Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor on a platform that emphasized affordability. He was less focused on the fight against racial inequality.
Now that he is in City Hall, Mr. Mamdani is moving to align his affordability agenda with an emphasis on racial equity — and, in the process, to correct political missteps that had alienated some Black New Yorkers.
He has appointed a Black deputy mayor after initially being the first mayor in decades not to do so. He pulled back a proposal he had floated to increase property taxes by 9.5 percent, which had angered many Black homeowners.
On Easter Sunday, the mayor spoke at two Black churches, one in the Bronx and one in Brooklyn, highlighting how hundreds of thousands of Black New Yorkers have been forced out of the city and what his administration is doing to try to reverse that trend.
And on Monday Mr. Mamdani will release two reports mandated by the City Charter — one offering a racial equity plan and one analyzing the true cost of living in the city. Although affordability affects the “vast majority” of city residents, “Black and Latino New Yorkers — who have been pushed out of this city for decades — are bearing the brunt,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement.
“These reports make one thing clear: We cannot tackle systemic racial inequity without confronting the affordability crisis head-on,” the mayor added, “and we cannot solve the cost-of-living crisis without dismantling systemic racial inequity.”
In 2022, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, New York City voters approved a referendum that required the city to release a plan to address racial inequality and a report that determined a “comprehensive standard” for what it actually costs to live in New York City.
When Mayor Eric Adams failed to release the racial equity report, the independent Commission on Racial Equity filed a lawsuit. Just two weeks after becoming mayor, Mr. Mamdani promised to release the preliminary plan during his first 100 days in office.
Afua Atta-Mensah, the chief equity officer and commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice, said in an interview that the “administration has always had this filter” of connecting affordability with racial inequity.
“The mayor almost always mentions the mass exodus of Black New Yorkers in the same frame of a rent freeze,” Ms. Atta-Mensah said.
When he was running for mayor last year, Mr. Mamdani’s laser focus on affordability rocketed him from little-known assemblyman to front-runner and eventually winner. But Black middle-class homeowners, some of whom are landlords, and Black professionals felt that Mr. Mamdani’s proposals might hurt them and declined to support him in the Democratic primary.
In that primary, the mayor earned less than 30 percent of the vote in predominantly Black precincts. However, he won more than two out of three votes in areas where the Black population had decreased the fastest between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, including Central Harlem and Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Mr. Mamdani was also hurt by the long ties that his main opponent, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, had with Black voters. Mr. Mamdani’s struggles to connect with the Black community were linked to his status as a relatively new politician who is “not yet a trusted messenger,” Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University, said. She added, “When it comes to fiscal issues that affect the real-world pocketbooks of Black voters in New York, that’s where the relationship with the mayor gets a lot more complicated because there isn’t yet one.”
During the general election, Mr. Mamdani, helped by being the Democratic nominee, made a successful push to gain the support of Black New Yorkers., making large gains in predominantly Black precincts.
The reports he is releasing on Monday list some of the ways city agencies are developing goals and measures to advance racial equity and present a picture of how Black, Latino and Asian New Yorkers are being left behind economically.
According to the racial equity plan, there is a startling gap between the median net worth of white households in New York State — $276,900 — and that for Black New Yorkers: $18,870.
Among the goals in the preliminary plan are increases in pay equity in the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget and the Department of City Planning and the collection of data in the Sanitation Department to identify and improve service to historically underserved neighborhoods.
The True Cost of Living Report, which will be updated annually, calculates how much it costs to actually live in the city and how much families must earn to “fully participate in the economy” while saving for the future. The report found that the median income that a family with children in New York City needs to achieve economic security is more than $159,000 per year, but in reality New York City families earn a median income of just over $124,000.
The report found that more than five million New Yorkers, about 62 percent of city residents, cannot meet their true cost of living, and that 73 percent of children live in families that cannot meet their true cost of living. That number climbs to 87 percent in the Bronx.
According to the report, almost 78 percent of Hispanics don’t earn enough to meet the true cost of living, followed by almost 66 percent of Black New Yorkers and 63 percent of New Yorkers of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage. Among white residents, 44 percent don’t earn enough to meet the true cost of living.
“We know that you can’t build a New York City for all, if you aren’t honest about who’s been left behind and how much that falls along racial lines,” Julie Su, the city’s first ever deputy mayor for economic justice, said in an interview.
Jennifer Jones Austin, chief executive of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, chaired a group, the New York City Racial Justice Commission, which proposed requiring the city to measure the true cost of living.
She said that New York City would be the first major city to use the tool and to move beyond relying on federal poverty indicators that only measure whether a family can meet their basic needs.
“I’m encouraging Black leaders and Black community members who had concerns about how this administration is moving forward to take note of the fact that Mayor Mamdani is doing something that the prior mayor never did, although he was obligated by law to do so,” Ms. Jones Austin said. “In the racial equity plans and the cost-of-living measure, the Black community has the tools to actually lean in and work with and hold government accountable.”
Jeffery C. Mays is a Times reporter covering politics with a focus on New York City Hall.
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