Political Whisperer
By Robert Hornak
When Mamdani ran for mayor his entire focus was on affordability. His win has set the model for all the candidates running as Democratic Socialists, with DSA candidates running across the country talking about not much other than affordability (and Israel).
There’s one big problem looming for this entire movement, however. Mamdani has not been successful in making NYC more affordable. In fact, just the opposite.
A recent report conducted by the financial information and advice website SmartAsset found New York to be the fourth highest in income required to live comfortably, coming in behind only Hawaii, Massachusetts, and California. The study showed that a single adult needs to earn $124,342/year to achieve “comfort” status, using MIT’s 2026 Living Wage Calculator and then applying the 50/30/20 budgeting rule, where 50% of salary goes to expenses, 30% is for leisure, and 20% for savings. For a family of four the required salary is $291,533.
This is an increase of 8.4% over 2025, the second highest increase nationally. This is not a good start for Mamdani. Especially after all his big promises.
Of course, as has been pointed out previously, Mamdani did not have any big ticket plans to make life more affordable. His plans were relatively marginal, with rent freeze likely his biggest promise, but that only applies to rent stabilized apartments that have leases up for renewal in the next 12 months.
That effort was successful, so far, but is being challenged in court for his alleged strong-arming of the Rent Guidelines Board, an independent body that is supposed to weigh the needs of both tenants and landlords in determining the precent of increase for one and two-year leases.
It may sound consequential, but there are only approximately one million housing units covered by rent stabilization out of a total of 2,324,000 rental units. Another 1,109,000 are owner-occupied, meaning at most 27% of NYC households might be affected by the freeze, again IF their lease is up in the next year. The Board will do this all over again in 2027 with a new rent increase determination. Not to mention that if the increase would have been a typical 2% for one-year leases, based on the average rent of just under $2,000 for stabilized units, the freeze saved less than 1-in-4 homes an average of $40 a month. Not even a full tank of gas.
And let’s not forget that Manhattan rent just hit an all-time high of $6,655/month. And units coming under rent stabilization in 2024 had a median of $3,105, a 2% increase from the year before and well above the overall stabilization average.
Perhaps the more consequential program is the free childcare program that Hochul agreed to fund for kids 2-K, for now. Childcare is surely expensive for families that need it. But in a city with over 400,000 children under 5, this program will only be available to 2,000 children this fall, with the hope of expanding to 12,000 children in 2027. A nice savings for sure, but for only a very small number of families.
That’s basically the extent of Mamdani’s success. Sure, he will claim his government-run supermarket plans as a success, but there will only be one store per borough, and it’s already coming in millions of dollars over original projections – without a single shelve being stocked. Mamdani is also experiencing huge opposition to this plan, including from local grocery store and bodega owners who expect this to dramatically hurt their businesses.
It’s too early to claim this as either a success or failure. But the possibility for failure, either from supply issues or from shoplifting – which will surely be a problem in a city that doesn’t want to prosecute people who steal food – or possibly from the recently announced requirement to show ID, will likely surpass the possibility of unknown savings for, again, a relatively small number of city residents.
Failure to make NYC living more affordable is Mamdani’s and the DSA’s Achilles heel. If NYC doesn’t see some real movement toward affordability, especially when Mamdani has a very friendly city council and state legislature, then the battle cry of the socialists to have a better way will fade quickly.
Robert Hornak is a veteran political consultant who has previously worked for the NYC office of the Republican Assembly Leader and served as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail.com and @roberthornak on X.
