Democrat Zohran Mamdani is likely to be the next mayor of NYC, as he proffered a number of campaign promises that delighted progressives young and old. (This is besides his pro-Palestinian stand on the Gaza war, which is irrelevant to his actions as NYC mayor but still delighted the benighted.)
Here are a few of those promises taken from a June 25 article in the NYT:
Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani set himself apart early despite his lack of name recognition.
He did it largely by connecting with younger voters, producing sleek, engaging campaign ads on social media and beating the drum about the need to make life in New York more affordable. This narrow focus on a single, salient issue drove Mr. Mamdani’s campaign, which his main rival, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, described as “highly impactful” as he conceded the race on Tuesday night.
In his victory speech, Mr. Mamdani hammered home his message one last time, attributing his success to New Yorkers who had voted for “a city where they can do more than just struggle.”
I’ve lumped the promises under bold headers, but what’s indented comes from the NYT:
1.) Cheap, city-owned grocery stores funded (like other stuff) by increases in corporate taxes.
One of his ideas to tackle rising costs was to create a city-owned grocery store in each borough. The stores would operate on city-owned land or in city buildings, buy food wholesale and be exempt from property taxes, which would keep the cost of their offerings down, he said.
Experts say the logistics of such a plan are complex, but similar initiatives are already in place in other parts of the United States. Municipalities in Kansas and Wisconsin have operated similar models since 2020 and 2024, and Chicago and Atlanta are working on their own versions.
To fund his affordability initiatives, Mr. Mamdani plans to raise the corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent, which he says will create an additional $5 billion in revenue. He also plans to charge the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers a flat 2 percent tax.
2.) Free city buses (and other transportation improvement).
Among Mr. Mamdani’s most distinctive campaign promises is his vow to make city buses free. As a state legislator, Mr. Mamdani worked with Gov. Kathy Hochul to start a pilot program offering free fares on five bus routes for a limited period. (He later sought to expand the program, but the pilot was not renewed.)
3.) Rent freezes.
In outlining his vision for the city, Mr. Mamdani identified the high cost of housing as the leading reason that residents had left New York in recent years. His main campaign promise was to freeze rents for nearly one million New Yorkers via his appointments to the Rent Guidelines Board, which decides on rent increases for stabilized apartments.
He promised to triple the number of available affordable housing units, with 200,000 new homes to be built over the next decade. Mr. Mamdani also said he would double the amount of money the city currently spends to preserve public housing.
4.) Barring ICE (immigration and customs enforcement) from city facilities.
On his campaign website, Mr. Mamdani pledged to bar Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from city facilities while increasing legal support for immigrants being targeted and protecting their personal data.
5.) Free child care.
The rising cost of child care is among the most pressing issues for parents in New York City. Mr. Mamdani has promised to make free child care available for children between six weeks and five years old and to deliver “baby baskets” to new parents that would include educational resources and necessities like diapers, baby wipes and swaddles.
6.) Replacing some police services (Mamdani originally pledged to defund the police but then backed away on that:
Mr. Mamdani has proposed creating a Department of Community Safety, separate from the Police Department, to respond to people having mental health crises, and to expand violence interrupter programs. In April, he told The Times that the new department would free up “police resources to increase clearance rates for major crimes.”
7.) Criticizing Israel and promoting Palestine (which is irrelevant, as I said, to running NYC:
Mr. Mamdani has accused the Israeli government of committing apartheid and genocide in Gaza. His criticism of the Israeli government and its treatment of Palestinians came under fire during the campaign, as did his support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement.
In a podcast interview with The Bulwark days before the primary, Mr. Mamdani declined to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” a phrase that Palestinians and their supporters see as a rallying cry for liberation, but that many Jews consider inherently threatening.
Note that Mamdani says he will order Netanyahu arrested if he sets foot in NYC, though that scenario ain’t gonna happen.
Now these promises all sound good and generous, but all of them have problems. Barring ICE from city facilities may be illegal, rent control could drive up other rents in the city by huge amounts, free buses and child care could help bankrupt the city or reduce transportation options, and a rise in corporate taxes could drive businesses from the city. Not one of these promises has been free of criticism, and not just by Republicans. It’s one thing to offer people pie in the sky, and another to bring that pie down to earth. While I hope these things are possible, I don’t expect that more than one or two of them can actually be met.
In fact, a contributing NYT opinion writer has outlined some of the problems with one of Mamdani’s promises: city-owned grocery stores. (The two store programs outlined above are in small cities lacking any grocery stores, and one of the two hasn’t even come into being yet, as it’s just a proposal). The author of the piece below is is Nicole Gelinas. Yes, she’s a conservative, but you should hear her out, as I haven’t seen anybody say these city-owned stores would ameliorate any problem.
Click the headline to read, or find it archived here
Gelinas’s words are indented:
Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s fresh Democratic nominee for mayor, devotes 126 words and a 43-second TikTok on his website to a signature proposal: “city-owned grocery stores.” This brevity might imply that function will follow form, that the idea is so self-evidently sensible that little needs to be said about it.
What this self-assurance shows, though, is that Mr. Mamdani knows nothing about the grocery business, raising broader questions about the practicality of an assertive socialist agenda like his.
He claims that “a network of city-owned grocery stores” would offer cheaper food and dry goods because it would avoid paying rent or property taxes, “buy and sell at wholesale prices” and “centralize warehousing and distribution.” These assertions collapse upon the slightest scrutiny.
Here are the problems with the proposal (again NYT stuff is indented)
a.) There’s no space for such stores.
New York City’s government does not have a secret stash of large, empty, retail-ready ground-floor spaces conveniently located along major pedestrian and transit corridors. Indeed, the city regularly rents real estate, including retail-style space, from private owners.
b.) The city government likely lacks the ability to buy groceries at lower wholesale prices compared to regular stores.
As for city-owned grocery stores’ ability to “buy and sell at wholesale prices” and “centralize warehouse and distribution,” the supermarket industry is an intensely intricate business.
“Product doesn’t magically appear on store shelves,” says Ron Margulis, who long covered the industry as a journalist and who hails from a family of supermarket operators. “There is a science that’s applied to making sure the product sent to the shelf is actually going to be purchased, and that science costs money.”
The price a store or chain pays depends on a number of factors, from size and efficiency — volume discounts — to location to an understanding of the complex supply chain.
Whether Mr. Mamdani will have one supermarket in each of the five boroughs, as he originally proposed, or more, as implied by the imprecise term “network,” the city probably will not be able to get wholesale prices as low as far larger and more efficient supermarket chains.
c.) Some distributors would not sell to nonprofit stores:
Moreover, some major New York supermarket operators cooperatively own grocery distributors that buy products from manufacturers and share income with the members. They would not allow a nonprofit public entity to join these networks. As for the city creating its own centralized distribution and bulk purchaser, John Catsimatidis, the Republican billionaire who owns the Gristedes and D’Agostino chains, says such an investment would make sense only if the city operated at least 100 stores.
d.) Mamdani hasn’t shown that the city can bet already-existing stores with their razor-thin profit margins. Anybody who’s looked knows that the profit margin of grocery stores is only about 2%.
Other pesky details intrude on Mr. Mamdani’s plan. Wholesalers offer stores lower prices if they participate in promotions, with in-store coupons and prominent placement. To take advantage of such offers, the city would have to be a marketer of branded products — often, less healthy, higher-margin products.
The reward for successfully navigating the science of stocking shelves is an average 2 percent profit for grocery retailers, Mr. Margulis notes. Mr. Mamdani has made no compelling case that the city could engage in such superior negotiation and cost-cutting techniques to overcome this margin and provide less expensive products. This prospect is especially uncertain because the city-owned stores would probably face higher labor costs, including government-scale pension and health benefits.
e.) Who decides what to sell in these stores?
Once Mr. Mamdani has addressed these issues, he and his top staff members would have to confront another question: What products to sell in the stores? His idea of partnering with “local neighborhoods on products and sourcing” may sound straightforward. But are community board members going to argue over whether to stock Pringles or Lay’s potato chips? Should a city-owned store even sell sugary soda? Should vegetarians who are morally opposed to killing animals be forced to subsidize other New Yorkers’ steak purchases? And while it would be virtuous for the city to focus on selling fresh produce, retailers need to stock high-margin snacks and processed foods to subsidize fresh produce, meat and fish, which carry lower profit margins.
. . .And if city stores would be selling fresh produce for no profit, they would be competing with 1,000 low-priced street vendors, many of them immigrants, who operate carts under a program the Bloomberg administration began.
In his TikTok, Mr. Mamdani pledges to work with “nearby farms.” But as the city’s green markets demonstrate, high-quality food from regional sources is expensive, even absent profits for a third-party retailer.
The problem is that Mamdani is riding on a wave of socialist sentiment promoted by the likes of Bernie Sanders and AOC, who appeal to the benighted young folk.
But don’t get me wrong, there are aspects of American society that should be at least partly socialist, including Social Security, Medicaid, free school lunches for the poor, and, especially, free medical care for Americans who can’t afford it.
But there are those who spend their whole lives carping about capitalism, saying that we shouldn’t allow people to be billionaires, etc., and yet most of those people spend their lives taking advantage of the benefits of American capitalism. (I expect you can name one such person pretty quickly.) If Mamdani can get those grocery stores built, funded, and selling healthy food, more power to him. But his entire socialistic program simply isn’t going to work, and I think he’ll find that out pretty quickly. As for the free buses and child care and so on, well, those pies are still up there in the stratosphere.
What will Mamdani do about shoplifters in public grocery stores?
There will be no shop lifters because the shelves will be empty.
Shoplifting itself will be transformed by critical theory.
One of your funnier comments
That’s the worst part. MOST of his promises he can’t deliver on because the Mayoralty doesn’t have jurisdiction over many of his promises. So he is a liar and/or a fool.
The DAMAGE is what he can do to our already terrible criminal justice system and soft on crime horror. Consider I used to be a defense attorney for the poor (one step above pubic defender, class wise) in Mhtn and Queens. I have some depth of understanding of the parameters here.
If we start to see San Francisco style encampments, public pooing (outside the Palestinian encampments that is).. and more mass shoplifting, that WILL move the needle of decision for the people who pay the bills here who do have other options. No matter how much they love NYC. There’s a limit for the 1%’s tolerance and this fool may reach it leading to a 1970s style downwards spiral.
D.A.
NYC
https://x.com/DavidandersonJd
Officers from the Department of Community Safety will direct the offenders to free counseling services. That and some stern talkings-to should take care of the problem
Kansas City has its own version of a publicly owned grocery store and it is no advertisement for this plan. Even the Washington Post reports on it:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/07/18/city-owned-grocery-stores-crime-funding/
This michigas stems from the Elizabeth Warren — Kamala Harris theories that inflation is the result of price gouging. Ignore the low profit margins of grocery stores and then you can spin out these stupid plans.
“Next to bombing, rent control is the most effective technique so far known for destroying cities.”
— Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck
Economics 101 should be required to graduate high school. Unfortunately, most of the teachers would support Mamdani’s economic illiteracy.
Free public transit can destroy a city, too. This guy’s got a great plan to bring NYC to its knees. The diverting of police calls to community outreach? One more nail in the coffin. Come to Tucson and see the rot that’s been festering since our woke to the hilt mayor and council began destroying this place. Stop enforcing crime, give people free rides, support the “housing first model” which gives the addicts on the streets the keys to their castles… We’ve done it all and the rot is festering. It’s called enabling.
As we learned at UC, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The only thing government gives away is other people’s money. The government still has to pay for these things, and they do it with tax dollars. At some point people who actually earn money will chose to move somewhere that they can keep more of it, even if that means giving up real bagels or getting ice cream at 2am.
On the grocery store plan in particular, it’s been reported several places that Mamdani’s plan relies on a basic misreading of the city’s FRESH program:
Mamdani thinks (or thought) that the city spent the $140M that FRESH costs, and that he could just take $60M of that to play grocery store. (The fact that the city is already giving tax and regulator relief is an admission that the city is to some extent responsible for the problems).
I think everyone has a soft spot for Trader Joe’s (count me in).
Imagine – a gedankenexperiment – if everyone just got groceries from TJ’s – while all other stores wither away. Then there’d be only one grocery store.
The reasons – that could be in anyone’s kitchen – why that has never happened suggest how a single government run grocery store would be made to work against its competitors.
And a book – nothing to do with grocery stores – that comes to mind :
Fantasyland : How America Went Haywire; A 500-Year History
Kurt Andersen
Random House
2017
Well, that is too bad. I was briefly thinking that lower priced grocery stores was the only proposal that had a snowballs’ chance in hell.
When fantasy fights reality, reality wins.
Catch up on your facts – there are already stores of this type in NYC.
Very well funded and running.
In New York City, several organizations and initiatives provide free groceries to those in need. Some notable examples include Nutrition Kitchen sites run by the Department of Probation, The Campaign Against Hunger’s SuperPantry, and City Harvest’s Mobile Markets. Additionally, Trinity Church offers free meals and groceries on certain days. You can also find food pantries and community kitchens through ACCESS NYC and by calling 311.
“Stores of this type” Do you mean stores that are profitable and only need a little bit of a tax break from the city? Or, do the stores you reference operate at a loss and are funded by charitable organizations? If they are the latter, I don’t think that’s what Mamdani has proposed. I could be wrong.
That sounds more like a charitable project, not an actual store.
Grocery stores have a slim profit margin and aren’t good candidates for socializing.
A tip to Mr. Coleman: do not start your comments with sentences like the first one above. It is rude to others, is meant to denigrate them as ignorant, and serves no purpose.
Nicole Gelinas’ article relies on a flawed premise that the grocery stores must be profitable. This was never the intention. The wealthy taxpayers will subsidize the grocery store losses.
That makes the idea even more foolish. It would be far cheaper just to give the money to people who can’t afford groceries.
Famous WEIT loudmouth and NYer here: I’ll eventually finish my piece on this for my column, which I’ll post here, but meantime… he is the worst Muslim thing to happen to NYC since 2001 when, you might recall, we had a planes problem.
He is a disaster – voted for NOT by the “poor and oppressed” – blacks and the poorest zip codes rejected him. As did the wealthy who actually pay for nearly everything around these parts. He was voted for by the white, upper middle class Millennial and younger hipsters. Because they’re idiots.
City owned grocery stores… (sigh) which, he’ll “pay for with the BIG SUBSIDIES” given by the city to supermarket chains and delis – which actually do not exist. He refers, in error, to a slight tax abatement scheme. All lies and commie puke retardation. He is the ultimate fail up theatre kid of intellectual, wealthy Columbia U./NYU class marxists. Who studied “studies” and anti-colonialism rather than economics or actual disciplines.
Consider I’m holding back my opinions for the politeness of WEIT. You aughta hear how I REALLY feel about this young chap.
D.A.
NYC
https://x.com/DavidandersonJd
“Commie puke retardation”. You mean that is not how you REALLY feel ? LOLOLOL
Why do you think he’s so popular?
It’s a harbinger of the Dems going farther left.
Re young idiots, maybe they’re not (clinically). But to paraphrase Mr Clarke, sufficiently stubborn ignorance is indistinguishable from stupidity.
What is the main reason for food deserts in American cities? Real estate prices so high cheap grocery stores can’t survive, grocery stores dying because too many people steal, or no fresh produce because not enough local people want or can afford to buy it?
All of the above.
Mostly B. The Dollar Store in my little rustbelt community just closed for that reason.
It’s an unnecessarily complicated way to redistribute wealth. Mamdami should try first sending a monthly cheque to the poor, and increase taxes. And see if it works.
In our area of NY State there are Food Banks which play an important role for food for people in need. What is being discussed here is a fuzzy idea like Santa Claus that everyone can agree is a great idea, but is in reality impractical.
Mr. Mamdani and his supporters are a generation who, if they have even heard of the USSR, imagine it to be a legend, like Atlantis or Narnia. They are thus quite unaware of its previous experiment with state-run retail grocery stores. One veteran of this experiment recollected as follows on Quora.
“Potatoes were, in most cases, rotten, exposed to light (making it greenish) and frozen. So you take 1/2 kilogram of potatoes and get about 300 of gramms (if you are lucky enough) of edible stuff. Same with onions, carrots and cabbages. Tomatoes, cucumbers, fruits were season-biased.
Bread was excellent if you managed to get it soon after delivery or was lucky enough to live/work/study not too far (say 3 bus stops) from bread-making factory each of which had a store for local bread and other local goods.
Milk, cream, sour cream and other milk derivatives were either sold in customer’s bottles /flasks or tare was to be exchanged. Each tare type had it’s price, so sour cream flask was 10 cop., 0.5 liter milk bottle was 15 and 1 liter was 20 (bus ride was 6, tramway was 3 and trolleybus was 5 copecs).
Meat. If you were lucky you could get some. Who said “T-bone please”? You got meat, don’t ask what meat.
Chicken was to be boiled for several hours to become eadible (it was called “bluebird” ’cause it was luck to get some and it was literally blue).
Fish. Well… We had some fish. It was undistinguable. It differed from meat and chicken so I’d say it was fish.
Cheeses, sausages and other delicatessen. Some had them, others heard of them. Some sorts were available and, I have to admit, edible.
In most cases you had to wait in a LONG queue to get your groceries. “
The green stuff in exposed potatoes is poisonous.
I can’t recall details, and it’s easy now to find material read about, but I think it’s an alkaloid, and in practical terms you’d probably be barfing a lot at worst.
But it ain’t good any way you cut.. or peel … it.
Green potatoes contain solanine, a toxic alkaloid with nasty gastrointestinal effects.
Does that also apply if you find a green part on a potato chip?
Great question – …
IMHO…. yes, I think it survives the cooking…
Google’s AI says :
“While the green color itself isn’t harmful, it can indicate the presence of solanine. Peeling and trimming green potatoes can help reduce the toxin, but if the potato is green throughout or tastes bitter, it’s best to discard it.”
So what does heat do?
I’m wondering now…
Sometimes I’ll find a potato chip that’s partly green, and I never thought it was from chlorophyll…
Long ago, when the world was young, in the UK the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire, aka Sheffield, adopted the policy of increasing taxation on businesses to fund reductions in costs for residents. Some years later, the local authorities were complaining about vanishing jobs for said residents.
Perhaps we shouldn’t try to prevent these ideas being implemented. Instead form a group of ‘Independent Mystery Auditors’ who will impartially report on the success or failure of such schemes.
Although their job would be a lot easier if the schemes were launched with a set of criteria for judging success or failure. Something you don’t often see with political ideas because…
Mamdani won in part because for reasons unknown, centrist Democrats thought that putting Andrew Cuomo up against him was a good idea.
The word “communist” is often thrown around inappropriately at leftists, but it is a pretty accurate descriptor of Mamdani.
He, like all Communists going back to Lenin, seems to believe that wealth is a given…that it just exists but the evil capitalists have stolen it from the people. Those capitalist grocery stores owners…you know they’ve stolen those stores that spontaneously occur in nature and comrades, let’s take them back!
He greatly underestimates the crucial role of capitalism in creating these stores in the first place, and the entire complex supply chain supporting them. He thinks it’s a cinch to run them, because he’s a dilettante rich kid who’s never had to run anything.
Lenin was much the same…he dismissed businesspeople as “bookkeepers” who could easily be replaced by bureaucrats, but found out this wasn’t the case at all. See also Cuba, China before 1990, and recently Venezuela.
But I would not expect Mamdani or any of his supporters to have much knowledge of history.
I imagine the Republicans contributed heavily to Mamdani’s campaign.
On what charge?