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.
