New York City Democrats may pick a socialist Muslim who has basically never worked as their mayoral candidate

His most popular proposal is a rent freeze - in a city with almost 9 million people and a chronic housing shortage. What could go wrong?

You know things are bad when Andrew Cuomo is the hero.

Cuomo was last seen losing his job as New York’s governor after multiple sexual harassment complaints. (13, but who’s counting?) Then there’s his decision to make nursing homes take Covid patients, which probably led to thousands of deaths.

But as Democrats vote in a New York City’s mayoral primary today, Cuomo is the city’s only hope to avoid Zohran Mamdani — a 33-year-old “Democratic Socialist” whose plans include a rent freeze, city-run grocery stores, free buses, and other goodies.

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Mamdani’s resume reads like a parody of wokedom.

He was born in Kampala, Uganda and grew up in a heavily subsidized apartment in Manhattan, thanks to his father Mahmood, a professor at Columbia who specializes in “post-colonial studies” and “the politics of knowledge production.”

Mamdani went to Bowdoin College in Maine — think Oberlin with worse weather — where he founded (okay, co-founded) a chapter of Students for Justice and Palestine along the way to earning a degree in “Africana Studies” a few months short of 23.

Maine: where all the true scholars go to learn about Africa.

After college, he “worked” as a rapper called “Mr. Cardamom” before becoming a “field director” and “foreclosure prevention coordinator.”

No matter that getting foreclosed on, much less evicted, in New York is nearly impossible. The state’s protections for tenants and homeowners verge on the absurd. Even squatters can be hard to evict, and law firms advertise their skills in delaying foreclosure. In one notorious case, the owner of a $3 million Manhattan loft has made one mortgage payment since 2008, while using bankruptcy and endless litigation to forestall foreclosures.

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(Mayor Cardamom and the Gang)

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By 2020, the year of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, Mamdani had decided he was ready for higher office.

He ran for New York’s state assembly, demanding a “universal rent and mortgage holiday for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis, with no back payments due later.”

This was a true why-should-anyone-have-to-pay-for-anything-the-magic-beans-will-feed-us-all proposal.

It was also very much in keeping with the spirit of the time. He won.

Now, after spending four years in the assembly, whose members are notoriously powerless, Mamdani has decided he should be in charge of New York City.

He has this chance because Eric Adams, the current mayor, got himself indicted for taking business-class upgrades on Turkish Airlines.

As corruption scandals go, this wasn’t much of one, but it added to the (correct) perception that Adams was not exactly the best and brightest. Adams, a former New York police captain, very much gives off Ivory-Coast-colonel-who-would-try-a-coup-but-probably-get-executed vibes.

The Trump Administration dropped the indictment but by then the Democratic power brokers in New York had their excuse to dump Adams and put someone a little more… mayoral… in charge.

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(Eric Adams, about to get on the next plane out…)

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Be careful what you wish for.

New York is the world’s financial capital, the world’s media capital, and the home of the United Nations. It is the largest city by far in the United States, with a 24-hour-a-day transit system. It faces constant terrorism threats and has a police force nearly twice as large as Chicago and Los Angeles.

Zohran Mamdani’s main promise to voters, the campaign moment that slingshotted him ahead, was an ad promising to freeze the rent for all rent-stabilized tenants in New York City. “Wait, you’re gonna freeze my rent?” a guy yells from a window.

“Yes,” Mamdani says.

“Did I hear rent freeze?” another guy says as he plays dominos.

“Yes, this guy’s gonna freeze the rent,” a lady adds as Mamdani passes her.

“No rent hike?”

“None,” Mamdani answers.

And so it goes for 30 seconds, until even the stupidest voter cannot help but get the idea.

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(See, it says FREEZE THE RENT in blue, because blue means cold. What more proof do you need? He WILL freeze the rent!)

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Mamdani probably can freeze the rent for stabilized tenants, who are governed by an incredibly arcane and tenant-friendly set of laws.

But that doesn’t mean doing so is a good idea. This is Economics 101, or whatever comes before Economics 101. The core housing problem in New York City is that there isn’t enough of it. People keep moving to New York, for jobs or adventure or to get famous or sheer masochism. Neither 9/11 nor the financial crisis changed that trend, and even Covid only reversed it temporarily.

The five boroughs supposedly have about 8.3 million people. The real number, counting illegal immigrants, is probably closer to 9 million, compared to 7 million in 1980.

But building in New York is very hard.

The reason isn’t just because land is hard to come by; Queens and even parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx have more empty land and single-family homes than an outsider might expect. It’s due in part to zoning, and even more to all those tenant protection laws Mamdani loves.

So prices are high, and developers tend to build very expensive housing with larger, fancier units.

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A rent freeze will do nothing to change these dynamics, and a lot of Mamdani’s other suggestions will make them worse. New York City’s budget, about $112 billion, is approximately as large as the state of Florida’s — though Florida has close to three times as many people. (Yes, you read that right.) The city depends hugely on the income taxes paid by the top 5 percent and particularly the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent of its residents. In 2021, the top 1 percent of filers paid about 50 percent of all personal taxes the city collected.

Those people mostly could live elsewhere. They love New York. They do very well in it. And they don’t mind being squeezed a bit, at a roughly 4 percent city tax.

But they are not the reason New York is so expensive or crowded, and they’re certainly not the reason the city’s government is so bloated and dysfunctional. Their taxes pay for the bloat and dysfunction, and they try to have as little to do with New York City’s services as possible.

If Mamdani pushes them too hard, they’ll just go to Florida, as many have already.

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Like all socialists, Mamdani likes making promises that his voters think other people will pay for. And he’s charismatic and friendly, where Cuomo is — rightly — wildly unpopular. As the New Yorker wrote of Cuomo in 2015:

It’s sometimes said of certain politicians that they love humanity but hate people; Andrew Cuomo does not appear especially fond of either. He is the uncommon elected official with a streak of misanthropy.

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(Sign up before the socialists take all your money!)

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So Mamdani might win the primary today. (I won’t even go into the “ranked-choice” voting system that might be helping him, since the polls suggest he’d have a good shot even in a standard election.) And winning the Democratic primary in New York City is tantamount to winning the election, except on those rare occasions when crime get so bad that the city decides it needs a Republican.

If he does, New York will survive. It always does.

But it won’t be pretty for New York. And it will be a disaster for the Democratic Party, which will find its loudest, stupidest, most quasi-socialist ideas in a position to do real damage to the media capital of the world.

Oh well. People get what they want.