The inevitable has finally been confirmed: Zohran Mamdani, the socialist dynamo we’ve gotten to know over the last five months, will be the next mayor of New York City. This result has many troubling implications. An avowed enemy of capitalism will soon be running the government of the world’s financial capital. An anti-Zionist crusader will be responsible for the safety of the largest population of Jews in America. And, as the mayor of America’s most populous and prominent city, a de facto communist may become the new face of the Democratic Party.

All these implications are by dint of Mamdani’s sheer persona as the avatar of left-wing grievance. The effects will be national. But Mamdani’s concrete policy proposals — what he has expressly promised to do once given the levers of power — should be of greater concern to New Yorkers. In campaigning to solve the city’s many problems through limitless government, Mamdani has committed to policies that would make New York less livable, less secure, and less prosperous. To his credit, he has laid out his plans in precise detail.

Rent Control and Public Housing

New York City already has one of the most tightly regulated housing markets in the country, in which nearly half of all rents are capped by a municipal bureaucracy and new developments are strangled by red tape and “affordable housing” mandates. Not coincidentally, New York is the most expensive rental market in the country and suffers from persistent housing shortages. Mamdani’s plan for renters is not to liberate the housing supply as cities like Austin have done to great success, but to vastly expand government control over it.

His signature proposal is to immediately “freeze the rent” of the 2 million New Yorkers who live in rent-stabilized apartments, whose rents have already been forced far below market rates. By appointing new members to New York’s Rent Guidelines Board, which determines how much landlords can raise rents, and demanding that they decide on 0 percent, Mamdani will double down on the failed policy of rent control. This will exacerbate the city’s housing shortage as tenants refuse to move, lest they give up their sweet deals on below-market-rate apartments, and landlords are discouraged from investing in their buildings. Pressure on unregulated rents will rise, which may spark cries for New York to extend its rent control regime to new buildings.

To fill the gap in private housing that his price controls will worsen, Mamdani plans to deploy $100 billion in public money to construct 200,000 “publicly-subsidized, affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes.” Do the math: That’s a cost of $500,000 per unit. The only thing “affordable” about these homes — if they ever get built — is that taxpayers, rather than tenants, will foot the bill.

‘Community Safety’ over Policing

Although Mamdani has shied away from his earlier calls to “defund the police,” he still does not believe that stronger law enforcement is the key to enhancing New Yorkers’ safety. Instead, he puts his faith in government to “prevent violence before it happens” by creating a new Department of Community Safety. Its employees — no doubt unionized — will provide “outreach” to vagrants in subway stations, deliver medical care to the indigent, and implement gun-violence and “hate violence” prevention programs. These are resources that will not go toward hiring additional police officers, as Mamdani has made clear.

The mayor-elect’s approach to public safety is perfectly aligned with the progressive conviction that crime is not an outgrowth of human nature and agency that must be deterred, but the product of social pathologies that government can smooth over. In Mamdani’s mind, criminals are merely the victims of a callous society, which he can now reform. In reality, Mamdani’s reluctance to police and punish criminal acts will result in more of them.

City-Owned Grocery Stores

Mamdani’s most humorous policy proposal is meant to cope with the rising cost of groceries in New York. He wants to give shoppers a “public option”: a network of grocery stores that the city government will own and run. “Without having to pay rent or property taxes,” Mamdani claims, these socialized stores “will reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers.” Yet grocery store profit margins are minuscule to begin with, at around 2 percent. A larger cut of grocery prices accrues to the city government, which charges a sales tax of 4.5 percent.

The more fundamental problem is that, even if Mamdani can offer groceries at below-market prices, he will ensure that his city-run stores are plagued by shortages. Subsidized groceries will function just as price controls would, driving up demand beyond available supply. If Mamdani is worried about the grocery industry’s efficiency, better to simply allow Walmart to compete for customers in the five boroughs.

Fare-Free Buses

Deeming $2.90 too high a price for transportation, Mamdani plans to make city buses free to ride. Transferring the cost of running buses from riders to taxpayers — many of whom do not ride the bus — will be a more equitable arrangement. Mamdani also claims that fareless transit will cut the average bus trip time by 12 percent. If Albuquerque’s similar experiment is any indication, it will also turn buses into homeless shelters on wheels and getaway vehicles for shoplifters. Such outcomes destroy the value of public transit for those who depend on it. If Mamdani succeeds in making city buses a new common area, he should expect the tragedy of the commons to result.

Raising the Tax Burden

To pay for his expensive agenda, Mamdani proposes raising taxes on corporations and affluent New Yorkers. He wishes to raise the city’s corporate income tax rate to 11.5 percent — on top of the state’s top tax rate of 7.25 percent — and impose a 2 percent tax on incomes above $1 million. The problem is that New York City is already highly dependent on wealthy residents and businesses for revenue. Nearly half of the city’s personal income tax revenue comes from the highest 1 percent of earners, who bear the highest state and local tax burden in the nation to support bloated budgets.

Rich workers and corporations can easily move outside New York City limits if they feel overtaxed. Many high earners have already fled the Big Apple, taking their taxable income with them. If Mamdani’s election accelerates the exodus, he may have to figure out how to cover an existing shortfall rather than how to pay for his suite of new programs. Even assuming that no one leaves, the math shows that Mamdani’s proposed taxes wouldn’t come close to delivering the revenue he has promised.

Attacking Excellence in Education

Mamdani attended a specialized high school for high-level students as a kid, but that won’t stop him from destroying similar opportunities for academic advancement as mayor. He has pledged to revive former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s impassioned campaign against academic excellence in New York City Public Schools by phasing out the system’s gifted and talented program for early grades. Recognizing differences in aptitude at a young age is, apparently, tantamount to racial segregation. Rather than offer accelerated learning to only some pupils, who are much too Asian and white for his liking, Mamdani will guarantee that all of New York’s children are equally miseducated.

To amplify government’s reach over children younger than elementary-school age, Mamdani wants to subsume private child-care arrangements into a public system. He vows to “implement free childcare for every New Yorker aged 6 weeks to 5 years,” and to raise the wages of child-care providers “to be at parity with public school teachers.” The enormous costs of this program, like all the other goodies Mamdani wants to dish out, will be foisted onto taxpayers.

Abolishing Low-Wage Jobs

The mayor-elect believes that there are too many low-paying jobs in New York City. Consequently, Mamdani proposes to eliminate them. He will begin by nearly doubling the city’s minimum wage from $16.50 to $30, barring any employee whose labor is worth less than $30 an hour from finding work. “After that,” Mamdani says, “the minimum wage will automatically increase based on the cost of living and productivity increases.” Who has the requisite knowledge to determine by how much millions of workers’ productivity has increased? Mamdani’s administration, of course.

In case the people his $30 minimum wage makes unemployable turn to delivery-app work instead, Mamdani plans to prohibit those jobs as well. He wants to copy one of California’s most damaging efforts at labor market manipulation, classifying delivery workers as full employees rather than independent contractors. That would force delivery-app companies to provide currently self-employed drivers with costly benefits and employment protections, wrecking the industry’s flexible business model.

The effects of this reclassification were so ruinous in California that voters chose to exempt delivery-app workers from being labeled as employees in 2020, reversing the legislature’s policy from just a year earlier. New York City’s stiff pay rules for delivery apps are already squeezing their workers and customers. Mamdani’s plan could finish them off.

New Yorkers should brace for a lot of changes under Mayor Mamdani. Virtually none of them will be any good.