How to Be Better Represented
Maybe Just a Little Hope as a Treat?
For the past week, New York City has been under the same heat dome as much of the country, with temperatures dancing around both sides of the 100-degree mark. With nights in the 80s, this city of hard surfaces soaked up sun and kept feeling hotter and hotter each day with no real escape.
New York City is like few places in America, and possibly like none of them. It’s population density means that much of the life here is lived out of people’s (generally smallish) homes and on the streets and in the parks and public spaces. In other larger American metro areas, you spend a good amount of time by yourself or just with people you know in cars driving ribbons of highways to get to where strangers might be. Going somewhere here means walking or taking the train or bus, usually with lots of other people whose trajectories and projects happen to overlap yours. (In fact, if you see an empty train car, it’s empty for a reason, like no A/C, and you don’t need to be a hero.) This means that New York is alive in a unique way for America, and it’s one of the reasons why so many people want to visit or to try, as the song goes, to make it here.
It’s not easy to make it here at the moment. The city is definitely expensive and getting moreso, particularly when it comes to housing. A recent NYC Comptroller report found that “among households at the city’s median income range ($60-80K), nearly 40% are considered rent-burdened, with about 5% severely so,” where rent-burdened means paying more than 30% of income on rent plus utilities. (Severely rent-burdened means paying more than 50%.) New York has some renter-friendly policies that keep some costs down for some residents as long as they stay put, but overall more than half the city’s residents are rent-burdened. Rising food prices only compound the struggle. Public transportation is relatively affordable, allowing people to live in lower-rent neighborhoods and travel to work, but lower-rent neighborhoods continue to disappear or to appear further and further from borough centers. And transportation costs continue to rise even as the system shows its age as public investment in it hasn’t kept pace with need.
This is all table-setting for the New York mayoral primary that took place this week. A lot happened. The NYC Comptroller’s report mentioned above came out of the office of it’s current occupant, Brad Lander, who ran for mayor this cycle and who was recently detained by ICE for gently requesting a judicial warrant. Lander also supported Zohran Mamdani, who pulled off an amazing victory over former disgraced NY Governor Andrew Cuomo.
If you don’t live in or near NYC, you’ve probably heard that Mamdani is a socialist and a Muslim and that he’s young, three things solemnly typed into column inches or said with consternation in widely distributed sound bites. All of these are mostly true: His Muslim but he’s Democratic Socialist, which has its own flavor, and he’s young compared to the depressingly decrepit political establishment, usefully embodied in this very race by Cuomo himself and his endorsers.
Mamdani’s surprising and convincing victory has many in power and legacy taking to theory. Here’s one of my favorite headlines from the week that appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
That’s how bad things are, folks. People are considering socialism, right up there with getting so thirsty that you’re thinking about drinking your own urine.
Here’s the thing, though. If you look at and listen to Mamdani’s platform, it’s pretty straightforward and not at all crazy. New York is too expensive, and life in the city is too hard for too many — and we can take practical steps to change that. That’s it. That’s the whole deal. Housing is increasingly out of reach for many New Yorkers, and he proposes freezing rents and building more affordable housing. Many people can’t afford public transportation, and he proposes making all city buses free and faster (dedicated infrastructure, cracking down on double-parkers, etc.). Subways will still have fares to ride. To help offset rising food prices, he wants to create some city-owned grocery stores not beholden to profit or shareholders so that people can buy food at wholesale prices. He wants to increase public safety not by adding to the largest current police force in America but by creating what he calls the “Department of Community Safety” that focuses on data-driven crime prevention. He prioritizes making the air in NYC public schools safer to breathe while making them greener spaces and powered by renewable energy. He thinks we should care about LGBTQIA+ people and the health of everyone.
But wait, you say. How are we going to pay for all this radical socialism? New York is, of course, full of money. Mamdani proposes raising corporate tax rates to the current levels of our surrounding states and introducing a surtax on those making more than $1 million a year, similar to the wildly successful Massachussets law that has generated more revenue that expected while seeing the number of millionaires in the state increase since it went into effect.
Will all or any of this happen if Mamdani does become mayor? Honestly, I don’t know. Like I said, New York is full of money, and money always wants more money and will fight attempts to limit it. New York politics and budgets between the City and State are also complicated and fraught and inertial. And Mamdani embraces the kind of identities (Muslim, socialist, immigrant) that so many have tried so hard, with a fair amount of success, to infuse with the kind of toxicity that short-circuits asking why things couldn’t be better for most people. The discourse around him has already gotten gross and absurd and national, and it’s only going to get worse.
Still, I do know that my kids, now just out of their teens, want to be artists and creatives, and at least one of them would like to build a life in or around New York City that isn’t defined by struggle and meanness. They were excited to vote in their first NYC mayoral primary, especially since, unlike at the state or national level, they finally had a choice whose platform, message, energy, and age better represented them. As born and raised New Yorkers, they aren’t spooked by words like “Muslim” or “Socialist” or “immigrant” or “queer”.
The swelter finally broke last night, and the New York streets were filled with people walking a little slower to wherever they were going. You could feel the city exhaling. It’s going to be a long and sometimes stifling summer, but, for at least a moment, better days seemed simply possible.
Thank you for this. My daughter is a New Yorker, a Muslim, and a member of DSA, and has volunteered many hours on the Mamdani campaign. As you say, the rhetoric around it has become gross and absurd, but when I listen to Anna or Mamdani himself, all I can see and feel is hope. I'm glad you and yours see and feel that too, and I hope people are right when they say the national democratic party could learn something from this campaign. A national commitment to hope for people who don't see or feel any would be most welcome.