One week before the primary, Beachwold Residential CEO Gideon Friedman did something unusual for an owner of multifamily housing. He gave $50,000 to a super PAC backing Zohran Mamdani’s bid for New York City mayor.
“In the final weeks of the campaign, it became clear he was the only candidate with viable polling who actually wanted the job and whose decisions would be made with the best interests of all New Yorkers in mind,” he said in an email.
Friedman said he and his wife are progressive, and he was excited by Mamdani’s ability to energize young voters in the primary. He also believes Mamdani is sincere in his commitment to build more housing.
Though real estate professionals overwhelmingly donated to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and to super PACs that backed his campaign, Friedman wasn’t alone. Donors who identified as working in real estate donated more than $13,000 to his campaign, according to an analysis by The Real Deal of New York City Campaign Finance Board records.
For some of those donors, Mamdani’s policy positions may not directly affect their business. Beachwold is based in Manhattan, but its multifamily properties are outside the city. Mamdani’s real estate-related donors largely were not top executives at major firms, but residential brokers, construction superintendents, project managers at architecture firms, non-profit affordable housing developers and employees of the New York City Housing Authority.
But some principals of real estate companies did chip in.
Hudson Companies’ Joseph Riggs gave $150 to Mamdani’s campaign and $1,000 to New Yorkers for Lower Costs, a super PAC that spent nearly $900,000 on ads supporting Mamdani and more than $400,000 on materials opposing Cuomo. The super PAC didn’t seem to draw much from real estate donors, though Latham, New York-based property owner Zubair Ahmed contributed $2,000.
Mamdani’s campaign raised more than $1.7 million, with most individual donations clocking in at less than $200. As with donations in general, contributions from real estate professionals don’t necessarily signal full-blown support. Executives often donate to multiple candidates to hedge their bets or to attend a campaign event.
Riggs said he liked several of the candidates running in the Democratic primary, and donated to a number of them, but Mamdani gradually stood out.
“Mostly, I was excited that he seemed to have the political juice to beat Cuomo,” Riggs said of Mamdani.
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Riggs was put off by what he called the “contempt” Cuomo had for addressing the sexual harassment allegations against him, which ultimately led to his resignation as governor in 2021. He also pointed to Cuomo’s tumultuous relationship with former Mayor Bill de Blasio and how that feud affected the city.
He acknowledged that as a multifamily housing developer, Mamdani’s promise to freeze rents for stabilized apartments wouldn’t affect him as much as others in the industry.
“The fears that those owners have are very real. They operate their buildings at razor-thin margins,” he said, noting that he is hopeful that Mamdani will take other steps to improve conditions for landlords and tenants, such as increasing funding for housing vouchers.
He is also encouraged by Mamdani’s plan to ramp up spending to build 200,000 units of housing.
“Everything worth doing is expensive,” he said. “We need to build housing and a lot of it, if we want to keep the city healthy.”
Mamdani’s campaign returned $75 worth of Riggs’ donation (the other $75 was under his full name, and may have slipped through), as well as contributions from other industry professionals flagged by the New York Post in March, including $1,000 from Mohannad Malas, who founded California-based Dana Investments.
Mamdani has pledged not to take donations from the real estate industry, telling TRD this month that he wants “to make clear that I answer to everyday New Yorkers, not the billionaires.”
The donations to Mamdani from the industry pale in comparison to the more than $5.5 million real estate executives poured into Cuomo’s super PAC and the more than $500,000 they gave to his campaign. Some in the industry have already signaled that they will support Mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent, in the general election. SL Green CEO Marc Holliday, whose company is competing for a state casino license, is hosting a fundraiser for Adams this month, Politico reported.
“Everyone is going to coalesce around Adams,” said one affordable housing developer who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I think it is going to be a race driven by who people are scared of more.”
