You Should Vote for Zohran Mamdani
You probably already did, but just in case
I don’t know very many people who live in New York who don’t also say, ‘But I’m leaving.’ And I’ve been thinking of leaving for 35 years now. I’m almost ready.
- Lou Reed, Blue in the Face
I’m older than most of my current friends in New York, because for some reason, I’m still here.
The original cohort that I fell in with after moving to town in the mid-nineties has long since fled. There’s an inevitable decimation of New York friend groups: when your pals eventually have kids and grow up, they usually opt for a more predictable and affordable environment to be parents and adults in. It’s a tough decision, and I’ve watched many friends suffer long stretches of loneliness and nostalgia before finally settling into their chosen new towns. I know I wouldn’t be any better at it than they were.
It’s a depressing thing about living here. It can feel like a city of transients, as Washington D.C. is often described: people come for a few years, often for a specific job, but then they want to get the hell out. This is mostly because New York is famously and crushingly expensive, and after a few years of paying a premium for a walkup with clanking pre-war radiators, you eventually feel like a sucker.
This has always been true, as with any of the world’s most famous and otherwise wonderful cities. But at this point it feels like we are fully captured by the rapacious real estate industry. Our favorite restaurants and concert venues are snuffed out at a shocking clip. Humble bagel spots are hunted for sport, tagged and bagged. And most importantly: affordable apartments are a forgotten legend, hunted to extinction when our forefathers walked these streets. The places where we all fell in love with the city, and with each other, are carted to the landfill, then the cranes block out the sky for six months, and what’s left is another tower full of trillion-dollar love nests for the teenage children of oligarchs.
There is only one candidate in the mayor’s race who is focused on the affordability issue, and his name starts with a Z.
In Zohran Mamdani’s vision of New York: it could be possible (perhaps even advisable!) to live and raise a family in the city without being a full-on nepo baby. That means building more rent-stabilized apartments, freezing the rent on as many existing apartments as we can, and prosecuting slumlords.
When they ask Mamdani how he will pay for all this, he replies that we should tax corporations and the very rich. And that’s when certain unsavory elements get interested. They plaster their privately-owned media platforms with bot-generated disinfo about Mamdani’s wild-eyed radicalism. Occasionally this gets personal, about his race, religion, or identity. And that’s how you can always tell exactly who, and what, we’re dealing with.
Watch two minutes from any of the mayoral debates, and tell me I’m wrong. Picture yourself as a child, or an alien, and try to figure out which of these three men is telling you the truth.
The most honest argument against Mamdani is that he is too young (not even 40!) and inexperienced to be in charge of something as vast and complex as New York City. But haven’t we seen the answer to this argument, quite recently and sharply, in our disastrous national politics? Isn’t it maybe time to give a young person a chance to run things? Have we, the old and the tired, maybe had our shot, and blown it?
“What I don’t have in experience, I make up for in integrity,” Mamdani said to some desiccated vampire in a recent debate. “And what you don’t have in integrity, you could never make up for in experience.”
It was sort of uncomfortable to watch, because one gets the sense that he doesn’t usually say things that are that impolite!
This guy should be our mayor. If you can, get out and canvas, talk to your neighbors about him, and vote for him.