Nick Berkowitz

For fifteen years, Nick Berkowitz has taken problems hiding in plain sight and made them impossible to ignore.

As Director of Communications and Digital Strategy at Open New York, he has spent three years rebuilding how New York argues about housing. The debate had been stuck in a false choice between protecting tenants and building homes, while the question of what actually gets built where stayed buried in zoning and procedure, the territory of experts and hearing rooms. Open New York made the case for all of the above, arguing that tenants need protection from their landlords, that New York needs far more housing, and that neither substitutes for the other. Underneath that sat an equity argument about who pays for the shortage: the communities drawing the largest share of city and state public investment build the least housing, and everyone else absorbs the result. Berkowitz wrote that case into usable language and built the strategy that moved it, using original polling, video, and social channels aimed past the people who already agreed. Both the governor and the mayor have since taken up the argument in Open New York's terms.

That case drove City of Yes, the largest rewrite of the city's zoning code in sixty years, and swept the housing measures on the 2025 ballot. Its clearest test came in Albany, where New York's State Environmental Quality Review Act had sat in state law for fifty years, sounding like environmental protection while working as one of the state's most dependable tools for stopping new homes. Berkowitz ran communications for the campaign that said so out loud, and SEQRA reform passed in the 2026 state budget. Counting the neighborhood plans and individual projects the same argument moved, that work will enable more than 100,000 new homes.

The pattern predates his housing work. He worked on Newark's lead water crisis, where a public health failure had gone years without a name, and on a national campaign for civic education as a right with Michael Rebell, the attorney behind the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. He served as Democratic District Leader and State Committee member for western Queens. Born and raised in New York, Berkowitz is a product of the city's public schools and holds a degree in political science from Hunter College.