New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office promising bold change, including making child care and buses free and freezing rents for over a million units, and proposing big tax hikes on the rich and corporations to pay for it. And in his roughly first 100 days, Mamdani has moved to expand free child care programs known as 2-K and 3-K, and supported a new pied-à-terre tax on the wealthy – all while navigating meetings with President Donald Trump, the person who could do more than anyone else to crush his plans.
Epicenter NYC sat down with its politics and civics contributor, Felipe De La Hoz, a writer and member of the editorial board of New York Daily News, contributing editor at the New Republic and NYU lecturer, to talk about what’s been accomplished, what’s aspirational and what’s ahead for a mayor who’s looking to reshape the city.
Thanks for doing this, Felipe. First off, can you zoom out and tell us how our mayor did in his first 100 days?
Overall, I think he’s been doing well! The honeymoon period is always tough, but I think Mamdani has proved that he wasn’t a dreamer about to crash into the wall of reality and derail, though he’s made some notable missteps.
What do we know about him now that we didn’t know before?
I don’t know that it’s something that we didn’t know before per se but one point that has been driven home is that he can be pragmatic in a way that is both necessary and politically perilous for a politician so publicly tied to a simple ideological message. In March, for example, the mayor reversed course and continued a city lawsuit against the implementation of a recent law expanding the CityFHEPS housing vouchers while seeking to renegotiate the law with the City Council.
I wrote about the CityFHEPS expansion back in January 2024, when it was first slated to go into effect, questioning the wisdom of such a significant expansion in the context of an acute housing stock shortage that the vouchers had no way of fixing. You can read that for some more of the details, but the basic contours are that the program is intended to help New Yorkers avoid and transition out of the shelter system by providing a housing voucher paired with rent payments, similar to the federal Section 8 program.
The Council decided that the benefit should kick in prior to people actually being kicked out of their apartments and cover a larger pool of New Yorkers, with expanded eligibility including higher income caps. As I and others noted then, these were eminently reasonable goals that were complicated by the fact that merely adding huge numbers of vouchers while we have a long-running problem with the availability of housing was going to balloon the city budget without actually adding any homes for people to use those vouchers and potentially even put people in need into a certain amount of competition with each other or with people who weren’t really in particularly dire straits.
That dynamic remains true two years on, and while Mamdani had during his campaign pledged to drop the suit and enforce the expansion, he’s shifted course now that he’s actually at the helm, catching backlash from political allies in doing so. But that’s what being a mayor is partly about; things look different from the executive office, when you have to ensure the long-term sustainability of a whole city while balancing interests. It’s not the only issue Mamdani has shifted on — encampment sweeps as well, for example — and he’s shocked observers via his interactions with Trump, whom he brought a flattering Daily News mockup cover during their last meeting.
It’s a signal that Mamdani well understands that the road to his ambitious policy objectives does not run through perfect ideological purity. He’s going to have to piss some allies off, make compromises, maneuver, horse-trade and back away from some of the promises he’d made; that’s just politics. I think he is nonetheless deeply committed to his ideals and knows that he has a large political base of people who will be watching him like a hawk, and there are a number of clear lines I don’t think he’ll cross, like caving on his push for higher taxes on the wealthy.
Mamdani has leaned into what he calls “pothole politics” — fixing visible, everyday problems to rebuild trust in government. But the 2-K childcare expansion isn’t rolling out until fall and the city-run grocery store won’t open until next year. So what’s actually been delivered vs. what’s still a promise?
I don’t think anyone with familiarity of the workings of city government really expected these signature accomplishments to be anywhere near fruition by this point. Let’s remember that 2-K’s precursor, universal pre-K — Bill de Blasio’s signature promise and lasting accomplishment — rolled out over a couple years, and that was considered lightning-fast. Of course, all of that infrastructure already built makes rolling out what is effectively an expansion much easier, but these are still big projects that take time to do right. That’s probably why Mamdani hired de Blasio veteran Dean Fuleihan — credited with shepherding pre-K — as first deputy mayor, among other City Hall long-timers.
One of the fundamental mistakes of Eric Adams was populating his administration with longtime pals and confidants from Brooklyn Borough Hall and back in his days as a police officer who did not understand the mechanics of the mayoral apparatus and clashed with key staff. Mamdani in my view has done a good job threading the needle, bringing in his own trusted people, like Chief of Staff Elle Bisgaard-Church, but also a number of people who cut their teeth in City Hall, including Deputy Mayor for Operations Julia Kerson.
Whether all this means that he’s going to sail his agenda through is at this point murky. The centrist policy publication Vital City put out a first 100 days scorecard related to a lot of nuts-and-bolts issues like scaffolding and city service delivery, mostly giving the new mayor the feedback of “it’s a start,” which is really all you can hope for at this point in a mayoralty. I do think there are some significant risks ahead, as well as some blunders that have hindered the agenda, including his whole property tax raise and rainy day fund debacle. In a nutshell, the mayor proposed significantly raising already-high NYC property taxes and tapping its reserves to fill a multi-billion-dollar budget gap in what seemed like a transparent way to force the question of state tax increases for the wealthy.
That bluff was quickly called by City Council Speaker Julie Menin, in one of a series of skirmishes that has put Mamdani at some odds with the second-most powerful elected official in the city, who he needs to implement his plans. The genesis of that fight was the city’s projected fiscal shortfalls, an issue that could have some significant implications for his lofty plans. But it’s still early days.
His most immediately achievable promise is the rent freeze for the city’s rent-stabilized apartments, as he can do that practically on his own via his appointees to the Rent Guidelines Board, which just met recently in advance of a June vote to set increases for the next year. A vote to block any increase would have a number of repercussions, some of which I and others have concerns over, but at the very least it’s pretty directly achievable.
We don’t want to gloss over the importance of 2-K. Might it be possible that this mayor’s major legacy is childcare – and might that be enough?
It’s so difficult to game out what might happen over Mamdani’s term. A decent chunk of Adams’ term was defined by the so-called migrant crisis, an issue that wasn’t even really on the radar at the moment of his first 100 days. With as volatile a federal government as we currently have, things can change very quickly. That said, Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul are perhaps in the most alignment when it comes to childcare, which is also a huge plank of the broader affordability crisis that has become a refrain of Democrats of all stripes, so I don’t doubt that a significant expansion will happen.
As I wrote in February, I think Mamdani could also be the mayor that at least started to get his arms around the housing crisis, which would be a huge legacy to have. He’s benefiting from some groundwork laid by his predecessor and some powers approved by voters, and if he uses them all to maximum effect, internalizes the lesson that housing should be built across income bands, finally manages to reform property taxes and uses other tricks like developing on city-owned land, then we can make real progress.
Beyond the 2-K expansion, Mamdani has announced the redesign of 45 major bus corridors, citywide trash containerization and a fast-track program for affordable housing on city-owned land. How would you rank these in terms of real impact for New Yorkers — and which one, if it works, is most worth watching as a potential model for other cities?
I think the bus corridors could be a big deal for New Yorkers, most of whom don’t own or use cars. Bus transit in the city has long been notoriously slow, and better corridors could allow more people to reach more destinations faster, which is huge. In the grand scheme of the city’s housing crisis, the development of housing on city-owned land will only be one small part of a broader approach, though a significant one, and the containerization thing is frankly just overdue (many other cities already have this as the norm).
What has genuinely surprised you about the first 100 days — and what are some challenges he faces in the next 100?
I don’t know that I’ve been floored by anything with the possible exception of Mamdani’s meetings with Trump, especially the first one (though that preceded the mayor taking office). I think Mamdani’s level of pragmatism as I described above isn’t necessarily shocking but it is reassuring and I think assuages some people’s fear that Mamdani was going to quickly be in over his head while engendering some fear that he will compromise away his fundamental objectives. I don’t think either is true.
As far as the next 100, I can summarize one big challenge in a single syllable: Trump. Chummy as the president has been with the mayor, he’s doing his utmost to blow up the global economy at a time when NYC’s own economy has been propped up precisely by a financial industry that is also at significant risk from the popping of the AI bubble. Many of Mamdani’s big-ticket promises will cost money, a lot of it, and even if these are the right long-term investments, the revenues are needed now, and barring Hochul dropping her opposition to tax increases on wealthy individuals and corporations — which I don’t see happening — there are real questions about where the money comes from.
At least a partial answer came this week when Hochul and Mamdani announced a compromise in the form of a proposed tax on only sort-of New Yorkers: a so-called pied-à-terre tax on second homes in New York worth $5 million or more. This has been a proposal that has been put forward and promptly killed by real estate interests in New York for years, but in the context of the full support of the mayor and the governor, who have hashed this out as a way out of their tax impasse, I think it’s got a good shot. It is also a pretty good example of the pair’s willingness to navigate even what seem like deadlocks; it’s hard to imagine splitting the difference when it comes to the binary question of whether or not to raise taxes on the wealthy, but they’ve managed here to find something both can defend.
Politico went so far as to call the deal an example of how Hochul has become (somewhat improbably for the western New York moderate) Mamdani’s “most important ally.” It’s a matter of symbiosis — both saw how the perennial de Blasio-Cuomo feud damaged both leaders, and understand that they need each other. Mamdani needs Hochul’s support to push his policies in Albany, and Hochul saw Mamdani’s election returns and knows she needs to put up those numbers to win comfortably in her race for reelection this November.
