New York City’s rents keep rising, and as they do, so do the odds that the city’s next mayor will be Zohran Mamdani. The median rent in Manhattan in June was $4,625, which was 7.6 percent higher than it was one year earlier. In Brooklyn, median rent was $3,733, 1 percent higher than in June 2024.
The crisis of affordability, in which housing costs loom largest, is the issue that Mamdani has addressed most directly and forcibly on the campaign trail, and is among the issues weighing down the dim re-election prospects of incumbent Mayor Eric Adams. (As, of course, is Adams’s deal with President Trump to allow ICE agents to proceed with his blessing within the city limits in return for the feds dropping their corruption charges against him.) Mamdani’s support for a rent freeze clearly played a major role in his decisive victory over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in last month’s Democratic primary.
A number of the city’s billionaires have been predictably spooked by Mamdani’s victory, and besides rallying to Adams’s banner (or Cuomo’s, or anyone’s not named Mamdani), they’ve leveled a host of absurd charges against the Democratic nominee: He’s a communist! He’ll seize the means of production! (Which in New York means what? Publishing houses? Broadway musicals?) Among their more plausible-sounding warnings, the Cassandras of Billionaires’ Row allege that a Mamdani rent freeze will stop the construction of all new housing.
That’s only plausible, of course, until you realize that the only apartments on which rent can be frozen are those built before 1974, and those relatively few whose building owners have agreed to have their post-1974 buildings subject to a freeze in return for the city providing financing for their construction. (Those two categories encompass about half of the city’s apartments.) In other words, a Mamdani rent freeze will not deter private developers by one measly iota from building new projects to their hearts’ contents.
As to their wallets’ contents, CUNY economics professor and Groundwork Collaborative senior fellow J.W. Mason has laid out in a brilliant article in Dissent how Mamdani could go about enlarging New York’s housing stock, by having the city become an equity investor on new buildings, the subsidizer of some private development and the direct funder of affordable public housing. The latter two alternatives will likely require tax hikes on the city’s wealthiest residents, which in turn requires the state’s permission. Mason points out the specter of New York’s wealthiest fleeing the city once their taxes are raised by a couple of percentage points is sheerest hooey; he cites a study by the Fiscal Policy Institute that found no such flight by the richest New Yorkers when their taxes were raised in 2017 and 2021.
Though private-sector development may yet be anathema to the more doctrinaire members of DSA, Mamdani is no foe of such developments, at least as they broadly comport with the kinds of policies that Mason lays out. Indeed, he’s clearly embraced a progressive version of the “abundance” agenda, as E.J. Dionne recently pointed out. What differentiates Mamdani from the more centrist abundance advocates is his pro-union stance and his willingness to raise taxes on the rich, both positions that rank-and-file Democrats have overwhelmingly supported in every known poll of the past decade.
Once “mainstream” Democrats of the center-left come to terms with the fact that Mamdani’s agenda focuses on social democratic policies that are broadly popular with their constituents, an increasing number of them will end up supporting him. Indeed, that’s already happening. Last week, Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the city’s most prominent Latino leader and a former supporter of Adams and Cuomo, endorsed Mamdani, as have many members of New York’s party establishment. Nor is this growing support limited to New York. In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, for instance, David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s political consigliere, said of some Democrats’ reaction to Mamdani’s victory that
The wrong response is the reflexive one: to say Democratic socialism … is a menace that will destroy us. Democratic socialism … is progressivism. It’s not communism. Democratic socialism is a response to the failure of the system to equitably provide opportunity for people who are willing to work for it … I don’t know if Mamdani’s solutions are exactly the right solutions, but he got credit from a lot of voters for at least centering the issue that is on the minds of people … There are lessons from Mamdani for Democrats. Affordability is far and away the most important issue. It was in 2024. It continues to be.
I suspect any number of the less sectarian members of DSA understand this, and understand that Mamdani will of necessity embrace some broadly popular positions over more purely doctrinaire ones in order to ensure that he has the political space to push for those left policies—such as progressive tax hikes to fund universal child care—that he deems central to the city’s needs. Such positioning may include, say, keeping Adams’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, atop the police department, while axing or reshaping the department’s Strategic Response Group, notorious for its less than strategic response to public demonstrations.
One initiative that New York DSA would be well advised to refrain from if they truly desire Mamdani to win November’s election would be lining up primary challengers to the city’s Democratic congressional delegation, a course of action, CNN reports, that some are now considering. Whatever the shortcomings of, say, Brooklyn’s Hakeem Jeffries or the Bronx’s Ritchie Torres, mounting a challenge against them while Mamdani is on the ballot would compel him to take sides—and refraining from taking sides would be taken as implicitly taking sides by refusing to endorse the incumbent. There could be no clearer way either to force Mamdani to don the sectarian garb that up to now he’s adeptly shunned, or to force him to oppose his base and back incumbents who, like Torres particularly, he’d probably otherwise prefer not to. It would amount to confronting Mamdani with a lose-lose proposition—not something his supporters, if they have an ounce of political sense, should want to be doing.
For now, Mamdani is well on his way to presenting New Yorkers, and Democrats generally, with a new birth of social democratic policy and political opportunity. This is not something the left should be fucking with.