How much? Mayoral hopefuls red-faced after guessing New York housing costs
With less than six weeks to New York’s mayoral primaries, two candidates have left themselves electorally vulnerable for vastly underestimating the median cost of buying a home or apartment in Brooklyn.
“In Brooklyn, huh? I don’t know for sure. I would guess it is around $100,000,” Shaun Donovan, the housing and urban development secretary under Barack Obama and housing commissioner under the former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, told the New York Times.
Donovan’s press secretary said later in a statement to the Hill that Donovan “misinterpreted the question and made a mistake”.
In the same set of endorsementseeking interviews, Ray McGuire, a wealthy former Citigroup executive, guessed that the median sales price was “somewhere in the $80,000 to $90,000 range, if not higher”.
McGuire later said: “I messed up when accounting for the cost of housing in Brooklyn. I am human.”
The tech entrepreneur and 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang guessed correctly, while two other candidates, Maya Wiley and the former NYC financial comptroller Scott Stringer, both guessed over $1m, with Wiley suggesting $1.8m.
Brooklyn’s median sales price is $900,000.
The housing-cost guesstimate game comes as voters in the city begin to engage with the choice of who will replace Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is stepping down after serving two terms.
This week, two of New York’s media outlets offered their endorsements – the New York Times picking the former sanitation department chief Kathryn Garcia, and the New York Post picking the former police officer Eric Adams.
Donovan and McGuire’s wild underestimation of housing costs, particularly in a borough where average individual income is about $32,000 and has, in parts, seen an affordable housing crisis develop as a result of rapid gentrification, was widely mocked on social media and by progressives.
“How could people running for mayor of the city not know this? Because most people want power, but few want responsibility,” the podcast host Ashley C Ford posted on Twitter.
Chi Ossé, a 22-year-old progressive candidate running for city council in the Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn, told the Guardian that the answers “proved that these wealthy men are out of touch with the majority of the population of New York City”.
“This is a city of the working class – tenants, immigrants, people who are in touch with what’s going on. When it comes to leadership, we need people who understand where the majority is coming from.”
For many progressives, Dianne Morales, a former executive with Phipps Neighborhood, an affordable housing developer, has emerged as a favorite to replace De Blasio. In her interview with the Times editorial board, Morales came relatively close to guessing correctly.
“Oh, my gosh. The median sales price of a home or apartment. I don’t know, half a million.”