Mamdani’s Countdown to Day One-Affordability Starts With Accountability

Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani at the podium.

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By Bob Hennelly

This will be the first Monday that Mayor Elect Zohran Mamdani gets to set the media agenda for the city he has yet to officially lead. Indeed the whole world will be watching with the kind of fascination and hope it had when a very young President-Elect John Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic to be elected to the office, prepared to assume it.

This moment of transition off of Mamdani's historic win comes before Mamdani has to take on the perilous 24/7 task of leading a city of over eight million with a workforce of around 300,000 when a mismanaged response to just one snow storm can inspire the first paragraph of your political obituary. 

It's about maintaining a coherent narrative that brings along the one million New Yorkers that voted for you while at the same time winning over voters who either voted for your opponent or stayed at home. By getting two million voters in an off-year election to come out to vote, Mamdani and his volunteer army of campaign workers demonstrated that there's still hope that democracy can provide the opportunity for improving conditions for all of us irrespective of our socio-economic or immigration status.  

It's a leadership handoff that comes once in a generation and there's a lot more at stake than what happens in New York City because of the white supremacist currently in the White House who has made the destruction of the American labor movement his top priority and our democracy along the way. A key part of Mamdani's forward-looking agenda is supporting unions and the power of collective action they rely on. The truth is you can't usher in a new era of affordability without accountability and that includes ending the way governments subsidize corporations whose business model relies entirely on paying low wages and on the government supplying things like food stamps.

The mayor-elect has to balance being a change agent, a challenge to the current establishment, while demonstrating that he can work effectively within it. So far, he has demonstrated that he knows how to practice this kind of tai chi in his high profile visit to the annual Somos confab in Puerto Rico where New York state's Democratic Party ruling elite gather in luxury supported by the very corporate lobbying interests that Mamdani's campaign challenged. 

In 2019, New York Times reporter J. David Goodman described how the list of Somos's top sponsors paying "between $5,000 and $40,000" were a "who's who of companies and groups with pending struggles in Albany" including Airbnb, “embroiled in a bitter fight with a powerful hotel workers' union, and the cigarette company Altria, which is battling bans on flavored e-cigarettes."

The headline on that 2019 article was "The Tropical Conclave Where Politicians and Lobbyists Go to Make Deals." This year, as the New York Post reported, Mayor-Elect Mamdani was the big draw along with New York Attorney General Letitia James at a cocktail party sponsored by the municipal union DC 37 at the El Caribe Hilton where chants of "tax the rich" broke out when Gov. Kathy Hochul arrived.

While in Puerto Rico, Mamdani met with union members from the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council as well as worshipped at a local mosque where he also helped distribute food at the mosque's soup kitchen. That takes on a certain relevance if you consider that according to the U.S. Census Bureau, New York along with Puerto Rico, ranked with Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee as having the highest poverty rates in the nation.

While New York's top Democrats were in Puerto Rico, 2.9 million New York State food stamp recipients were set to receive the payments the Trump administration had stopped. As of this writing, the New York Times reported President Donald Trump has ordered states like New York to reverse any actions they have taken "to provide full food stamp benefits to low income families, threatening financial penalties if they do not comply."

On Friday, the US Supreme Court granted Trump's  emergency appeal to stay a lower court ruling requiring the federal government, despite the shutdown, fully fund the food stamp program upon which 42 million Americans depend including tens of million children, elderly and disabled.   

While the corporate news media fixates on political intrigue with headlines speculating on if Mamdani will challenge Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for his seat, they ignore reporting on the economic immiseration of millions and millions of New Yorkers. It's a story they have downplayed  in our era of paywalls.

Over decades the Albany establishment, that's been dominated by Democrats, has repeatedly sided with deep-pocketed monied interests, just like their beltway counterparts busy trading stocks while steering the ship of state. This massive wealth concentration and income disparity is the consequence of our system being swallowed whole by big money.

As the percentage of Americans in a union slid and wages stagnated or declined, federal tax policy helped US multinationals export the nation's industrial base to cheaper labor markets with weaker or non-existing environmental regulations. At the same time in the early 1980s, Albany decided to rebate back the state's Stock Transfer Tax to Wall Street that had been on the books since before WWI. This miniscule dime per hundred dollar stock transfer tax generates revenue whether the market goes up or down. 

A levy like this has been on the books in London for hundreds of years and is in place all over the world yet here, it's on the books but Albany has handed back hundreds of billions of dollars to the wealthiest investors while it closed hospitals and under invested in the transportation infrastructure. The MTA had to borrow billions but investors don't mind because the bonds they buy are tax-free and help them accumulate more wealth faster. 

Meanwhile, the public pays higher fares and congestion pricing as the wealth concentration continues to accelerate—all because too many of Albany's leaders were more committed to their donors amassing vast fortunes than the economic wellbeing of their constituents. 

Indeed, affordability starts with accountability. The vast wealth inequality that we live with now has been decades in the making.

In 2025, the poverty rate in New York City spiked to 25 percent, up from 23 percent the year before, and close to double the national rate, according to the Robin Hood Foundation and Columbia University's Center on Poverty and Social Policy. Out of the 2.2 million New York City residents in poverty, 420,000 are children. 

But these numbers don't tell the whole story by half. 

Consider the county by county analysis done by the United Way that tracks the crisis of affordability by zip code that uses localized data on essentials like the cost of childcare, utilities, transportation, food and rent for households that are working. United Way calls this struggling cohort ALICE for Asset Limited-Income Constrained-but Employed. These are households that don't live below poverty but struggle month-to-month to make ends meet.

In the five boroughs, if you add the poverty level to the ALICE cohort, 74 percent of the Bronx is struggling to get by. In Brooklyn and Queens it's 54 percent. In Staten Island, 51 percent face an uphill battle to make ends meet. For Manhattan it's 50 percent. 

This is the electorate that picked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over Rep. Joe Crowley. This is the New York City that elected Mamdani.