The New York City mayor is enjoying a terrifyingly successful summer, and if we do not put a stop to this working-class prosperity soon, the institutional investment industry may never recover.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is having a dangerously good summer. His Democratic Socialists of America allies have been racking up electoral victories from the boroughs of New York all the way to the statehouses of Colorado. His localized policies are being widely praised for successfully cooling inflation and delivering tangible economic relief to working families. Everyone is cheering. But I am just asking the questions no one else will: when a working-class family can suddenly afford groceries and rent in the same month, whose pocket is that money coming out of?
It is coming out of the pockets of our bravest citizens. The shareholders.
I had breakfast at Balthazar yesterday with a managing director at a prominent real estate investment trust. The man could barely touch his eggs. For the last decade, his entire portfolio was built on the rock-solid American assumption that desperate millennial renters would accept fifteen percent annual rent hikes until they died, simply because they had nowhere else to go. It was a beautiful, elegant system that reliably delivered double-digit quarterly returns.
Now, thanks to Mamdani’s aggressive rent stabilization policies and public housing expansions, that fundamental desperation has been stolen from the market. By treating housing as a human right rather than a speculative asset class, the mayor has fundamentally undermined the foundational principles of the New York real estate sector. How can you have a vibrant, dynamic city if you can no longer threaten to evict people into the winter cold for missing a predatory convenience fee?
This economic contagion is not just isolated to the coastal elites anymore. The recent DSA electoral victories in Colorado prove that the heartland is now being infected with the virus of living wages. We are seeing ski resort towns where the people who operate the lifts and pour the coffee can suddenly afford to live in the same zip code where they work.
This is a tragedy. It destroys the noble, character-building tradition of the two-hour commute from a crumbling trailer park. When a service worker is not exhausted by a punishing transit ordeal before they even clock in, they start getting ideas. They start asking for consistent schedules. They start unionizing.
Let us look at the inflation numbers that Mamdani is taking so much credit for. The mayor is being universally praised for economic changes that directly addressed localized inflation, expanding public transit options and cracking down on corporate price gouging. But what is inflation, really, if not a vital pressure valve that allows corporate America to quietly double the price of basic necessities while blaming a vague global supply chain?
I spoke with an executive at a major grocery conglomerate who told me the mood in their boardroom is absolutely funereal. They had a flawless system going. The pandemic gave them the excuse to hike prices on eggs and bread, and they fully intended to just keep those prices elevated forever. Now, Mamdani’s localized public options and aggressive regulatory crackdowns are forcing them to compete on actual value. It is sickening to watch private enterprise be bullied like this.
President Trump has repeatedly taken to the airwaves to label Mamdani and his allies as communists. The mainstream press clutches its pearls at this rhetoric, calling it hyperbolic and unpresidential. But I am here to tell you that the president is entirely correct, provided we use the modern, practical definition of communism.
What is communism today? It is the chilling belief that a private equity firm should not be allowed to buy a mobile home park, defer all maintenance, and extract maximum yield from the elderly until the pipes burst. If stopping that is communism, then yes, the mayor is Karl Marx reborn, and we should all be terrified.
We must also consider the psychological toll this economic miracle is taking on our wealth creators. For decades, the implicit bargain of American capitalism was that the wealthy would be treated as benevolent gods. You endure the low wages, and in exchange, you get to read aspirational magazine profiles about our morning routines and our philanthropic galas.
Mamdani’s policies strip the wealthy of this cultural cachet. When a municipal government proves it can provide reliable transit, affordable housing, and functional infrastructure without begging a billionaire for a tax-deductible donation, the billionaire is reduced to just being a guy with a lot of money. It is profoundly dehumanizing.
The most terrifying aspect of the Mamdani administration is not that his policies are failing, but that they are working so well they threaten to make our entire ideological apparatus obsolete.
Channing is exactly right. I sat on a panel with him in Washington last week, and the panic in the green room was palpable. There are thousands of consultants, lobbyists, and policy analysts in this country whose entire livelihood depends on managing the managed decline of the middle class.
If the DSA proves that a government can just step in and fix things, what happens to the public-private partnership industry? What happens to the tax-increment financing consultants? What happens to the think tanks that receive millions of dollars in grants to study why the poor are poor? They will be entirely out of a job.
As we look toward the midterms, the stakes could not be higher. The winning streak we are seeing from Mamdani’s camp in New York and their ideological siblings in Colorado is not just a passing political trend. It is an existential threat to the comfortable, profitable misery we have spent fifty years carefully calibrating.
We are standing on the precipice of a terrifying new world. A world where a medical emergency does not guarantee personal bankruptcy. A world where a landlord has to fix the boiler before cashing the check. A world where the stock market is no longer considered the sole measure of human flourishing.
The voters have a choice to make this November. They can selfishly choose to continue this run of broad-based economic prosperity, or they can do the right thing, tighten their belts, and return the reins of power to the people who view them as a rounding error. I can only hope they remember their place.
