Cuomo housing plan faces scrutiny

NEW YORK (PIX11) -- Candidates in the race for New York City mayor are calling out former Gov. Andrew Cuomo for his housing plan.

They claim it is light on details and that part of it was written using ChatGPT.

“Let’s build affordable housing for members of the community who have been priced out of where they live,” Cuomo said Sunday while rolling out his proposal at a church service.

He is leaning into his experience as both the governor of New York and HUD Secretary. Cuomo is promising to aggressively build a half million new units of housing with tax incentives, streamlined permitting, and leveraging partnerships, including partnerships with church groups.

However, others running for mayor were quick to pounce once the plan was posted online.

There were grammatical issues, and a footnote on page 28 that appears to reference the use of ChatGPT to locate an article on rent-stabilized housing.

“If you wanna ChatGPT Mayor Andrew Cuomo is your guy,” chided Comptroller Brad Lander, who is running in the primary.

Another opponent, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, said, “What Cuomo has done has outsourced his vision to real estate developers and outsourced his vision to an AI chat bot.”

A spokesman for Cuomo said, "There was one grammatically incorrect paragraph on page 28 that was not caught up on proofreading, which has since been remedied.”

He said by phone that ChatGPT was used by a member of the policy team to assist in basic research, similar to how you would use Google.

Mamdani’s signature housing proposal is to freeze the rent for the more than 2 million rent-stabilized New Yorkers.

PIX11 News asked him about using ChatGPT for researching housing policy.

“I think what we can see is from the results of it where we have unintelligible portions of the housing platform that pretends to speak to the greatest crisis New Yorkers are facing,” Mamdani said.

The same question was put to Lander, who is also proposing to build a half million housing units, including using city golf courses.

“There’s valuable uses for AI,” Lander said. “But someone running for mayor in this city that’s facing a housing crisis should actually do their own research and write their housing plan.”

For his part, state Sen. and mayoral candidate Zellnor Myrie is proposing to build 1 million units of housing. Myrie said he believes his campaign has used AI tools for research and fact-checking— but said he has bigger issues with the Cuomo plan and record than any concerns about ChatGPT use.

“It was short on actual detail,” Myrie said, warning Black New Yorkers in particular “not to be fooled,” pointing to the increased cost of housing during Cuomo’s time as governor.

Cuomo has been the center of attacks for weeks now because of his clear front-runner status in the polls.

However, at least as far as endorsements, Cuomo has kept up the momentum. On Monday, he was endorsed by two large unions that helped propel Mayor Eric Adams to office: 32BJ and the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council.

Cuomo cheered the endorsement on social media.