The Mainstream Begins to Come to Mamdani

[Passages]

So, he’s a socialist. But his agenda sure is popular, and in the American progressive tradition.

by Harold Meyerson July 14, 2025

New York City’s rents keep rising, and as they do, so do the odds that the city’s next mayor will be Zohran Mamdani. The median rent in Manhattan in June was $4,625, which was 7.6 percent higher than it was one year earlier. In Brooklyn, median rent was $3,733, 1 percent higher than in June 2024.

The crisis of affordability, in which housing costs loom largest, is the issue that Mamdani has addressed most directly and forcibly on the campaign trail, and is among the issues weighing down the dim re-election prospects of incumbent Mayor Eric Adams. (As, of course, is Adams’s deal with President Trump to allow ICE agents to proceed with his blessing within the city limits in return for the feds dropping their corruption charges against him.) Mamdani’s support for a rent freeze clearly played a major role in his decisive victory over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in last month’s Democratic primary.

A number of the city’s billionaires have been predictably spooked by Mamdani’s victory, and besides rallying to Adams’s banner (or Cuomo’s, or anyone’s not named Mamdani), they’ve leveled a host of absurd charges against the Democratic nominee: He’s a communist! He’ll seize the means of production! (Which in New York means what? Publishing houses? Broadway musicals?) Among their more plausible-sounding warnings, the Cassandras of Billionaires’ Row allege that a Mamdani rent freeze will stop the construction of all new housing.

That’s only plausible, of course, until you realize that the only apartments on which rent can be frozen are those built before 1974, and those relatively few whose building owners have agreed to have their post-1974 buildings subject to a freeze in return for the city providing financing for their construction. (Those two categories encompass about half of the city’s apartments.) In other words, a Mamdani rent freeze will not deter private developers by one measly iota from building new projects to their hearts’ contents.

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-14-mainstream-begins-to-come-to-mamdani/