Connor Greene
New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani built his platform around a simple premise: The city is far too expensive, and he’s going to make it more affordable.
From freezing rents and making buses free to boosting the minimum wage and increasing taxes for New York’s wealthiest residents, nearly all of the major actions Mamdani has pledged to take as mayor are aimed at lowering costs for New Yorkers and shrinking the wealth gap in the country’s biggest city.
“I think that the Democratic Party must always remember what made so many proud to be Democrats, which is a focus on the struggles of working-class Americans across this country,” he said in an interview on ABC.
Those ambitious, affordability-focused proposals have been key to Mamdani’s unlikely rise from a lesser-known Queens assemblymember who came into the crowded Democratic primary as a heavy underdog to New York City’s next mayor. Now, as he leaves the campaign trail and turns toward governing the city, the question looms large: Will he be able to make his plans work in practice?
“Mamdani’s going to face a lot of pressure to make good on some of these promises,” says Doug Turetsky, the former chief of staff and communications director at New York's City's Independent Budget Office.
“They're all feasible, and they're feasible because they're not really new,” he says, pointing to past mayors like Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio who were able to implement some similar city reforms after campaigning on them themselves. But Turetsky predicts that though the proposals are “good promises in my estimation,” they will be “tough to enact, and tough to enact quickly.”
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