A New Yorker’s Take on Zohran Mamdani
As New York City enters a new political moment, a longtime resident reflects on decades of mayoral leadership and what the city’s next administration could mean for everyday New Yorkers.
I moved to New York City from New Jersey in March 2000. In the last 25 years, I've lived here under four different mayors: Rudolph Guiliani, Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams. Each mayor was unique in his approach to the city but, in certain ways, these four had many overlapping policies. What they all had in common was putting outside interests above the citizens that live in the city and who make New York City what it is.
When I arrived, the city was undergoing a serious transformation under Rudolph Giuliani. A former prosecutor, he introduced the “Broken Windows” policy as an alleged reaction to the rampant crime and urban decay of 1990s New York City. His messaging was clever and insidious, with New Yorkers believing that his focus on quality-of-life issues, beautifying and cleaning up public spaces, and cracking down on even misdemeanor crimes would increase investment and make residents feel safer. Except it was at the expense of many citizens’ civil rights, as overpolicing, racial profiling and disproportionate policing in poorer neighborhoods meant overall crime didn’t disappear but was merely shifted away from the city's financial epicenters.
The events of 9/11 allowed him to double down on his policies even further. The destruction of the twin towers also had another unseen effect. It meant that New York City would again become a hotbed for corporate interests to invest in, making it a place for the super wealthy to capitalize on. Rudy’s goodwill as “America’s Mayor” and the need to restore and rebuild the city meant that the first wave of hyper-gentrification occurred under his tenure. None of this was good for the average working New Yorker, who became priced out of neighborhoods almost overnight. If you were Black, Brown, or Arab, the city became a very uninviting place, as police, in the rush to make quotas, routinely harassed us and violated our rights. Worst of all, the “Disneyfication” of Manhattan began, turning New York City into a plastic safe haven for incoming tourists and business interests. All of this was done at the expense of some of New York’s most vulnerable inhabitants.
Michael Bloomberg took this to the next level, handing the city over to corporate interests and further disenfranchising everyday working New Yorkers. He also had one of the longest tenures of any New York City mayor. For more than a decade, Bloomberg took what Giuliani began and doubled down, expanding gentrification even deeper into the outer boroughs, making the cost of living in New York City skyrocket and giving leniency and tax breaks to the real estate and tech industries. More private money was coming into the city than ever before, and more of it remained concentrated at the top, without positively affecting everyday citizens.
Social services continued to decline, and despite fair hikes steadily increasing for public transportation, the trains’ infrastructure remained archaic and unreliable, even as the aesthetics of certain stations and trains were upgraded. With every passing year, from the mid-2000s into the 2010s, the city became even more unlivable for those who were born here or weren’t in the wealthiest tax brackets.
Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams were very ineffectual, but for different reasons. The very conservative mayorships of Giuliani and Bloomberg (even as Bloomberg presented himself as an “independent”) led many to want a swing back toward a more liberal leadership. De Blasio prided himself on being a people’s mayor, one who wanted to end aggressive policing and prioritize the arts and education, but ultimately he had little effect, in part because of his milquetoast approach. Eric Adams, the most recent mayor prior to Zohran Mamdani, also touted himself as a people’s mayor—a once-popular Brooklyn borough president—who proved to be a conservative sycophant maintaining the status quo of the two conservative mayors who preceded him in the 21st century.
Zohran Mamdani represents a real shift toward the everyday working-class person in this city. Take away the buzz label of “socialist” and simply listen to his ideas: genuinely asking New Yorkers in higher tax brackets to pay their actual fair share. He calls for a fairer distribution of housing in this city — housing that is genuinely affordable and not dictated by the market that private real estate moguls set. No one doing actual math thinks $2,500 for a studio apartment that’s barely 500 square feet is fair, equitable or just. Tens of thousands of units in New York City lie vacant as tax shelters and assets for the rich, while the number of unhoused people continues to climb.
When Zohran talks about creating agencies to handle social issues traditionally undertaken by police — with little or weak oversight, resulting in people’s civil liberties being violated — that won’t make us less safe or safer. Why should an institution such as the police with a history of being unable to de-escalate a myriad of situations be continually tasked with that work? I don’t want police showing up if someone is having a mental breakdown. New York City is a city built by enslaved Africans, free African Americans, Indigenous tribes and countless immigrant populations, and yet in 2025, the descendants of these groups have been largely ignored, persecuted or priced out of the place that they not only laid the foundation for but continue to energize and help thrive.
Zohran has been the only candidate in my 25 years who isn’t just waxing poetic or talking tough but laying out ideas that are rooted in common sense. Will they be easy? No. It will require everyone to get behind him to push his ideas forward. His ideas mean that those at the top will have to genuinely share and do their part instead of exploiting those beneath them, as has been the case in this city for longer than I’ve lived here. But make no mistake, the erosion and erasure of what New York City is and what it stands for will only be arrested under a mayor who chooses to take on the actual problems this city faces: greed from private interests, racism and favoritism toward the powerful and elite. It is the first time in a quarter-century I have genuine hope that New York City can change — for the better.
