By JACK DELANEY and COLE SINANIAN | news@queensledger.com
Last December, as Zohran Mamdani prepared for his impending inauguration, a headline broke that turned the heads of local activists and business leaders alike: Andrew Kimball, the president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC), was planning to step down.
Weeks of high suspense ensued. Who would Mamdani tap to run one of the city’s most powerful entities, a public-private hybrid — described by the mayor as his administration’s “Swiss Army knife” — that oversees megaprojects like the High Line and Hudson Yards in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park, and an in-progress soccer stadium at Willets Point in Queens?
Seven months later, however, the top job at the EDC was still vacant. At a City Council hearing in June, officials said operations were continuing smoothly under interim president Jeanny Pak, but the council members questioning them remained skeptical.
Now the wait is over. On Wednesday, July 22, Mamdani announced that he was naming Anthony Shorris as president of the EDC and — in a surprise move — Lina Khan as chair of its board.
The appointment of Shorris, a veteran civil servant, has been cast by many analysts as a peace offering to New York’s business community.
Shorris cut his teeth in the 1980s as budget director and later finance commissioner for Mayor Ed Koch, helping to architect a landmark housing plan. Next came high-profile positions at the Port Authority — which Shorris led from 2007 to 2008 — and the Board of Education, before Shorris was chosen by Mayor Bill de Blasio as his first deputy mayor, serving from 2014 to 2017. After leaving politics in 2017, Shorris most recently worked as a partner at the consulting firm McKinsey.
Though widely respected, Shorris also weathered his fair share of scandal, including the uproar over the sale of Rivington House in 2016. During a six-hour grilling by the City Council, Shorris admitted it was a “mistake” to lift a deed restriction on the Lower East Side nursing home, allowing it to be sold to a luxury condominium developer.
The New York Building Congress, a trade association for the construction industry, praised the selection of Shorris as “outstanding,” noting that he “has led some of New York’s most consequential public and private sector institutions.”
Yet Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and perhaps the country’s most prominent anti-monopolist, has been seen as a progressive counterbalance to Shorris.
Khan’s essay on “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” written while attending law school, attracted national attention; in 2021, Biden nominated her to lead the FTC, making her the regulatory body’s youngest-ever chair. Khan left the FTC in 2025, having launched major investigations into Big Tech companies and established tighter requirements for large mergers, and joined Mamdani’s mayoral transition team in 2025 as its co-chair.
In a brief speech, Khan highlighted the EDC’s “critical role” in city government, saying it has “key tools to drive projects that grow our economy, create good jobs, promote entrepreneurship, and make life more affordable for New Yorkers.”
At the press conference last week, Mamdani downplayed any appearance of friction between his two appointees. Both Shorris and Khan were policy wonks dedicated to economic justice, the mayor said, joking that Shorris and his wife Maria “looked forward to watching unedited mayoral press conferences on WNYC-TV the way that other couples look forward to watching ‘Seinfeld.’”
When pressed by reporters on his priorities for the EDC, Shorris emphasized that Mamdani’s socialist platform could coexist with businesses’ desire for growth: “Those objectives are not in conflict,” he stressed. “They can be in confluence, but it takes work.”
“I don’t believe in permanent allies or permanent adversaries — I’ve been around too long for that,” Shorris explained. “I do believe there are those in the business community who support a lot of what this mayor is trying to do.”
Across Brooklyn and Queens, local organizers — many of whom have clashed with the EDC over its neighborhood-reshaping development projects — reacted with cautious optimism to the appointments.
In Red Hook, for example, residents along the waterfront have fought the EDC’s redevelopment of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, opposing a plan that would construct thousands of high-rise apartments in the decrepit dockyards.
“We don’t trust the EDC,” said Victoria Alexander, founder of the coalition Voices of the Waterfront. “They’ve made promise after promise to this community that they have not delivered on.”
”We can’t do top-down anymore,” she added. “Start at the bottom, and we need to be at the table. It really needs to be a partnership.”
And in Long Island City, the site of the EDC’s failed push in 2018 to persuade Amazon to build a corporate campus in exchange for $3 billion in incentives, members of the Western Queens Community Land Trust (WQCLT) struck a similar tone.
“Economic development is a really important thing if it’s equitable,” said Jenny Dubnau, co-chair of the WQCLT’s board. “That does not mean, let’s bring in Amazon or some tech firms. It means let’s create and preserve really good jobs for people at the bottom of the economic ladder.”
