Council District 3 Special Election
TL;DR: Rank Carl Wilson first
On April 28, there is a special election to fill now-State Senator Erik Bottcher’s former seat on the Council. We have thoughts on which candidates align with our vision for a more abundant New York. There are more races underway for the Democratic primary in June and we will be releasing a more comprehensive voter guide in May, but in the meantime we wanted to comment on this special election race.
The third district seat opened when Erik Bottcher—one of the city’s strongest abundance champions—won the State Senate District 47 special election in February and resigned to head to Albany. We’re glad to have Erik in the Senate and we want to make sure his district elects someone who can carry that work forward on the Council.
This is a nonpartisan special election, meaning candidates run on ballot lines of their own creation rather than party labels. It also uses ranked-choice voting. We urge you to rank more than one candidate: no single candidate here is likely to clear 50% in the first round, which means that your second and third choices could shape the outcome.
Key Issues in the District
Housing in Midtown
The Midtown South Mixed-Use rezoning, approved by the City Council in August 2025, legalizes housing in previously manufacturing-zoned areas. The plan unlocks roughly 9,500 new homes, including 2,800 permanently affordable units. It was a major victory in a season of wins on housing supply in the city.
At the Western Rail Yards, the City Council approved a PILOT financing structure in June 2025 to fund a $2 billion platform over the active rail yard, opening a site that has sat vacant for decades. The project will bring up to 4,000 new homes, including at least 625 affordable units, a new school, and 6.6 acres of public green space to the West Side of Manhattan.
Abundance New York calls for more housing of all kinds, and processes that deliver it faster and at lower cost. The next council member will have to negotiate projects like these, with the aim of creating far more housing.
Major Transit Projects
Penn Station handles over 600,000 daily passengers across the regional railways and subways, which is three times its designed capacity. New York has been working on renovation plans for years and the Cuomo Administration was the last to put forward a major new development plan. Since then, the Trump administration bumped the MTA as the lead in favor of Amtrak, which the federal government can more directly influence. A request for proposals has been issued and Amtrak is expected to announce the master developer in May. Andy Byford, of “Train Daddy” fame, is leading the project for Amtrak. He has put through-running trains (i.e., from New Jersey to Long Island) on the table and has left open the possibility that the redevelopment will include the area around the station (i.e., demolition in favor of new housing or office space as part of the project). Meanwhile, the Port Authority is building a new bus terminal in midtown too.
We welcome these new projects for the city. Both Penn Station and the bus terminal are tests of whether the city and its representatives can keep major projects on track—on time, on budget, and with procurement and construction practices that make the next generation of projects more feasible. The new council member will have a role in both. We want someone who will keep their eye on the ball—the city needs more transit capacity and housing—and works to reduce the processes that make these projects too slow and too expensive while mustering the political will to keep it all together.
The NYCHA Fulton & Elliott-Chelsea Project
NYCHA’s plan to demolish and rebuild the Fulton & Elliott-Chelsea Houses—replacing aging buildings with a new mixed-income development, including all current residents’ homes—has become a fault line of the special election.
It would cost roughly $1 billion to repair the Fulton & Elliott-Chelsea buildings alone—part of a $78 billion citywide backlog across NYCHA’s portfolio. This funding has been elusive for decades. Even the last Democratic party trifecta in Washington, under the Biden Administration, failed to provide the federal funding for a government-only solution to the backlog. Now, under a Republican trifecta and specifically a Trump Administration actively trying to cut federal support for public housing, it is simply not reasonable to contend that public funding to alleviate conditions across NYCHA properties is forthcoming.
We believe New York should use every tool available, including cross-subsidy from market-rate units, to empower NYCHA, the original social housing authority in this city, to pursue equitable outcomes at scale. NYCHA has tools that no other city agency does—to flexibly procure, build, borrow, and finance—and ambitious leadership willing to use them should be welcomed. This project is an example of such an approach, and Mayor Mamdani’s administration has affirmed it. Current tenants and their advocates have every right to be critical of NYCHA, which has a long history of failing its residents, and demand greater oversight and accountability. But candidates for public office who reject the current redevelopment plan without any way of providing the alternative funding needed are selling snake oil.
Our Recommendations
We sent each of the four major candidates a questionnaire covering our core issue areas: government capacity, housing, transportation, and climate. Three of the four completed it. We also reviewed public statements, forum appearances, and track records and compared them to our policy agenda. We thank all of the candidates who participated in our process for their time.
Rank Carl Wilson First
Carl is the most abundance-aligned candidate in this race. He has spent a decade on the West Side, co-founding the Hell’s Kitchen Democrats before serving as Chief of Staff to Council Member Erik Bottcher. In that role, he worked directly on the Midtown South rezoning—a process that required navigating competing interests across community boards, business improvement districts, and the garment industry to unlock significant new housing in a part of Manhattan constrained by outdated zoning. On our questionnaire, Carl supported our key recommendations across the board. His legislative priorities include legalizing shared housing options and making it easier to build while pairing density with transit and public space investments. He has taken a sensible and responsible approach on the NYCHA Fulton & Chelsea-Elliott project. Carl has his old boss’s support too, which carries credibility with us.
Rank Leslie Boghosian Murphy Second
Leslie is a credible second choice. As Chair of Community Board 4, she has worked on major projects in the district, including the NYCHA Fulton & Chelsea-Elliott redevelopment, the Western Rail Yards, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the Manhattan Cruise Terminal, and Penn Station. In our questionnaire, she agreed on many of our priorities, but less so than Carl. She points out the nuance of the NYCHA redevelopment. Leslie took the time to meet with us and expressed considered views on housing, clean energy, and overall process reform to make it cheaper and easier to build in New York.
Consider Ranking Lindsey Boylan
Lindsey did not complete our questionnaire, and her housing platform gives us more concern than the two candidates above. Her framework centers on social housing and anti-privatization rather than supply expansion across income levels, and she has not engaged as substantively on the permitting, zoning, or building code changes necessary to build more of what we need. She opposed the City of Yes legislation, but supported the housing charter amendments. On NYCHA, her position is more resistant to redevelopment than Wilson’s or Murphy’s, without a clear alternative for funding the capital backlog. Where she is stronger is transit and public space—her platform includes busways, Fair Fares expansion, signal priority, universal daylighting, and pedestrianizing Broadway, all of which align with our agenda. If you are inclined to rank her, she is a reasonable third choice on those grounds. On our core housing issues, she is more skeptical and less proven than the two candidates above.
Do Not Rank Layla Law-Gisiko
Law-Gisiko opposes nearly all of Abundance New York’s core issues. In our questionnaire, she rejected expanding housing supply, easing permanent supportive housing projects for the homeless, and capital procurement reform. She opposed parking reform, which would fairly charge for use of public space and free it up for more productive uses. She is skeptical of market-rate components in any development and approaches new construction primarily as a threat to existing conditions rather than as a necessary response to scarcity. Further, NIMBY Councilman Chris Marte endorses her and we have concerns about her past advocacy tactics. That said, as leader of the City Club of New York she favored congestion pricing and pushed back on Governor Hochul’s delay of its implementation.
On NYCHA, she has made opposition to the Fulton & Chelsea-Elliott project a centerpiece of her campaign, celebrating the March appeals court restraining order that paused demolition. She has not put forward a funded, credible alternative to address the buildings’ capital backlog. With federal housing funding under active assault from the Trump administration, the argument that renovation alone can save these buildings asks tenants to wait indefinitely for money that is not coming.