Time to Give Zohran a Chance

By Arthur Schwartz

Zohran Mamdani won in Greenwich Village, getting far more votes in the East, and while winning the Central and West Village, the results differed block by block.

It was a vile campaign. As bad, if not worse than Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 campaign against David Dinkins, which hinged on racial prejudice, including a police rally at City Hall where cops held signs that referred to Dinkins as a “washroom attendant” and depicted him as a racist caricature with bulging lips and an Afro.

This year’s race focused a lot on allegations that Mamdani was an antisemite, with both Curtis Sliwa and Mayor Eric Adams saying that Jewish children wouldn’t be safe if he were elected. There was the Islamophobic angle, with one ad showing a plane hitting the World Trade Center, comparing that to Mamdani winning. And then there were tirades about Mamdani being an anti-cop ultra-leftist. That stuff got Cuomo 42% of the vote and left many feeling uneasy about Mamdani’s win.

But think about this. I’m 72. I cannot remember a mayor who left New York in better shape than when he started. That includes Bloomberg, whose zoning changes, school combining, and stop and frisk policing, left the city gentrified, unaffordable and racially divided. Bill De Blasio ran to end the “Two Cities,“ instituted universal pre-K, and successfully raised the minimum wage to $15/hour—but he left office immensely unpopular, with the “Two Cities” still intact. And Adams, who announced that God put him in office, left New Yorkers uneasy, even as crime dropped. There seemed to be no fresh ideas coming from City Hall.

I have watched Mamdani carefully and talked with him. He comes in with a positive approach. He was smart enough to not join the chorus against some City Charter amendments which give the mayor power to move housing construction faster. He pledged to keep Jessica Tisch on board as police commissioner. She has been a breath of fresh air after corruption ripped through the NYPD. His first deputy mayor is Dean Fuleihan, hardly a radical, who has 40 years of government experience in City Hall and Albany. He has been kind to Gov. Hochul, whose help he needs to raise the billions of dollars to enact his programs. Somehow, he has even charmed Donald Trump.

Mamdani will face a steep set of challenges when he takes office on Jan. 1. He campaigned on an expansive and expensive set of solutions to the city’s spiraling living costs: making buses free, expanding government-funded childcare, freezing the rent on nearly a million rent-stabilized apartments, and building hundreds of thousands more apartments without relying on developers whose vision of affordability has made New York unaffordable. Mamdani has not come off his win as some wild-eyed radical who believes that he can ignore the power structure in our city. And he has repeatedly pledged, displaying the compassion that he learned as being a dark-skinned Muslim growing up in New York City, to be vigilant against antisemitism – something that his critics, from Adams to Cuomo to Bloomberg, never got a handle on, despite their rhetoric and support for Israel’s actions in Gaza.

In almost every area that featured prominently in the mayoral campaign, Mamdani can improve life in New York by marrying his admirable ambition to pragmatism and compromise.

• He has a plan to build 200,000 rent stabilized apartments while being open to working with the real estate community.
• He has pledged to make buses free and faster. He doesn’t control the MTA but the Transport Workers Union believes it can be done. It may require a tax, but don’t believe the B.S. that he will tax anyone making less than a million dollars a year with a bigger focus on raising New York’s corporate tax rates up to the same level as New Jersey.
• Free childcare is doable; they just enacted it in North Dakota. The additional ability of parents to work will generate significant tax revenue all on its own.
• His plan is to improve public safety by addressing the mentally ill on the streets with professionals and not cops. Some of these ideas have shown promising results elsewhere. They typically require collaboration between social-services workers and police officers. If we can address affordability, and get people out of homeless shelters, my prediction is that crime will continue to drop. And maybe Mamdani will go back to David Dinkins’ idea that cops get out of their cars and walk our streets.
• Mamdani hasn’t spoken much about our subpar schools. But he is a graduate of the NYC public school system and has recognized the problem of overcrowded, understaffed schools.

Give him a chance, my neighbors. New ideas, if they work, can become infectious. NYC is in the middle of a country full of horrific problems. Just maybe NYC will be a shining light.