Zohran Mamdani’s Next Act
The secret fear of the loudest die-hard critics of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is not that he will fail as the city’s leader but that he has a very good chance of succeeding. If the new administration demonstrates it can deliver on its promise to lower the cost of living while managing our city efficiently and keeping the streets safe, it will become clear that the fearmongers who have been screaming warnings about a coming municipal apocalypse were peddling nonsense all along.
We had nearly a year of discussion and debate before voters gave the go-head to Mamdani’s core four promises: freeze the rent, expand early education, make buses fast and free, and open one government-owned grocery store in each borough to help ease New York’s endemic hunger problem. “The residents of the city have spoken, and it’s been very clear, and they’ve done it in amazing numbers, and their response to the Mamdani campaign is that this has to happen,” Dean Fuleihan, a veteran government manager who will be Mamdani’s first deputy mayor, told me. “So I don’t see it as a question of choice.”
Fuliehan also points out that naysayers have been wrong before. “You and I have actually witnessed many times when someone said or commented, ‘Can’t be done,’ and then three months later, it gets done,” he said. “I was part of [creating] universal pre-K with Mayor de Blasio, and everybody said it could not happen. Could not happen in the education department; it would take five years. The then-governor of New York said, ‘Impossible. Start with a pilot.’ And it happened in two years.”
Fuliehan’s smooth confidence, the product of decades spent in state and local government, stands in contrast to the sky-is-falling prognostication of many New York leaders, who ought to know better. “If the city of New York is going socialist, I will definitely close, or sell, or move or franchise the Gristedes locations,” billionaire John Catsimatidis, the owner of the Gristedes chain, told Fox Business.
That is an absurd overreaction to Mamdani’s proposal to open five government-owned grocery stores in so-called food deserts. An estimated 1.8 million New Yorkers already rely on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, including 40 percent of Bronx residents, and more than 500 soup kitchens and pantries around the city also try to fill the gap. Mamdani’s proposal to open one outlet in each borough – essentially, five more food pantries – will in no way affect the profits or losses of Castsimatidis’s 17 supermarkets.
“I love New York. I will never move from New York, but there’s a lot of other people that will and are leaving New York,” Neil Blumenthal, the founder and CEO of the Warby Parker eyeglasses empire, told the Free Press. “Then there are others that will never even become New Yorkers because the cost of living is just too high. We’re one election away from becoming San Francisco.”
Another worried rich man, billionaire Bill Ackman, who has made one laughably wrong call after another about New York politics this year, predicted before the election that “if Mamdani becomes the mayor of New York, you’re going to see the flight of businesses from New York. Most of the businesses that operate in New York City in the financial sector are incredibly portable.”
Individual families or companies may pull up stakes, the way Ken Giffien moved the financial giant Citadel from Chicago to Miami and Elon Musk shifted Tesla’s headquarters from California to Texas, but cases like these run counter to broader data showing that the rich, as a group, generally do not move around the country chasing low income-tax rates. An exhaustive 2016 study by researchers at Stanford University and the U.S. Treasury Department tracked the tax records and movements of every millionaire in America for 13 years and concluded, “Millionaires are not very mobile and actually have lower migration rates than the general population. This is in part because family responsibilities and business ownership are higher among top income-earners, which embeds individuals in their local regions.” More to the point, the study says, “their elite income itself embeds them in place: millionaires are not searching for economic opportunity — they have found it.”
A similar study by the Fiscal Policy Institute found that 2,400 millionaire households moved out of New York during the pandemic years of 2020 to 2023 — but the state gained 17,500 millionaire households over the same period. “High earners do not move in response to tax increases,” the study found. “Out-migration for those most impacted by recent effective tax increases (in 2017 and 2021) did not increase significantly in response to the tax increases.”
And if we’re looking at particular cases, let’s not forget that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, just cut the ribbon on a new $4 billion headquarters on Park Avenue this year; Google opened a new $2.1 billion headquarters last year. They and other big-money firms are staying put because they know that the secret of New York’s trillion-dollar annual output is the army of young, talented professionals, artists, and scientists who grow up in our city or flock here from every corner of the globe. Mamdani has promised to help these folks find their footing in New York, whatever it takes.
“The affordability crisis was top of mind for folks and challenged everyone else in the race to speak to that, and no one spoke to it as well as he did,” Mamdani’s campaign manager, Maya Handa, told me. “People are unhappy and people are angry, and they feel like the system has screwed them over, and [Mamdani showed] a willingness to really call that out in an honest and authentic way and really say we should not be afraid to tax the rich, we should not be afraid to redistribute some of that wealth so that people can live a life of dignity. I just think that message spoke to folks.”
That blame-the-rich rhetoric has some elites worried. New York’s high-earning families, by and large, work hard, spend freely, and donate tons of money to charity. They aren’t used to being criticized by anybody, and certainly not by the activated army of pro-Mamdani young New Yorkers. But they should get used to it: If Mamdani succeeds, it will be more clear than ever that the city’s public- and private-sector leaders should have addressed New York’s affordability crisis long before now.
Above all, says Morris Katz, a campaign strategist who served as a senior adviser to Mamdani, New Yorkers should stop listening to the doomsayers. “They’re the same people who said in April that he would never win a Democratic primary, the same people who said nine months before that, that he will never even be viable, the same people who said it would all crumble in a general election,” Katz told me. “Zohran demands a culture of excellence. He pursues excellence relentlessly. And it was that culture that took the campaign from polling at 1 percent to defeating and toppling a political dynasty. And I think it’s gonna be that same culture of excellence that delivers this agenda in City Hall. And it’s going to be some of those same people with egg on their face.”