New York City Is Acting Like a Developer, an Insurer, and a Grocer. Its Economic Development Agency Is How.

On July 22, 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani named Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, as board chair of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, and appointed government veteran Anthony “Tony” Shorris as its president. Khan, who co-chaired Mamdani’s mayoral transition and will serve without pay, takes over a 27-member board from Margaret Anadu, an Adams-era appointee. The headlines focused on Khan’s antitrust record. The sharper story is the turn the agency itself has taken. The EDC’s public “NYC Wins” feed — the running list of corporate relocations and expansions it has long celebrated, from Meta to Bank of America to Coinbase — has not been updated in the four months since March 2026. In its place is a very different kind of activity: the city developing housing on its own land, backing an insurance program, opening grocery stores, and running businesses of its own. New York is stepping into markets as a direct participant, and the EDC is how.

What the EDC Actually Is

The Economic Development Corporation is a nonprofit that acts as the city’s primary vehicle for development and infrastructure. It manages roughly 66 million square feet of city-owned land, according to testimony from then-president Andrew Kimball at a March 2025 City Council hearing. Its portfolio includes Hudson Yards, the High Line, the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island, the Brooklyn Army Terminal, the MADE Bush Terminal manufacturing campus in Sunset Park, the NYC Ferry system, and Hunts Point, the largest food distribution center in the country. Khan described it plainly on being appointed: this is the agency that manages “some of our city’s most valuable lands,” and she framed her goal as ensuring “public resources are being used to build state capacity.”

The EDC also sends money back to the city. In Fiscal 2024 it contributed about $27 million to the general fund, alongside roughly $55 million in other support; in Fiscal 2023 the figures were about $28 million and $41 million. That revenue comes largely from managing city land — 31 land sales and 99 leases in Fiscal 2024 alone. It is real money, but a small share of a municipal budget that runs well over $100 billion. The point worth making clearly: the EDC is not a budget windfall. What is changing is not how much the agency raises, but how directly the city is choosing to act inside markets.

The City as Developer

The EDC owns land, and it is putting that land to work as a developer rather than simply a seller. It recently issued a request for proposals to redevelop a city-owned site on East 125th Street in East Harlem into a new housing project. At the MADE Bush Terminal campus in Sunset Park, the agency leases city-owned industrial space directly to manufacturers — recently to the lighting manufacturer Stickbulb, which took 27,300 square feet, alongside other design-and-manufacturing tenants including PELLE, Aripack, and MushLume. In both cases the city is the landlord and, on the housing side, the master developer selecting who builds on public land.

The City as Insurer

In April 2026 the Mamdani administration unveiled what it called a first-of-its-kind city-backed insurance program aimed at affordable and rent-stabilized housing, whose property and liability insurance costs have more than tripled since 2017. The city acts as backer and purchaser, using municipal scale to negotiate lower premiums rather than serving as the direct insurer. An interagency group — the EDC, the Housing Development Corporation, and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development — is running it, with the EDC set to seek program operators in the summer of 2026. The administration says the program will be self-sustaining over time and targets 20,000 policies in 2027, reaching 100,000 homes by 2030. Coverage of the plan has put the initial public commitment near $100 million.

The City as Grocer

Mamdani’s best-known campaign promise is now moving through the EDC: five publicly owned grocery stores, one per borough, backed by $70 million in city capital. La Marqueta in East Harlem is the first identified site — a roughly 9,000-square-foot store expected to open around 2029 — with the Peninsula in the Bronx named second. The city owns the land and covers overhead; a private operator selected by competitive bid runs day-to-day sales and is contractually required to pass savings to customers.

“A public option allows us to intervene where the market has failed.”
— Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on the public grocery plan

The City as Operator and Brand

Beyond land and public options, the EDC runs businesses that look a lot like private ones. It operates the NYC Ferry and released a summer 2026 branded merchandise collection. It runs workforce and startup programs, including the NYU Tandon Game Design Future Lab, now taking applications for its second cohort, and a newly issued RFP for life-sciences programming at Kips Bay aimed at students. Taken together, the agency functions as landlord, developer, insurer, grocer, ferry operator, retailer, and incubator at once.

The Traditional Role: Courting Private Employers

Alongside these public ventures, the EDC has long played a more conventional part — recruiting and retaining private employers, then publicizing the wins. Its public “NYC Wins” feed catalogs recent commitments: Meta’s first New York flagship store on Fifth Avenue, Bank of America’s long-term campus commitment, Coinbase’s hub expansion, PayPal’s lease of 261,000 square feet across 345 Hudson and 555 Greenwich, ElevenLabs’ $33 million expansion and 230 new jobs, and Kraken’s planned second global headquarters, among others. As noted at the top, the most recent entry on that public feed is dated March 2026, roughly coinciding with the change in administration and EDC leadership, and as of July 22, 2026 it had not been updated. Whether that reflects a deliberate change in emphasis or simply a lag in updating a webpage is not clear from the record. But the contrast is stark: the ledger of corporate wins has gone quiet while the announcements of grocery stores, insurance programs, and housing RFPs have accelerated.

A Shift in Economic Development

These moves are part of a broader reorientation. Where earlier administrations measured economic development largely by corporate relocations and tax-incentive deals, the Mamdani administration has added two other priorities: direct public options and small-business support. In July 2026 the mayor announced OPEN — “Overhauling Procedures and Expanding Navigation” — a package of more than 50 regulatory reforms meant to cut red tape for small businesses. The changes are granular: eliminating a separate frozen-dessert permit for restaurants that serve both hot food and cold dairy, consolidating three barber-shop licenses into one, removing bingo prize limits, and reducing overlapping rules for bodegas and childcare providers. The city also expanded NYC BEST, its business express service team, to assign each business a case manager, and made OPEN a permanent body for continuous reform. Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, who led listening sessions in all five boroughs, framed the goal as government acting as a “partner” to entrepreneurs rather than an enforcement-first antagonist. Taken with the grocery, insurance, and housing efforts, it points to an economic-development strategy aimed less at attracting large corporations and more at lowering costs for residents and small businesses.

What Khan and Shorris Signal

The leadership choices fit the direction. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, created a first-ever deputy mayor for economic justice, Julie Su, in place of the traditional deputy mayor for economic development. Khan built her national reputation arguing that concentrated corporate power harms consumers and that public institutions should push back. Placing her atop the EDC, alongside an operator like Shorris to handle execution, signals that the administration intends to use the agency’s land and balance sheet as active tools rather than passive assets. Her “state capacity” language is the throughline connecting the housing RFPs, the insurance program, and the grocery stores.

The Debate and the Risks

Supporters argue these are responses to genuine market failures — grocery prices, insurance costs, and rents that the private market has not brought within reach — and that the city already owns the land and infrastructure to do something about it. Critics counter that public grocery stores compete with bodegas and small businesses, that the city has a mixed record running complex operations, and that taxpayers ultimately carry the execution risk if these ventures do not become self-sustaining as promised. Several of the boldest targets — 100,000 insured homes, five open grocery stores, a redeveloped East Harlem site — are years out and unproven.

What to Watch

The near-term signals are concrete and dated. The EDC’s Request for Expressions of Interest for operators of the Affordable Housing Insurance Program closes August 6, 2026 — the first real test of private appetite to help run a city-backed insurance pool. Separately, the agency has an open RFP due August 3, 2026 for auditors to review revenue-sharing and other provisions in EDC-managed real estate agreements — a sign the agency is checking whether the city is capturing its full share from the land it leases, which is where Khan’s “public resources” language becomes a budget question rather than a slogan. Also worth tracking: which operators bid to run the public grocery stores, whether the East 125th Street housing project draws credible development proposals, and how the agency’s Fiscal 2027 budget balances these new commitments against the modest revenue it sends to the city. Each of these moves through the EDC’s board and its request-for-proposals pipeline — public documents that surface well before the ribbon-cuttings.