The historic Gracie mansion will get new residents in the new year. Mayor elected Zahran Mamdani They say they will move into the mayor’s official residence on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Mamdani and his wife, Ram, will be on the move once he is sworn into office in January. He said that the decision is less for security.

“My wife Ram and I decided to move into Gracie Haveli in January,” Mamdani said in a statement.

The couple will leave behind their rent-stabilized apartment in Austria, Queens. His current residence created controversy as Mamdani hails from a wealthy family. According to WNBC, the mayor-elect has said he didn’t know the apartment was rent-stabilized when he first moved in when he was elected to the state assembly five years ago.

According to the New York Post, Mamdani 3 is living in a $2,300 one-bedroom unit.

“Cooking in our kitchen together, sharing a sleepy elevator ride with our neighbors in the evening, hearing music and laughter echoing through the walls of the apartment,” Mamdani said in a statement about what he will miss from his apartment.

“This decision came down to protecting our family and the importance of devoting all of my attention to getting New Yorkers to vote for an affordable agenda,” he added.

During his campaign, the Democratic Socialist proposed better housing reform for New York City. This is a plan that will include frozen rents on some apartments. construction of 200,000 new subsidized, rent-stabilized units; And an investment of $100 billion in housing over 10 years.

Gracie Mansion

Mamdani will be sworn in as the 111th mayor at midnight on January 1, 2026. That’s when he can officially take the keys to the Gracie mansion.

He’s trading in his Astoria neighborhood, where the median list price is $750,000 for the Upper East Side, where the median price is $1.7 million.

The house on East End Avenue was built in 1799 Archibald Gracieas a country house overlooking the East River. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

It was not until 1942, when Fiorello H. LaGuardia And his family moved into the Gracie mansion—essentially a security precaution when the United States entered World War II.

Over the decades, the house has been renovated and had many uses. Former Mayor Ed Koch The Gracie Mansion Conservancy was established in the 1980s. His goal was to restore the dilapidated house to how it might have looked during its Federal beginnings.

When Bill de Blasio was mayor, his wife, Cherylene McCree — an activist and writer — expanded the mansion to call attention to the “diversity of the early 1800s,” in which Frederick Douglass and Haitian slaves replaced the philanthropist Pierre Toussaint.

Every mayor since Michael BloombergGracie lived in the mansion, known as “the people’s house”.

Bloomberg believed that mayors should not live in the Gracie Mansion.

“It should be used when we use it,” Bloomberg said back in 2012, according to CBS News. “All over the house there are events like this every day at the Gracie Mansion. If a mayor’s family is living there, most of that house — a good half of it is just not available. If a mayor lives there, what they’re doing is costing the city a lot of money and missing out on one of the great amenities that any city has left.”

In Mamdani’s statement, he thanked Astoria, the neighborhood he has called home for years.

“Thank you for showing us the best of New York. We’ve called this neighborhood home as our city has endured years of a devastating epidemic of immigrants, brutal attacks, and an affordability crisis. Time and time again, this community has shown up for each other. We’ll miss it all—the endless tea, the flow between it and every language, and the politeness and passion in every language.”

“I can no longer live in Astoria, Astoria will always live within me and the work I do,” the statement added.

Realtor.com® reached out to the mayor-elect’s office for comment and did not hear back.