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Here’s an idea for Zohran Mamdani to create more jobs in NYC: he could ask Julie Menin and City Council to relegalize the construction of new hotels, which Bill de Blasio banned citywide as a parting gift to the hotel workers union on his way out of office in 2021 www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/n...

You are overstating. Here are a few special permit hotel applications: zap.planning.nyc.gov/projects/202... zap.planning.nyc.gov/projects/202... zap.planning.nyc.gov/projects/202... A special permit does make it hard, but it's a legal use and it is not banned.

Kind of a philosophical question – at what point can you say that something cannot be done? At this point I believe we're in the second decade of the hotel special permit (can't remember what the first rezoning with it was – Hudson Square? earlier?), and nothing has been built.

That first one is less than a year old, so maybe it'll still happen. Although this is a very strange hotel – 38 units in 46,913 gsf of hotel area? I'm not sure what exactly that is, but it probably won't fit most people's definition of a hotel. That second one is already operational and has...