Mayor Zohran Mamdani to unveil plan to use modular housing to bring more units to NYC

Josephine Stratman, New York Daily News on May 26, 2026

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NEW YORK – Mayor Zohran Mamdani is expected to unveil his New York City housing plan Tuesday, including using modular housing to modernize construction and build new units faster and cheaper, the Daily News has learned.

Modular housing brings an assembly line format to construction, largely taking place in factories. Advocates for that type of building say it’s faster and cheaper than building on site.

And by bringing more of the construction supply chain local, the city can lower transportation costs and reduce reliance on far-off suppliers.

The new initiatives, according to portions of the mayor’s broader plan shared with the Daily News in advance, are intended to make affordable housing more investor-friendly for manufacturers and create more local jobs while ramping up the city’s housing output.

“This plan meets the housing crisis with the urgency it demands,” Mamdani said in a statement. “We are setting the most ambitious housing production and preservation targets in the city’s modern history – and backing them up with investments to match – while also protecting tenants and homeowners, investing in public housing and ensuring the workers building that housing have good-paying, safe jobs.”

The public-private Economic Development Cooperation will be looking at how to bring in and train workers on industrialized construction methods like off-site manufacturing and digital fabrication.

These methods could significantly cut back on construction time and waste — though the logistics of transporting large prefabricated parts through the five boroughs and finding sites to work from could pose a challenge.

The EDC will work to find city-owned sites to do the construction staging, particularly in industrial areas of the city, according to the plan.

Mamdani is also slated to announce the formation of a working group led by Deputy Mayors for Housing and Economic Justice Leila Bozorg and Julie Su to look at forming more Project Labor Agreements to secure union labor for city-financed affordable housing projects.

In the past, those collective bargaining agreements have mostly been used within specific arms of government, like NYCHA.