New York City is in trouble. And that’s because of the upcoming 2025 mayoral election. Let’s face the obvious truth first and foremost: Eric Adams is done. He is currently polling at 7%, which puts him in fourth place among Democrats. Adams’ high-profile legal troubles, combined with his fealty to President Trump for getting him out of said legal troubles, makes him a non-factor—so much so that he is not even running as a Democrat, but as an Independent.
On the Republican side, you have the ever-present former radio host and founder of the Guardian Angels, Curtis Sliwa, and a bunch of no-name candidates who won’t factor much into the decision come November. Thus, as usual, we are left with the Democratic primary deciding who the next mayor of the largest city in the country will be.
The frontrunner is the disgraced former Governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo. If you are a long-time reader of this column, you will know I have no love lost for Andrew Cuomo. In August of 2021, when Cuomo resigned amid conduct allegations, I wrote an article entitled “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.” In fact, the only time I found myself siding with Cuomo was when he was having very public disputes with the communist former mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, a man who, by the end of his tenure, had a lower approval rating than Donald Trump at any point during either of the latter’s presidencies.
And yet, AND YET, Andrew Cuomo is the best option we have come November. That is because the alternative to Cuomo—the man who forced COVID into nursing homes, and then tried to cover it up by having cutesy conversations with his brother on CNN—makes Bill de Blasio look like Ben Shapiro.
Introducing Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani is currently the State Assembly representative for New York’s 36th District, which is comprised primarily of Astoria, Queens. And if you think I am exaggerating about the communist tendencies of Mamdani, let me get you familiarized with his solution to bringing down prices: a network of city-controlled supermarkets. What’s so bad about city-run supermarkets, you ask? These markets will be exempt from taxes and rents generally charged to private businesses. This is classic communist thinking: Force the taxpayers to subsidize the cost of the grocery stores, thus driving the private stores out of business because groceries sold at those markets will be significantly cheaper than those of the private businesses, and they don’t even have to worry about rent. Eventually, the only way to purchase groceries in New York City would be through the city-run chain, which, if you know anything about how New York has squandered away money on the subway system, would definitely be run super smoothly and efficiently. No wait, strike that; reverse it.
He is doing this all because he claims the reason for high prices in grocery stores is greedy businesses price-gouging, a claim for which he has yet to bring any evidence.
But Mamdani has more policies. He is pushing for freezing rent in all rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments. Of course, by now we should all be aware that artificially freezing the prices of a million apartments in New York City will force the price of regular apartments to skyrocket. Now Mamdani has a “solution” to this as well: Build 200,000 rent-controlled apartments in the next 10 years. Sounds great, right? Wrong. New York City has a tremendous housing shortage program, and that’s because our bureaucracy does not allow new homes to be built.
In 2022, New York City allowed the construction of over 68,000 new housing units. That’s not nearly enough to keep up with demand, and it certainly won’t do anything to lower costs. But in 2023, that number cratered to 28,000, and it didn’t improve much in 2024 to 34,000. This is not keeping prices down. We need more housing available, not less. The 200,000 units Mamdani is proposing is less than we produce on an annual basis, which already is not enough. And even if you want to add his proposal to what we already do, that doesn’t even bring us to where we were in 2022. Additionally, his insistence that these 200,000 units be rent-controlled only will only increase the cost of any other housing that exists.
The answer to the rent problem has never been rent control. It has always been higher demand. Allow the builders to build more units, and the price can come down. For a perfect understanding of this, just look at the construction of the apartment building on Vleigh Place and 77th Road. The city denied the construction of additional stories, thus limiting the number of units available in that building. Do you think the fact that the building has fewer units makes the price of those apartments more or less expensive? But dimwits like Mamdani will insist that they can lower the price for everyone by just deciding that the price should be lower.
Mamdani, as you would expect from the Extreme Left in today’s society, hates police as well, wanting to reallocate $1.1 billion from the NYPD to a “Department of Community Safety,” which hires peer-led social workers and counselors to engage with the community—a plan that has already been proven to have disastrous results around the country.
If you were wondering where Mamdani stands on Israel, it is exactly where you think he does. When asked by Politico if the U.S. should cut off all funding for Israel’s defense, Mamdani had no problem blaming Jews for all fiscal problems. “It is hard for me to explain to my constituents, who live in the largest public housing development in North America, in Queensbridge, why they have to live in substandard conditions because the government refuses to fund public housing, all while we continue to find billions of dollars to drop bombs that kill tens of thousands of Palestinians over more than a year now.” What a perfect way to blend antisemitism with economic idiocy. You see, says Mamdani, it’s the federal government’s job to house everyone in the city, even if it means artificially raising the prices on all apartments, and the reason they are not doing it is because of the Jews.
In a city that has the largest Jewish population outside Israel, we need to have an outsized voice in this election. It can very plausibly happen that Mamdani will be the mayor at next year’s Israel Day Parade. Does he even show up? He knows he will be mercilessly booed throughout the parade route. This is not the man we need representing the city, and certainly not the man the Jewish community needs in that office.
If you look at Mamdani’s plans and proposals, it is filled with progressive plan after progressive plan that will turn this city back into what it was under de Blasio—at best. At worst, the city could fall into disarray that we haven’t seen since the 1980s.
I never thought I would see a politician who’d make me want to see Andrew Cuomo win, but here we are.
Izzo Zwiren is the former host of the Jewish Living Podcast. Follow him and his brothers on their health journey on their YouTube Channel, Brotherly Lovehandles. Izzo lives on Long Island with his wife and three adorable, hilarious children.
