
NEW YORK—Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York primary resulted from an uprising of voters inspired by his message that the largest and most expensive city in the nation can be turned into an affordable place for the besieged working class to live comfortably.
They were inspired by a message that the preconditions for this huge shift exist and that the people have only to unite and organize to force it to come into existence.
One of the initial reactions from the mainstream press and from a variety of lawmakers beholden to corporate interests is that he is making promises that he cannot keep. A brief look at some of his major positions shows, however, that this is entirely false.
Among his most popular proposals are initiating free bus service, freezing rents on rent “stabilized” apartments, setting up city-owned grocery stores, and establishing free child care. Even his proposal to build 200,000 affordable housing units, seemingly out of reach because of the huge expense involved, is actually out of reach to a profit-hungry real estate industry, but not to a city government determined to do the right thing.
To begin with, not all of his proposals are actually new. They have, in fact, been done before. High on that list is the freezing of rents, which was done several times by former Mayor Bill de Blasio. Freezing of rents is entirely possible for any mayor of New York, since it is the mayor who appoints, at will, the majority of the members of the Rent Guidelines Board, which can freeze rents without any approval needed from Albany.

Other parts of the Mamdani plan depend on higher taxes on big business and the super-rich, who, of course, won’t be happy about paying a little more. But an examination of what he is proposing, compared to what big business and the rich would have us believe are “realistic” options, shows that Mamdani’s taxation agenda is doable, too. Under his plans the very wealthy on the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side of Manhattan would pay increased income taxes, which they can well afford.
His income tax proposal for those making more than $1 million a year is only a 2% hike. Most reasonable estimates are that this tax alone would bring in $4 billion or more to the city coffers.
In addition, he calls for hiking the top corporate tax rate from the current 6.25% to 11.5%. The hue and cry years ago that corporations would flee to New Jersey if they had to pay more taxes is absurd because in New Jersey those same corporations are already paying 11.5, something the corporate media fails to mention when they decry the “lack of realism” in Mamdani’s corporate tax plan to raise taxes on the richest corporations.
His plans for taxing the wealthy are not aspirational rally cries but totally realistic approaches to improving social services in the city. According to most projections, Mamdani’s approach to corporate taxes would bring in another $5 billion or more a year.
The glitch on these tax hikes for the wealthy and the top corporations, of course, is that they would need the approval of Kathy Hochul, the governor. She has been the beneficiary of support from some of those who would have to pay more and right now, she says she is opposed to any tax hikes.
Rather than impracticality being the problem for Mamdani’s initiatives, then, the battle that he and the people will have to fight will be with Albany and the corporate backers of lawmakers there.
Hochul, the top Democrat in the state, has not endorsed Mamdani. This week, she simply said she wants to have “a positive relationship with whoever is the mayor of New York City.”
When it comes to money to pay for services, some Democrats are even saying Mamdani should cool his opposition to some of the Trump agenda, because the city needs support from the federal government. Already, however, the Trump administration is slashing funds for New York wherever it can.
Those areas include natural disaster protection and demands that the city pay for immigration roundups which, of course, Mamdani opposes. Opposition to the Trump agenda then, is necessary for any realistic mayoral candidate, unlike sitting Mayor Eric Adams and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, who have both worked with Trump to no good ends for New York.
A huge part of Mamdani’s plan, and the part that has the ruling class most nervous, though, is his proposal to build 200,000 units of affordable housing. The city’s debt limit is now $40 billion, and it would have to be raised to as much as $70 billion so that the needed funds the city would have to borrow for any massive building program would be available.
Again, however, the economics of the situation are not the problem. The amounts of money that would have to be borrowed are not out of the question, nor would the debt load be more than the city could manage. The kind of borrowing that would be involved pales in comparison to the many trillions of dollars the right wing is adding to the national debt right now in the Senate and the House in order to pay for tax cuts for the rich.
The problem is the guarantees that the real estate industry is demanding in order to make sure it can control and obscenely profit from any housing construction. It is why they have always opposed massive building of low-income public housing, for example, long supported by New York’s Metropolitan Council on Housing.
Filling 200,000 units of affordable housing with working people paying taxes would boost the economy of the city in numerous ways, bringing in more than enough funds to pay off what is borrowed. Many economists and housing experts agree with Mamdani on this, but that does not make the property developers and real estate agents any happier.

On child care, Mamdani says the city should implement free child care for every child from 5 months to 5 years of age. His campaign argues that the savings incurred by raising taxes on the top corporations and people making over $1 million would go a long way to pay for these costs.
In addition, this is one area where there should be agreement from Gov. Hochul, who claims she supports billions in state aid to New York City for child care. Free child care in New York is also not entirely new. For pre-kindergarteners 4 years of age, it already started under Mayor de Blasio.
As for free buses, they’d cost around $700 million annually, also doable from those new tax revenues of $9 billion.
And the free grocery stores? They’d cost the city less than what it now shells out to private supermarkets in tax abatements, land use privileges, public transport to and from stores, and much more. (Watch People’s World for upcoming stories detailing how these public grocery stores would work and how they would save people huge amounts of money.)
So, when the New York Times, Fox News, and others argue that Mamdani is making promises he cannot keep, the reply should be that it is the lawmakers already in power who are not keeping the promise they made to work for the people they represent.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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