Meet Zohran Mamdani – NYC’s New Mayor!
On Monday, I sent a note to four of my friends that live in New York City, warning them that I had heard they and their fellow city dwellers were on the verge of electing another one of those “Progressive” or “Socialist” Democrats and urging them to vote, instead, for the Republican candidate, Curtis Silwa, the man who founded the Guardian Angels.
My message was worded passionately but it was entirely disingenuous, which, I thought, would be crystal clear. After all, they were all coevals of mine – Baby Boomers who, in our college years, were anti-war, anti-interventionist, anti-government, and anti-Big Business, and then went to respectable colleges and universities that reinforced those ideas.
Since 2015, however, our generation had undergone a major ideological shift in which a vast number of us were infected by an allergic reaction to Donald Trump as a politician, which was tenacious and inflammatory and eventually presented itself as TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome, characterized by a reflexive disagreement to everything Trump does or says).
There are many curious symptoms of TDS, but the most noticeable is that millions of people that once were anti-war, anti-interventionist, anti-government, and anti-Big Business are now staunchly pro-war, pro-interventionist, pro-government, and pro-Big Business.
Of course, there were some of us who maintained our original biases, which, through five decades of living in the real world, turned us into Conservatives.
Anyway, back to my digital poke…
One of my friends must have thought I was serious because he wrote back and said that he couldn’t bring himself to vote for the Republican candidate because he “lacked the managerial experience.”
I suppose I could have said, “I was joking!” Instead, I wrote, “You don’t need ‘managerial experience’ to be Mayor of New York City. You need an open pocket and a red beret.”
Curtis Silwa, Andrew Cuomo, Eric Adams, and Zohran Mamdani
The next day, thinking about my friend’s comment about Silwa’s lack of managerial experience, I wanted to find out what experience Mamdani has had, especially considering New York City’s newly adopted ranked-choice voting system.
According to Alex Berenson (one of a very few journalists I read regularly), Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, and grew up in a heavily subsidized apartment in Manhattan with an interesting education, thanks to his father, Mahmood, a professor at Columbia who specializes in “post-colonial studies” and “the politics of knowledge production.”
From Berenson:
Mamdani went to Bowdoin College in Maine – think Oberlin with worse weather – where he founded (okay, co-founded) a chapter of Students for Justice and Palestine along the way to earning a degree in “Africana Studies” a few months short of 23.
After college, he “worked” as rapper called “Mr. Cardamom” before becoming a “field director” and “foreclosure prevention coordinator.” No matter that getting foreclosed on, much less evicted, in New York is nearly impossible. The state’s protections for tenants and homeowners verge on the absurd.
In 2020, Mamdani ran for New York’s state assembly on the promise of putting rent and mortgage payments on a “moratorium” until the end of COVID, with no back payments due later. Not surprising, he won.
In his bid for the mayor’s position, he has been promising a freeze on rent for all rent-stabilized tenants in New York City, which sounds like a really good idea unless you know how to count.
The core housing problem in NYC, which is no secret to anyone who lives there, is that there aren’t enough rental units to satisfy the city’s need. Despite the ever-rising crime and filth, the perception of the city as a springboard for wealth, fame, and power continues to attract 20,000 new residents every month.
Officially, the city has a population of 8.3 million people. Counting illegal immigrants, the number is closer to 9 million. (Interesting: In the 1960s and 1970s, when I was watching The Naked City, there were about 7 million.)
But building in New York is tediously difficult and crazy expensive. This has made it all but impossible for builders to risk new construction for lower- and middle-level-income families. The only option from a P&L perspective is high-end buildings for high-net-worth customers, leaving the housing shortage just as it is.
Berenson:
A rent freeze will do nothing to change these dynamics, and a lot of Mamdani’s other suggestions will make them worse. New York City’s budget, about $112 billion, is approximately as large as the state of Florida’s – though Florida has close to three times as many people.
The city depends hugely on the income taxes paid by the top 5 percent and particularly the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent of its residents. In 2021, the top 1 percent of filers paid half of all personal taxes the city collected.
These hyper-wealthy New Yorkers are not the reason New York is so expensive or crowded, and they’re certainly not the reason the city’s government is so bloated and inept. But they are the people that pay for half of what the city spends each year!
So, after Mamdani and his supporters get done celebrating his all-but-certain win, they should sit down and face the facts: If they want New York to continue supporting its cherished million-plus population of unemployed drifters and grifters, of mentally disabled streetwalkers who have no homes, of the professionally unemployed and perennially needy lay-abouts and half a million illegal immigrants, they’d better start thinking about what will happen to the city’s tax revenues when this tiny group of its citizen (probably 0.3% of the taxpayers) begins to move out of the city for a better tax and quality of life experience elsewhere.
As a former New Yorker, I don’t like to root against them. But as someone who is living in a state that will probably net at least 30% of those uber-rich who will be leaving NYC during Mamdani’s administration, I’m looking forward to the benefit it will bring to us.
