Zohran Mamdani, the Socialist Who Could Be NYC's New Mayor

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1:23Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Jill Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, we might get a socialist mayor here in New York City. Can I tell you something? Please. It's slightly weird. Last night, the night before we're recording this episode, I had a dream that I was in a shared Uber with Adrienne Adams. And she was the driver. Really? She's another mayoral candidate. She was driving. And I told her we were going to interview this particular candidate. This is amazing. I was asking her for good questions. This is an amazing dream. You're not making this up.

1:58No, my dreams are very literal. And everyone in the Uber was giving me ideas for questions and had opinions and stuff like that. But now I can't remember any of them. That's really disappointing. Anyway, you know, we don't really cover a lot of New York City politics. We don't cover a lot of politics in general. We hardly ever talk about New York City politics. Who really cares about New York and the broad audience? We don't like to be too navel-gazing. But, you know, this is a city with a lot of people who, needless to say, work in finance. Potentially, if there are major changes to tax rates here, et cetera, then that could have an impact on the industry that we cover a lot.

2:38There are a lot of economic stories that are sort of New York-centric, particularly relating to housing that are very universal, et cetera. So it's not a crime to every once in a while do a New York City-focused episode. No. And this also relates directly to a previous All Thoughts episode we did all about how New York gets its groceries. That's right. That's the that's the connection. Let's jump right into it. I'm very excited to say we have a state assemblyman and candidate for the Democratic nomination for Mayor Zoran Mamdani coming on the show. Zoran, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for having me.

3:13It's a pleasure. I mentioned you're a socialist. What specific strand of socialism are you and are the other socialists revisionists and deviations of various flavors? We need to know your exact – the exact category here. I will leave that to the internet. I will tell you that I am a democratic socialist, yes. And I started to call myself that after Bernie Sanders' 2016 run for president when I finally had a language described the way that I saw the world and the way that I believe the world should be, which is one where every person has the dignity they need to live a decent life. By the way, you know, now that I am a journalist at a mainstream news organization, I do not personally have political opinions, but I can say that I didn't wasn't always the case.

3:56And I went to high school in Vermont and I was a volunteer on Bernie's 1996 House campaign. And there's a picture of me with Bernie. So I was a very early. You too. I was a Bernard brother before it became cool. Yes. You got in early. Yeah. All right. So how would you describe your platform? Is it the New York version of Sanders? It's heavily inspired by that same focus on income inequality and a recognition of the fact that one in four New Yorkers are currently living in poverty in what has now been described as the most expensive city in the country. and it is a platform at its core to make this city affordable and to use every tool at city government's disposal to do so because for too long we've had politicians pretend that we were just bystanders to a suffocating cost of living crisis when in fact we have two choices whether to exacerbate it or put an end to it and we've seen eric adams do the former we're running to do the latter what did eric adams do when you said he did the former what did he do in your view to exacerbate it you know the first issue that you hear from most new yorkers when it comes to cost of living is housing.

5:00And the mayor sets the rent increases for more than 2 million New Yorkers who live in rent-stabilized housing. And he came in as a self-described real estate. That's how he described himself coming into the office. And he's raised rents accordingly. He's raised them more than 9%. And this year, when the Rent Guidelines Board, which is entirely composed of his appointees, found that the landlords of those million or so units that have close to 2.5 million tenants had seen a increase in their revenues by 12%. He wanted to raise the rent once again to close to 8%. And that is one example. Another, I would say, is his relationship to Con Edison.

5:38Con Edison can only raise the rates of gas and electric with the permission of the state, and they do so through something called a rate case. The city of New York, under Eric Adams' administration, sided with Walmart in support of Con Edison's request to raise those rates by$65 a month on average. And I know that because I was also a part of that rate case, one of the few elected officials who signed in opposition to it. And I think that you can see this again and again and again in the way that he has intervened in the major costs that are driving New Yorkers out of the city. So since you mentioned housing and the rent freeze, you support rent freeze, lower rents.

6:12What do you say to people who think that you need to incentivize landlords to maintain their buildings, to build new ones. There are also people out there who think that regulatory reform is the key to the supply problem in New York. Why rent freezes particularly versus, you know, maybe loosening some of the regulations? I think that many of these things can actually be achieved in tandem. I am both a candidate who believes we need to freeze the rent for rent stabilized tenants and one who believes that we need to end the requirement to build parking lots and reconstruct housing, who believes we need to increase density around mass transit hubs, that we need to upzone wealthier neighborhoods that have historically not contributed to affordable housing production.

6:53And we need to interrogate why Tokyo is building 10 homes for every thousand people, Jersey City is at seven, and New York is barely at four. And some of that also has to do with what is often described as the mundane details of housing law, but can have massive impacts on whether or not it's affordable or expensive to construct that housing, be it single staircase versus dual staircase, or the regulations that have effectively made it illegal to build SROs in this city, and the need for us to have a true diversity of housing stock. And I think the reason for the focus on a rent freeze is that that is the clearest and most direct way that you start your housing platform as the mayor of the city, given your appointing of all nine members of that rent guidelines board.

7:35But it cannot be the extent of it, because a city of 8.48 million people deserves a mayor with a housing platform for 8.48 million people, not just the close to two and a half million that live in those units. And the other point I would make is that I have served in Albany. I'm now in my third term and I've seen in Albany, while I have opposed it, we have passed legislation that allowed landlords to double the amount of money they can receive for IAIs, which are otherwise known as individual apartment improvements. So to your concern around incentivizing repairs and things of that nature, landlords have already just won the right to double the amount of money they can receive for those improvements.

8:13And I was in opposition to that doubling because of the immense amount of fraud that we've seen in that kind of program where expenses are not actually what they are represented to be. And the final thing I would say is the rent guidelines had that findings of the 12 % increase in revenue for those landlords. If there are landlords for whom that picture is not an accurate representation. There is a program where they can apply a hardship program for relief when they show that their income from rents is not matching up to their costs at a ratio that is allowing them to continue to operate that building.

8:46And that is a program that I will intend to continue to support because I believe it is important to ensure that we can keep all of these buildings in operation. I've heard that about Jersey City, that they've actually done a fairly good job of expanding housing supply. What is the role in your vision for more affordable housing for the private developers and the for-profit developers and so forth? And in your view, how can we actually move the dial in terms of housing production of, and we'll get into some of the stuff about, I want to talk about the public housing too, or quote, affordable housing.

9:20But for the private landlords, what can actually, in your view, move the dial on that? I think some of it has to do with the regulations I was Speaking of the fact that we continue to have this requirement to build parking when you build housing, that's not a requirement we should have any longer. The need for us to take advantage of our unique place in this country and that we have mass transit hubs across the city and that should be a site of more housing density. And the fact that housing production has not been evenly distributed across the city, especially in wealthier neighborhoods. But I think even beyond that question of zoning, which is what a lot of this comes back to, there's also the question of process.

9:58We need to make it faster to build this housing and ensure that we don't see delay after delay after delay. And so one of the points of our housing plan is also to move away from the piecemeal process that is the one you can describe today as being where you have something known as member deference, where every city council member has the ultimate vote on whether or not a development goes up or down. We need to have a citywide approach, one that also fast tracks developments that are in line with the very priorities we've laid out with regards to housing production, labor standards, affordability, because it's been too long where we've seen proposals to build affordable housing for low income seniors languish for years in delays.

10:42And those delays all cost money. And that's also what drives up the cost of this production. And I think we need to streamline those processes. Actually, let's talk about that a little bit further because public housing, which you want to expand significantly, is very costly to build. And, you know, there are certain standards of public housing. We expect it to last a very long time. There's priorities that it be carbon friendly, et cetera. But like public housing production in New York City has been on par cost wise with even some very high end private construction, Hudson Yards on a per unit basis.

11:19came in pretty similarly. This would be important regardless of how it's financed. How do you actually get the cost down in your view of public housing production? So the first thing I would do is just distinguish between what kind of housing we're speaking of. When we say public housing, a lot of times we're referring to NYCHA developments across the five when I said it, I was thinking NYCHA. Okay, just to be clear. And I think that What we've seen in NYCHA is in many ways emblematic of a larger betrayal of working-class New Yorkers. NYCHA is technically underneath the auspices of the federal government, but the city and the state have an immense role to play.

11:57And we've seen over time, while the federal government has refused to fund the plan to put at least$40 billion towards NYCHA to deal with an ever-expanding amount of capital needs, The city, since the time of Bloomberg, has started to narrow the amount of funding that it provides, and the state is not stepping up in the way that it should. Now, in our housing plan, we propose doubling the amount of money we spend on preserving NYCHA housing because what we've seen is that oftentimes it's easy to describe this housing crisis in New York City as solely one of affordability. It's also a crisis of having a safe and habitable place to call your home.

12:36And as someone who represents the largest public housing development in North America, Queensbridge Houses, as well as Astoria Houses, Ravenswood Houses, I have seen so many of my constituents, seniors who are forced to walk up many flights of stairs because their elevator isn't working, who are waiting for months to have repairs be conducted. And who in a moment of housing crisis under Eric Adams, we've actually seen the time it takes to fill a vacant unit in NYCHA now exceed more than a year, which should be the easiest thing for city government to do.

13:21your best bottling plant employs 3 300 people how do you get 3 300 people working at peak efficiency your best store has reduced waste water and energy usage how do you make every store like your best store? Your best property has every guest raving. How do you make every property like your best property? The answer is Ecolab. Better performance, better outcomes, better impact. Ecolab. Now every location is your best location. For enterprise organizations, managing all your food needs is a tall order. But with EasyCater, you get a single workplace food vendor with the tools and resources to make it easy, giving teams across your organization an easy way to order from a huge variety of restaurants, all on one platform, all while consolidating your corporate food spend so you can control costs, streamline billing and payment, and simplify reporting.

14:17EasyCater, your business tool for food. To learn more, visit easycater.com slash podcast. I want to talk about another plank of your platform that is of particular interest to us, and that is groceries. Of course. So a while ago, Joe and I recorded an episode on how New York actually gets its produce, and we learned about the importance of the Hunt's distribution terminal and all of that. Why grocery stores? You know, we are focused on the cost of living crisis. And when you ask New Yorkers whether they're making$40 ,000 a year or$200 ,000 a year, you will inevitably hear them speak about groceries and the sticker shock they feel in going back to the grocery store and their sense that that which they could afford years ago is now out of reach for them.

15:04And ultimately, groceries and food are a non-negotiable part of being a New Yorker and living in any city in the world. You need to be able to afford it to build any kind of a life. And yet what we're seeing is that people are being priced out of produce. And when something is critically important to that dignity, I believe that there should be a public option for it. And what we have proposed is a reasonable policy experimentation in our city of a pilot program of a network of five municipal-owned grocery stores, one in each borough, that would respond to twin crises, one of affordability, and two of food deserts.

15:40Because as I was saying earlier, as the representative of Queensbridge Houses, I will speak to constituents who live in the largest public housing development in North America, and they will ask me questions for which I don't have the answer. Questions like, why are there five fast food restaurants in a five block radius, but I cannot find a place where I can get fresh produce that I can afford? And I hear that time and time again. And so what this proposal does is it not only guarantees cheaper groceries, but it also guarantees that those groceries can be in the very neighborhoods of New Yorkers that are being denied that service today.

16:11So some commentators have described this proposal as somewhat unusual in America. I actually don't think it's that unusual. I'm a former military brat and I vividly remember commissaries and BXs on military bases and those were subsidized. Anyway, how do you, I guess, address the fears of critics who worry that this is going to devolve into some sort of Soviet style market where, you know, maybe I can only buy one specific brand of tuna fish versus like the five that are currently on offer? Well, the beauty of a pilot program is that it only expands if it's successful. Now, I'm confident that it will be successful, and yet we will have to see those results themselves.

16:56And the reason we even came up with this is because of the successes of this model in Kansas, as well as what you said in the context of military bases across the country. And what we've also found is there was a feasibility study done in Chicago to see the applicability of this kind of a model in an urban setting. And it found it not only possible, but urgent and necessary. And that is the exact kind of approach we have to take here. And I think what's been quite interesting to me is state government, in the time that I've been there, has had a similar recognition, but on a different topic, where it said that gas prices are something that we can only allow to get up to a certain point.

17:32And when they go beyond that, we need to subsidize it to ensure that it's affordable. In 2022, the state spent more than$600 million dollars to suspend portions of the gas tax. And yet we are watching as New Yorkers are being priced out of bread and milk and eggs. And we are saying that this is beyond our control. And I think that the last point I would make here is that our proposal is one that would cost$60 million for all of those five together. That is less than half of the money the city is already spending on a program called City Fresh, which will subsidize corporate supermarkets in the hopes that they provide affordable groceries, but with no guarantee to that and with no requirement for them to accept SNAP or WIC or to engage in collective bargaining or to actually guarantee those cheaper groceries.

18:22So this is going to save the city money while piloting a program that we are confident will actually deliver the results that we have been denied in that existing program today. All right. I have two specific questions on this. One is I understand and I find intuitively logical the idea that people should be able to afford produce. And food has gotten very expensive at the grocery store. But grocery store margins themselves are pretty thin. About 3%. Yeah. So in terms of like actually using the grocery store channel to deliver these cost savings, Given that the retail store's margins are so thin, just 3%, why is that the dial rather than, I don't know, give people a voucher so that they can order Fresh Direct or something like that?

19:08You know, I am someone who has been skeptical of the efficacy of a voucher-based model. And what I am proposing with this idea of a network of municipal-owned grocery stores is not a means by which the city would make money and be able to increase that profit margin. I'm just saying these, like, the grocery-level margins seem very thin. No, I know you're not trying to make money. I'm just saying the margins seem thin. So if I think like what moves the dial significantly on affordability, the actual retail level grocery does not strike me as where the big opportunity is. I think the opportunity we have with a city-run model is that we can actually guarantee those cost savings, right?

19:47We have heard national chains and executives speak on earning calls about how they've been able to blame COVID-era supply chain costs to increase profit margins even further. And what this would be is a clear mandate from the city that every single dollar we save, we pass on. But beyond that, given that the mandate is not a profit-based one, that we can also pass on further savings to ensure that things like milk and eggs and bread are actually affordable. So the other thing, and you sort of anticipated this question, which is you mentioned, for example, that in existing NYCHA housing, people are waiting for a long time to get an elevator repaired and so forth.

20:28How do you ensure operational success? Because I think people would say, oh, I've seen how NYCHA housing works. I guess I'm going to know how a New York City-run grocery store is going to work. and who knows if it's going to be open and who knows if they're going to keep the refrigerators repaired or if they're going to have tomatoes one day. I'm just saying like you have already confirmed the idea that certain city run things are not run particularly well. So why should we, why should the public have confidence that even setting aside price, that these would be like run well, run efficiently?

21:02I have to earn the public's trust and I will do that every single day as the mayor of the city. And if you believe in public goods and public service as I do, it behooves you to believe in just as much in public excellence. And the first charges that you must have is to tackle that which has not displayed that excellence. I think NYCHA is an example of that. I also think one of the reasons why I focus so much on the MTA and my time in the state assembly has been because that's another example of that, where we have a world-class city and we do not have world-class public transit. I love our public transit.

21:33I love our trains, our buses. I love riding a city bike. And yet I know that the way in which we are running it could be so much better. And what has excited me is that we've seen glimpses of what that excellence could look like. I mean, I remember when I went in to get my vaccine for COVID, I was in and out of that facility in 15 minutes. And that to me was an example of the public sector being able to match the efficiencies we often hear about when we describe the private sector. I think about NYCHA, which today is a story of disinvestment and of so many New Yorkers being left behind, could also be a story closer to the one of how they developed the mini fridge in this country because it was a direct result of an RFP that was put out or a story about.

22:19Yeah. And I think there's also a story today to be told about Woodside Houses, which is a NYCHA development that is piloting a large scale installation of heat pumps that has been shown to both increase the quality of life, but also decrease the carbon emissions and the cost. And ultimately, that is what we need to show New Yorkers. We have to earn their trust. And the best way to earn their trust is to deliver the results that we're confident we can with these ideas. Just one more question on the grocery stores. So I take the point about their purpose is not to make money for the government, obviously.

22:50But how would you actually judge the success of them? I would judge the success in their provision of affordable groceries. I would judge their success in them meeting a need that is currently being left unmet. And I think that also means in the location of those stores that they actually provide a grocery store in a place where currently it is too difficult to find any of that produce and that their prices are, as we are discussing them, significantly more affordable and more in line with where New Yorkers are actually able to spend. I want to talk more about public excellence in the provision of public My Bernard brother, let's do it.

23:26I am an avid utilizer of many of the public goods that New York City provides. My kids are in public school. They go to the park almost every day. We ride the bus together. We ride the subway together. I don't think the subway and the bus are as bad as some people say. It's certainly not as bad as the impression I would get if I didn't live here and I were watching Fox News about New York City. Nonetheless, there has been an increase in crime over the last several years. I think it's come down recently. But there is a fair amount of disrepair. My impression is when I think about public goods in general, which is that people on the left really like to talk about them and how important they are and then generally do not seem as committed to sort of like product excellence as I would expect for them to, say, be politically sustainable.

24:19Like I said, I feel I feel very safe. I live in the East Village. I commute up here. I generally feel very safe. But, you know, like I see needles on the playground at Tompkins Square Park. There are bathrooms that are almost never open or functional. They're smoking on the subway from time to time. It's not the end of the world, but it's not very pleasant, especially when you have kids. And I'm curious like what your view is about like what seems to be a sort of tension between excellent provision of public goods and some of the law and order, as people would call it, requirements for them to be clean, friendly, excellent places.

24:56You know, I think we on the left have to make it clear that quality of life is of immense concern to us because when we are fighting for public goods, for public service, for public excellence, at the core of it is that belief that everyone should have an excellent quality of life. And yet what has happened in the last few years is that this term has almost been made to be understood as if it is solely a conservative concern when in fact this is at the heart of what we're fighting for. It feels to me like, to be honest, that the left has conceded that, that actually part of the reason it's become a sort of conservative coded term is because I perceive – and tell me if I'm wrong.

25:35It's fine. But I perceive a certain discomfort about some of the hard choices or some of the more – maybe carceral is the right word, law and order, whatever, that would contribute to making some of these public goods safer and clean. Well, I think what we have to make clear is that those are not the only choices on offer, and yet we do have to still respond to that same crisis. And so often, as you were describing, living in New York City, you have a different understanding than if you were to view it through the prism of social media or TV. And yet we can say two things at once, which is that there is an immense amount of fear mongering and that we still have to deliver world class goods, which we are far from doing today.

26:15And I say that as someone who loves our subway system and who knows that when you ask New Yorkers where they feel least safe in the city, you oftentimes hear those same words. It's the subway system. And that's why at the heart of our campaign is a proposal to deliver that same public safety that New Yorkers have been denied under Eric Adams, a mayor who ran in 2021 telling those same New Yorkers they need not choose between safety and justice. He's shown himself unable to deliver the former, uninterested in delivering the latter. And what we've said is that we will create a Department of Community Safety, the DCS, which understands that police have a critical role to play in public safety.