cool. In terms of housing, it’s not too far from what you may imagine for a 58-year-old finance guy: a Carnegie Hill co-op in an upper Fifth Avenue Beaux-Arts building across the street from Central Park. He and his wife paid $2.1 million for a three-bedroom apartment in mid-2002, per campaign spokesperson Daniel Marans, though it’s unclear how much of a return they would get selling it today; another three-bed on their floor went for $2.7 million in February.
Party: Independent
Address: 200 Hicks Street, Brooklyn Heights
Rent or own? Own
How much does it cost? $1.1 million in 2009; a comparable unit in the building sold for $3.3 million in 2021 with $4,843 in monthly maintenance fees.
Walden’s Brooklyn Heights co-op feels very much like the type of apartment a Michael Bloomberg–redux-style candidate would live in. A former federal prosecutor turned white-collar defense attorney who lent his own campaign $500,000, Walden and his wife bought their 2,000-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath apartment in 2009 for nearly $1.1 million. They wound up renovating the space and tried to sell it for nearly $3 million in 2017 but took it off the market after four and a half months and a $200,000 price cut. It’s full of pretty nice details (arched windows, wooden floors, a bona fide laundry room and pantry), though it’s unclear who thought wall-to-wall beige carpeting in the bedrooms was a good idea.
Party: Republican
Address: 272 West 73rd Street
Rent or own? Rent
How much does it cost? $3,675 a month
The very Republican Sliwa and his wife, Nancy, live on the Upper West Side and clearly don’t want to leave: Last year, the couple moved from their West 87th Street studio into a first-floor one-bedroom rental on West 73rd Street. (They appear to pay nearly $3,700 a month for the place.) A recent listing photo of their current apartment shows the space comes with a sort of Evita balcony — the perfect setup for the Guardian Angels founder and former WABC radio host to give impromptu rallies about why the city needs to increase the police force and why cats rule. It’s quite the upgrade from the 320-square-foot shoebox the pair previously shared with 16 rescue cats. (The couple is now fostering five senior cats in their new home, Sliwa tells me, which is frankly still a lot of cats.)