Mamdani's biggest challenges

Socialist priorities aren't going to retain NYC's key industries or bring down its high costs.

Photo by Bingjiefu He via Wikimedia Commons

As expected, Zohran Mamdani has won the New York City mayoral election. Most of the commentary about Mamdani has centered around either his Muslim religion, his leftist ideology, or some intersection of the two. This is only to be expected. The GOP electoral victory in 2024 left the Democratic party without any obvious leader, and Mamdani is a charismatic guy who ran a slick, competent campaign and inspired a lot of people. It would be an exaggeration to say that Zohran is now the de facto leader of the progressive movement or of the Democrats as a whole, but he’s definitely soaking up a ton of attention, and his success is widely seen as an indicator of where the left in general is headed.

Mamdani’s Muslim religion and his stance on Israel will certainly soak up a lot of attention and controversy. But ultimately his leftist ideology will probably be more important to how he governs as mayor. Back in June, I argued that Mamdani’s socialist roots have given him some bad instincts about how to run a city:

Zohran Mamdani's policies will (mostly) not bring abundance to NYC

Essentially, Zohran’s instinct for improving affordability is to provide a bunch of free services at the city level — free buses, city-run grocery stores, and so on. That will not work very well. If he’s successful, the quality of those services is likely to be poor, drawing criticism and backlash far out of proportion to their actual economic significance. But many of the plans are unlikely to be implemented in the first place, given the need to win approval from statewide agencies like the MTA.

Meanwhile, Zohran’s housing and education policies are likely to be contaminated by bad ideas from the progressive information-bubble. Mamdani’s attack on elite public schools is based on the common but mistaken idea that these schools worsen racial gaps; in fact, they are a vehicle for discovering and giving a boost to talented minority kids. Zohran’s housing policy is based on subsidizing “affordable” homes, but — as we’ve seen in California — this will make housing harder to build overall, while increasing construction costs, and will ultimately not lead to a big boost in supply.

It’s therefore easy to envision a pretty depressing scenario for Mamdani’s tenure in office. Identity, foreign policy, and ideology might soak up tons of attention, stirring general nationwide fear about the direction of the Democratic party, while distracting from NYC’s real material concerns. And the failures of a few economically minor but symbolically important socialist initiatives could draw widespread condemnation, painting Mamdani’s whole tenure in office as a failure. This would basically parallel what happened to Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s leftist district attorney, or (more loosely) to Chicago’s socialist mayor Brandon Johnson.

And that would be a shame, because New York City has some serious problems that Mamdani really should be addressing. NYC is America’s flagship city — in some sense, its only real city. But its tentpole industry is slowly abandoning it, leaving the future of its economic base in doubt. And it’s beset by ruinously high costs, leading to a slow degradation of public infrastructure and services. These are problems that socialist approaches will simply never fix — but if NYC is going to thrive, someone has to fix them.

The finance industry is slowly leaving NYC