Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s polarizing pick for a powerful housing board — a nominee who has previously characterized neighborhood resistance to new development as “wealthy homeowner cartels” — won City Council approval Thursday with little difficulty.
John Mangin, the housing director at the city Planning Department and one of the central figures behind recent citywide zoning revisions, was confirmed as chair of the Board of Standards and Appeals in a lopsided 40-6-4 council vote.
The independent five-member BSA can approve exemptions from zoning rules and, under city charter changes recently backed by voters, may also overrule council opposition to certain affordable-housing projects.
Mangin played a major role in drafting those contentious charter revisions, which established a faster path for some projects to move ahead without traditional council review.
Council members had fiercely opposed Mangin’s 2025 proposals, first pressing the Board of Elections to block the charter measures from reaching the ballot. When that failed, they publicly campaigned against the changes and urged New Yorkers to reject them.
“I don’t see how we go from a campaign against those proposals to put one of the principal architects in charge of the BSA,” said Council Member Frank Morano (R-Staten Island), among the small group voting against Mangin’s confirmation.
“We told New Yorkers that local input matters,” Morano said during the council’s stated meeting.
The remaining “no” votes were cast by Council Members Joann Ariola (R-Queens), David Carr (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn), Vickie Paladino (R-Queens), Inna Vernikov (R-Brooklyn) and Phil Wong (D-Queens). Chris Banks (D-Brooklyn), Eric Dinowitz (D-Bronx), Linda Lee (D-Queens) and Christopher Marte (D-Manhattan) abstained.
The change of heart from the council came after Mangin convinced members to back him during one-on-one meetings, according to Speaker Julie Menin (D-Manhattan).
“We had concerns from a good number of members in the beginning,” Menin said Thursday after announcing she would vote in favor of his confirmation.
“He really assured me that he definitely valued community input.”
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Mangin has also criticized the community benefit agreements that council members often negotiate with developers for local givebacks such as parks, school seats and jobs, arguing they are too cumbersome and make housing more expensive.
Council members at his Sept. 1 confirmation hearing questioned Mangin about his past positions they said favored steamrolling neighborhood concerns and stripping the council of its say.
Council Member Nantasha Williams specifically accused him of helping to “build a system that lets certain affordable housing projects move faster with less Council control” — and portraying homeowners as “part of an exclusionary problem.”
Still, Williams voted to confirm Mangin Thursday.
“One of the things that he was very clear about is the context in which he wrote those previous writings,” Williams explained. “He was talking about a completely different community, not New York City.”
At the hearing, Mangin said he had been referring to opposition to housing development in suburban communities.
Banks, chair of the council’s Public Housing Committee, pressed Mangin over his past “homeowner cartels” comment.
In a 2014 academic paper, Mangin slammed municipal zoning dominated by affluent homeowners as “homeowner cartels” — keeping housing scarce and reinforcing racial segregation.
“Normal folks would take that offensively, especially when they advocate for their community,” Banks told Mangin at the hearing.
More than a dozen members had expressed reservations about Mangin in a closed Democratic conference last month, according to a report in The Post Millennial.
Mangin still has to be sworn in before he takes over as chair of BSA.
