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HOW DID ASTORIA BECOME SO SOCIALIST?  
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Naaman Zhou
January 6, 2026
The New Yorker
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_ One neighborhood in New York has elected so many democratic
socialists—including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran
Mamdani—that people have started calling it “the People’s
Republic,” or a part of the Commie Corridor. _

Supporters of Zohran Mamdani at an election watch party in Astoria,
Queens, on November 4, 2025., Photograph by Vincent Alban / NYT /
Redux // The New Yorker

 

chilles (Alan) Akrivos was born in a working-class neighborhood of
Athens, to a family of left-wing activists. His relatives had fought
the Nazis during the Second World War. One of his uncles had been part
of the resistance to the right-wing military dictatorship that
controlled Greece between 1967 and 1974. In 1982, when Akrivos was in
his early twenties, he decided to move to the United States, settling
in Astoria, a mostly Greek enclave in northwestern Queens. It wasn’t
really a hotbed. People would yell at him, he said, when he tried to
hand out flyers advocating for an increase to the minimum wage. Around
2015, that started to change. Akrivos was a volunteer for Bernie
Sanders’s Presidential campaign, and he would often talk to voters
under the elevated train station at Thirty-first Street, sitting at a
long table with placards and socialist literature. “For the first
time, we were not getting shouted at,” he told me recently. His
neighbors actually seemed curious. They were unhappy about the state
of the world, the cost of things, and sometimes even with capitalism
itself. “People were, like, ‘Yeah, I cannot live like this. We
need to change something.’ ”

In 2023, Astoria became notable for having a democratic socialist at
every level of elected government. The neighborhood elected Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018, and Zohran Mamdani to the State
Assembly in 2020. (Back when he was still a longshot, Mamdani used to
plan his mayoral run in the Astoria branch of Qahwah House, a Yemeni
coffee shop.) In 2021, it elected Tiffany Cabán, an attorney endorsed
by the Democratic Socialists of America, to the City Council, and in
2022, it elected Kristen Gonzalez, another D.S.A. endorsee, to the
State Senate. Observers of this political confluence have dubbed it
the People’s Republic of Astoria, or a part of the Commie Corridor,
a wider term that also includes nearby Greenpoint and Long Island
City. A running joke is that candidates endorsed by D.S.A. regularly
“do Assad numbers”—a reference to Bashar al-Assad, the former
Syrian dictator—as if it were no contest.

 
 
How did this happen? Recently, I spoke to a half-dozen activists,
campaigners, and longtime Astoria residents. “The short answer is
extreme demographic change,” Akrivos told me. Astoria doesn’t have
a particularly extensive history of socialism. Katya Nicolaou, another
resident and left-wing organizer, said that there had been an influx
of radical Greek students, like her and Akrivos, in the seventies and
eighties. And Akrivos told me that in the late nineteenth century,
pockets of socialist German immigrants settled in the area. (Also in
the nineteenth century, a company town set up around the Steinway
piano factory had elements of utopian-socialism.) But generally, in
recent decades, the residents were conservative Democrats. Astoria is
the fictional home of Archie Bunker, the bigoted, blue-collar guy from
the nineteen-seventies sitcom “All in the Family,” who perpetually
bickered with his more progressive relatives. (Bunker’s son-in-law,
Mike, was a bit more woke, but probably not D.S.A.-level.) It used to
be represented in Congress by Joe Crowley, an establishment Democrat,
and at the State Assembly level for ten years by Aravella Simotas, a
progressive but not socialist Greek American. Simotas narrowly lost a
primary in 2020 to Mamdani, by around four hundred votes. Simotas told
me recently that she had noticed the electorate had started to change
more than fifteen years ago, even before Ocasio-Cortez’s initial
victory.

What changed? Astoria, which was relatively affordable at that point,
started to attract people who cared about the cost of living. Young
families moved in. New immigrants continued to come, too, increasingly
from the Middle East and South Asia. Stylianos Karolidis, a
thirty-one-year-old D.S.A. member who grew up in Astoria, told me that
new arrivals tend to be more open to D.S.A. candidates because they
didn’t have a preëxisting loyalty to New York’s Democratic
machine. “That makes people more open to change,” he explained.
Georgia Lignou, who moved to the neighborhood in 1987, ventured that
Astoria’s immigrant mix is also a bit less scared of the word
“socialist.” “We come from parts of the world where socialism
isn’t a curse,” she told me. Karolidis agreed. Even some of the
newer Greek migrants, who are still coming to Astoria, he said, are
pretty radical, thanks to the eurozone crisis.

 
 
It’s not just who arrived. Around the same time, Astoria’s
conservative Democrats—the Archie Bunkers—started leaving the
Party and becoming Republicans. Michael Lange, a New York elections
analyst who is often credited with coining the term “Commie
Corridor,” described it to me as a “perfect storm.” Astoria
isn’t actually the most left-leaning neighborhood in New York. (That
would be parts of Williamsburg and Bushwick, in Brooklyn, and parts of
Ridgewood, in Queens.) In the general mayoral election, Lange pointed
out, some parts of Astoria voted more than forty per cent for Andrew
Cuomo. But those voters aren’t dominant in Astoria’s Democratic
primaries anymore.

On Election Night, as the results rolled in, one graphic showed the
returns for Mamdani in blue, against those for Cuomo in orange. A lot
of New York was blue. Ridgewood was deep, deep navy; the Upper West
Side was pale cerulean. Lange tweeted, “You can see the Commie
Corridor from space.” Astoria was in the center, but it wasn’t the
bluest. The Bronx, parts of which Ocasio-Cortez also represents, was
about the same shade. It can be hard to disentangle Astoria from the
citywide and nationwide trends of the D.S.A. But if you look at a
significant part of Mamdani’s winning coalition that night—young
people, renters, South Asians, and Muslims—it looked a lot like
Astoria.

Last month, I took a walk around northern Astoria with Karolidis, the
D.S.A. member who grew up there. As a young man, Karolidis had been a
conservative Republican. “I was really on one about gentrification
and affordability,” he said. “My nemesis when I was a teen was the
hipster.” He saw the neighborhood change from his front door: people
started calling delis “bodegas,” and diners became smoothie shops.
When he was ten years old, he remembers seeing his neighbors, two
women in their twenties, order FreshDirect. “I was, like, What the
hell is that?” he told me. “That was a harbinger.”

Karolidis moved away from Astoria, but he found himself drawn in by
the Ocasio-Cortez campaign. “I don’t think I understood what it
meant to be a socialist—I just knew, these were the people doing
something in my neighborhood,” he told me. He moved back, and got
involved with a D.S.A. campaign to gain public control over the energy
system. Within three years, he had started a socialist podcast. “I
just learned an incredible amount about the economy, how the world
works, and what socialism is and what Marxism is,” he said. “What
is the petite bourgeoisie? It’s been a wild ride.”

Earlier in the day, I’d also met with Shawna Morlock, who had been
one of the very first volunteers on Ocasio-Cortez’s primary
campaign. Morlock, who was a hair stylist, had moved to Astoria a few
years earlier with her husband, a restaurant manager, because it was
“a place you could afford on two blue-collar salaries.” She had
never worked on a political campaign. On her first-ever canvassing
shift, near Astoria Park, she met Ocasio-Cortez, who, in a role-play,
pretended to be a voter, and had Morlock practice pitching her. (“I
was so awkward and terrible, but she was so kind,” Morlock said.)
Morlock joined the D.S.A. and eventually became a full-time staffer to
Gonzalez, the state senator.

“I don’t think I joined D.S.A. thinking, I am a socialist,”
Morlock told me. “I joined it because they believe the same thing I
believe in.” The year after Ocasio-Cortez won, Morlock campaigned
for Cabán, who was running for Queens District Attorney. (Cabán lost
the Democratic nomination by just fifty-five votes, and was later
elected to the City Council.) One day, Morlock recalled, “I was
picking up my literature to knock doors, and one volunteer was, like,
‘Thank you, comrade.’ ” I was, like, ‘O.K.? Comrade . . .
I guess.’ ” As Morlock puts it, it took a few campaigns to
“dis-McCarthyize” her mind. “After organizing for a couple of
years, I’m, like, I’m socialist.”

Astoria can feel a bit like an island. It’s nice, a little isolated,
and has good seafood. Is there something about it as a place that has
made it more amenable to socialist politics? “Astoria is very
accessible,” Nicolaou, the Greek left-wing organizer, told me.
“People are accessible to each other.” “It’s walkable, it’s
beautiful, it’s a good place to run political campaigns,” Lange
told me. There is an argument that Astoria is the perfect place for
one of the D.S.A.’s signature New York tactics—the canvass.
“I’ve knocked all of Astoria, basically,” Morlock told me. When
she rings a doorbell, people actually come to talk to her. “I’m
coming back to the same people, over and over, cycle to cycle, who
remember me,” she said.

In 1932, Morris Hillquit, a founder of the Socialist Party of America,
coined the term “sewer socialism” to describe a kind of socialism
that focusses on everyday municipal problems. Nicolaou said that a lot
of the neighborhood’s older residents were impressed by young D.S.A.
members who went grocery shopping for vulnerable people at the start
of the pandemic. Karolidis told me a story about Mamdani, when he was
a state assemblyman, supporting seniors at an affordable-housing
complex near Ditmars. “Now there are dozens of older Greek seniors
in this complex who love Zohran because he helped them out,” he
said. The City Council office of Cabán, he added, has a reputation
for being very responsive. “It’s the little things over and
over,” Morlock said. Some people are “probably not familiar with
D.S.A. and what it means to be a socialist,” Karolidis said, “but
they see our candidates and are, like, ‘Oh, yes, I had a good
experience—I like these people.’ ”

Astoria’s local outpost of the D.S.A., the Queens branch, is also
known for being results-focussed and cohesive, multiple people told
me. (“There’s nobody who is, like, ‘Oh, man, this candidate
doesn’t know this Marxist theory,’ ” Lange said.) Years of
winning elections have reinforced that approach, and helped members
bond outside politics. The New York City chapter of D.S.A. has a run
club and a thriving parents’ group called Comrades with Kids. (Diana
Moreno, who was recently endorsed by Mamdani to take over his State
Assembly seat, is a loyal member of the parents’ group chat.) In
Astoria, normie Democrats wind up getting converted. Morlock told me
about a friend of hers from the neighborhood. “When we first met, I
remember her being, like, ‘Oh, I love Kamala Harris or Cory
Booker,’ ” she said. Now that friend sends Morlock communist
memes. “Really, really hard-core anti-capitalist things,” Morlock
said. Why did that happen? “This mom—she is struggling to afford
the things that used to be easy,” Morlock said. “Our kids are seen
as an afterthought. Our elected leaders don’t give a shit.
Everybody’s fucking pissed!” Lignou, one of the longtime Astoria
residents, told me, “Astoria attracted many people because it was
very humane. You can save and raise a family. Then everything became
very expensive. It was a very good example of what capitalism does.”

On a recent evening, I pushed open the door of the Syllogos Kreton
Minos, a community club for the Cretan diaspora in northern Astoria,
to attend a Greek music night, run by Nicolaou. I was looking forward
to quizzing long-term Astoria residents about the recent leftward
turn. “The Greek left loves this kind of music,” Nicolaou had told
me, referring to a genre called _rebetiko_, which she described as a
Greek version of the blues. Inside, there were a few Christmas
decorations, and some older Cretan men played endless rounds of cards
in the corner. I was early, so I started eating a large plate of pork
_kleftiko_, a dish of meat and red and green peppers, braised with
oregano and olive oil. Slowly, the musicians set up and the tables
around me started filling. Akrivos, the Athenian from a political
family, was picking at a plate of fried whiting, and I was handed a
shot glass of grappa mixed with honey by Barbara Lambrakis, a
seventy-five-year-old woman who has lived in Astoria since she was
thirteen. Lambrakis was very excited to tell me that she owned an
apartment building near where Mamdani lived. “Even though I do own
rent-stabilized apartments, I support him, believe it or not,” she
said.

I was sitting next to Maria Lymberopoulos, a seventy-five-year-old
woman who has lived in Astoria for fifty years. Lymberopoulos told me
she thinks of herself more as a liberal, but since 2019 she had
consistently voted for D.S.A. candidates. She’s not interested in
the “socialist” label. (Mamdani, she said, reminded her of a young
Barack Obama.) “I believe in the social issues we have—everything
is expensive. They’re concerned about the things the average person
needs.” There wasn’t much difference between her idea of
liberalism and Astoria’s idea of socialism, she said. “Maybe, when
you get older, your mind opens up more,” she told me. “And
you’re ready to accept what your grandson or the young neighbor is
doing.”

In the meantime, Nicolaou and a friend had started dancing. Akrivos
was noodling on a bouzouki. Over the music, Lymberopoulos made sure to
tell me that most Greek people in Astoria weren’t this leftist.
Earlier, I’d also spoken to a man in his late sixties, named
Dimitris, whom someone had described to me as an “old-school Greek
communist.”(Dimitris declined to give his last name. “They have
memories of McCarthy,” Nicolaou said.) Dimitris told me proudly
that, in the early nineties, the former general secretary of the Greek
Communist Party had visited Astoria, and he’d met him; his friend
showed me a photo on his phone. Dimitris was grateful for the
socialist wave, but he wasn’t fully impressed. “I wouldn’t call
them socialists,” he said of Astoria’s younger residents. “As
Marx put it, all the crucial sectors of the economy—they are
supposed to belong to the people. I didn’t hear any of those
candidates proposing something like that.” Of Ocasio-Cortez, he told
me, “She’s not a Marxist. Anybody can say ‘I’m a socialist.’
It’s become fashionable to.”

A few days earlier, on my walk with Karolidis, we’d gone to look at
his old family home. He had told me it was a very obvious metaphor for
Astoria. We walked down Ditmars Boulevard, past Karolidis’s old
elementary school, and onto Sound Street, a strangely cut-off street
that hits the highway. Karolidis had grown up in a low-slung duplex.
His family lived on the left side; his father ran a food truck and
stored it in the garage. When Karolidis was sixteen, his father died.
His mother had to sell the house, and the family moved to Jamaica,
Queens. A few years later, their half was redeveloped. The new owner
added another story, and then subdivided it into apartments. Standing
on the street, we gossiped about how funny it looked. The right side,
which hadn’t been renovated, had a classic triangular roof that
ended suddenly as it hit the new story of apartments, which shot
straight up. “It used to be one—it looked normal,” Karolidis
said. “You can see what I mean,” he said.

I asked Karolidis how he thought his sixteen-year-old self, the
conservative Republican, would have reacted if he’d told him that,
one day, people would be calling his neighborhood the People’s
Republic of Astoria. He warned me that the term was very
“Twitter-born.” He could imagine his teen self getting angry over
it. Now he appreciated it. Since he’d been forced to move out of
Astoria all those years ago, he’d grown up, met someone—a
transplant from the Midwest—moved back, joined the D.S.A.,
campaigned for public power over electricity, and quit his old job.
Astoria had changed a lot but also stayed the same. Socialists, he
pointed out, had been elected in Astoria for almost ten years, and the
place was still quite nice. “I feel very positive about that term
now,” he said. “The People’s Republic, or the Commie
Corridor—the people own it.”

_[__NAAMAN ZHOU_ [[link removed]]_
is a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff. He was previously a
reporter for the Guardian Australia.]_

 

* Astoria
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