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ZOHRAN MAMDANI IS LASER-FOCUSED ON AN AFFORDABLE NEW YORK  
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Liza Featherstone
May 7, 2025
Jacobin
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_ With local and national elites indifferent to working-class
struggles over the costs of housing, childcare, groceries, and more,
socialist NYC mayoral candidate Mamdani is finding success by putting
affordability at the heart of his campaign. _

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani joins the weekly
demonstrations outside of Tesla stores to protest Elon Musk and his
role at the Department of Government Efficiency, March 29, 2025, in
the West Village neighborhood of New York City. , (Andrew
Lichtenstein/Corbis)

 

If anyone needed a compelling argument for why New York City is in
desperate need of socialist governance, the city’s real estate
elites and the political class they own gave one last week. The Rent
Guidelines Board, whose members are appointed by the mayor, voted on
April 30 to consider drastic rent increases on at least one million
rent-stabilized apartments. The nonbinding vote showed the board’s
openness to raising rents by as much as 7.75 percent — in the midst
of ever-skyrocketing rents that have pushed out enormous numbers of
working-class people from the city in recent years.

Socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has been campaigning on a
promise to immediately freeze the rent for those very tenants. Of all
the enticing campaign promises socialists make during an election
season, this is one of the easiest to implement, since the mayor
appoints the rent board and can pick members who will implement his
agenda. Just as Mayor Eric Adams has consistently chosen members who
side with landlords, Mayor Mamdani could appoint a pro-tenant board
that would freeze the rent (as Mayor Bill de Blasio
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It is an insult to the city’s working people that our real estate
elites feel entitled, in the middle of a crippling affordability
crisis
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to further squeeze a million tenants living in rent-stabilized
buildings. And it is part of the reason why Mamdani’s campaign has
so much momentum
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As in many other US cities, housing costs cause New Yorkers immense
hardship. Last month, the _New York Times_ reported that not
including migrants, about a third of families living in the city’s
homeless shelters had at least one adult
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was working. These are New York City’s workers: janitors, line
cooks, construction workers, ambulance drivers, even librarians and
nurses. They’re not in the shelters because of drug abuse or mental
illness or failure to keep a job — they’re there because the rent
is too damn high.

Homelessness complicates all of New York City’s public goods,
spaces, and services. One in eight public school children are
homeless, for example, requiring enormous additional support from a
system already stretched thin. Homelessness is obviously a
humanitarian and moral issue, but it is also impossible for the city
to function well when so many people have nowhere to live. While many
of the most visible homeless people need more than housing, thousands
of working-class people now living in shelters simply need rent that
is reasonably scaled to their take-home pay.

Those who are not flooding the shelters are leaving New York City, a
grave loss for a city which has historically allowed people from all
over the world to follow their dreams. A Citizens Budget
Commission report [[link removed]] last year
found that the city lost 160,000 residents, an exodus in which housing
costs were a huge factor. Rent stabilization is key to keeping many
New Yorkers in their homes, but the power of landlord money means that
this basic protection is constantly imperiled.

Mamdani’s proposed way forward includes both freezing the rent on
rent-stabilized units and using city dollars to build 200,000 new
affordable homes. Using the public sector to house people is something
that New York City has a rich history of doing well, and it’s much
needed: waiting for private set-asides on the luxury housing stock is
never going to address the gap between New Yorkers’ housing needs
and the available supply (the Regional Plan Association has estimated
that the city needs nearly half a million new units by 2032).

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Mamdani speaking during a press conference on universal childcare at
Columbus Park Playground on November 19, 2024. (Michael M. Santiago /
Getty Images)

Housing isn’t the only expense that New Yorkers are struggling with.
More than half of New York families, both low- and high-income
households, struggle to afford childcare costs, another expense
driving many to leave the city. Childcare for just one child consumes
about a quarter of a New York City family’s annual income, according
to a recent New York City Council report.

Mayor Adams has consistently refused to make affordable childcare a
priority, even cutting some programs. He has closed childcare centers
in Brooklyn and Queens and slashed $112 million from the 3K program.
On Monday, the Adams administration announced that it would no longer
enroll
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in a popular childcare voucher program because of funding
uncertainties in the state budget. Mamdani has run on a promise of
universal childcare for New Yorkers, by improving wages for childcare
workers, expanding current 3K programs and funding new programs.

He’s also tackling a problem most politicians avoid: the cost of
groceries, through municipal grocery stores — a public option for
food. The idea is popular among New Yorkers
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two-thirds of voters supporting it in a recent Data for Progress poll.
And we aren’t alone: Chicago is also considering the idea, and
the Bulgarian government
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a network of food stores with limited markup earlier this year. While
the idea hasn’t succeeded everywhere
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been tried, a small town in Kansas
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been making it work for nearly two decades.

Mamdani is also proposing to raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour by
2030, starting at $20 in 2027. After 2030, under Mamdani’s proposal,
the floor will continue to rise every year. The campaign cites data
from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator
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showing that this represents a living wage for a single adult in New
York City.

Andrew Cuomo is still far ahead of Mamdani in the polls, but Mamdani
is making far more of an impact in this race and on New York City
politics as a whole than anyone expected. On Sunday, some two thousand
people attended a Mamdani rally in Williamsburg, an exceptionally rare
show of enthusiasm for any local political candidate. The slogan? “A
City We Can Afford.”

_Liza Featherstone is a columnist for Jacobin, a freelance
journalist, and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark
Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart._

* Zohran Mamdani
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* NYC Mayor's Race
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* socialist politicians
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* Affordability crisis
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