Nicole Gelinas joins Brian Anderson to discuss Zohran Mamdani’s performance as mayor and the fiscal condition of New York City. 

Audio Transcript

Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks Podcast. This is Brian Anderson. I’m the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the program today is a frequent guest, Nicole Gelinas. She’s a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a longtime contributing editor of City Journal and a columnist for or a regular contributor to the New York Times. She writes often on urban economics, infrastructure, finance, and really has covered the city about as well as anybody over the last years. Her work has appeared in Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and many other publications. She’s also the author of the award-winning 2024 book, Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets From the Car. Today though, I want to talk about a topic she’s been covering extensively for City Journal, New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and his performance as he has completed the first two months in office.

So Nicole, thanks very much for joining us as always on 10 Blocks.

Nicole Gelinas: Good morning, Brian. Thank you for having me on again.

Brian Anderson: So the mayor has recently proposed to raise property taxes on all property owners in the city in order to fund the city’s budget gap, which he calls the “Adams Budget Crisis,” referring to his predecessor, Eric Adams, and to cover the cost of his proposed programs. So this shift in tone is significant. It’s a shift away from the optimistic focus on alleviating the cost of living difficulties of everyday New Yorkers. I wonder, in your view, is the city’s budget situation really a crisis, as he says, or is this more about just trying to get the state government to approve his need for money and his proposed taxes on high earners and large corporations?

Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, it’s a little bit of a bait and switch as you intimate from the campaign. And as for whether it’s a crisis or whether he just wants more money, it’s a little bit of both. Yes. And the optimistic tone, at least as regards to the budget, has entirely disappeared. If you were around during last year’s campaign, if you voted for Mamdani, based on the idea that he was saying, we need to ask the state to raise taxes for New York City, the personal income and the business income tax. The state is in charge of those taxes. So he wanted pretty significant tax hikes on those two taxes for Albany to give the city that $9 billion or so a year in extra tax money, and the mayor would spend that money on new programs, universal pre-childcare for infants six weeks old on up to four-year-olds where we already have childcare, a brand new billion dollar Department of Community Safety to take away some of the police department’s jobs, free buses, which would cost about a billion dollars a year. So this was all, we’re going to raise taxes and we’re going to spend the money on all this exciting new stuff.

Here, the mayor comes into office and just a few weeks into office, he says, if Albany won’t give us these tax increases because the governor has actually been pretty consistent that she’s against this. It’s not to say she’s not going to cave in the next few weeks, but so far she’s actually been pretty good on it. Here’s the mayor saying, if we don’t get these tax increases from the state, we’re going to have to raise our own city property tax. So the city has full control over its property tax. The mayor is saying nine and a half percent property tax for everybody across the board, which obviously hits middle-class, working-class homeowners as well as renters, market rate renters, which is not necessarily paying very high luxury rents. These are just apartments and small buildings with small landlords. They would pay this extra monthly cost as well because it would be passed on in the rent. So very different message that instead of just raising taxes on the rich, it won’t directly affect most people saying he’s going to have to raise taxes on essentially everybody. And the other part of the switch is this would not even be for most of his new programs. Most of this money would go toward what he sees as a hidden budget deficit that under the Adams administration programs like public assistance, what we used to call welfare, new housing voucher assistance for people to the city wants to keep out of homeless shelters. These programs have ballooned to multi-billion dollars a year. And the mayor, its criticism of Adams is not that Adams wanted to spend this money, but just that he didn’t find the revenues for it, which the question that arises is what revenues? There are no extra revenues. And so you see the real crisis is just failing to cut back on this spending growth, particularly in social services to such an extent that it imperils the program that the mayor ran on, but the mayor has no appetite to cut back on any of that spending. It’s just raise some type of taxes immediately or else.

Brian Anderson: Nicole, you’ve covered New York City mayoral politics for many years now. Apart from their dislike of Mamdani’s political views, critics have often argued that his age—he’s only 34 years old—and lack of experience in politics make him ill-prepared for the job of running this enormous city. What’s your impression of how he’s performing from that standpoint so far? In an executive sense, does he seem to be up for the job?

Nicole Gelinas: Well, I think it’s too early to have a definitive conclusion. We’re still less than three months in. I think the best we could say about him is that he does show some adaptability and flexibility when things are not going according to his theories. And that’s a good thing. We are here to make constructive criticism. Other people in the city from nonprofits to budget watch dogs to lots of different pro transportation groups and so forth, all there to make constructive criticism. And he does listen to some of that. For example, we had this cold snap weeks and weeks of record long cold snap in January and another taste of that in February. And Mamdani came into office saying he wasn’t going to clear out encampments of the homeless, that it was just going to leave people living in homeless encampments until he found everyone permanent housing. People, including our colleague Stephen Eide said, “That’s not really going to work out very well.” And to his credit, when the mayor realized this is going to be an issue in getting people out of the cold, he very quickly changed his mind and said, “Yeah, we are going to clear out the encampments. We’ll just have a slightly different procedure.” So that’s one example that when he sees that his own ideology is going to cause him an immediate crisis, he does show some flexibility on that.

Same thing with the involuntary commitments. Another aspect of getting people out of the cold is if they won’t come in and they don’t seem to be able to have any capacity to make responsible decisions for themselves, the police department or clinician can bring them into a hospital for involuntary commitment. Mamdani said during their campaign, he wasn’t going to do that. And in the cold snap, that was reversed. And so they did commit more than 50 people, but not only that, the mayor would say they were doing this. So people were clear that he had changed his mind. So that’s two examples in a good direction. And it’s way too early to tell on policing, but there are at least some indications that he listens to and takes seriously what his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch has to say. Who knows if he will backtrack on getting rid of the police department’s strategic response group. Very important to the response of last week’s bombing attempt of some protestors outside of City Hall, but he certainly shows some capacity to learn how much I guess we’ll see as we go along.

Brian Anderson: Speaking of that, we did see this attempt by two alleged ISIS followers to attack a group of protestors outside of Gracie Mansion with improvised explosive devices. Some of the mayor’s more radical and controversial views have involved his approach to policing, including a plan to reduce the number of police officers to dismantle—and that seems crucial in this context—the NYPD’s strategic response group due to its role in responding to protests. How would you characterize overall Mamdani’s response to this incident last weekend and how do you think it’s going to affect his approach to policing?

Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s no question, and there has been no question for a while that New York needs more police officers and also needs to be thoughtful about how they are deployed. As our colleague Ralph has said many times, this strategic response group is important to making sure we don’t have violence at these protests. There’s a capacity for any type of protest to turn violent, whether it’s protestors turning into not so peaceful protestors, or in this case, counter protestors showing up. Some of the counter protestors were perfectly peaceful, but then you had these two individuals allegedly joined ISIS, self-radicalized, drove up from Pennsylvania on their own and improvised these bombs and attempted to maim or kill some of the protestors there. So you need more than just community police officers, regular street police officers at these protests. You need people who are trained to look for something suspicious and cases of deciding do you have to set up a cordon where we search people coming in like they do for some parades, some street festivals and make sure they don’t have any guns, knives, bombs with them. So these are important things to think about that he’s definitely been blase about and just the overall number of officers. We are 6,000 officers down from the peak around the turn of the millennium with officers needed constantly for subway crime. We’ve also seen an increase in subway crime over the past two months and heightened environment because of the war right now and just protest after protest. We are just a target nationwide for people to come here and say their thing, and that’s fine, but you need a police presence for that. So I think he needs to be much more realistic about, can we just deal with the number of police officers that we have or does he have to go back to the Adams Plan to try to add another 5,000 officers, I think the latter.

Brian Anderson: You’ve criticized the administration for its position toward the press. I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit on that. I know you’ve posted on X about this. They do seem to be trying to control the narrative in a way that goes beyond what the Eric Adams administration or really any recent administration has tried to do.

Nicole Gelinas: Yeah. And I think this is the difference between a campaign and being a top government official, that when Mamdani was running for mayor, in that capacity, he was a private citizen and you can invite whatever press you like to cover your campaign. And they refused access to one of our colleagues to their campaign rally. That’s not a good thing, but that was their right to do. When you are the mayor, you have a different responsibility toward the Press Corps. So we have a credentialed press corps, reasonably objective criteria that you have to write or report on a certain number of articles per year. But once you get that credential, you’re generally admitted to the mayor’s events. Now, if there’s not enough room, they do RSVP where first people to answer get in, or they have a pool where you pick people randomly from different outlets and they give all the material to their other colleagues in the press. So there are ways to do this.

Instead, the mayor has developed a habit of some events are just invited press only, and there’s no way to apply to be invited to those events. So he had an event a couple weeks ago on a bus. He was promoting new bus lanes, new bus ways, basically only invited press members who are in favor of this. That’s not a very good strategy. It also hurts the credibility of reporters to show up to that. And he did the same thing last week when he had a Iftar celebration to end the Ramadan fast just for city workers, just invited select members to the press to that. Hopefully they will realize that this is not working out for them and just go back to normal press rules.

But also the rental rip off hearings that the mayor has been having very confusing in that he billed these as public hearings where people could show up and complain about the conditions in their apartments. But when the people who sign up get there, these are one-on-one sessions with city officials. They appear to be private because the person is sitting down across from a city official to make their complaint about their landlord. But these are actually public events where the reporters can wander around and listen to people. And it’s just a weird setup, makes both sides of this uncomfortable. And so at this week’s rental rip-off hearing, they actually backtracked and said they’re not public events when the people are testifying to the city officials that will be private, which is not obviously the definition of a public hearing. So they’re being too cute for their own good. And this is backfiring to the extent that making some of these people who show up with their complaints uncomfortable because they don’t know, is this private or public?

Brian Anderson: To anticipate a story that will be appearing in our next issue, I don’t want to talk about it too extensively, but it’s really on the state of the city’s economy. I wonder how precarious is it? What is the recovery looking like from COVID-19 and how do Mamdani’s plans get affected by what could happen to the economy?

Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, thanks, Brian. And the city’s economy has not recovered all that well from the lockdowns of six years ago. So it’s okay and that we have about 4 percent more private sector jobs than we had just before the lockdown. But compared to national growth, that’s not very good. Our job growth and our income growth are leg far behind the nation as a whole. Certain areas of the economy, retail and hospitality creates tens of thousands, actually hundreds of thousands of entry level jobs where you don’t need a college education or a lot of experience and maybe don’t even need to speak English. Those jobs are still not recovered, whereas the nation has recovered those types of jobs. So we’re already seeing some of the impact of the high minimum wage, $17 minimum wage, very high taxes. This governor has raised taxes, including the downstate payroll tax for the MTA a couple of times during her administration. The former governor raised taxes on wealthier earners during his last year in office. So we’re starting to see the results of that heavy burden on business. They are creating more jobs outside of New York City and New York State than they are in the city and the state. So I think the city needs to take that a lot more seriously before it embarks on new tax hikes and new burdens. There’s a proposal to raise the minimum wage to $30 in the city council. You’re just going to automate a lot more jobs if you do that. And to the mayor’s credit, he has not said whether he supports that or not. I think he has no choice but to listen to different voices and try to navigate this reality.

Brian Anderson: There’ll be much more to talk about when that article appears. It’ll be in our next issue. Nicole, thanks very much for this overview. You can read more of Nicole Gelinas’s work on the City Journal website, including her recent big essays on the Mamdani campaign and the first Mamdani budget. We’ll have a link to our author page in the description where you’ll be able to find those and other articles. You can find City Journal on X @cityjournal and on Instagram @cityjournal_mi. If you like what you’ve heard on today’s podcast, please subscribe and give us a nice rating. Nicole, thanks so much as always.

Nicole Gelinas: Of course. Thank you, Brian.

Brian Anderson: Thanks for joining us for the weekly 10 Blocks Podcast featuring urban policy and cultural commentary with City Journal editors, contributors, and special guests.

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