Mamdani's Socialist Mayorship Will Make New York a Worse Place To Live and Do Business
His plans to offer "free" buses and daycare, freeze rents, and create city-owned grocery stores are expensive and proven failures.
As I write this, I have yet to cast my vote for the mayor of New York City, where I live (a question I can answer more easily and definitively than the current mayor). In most elections, there are only two bad choices. But because New York has more of everything, from people to rats to unlicensed weed dispensaries, this time there are at least three terrible choices: The Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, the Republican Curtis Sliwa, and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running on the "Fight and Deliver Party" line.
Bad candidates are like unhappy families, each awful and terrible in their own way. But by all indications, only Mamdani matters because he is going to cruise to victory next Tuesday. When that happens, Andrew Cuomo, already hounded out of Albany due to terrible COVID policies and disturbing harassment of basically everyone he ever worked with, will disappear for good. Maybe he'll live in South Florida like the next-in-line son of a deposed Shah or, in a more just world, in a tiny, market-rate studio apartment in Crown Heights with another disgraced politician, Anthony Weiner. The beret-wearing fabulist Curtis Sliwa will continue to haunt New York's airwaves and local TV shows, talking about his cats and whatever else rambles like tumbleweeds through his mind.
Mamdani's win will absolutely not be good for the city, but it will also not usher in the utter, instantaneous apocalypse that some fear. Yes, he will try to make buses and child care free, create city-owned grocery stores, jack up taxes on the ultra-rich (charitably defined as anyone making more than the "many young professionals at tech start-ups, law firms and investment companies" that seem to love him the most), and "freeze the rent" on perhaps as many as 1 million rental apartments (around half the total rental market). Maybe he will even issue an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because, well, that sort of dramatic, dubiously legal action is a huge part of being the mayor of New York (and of being a member of the Democratic Socialists of America).
If you live outside New York, your biggest worry should be what effect a landslide win might have on the Democratic Party nationally. If Mamdani crushes Cuomo and Sliwa as seems likely, expect a big push from allies like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) to revive the worst excesses of the populist identity politics that helped cost Democrats the White House in 2024 and caused much of the discord, overspending, and stupidity of the past decade. (If the centrist Democrats running for governor in New Jersey and Virginia win as currently expected, expect a ton of articles about the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party.)
As Reason's Zach Weissmueller recently explained, Mamdani's appeal goes beyond playing Santa Claus to large blocs of voters. He personifies the symbolic grievances of college-educated and relatively well-off Millennial and Gen Z voters who don't really understand how capitalism works and what creative destruction entails. They take wealth production for granted, focusing instead on what they perceive as its morally just distribution, while overlooking the challenge of maintaining, much less expanding, economic and social opportunities for all.
For New York City, what Mamdani's mayoralty will absolutely do is hurry along the slowly decaying orbit of the country's largest city that commenced with the election of groundhog manhandler Bill de Blasio to two terms in Gracie Mansion and continued with the mediocre-at-best performance of Turkish Airlines enthusiast and cheese-detractor Eric Adams. We're already a dozen-plus years into having the city run by bums or buffoons and, if you read histories like Richard E. Farley's Drop Dead, you know this is how things go in New York City. There are long cycles of mediocre-to-terrible mayors (think of the years of Robert Wagner*, John Lindsay, and Abe Beame, a period lasting from 1954 to 1977) that are interrupted by periods of better-than-average governance (think Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Bloomberg, a span lasting from 1978 to 2013, exclusive of David Dinkins' single term in the early '90s).
New York has famously been called "the ungovernable city," and in most ways, it is. Everything here is out of control; it is simultaneously the most regulated and freest autonomous zone imaginable. Yes, what happens here is deeply affected by politics and politicians, but those are just small streams that add to the powerful torrent of everyday life. After World War II, for a variety of reasons, New York flatlined in population in the 1950s and 1960s and then lost over 10 percent of its residents in the 1970s. Its population rebounded in the late '80s, and the city has seen decades of sustained growth and vitality, even through events like 9/11, the financial crisis (felt deeply in the country's finance center), and COVID (which posed particular issues for America's most densely populated big city).
The city's resurrection in the '80s was in no way a foregone conclusion and was a combination of many factors. The most important parts included the invention of the contemporary financial industry that revved up so much so that by 1987 it provided the setting for Tom Wolfe's era-defining novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, and its cast of "masters of the universe," social justice warriors, and journalistic grifters. An influx of immigrants (both from abroad and various parts of America) flooded into a city with relatively abundant housing, reviving neighborhoods and areas written off long ago. But governance mattered greatly, too. The mayoralty of Ed Koch, a "liberal with sanity" who fought against rent control, crime, and excessive spending while personifying the city's tolerance of all sorts of lifestyles, was an essential part of the renaissance, as we discussed in this 2011 interview.
But the fortunes of a city rarely rely solely or even mostly on its political class. In the '50s, '60s, and '70s, New York was hardly the only city in the Northeast and Midwest that was seeing major population declines as the U.S. economy became more post-industrial and the South and West opened for business in big ways. Yet New York's elected officials exacerbated exodus and decline by promising more and more services to people and papering over growing budget shortfalls with all sorts of gimmicks and tricks that ultimately came undone in the mid-1970s.
Farley's account in Drop Dead is detailed and appalling—and it comes with a warning for today: After cleaning up its fiscal act and getting its budget more or less in order, the city is reverting to its old tricks and running up annual shortfalls of $10 billion or more for the foreseeable future. The terms of the city's bailout by the feds (contrary to the memorable Daily News headline, Gerald Ford, desperate for Empire State electoral votes, never told the city to "drop dead") and the state legislature of New York mean that Mayor Mamdani will be tightly constrained in what he can do. Many of his proposals (such as freezing the rent) are either legally dubious or will have to go through Albany (such as almost anything related to the public transit system).
This is good news, because his agenda, in virtually every particular, will make New York a tougher place to live and run a business (and thus work as a regular employee), or even go to school—he wants to get rid of gifted-and-talented programs and entrance-exam schools which motivate striver parents with limited financial resources to leave an expensive and generally awful system.
His housing proposals are also sure to backfire. As Reason's Justin Zuckerman recently documented, the city is already experiencing a severe housing drought—partly as a direct result of 2019 changes to state laws eagerly signed by then-Gov. Cuomo. Far from making housing more affordable or available, freezing rents at current levels will incentivize renters to stay put (rental turnover here is already 41 percent lower than the national average) and do nothing to spur large-scale construction of new units (who will build in a place where they have little or no say over what they can charge?). The hunt for good apartments in New York will go from bad to worse.
"When I read [Mamdani's] proposals," writes Andrew Sullivan at Substack, "at first I thought I was reading a high-schooler's essay. Free everything!" He's onto something—most of Mamdani's ideas have already been tried extensively and failed in the immediate past. Consider his promise to hike the minimum wage from $16.50 an hour to $30 an hour in a few years. As Jim Epstein showed a decade ago for Reason, a minimum wage hike to $15 had predictable and bad effects on the city's car wash industry. Whatever the intentions, such moves "push[ed] car washes to automate and to close down." As bad, the mandated wage increase also fostered "a growing black market—workers increasingly have no choice but to ply their trade out of illegal vans parked on the street, because the minimum wage has made it illegal for anyone to hire them at the market rate."
None of this is rocket science or terra incognita. One of Mamdani's signature proposals is the creation of city-run grocery stores, an idea that is especially nonsensical in a place like New York, which already is "the No. 1 U.S. metro area in terms of residents' 'equitable access' to a local supermarket." He or his advisers might look to the recent experience of Erie, Kansas, where things are not going well for government-run supermarkets. Or he might follow the lead of Kennedy, who asked some Bronx residents about the plan and learned that they would rather the city work on homelessness, "dealing with 'rats the size of cats,' and cleaning 'all of the needles on the street.'"
Depending on how much of his agenda he can muscle through, the City that Never Sleeps may be in for a longer or shorter nap when it comes to the growth and vitality of recent decades. Eventually, New York always wakes up and renews itself economically, culturally, and politically. It's depressing that no one on the political horizon seems likely to conjure the magic that Koch, Giuliani, or Bloomberg—all of whom had terrible flaws—brought, but that's almost always the case. The most depressing thing is that all of Mamdani's mistakes are completely avoidable because they've happened time and time before. But unlike its old colonial rivals, Boston and Philadelphia, New York has never had much time or use for history.
*CORRECTION: The original version of this story misidentified former New York Mayor Robert Wagner as Richard.
