Zohran Mamdani’s City Hall will pit ideology against reality

Free buses. Free child care. City-run grocery stores. Brand-new union-built, publicly subsidized housing.

Zohran Mamdani makes it sound so simple.

But the mayor of New York City isn’t a monarch. He can’t unilaterally do anything he wants.

Much of the job is drudgery — grappling with budget and legal complexities, hard trade-offs and bitter compromises.

Ideology and idealism must give way to pragmatic reality.

If Mamdani wins Tuesday, he’ll need to understand these details — and earn the cooperation of other leaders — if he wants to achieve even a fraction of his agenda.

Take free buses: The mayor has no power over fares.

The MTA, a state agency, runs the city’s trains and buses through a board appointed by the governor — and CEO Janno Lieber is highly skeptical of Mamdani’s pledge.

Lieber, a realist, doesn’t like “bumper-sticker decision-making,” he said last week.

The MTA doesn’t treat “New York like it’s Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory: Let’s just attach the electrodes and see what happens,” he warned.

Mamdani, in response, said he took Lieber’s rejection “with a grain of salt.”

But he can’t implement free buses without the support of those with the power to make it a reality.

Lieber’s opposition isn’t merely philosophical; it’s rooted in financial and legal reality, a world Mamdani assiduously avoids.

The MTA has pledged future bus revenues to its bondholders — that is, the money collected from bus fares is used as a guarantee to the MTA’s lenders.

Alone, the authority can’t legally terminate a revenue stream upon which lenders relied when buying its debt. 

Amending the bond agreement requires the MTA to substitute an equally reliable source of income, plus the bondholders’ consent.

Good luck getting either: The buses generate hundreds of millions of dollars in fares and cost nearly a billion dollars to operate annually. Bondholders want security. 

With his grain of salt, Mamdani insists he can control a system he does not command.

After all, he touts that he “made one bus route free in every single borough.”

In Mamdani’s world, if it’s possible to pull one brick from a wall without it collapsing, then surely it’s possible to remove all of them.

Speaking of bricks, Mamdani is calling for public construction of 200,000 affordable housing units, which he says will cost $70 billion.

But he hasn’t explained where the money will come from, or whether borrowing that much would exceed the city’s debt limit, which is set by the state Constitution and by statute.

And how can he build at $350,000 per unit, when affordable housing units routinely cost more than $600,000 each to construct — and sometimes close to a million?

He reduces these realities, too, to a grain of salt.

Even if he could secure the money, he still hasn’t made his views known on Ballot Proposals 2, 3 and 4, which would weaken City Council members’ unilateral veto over rezonings, making his construction promise more plausible. 

If he’s serious about his housing agenda, he would support the measures — but he’s more concerned about ruffling the council’s feathers: It’s run a disgraceful disinformation campaign against the proposals.

If the City Council can cow him, just imagine what Donald Trump could do.

To fund his $6 billion child-care proposal and others, Mamdani wants a new tax hike on corporations statewide and an added 2% tax on city residents’ personal incomes over $1 million.

But since the mayor doesn’t have the power to levy new taxes, he’ll need to get the legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul to sign off — so that businesses in Poughkeepsie can pay for Mamdani’s wishlist.

He enjoys the endorsements of Hochul and Albany leaders, but she has repeatedly promised not to raise income taxes — as recently as last week.

Even if she budges, it won’t be for his full $10 billion ask.

Money aside, it’s been over eight years since Mamdani’s hero Bill de Blasio first announced pre-K for 3-year-olds — and the city still hasn’t gotten it right.

Some neighborhoods have waiting lists, and others empty seats, because de Blasio never did the hard work of building an adequate provider network.

Why should anyone think Mamdani can make this happen for every infant 6 weeks or older — or even just for 2-year-olds?

Over four years, he might be able to find one city-owned parcel in each borough and spend $60 million to build or reconfigure grocery stores on them.

Whether those stores are near you, or how their supply chain can give you what you want at lower prices, is up in the air.

When Mayor Mamdani fails to deliver on his promises, New Yorkers will be left with nothing but his moral convictions and the bills they incur.

Voters can’t say they weren’t warned — back when it all sounded so simple.

John Ketcham is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute. All views expressed are those of the author and not the Manhattan Institute.