Zohran Mamdani’s not-so-radical agenda

Last week, New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani sent shockwaves through the political establishment after he clinched the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor. Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, defeated a crowded field, which included former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, by double digits. Turnout was higher than usual, especially among younger voters, indicating that Mamdani’s campaign energized New York City residents in ways few people expected. Throughout his campaign, and especially since the stunning upset, Mamdani has faced attacks from both Republicans and centrist Democrats that paint him as far too extreme for New York City, let alone America. Part of that caricature is clearly fueled by racism — Mamdani is a Muslim immigrant born to Indian parents in Uganda — with Republicans sharing photos of the Statue of Liberty dressed in a burqa, saying Mamdani is uncivilized for eating with his hands, and calling for the 33-year-old candidate to be denaturalized and subsequently deported. It’s also part of the backlash to Mamdani’s support for Palestinian rights, as even members of his own party baselessly accuse him of peddling antisemitism. But much of the criticism has also centered on Mamdani’s campaign promises, which pledge to make New York City more affordable in small but meaningful ways with rent freezes, city-owned grocery stores, and fare-free buses. Some of that criticism is very heated: Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, for example, called Mamdani’s rent stabilization proposal “the second-best way to destroy a city, after bombing.” Many argue that Mamdani is only offering pie-in-the-sky proposals — nice policies in an ideal world, but unachievable in our not-so-ideal reality. But Mamdani’s splashy policies aren’t exactly foreign ideas, nor is he the first to try to implement them. They’ve been tried before, often with promising results. Mamdani’s policies aren’t reckless; they’re tested Let’s take three of his policies that have gotten some of the most attention: 1. Rent freeze Mamdani has proposed to impose a rent freeze. That means that landlords would be unable to raise the rents on roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments across the city. This mostly falls within the mayor’s jurisdiction: Rent hikes (or freezes) are decided by the Rent Guidelines Board, whose nine members are appointed by the mayor. And if elected mayor in November, Mamdani can appoint members to the board who pledge to freeze the rent. As dramatic as the negative response has been, this isn’t exactly a novel idea. In just the past decade — during Bill de Blasio’s tenure as the city’s mayor — the board froze the rent on three occasions: in 2015, 2016, and in 2020. (Those freezes, it should be noted, are hardly, if ever, blamed for worsening the city’s housing problems.) Mamdani’s proposal also doesn’t mean that a rent freeze will be permanent. The idea is to hold rents where they are to give tenants a chance to catch up to the rising cost of living. (In Mayor Eric Adams’s first three years in office, for example, the board raised the rents by a combined 9 percent.) Opponents to this plan often point to the piles of literature that show the pitfalls of rent control in the long run — that it disincentivizes landlords to provide services and ultimately leaves apartments in disrepair. But those arguments conveniently leave out some key parts of this debate. Under New York’s rent stabilization laws, landlords who invest in meaningfully improving their apartments are allowed to increase rents beyond the guidelines set by the board, meaning that landlords can’t really use a rent freeze as an excuse to leave their apartments in bad conditions. More than that, Mamdani’s plan for a rent freeze doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s part of a broader plan to spur investment in housing and improve renters’ lives, which include changing zoning laws, cutting red tape to get more housing built more quickly across the city, and cracking down on crooked landlords by more strictly and efficiently enforcing New York’s housing codes. Put another way, Mamdani’s rent freeze is not presented as the solution to New York’s housing crisis. It’s just one part of a bigger toolkit that can help tenants in the near term while the other tools finally put housing costs under control in the long run. 2. City-owned grocery stores Mamdani’s suggestion of city-owned grocery stores has irked some entrepreneurs to the point that one supermarket mogul threatened to close down all of his stores if Mamdani becomes mayor. The rationale behind this proposal is that a publicly owned grocery store would make food more affordable. The store wouldn’t have to worry about making a profit or paying rent, and those savings would be passed onto consumers by lowering the price of goods. Realistically, this is unlikely to have a significant impact on grocery prices across the city — after all, grocery stores famously run on very slim profit margins to begin with. But Mamdani’s plan is also a means to address some of the city’s food deserts, where there aren’t enough grocery stores to serve residents. (While some argue that New York City doesn’t really have food deserts, the reality is that it’s hard to argue that residents have equal access to healthy and fresh foods across the city.) Some of Mamdani’s critics have seized on this plan to call him a communist who would put private businesses and consumer choice at risk. The government, they argue, shouldn’t be operating businesses because governments are an inefficient alternative to the private market. The reality is that public-owned stores aren’t exactly new, let alone a threat. Several states, from Alabama to Virginia, have publicly owned liquor stores — a product of the post-prohibition period where states took more control over the sale and distribution of alcohol — and boast of their success. (Virginia’s government website, for example, notes its state-owned liquor stores’ “history of giving back to Virginians” and highlights that it has generated more than $1 billion in revenue for six consecutive years.) Other cities across the country are also trying their hand at publicly owned grocery stores. In St. Paul, Kansas, for example, the municipality-owned grocery store helped end the city’s nearly two-decade run without a grocery store. In Madison, Wisconsin, a municipally owned grocery store is set to open later this summer, and other cities, including Chicago and Atlanta, are planning to dabble in this experiment as well. Mamdani’s proposal for publicly owned grocery stores is also far more rational and modest than the state-monopoly model of liquor stores: He’s merely proposing a pilot program of just five city-owned grocery stores — one in each borough — in a sea of some 15,000 privately owned grocery stores. If the pilot program succeeds and satisfies New Yorkers’ needs, then it could be expanded. 3. Fare-free buses One of Mamdani’s signature wins as a New York State Assembly member was his push for a fare-free bus pilot on five lines in New York City. As mayor, he promises to expand fare-free buses across the city to make public transit more accessible. It’s also good environmental policy that helps alleviate traffic because it encourages people to ditch their cars and ride the bus instead. Fare-free transit experiments in various cities have already shown promising results. In Boston, a fare-free bus pilot after the pandemic found that bus lines without fares recovered ridership much faster than the rest of the transit system. A year-and-a-half after the initial Covid lockdowns — when transit ridership cratered across the country — one fare-free bus line in Boston saw ridership bounce back to 92 percent of pre-pandemic levels, while the rest of the city’s transit system was stuck near 50 percent. According to an article by Mamdani and his colleague in the state legislature, in New York City, the lines included in the fare-free bus pilot showed an increase in ridership across the board, and of the new riders those lines lured, the highest share was among people making less than $28,000 a year. Of course, fare-free transit should be a secondary goal. After all, what good is a free fare if the buses won’t get you to where you need to go, let alone get you there in time? But Mamdani’s plan makes clear that he’s not just interested in making transit free, but fast and reliable as well. His fare-free proposal is packaged with a commitment to invest in improving infrastructure — like building more dedicated lanes — to make bus trips more efficient. There are plenty of avenues to raise revenue for that kind of investment, from imposing a new tax to introducing schemes like congestion pricing, as New York already has. Plus, if making buses free makes people more likely to get out of cars and ride public transit instead, then that is a worthwhile investment. What Mamdani’s policies could mean for the future of Democratic politics Ultimately, Mamdani’s policies also proved to be good politics, at least good enough for a Democratic primary. Part of the reason Mamdani’s policies might have resonated with so many voters is that they are, in many ways, a promise to reshape government — not into a communist haven on the Hudson, but into a government that owns up to its responsibility to provide all of its people with a dignified life. That’s why ideas like fare-free transit aren’t solely about saving $2.90 on a bus ride. It’s true that there are plenty of reasonable arguments against fare-free transit: Eliminating fares would get rid of a reliable source of revenue for transit agencies. Solely relying on taxes to fund public transportation potentially makes transit systems more volatile and susceptible to politics, where they can be used as a bargaining chip in the legislature’s tax bills. And there are other ways to make transit affordable to those in need, including existing subsidies that reduce fares for low-income commuters. But these arguments miss the broader appeal of agendas like Mamdani’s, which are a commitment to expand the government’s role in our daily lives in positive ways. Despite the depiction of Mamdani as a radical socialist, his agenda, at its core, actually promises something much more ideologically modest: making government more likable by making it work well. So his overarching goal as mayor, it seems, would be to make people believe that effective governance is possible — that local government can tangibly improve the quality of life in a city by being more present and, not to mention, pleasant to deal with. This is not to say that Mamdani’s primary win will reshape American politics — or even Democratic primaries in other cities. But Mamdani is onto something, and Democrats might be well-served by looking at his not-so-radical agenda and understanding that people want more from their own governments. Mamdani’s ideas, like publicly owned grocery stores, might not always be the answer voters are looking for, but the dignity underlying his whole agenda is.

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Zohran Mamdani’s not-so-radical agenda