Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani has managed a State Senate campaign. He’s been a tutor and a rapper. And in 2016, he helped his mother, the director Mira Nair, with the music in her movie, “Queen of Katwe.”
But his first and only full-time job outside of politics involved counseling struggling homeowners at a small nonprofit in Queens.
Mr. Mamdani’s work at the nonprofit, the Chhaya Community Development Corporation, has mostly been an aside in this year’s mayoral campaign, occasionally mentioned by his opponents to criticize his comparatively thin résumé.
But a closer look at his year there, based on accounts from current and former co-workers and his past statements, shows how Chhaya laid the path for his rise and sharpened his politics into a message of empathy that has resonated with New Yorkers amid the worst housing shortage in nearly 60 years.
Housing is a top issue in the mayor’s race. The focus of both leading candidates, Mr. Mamdani, 34, and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, 67, has mostly been on renters, who make up roughly two-thirds of New York City residents. Mr. Mamdani’s rallying cry to “freeze the rent” helped propel him to a decisive victory in the Democratic primary.
Still, some three million New Yorkers live in homes that are owned and not rented. Many city leaders, including Mayor Eric Adams and Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker, have spoken about the need to do more to help struggling homeowners.
Seven years ago, Mr. Mamdani was learning the ropes.
“No one goes to college to become a foreclosure prevention counselor,” said Will Spisak, who interviewed and hired Mr. Mamdani to work at Chhaya. “It’s hard to find that perfect fit.”
When Mr. Mamdani applied for the job in 2018, the organization was trying to expand its foreclosure unit. Mr. Spisak knew that Mr. Mamdani, like many applicants, did not have experience working on foreclosures. But Chhaya was founded in 2000 to help New Yorkers of South Asian descent with housing and other economic issues. Mr. Mamdani, who is South Asian, won Chhaya over with his comfort around strangers and his ability to speak Bangla as well as Hindi and Urdu, which are similar when spoken.
He would meet daily with people on the brink of losing their homes after missed mortgage payments or late utility bills. He would try to negotiate with banks on their behalf, or find them aid from the government. He has said he sometimes tried to help his clients raise money on the website GoFundMe.
“At my best, I can stop maybe one foreclosure a month, a couple months,” Mr. Mamdani lamented on a podcast in 2020 during his Assembly campaign. “What my job is, is to try and put people’s lives back together after they’ve been broken apart into a million pieces. The potential of legislation and being a legislator is to ensure people’s lives don’t get broken in the first place.”
Mr. Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment about his time at the nonprofit.
Chhaya’s work on foreclosures peaked during the 2008 financial crisis, when thousands of homeowners could not pay their mortgages. In the following years, grant funding for that kind of work dried up, Mr. Spisak said.
Still, many low-income homeowners continued to call for help, particularly in Queens neighborhoods with big South Asian and Indo-Caribbean populations like Jamaica, Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park. They would be assigned to someone like Mr. Mamdani to take a closer look at their case and to refer them to other programs that could help.
While the job might have seemed bureaucratic, it was often intensely emotional and complicated. Many clients were immigrants, older people on fixed incomes and people who had bought homes for the first time. Many homes were old and needed repairs. Many families did not speak English and frequently misplaced important documents.
“A lot of our senior clients don’t have family members,” said Tenying Yangsel, Chhaya’s assistant director of homeownership, who began working on foreclosures when Mr. Mamdani left. “So they come, and even just to get through the appointments, we have to spend like two or three hours with them.”
At first, Mr. Spisak said, Mr. Mamdani needed help learning how to manage the meticulous amount of paperwork involved for the 100 or so cases the group dealt with in a year. But he learned quickly, Mr. Spisak said, and even pushed Chhaya in new directions.
Once, Mr. Spisak said, Mr. Mamdani recognized that the organization let employees take time off during holidays that were more common in America, like Columbus Day, but not Eid or Diwali, that might be more relevant to the South Asian community. He led an internal push to get those holidays off, Mr. Spisak said.
Mr. Mamdani also wanted Chhaya to be more proactive in how it found clients, Mr. Spisak said. He decided to investigate tax lien sales.
Every year, New York City, like many other cities and towns, sells the right to collect overdue property taxes and other bills to people who will then collect the outstanding debt. Mr. Mamdani looked at the list of properties in Queens on the list, keying in on the names that sounded South Asian.
Then, on one summer weekend, Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Spisak set out to visit them, driving home to home. Mr. Mamdani would hop out, knock on the door and talk to each person. In between, the two listened to music by the band Weezer and the musician K’naan.
Intaz Khan, 72, bought a home in South Ozone Park around 2008, but he quickly fell behind on mortgage and insurance payments, he said.
“It caught me off guard,” he said. “I was in a desperate situation.”
He contacted Chhaya for help and got his mortgage rate reduced. He has been relying on the organization for help ever since, and on one occasion remembers meeting Mr. Mamdani during a visit to Chhaya’s office. Mr. Mamdani looked through his bank statements and called the mortgage company to check on the status of his loan, he said.
“He helped me in whatever way he could,” Mr. Khan said.
He said he had not thought about Mr. Mamdani until he saw him on the news recently. “I told my wife, I know that guy,” he said.
Mr. Spisak said Mr. Mamdani grew frustrated at times when he wasn’t able to help people.
“He would frequently, not in a necessarily bad way, raise the issue, ‘There aren’t enough resources for the people we are serving,’” Mr. Spisak said.
When a seat in the State Assembly seemed attainable, Mr. Mamdani jumped at the opportunity, and Chhaya let him take a leave of absence.
“Homes should not be a place of financial speculation — they should be a place of stability and setting a foundation for a family to build on for the rest of their lives,” Mr. Mamdani said in a 2020 interview about his campaign.
Foreshadowing his mayoral politics, he added then: “This is not the only issue we care about, but the reason it’s a flagship issue is that it’s a building block of the major crisis facing New Yorkers across all communities.”
Mihir Zaveri covers housing in the New York City region for The Times.
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