New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on an ambitious agenda that won him the enthusiastic support of a broad coalition of voters. His charisma and boundless energy has helped to raise the hopes and expectations of many. The agenda itself should be applauded, and the emergence of this coalition, with its hopes and expectations, is a positive development that has helped create a growing audience for socialist politics.
Yet winning Mamdani’s agenda requires more than the election of a progressive politician—in this case a democratic socialist—to executive office. Arrayed against it are New York’s capitalist class, which includes the powerful real estate and financial interests based in New York City and the politicians who represent them. Without a countervailing force in the form of an organized popular movement capable of defending its own underlying class interests, and which is able, when necessary, to engage in targeted, disruptive action, strong and sustainable progressive reform is not possible.
After almost four months in office, both Mamdani’s governing style and strategy and political events beyond his control—including the outcome of the budget battle currently being waged in Albany—have revealed how unlikely it is that his agenda will be realized. In fact, some of it has already been abandoned. And Mamdani’s responses have illustrated that while he wants to establish his bona fides as a trusted and efficient manager of New York City, there is much less evidence that he has any interest in building a movement to defend the interest of New York City’s diverse working class.
The means to, and meaning of, “Tax the Rich”
Mamdani’s “affordability agenda”—universal free childcare, free buses, a rent freeze for stabilized apartments, and an explosive growth in the number of affordable housing units—has mass support but carries with it a hefty price tag. New York City is legally unable to raise its own taxes without approval from the state. Candidate Mamdani’s explicit call to raise income taxes on the wealthy and on corporations in order to fund this agenda was (and remains) extremely popular, and was of course intended to put pressure on the New York State legislature and more particularly the governor. Without a revenue increase of many billions, achieving this agenda will be impossible.
Whether increased taxes on the wealthy can actually be won by the usual political means is now playing out in Albany. On April 22 the state legislature passed its sixth “budget extender” of the season after negotiations to resolve the state’s budget blew past the April 1 deadline. It’s not unusual for the budget to be late—last year it took until May 9—but this year negotiators have not yet gotten beyond bitter struggles over implementing climate goals and reforming auto insurance laws to more fiscally significant issues. Prominent among these are (separate) proposals by the state senate and state assembly to raise taxes on the wealthy and on corporations. Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul has been adamant in her opposition to such tax increases.
Every year, New York State’s governor and each of the two houses of its legislature devise separate budget proposals. The three proposals are a basis for the negotiations among the leaders of the two houses and the governor (a process formerly gendered as “three men in a room”—this year the only man among them is Assembly Speaker Democrat Carl Heastie). In recent years, it has become common for the legislature’s “one house budgets” to include a proposal to raise taxes on high earners, and some form of such increases has occasionally passed. This year, though, those proposals have taken on increased significance.
The revenue the city would receive under both senate and assembly tax proposals is somewhat less than under Mamdani’s own, but those amounts are nevertheless enough to have heartened his supporters. Governor Hochul, though, has not hesitated to repeat her strong opposition, and it’s hard to see where pressure sufficient to move her can come from. She dismisses passionate chants from crowds demanding these tax increases, unconcerned about any potential electoral weakness coming from their opposition, and is likely to remain firm as the budget negotiations drag on. (The pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes that Hochul finally announced—and Mamdani applauded—on April 15 would only raise $500 million annually, while the legislature’s proposals would raise $3 billion in city income taxes and an additional $1-2 billion in direct state funding for the city. By contrast, in a document labeled “How to Pay for the Mamdani Agenda,” the mayor-to-be offered a plan to raise $10 billion.
It was never likely that a robust form of “tax the rich” would get over the hurdles that the State’s power structure imposes. Mirroring the U.S. constitutional order as a whole, the structure of New York government is notorious for serving to insulate the powerful from democratic control. The “three men in a room” is but one problem. The business lobby has made sure to fund lavishly the re-election campaigns of Hochul and others, and has made its objections to taxation publicly known. According to Crain’s, even the proposed pied-à-terre tax on second homes in New York City, “is certain to prompt a massive fight in Albany from the real estate industry in particular and delay the already delayed state budget much further”. Like the governor herself, business leaders are predicting that businesses would leave New York if their taxes are raised. Predictably, in an April 6 letter to shareholders, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon argued that cities and businesses needed to “compete,” and blamed high local taxes for his own corporation’s shifting of some jobs to Texas.
Although it is technically possible that the legislature could pass tax legislation outside of the context of the budget process, the access of New York’s capitalist class to the halls of power, and the usual nervousness of legislators looking over their shoulders in an election year, prevent any serious consideration of such legislation which would in any case require veto-proof majorities.
The Mamdani administration has no real strategy to try to overcome these obstacles. The option of cohering a sustainable mass movement to disrupt business as usual, and grow popular participation and organization, has not been on the table. To be sure, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and its sister organization, the nonprofit Our Time, have been consistent in their organizing efforts on the issue, but the tactics they have used—door-knocking and phone-banking—have done nothing to move New Yorkers beyond the atomization of individual voters calling legislators. Tactics that worked, in a particular moment, to get a democratic socialist elected are not sufficient to win a serious reform agenda.
The limitations of DSA’s strategy are apparent in the diminishing returns of its tactics. Well-planned phone-banking efforts failed to get more than about 1,700 people to ride buses to “take over” Albany on February 25, far short of what was hoped for (this at a time when millions can be mobilized to demonstrate against Trump). And having won his election, Mamdani has proven ambivalent in his support of his DSA allies’ tactics. By mid-February, the mayor made it clear that he himself would not be taking part in such “tax the rich” events. Thus, he avoided attending the Albany “takeover” and the March 29 tax-the-rich rally in the Bronx headlined by Bernie Sanders.
The mayor’s February 5 endorsement of Hochul for re-election—and the resultant demise of the campaign of her primary challenger, Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado—removed a significant source of leverage over the governor and signaled still further Mamdani’s intention to collaborate as much as possible with the powerful as an elected executive, rather than attempt to lead a popular movement against the state’s rulers and its Democratic Party machine. NYC-DSA, for its part, distanced itself from Mamdani while indicating in a statement that the governor was not worthy of the endorsement.
Mamdani’s efforts to distance himself from his DSA allies have become apparent within the tax-the-rich movement. Winning the “affordability agenda”—or at least part of it—has remained DSA’s goal. In its messages asking members and supporters to urge their legislators to support taxing the rich, the appeal was always in the name of achieving parts of the agenda—usually, free child care. The organization pointed out, correctly, that the January agreement between Hochul and Mamdani on universal childcare was limited to funding pilot programs and the early stages of a phase-in of the program.
But Mamdani has had to retreat to using whatever new revenue he can get from the state to fill a $5.4 billion gap in the city’s budget, which he is legally required to balance. His appeal to the legislature on “Tin Cup Day”—the day in February each year on which officials from around the state make their case for state assistance—included a request for a 2 percent tax increase on high earners, but in his testimony he mentioned no other goal than that of achieving a balanced budget.
Mamdani’s strategy in action
In order to pressure Hochul to support the 2 percent increase, it may have been possible for the mayor to encourage the organization of activities beyond phone calls to legislators. He might have attempted, for example, to bring together unions, nonprofit advocacy groups, and other organizations to mobilize their members and engage in activities such as protests at her New York offices or holding marches in each of the city’s boroughs. Even at the level of electoral politics, he might have sought leverage by offering more support for insurgent democratic socialist candidates.
Instead Mamdani resorted to a threat to raise property taxes (which the city can do without state approval), seeking to pressure the governor into an income tax hike as a lesser evil. This was a serious miscalculation. Not only did it “greatly anger” Hochul, who viewed it as a breach of his promise to tone down his tax-the-rich rhetoric, but it backfired in the eyes of many whom the mayor should have seen as allies. The city’s property taxes are notoriously regressive, and this move left middle class homeowners—overwhelmingly in favor of taxes on the rich—feeling unsupported by the mayor. Black homeowners in Queens publicly protested and spoke to their city council representative on the matter, and this seems to have been enough for Mamdani to back off of this property tax hike proposal.
These miscues—angering a powerful Democrat he hoped to keep as an ally (despite their differences on his signature campaign promise), and alienating an important electoral constituency—can be viewed as understandable errors of an inexperienced executive. But perhaps it is more instructive to consider them as natural consequences of his strategy: From early in his candidacy Mamdani has tried to combine a style of friendly negotiations between himself and powerful players with an attempt to represent the interests of working people.
Mamdani is not responsible for the city’s fiscal woes. His predecessor Eric Adams had been overestimating revenues and resorting to accounting tricks to balance the budget. Nonetheless he clearly needed a “Plan B” (perhaps better thought of as “Plan A”) and for that he first turned to the all-too-familiar playbook of seeking systematic cuts. Even before his trip to Albany he issued an executive order mandating that every city agency appoint a chief savings officer, tasked with proposing ways to slash hundreds of millions from the budget. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that under these circumstances reforms like a robust free child care program and free buses are fast receding from what is likely.
More recently, Mamdani has found himself in a battle with the city council over his proposed budget. He has resorted to the highly unusual tactic of tapping the city’s reserve fund to avoid a deficit. Council Speaker Julie Menin, a “moderate” Democrat, defended the council’s own proposal, which includes a supposed $6 billion in savings, and argued that dipping into the reserve fund will damage the city’s credit rating and spike its borrowing costs. Each side has attacked the other’s proposal as requiring cuts in essential services.
Charm the Rich
Mamdani’s strategic approach started becoming clear after he won the election primary last year. In June of 2025, he met with business leaders from the Partnership for New York City and the Association for a Better New York, assuaging their fears about “socialism” and assuring them that his administration will behave as a partner in pursuing their shared goals of a prosperous and affordable city. He also promised to consider retaining Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch (a billionaire from the business class herself), a move which he eventually made despite his stated opposition to Tisch’s collaboration with former Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul in rolling back progressive criminal justice reforms.
Mamdani’s positioning himself as a “reasonable” politician, willing to learn from experts rather than following a particular ideological program, has also extended to the electoral arena. His endorsement of Hochul followed their joint announcement of the free child care program. The governor had made it clear that affordable child care was a goal of hers as well, and many of the state’s business leaders (with an interest in having their employees able to come to work rather than attend to the kids) backed her on this, as long as state treasuries could fund it without a tax increase. Rather than emphasize the inadequacy of the partial and temporary funding Hochul was able to come up with, Mamdani chose to cheerlead alongside her. His endorsement of her re-election was an indication of his approach and desire not to have the kind of contentious relationship with the governor that former mayor Bill DeBlasio had with Andrew Cuomo.
The other leaders of New York’s Democratic Party establishment—U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—were much sharper than Hochul in their opposition to Mamdani during the election. Nonetheless, Mamdani urged his fellow DSA members not to endorse one of their own—city council member Chi Ossé—to challenge Jeffries in the 2026 primary. In a close vote, the organization denied Ossé their endorsement.
Given this background, it’s not surprising that Mamdani relied on his ability to appear reasonable and friendly, and to use a strong dose of flattery, during his infamous November Oval Office visit with Donald Trump. In October, he had similarly flattered the members of the Association for a Better New York as “some of the most forward-thinking leaders within our city.” Despite his inexperience, Mamdani is a very skilled tactical politician and careful student of recent political relationships. New York City’s mayors have always had to rely on a positive relationship with Washington (as they have with Albany), and Mamdani had clearly observed Trump well enough to know that if any money was to flow from D.C. to New York, that relationship had to be nurtured early on.
If Mamdani’s intent has been to establish a good working relationship with the business community, he has probably succeeded. Crain’s New York Business issued a scorecard on the Mayor’s first one hundred days, rating him on several metrics. On business confidence in the new administration, he was given a mixed review, applauding his responsiveness and attempts to be engaging. On the other side of their ledger, the piece mentioned aspects such as the “one-sidedness” of his approach to “bad” landlords. But whether his friendliness to business leaders will enable him to implement his costly agenda is another matter.
The police and community safety
Mamdani has also been careful to ensure a positive relationship with the NYPD. Eric Adams, of course, began his career as a police officer, but before him Bill DeBlasio was famously despised by the cops for his support for reform measures meant to minimize killings by police. To avoid such a chilly relationship, Mamdani re-framed the purpose of his proposed Department of Community Safety as premised on removing burdens on the police in responding to emergencies involving mentally ill people, i.e., by having social workers among those responding. Police would thus be allowed to do “their actual jobs” while professionals trained to work with the mentally ill would have a different role to play.
But the new mayor was apparently overeager in this regard. In late January, the mother of a 22-year old mentally ill Queens man, Jabez Chakraborty, called 911 requesting an ambulance when her son, who lived with her, experienced a rageful crisis. Only the police responded, without an ambulance, and when the young man brandished a kitchen knife the cops shot him four times. Mamdani’s first public statement on the matter (which he later retracted) was that he was “grateful to the first responders who put themselves on the line each day to keep our communities safe.”
Chakraborty himself wound up in the hospital, in critical condition, handcuffed and shackled. The group Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), which advocates for South Asian immigrant workers and which had provided important support for Mamdani during the election campaign, published a statement by the family strongly critical of the NYPD and the mayor’s praise of them.
This case offered the purest possible example of a mental health emergency requiring a non-police response. Chakraborty’s mother did not report being in danger, and the entire incident took place inside their home. It potentially offered a perfect illustration of how Mamdani’s promise to adopt a “public health approach to safety” made sense. Instead it was perhaps the first indication that his plan for a Department of Community Safety was in trouble.
The proposed new department was meant to address crises involving mental health, domestic violence, the threat of gun violence, hate crimes, and outreach to the unhoused by relying on trained professionals to diffuse the crisis, rather than just summoning the police. Creating the department would have required City Council approval, and its billion dollar budget made that unlikely, more so as the city’s deficit became clearer. The mayor wound up retreating in mid-March by creating a scaled-down Office of Community Safety (not a deparment), which he can do by executive order.
A recent article in Gothamist detailed additional ways Mamdani has pulled back on some of his public safety initiatives. Although he remains on record as wanting to disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group (SRG—known for its violence against peaceful protesters) and end its gang database, both moves are strongly opposed by Commissioner Tisch. In an April 8 New York Times interview, the mayor said that in cases of disagreement between him and the Commissioner, final decisions would be his. But according to Gothamist, he has recently “tempered his rhetoric” on the SRG and failed to speak up when Tisch defended the gang database. While some have defended the mayor’s approach as necessary to “build trust” with the police, long-standing activists have demanded a different approach. They rightly argue that the mayor should take his lead from those “directly impacted by the city’s failed police-based mental health response and the organizations led by and accountable to them.”
Whether these retreats are consequences of Mamdani’s retention of Tisch in particular, or simply of his concern that he avoid the kind of conflict with the NYPD that DeBlasio experienced, is not particularly important. More significant is what they reveal about a politician attempting to undertake radical changes by relying on a passive electorate. Power must be confronted in order to make these changes, and to do so requires a self-conscious movement with clear objectives, democratic mechanisms to determine strategy and tactics, and a focus on broadening its reach and increasing its popular strength. Mere political maneuvering within an undemocratic political system, established to insulate the powerful, will inevitably fall short in winning meaningful reforms, let alone the more fundamental change sought by socialists of all stripes.
Affordable housing
Mamdani entered office having made the fight for affordable housing a central policy promise. And it’s likely Mamdani will achieve one of his goals: a rent freeze for the approximately one-third of New Yorkers living in apartments covered by the city’s rent stabilization laws. He has been able to appoint members to the Rent Guidelines Board—the agency which each year determines a maximum percentage by which rents in stabilized units may legally rise—who are sympathetic to the concerns of tenants squeezed between small wage increases and more rapid inflation. Mamdani was able to overcome the plans of outgoing Mayor Adams who almost succeeded, on his way out of office, in appointing enough landlord-friendly members to ensure landlord concerns would prevail on the board for the next several years.
But the rent freeze was hardly the only proposal in Mamdani’s platform intended to increase housing affordability. The platform promised to use city funds for the construction of 200,000 new units over ten years. “[F]or decades,” it read, “New York City has relied almost entirely on changing the zoning code to entice private development—with results that can fall short of the big promises.” Most of his plan’s funding—$70 billion out of $100 billion—was to be raised by a proposed sale of municipal bonds.
Mamdani’s ultimate support of ballot measures fast-tracking and otherwise smoothing the path for developers relies on the same market-based methods of constructing for-profit housing that have failed, over those same decades, to produce very many units of housing that most New Yorkers—certainly the vast majority of working-class New Yorkers can actually afford. (Ben Rosenfield and Holden Taylor, in an article in the Marxist journal Spectre and summarized in a Tempest interview, dig into this dynamic, and its recent history, in great detail.)
The ballot measures were backed by a coalition including developers and real estate firms, who funneled millions of dollars into the campaigns. Of course, and as Rosenfield and Taylor note, whatever housing goals Mamdani may personally favor, he “will have to navigate the limitations and contradictions of the capitalist city and state.”
Another early sign of his apparent change in approach on housing came during Mamdani’s October speech to the Association for a Better New York (co-founded in 1970 by leading real estate investor and developer Lewis Rudin). Mamdani stated that business leaders had approached him with concerns about the “affordability crisis” and their inability to employ people in an “expensive New York.” “As rents soar,” Mamdani continued, “it becomes almost impossible to attract the very kind of top talent that we need to see in this city.” One can imagine that the “top talent” people that these business leaders look to attract have a very different limit on the rent they can pay from that of the median working class New Yorker.
As for the project to build a deck over the Sunnyside rail yards which Mamdani theatrically pitched to the Developer-in-Chief in another Oval Office meeting (in February 2026), even if Trump comes through with the promised $21 billion in federal funds, the 12,000 homes it would eventually support would only become a reality several decades into the future. The housing construction itself would be separately funded.
Samuel Stein of the Community Service Society of New York, writing in Jewish Currents, runs through some of the financial limitations that a strong public housing program would face: Raising large sums on the bond market strains the city’s budget as debt comes due, and a downgrade by credit rating agencies may well increase interest payments on that debt. Paying union-scale wages on city construction projects while keeping rents low and maintaining buildings well adds further strain.
The city’s deficit—now a top concern for Mamdani—adds a new dimension to these limitations. The mayor recently broke a promise to implement a measure passed by the city council in 2023 that would expand CityFHEPS, a program providing housing vouchers intended to move homeless people from shelters into permanent housing. Eric Adams challenged the measure, and Mamdani is now continuing that challenge, saying that the city cannot afford it and battling the council—and advocates for the homeless—in court. The issue has attracted quite a bit of public attention: A recent article in Gothamist profiled several individuals fearing that they will wind up in the revolving door between homeless shelters and the streets.
Conclusions
In one sense, Mamdani himself is not to blame for the failure of his agenda. The obstacles to achieving it are not of his making. The Mayor could be criticized, though, for not pointing out to his voters how formidable these obstacles are, and thereby raising the question of what it might actually take to win. Eric Blanc and Bhaskhar Sunkara—strong Mamdani supporters very wary of (even hostile to) left critiques—warned in a December article in Jacobin against overestimating the Left’s strength based just on an electoral victory. “To push Hochul and other establishment politicians to fund reforms,” they wrote, “New York’s Left will need more popular depth and breadth. Without such a working-class movement, there’s a real danger that Zohran’s agenda will get blocked.”
As a DSA member himself (like Blanc and Sunkara), Mamdani is surely aware of this argument. He could have spoken up himself on the need to build popular power in order to prevent his agenda being blocked. But it’s clear, after his absence from tax-the-rich rallies and other events challenging New York’s Democrats, that his choice not to alienate himself from them—and from the business class—has prevented a full-throated call for a movement opposing the powerful.
Blanc and others close to him are very troubled by what they see as merely empty criticisms with no proposed solutions—attacking Mamdani (and others) from the Left, without taking responsibility for building real, lasting coalitions. But rather than taking aim at leftist critics, the socialist movement needs an open and thoroughgoing debate about how we offer a strategic alternative to what Mamdani is offering.
The New York Times, in its “first hundred days” piece on Mamdani, didn’t hesitate to point out that “he has quickly retreated from one campaign promise after another” and that he “has little actual power to impose that ideology [democratic socialism] on city government”. But while this article has criticized Mamdani in similar respects, more important than passing judgement on the man is to point out the reality of what it will take to build and maintain the kind of power that can win what Mamdani’s voters eagerly wished for.
In a matter of weeks, it will be clear how much revenue the city can expect from Albany this year. Under any likely scenario, a tax on the wealthy sufficient to plug the budget gap and also move the needle on meaningful reforms, e.g., free buses or significant numbers of truly affordable publicly-owned apartments, will not happen. Hochul’s wildly inadequate concession in the form of a pied-à-terre tax—especially after Mamdani essentially declared victory, saying “today we’re taxing the rich”—will almost certainly be as far as she is willing to go. But in itself, this won’t necessarily lead to discouragement and lowered expectations. The outcome will depend on what conclusions people draw. It is certainly not too late—especially at a time of heightened activism—for numbers of people to begin building the kind of forceful pushback that can eventually make the Mamdani agenda a reality.
The capitalist class is powerful—New York City’s real estate and financial interests particularly so—and its political reach extensive. Without strong and growing institutions of resistance that can fight for working people’s needs, gains promised by an individual maverick politician can’t be won against such power, except in muted form. Many DSA members, as well as others on the Left who watch events closely, may find ways to come together and help build those institutions. But a different strategic vision will be required. If this happens, the momentum triggered by Mamdani’s campaign and election, rather than dissipating, will build. Otherwise, we risk the type of disillusionment with “progressive” politics, the result of which we are all too familiar with in Trump’s “America.”
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Karamccurdy; modified by Tempest.
