New York is too expensive. Zohran will lower costs and make life easier.
Housing
Freeze the rent.
A majority of New Yorkers are tenants, and more than two million of them live in rent stabilized apartments. These homes should be the bedrock of economic security for the city’s working class. Instead, Eric Adams has taken every opportunity to squeeze tenants, with his hand-picked appointees to the Rent Guidelines Board jacking up rents on stabilized apartments by 12.6% (and counting)–the most since a Republican ran City Hall.
As Mayor, Zohran will immediately freeze the rent for all stabilized tenants, and use every available resource to build the housing New Yorkers need and bring down the rent. The number one reason working families are leaving our city is the housing crisis. The Mayor has the power to change that.
Building affordable housing.
We need a lot more affordable housing. But for decades, New York City has relied almost entirely on changing the zoning code to entice private development – with results that can fall short of the big promises. And the housing that does get built is often out of reach for the working class who need it the most.
As Mayor, Zohran will put our public dollars to work and triple the City’s production of permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes – constructing 200,000 new units over the next 10 years. Any 100% affordable development gets fast-tracked: no more pointless delays. And Zohran will fully staff our City’s housing agencies so we can actually get the work done.
For the additional housing we need, Zohran will initiate a Comprehensive Plan for New York City to create a holistic vision for affordability, equity, and growth. This planning will allow NYC to address the legacy of racially discriminatory zoning, increase density near transit hubs, end the requirement to build parking lots and proactively chart our future. Read more
Cracking down on bad landlords.
One in ten renter households reported a lack of adequate heat last winter. One in four reported mice or rats in their homes. Half a million live in poor quality housing.
Every New Yorker deserves a safe and healthy place to call home. That’s why Zohran will overhaul the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants and coordinate code enforcement under one roof, making sure agencies work together to hold owners responsible for the conditions of their buildings. Tenants will be able to schedule and track inspections with a revamped 311. If a landlord refuses to make a repair, the City will do it and send them the bill. And in the most extreme cases, when an owner demonstrates consistent neglect for their tenants, the City will decisively step in and take control of their properties. The worst landlords will be put out of business.
Supporting homeowners and ending deed theft.
25% of all NYC homeowners spend more than half their income on housing, a burden felt most acutely in our city’s immigrant communities and Black and Latino neighborhoods. Prior to becoming an Assemblymember, Zohran worked directly with these New Yorkers to keep them in their homes, serving as a Foreclosure Prevention Housing Counselor. He knows how the city’s property tax system favors wealthier homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods, has seen how the tax lien sale system leads to families losing their homes, recognizes how deed theft is displacing entire communities, and understands how the city lets speculators and slumlords box working class New Yorkers out of homes. And he has a plan to fix it as Mayor.
Zohran will create a new Office of Deed Theft Prevention to protect homeowners from scam artists. He’ll fix the property tax system so the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods pay their fair share. He’ll help homeowners comply with Local Law 97. And he’ll end the tax lien sale.
Safety
The Department of Community Safety.
All New Yorkers deserve to be safe. But the Adams administration has failed to deliver the sense of safety and security that everyone should feel walking down our streets, riding our subways, or taking our buses. Zohran will create the Department of Community Safety to prevent violence before it happens by prioritizing solutions which have been consistently shown to improve safety. Police have a critical role to play. But right now, we’re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net—which prevents them from doing their actual jobs. Through this new city agency and whole-of-government approach, community safety will be prioritized like never before in NYC. The Department will invest in citywide mental health programs and crisis response—including deploying dedicated outreach workers in 100 subway stations, providing medical services in vacant commercial units, and increasing Transit Ambassadors to assist New Yorkers on their journeys—expand evidence-based gun violence prevention programs, and increase funding to hate violence prevention programs by 800%. Read more in the NYT, and the full proposal here.
Read our full proposal here
Affordability
City-owned grocery stores.
Food prices are out of control. Nearly 9 in 10 New Yorkers say the cost of groceries is rising faster than their income. Only the very wealthiest aren’t feeling squeezed at the register.
As Mayor, Zohran will create a network of city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low, not making a profit. Without having to pay rent or property taxes, they will reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers. They will buy and sell at wholesale prices, centralize warehousing and distribution, and partner with local neighborhoods on products and sourcing. With New York City already spending millions of dollars to subsidize private grocery store operators (which are not even required to take SNAP/WIC!), we should redirect public money to a real “public option.”
Read More at The New York Times
FAST FARE FREE BUSSES
Public transit should be reliable, safe and universally accessible. But one in five New Yorkers struggle to afford the ever rising fare. Adding insult to injury: our city’s buses are the slowest in the nation, robbing working people of precious time for family, leisure and rest.
Zohran won New York’s first fare-free bus pilot on five lines across the city. As Mayor, he’ll permanently eliminate the fare on every city bus – and make them faster by rapidly building priority lanes, expanding bus queue jump signals, and dedicated loading zones to keep double parkers out of the way. Fast and free buses will not only make buses reliable and accessible but will improve safety for riders and operators – creating the world-class service New Yorkers deserve.
FIGHTING CORPORATE EXPLOITATION
New York’s working class is getting nickel-and-dimed, and Donald Trump is making it easier for his corporate pals to pick their pockets. As Trump loosens consumer protections and empower CEOs, scammers, monopolies, and monopsony power, New York needs a mayor who will stand up to corporate greed and protect working-class dollars. Zohran has a plan to do just that. He’ll fight misleading advertising and predatory contracts, and ban all hidden fees. He will ban non-compete clauses, which suppress wages and allow employers to take advantage of their workers. He’ll end secret corporate handouts, where tax dollars are given away to companies in agreements protected by NDAs. And he’ll fund challenges to utility companies, so that ConEd can’t raise prices without a fight.
Early Childhood & Education
No cost childcare.
After rent, the biggest cost for New York’s working families is childcare. It’s literally driving them out of the city: New Yorkers with children under six are leaving at double the rate of all others. The burden falls heaviest on mothers, who are giving up paying jobs to do unpaid childcare.
Zohran will implement free childcare for every New Yorker aged 6 weeks to 5 years, ensuring high quality programming for all families. And he will bring up wages for childcare workers – a quarter of whom currently live in poverty – to be at parity with public school teachers. It will foster early childhood development, save parents money and keep our families in the city they call home.
Baby baskets for New York’s newborns.
Each year, 125,000 New Yorkers are born across our city – but the cost of living crisis can make it difficult for new families to give them a healthy start. Building on the success of more than 90 similar programs around the world, the Mamdani administration will provide new parents and guardians with a collection of essential goods and resources, free of charge, including items like diapers, baby wipes, nursing pads, post-partum pads, swaddles, and books.
Each NYC Baby Basket will also include a resource guide of information on the City’s newborn home visiting program, breastfeeding, post-partum depression and more. These are critical resources for combating postpartum maternal mortality and increasing trust in government as well. At less than $20 million a year, it’s a relatively small investment with potentially huge rewards for healthy development and family stability – as demonstrated by countless programs around the globe.
Listen to Zohran discuss the policy on WNYC
K-12
Zohran will ensure our public schools are fully funded with equally distributed resources, strong after-school programs, mental health counselors and nurses, compliant and effective class sizes, and integrated student bodies. To address the 7,000-9,000 teacher shortage required by the class size law, he will launch “Community to Classroom,” a new initiative to train, certify, and hire new teachers. The program will provide tuition support in exchange for a three-year commitment to teaching in NYC Public Schools. He will create car-free “School Streets” to prevent traffic fatalities, improve play, and lower pollution for every school, and address student homelessness by expanding the successful Bronx pilot Every Child and Family Is Known. Zohran supports an end to mayoral control and envisions a system instead in which parents, students, educators and administrators work together to create the school environments in which students and families will best thrive—strengthening co-governance through the PEP, SLTs, DLTs, and CECs in particular. He will also work with the City and State to massively invest in CUNY—whether taxing NYU and Columbia or passing the New Deal for CUNY which he has long championed—to invest in infrastructure, pay staff and faculty a living wage, give free OMNY cards to all students, and make CUNY tuition-free for all students, as it was for 130 years.
Paying for Our Agenda
Taxing Corporations & the 1%
Zohran has a plan to bring down the cost-of-living through city-owned grocery stores, universal childcare, and other bold proposals, and he knows exactly how to pay for it, too. Zohran’s revenue plan will raise the corporate tax rate to match New Jersey’s 11.5%, bringing in $5 billion. And he will tax the wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers—those earning above $1 million annually—a flat 2% tax (right now city income tax rates are essentially the same whether you make $50,000 or $50 million). Zohran will also implement common-sense procurement reform, end senseless no-bid contracts, hire more tax auditors, and crack down on fine collection from corrupt landlords to raise an additional $1 billion.
Climate
Green Schools For A Healthier NY
Fighting the climate crisis and improving quality of life are not separate issues, but are deeply intertwined. Zohran has a plan to deliver a better and cleaner New York, including an unprecedented investment in our public schools. Zohran’s Green Schools for a Healthier New York City will renovate 500 public schools with renewable energy infrastructure and HVAC upgrades, transform 500 asphalt schoolyards into vibrant green spaces, create 15,000 union jobs, and build resilience hubs in 50 schools that provide resources and safe spaces during emergencies.
LGBTQIA+ Protections
Queer and trans people across the United States are facing an increasingly hostile political environment. New York City must be a refuge for LGBTQIA+ people, but private institutions in our own city have already started capitulating to Trump’s assault on trans rights. Meanwhile, the cost of living crisis confronting working class people across the city hits the LGBTQIA+ community particularly hard, with higher rates of unemployment and homelessness than the rest of the city. The Mamdani administration will protect LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers by expanding and protecting gender-affirming care citywide, making NYC an LGBTQIA+ sanctuary city, and creating the Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs.
Healthcare
Twelve percent of New York City residents are uninsured. To expand access to healthcare, Zohran will create a new corps of outreach workers to support New Yorkers navigating the healthcare system. Those workers will support patients in understanding the public resources available to them: how to find insurance, apply to programs, access financial assistance, and claim their health benefits. As Trump attacks public health, particularly reproductive healthcare, Zohran will also guarantee that these outreach workers connect every New Yorker in need of reproductive care to affordable, quality support.
Moreover, New York’s public hospital system serves over one million unique patients a year and is the crown jewel of our public health infrastructure—but it faces significant funding gaps, leading to underinvestment, understaffing and overburdened caregivers. Meanwhile, we keep closing our critical community hospitals. Zohran will work with our healthcare unions and city and state partners to increase funding for H+H and end hospital closures. He will also protect NYC for future public health emergencies, including guarding against shortages of PPE, ensuring adequate surge capacity and healthcare worker safety, maintaining programs like Test and Trace to stay on top of trends, and more.
As Mayor, Zohran will reject Medicare Advantage, and reject higher copays for inservice workers. Instead he’ll partner with retirees, workers and their unions to take on the fragmented, for-profit healthcare system and lower costs for everyone.
Labor
As Mayor, Zohran will work closely with our city’s powerful labor movement to ensure that union- and non-union workers alike know and can enforce their rights at work, including by fully staffing and expanding the role of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. He will continue fighting for the Secure Jobs Act, which will make it easier for workers to organize without fear of unfair or retaliatory firings. Through requiring high-road labor standards for all City contractors, City-financed development projects, and City-funded organizations and their contractors and expanding labor peace agreement requirements, he’ll ensure that all workers, including public sector workers, have the right to collective bargaining and to fight for strong contracts. Finally, Zohran will work closely with unions to pass additional sectoral extender laws that provide better wages and working conditions across entire industries, similar to NYC’s fast-food minimum wage law.
Raising the minimum wage to $30 by 2030.
In the world’s richest city, making the minimum wage shouldn’t mean living in poverty. But that’s exactly what it means for working people today, even with the hard-won increase in the state minimum wage. When incomes don’t match the true cost of living, government services have to make up the difference – effectively subsidizing low wage employers.
As Mayor, Zohran will champion a new local law bringing the NYC wage floor up to $30/hour by 2030. After that, the minimum wage will automatically increase based on the cost of living and productivity increases. When working people have more money in their pocket, the whole economy thrives.
Regulating delivery apps & protecting delivery workers.
The delivery app industry has transformed New York City. Delivery workers are fundamental to keeping this city running—supplying groceries, meals, and medications 24/7. Traveling around the city at breakneck speeds, app-based delivery workers now hold the most dangerous job in NYC. Despite the immense risks these workers face every day, deliveristas—80,000 Black, brown, and immigrant workers—are exploited by the app companies who demand they complete deliveries at a dangerous pace. Moreover, app companies have misclassified delivery workers as independent contractors, instead of employees, so that they can avoid providing them with the rights and benefits all workers deserve. New York City app consumers, restaurant owners, small businesses, cyclists, and pedestrians all suffer due to app companies’ predatory policies. The ever-increasing demands from app companies make our streets less safe, and deliveristas more vulnerable. To address these issues, the Mamdani administration will strengthen licensure requirements for delivery apps, expand capacity and resources to support deliveristas, and improve street infrastructure including expanding DOT e-bike programs and investing in deliverista hubs.
Small Business
New York is the greatest city in the world, but the people who make it so are being priced out. That includes small business owners, who account for over 90 percent of all firms in the city and who employ nearly half of all New Yorkers within the private sector. But too many mom-and-pops are forced to close because keeping a business open costs too much and navigating our bureaucracy is too difficult. That costs New Yorkers their jobs, small business owners their dreams, and our city the places that give it character.
Zohran will make it faster, easier, and cheaper to start and run a business in New York City, so that bodegas and corner stores stay open and dollar slices come back. He will cut small business fines in half, speed up permitting and make online applications easier, and increase funding for 1:1 small business support by 500 percent. And he’ll appoint a Mom-and-Pop Czar to make sure it happens.
Libraries
Libraries are critical to our city’s success—they enable access to the internet, provide cool from summer heat, serve as vital community hubs, and help New Yorkers seek career advancement and education. Yet, Eric Adams’ library closures have been devastating. As a state legislator, I supported neighborhood organizing to restore funding to Astoria’s Broadway Library and have used Assembly discretionary money to fund programming at the Queens Public Library. As Mayor, I will end the practice of using library funding as a bargaining chip in budget negotiations and commit 0.5% of NYC’s budget to libraries, ensuring we have enough revenue for robust services and well-staffed facilities.
Trump-Proofing NYC
Donald Trump is tearing at the fabric of New York City in his second term. He has deployed ICE agents to pluck New Yorkers from their families. He has sent already-high prices skyrocketing with tariffs. And he has threatened vital social services that working New Yorkers rely on every day. Zohran Mamdani will fight Trump’s attempts to gouge the working class, and deliver a city where everyone can afford a dignified life. He’ll ensure our immigrant New Yorkers are protected by strengthening our sanctuary city apparatus: getting ICE out of all City facilities and ending any cooperation, increasing legal support, and protecting all personal data. He’ll make NYC an LGBTQIA+ sanctuary city and protect reproductive rights. He’ll also protect workers and ensure our current laws are enforced, by increasing the budgets of DCWP and the NYC Commission on Human Rights, and muscling up our Law Department.
Sources: Zohranfornyc.com , BigNY.com
