If there’s one thing New York City desperately needs, it’s an economically illiterate ideologue with a megaphone, a budget, and no brakes. Enter 33-year-old Hollywood nepo baby, failed rapper, and current State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, Astoria’s answer to Hugo Chavez, if Chavez had a podcast and a master’s degree in vibes.
Mamdani’s socialist agenda reads like a crowdsourced listicle from a Jacobin comments section: freeze all rents, soak the rich, make the buses free, borrow billions to build “deeply affordable” housing, and seize the means of food distribution.
STEFANIK REPORTS $12 MILLION CAMPAIGN WAR CHEST AS MOMENTUM BUILDS FOR GOVERNOR RUN
If it sounds unserious, that’s because it is. But unserious people in power can do real damage, especially when they equate spreadsheets with microaggressions.
Start with rent control. Mamdani’s plan is to put his boot on the neck of the market and squeeze until it coughs up unicorns. In a city already starved for low-income units, he’d tighten restrictions until housing becomes Cold War rationing. See 1970s Stockholm: rents frozen into oblivion, 20-year waitlists, black-market leases traded like cigarettes.
But Mamdani has learned nothing. After all, supply and demand are just tools of neoliberal oppression, right? Asked during the Oct. 16 NBC-Telemundo debate how he’d lure businesses to New York over Dallas, Mamdani offered, earnestly, “arts and culture.” Texas has no state income tax. The cost of living in Dallas is roughly 40% lower. Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America have spent the past few years shifting operations to Texas, chasing lower taxes and a surging post-pandemic population. But sure, arts and culture.
What he and his City Council echo chamber fail to grasp is that real estate in New York doesn’t just house people. It supplies the tax base, anchors the pension system, and underwrites critical services. Commercial property taxes alone make up 40% of the budget. That golden goose doesn’t survive a mayor who treats developers like war criminals and investment like original sin. You don’t build housing by villainizing the people who build it.
Then there are the buses. Mamdani wants to make them free — because what could go wrong with offering unlimited public goods in a city $120 billion in debt with billions more in unfunded pension obligations? Never mind that the MTA isn’t under mayoral control. Details. The point isn’t policy; it’s performative outrage, preferably in all caps and optimized for Zillennial TikTokers.
Which brings us to taxes. Mamdani wants to hike them. On who? Why, “the rich,” a group that now includes anyone who ever dines out or gets delivery. But capital, like tourists, has options. Tell it to leave, and it does. In a city whose budget depends on a sliver of 1 percenters staying put, this is real-world Jenga with a ball-peen hammer.
But Mamdani doesn’t believe in capital flight. He believes in capital guilt. The rich don’t create value; they hoard it. They’re not taxpayers; they’re targets. Taxation isn’t for revenue. It’s for retribution. And when the budget craters? Cue the “austerity” hashtags and artisanal cardboard signs.
Many of Mamdani’s worst campaign planks constitutionally require approval from Albany — historically, a death knell for most mayoral agendas. But along came Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desperate, simpering New York Times tongue bath. What should’ve been a wake suddenly looks like a cakewalk.
Take his plan to borrow $70 billion in order to fund 200,000 units of “deeply affordable” housing — laughable, in a city where most projects drown in years of environmental review. Mamdani won’t deliver egalitarian housing. He’ll deliver debt, delays, tent communes, and bondholders on blood pressure meds.
At bottom, Mamdani’s vision isn’t a city; it’s a sermon. But cities don’t run on sermons. They run on incentives. Warp those long enough and you don’t get utopia. You get 1970s Detroit — or San Francisco, yesterday.
CUOMO PICKS UP NEW SUPPORT IN NYC MAYORAL RACE AFTER ERIC ADAMS DROPS OUT: POLL
Mamdani won’t get everything he wants, but that’s hardly comforting. Enough to spook investors, freeze development, weaponize the tax code — and the city’s economic engine starts coughing blood.
New York may be resilient, but it’s not bulletproof. A Mayor Mamdani wouldn’t govern the city. He’d stress-test it to see what breaks first: the budget, the bond rating, his tax base, or voters’ capacity for mythomania.
John William Schiffbauer served as deputy communications director for the New York Republican State Committee from 2014 to 2016.
