Can Mamdani Be a Mayor Who Builds?

Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor-elect, waged one of the most impressive outsider campaigns in modern politics on a relentless message about the affordability crisis sapping America’s largest and most thoroughly global “superstar” city. No less remarkable than his victory over former governor Andrew Cuomo is the transition he pulled off on the campaign trail. Having won the highest vote total since 1969, Mamdani proved he could mostly shed his image as a creature of the ultra-woke wing of the Democratic Socialists of America and style himself as a thoughtful reformer capable of building a broad coalition beyond the ranks of the city’s Brahmin left.

The exhilaration of his supporters, however, is about to give way to fresh anxiety about Mamdani’s ability to meet the expectations of cost-burdened New Yorkers and defy his critics’ (often histrionic) predictions of failure. And what some strategists hail as his “Mamdate” should neither be exaggerated nor squandered on symbolic fights that don’t yield better conditions for regular New Yorkers. Although Mamdani has proven to be a charismatic and unusually gifted communicator, there is an inescapable asymmetry between the grassroots excitement his campaign generated and the actual political capital he will possess when his mayoralty begins on January 1st.

Mamdani’s biggest challenge ahead of his swearing-in is to arouse a spirit of collaboration that ushers in a new era of development. One of the ways he can do so is by demonstrating he is thinking holistically about how to govern well amid a worsening macroeconomic outlook. Nationally, layoffs are at their highest level since 2020, and the city, a bellwether of the country’s economic health, is no exception to the monthslong hiring freeze. The impact could prove severest for the young adults Mamdani mobilized. According to the state comptroller, youth unemployment in 2024 inched above 13 percent and was nearly a quarter for young black residents. The trajectory is likely to worsen: since the pandemic, a third or more of public school students have been chronically absent.

The ranks of underemployed and unemployable New Yorkers could soon extend beyond this emerging lost generation. Despite a record number of small business openings under the departing mayor, Eric Adams, the retail sector’s stubbornly high vacancy rate and flatlining job growth are telltale signs of softening demand. Still more fundamental sectoral problems threaten to surface. As fears mount over a potential AI-induced “bloodbath” in the city’s critical tech, finance, and media sectors, there is an overriding sense that the city’s overly hyped post-pandemic recovery has reached a critical impasse.

Unmet, these are all challenges whose attendant consequences—small business closures, shrinking municipal revenue, and rising crime and addiction—could consume any mayor. But they would be especially devastating for an anti-establishment idealist such as Mamdani, whose legacy will depend on translating “affordability” into a fulfilling standard of living for the 60 percent of New Yorkers who currently lack economic security. This is precisely the moment, then, to convey how his incoming administration intends to boost business confidence, help reinvent struggling sectors and empty commercial space, and keep unemployment low.

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That, in turn, requires policy development that goes beyond the catchphrase proposals that catapulted Mamdani to fame. His platform was famously dominated by simple, memorable pledges to deliver subsidized services and freeze the rent for roughly two million rent-stabilized residents. It was smart politics in a city highly exposed to Trump’s tariff gamble and beleaguered by an acute sense of declining real purchasing power. Mamdani’s invocations of Nordic social democracy and Fiorello La Guardia, by most counts the city’s most progressive mayor in history, also helped rebut spurious claims that his social welfare ideas are highly unorthodox and untested. Although they will almost assuredly require higher taxes on the very wealthy, proposals like fare-free buses, Scandinavian-style baby boxes, and universal child care for children age five and under are hardly the road to state-command socialism.

Mamdani’s vision, nevertheless, could be more ambitious. This, however, is not because his ideas are insufficiently “socialist” or “redistributive” according to the DSA’s rubric. Rather, it is because they are mostly ancillary measures that don’t get to the root of New York’s developmental obstacles in the 2020s.

To both Mamdani’s foes and his allies, this critique might sound counterintuitive. His Achilles’ heel, it is widely assumed, is that his agenda is already a heavy lift, dependent on the approval of Democratic governor Kathy Hochul, an upstate-reared pragmatist, and a state legislature notoriously reluctant to raise taxes on top earners. No doubt, Mamdani needs to forge a much tighter partnership with Hochul than the measured endorsement he secured in the weeks before the election to implement any of his current priorities. But the real underlying issue is his platform’s relative deficit of pre-distributive ideas, including steps to offset the city’s slide into a pre-recessionary stage. Notwithstanding his plank to build affordable housing, his platform tilted toward the theme of price relief. Transformative projects, long-term reallocations in the labor market away from low-wage work, and measures to recruit and incubate more productive enterprises: the stuff that made a mayor such as La Guardia historic is generally missing from Mamdani’s vaunted mandate.

That tight focus may have suited the campaign’s logic. The contrast between the cheerful populism of Mamdani, the underdog, and an out-of-touch establishment had to be relentlessly amplified at every possible moment. And yet, while New Yorkers know Mamdani adamantly wants “a city we can afford,” they know much less about what he envisions for the New York of 2040 or 2050.

Understandably, the scale of the affordability crisis and its salience to a Democratic revival tend to dwarf such questions. In New York as elsewhere, decreasing the financial burdens of working families is crucial, whether it is done through capped and slashed fees, minimum wage hikes, preventing wage theft, or in-kind provision (such as the universal school meals bill recently passed by Hochul). Following the Biden era, Democrats of all stripes have also doubted the political benefits of stressing industry and infrastructure. Hammering costs is safer terrain, even as the party wrestles over which mechanisms would best lower them.

Nonetheless, if he is to achieve his vision of a fairer, more solidaristic city, Mamdani needs to channel his inner developmentalist and increase New Yorkers’ sense of possibility. And he should do so without hesitation, free of any dogma that might diminish his command of the bully pulpit and the public’s confidence in him.

Above all, Mamdani ought to take very deliberate steps to promote a “countercyclical” economic climate that bucks the stagflationary trends spreading across the country. That means pursuing an agenda that radically expedites housing construction, eases small business formation and expansion, ramps up vocational training (particularly in school districts with weaker high school graduation rates), welcomes socially beneficial innovation, and continues to upgrade the city’s mass transit system. Mamdani’s inner circle should therefore evaluate judiciously every possible policy lever to spur fixed investment, encourage high-wage job creation, and uproot supply chokepoints.

After a triumphant rebuke of the status quo, some of these endeavors may seem downright prosaic. No one in Mamdani’s corner, though, should doubt the primacy of being a mayor who builds and integrates—as well as one who can enlist key business interests to advance his cause. Mamdani will need all the allies he can get. While New York enjoys a dynamism that has sadly eluded many heartland cities, there are sections whose challenges remain essentially unchanged since the 1980s. Before the federal government shutdown, 25 percent of New Yorkers were in poverty, an uptick that ignominiously rivals London’s rate. These are indictments of the status quo that can’t be solved merely through social assistance, much as it might alleviate the ambient cruelty of unhappy choices.

Encouragingly, his new transition team, co-led by Lina Khan, the former FTC chair and leading light of the neo-Brandeisians, seems poised to embrace this shift in emphasis toward development. As she and other anti-monopolists have underscored, more productive and deconcentrated markets, along with policies that weed out corruption and deter price discrimination, are key to fostering the jobs and commercial diversification that lift up long-neglected neighborhoods.

There are hints Mamdani himself is now leaning in this “productivist” direction. On election day, he finally revealed he was voting in favor of ballot propositions to effectively curb the city council’s veto power over housing construction, a signal he understood the urgency of building more at a rapid clip. He could go a step further and underscore his office will make every effort to ensure new housing puts young and growing families first. Working families with three or more children have steadily decamped for other regions in the last decade—a new form of urban flight driven overwhelmingly by housing costs that now range from one-third to one-fifth of a typical New Yorker’s income. Unfortunately, the dearth of three- and even two-bedroom units in new buildings suggests the city’s elites have yet to reckon with the implications of this dynamic. Efforts to reverse it, perhaps more than anything else, will determine the size of the city’s indigenous middle class and its ability to thrive over generations.

The future of housing policy gets to the heart of the city’s character and the looming demographic consequences of intense wealth polarization. Indeed, the composition, allocation, and geographic distribution of new housing stock will show whether the city is oriented to helping young families put down roots and build wealth or is structured to favor itinerant professionals, upscale singles and childless couples, and luxury real estate interests. Still, it is one piece of the “supply-side” puzzle that Mamdani could more forcefully address. Occasionally he has spoken of how his administration would aid entrepreneurs. Prior to the June primary, Mamdani touted a policy memo detailing how he would cut administrative fees and other red tape for new small businesses. Cleverly timed, it offered a preview into his emerging approach to market governance. While his critics still insist he will create a regulatory environment that strangles enterprise, Mamdani instead seems intent on supporting local businesses, streamlining their operations, and diversifying the sources of community wealth.

Much more can be done, however, to aid popular local businesses as well as foster commercial growth and value-added production in food and transit deserts. In some cases, entrepreneurs could be won over by “pro-competition” regulation, such as the proposal for a commercial rent guidelines board that was recently introduced in the New York State Senate. In fact, the cultivation of an anti-vacancy bloc within the city’s larger YIMBY movement could be key to Mamdani’s first-year success. As anyone who has lived in the city long enough to see celebrated neighborhood institutions and promising new businesses suddenly vanish can attest, out-of-control commercial rents are jeopardizing the fruits of the city’s turn-of-the-century renaissance.

At the same time, Mamdani’s team should identify other ways to curtail barriers to market entry, particularly for firms that are likely to boast living-wage positions and cluster other remunerative companies with desirable products and services. And they should do so with an eye toward the net effect on economic empowerment and mobility, rather than tending to whatever might feel ideologically consistent in the abstract. As his team is surely aware, a stultifying preoccupation with procedures and interest group management has damaged the credibility of the liberal-progressive establishment over the last fifteen years. Mamdani, having promised transparent and efficient government, will be afforded little grace if he is seen as similarly dithering on issues that could profoundly affect the city’s resilience.

The leap from running an insurgent campaign to ensuring the next generation of New Yorkers has a brighter future does not mean Mamdani has to suddenly appease every city tycoon and bank CEO. America’s top ten percent has accounted for almost fifty percent of all new U.S. consumer spending in the last two years, and the city’s rate is surely comparable if not more lopsided. This is yet another disturbing indicator that upward mobility and the American dream are patently unfamiliar to a growing share of Americans born after 1980 (as well as the city’s some 3.4 million immigrants). Reports on the city’s “true cost of living,” moreover, suggest that one in two working-age households lacks a living wage. A galloping middle class, as witnessed in the first decades of the postwar era, would be claiming a far greater share of the pie.

Still, to realize the city’s untapped economic potential, Mamdani must extend a hand to all who are drawn to the liberties New York is thought to embody. Through thick and thin, New York has remained a magnet for entrepreneurs, creative types, and ambitious people of all backgrounds, trades, and stations. Even at its lowest points, such as the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and the crime wave of the 1980s, its unquenchable spirit of reinvention had assured a verve and optimism unmatched by most other U.S. cities. That breadth of vitality, so essential to urban character and development, is now under threat precisely due to how expensive it is to simply pay for the basics of food, housing, and energy. Mamdani, though he easily outshone his rivals, won with the margin he did because he spoke convincingly about what is on the verge of being lost. He captured the indignities that cumulatively smother what makes earning a living in New York—and making a life as a New Yorker—attractive and rewarding.

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This disenchantment is the essence of the Mamdani vote. He was carried to victory not just by a squeezed middle class, but by those who sense they are increasingly unable to chart their lives on their own terms. Whatever his critics make of his policies, they should not mistake that feeling of enervation as a passing phase. It is a warning sign that democratic capitalism, in America’s quintessential global city, is no longer creating the conditions that sustain a free but purposeful society.

The solution, however, is not to be found in the facile dichotomy between government and the market. It is to be forged through policies that promote enablement and rising economic agency, as these are the very things that actually deepen people’s stake in the system, their associational bonds, and their belief in the common good. Of course, for Mamdani’s left flank, this might sound like the hoary language of public-private partnerships, part of the Third Way’s discredited gospel. For them, talk of opportunity is a distraction from the untenable gulf between the ultra-wealthy and the rest. Yet the erosion of countervailing power, steadily reflected in rising monthly costs and the discontent it stirs, is in large measure about economic opportunity. It is about the opportunities that fall out of reach because it has become too risky to do anything but settle for a meager existence.

As he prepares for his mayorship, Mamdani would be wise to recall that every effective and fondly remembered social democrat and American liberal embraced some version of this philosophy of enablement. They did so not because they abandoned their conviction that certain freedoms from the market were the mark of a civilized and humane society; on the contrary, they very much believed there were public goods that had to be divorced from the profit motive. But they grasped that modern society consciously exercised, to a great degree, its sense of liberty through markets. Accordingly, the most far-sighted among them reasoned that protection from exploitation, though a sound and central principle of market governance, must be continuously accompanied by measures that also make bustling communities and more fulfilling lives possible.

Mamdani does not have to sacrifice his principles to win allies and pacify his foes. But to be a mayor who truly builds—who leaves behind a topography of greatly broadened prosperity and economic empowerment—he must nurture the spirit of freedom and ambition that the best American leaders have always kindled and that has always made New York New York.