What Can Zohran Accomplish?

What Can Zohran Accomplish?

What distinguishes Zohran Mamdani’s socialism is not its aims. It’s his willingness to take seriously the problem of how to get there.

When I first heard that Zohran Mamdani was running for mayor last fall, I admit I was skeptical. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has an impressive track record of winning legislative races, but the mayor’s race was a challenge an order of magnitude larger. And Andrew Cuomo’s advantages—in name recognition, in funding, in elite support—seemed almost impossible to overcome.

But once I started canvassing for the campaign in April, I came to believe he could win. It wasn’t just the responses from people at the doors. It was the number of other people showing up to canvass, most of whom had never volunteered for a political campaign before. In the last week or two before the election, it felt like a movement—there were canvassers everywhere (more than 40,000 people volunteered in total) and you couldn’t leave the house without seeing distinctive blue and yellow Zohran bandanas on the subway, or young people with Zohran T-shirts on the street. In some neighborhoods, every other small business seemed to have a Zohran poster in the window.

There have been plenty of analyses of how the campaign won (including an impressively detailed post-mortem by the candidate himself on YouTube). There is a lot to study and learn from there. But we also need to think about what comes next. Barring some extraordinary calamity, Mamdani will win the general election in November and become mayor at the start of next year. What can we reasonably expect him to deliver?

What can be done about housing costs?

Housing is the most important piece of the affordability agenda—the single largest item in most families’ budgets, and the main reason that the cost of living is so much higher in New York City than elsewhere in the country. Whether or not a Mamdani administration can bring down housing costs may well be the issue on which its success is ultimately judged.

Housing politics on the left in recent years has been polarized between a side emphasizing supply constraints and land use regulation, and a side emphasizing rent regulation and public investment. Mamdani, to his credit, recognizes that a both/and approach is called for. More precisely, four distinct strategies will be needed to address the housing crisis.

First is zoning reform. Much of New York City is still subject to zoning rules that sharply limit density and impose parking minimums and other requirements that make it difficult to build new housing. During the Michael Bloomberg administration, these restrictions were tightened by downzoning across the outer boroughs, while upzoning was concentrated in a few areas, mainly lower-income neighborhoods and the city’s remaining industrial zones like Long Island City. The result was to channel development into a few areas, which was unsurprisingly resisted by residents, especially given the weakness of rent regulations at the time. Under Bill de Blasio, the same basic model of concentrated development continued, though the targets now also included some higher-income residential areas. This model tended to provoke opposition to new development from tenants and homeowners, while generating big windfall gains for landowners in the targeted areas.

Surprisingly, it was Eric Adams (or rather his planning commissioner Dan Garodnick) who broke with this model. Rather than picking a few areas for massive redevelopment, his signature “City of Yes” plan was intended to raise allowed densities moderately across the whole city, while rolling back restrictions—especially minimum parking requirements—that discouraged new housing development. The original plan was watered down significantly by opposition from outer-borough City Council members. But it represents a solid starting point for further land use reform.

Land use changes can significantly increase the amount of new housing built, allowing more middle-class people to live in the city. This is a good thing—we should be clear that allowing more people to live here, especially near transit lines, is a positive goal of housing policy, independent of affordability. But land use reform by itself is unlikely to bring down housing costs substantially or increase the supply of affordable units.

One important reason for this is the high returns required by equity investors, who typically supply 30 to 50 percent of the financing for a new housing development. Given the relative illiquidity and riskiness of housing investment, these returns need to be significantly higher than those available from financial assets. And, critically, returns do not come only from rents; they also come from the expected capital gains when the project is sold or refinanced. This means that private developers generally build only on the expectation of rising rents. In order to keep equity finance flowing in an environment of slower rent growth (let alone flat or falling rents), land use reform would have to drastically reduce development costs. This might be plausible in a few areas where land acquisition is the biggest cost. But in general, it’s more reasonable to expect land use reform to lead to more housing at current rents than to significantly lower rents.

So the second piece of the housing package has to address the financing side. With its vast balance sheet and long planning horizons, the city government can accept a much lower return on housing investment than equity investors will. If the city replaces equity investment in new housing at a rate similar to existing debt finance, it can substantially lower the required return and thus make private investment in housing attractive even in an environment of slower rent growth. This does not require subsidies—the city will be paid back—and would be a logical purpose for which the city could issue new debt. As an equity investor the city would be exposed to falls in the value of its portfolio. But this is a much smaller concern for the public sector, since it does not expect to liquidate its investment to repay shareholders or finance new projects, so capital gains or losses matter less than they would to a private investor.

The city’s vast stock of private affordable housing—Mitchell-Lama buildings, limited equity co-ops, and so on—testify to the ability of public or nonprofit financing to deliver substantially lower housing costs. But while financing, unlike land use reform, can indeed lower rents, there will still be a floor set by the actual costs of building and maintaining housing. For deeply affordable units, direct public funding will be needed. This part of the housing program is better funded by tax revenues than debt, so state agreement on new taxes will be important here. Public funding can take the form of subsidies to private developers or direct public ownership. I am not sure there is a strong principled argument between these two approaches. What one wants to avoid are subsidies in the form of vouchers to individual renters, which are subject to landlord capture and abuse. But no one seems to be proposing that.

The last piece of the puzzle is rent regulation. “Freeze the rent” must have been one of the campaign’s most-chanted slogans. And with good reason: this is one policy the mayor can deliver directly without the need for approval of any other body. The mayor appoints all of the Rent Guidelines Board’s members; as the board’s membership turns over he can appoint members who will vote for a rent freeze, as de Blasio’s board did more than once during his administration. And thanks to the improvements to rent regulations passed in 2019—an early victory for the socialist caucus in New York’s state legislature—this will be sufficient to control rents on the city’s one million rent-regulated apartments (close to half of the total stock).

Despite what is sometimes claimed, there is no conflict between favoring both more private housing development and stronger rent regulation. Actually existing rent regulation in New York (and in the few other American cities that have it) is limited to older buildings—in New York, those built before 1974, plus ones where the developer voluntarily opted in as a condition of city subsidies. And they only limit rent increases, not the absolute level of rents. There is no reason to believe that these types of regulations have any effect on new housing construction. One could go a step further: economically, land use reforms and stronger rent regulations should go together. The same limits on new development that make land use reform worth pursuing mean that owners of existing buildings are receiving rents in the economic sense—payments in excess of the cost of production. Limiting those economic rents will have no effect on the supply of housing; it simply allows tenants to share in the gains from improvements in their neighborhoods, rather than being displaced so that landlords can capture them.

Rent regulation and land use reform are also political complements. One of the big obstacles to allowing new housing development—especially in a city of rents like New York—is people’s fear that new development may lead to rising rents and displacement. These fears are often well-founded: even if increasing housing supply leads to lower rents across the city or metro area, it is often associated with rising rents locally, since higher-density areas are generally more desirable than lower-density areas. (That is why cities exist in the first place.) This is especially true when new development is channeled into a few limited areas, as has historically been the case in New York. Strong rent regulation, by reassuring existing tenants that development will not mean displacement, makes a program of boosting housing supply more politically feasible.

There’s one other point to make on the political side. It’s common on the left to talk about developers and landlords interchangeably, and it’s true that in the political arena they often act as a team. But economically, these are two quite different interests, and to a large extent they are two distinct groups of people. It is at least possible that a housing program that included substantial land use reforms and public financing could peel off support from a significant fraction of developers, even if landlords are strongly opposed.

What kind of fiscal space does the city have?

At the federal level, leftists have long argued—correctly, in my view—that tax revenue and bond markets should not be seen as constraints on the public budget. With its own central bank issuing the world’s reserve currency, spending by the federal government should be seen, in the first instance, as a purely political question.

This is not the case at the city level. New York City cannot raise taxes other than property taxes without state approval. It cannot normally issue debt to meet operating expenses. And the level of debt issued for capital projects that bond markets will accept is a genuine concern. At the city level, “how are you going to pay for that?” is a question that has to be answered.

On an economic level, to be sure, the city certainly has the capacity to raise taxes. The current city income tax is essentially flat; raising taxes by one point on incomes over $1 million would bring in around $2 billion, enough to fund a significant part of the Mamdani administration’s agenda. Winning agreement from the state may not be easy. But the income is there to be taxed.

One thing we do not have to worry about is tax increases driving rich people out of the city. Whatever they may say in the political arena, when it comes to their actions, rich people show a clear preference for high taxes and good public services. The two U.S. states with the greatest numbers of billionaires are California and New York; as it happens, these are also the two states with the highest top rates for their state income taxes. The major U.S. city with the highest median income is San Francisco, despite the fact that millionaires there pay a higher tax rate than they would anywhere else in the country. A recent study by the New York Fiscal Policy Institute found no increase in out-migration by high income households following tax increases in 2017 and 2021; high-income households were significantly less likely to leave New York than others were, and when they did leave it was usually to other high-tax jurisdictions.

It’s worth noting also that the very high cost of commercial and retail space in New York reflects the greater income that businesses can generate here. A higher minimum wage, say, is not going to cause businesses to move to New Jersey; given the much higher rents here, if they could move, they already would have. Gristedes owner John Catsimatidis may rage all he likes, but if you want to sell groceries to New Yorkers your stores have to be in New York. Catsimatidis could of course sell the business; but that would just mean it would keep operating under the ownership of someone else. Rich people may sincerely believe that it is only their physical presence that keeps the business they own running, but there’s no reason the rest of us need to share in their narcissism.

With respect to debt, on the other hand, economic constraints are a more serious concern. Unfortunately, it is very hard to say a priori how much more the city could borrow without running into trouble. Certainly, the statements that any more debt would mean catastrophe, and that the city can simply borrow whatever it needs, are equally wrong. Clarifying how much more the city can reasonably borrow—and what it can reasonably borrow for—will be an urgent task for the administration and its allies.

What can the city do on its own authority, and what requires cooperation from the state?

Despite an inspiring history of municipal socialism, city government is not the best platform for an ambitious program to expand the public sector. In the American federal system, city governments are entirely creatures of the state; their powers are limited to what the state grants them.

Major spending expansions will require the cooperation of state government, as will raising corporate and income taxes. There are other areas where the city has the authority to act on its own. Land use is one important area. Another is labor regulation. While the city (probably) does not have the power to independently set its own minimum wage, it can regulate employment terms in individual industries. Recent city laws regulating pay for ride share workers and delivery drivers are among the strongest in the country when it comes to regulating the gig economy (and may be the reason that DoorDash donated so generously to Cuomo’s PAC). This is a foundation we can expect the Mamdani administration to build on.

On transportation, the campaign’s signature proposal was to make buses free, with the MTA being compensated for the lost revenue. In 2023, the city’s Independent Budget Office estimated that this would cost about $650 million per year. Some transit advocates are skeptical of this proposal, arguing that improving service is more important than reducing fares, and that scarce transit dollars would be better spent elsewhere. On the other hand, free buses are not just about reducing costs to riders—without the need to collect fares, buses would move faster. (To be sure, if more people start using buses for short trips, that could cut the other way.)

Whether or not free buses are the ideal transit policy, they have another important virtue: like a freeze in regulated rents, they would be an unambiguous promise made good on, a directly visible gain the administration could deliver relatively quickly. Legibility, simplicity, and universality are underrated virtues in policymaking. Other transportation policies might be better on paper. But it’s unlikely they would do as much to maintain support for the administration or build momentum for further reforms.

Ironically, the criticism directed at this proposal by the Cuomo campaign and others may have made it more effective in this respect. $650 million is a lot, but it’s not an enormous amount in the scale of the city’s budget. And if the result is a free public service that people had been told was impossible, that will ease the path toward other, perhaps more ambitious, improvements. The discovery that we can have nice things is a powerful force to get people to demand more.

Changes to the way the city’s streets are used should also be within the city’s power. More busways, less free parking, closing blocks with schools to cars during school hours—these are reforms that will provoke anger initially but, like congestion pricing, are likely to become much more popular once they are in place.

The parts of the agenda with big price tags—universal child care and public money for housing—will require cooperation with the state, either to provide funding or to give the city authority to raise taxes itself. But it’s worth noting here that the substantive goals of Mamdani’s proposals are, at least notionally, shared by the Democratic mainstream. The recently passed city budget includes money for a pilot program for universal child care, and Governor Kathy Hochul has her own taskforce studying the issue. Everyone agrees that housing is a major problem, and that addressing affordability will require a mix of land use reforms and public money.

What distinguishes the socialist position, in this context, is not its aims. It’s the willingness to take seriously the problem of how to get there—meaning how to mobilize mass support, but also how to pay for it, by raising taxes if necessary. The “moderate” position, as embodied by Governor Hochul, also supports expanded public services. But it resists the new taxes that would make them possible. In this context, the challenge in winning state support may be less about making the case for the program on principle, and more about demonstrating a credible plan to carry it out.

What about the police?

It’s no secret that the police in New York, as in many big cities, operate largely outside the control of elected officials, and are prepared to aggressively challenge a government that tries to limit their prerogatives. You can avoid saying the words “defund the police” on the campaign trail, as Mamdani did, but that doesn’t answer the question of how much funding to dedicate to policing. There will, inevitably, be high-profile cases of police violence that will provoke protests; the mayor will have to take a position. If there are renewed protests over Gaza on New York campuses, will he try to limit police involvement? (And will the police listen if he does?) Mamdani has promised to eliminate the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, which is notorious for its heavy-handed response to protests and is responsible for a disproportionate share of brutality complaints, lawsuits, and overtime. Whether he can deliver on this will be an important test of his relationship with the department.

That said, the proposal to create a new Office of Community Safety is promising, and it is an example of the kind of bureaucratic reorganization that mayors are generally able to carry out without too much difficulty. It fits the model of successful police reform that scholars like Alex Vitale have emphasized—the goal is less to modify police behavior than to reduce the number of occasions on which people come into contact with the police in the first place. Similar offices of public safety have been created in dozens of cities in recent years such as Albuquerque Community Safety and the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery in Newark. In the best-case scenario, this offers a route to reduce the role of the police without a public confrontation.

What does the campaign tell us about the shift in political climate?

The campaign’s single-minded focus on “a city we can afford” was clearly a smart choice strategically. But it’s also important for what it suggests about the shifting political valence of inflation. By framing affordability in terms of expanded public services (universal child care) and limits on the pricing power of private businesses (rent freeze; publicly owned groceries), the campaign showed how the cost of living can be an issue for the left.

This framing of affordability built on several years of debates at the national level. The new anti-trust scholarship of people like Lina Khan and Tim Wu (who himself opposed Cuomo in an earlier campaign as Zephyr Teachout’s running mate for Lieutenant Governor in the 2014 primary), along with work by advocacy groups like the Groundwork Collaborative (full disclosure: I am a fellow there) has advanced an understanding of price increases as the result of the deliberate exercise of market power, rather than the impersonal forces of supply and demand. At the macro level, heterodox scholars like Isabella Weber have made the case that responses to inflation should focus more on relieving specific bottlenecks rather than cutting spending across the board. From both these perspectives, an effective response to price increases requires the government to do more, not less.

The choice to focus on affordability is, obviously, to the credit of Mamdani and his campaign staff. And, obviously, it resonated with voters who had never heard of Louis Brandeis. Was it easier to make these arguments because the intellectual foundation was laid over the past few years? Maybe—it’s hard to say. But at least, it shows that heterodox perspectives on inflation can resonate with the public.

The idea that controlling inflation calls for more public spending and regulation is a departure from the politics of inflation over the past generation, but considered from a longer perspective it’s not so strange. In the mid-twentieth-century debates, it was often union representatives who were most concerned with rising prices, and stronger unions could even be seen as a way of limiting inflation. Or think of the protests against high rents and grocery prices by communist housewives early in the century. “A city you can afford” is probably a slogan they would have approved of.

Is the Zohran campaign a vindication of the idea that winning campaigns need to focus on a narrow set of economic issues, and leave aside broader social justice concerns? I am not sure that it is. It is certainly true that the campaign’s messages emphasized affordability in a clear and consistent way. But that doesn’t imply that they did not take positions on other questions. On Gaza in particular, Mamdani was impressively forthright—in fact, one of the lasting impacts of the campaign may be to break the taboo around criticisms of Israel and its endless wars. No one paying any attention could be in doubt about Mamdani’s support for the rights of gay and trans people. And while he didn’t campaign on “defund the police,” he refused to join other candidates in calling for more cops, proposing instead to diminish their role in New Yorkers’ lives. His call to abolish the Strategic Response Group was particularly significant, given their leading role in the violent suppression of campus protests against the genocide in Gaza.

Picking a single, broadly resonant message and communicating clearly and consistently is surely a big reason why the campaign was so successful. But the economic-populist view is wrong to argue that this requires not talking about other issues. Avoiding a clear position on Gaza or taking the safe route of calling for more police would not have made the core economic message any stronger. The advantages of focus come from what is focused on, not what is left out.

For the past five months, much of the center-left has been shell shocked, off balance, and uncertain how to move forward. This campaign may help break that spell—I suspect it will find many imitators elsewhere in the country. It’s true that a few high-profile figures have embarrassed themselves with public attacks on the mayoral nominee. But many more elected officials and candidates—and probably even more of their staffers—will see a model of how to mobilize an electoral majority for a progressive program.

Mamdani’s agenda will face serious obstacles. But a massive wave of new voters doesn’t just carry you into office. It shifts the landscape, and creates political capital that can be turned toward other ends. It is not just the official powers of the mayor’s office that will allow Mamdani to fulfill his promise to improve the daily lives of New Yorkers. It is also the way his upset victory changes the political calculations for other officeholders across the city. And while no city or campaign alone can reverse Trump’s assault on immigrants or halt the genocide in Gaza, Mamdani’s victory has opened up critical space for politicians and communities courageous enough to take on these tasks.

J.W. Mason is associate professor of economics at John Jay College, CUNY, and a senior fellow at the Groundwork Collaborative. His book Against Money, coauthored with Arjun Jayadev, will be coming out from the University of Chicago Press in 2026.