Zohran Mamdani and the Economic Transformation of New York City

July 24, 2025

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The following guest blog is from Daniel Wortel-London, Assistant Professor of History at Bard College, and author of the forthcoming book The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981. The views expressed are his own.

Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in New York City’s Democratic Primary has opened up new horizons of possibility for economic transformation in America’s cities. His campaign’s relentless focus on affordability, together with his coalition’s exceptional ground game, dramatically expanded the electoral base for progressive politics amongst young people, immigrants, and a broad swath of other demographics. Their rejection of business-as-usual economic development approaches, which have dominated the city for decades, proves that the demand for alternative paradigms such as Community Wealth Building (CWB) is deep and broad.

At least, in theory. In truth, with the notable exception of his flagship policy of municipal ownership of grocery stores, Zohran didn’t focus on the institutions and strategies for economic transformation during his campaign. Worker co-operatives and progressive procurement, for example, barely featured in his campaign literature, and it is unclear what role the pursuit of economic democracy might play in a Mamdani Administration in America’s largest city.

This is a missed opportunity – both for the Mamdani campaign, which after all still has a general election to win, and for the movement to democratize the economy in the United States. On the one hand, the movement for Community Wealth Building could benefit immensely from the fiscal and political power which the Mayor’s office brings in New York City. On the other hand, Zohran’s quest to make New York affordable can benefit from leveraging the power of cooperatives, Community Land Trusts (CLTs), and public banking as a means to shift wealth and power in the economy from the bottom up.

One of the main tasks of the Community Wealth Building movement, therefore, must be to show how CWB strategies (and related approaches, such as post-growth economics and the solidarity economy) can benefit Zohran’s powerfully simple goal of an affordable New York.

Community Wealth Building: A New York State of Mind

New York City already contains the seeds of a new economy – an economy rooted not in extraction but in democratic ownership, community control, and long-term equity. The Community Wealth Building ecosystem is not hypothetical here. It’s real. And it’s growing.

NYC’s labor movement provides a strong foundation for the Fair Work pillar, with one of the highest union densities in the country and a Living Wage Law that ensures baseline pay for many workers on city-funded projects. The city is also home to more than 100 worker-owned cooperatives, a robust network of community development financial institutions (CDFIs), and a growing array of community credit unions – key pieces of democratic enterprise and locally rooted finance. In housing, Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and Community Development Corporations are growing in number and visibility. Meanwhile, NYC’s progressive procurement system – anchored by a Minority/Women-owned Business Enterprise (M/WBE) program that directed 17 percent of contract dollars to small and disadvantaged businesses in FY2024 – continues to develop and evolve.

This isn’t happening by accident. It’s the product of organizing. Groups like the NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives, the Cooperative Economics Alliance of NYC, the NYC Community Land Initiative, and allies like New Economy Project and Demos have pushed for policies that align with CWB principles. City officials, including former Deputy Mayor J. Phillip Thompson and Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, have taken up the cause, championing initiatives like the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative (the first of its kind in the nation), the country’s first state-run CDFI fund, and City-backed expansions of CLTs.

And yet, New York remains only at the beginning of its CWB journey.

Despite scattered successes, these efforts remain siloed. Worker co-ops, unions, CLTs, and CDFIs largely operate in parallel rather than in coordination. NYC’s powerful array of anchor institutions – hospitals, universities, major nonprofits – spend billions annually on procurement, but these funds are rarely channeled toward deep community wealth outcomes. The city’s broader economy is still dominated by speculative real estate and finance, which prioritize extractive capital flows over a place-based economy serving ordinary working people.

Most importantly, the CWB movement in NYC has remained somewhat niche – respected in policy circles, but peripheral to the broader popular movements that have defined recent political life in the city such as the anti-ICE protests, the George Floyd uprisings, the labor strikes, and the mobilizations against Trumpism. CWB has lacked a mass, politically engaged base that could push it from the margins to the mainstream.

Until now.

The Zohran Effect

Zohran’s campaign reoriented NYC politics around a simple but powerful material demand: make the city livable again. At its heart was the recognition that the very people who built New York – immigrants, workers, artists, tenants – are being pushed out by soaring housing costs, stagnant wages, and an increasingly privatized public realm.

This resonated, for obvious reasons. Nearly 20 percent of NYC residents live at or below the poverty line. Unemployment remains over 5 percent. Wages for low-income workers have lagged behind other major metropolitan areas. Meanwhile, the costs of housing, child care, groceries, and transit continue to rise inexorably. He captured the street mood of popular opposition to price inflation and the soaring cost of living with his pithy call to “Make halal eight bucks again.”

Zohran offered an unapologetic alternative: free buses, municipally owned grocery stores, a higher minimum wage, and a massive expansion of truly affordable housing. He promised rent freezes for subsidized tenants and support for small businesses. And he delivered that message through an unmatched organizing effort led by NYC-DSA and community groups.

The result was an unprecedentedly broad electoral mandate. Zohran’s coalition went far beyond the usual progressive base: he won working-class Asian neighborhoods, increased support in Black and Latino districts, and activated thousands of new voters, especially the young. His opponent, Andrew Cuomo, was left with support from the city’s extremes: the very richest and the very poorest. Zohran won the middle – and the future.

Nonetheless, Zohran will be confronted with a pressing challenge should he now go on to win the general election in November: money.  He calls for financing his platform through increased taxes on the wealthy, but authority for most of these increases is lodged with New York State, not New York City. And Governor Hochul has stated her opposition to any tax increases. To build the fiscal and political capacity to deliver on his program of making New York affordable, Zohran must get creative and leverage the city’s existing assets and financial power. 

This is where CWB can help him. 

CWB +  Zohran = Progress

CWB initiatives can further Zohran’s cause in a number of ways. 

First, they can help deliver affordable goods and services. For example, Community Land Trusts can help secure affordable housing, and worker cooperatives can provide higher wages than their for-profit counterparts. Similarly, alternative business structures – public enterprises, nonprofit enterprises, and more – can provide goods more chiefly and equitably than strictly for-profit and extractive firms. Zohran has already recognized this principle by promoting municipal groceries as a key part of his platform. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: there’s a lot more sectors that can do with a CWB option. 

Second, Zohran can build out the capacity of these enterprises without the politically difficult task of raising taxes. New York City’s government already spends billions of dollars every year in public procurement, not to mention tax incentives and other subsidies on behalf of economic development goals. By leveraging these existing expenditures towards CWB-oriented enterprises rather than conventional firms (and encouraging anchor institutions to do the same through his bully pulpit and convening power), Zohran could help deliver greater affordability even within the existing fiscal envelope.

Perhaps the best example of this is through developing a public bank. The city’s $100 billion in deposits currently flow through the kind of extractive financial actors which typify the Wall Street model and drive the factors that make New York unaffordable. By redirecting these funds into a New York City public bank, however, the city could begin to change this.

A recent estimate found that a public bank could help develop 17,000 new or rehabilitated housing units, help sponsor $6 billion in new lending, and provide cheaper access to credit for millions of working-class New Yorkers. A Public Bank, in other words, can help provide fiscal muscle behind Zohran’s pledge to make a city more affordable for small businesses, renters, and New Yorkers in general. 

Zohran already knows this: as an Assemblyman he co-sponsored the “New York Public Banking Act” back in the 2021-2022 legislative session. But the public bank is also a political winner, with groups ranging from the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, the New York Immigration Coalition, the NYC-DSA, and United Auto-Workers Region 9-A all rallying to support it. Many of these are groups Zohran needs to court to stay in power. Pushing for a public bank can, in this sense, be the keystone linking Zohran’s coalition to the CWB coalition. 

Third, pushing for CWB policies can help build out Zohran’s leverage at the state level as well. New York City, after all, isn’t the only place that is facing an affordability crisis – small and struggling towns all across New York State are facing it, too. By showing how CWB policies can help tackle these issues, Zohran can attract constituencies outside NYC to the cause of economic transformation, giving him greater leverage in Albany as well as via City Hall. 

Finally, CWB initiatives can help build up the economic power – and hence, political power – of Zohran’s base. By strategically rolling out CWB policies in a way which materially benefits his constituency, and by connecting New York’s radical civil society to a network of supportive economic institutions, Zohran can provide his constituency with the durability, cohesion, and motivation needed for further political advances and policy victories. Such alliances between mutualistic economic institutions and radical political movements, after all, provided the foundation for progressive hegemony in the past. Zohran must rebuild such alliances today if he is to succeed. 

CWB in the Belly of the Beast 

At the moment, however, Zohran’s campaign does not make the most of existing and potential  CWB initiatives as a means to both wider economic transformation and delivering on his affordability agenda. Outside of support for CLTs and housing co-ops, there are few references to worker-cooperatives or even public banking in his electoral program. This is a missed opportunity for him – but he won’t know it unless advocates of alternative economic frameworks speak up and reach out. 

And to do this we must adapt.  We need to frame our work not just as strategies for reviving struggling cities (as has been the case in postindustrial rustbelt cities like Preston or Cleveland), but as a tool to fight unaffordability and displacement in so-called “hot markets,” cities that are otherwise thriving, but at the cost of widening disparities of wealth and life chances. We must speak directly to Zohran’s agenda and to the concerns of his supporters: cost of living, economic security, and affordability. 

If we can do this, and demonstrate how CWB can help Zohran accomplish his goals, then political office-seekers like Zohran can help the CWB movement accomplish ours.  New York City’s wealth and international stature can provide our movement with funds, political capital, and publicity. Zohran’s political genius and his grassroots supporters, most notably the DSA, can provide political leverage in a way we have not previously enjoyed in the States.

Most importantly, New York City’s diversity and shared challenges mirror those of working people across the country – even around much of the world. If Zohran were able to build a beachhead for CWB policies in NYC, it could open up possibilities for expanding CWB far beyond the five boroughs. This is New York, after all. As the old song goes, “If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.” Time to get CWB and the affordability agenda lined up to deliver actual material change for ordinary people that can make a real difference.

Zohran’s campaign has shown that a majority of New Yorkers are ready to fight for a city that works for the many, not the few. Community Wealth Building offers the tools to make that vision real. Let’s make the case!