Let Mamdani give free buses and government food stores a try
If you think his plans to address the affordability crisis are stupid, come up with some better ones.
Four years from now, Zohran Mamdani might be America’s most feckless mayor. His idealistic plans and socialist leanings might crash and burn in the gritty hardball of New York City. It might not even take four years.
But voters elected him because something is wrong, and nobody else has been able to fix it. New Yorkers, like many other Americans, think living costs are too high and politicians are clueless. They overlooked the 34-year-old Mamdani’s lack of experience and other shortcomings and made him the next mayor because he gets the problem of trying to stretch a paycheck to the breaking point.
Before most people ever heard of him, Mamdani was trudging across the five boroughs and talking with New Yorkers about their struggles paying for rent, food, childcare and transportation. His platform calls for a rent freeze and more affordable housing, city-run grocery stores selling staples at wholesale prices, free buses and no-cost child care. Some of it is fanciful, but Mamdani’s convincing win shows that New Yorkers feel he hears their concerns and is sincere about addressing them.
[See what Mamdani and Trump have in common.]
The snickering class on Fox News will lampoon Mamdani’s socialistic idealism, highlighting every failure and distorting other developments to make them look like failures. But they’re not the ones struggling to make the rent or feed the kids.
There are a lot of reasons Mamdani’s plans might flop. But there are also some good reasons to try them. The biggest is that nobody else has solved the problem of affordability, in New York or in other places where it’s a problem. Anybody who wants to bash Mamdani’s ideas should come up with better ways to get the job done.
Mamdani’s idea for free buses starts with the reality that nearly half of all riders already evade the fare. Making the buses fully free would cost between $600 million and $800 million per year, in an annual budget of $116 billion. A heavy lift, but far from impossible. Eliminating fares would make buses faster, because riders could board at all doors and there’d be no money to collect. This seems like an experiment worth trying. If it doesn’t work, bury the idea for good.
[See why New York will survive Mamdani.]
Mamdani’s city-run food stores would pay no rent or property taxes and earn no profits. Would that lower prices enough to make a difference for customers? It might. The downside of government-run anything is that without a profit motive, there’s no incentive to innovate or compete for customers on service and quality. So these MamdaniMarts might be drab disasters. But he only wants to start with five—one in each borough—so what’s the harm?
Mamdani’s other big ideas are harder. Free childcare would be very complicated and extremely expensive, with a price tag of around $6 billion per year. He’d need major tax hikes that the city’s overlords in Albany probably won’t approve. Mamdani can probably freeze the rent on nearly one-million apartments that qualify, but developers won’t build more affordable housing if they can’t turn a profit.
No politician fulfills every campaign promise, however, and New Yorkers will judge Mamdani’s effectiveness based on whether they think he’s moving the needle and making a difference. At a national level, there’s value in having an ambitious young mayor try some new ways to solve old problems, and do it at the local level where it’s easier to customize solutions.
If Mamdani fails, we can move on to new experiments. But if there are some successes, maybe we should be thankful somebody is willing to use New York City as a testbed for addressing problems that vex many Americans.
Excellent argument! The people of NYC spoke loudly enough (with the highest turnout over the last 3 decades I think) that the chap should be given a chance to succeed.