Zohran Mamdani and the revenge of the struggling yuppie

NEW YORK – Ms Kate Schutzengel, a mother of three living in Brooklyn, has it pretty good and she knows it.

Ms Schutzengel, 38, who works in technology, is grateful that her family could afford their US$50,000 (S$65,000) childcare bill in 2024. She is grateful that she and her husband bought their home when interest rates were low and that they could refinance their mortgage during the Covid-19 pandemic.

She is not complaining. But she also wonders how long her children can reasonably share a single bedroom, with curtains surrounding each of their beds.

And when she and her husband look for larger apartments nearby in Kensington, their relatively affordable neighbourhood, everything is out of their price range.

“It does not feel like there is any next step that we could reasonably achieve,” Ms Schutzengel said.

It is a feeling that is shared by a constituency of young-ish, middle-class-ish New Yorkers who are disillusioned by a city of shimmering wealth that they cannot quite seem to access.

Rather than seeing a New York of boundless possibility – or at least of apartments with in-unit washers and dryers – they see a mirage.

And now, they have helped to make Mr Zohran Mamdani

the city’s next mayor

.

Mr Mamdani, 34, a democratic socialist, ran on a platform of making one of the most expensive cities in the world more affordable, promising an ambitious, expensive expansion of the social safety net.

“It is so energising that politics might work for all of the people in this city,” Ms Schutzengel said. “Not just the people who are in power right now.”

Mr Mamdani, of course, owes his victory to many factors.

He is an uncommonly charismatic politician who effectively taught a global masterclass on how to use social media in campaigns.

He mobilised Muslim and South Asian voters who had long been overlooked by the city’s political establishment, and won over many black and Latino voters across the city.

He benefited from the rancour many felt for his chief opponent, former governor Andrew Cuomo.

His pro-Palestinian stance aligned with many New Yorkers’ growing criticism of Israel, bucking conventional political wisdom.

But it is undeniable that crucial to Mr Mamdani’s success was a group of voters with the six-figure salaries and college degrees that were supposed to insulate them from feeling economically precarious.

Many of them cast their ballots for a platform that included childcare for all families, rich, poor and in between; free buses across the city; and a rent freeze for roughly two million tenants in rent-stabilised apartments.

Paying US$2.90 to ride the bus is not a hardship for Ms Schutzengel, and a rent freeze would not affect her family.

But it is the message – the orange and purple campaign posters blaring “For a New York You Can Afford” – that made many of Mr Mamdani’s supporters feel recognised.

In his upset victory in the primary, Mr Mamdani won in neighbourhoods where New Yorkers tend to rent rather than own and in parts of the city where the median income is at least US$200,000 but most residents are under 45.

In the general election, he ran up some of his widest margins in Brooklyn neighbourhoods like Park Slope, where Mrs Hillary Clinton defeated Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary by double digits.

Mr Mamdani won in most wealthy neighbourhoods, but not in the richest neighbourhoods of Tribeca and the Upper East Side.

Since the primary, New York’s dismayed power brokers – the real estate and finance industries, the local Democratic Party – have struggled to understand how a democratic socialist could be elected mayor in the global centre of capitalism, and with the support of people who are ostensibly doing reasonably well in it.

Today’s New York was created for upwardly mobile residents to enjoy by those same power brokers, out of the wreckage of a more dangerous, much poorer city that emerged from the fiscal crisis of the late 1970s.

The great irony is that those changes have helped create a new, pro-Mamdani constituency.

As poor and working-class neighbourhoods have been transformed, home prices have skyrocketed, and then the gentrifiers started to get priced out of the gentrified neighbourhoods.

As public schools have improved, there is often more demand and more competition for the most coveted seats.

“It is an existential backlash, a wholesale rejection,” said Mr Jonathan Mahler, author of the new book The Gods Of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, And The Birth Of The Modern City: 1986-1990 (2025) and a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.

“These people who would have been yuppies 40 years ago are now kind of struggling,” Mr Mahler said.

He added: “They are making US$120,000, US$140,000 a year and that is not enough to live an upper-middle-class life in New York at all. And that is the Mamdani voter.”

A ‘magic city’, but ‘hard to live in’

Not all that long ago, New York City was known for being a place where Americans could come to create a comfortable, working-class life.

In the middle of the 20th century, then Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, whom Mr Mamdani often calls the best mayor in the city’s history, helped create a city where there were plenty of unionised manufacturing jobs to go around.

Organised labour had enough power to help drive up wages and benefits, and pave a way for union members to save for a down payment.

New York was transformed with the help of New Deal-era federal funding. The city built a vast public housing network, along with parks, playgrounds and other infrastructure, and created its jewel of a public university system.

But by the late 1970s, deindustrialisation and automation crushed the city’s economy, and decades of fiscal mismanagement left the government thoroughly broke.

Saving New York from bankruptcy required pulling back on social services, charging tuition at the City University of New York for the first time, and cutting funding for public hospitals and other institutions.

The private sector began to wrest power from the government, and soon the mayor’s job was not only to run the city, but also to manage the needs of the business community, which formed a crucial core of the city’s tax base.

New York was now the financial capital of the world. It was the place to be if you wanted to make money, a haven for young urban professionals not-so-affectionately dubbed yuppies, and a creative hub, with plenty of studio space for artists.

Wall Street’s ascendance in the 1980s did, at least for a while, help lift quite a lot of boats, making space for growth in media, marketing and advertising.

That boom reshaped the city, making it a centre for the ultrarich, who soon drove up demand for apartments that cost US$50 million, then US$100 million, then more than US$200 million.

They wanted designer shopping districts not just on Madison Avenue, but also in the former artists’ havens of SoHo and the West Village. And they now pay US$65,000 a year or more, per child, for elite private schools.

In 2003, the mayor at the time, Mr Michael Bloomberg, said that New York City was a “luxury product”.

If that was a vision for the city that left many behind, it has now left behind many people who may have occasionally shopped for luxury goods. Mr Bloomberg gave nearly US$10 million to anti-Mamdani super political action committees in 2025.

Over the past 20 years or so, the cost of living has risen steadily, coalescing into an affordability crisis made worse by the pandemic.

New York is “suffering from good luck”, said Mr Thomas Dyja, the author of New York, New York, New York: Four Decades Of Success, Excess, And Transformation (2021).

He added: “We’ve created a magic city that is really hard to live in.”

Of the country’s 10 largest cities, only New York has seen a statistically significant decline in median household income since 2019, according to a report from The New School’s Centre for New York City Affairs.

The city’s highest-paid workers – New Yorkers making US$312,000 a year or more – saw their hourly wages rise by almost 35 per cent between 2019 and 2024. That was more than triple the hourly wage growth experienced by upper-middle-class employees.

Families have to make at least US$100,000 to afford basic necessities, according to a separate report.

And families need to be bringing in at least US$334,000 to comfortably afford childcare for one toddler, according to the city comptroller’s office.

The price of daycare now averages more than US$23,000 a year – and much more in some neighbourhoods.

A leap of faith

Some of the Mamdani coalition’s most active members see themselves as part of a movement and were drawn to his proud democratic socialist affiliation.

But many others simply voted for the candidate who has promised to “convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness”, which is how Dr Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and a Mamdani supporter, has described the goal of socialism.

“Mr Mamdani has tapped into this sense that life does not have to be this endless slog,” Dr Robin said. “It can be a life of not utopia, but of a certain amount of calm.”

That new version of New York would have social programmes available to all, a departure from the local government’s long-time approach of focusing mainly on the neediest New Yorkers.

For his part, Mr Cuomo warned that Mr Mamdani would bankrupt the city by “subsidising the rich” with universal programmes.

“City government’s job is to make sure each New Yorker has a dignified life, not determine which New Yorkers are worthy of that dignity,” Mr Mamdani would tell reporters when asked why he was so insistent on expanding services for every one.

It is, of course, not quite so straightforward.

New York City is facing profound fiscal headwinds, with budget cuts that have left the local government and the city’s vast non-profit infrastructure scrambling to ensure that the neediest New Yorkers are taken care of at all. US President Donald Trump has promised to make that already dire fiscal outlook worse under Mr Mamdani.

Some New Yorkers will face higher taxes, at least if Mr Mamdani gets his way.

He has promised to lobby the state legislature to raise taxes on anyone making more than US$1 million a year to pay for some of his agenda, though the governor has poured cold water on that idea.

If members of the already tax-burdened professional class start to feel that the city’s scarce resources are providing services that they do not actually need – or if paying for those services requires raising taxes beyond the super-wealthy – will the Mamdani coalition hold together?

But for now, many Mamdani voters see in the candidate’s message a tacit acknowledgment: that the city’s poor and its middle class should not have to compete for services, that struggling to pay tens of thousands of dollars to have someone watch your toddler while you go to work is not merely a “first-world problem” and that it is acceptable to expect more from city government.

Many New Yorkers already have some experience with an expanded social safety net.

In 2013, Mr Bill de Blasio was elected on an explicitly anti-Bloomberg platform focused on combating income inequality and, more specifically, on a promise to offer free pre-kindergarten (pre-K) to all New York families.

Mr De Blasio always expected low-income New Yorkers to appreciate a major addition to the programme. What he did not anticipate, he said, was the relief it offered to New Yorkers up the income ladder.

“Working-class and low-income New Yorkers come up to me and say thank you with great sincerity,” he said. “But upper-middle-class people come up to me, grab my arm and say thank you emphatically.”

Universal pre-K was primarily about supporting children and families, Mr de Blasio said, but adding a new benefit that was available to all was also “about proving that government could work”, and that the huge fraction of voters’ salaries that went to local taxes could produce something they really needed in return.

The pre-K programme has had more enduring popularity than Mr de Blasio’s overall tenure.

This week, New Yorkers took a major leap of faith, asking the government to take a much bigger role in their daily lives.

Reviving elements of city government that have been dormant for decades thrills some voters and frightens others, who worry Mr Mamdani will lead New York back to the bad old days of fiscal irresponsibility, with its attendant crime and grime.

Mr Mamdani has promised to build a new city, but one that reaches back to its past.

To do so, he will have to harness a sprawling, unwieldy local government and make it run as efficiently as it ever has, if he hopes to achieve even a fraction of his agenda.

Difficult as it may seem, voters are demanding something that New York has delivered before, Mr Dyja said.

He added: “For all the rhetoric, this is not Trotsky here.

“This is stuff New York has done, not just talked about, but actually executed on.” NYTIMES