Mamdani’s Success Is Not a Response to Austerity

New York City is well known for its expansive public sector. New York State is first nationally in state and local taxes per capita and as a percent of personal income, and second in terms of state and local spending per capita. While those statistics aren’t available at the municipal level, state spending is certainly getting funneled to Gotham. Forty-seven percent of New York City residents are enrolled in Medicaid, for example, compared with 35 percent statewide. Consider, also, the city’s multibillion-dollar affordable housing effort and its unique commitment to sheltering the homeless. Austerity, this is not.

Somehow, New York Times Magazine staff writer Jonathan Mahler missed all this. In a recent Times op-ed, Mahler claims that New York City is only now emerging from 40 years of business-dominated hostility to welfare spending. He considers austerity the purpose of the state control board’s takeover of the city’s finances after the 1975 fiscal crisis. “Desperate to revive its economy, New York transferred power in the 1980s from the public sector to the private sector,” Mahler writes. “New York was reborn. Only not exactly. Large portions of the city were left out of the transformation.”

In Mahler’s telling, Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has arrived to restore the city’s long-abandoned preference for the poor. A “backlash has produced Mr. Mamdani, with his bold proposals to turn back the historical tide with an old but familiar playbook: big government and high taxes,” he writes. “His system-is-rigged narrative is aimed at the poor, and they are the ones who would benefit most from his policies.”

Mahler’s argument is so ahistorical and contrary to the known facts that it warrants commentary. His version of history seems influenced by NYU historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s 2018 book, Fear City, which also asserts that the 1975 crisis was a nefarious plot by business interests to dismantle the city’s welfare state. That is not, of course, what then-New York governor Hugh Carey and other leaders thought; they claimed that they were putting the city’s finances on a sustainable long-term path to support its needs for public services.

Arguably, that’s exactly what happened. The city emerged from its fiscal crisis sooner than many expected. The welfare state returned, larger and more robust, and the economic recovery proved far more fiscally sustainable than it otherwise might have been. Even Phillips-Fein concedes in her book’s closing pages that austerity has ended: “From the vantage point of the present day . . . it is remarkable that the city did not lose more of its public sector than it did. . . . For all the pain of the cutbacks, one can imagine much worse outcomes.”

Claiming Mamdani’s success results from a backlash against post-fiscal-crisis austerity is unserious. A more credible account of the socialist’s rise and Democratic primary win must grapple with the fact that his voter base in the primary was not the poor but young, college-educated adults who feel excluded from public largesse. Judging from the voting results, Mamdani also benefited from South Asian ethnic pride, evident for example, in the corridor in Queens running along Jamaica and Hillside Avenues from Woodhaven to the Nassau County border.

Voters in many low-income neighborhoods gave their support not to Mamdani, but to his rival, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Now running as an independent in the general election, Cuomo seemingly hopes low-income New Yorkers will see Mamdani not as a champion but as a threat to the benefits they currently receive.

Hence, in recent days, Cuomo’s attempt to make an issue of Mamdani and his wife’s occupancy of a rent-stabilized apartment, despite their relatively high household income. The former governor has proposed the not-subtly-named “Zohran’s Law”—state legislation that would apply income limits to vacant rent-stabilized apartments upon rent-up. Cuomo seems to be signaling to low-income voters that he’s protecting their public benefits from affluent interlopers like Mamdani.

Rent stabilization has always been a universal program, with no income restrictions. Mamdani is entirely within his rights to be renting one. Further, Cuomo’s proposal is hastily designed, capping eligible incomes at three-and-one-third times the annual rent, so that every new tenant would be considered “rent-burdened.” Every stabilized rental unit would have a different maximum income, making the process of finding an apartment extremely complicated in certain neighborhoods. Such rental apartments would also need to be advertised on the city’s Housing Connect online portal, restricting landlords’ choice of tenants.

Cuomo’s proposal recalls the process by which one rented an apartment in the Soviet Union—in other words, less practical policy than a political ploy to win a news cycle. It does highlight, however, the former governor’s interest in seeing that his base of low-income voters not defect to Mamdani.

That, in turn, shows that—far from mobilizing the poor to revolt against austerity, as Mahler suggests—Mamdani has done something subtler and more interesting. He has built a base among people who live in New York only because of the city’s long post–fiscal-crisis prosperity. That prosperity created an expanded service economy attracting both college-educated young adults and immigrants from diverse backgrounds.

New York is well past the fiscal crisis, and one result is that new groups are using the democratic process to demand a larger share of the welfare state. Some may wish our political debates focused more on growing the pie than slicing it differently, but we should at least see these arguments for what they are.

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images