Zohran Mamdani’s Bold Program for an Affordable New York City

In a shocking upset, socialist Zohran Mamdani bested former governor Andrew Cuomo in the June 24 New York City mayoral Democratic Party primary. No shortage of ink has been spilled trying to understand how the 33-year-old Mamdani, who is now in his third term as a member of the New York State Assembly, pulled off the win in the face of massive spending by Cuomo and his backers.

Commentators have pointed to Cuomo’s exceptional weakness as a candidate: He has a scandal-ridden background and ran a dour campaign. They also point to Mamdani’s exceptional skills as a communicator, including his savvy use of social media, his massive volunteer field operation (powered in no small part by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America), and the electorate’s desire for generational change. There is some truth in all of these points. But there can be little doubt that Mamdani’s appeal was due in large part to the substance of his campaign. Unlike the other candidates in the race, Mamdani put forward a bold populist platform of solutions to New York City’s cost-of-living crisis. That platform included, among other planks, freezing rents on the city’s rent-stabilized apartments, making buses fare-free, providing universal childcare, and piloting a handful of city-owned grocery stores. Mamdani has pledged to fund his proposals by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

Despite (or maybe because of) the Mamdani campaign’s clear resonance with New York City voters, he has come under fierce attack from elite opinion-makers and moneyed interests. One of the most colorful condemnations came from Larry Summers, the former White House economist who for decades has advised Democratic politicians to embrace neoliberal economics. In the wake of Mamdani’s primary win, Summers commented on the social media platform X that he was “profoundly alarmed about the future of the @DNC and the country by yesterday’s NYC anointment of a candidate who … advocated Trotskyite economic policies.” (What makes his proposals specifically “Trotskyite” as opposed to some other flavor of Bad Leftist is anyone’s guess.) And in late July, the New York Times reported that corporate leaders had launched no fewer than five Super PACs to try to stop Mamdani in the general election.

Yet Mamdani’s platform has received praise from prominent voices in the economics profession as well. In an open letter published by The Nation on June 20, just ahead of the primary election, several leading progressive economists—including Isabella Weber, James K. Galbraith, and Ha-Joon Chang—came out in favor of his economic proposals. “His platform proposes targeted, responsible interventions that would immediately improve millions of lives while building a fairer and prosperous New York,” they wrote.

So what, exactly, is Mamdani proposing to do to address the city’s affordability crisis? Here’s a quick rundown of his major platform planks.

A Public Sector-Driven Approach to Affordability

Mamdani’s platform is ambitious and wide-ranging, encompassing everything from massive expansions of the public sector to somewhat wonky tweaks to municipal governance and regulations. His proposals around housing, the biggest driver of affordability concerns for most in the city, is at the center of his program. Mamdani has pledged to freeze the rent on New York City’s roughly one million rent-stabilized apartment units. (That leaves about 1.3 million market-rate apartments to which the rent freeze would not apply, according to the New York City Rent Guidelines Board.) This measure would offer immediate relief to many New Yorkers and help prevent displacement due to rising rents.

Mamdani also advocates a number of policies to supercharge the construction of new affordable housing. He has promised to put public funds to work building 200,000 new units of affordable housing over the next 10 years, and to double the city’s capital investment in preserving existing public housing stock. Recognizing that public development alone is not sufficient to meet the demand for new housing, Mamdani is also planning to facilitate more private development by increasing zoned housing capacity and loosening restrictions like requirements that new buildings have a minimum number of parking spaces.

Besides his housing plans, undoubtedly the most ambitious part of Mamdani’s platform is free childcare for children six weeks to five years old—another attempt to tackle one of the city’s biggest cost pressures. This would be a game-changer for many working-class families. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy, reporting on a conversation with the economist Isabella Weber, said she “pointed to studies showing that child-care programs—which already exist in places like France, Sweden, and her native Germany—generate positive outcomes for parents and children alike.” Free childcare, as Weber points out, would help families who would otherwise be priced out of New York to stay in the city. And in addition to helping working parents (especially mothers) stay in the labor force—benefiting parents and boosting economic growth—family policy expert Elliot Haspel has argued that high-quality childcare programs contribute to communities’ “social infrastructure,” promoting children’s well-being as well as social connections and solidarity between adults.

Another top-line platform plank is making public buses fare-free. As a state assembly member, Mamdani spearheaded a program piloting fare-free buses on five lines across New York City, which ran from September 2023 to September 2024. That pilot was a success, with ridership on those lines increasing by 30% on weekdays and 38% on weekends; the fare-free lines also saw a 38.9% decrease in assaults on bus drivers. (Many altercations between passengers and bus drivers start with interactions at the fare box.) Mamdani’s proposal to make all city buses fare-free is a logical step to build on this success.

Almost all discussions of Mamdani’s platform (pro and con) have taken note of his unorthodox proposal for a pilot of five city-owned grocery stores. The idea here is to provide nutritious, affordable food for residents living in “food deserts.” Because the stores would run as nonprofits on city-owned land and not have to pay rent or property taxes, the campaign claims that they can charge lower prices than privately owned grocery stores. The plan is an innovative attempt to experiment with a “public option” for groceries, as the economists who wrote in support of Mamdani in The Nation put it, adding, “The economic data is clear: When the public sector steps in to correct market failures in the provision of essential goods, consumers benefit.”

Mamdani’s proposals around public safety and policing have also been a point of controversy. While he once advocated for “defunding the police,” Mamdani has since backed away from this rhetoric. He has campaigned for mayor on working with the police and freeing them up to focus on solving violent crimes. Rather than calling on police to play the roles of social service workers or mental health professionals, he plans to invest more heavily in mental health programs and other social services to help address the root causes of violence.

Mamdani has also pledged to raise the minimum hourly wage in the city to $30 by 2030. And—perhaps more surprising for a socialist—he has a platform plank devoted to helping small business. This plank includes promises to cut fines and fees for small businesses and speed up permitting, which the campaign hopes will “decrease dramatically” the time and money that businesses spend on navigating the byzantine permit approval process. (The campaign points to a similar recent initiative by the state of Pennsylvania that reduced the licensing and approval process for small businesses from eight weeks to just two days.)

Plans to loosen zoning restrictions and ease regulations on small businesses aside, though, at the heart of Mamdani’s platform are calls for a significant expansion of the public sector and major increases in government spending. This has prompted the usual semi-rhetorical question from centrists and conservatives: How will he pay for it? But as Weber, Galbraith, Chang, and the other authors of the June letter in The Nation observe, Mamdani’s proposals are “responsibly costed.”

The campaign says a Mamdani administration would raise $10 billion in additional revenue a year. Five billion dollars of that would come from an increase of the top state corporate tax rate to 11.5% a year (the same as New Jersey’s), and $4 billion would come from a new 2% income tax on those making more than $1 million a year. (These tax increases would need to be passed by the state legislature and approved by the governor, —something New York Governor Kathy Hochul has said she will not do. For more, see the sidebar, “How Will He Pay for It?”) Mamdani has also said he would bring in an additional $690 million a year by collecting money the city is already owed. And, in a nod to the sort of good-governance practices associated with past socialist mayors like the “sewer socialists” who held the mayoralty for 50 out of 60 years between 1910 and 1960 in Milwaukee and Bernie Sanders in Burlington, Vt., Mamdani intends to institute “common sense procurement reform,” including instituting competitive bidding for government contracts and thereby reducing wasteful spending. (See Shelton Stromquist, “Mamdani’s Municipal Socialist Inheritance,” D&S, September/October 2025.)

Municipal Socialism for the 21st Century?

Mamdani’s proposals may be both popular and economically sound. It is another question whether they are politically feasible, given the mayor’s limited powers and the considerable forces arrayed against his program. Many of the policies Mamdani is championing would require approval by the state legislature and the governor, for instance, most notably the tax increases needed to fund big-ticket items like universal childcare and publicly funded housing. Other plans like the rent freeze or changes to the city’s procurement system could be enacted more or less unilaterally, though enacting even those policies would likely meet with backlash from corporate interests.

What is clear is that Mamdani’s platform has captured the public imagination, and depending on what happens in the coming months and year, it could very well become a blueprint for progressives and socialists running at the local level elsewhere. It is already to Mamdani’s credit that he has powerfully recaptured the issue of affordability for the left. He is presenting the cost-of-living crisis not as a reason to attack labor unions and demand austerity—as politicians in both parties typically have done over the past several decades—but as a rationale for reducing inequality and building out the public sector.

Nick French is an associate editor at Jacobin magazine and a member of the Dollars & Sense collective.

Sources: John Cassidy, “The Case for Zohranomics,” The New Yorker, June 30, 2025 (newyorker.com); Various contributors, “Economists Support Zohran Mamdani’s Plan for New York City,” The Nation, June 20, 2025 (thenation.com); J.W. Mason, “What Can Zohran Accomplish?,” Dissent, July 4, 2025 (dissentmagazine.org); Robert Kuttner, “Ezra Klein Meets Zohran Mamdani,” The American Prospect, July 3, 2025 (prospect.org); David Dayen, “Mamdani and Lander Combined Two Strands of Progressive Politics,” The American Prospect, June 30, 2025 (prospect.org); Nick French, “In Zohran Mamdani’s Win, Socialism Beat the Status Quo,” Jacobin, June 25, 2025 (jacobin.com); Peter Dreier, “How Zohran Mamdani Can Succeed as Mayor,” Jacobin, June 30, 2025 (jacobin.com); Ezra Klein. “Mamdani, Trump and the End of Old Politics,” New York Times, June 28, 2025 (nytimes.com); Sam Mitchell, “Larry Summers Is Not Your Friend,” Jacobin, July 2, 2020 (jacobin.com); @LHSummers, X post, June 25, 2025; Zohran for New York City, “The Platform” (zohranfornyc.com); Zohran Mamdani and Michael Gianaris, “A Year Without Fares: Lessons From New York’s Free Bus Pilot,” The Nation, September 6, 2024 (thenation.com); Zohran for New York City, “Mamdani Revenue Proposal: How to Pay for The Mamdani Agenda;” David Moberg, “How Bernie Sanders Put Socialism to Work in Burlington: A Profile from 1983,” In These Times, January 29, 2016 (inthesetimes.com); Dana Rubinstein and Nicholas Fandos, “‘Anybody but Mamdani’: 5 Groups Emerge to Raise Millions in Attack Funds,” New York Times, July 30, 2025 (nytimes.com); Elliot Haspel, “Childcare Is Not Just an Economic Fix. It’s a Social Good.,” Jacobin, August 8, 2025 (jacobin.com); New York City Rent Guidelines Board, “Housing Types” (rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us); State of New York, Office of Rent Administration “Fact Sheet: Rent Stabilization and Rent Control,” January 1, 2024 (hcr.ny.gov); New York City Rent Guidelines Board, “About the RGB” (rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us); New York City Rent Guidelines Board, “Rent Guidelines Board Apartment Orders #1 through #57” (nyc.gov/rgb); Ginia Bellafante, “New York, Finally, Taxes the Rich,” New York Times, April 9, 2021 (nytimes.com); Tax the Rich (taxtherichny.com); Peter Sterne, “Mamdani promised to tax the rich. DSA is already mobilizing to make that happen.” City & State New York, July 11, 2025 (cityandstate.com); Mia Hollie, “How Zohran Mamdani Answered Every Question in THE CITY’s Meet Your Mayor Quiz,” The City, June 25, 2025 (thecity.nyc); @ZohranKMamdani, X post, December 19, 2024; Branko Marcetic, “Bernie’s First Political Revolution,” Jacobin, December 12, 2019 (jacobin.com); Ross Barkan, “Can Zohran Mamdani Buy the NYPD’s Support?,” The Intelligencer, July 2, 2025 (nymag.com).