Developer Don Peebles does not want an “upstart” mayor. 

Peebles, who flirted with a mayoral run to challenge Bill de Blasio in 2017, extolled the virtues of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a favorite within the real estate industry. He emphasized that Cuomo is a “known commodity.”

“You have got to be a superhuman being to run New York City,” Peebles said at The Real Deal’s NYC Forum on Wednesday. “What we need now is a mayor who can attract talented people to come and serve New York City and be as close to a dominating presence as possible.”

The developer shared the stage with Andrew Yang, a one-time upstart mayoral candidate who came tantalizingly close to winning the Democratic nomination in 2021 and Marc Norman, associate dean at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.    

Peebles said that the next mayor needs to be able to wrangle the City Council. 

“Ultimately, you need a very strong leader who’s willing to take them on,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s any other candidate in the race who can do that except Cuomo.”

He noted that Mayor Eric Adams (who graced the Forum’s stage a few hours earlier) was a “dramatic improvement” over de Blasio, as a much more business-friendly mayor, but that he has “got distracted,” vaguely alluding to the mayor’s criminal indictment, which was dropped last month. 

Yang joked that the city is going to get a lot more “Cuomosexual,” a phrase that went blessedly unexplored and unrepeated. He said, however, that the rise of socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani, currently polling second behind Cuomo, should be taken seriously.  

“A lot of people are feeling they can’t afford to live in New York City anymore, and then someone shows up — and he’s 33, charismatic, uses social media very, very deftly — and says, ‘Look, I’ve been trying to make the city more affordable for working families.’ I mean, that’s a very, very powerful message that’s going to reach a lot of people,” Yang said. 

“Instead of dismissing that,” Yang went on, “I think people need to dig in and say, ‘Okay, what is the nature of this appeal, and why does it strike a chord for so many New Yorkers?”

Several mayoral candidates, including Cuomo and Mamdani, have released housing plans. On the topic of candidates pledging specific housing unit targets, Norman urged caution. 

“Unless they’re actually also saying the developers are going to work with them and the policies are going to change, I wouldn’t believe them,” he said. 

Moderator and TRD columnist Erik Engquist asked the panelists about their views on construction unions and other organized labor groups that influence city real estate and politics. 

Yang, who founded the Forward Party in an attempt to upset the dominance of the Democratic and Republican parties, said that giving independent voters more of a voice in primaries would diminish the influence of special interest groups, such as unions. Yang supports establishing nonpartisan primaries in New York.   Peebles said unions operate like “unregulated PACs” and scare “weak-kneed politicians.” He said Cuomo would not be pushed around. However, construction unions are among Cuomo’s biggest supporters. At his campaign launch event, Cuomo pledged to build thousands of units of housing, noting that these would be “union jobs, of course.”

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