New Comptroller Levine Looks Back on 4 Yrs as Boro Prez

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Exactly four years ago I walked into the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building for the first time as Manhattan Borough President. On that day—January 1, 2022—New York City recorded more than 50,000 COVID cases in a single day, at the peak of the Omicron wave.

As I come to the end of my term representing this incredible borough, it’s remarkable to reflect on how far we’ve come since that difficult time four years ago. Our concerns have long-since shifted from case counts to average rents, from the positivity rate to the homelessness rate. I’m proud to have used the office of the Manhattan borough president to take on each and everyone one of these evolving challenges.

Our housing affordability crisis has been far and away my top priority. Early in my term my team scoured every corner of Manhattan to identify places to build desperately needed housing. Our Housing Manhattanites report identified sites with capacity for 71,000 new homes; already, approximately 20% of those sites are moving forward. We pushed to convert vacant office buildings into housing, unlocking thousands of new homes in Midtown, and fought to pass City of Yes and the Midtown South rezoning—together unleashing the potential for up to 90,000 new homes citywide. And we revitalized Manhattan’s community boards, appointing hundreds of new, diverse members who are prioritizing housing and solving our affordability crisis.

We focused relentlessly on quality-of-life issues in the borough. We helped modernize scaffolding rules to finally rein in the epidemic of sidewalk sheds. We led the charge to address New York City’s severe shortage of public bathrooms, with new facilities now opening across all five boroughs. And we have worked tirelessly to fix our broken mental health system so that we can achieve a future where no New Yorker experiencing serious mental illness is left to cycle between the street, to the E.R. and back to the street again.

We also worked to build a healthier and greener Manhattan. Through our Million More Trees initiative, we planted hundreds of trees across the borough, have proposed finally tearing down the FDR South of the Brooklyn Bridge, and have successfully won expansions of curbside composting.

And we backed up our priorities with real capital investments, directing more than $150 million in capital funding to schools, parks, libraries, cultural institutions, health clinics, housing, and social services across Manhattan.

None of this would have been possible without the thousands of Manhattanites who partnered with us—my wonderful staff, members of our volunteer corps, community leaders, and the more than 1,000 people who serve in appointed roles overseen by this office. Fighting shoulder to shoulder with you, across every block and neighborhood of this vibrant little island, has been one of the great joys of my life.

As 2025 comes to a close, so too does my tenure as your Manhattan Borough President. On January 1, I will begin a new chapter as New York City Comptroller. Our city—our economy and our budget—faces real uncertainty and major challenges ahead. But this is the city that came back from COVID. From Hurricane Sandy. From 9/11. I know that we can take on any challenge, because we will meet what comes next, together.