{"id":83473,"date":"2025-12-29T13:45:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-29T13:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/83473\/"},"modified":"2025-12-29T13:45:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T13:45:08","slug":"zohran-mamdani-on-suitsupply-scaffolding-and-sugar-free-red-bull","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/83473\/","title":{"rendered":"Zohran Mamdani on Suitsupply, Scaffolding, and Sugar-Free Red Bull"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Zohran<\/a><\/p>\n

SUNDAY 5:13 PM DECEMBER 21, 2025 DOWNTOWN<\/p>\n

Love it or not, Zohran Mamdani<\/a> will be sworn in as the new mayor of New York City on January 1. I\u2019ve been angling for some one-on-one time with the Mayor-elect ever since the election, and right before Christmas they gave me 10 minutes with him. We met at the transition office, which looks like a cross between Being John Malkovich and Severance but REAL (we loved the location vibe). I brought Interview photographer Lee Manning<\/a> along. 10 minutes isn\u2019t much but we hit it off. I fell for him, and can\u2019t wait to see what he does, what the Post cover-lines are, and if he can change our broken city for the better!<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

MEL OTTENBERG: Very nice to meet you.<\/p>\n

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Nice to meet you. Thank you so much.<\/p>\n

SPEAKER 3: We\u2019re going to have a little bit less than 10 minutes, so I think the best way is to take photos as we go.\u00a0<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Absolutely.\u00a0 I\u2019ll take whatever time I can. Thank you, Emilia, for making it happen. Alright. Let\u2019s go.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: Let\u2019s hit it.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: So let\u2019s start with the day in the life of Zohran Mamdani, mayor elect of New York City. You wake up, and then what?\u00a0<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: Okay. I wake up, I read my morning book, which is an amalgamation of the day\u2019s news, the status of our press and comms, each of the events I\u2019ll be doing that day, and briefs for each of those events. Then, I\u2019ll get ready. I\u2019ll head towards the office or wherever the first meeting is. During that time of transit, I\u2019ll get on a call with the team to go through the book, to go through the news, to go through the status of everything. Then, it\u2019s a whirlwind of events and meetings throughout the day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Okay.\u00a0<\/p>\n

MAMDANNI: The transition is unique in that there are a lot of internal meetings towards building out the team\u2014a lot of interviews, a lot of vetting, a lot of hiring questions that then has led us to the point where each week we\u2019re announcing two, three, four new appointments.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: What\u2019s your fuel? What keeps you going?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: On especially tough days?<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Yes, sure.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: Red Bull.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: [Laughs] Nice.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: I only allow myself one sugar-free Red Bull a week. On most days though, I would say that New Yorkers have put their trust in us, and they have an immense hope about what politics can mean and what it can represent in their lives. That hope is both a responsibility and an opportunity for us, and those fleeting moments between meetings, when I see New Yorkers and what this means to them, that\u2019s the fuel carrying me.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: That\u2019s beautiful. Also, sugar-free Red Bull is my signature drink.\u00a0<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: [Laughs]<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Do you have a playlist that helps you get hyped?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: Oh, man. I have a few songs. My wife prefers calmer music in the morning. I, for some reason, want to listen to Kim Petras or Lil Wayne or Madonna.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Beautiful.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: [Laughs] At eight in the morning, it doesn\u2019t make much sense.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: I love that. Kim Petras was in our last issue.\u00a0<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: \u201cLike Your Look\u201d is a great song.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: [Laughs] Yes. Okay, let\u2019s talk about your style. Tell me about it. What are you wearing right now? Suitsupply?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: The shirt and the thermal are from Uniqlo. Everything else, the tie and the suit, is from Suitsupply.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: How do you describe your style?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: What are the options? I\u2019m kind of just thinking in casual, business casual, and formal. Formal? I don\u2019t know. [Laughs]<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Professional?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: Professional.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: It\u2019s a Sunday. You\u2019re wearing a suit. Let\u2019s go with professional. Alright. So I went to the mayor\u2019s listening event last week, where you talked to a ton of New Yorkers about their\u2014<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: I loved that piece, by the way. The photos were beautiful.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Oh, I\u2019m so glad. It was really moving. What stuck with you from it?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: The stories that people told me about their lives. People shared moments that you often miss in the whirlwind of politics. They came there with their children, they came there with their parents. Undocumented New Yorkers came there to tell me about the fear that they live with, the exhaustion, the anxiety. A mother came in with her seven-year-old who told me how sad he was every time he saw a homeless person on the train, and how could we actually not provide housing to them? It was so New York, in that some people spoke to me about issues that we\u2019ve been fighting for decades, and others came to talk to me about, \u201cWhy is the construction on the Van Wyck during the day when it used to be during the night?\u201d I think that\u2019s what politics has to be. No issue is too big and no concern is too small. We can care about all of it, because that\u2019s what people\u2019s lives are like, and I loved it. I really loved it.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Everyone I talked to afterwards told me that you really knew your shit, which was exciting. If I was in that room with you, I would have asked you about two New York problems that drive me crazy.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: Hit me.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Empty storefronts and scaffolding. Can we talk about these?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: We absolutely can.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: The empty storefronts, Zohran, feels like a scam against the people. They\u2019d rather push everyone out and take a tax break. Now, we don\u2019t have neighborhoods. Then, you go to somewhere like Paris, and it\u2019s like everything is a small business\u2014<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: The size of the businesses are also, quite literally, physically smaller. We have a lot less variety than other cities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Yes.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: I think that storefront vacancies are a problem, not just in terms of the economy, but also in terms of the vibrancy of the public square and even public safety. We always think about above ground businesses, but even in terms of underground MTA commercial vacancies, one of the more recent estimates had it close to 70 percent, which creates a larger sense of isolation.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Yes.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: I\u2019m very interested in providing affirmative services to small businesses to keep them in the spaces that they\u2019ve leased, because what we\u2019re also seeing, especially in Astoria, is the transition where a small business owner had a handshake agreement with the landlord, the landlord passes on the business to the next generation, and now that handshake agreement is gone.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Right.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: And now there\u2019s a lease put in front of them with a 100 percent rent increase and they cannot afford it. What we\u2019re often losing is not just a small business, but a community institution, and so it\u2019s ensuring that we\u2019re providing more than $10 million in additional assistance for one-to-one case work for small businesses. We\u2019re cutting fines and fees for small businesses by 50 percent, and then we\u2019re looking at approaches that can ensure that we\u2019re incentivizing keeping a storefront active as opposed to having it be vacant.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Awesome. I\u2019m going to skip the scaffolding question, because that was good.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: Oh. Scaffolding is incredibly important.<\/p>\n

\"Zohran<\/a><\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Okay. Let\u2019s go. Scaffolding drives me fucking crazy. In How To with John Wilson they say it\u2019s a $6 billion economy. Zohran, is that true?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: I don\u2019t know the fiscals. But what I can tell you is that scaffolding is not just an issue in the private market. There are city buildings that have had scaffolding up for years, and that means we have an opportunity to fix something early to prove that this can actually work. That\u2019s going to be one of our first things that we do.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: That\u2019s very exciting. Okay.<\/p>\n

Crew: We have until 5:30.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Okay, thank you. The kids in the office tell me that millennial optimism is huge right now. Did you know that?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: [Laughs] What does that mean?<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: It means they\u2019re like, \u201cOh my god. Hope 2008.\u201d We have nostalgia for that. I feel like you\u2019re really giving millennial optimism. How do you stay optimistic?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: I think I find it in other people. The excitement that others have about this moment\u2014it\u2019s contagious in the best way.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Yes.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: And what made the campaign something that I could weather, whether in easy moments or the difficult ones, was that it all came back to New York City. We all love this city so much.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: We do.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: And we can reckon with its failures while always remembering what makes us love it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: I love it. You can get into any restaurant in New York City now. Anywhere new you want to go?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: I went to a Moroccan restaurant today for lunch, Dar Lbahja. You\u2019ve got to go. They have this, it\u2019s a pastry with chicken in it, so it\u2019s savory and sweet. I\u2019ve never had that before.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: I\u2019m going. You ran on affordability. What can you, the mayor of New York, do to make the city more affordable on a day-to-day basis?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: Freezing the rent for rent stabilized sense, making buses, not just fast, but free, and delivering universal childcare. Let\u2019s talk about it.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Go for it.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: After housing, childcare is the leading cause of New Yorkers leaving the city. We are talking about an average cost of $22,500 a year to take care of a single toddler. If you provide universal childcare, you are putting that money back into New Yorker\u2019s pockets, which means that they can actually afford not just to live here, but to build a family here.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: What do you miss most about being an anonymous guy? It wasn\u2019t so long ago.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: That I could just go anywhere at any time without having to schedule it, prep for it. I can still do those things. I just have to take a little extra time.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Okay. Has anyone made you really starstruck this year?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: I was doing the Adam Friedland show and he played a video of a few arsenal players for me. I\u2019m a big Arsenal fan. I did not expect that. It\u2019s just absurd to hear them say my name, that they know I exist.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Is woke back?<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: [Laughs] We\u2019re here.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Okay. I love it. Thank you so much.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI: Thank you, Mel.<\/p>\n

OTTENBERG: Have a good one.<\/p>\n

\"Zohran<\/a><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t