Building the Future: Zohran Mamdani and New York

The economist Noah Smith recently penned a piece titled ‘America Has Only One Real City.’ It should be obvious which city Smith is referring to. While Los Angeles may have the cultural Hollywood elite that is so allegedly resented by the masses in flyover country, New York has some of that along with many more things so despised by reactionaries such as a population density that dwarfs every other big city in the U.S., including a vast immigrant population, and a large public transit system that is by far the most used system in the country. 

This list could go on. In fact, New York can hold up pretty well to any city in Scandinavia. While cities such as St Louis and Chicago have long taken down their public housing, New York has barely touched any of it. The 400,000 units of New York’s public housing hosts a larger population than cities such as Jersey City, Richmond, and Pittsburgh. Overall, almost half of New York’s apartments are rent-stabilized. The past decade, New York instituted both universal pre-k and universal 3-k and recently the city announced a $10 million pilot program to provide free childcare for children 2 years old and younger, expected to cover hundreds of low-income families.

New York’s unions may not have quite the juice they once did, but the city is still certainly a union town with a rate almost twice the national average (there was recent talk of a strike on Broadway until the two unions representing Broadway actors, stage managers, dancers, and musicians agreed to new contracts). It has been a long time since CUNY, the city’s university system, was free but it still offers in-state tuition far cheaper than can be found in most other places. 

Now, with the eyes of the whole country on the city’s mayoral race, New York just elected a democratic socialist. Few things are as tediously amusing as a right-wing freakout. The amusement lies in how regular and predictable such freakouts are and just how simple it is to cause them. The past six months, since Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary, have been something to behold. Campaign to make bus service free and New York is apparently on its way to being a surreal combination of sharia law and North Korea. 

Certainly, like many political insurgents, Mamdani has been quite fortunate in his opponents. Current mayor Eric Adams washed out weeks ago. Rare for an incumbent to top out at under 15 percent in poling but Adam’s combination of corruption scandals and footsie playing with Trump managed the feat. It wasn’t long ago Andrew Cuomo resigned the governorship of New York in disgrace following a barrage of sexual harassment allegations. The word ‘establishment’ is ultimately useless in that nobody can precisely pin down its meaning and attempts to do so would just end in bitter debate, but if the description applies to anyone it applies to Andrew Cuomo. It takes a special kind of addiction to power to run for mayor of a city inside the state where one was a governor for three terms. Meanwhile the Republicans are barely trying in New York these days. Their nomination once again went to Curtis Sliwa, this time unopposed, a blowhard demagogue best known for founding the Guardian Angels, a clownish outfit more famous for their uniforms than anything else. Sliwa rejected calls to withdraw from the race for months and ended up bringing in 7 percent of the vote. Expecting an egomaniac like Sliwa to take one for the team was always going to be a bridge too far. 

As for Mamdani’s platform, it is important to keep in mind much of it would have to go through the state where Governor Hochul and the legislature don’t exactly win awards for their progressive bonafides. Free buses? The city’s public transit is run by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), a state-run agency. Its CEO and a majority of its board are appointed by the governor (a minority is appointed by the mayor). As an organization the MTA is facing a mountain of debt and loses $300 million a year due to simple fare evasion i.e. people jumping the turnstile and/or just walking on to buses without paying, it is quite possible it can be talked into getting more of its funding from public money rather than relying on fares (the MTA’s already gets roughly the same amount of its operating budget from pubic money already as it does from fares).

A $30 minimum wage? Here’s where it gets more challenging. Mamdani’s idea is to raise the minimum wage to $30 per hour by 2030. This past January the city’s minimum wage increased to $16.50 per hour. Adjustments meant to keep pace with inflation are scheduled to begin in 2027. Difficult to see the minimum wage almost doubling in five years. Increases have always gone through the state legislature (a recent push to raise the wage to $21.25 has gone nowhere). The last time the city tried to go its own way and raise its minimum wage was in 1964. That effort was struck down by the courts.

Raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy? Mamdani campaigns on raising almost $10 billion in revenue with a new income tax on residents making more than $1 million a year and by raising the top corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent, up from 7.25 percent now. Again, this goes through the state. In 2021, the state did raise such taxes, but Governor Hochul shows no signs of relenting now. Any movement here promises to be quite an uphill battle. 

The five city-owned grocery stores? The idea is to have one of these in every borough, on city owned land to eliminate rent, to sell products at wholesale prices. Certainly, such stores exist in the world, and it is well worth noting that, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, around 14 percent of New Yorkers lived in food insecure households between 2021 and 2023. Grocery stores tend to operate on low-profit margins, historically like 1 to 3 percent, and if the jobs at these city-owned stores are also meant to provide solid paychecks for their public employees that could prove tricky. Not a problem as long as subsidies keep flowing but it’s perhaps questionable whether public support would hold up if it came to that. But it seems worthwhile to give it a try. 

Universal childcare? Again, there is already momentum to build on. The pre-k and 3-k programs are popular. At the time pre-k was instituted in 2014 Cuomo and then Mayor De Blasio disagreed over how it would be funded. DeBlasio wanted the city to fund it through higher taxes on the rich while Cuomo wanted the state to fund it without the tax increase. Needless to say, the state prevailed and there was no tax increase, but the program still got done. Governor Hochul has expressed some support for expanded childcare so Mandani should be able to build on these efforts to at least some extent. 

The main arena is housing. If New York’s problem could be boiled down to one sentence it is this: two-thirds of New Yorkers are renters, and the rent is too damn high! Those other achievements listed earlier have been somewhat offset because of the cost of living. Between rent and the cost of childcare the city has been bleeding young families. Between 2020 and July 2023, the number of children under the age of five living in New York dropped by 18.3 percent- nearly four times the national average. Since 2020, New Yorkers with children under age six have left at twice the rate of other residents with Black and Hispanic families moving out at a higher rate. This past July the median rent in New York reached $4700 a month. According to Zillow, the average rent is $3599. 

Mamdani’s immediate proposal of a rent freeze for rent stabilized apartments is quite doable. This happened three different years under DeBlasio (2015, 2016, 2020). Rent increases for these apartments are decided annually by the Rent Guidelines Board whose members are appointed by the mayor. Rent stabilization applies to buildings built before 1974 with six or more units. As for further regulations, in 1971 the state legislature passed the Urstadt Law that prevents cities with populations of over a million people (i.e. New York) from passing rent controls that are stricter than the state level. 

Here’s the thing: the city isn’t building more public housing any time soon. Mamdani’s housing plan is somewhat vague but calls for 200,000 units of affordable housing. The main way such housing gets built in New York nowadays is by giving developers a property tax break for a period of years in exchange for them setting aside a certain percentage of apartments at below market rents. These below-market apartments are divvied out via lottery. Eligibility for the lottery is usually connected to Area Median Income (AMI) which includes areas like Westchester and parts of Connecticut making the median, therefore the apartments, still quite pricey. Obviously, this is no long-term solution for making housing affordable in the city.   

One doesn’t have I endorse the entire ‘abundance’ agenda to recognize that increased volume is the only game in town here. To build any sort of housing, the housing must be built. A big problem is, despite having a dense population by American standards, about 40 percent of the city is zoned for single-family or two-family buildings. Another 30 percent is zoned for lower density construction. 

An unnoticed policy of the Bloomberg years was that, while historically working-class neighborhoods along subway lines like Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Long Island City were targeted up for upzoning and gentrification (gentrification is helped along when development is concentrated) suburban-like neighborhoods were downzoned and preserved (see Thomas Angotti and Sylvia Morse’s Zoned Out: Race, Displacement, and City Planning in New York City). This includes neighborhoods throughout Queens and the North Bronx but there are also historically preserved areas like Brownstone Brooklyn and Greenwich Village which are comparatively densely populated but not nearly as populated as they could be. For all their aesthetic charm the difficulty in building new housing has increasingly made these neighborhoods the domain of the well-off. Rezoning parts of the city will be necessary. 

Local resistance is basically inevitable and to call any prospective fights over this ‘titanic’ is probably understating it. However, as with Mamdani’s other policies, the fight for an affordable, dynamic city is well worth waging.

The post Building the Future: Zohran Mamdani and New York appeared first on CounterPunch.org.