Historic Gracie Mansion will get new occupants in the new year. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani says he will move into the mayor’s official residence on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Mamdani and his wife, Rama, will move in once he’s sworn into office in January. He said the decision comes down to safety.
“My wife Rama and I made the decision to move into Gracie Mansion in January,” Mamdani said in a statement.
The couple will leave behind their rent-stabilized apartment in Astoria, Queens. His current residence raised controversy because Mamdani is from a wealthy family. The mayor-elect has said he didn’t know the apartment was rent-stabilized when he first moved in when he was elected to the state assembly five years ago, according to WNBC.
Mamdani is living in a $2,300 one-bedroom unit, according to the NY Post.
“Cooking dinner side by side in our kitchen, sharing a sleepy elevator ride with our neighbors in the evening, hearing music and laughter vibrate through the walls of the apartment,” Mamdani said in a statement as to what he’ll miss of his apartment.
“This decision came down to our family’s safety and the importance of dedicating all of my focus on enacting the affordability agenda New Yorkers voted for,” he continued.
During his campaign, the Democratic socialist had proposed sweeping housing reform for New York City. It’s a plan that would include freezing rents on some apartments; the construction of 200,000 new subsidized, rent-stabilized units; and a $100 billion investment in housing over 10 years.
Gracie Mansion
Mamdani will be sworn into office as the 111th mayor at midnight on Jan. 1, 2026. That is when he can officially take the keys to Gracie Mansion.
He’s trading in his Astoria neighborhood where the median list price is $750,000 for the Upper East Side where the median price is $1.7 million.
The home at East End Avenue was built in 1799 by Archibald Gracie, as a country house overlooking the East River. It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
It wasn’t until 1942, when Fiorello H. LaGuardia and his family moved into Gracie Mansion—which was mainly prompted by security precautions when the U.S. entered World War II.
Throughout the decades, the home has been restored renovated and was the site of many uses. Former Mayor Ed Koch established the Gracie Mansion Conservancy in the 1980s. The goal was to restore the dilapidated home to how it might have looked during its federal beginnings.
When Bill de Blasio was mayor, his wife, Chirlane McCray—an activist and writer—overhauled the mansion to bring attention to the “diversity that existed in the early 1800s” by displaying portraits of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Haitian slave turned philanthropist Pierre Toussaint.
Every mayor since—except Michael Bloomberg—has lived in Gracie Mansion, dubbed the “People’s House.”
Bloomberg believed mayors should not live at Gracie Mansion.
“It should be used as we use it now,” Bloomberg said back in 2012, according to CBS News. “There are events every day at Gracie Mansion throughout the whole house. If a mayor’s family is living there, then most of that house—a good half of it—is just not available. If a mayor lives there, then what they’re doing is costing this city a lot more money and depriving the rest of the city of one of the great facilities any city has.”
In Mamdani’s statement, he thanked Astoria, the neighborhood he’s called home for years.
“Thank you for showing us the best of New York City. We have called this neighborhood home as our city weathered a devastating pandemic, cruel attacks on immigrants, and years of an affordability crisis. Time and again, this community has shown up for one another. We will miss it all—the endless Adeni chai, the spirited conversations in Spanish, Arabic and every language in between, the aromas of seafood and shawarma drifting down the block.”
The statement went on to say, “I may no longer live in Astoria, Astoria will always live inside me and the work I do.”
Realtor.com® reached out to Mayor-elect Mamdani’s office for comment and did not hear back.
