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Zohran Mamdani, like every modern mayor of New York, takes on the devilishly difficult job of attempting to master municipal challenges for which, in reality, there are no true solutions. Every New York native possessing more than a surface-level understanding of the city knows that no single man can wave a magic wand and cure poverty, end homelessness, abolish violent crime, or make the subways run on time. If perfection is the metric, every mayor must fail; the job’s exacting standards are more akin to those of Major League Baseball, where even elite players like Yankee slugger Aaron Judge fail to get a base hit seven times out of every ten turns at bat.
The new mayor must remember that the most important decisions that land on his desk will be, by definition, problems that none of the other 300,000 city employees could resolve. Here are five big ones he will face on day one.
The Frozen Logic of Regulated Rent
Mamdani’s first campaign ad depicted him plunging into the cold waters of Coney Island and declaring himself to be “freezing … your rent!” Providing relief to renters in rent-stabilized apartments is the central promise of the Mamdani campaign with no wiggle room to back off. That sets up the administration for a battle against the inexorable laws of supply and demand: A famous column by Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning Princeton University economist, laments that “the analysis of rent control is among the best understood issues in all of economics, and — among economists, anyway — one of the least controversial … Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand.”
The side effects, says Krugman, include “sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go — and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended.” In St. Paul, Minnesota, for instance, voters approved a rent-stabilization law by referendum in 2021 — and by 2024, 80 percent fewer housing units were built in the city compared to the previous three-year average, leading the city’s young, progressive, all-women city council to dial back its stabilization law to spur more construction. Mamdani told me he is aware that the explosion of New York rent is fueled by the cost of maintaining apartments, especially property taxes and insurance premiums. But he isn’t likely to take the next step and loosen stabilization.
The Correction Conundrum
An astounding 48 people died while in the custody of the city’s Department of Correction during the mayoralty of Eric Adams, 15 of them this year alone. The failure to contain violence on Rikers Island led an exasperated federal judge, Laura Swain, to place the jail system in receivership.
That means Mamdani must negotiate with a court-appointed overseer of Rikers — who will have sweeping powers to change hiring, staffing, and deployment policies and renegotiate union contracts — while also moving forward with plans, pursuant to a 2019 law, that calls for the island jail to be closed by 2027 and replaced with borough-based facilities. The mayor will be in a politically impossible position: He won’t have full control of his own Correction Department, but he will also need to expand its footprint by pushing to complete borough-based jails that are behind schedule, over budget, and targeted by neighborhood advocates who don’t want them built.
Vexed Vendors
Mamdani’s political rise included a special focus on immigrant taxi drivers and the vendors who sell halal chicken and other street food. The City Council recently passed a law, enacted over a veto by Adams, that will lift the total number of food vending licenses from the current, absurdly low 6,800 to 17,000 by 2031. General vending licenses will increase from 853 to more than 11,000 by 2027.
Those increases are better than nothing — but not by much. Right now, there are an estimated two unlicensed vendors operating for each one with proper paperwork. The planned increase will provide some relief, but the yearslong waiting list will remain, as will the complaints from rent-paying storefront owners who resent the competition. It’s a fight that has literally been playing out in the streets of New York for centuries.
Public Housing, Private Problems
The New York City Housing Authority, home to 450,000 residents with a median income of $26,000 a year, has long been starved of adequate funding; the Independent Budget Office estimates that NYCHA will need $78 billion over the next 20 years to bring its 350 developments up to a state of good repair. The Housing Authority has turned in recent years to striking deals that allow private companies to improve and manage selected developments under a federal program called Rental Assistance Demonstration.
But a recent investigation by The City found more than 14,000 housing-code violations since 2021 in buildings under public-private RAD management. “Most code violations — such as mold, pests and peeling paint — get addressed within a year. But at 10 developments, more than half of violations take longer than that to resolve, and at five of those 60% or more of violations are still open after one year,” The City reports. Mayor Mamdani will find himself in charge of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development that is charged with taking action, including fines, to fix problems that are accumulating by the thousands in buildings owned by NYCHA but with management outsourced to private firms.
The underlying problem is that the average NYCHA tenant pays $628 a month in rent — not nearly enough to cover the cost of keeping the aging stock in good shape — with two-thirds of the authority’s funding supplied by a federal government that has been retreating from funding public housing for decades with further cuts likely.
Unfinished Business at One Police Plaza
Another Adams legacy is the wave of lawsuits by high-ranking police officials, including former commissioner Tom Donlon and former chief of detectives James Essig, alleging rampant criminality at the highest levels of the NYPD. The allegations include grimy stuff, like former commissioner Edward Caban purportedly selling promotions for $15,000 apiece; former chief of department Jeffrey Maddrey approving lavish overtime to a subordinate he was sleeping with; and a former deputy chief, Tarik Sheppard, allegedly using an automated stamp to give himself a raise and promotion.
Adams was named as a central participant who, according to Donlon’s suit, “empowered individuals with known histories of abuse and misconduct while dismantling the careers and credibility of those who spoke out.” It’s hard to imagine Mamdani defending Adams’s scandal-plagued cronies. But if he swiftly settles the lawsuits, in effect admitting and uprooting rampant corruption in the department, it will spark a whisper campaign, anonymous leaks to the press, and other pushback from friends and appointees of the former officials named in the lawsuits. And an NYPD in rebellion or internal turmoil is a headache no mayor wants to deal with. There are no easy options.
We should all expect Mamdani and his team to make a sustained, good-faith effort to wrestle with horrendously complicated matters, deploying the city’s vast material resources with skill, ingenuity, efficiency, and integrity. He must be honest and transparent about government operations and maintain the character, mental focus, and humility to keep stepping up to the plate after the inevitable strikeouts, which will far outnumber the home runs.
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