My hope is the Mamdani is intelligent enough to understand what policies have a chance of actually improving the problems he cares about, and young enough that he's not forced into pandering to a million vested interests like other would-be mayors.
A good portion of his policy aims, like freezing the rent and city-run grocery stores aren't great, but if we're lucky they're mostly just rhetoric to get him elected. It would be really great if he moderated some of the policies that are good for rent-stabilized apartments and bad for everyone else, while aggressively pursuing policies that would actually mitigate the problem, like creating incentives to rent vacant apartments, reducing restrictive permitting and zoning and identifying specific vested interests, like the people who own the food truck permits, and smashing their rackets.
My hope is the Mamdani is intelligent enough to understand what policies have a chance of actually improving the problems he cares about, and young enough that he's not forced into pandering to a million vested interests like other would-be mayors.
A good portion of his policy aims, like freezing the rent and city-run grocery stores aren't great, but if we're lucky they're mostly just rhetoric to get him elected. It would be really great if he moderated some of the policies that are good for rent-stabilized apartments and bad for everyone else, while aggressively pursuing policies that would actually mitigate the problem, like creating incentives to rent vacant apartments, reducing restrictive permitting and zoning and identifying specific vested interests, like the people who own the food truck permits, and smashing their rackets.