My name is Zohran Kwame Mamdani. I was born in Kampala, Uganda, at an early age my family moved to Cape Town, South Africa and then when I was seven we moved here to New York City. I am running to be Mayor of our beautiful city.
We live in the wealthiest city in the world and it’s become unlivable for the people who built it. Half of all New York households struggle to pay for their basic needs. One in four live in poverty. Working and middle class families are fleeing our city in search of anywhere their dollars can go just a bit farther.
For too long, politicians have pretended to be bystanders to this cost of living crisis. But the truth is that city government has the tools to make life easier and more affordable. That’s exactly what I will do as mayor.
We will freeze the rent for more than 2 million rent stabilized tenants — saving New Yorkers nearly $7 billion over the next four years and boosting our local economy. We will make the nation’s slowest buses fast and free. We will raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030. We will pilot a network of municipally-owned supermarkets — one in each borough — that guarantee cheaper groceries. And we will deliver universal child care, taking what can be a $25,000 annual cost off the backs of working families.
An affordable city must also be a safe one. As multiple categories of crimes remain stubbornly high and too many New Yorkers feel uneasy in our subways, we will create the Department of Community Safety to deploy evidence-proven methods of addressing mental health crises, homelessness and hate.
Police have a critical role to play. But right now, we’re relying on them to deal with our frayed social safety net — which prevents them from doing their actual jobs. It’s one of the reasons why more than 200 officers are leaving the force each month and only 39% of crimes are solved.
Police response times are more than 20% longer than they were in 2022 as they field hundreds of mental health calls each day. The DCS will coordinate across city agencies, including with the NYPD, creating a whole-of-government approach to improve safety outcomes.
I never back down from the fight for working people. As an assemblymember, I went on a hunger strike with yellow cab drivers to win more than $450 million in debt relief. When the MTA was pushing to raise the cost of a ride, I delivered more than $100 million in better subway service, limited the fare hike and won the first fare free bus pilot in our city’s history, leading to a significant increase in ridership and safer trips. And in 2021, I led the charge against then-Gov. Cuomo to tax the billionaires and corporations — his biggest donors — to invest in the public schools he had starved of funding.
Fighting for working people also means standing up to Donald Trump and his war on the fundamental values of our city. Eric Adams’ collaboration has delivered nothing but embarrassment, money being stolen from our city coffers, and immigrant families being torn apart.
This is personal to me. Like so many New Yorkers, I wasn’t born in this country. I spent the first years of my life in Uganda. When I was 7-years-old, my family moved to Morningside Heights. And I fell in love with this city.
I fell in love with poppy seed bagels with scallion cream cheese in the afternoon and soccer games at Riverside Park in the evening, with crowded subways and cheap halal carts and just catching the Bx10 so I could get to Bronx Science on time.
That love has deepened as I have served in the New York State Assembly, working each and every day to make my neighborhood better, safer, fairer.
But as much as I love this city, there’s a myth about it that has persisted for too long. It’s the lie that life has to be hard in New York. It has to be an ordeal. That only the rich or the lucky get to live a good life here.
I don’t believe that for a minute. I believe every New Yorker deserves a life of dignity, safety and stability and that it’s the job of city government to deliver it.
We face a clear choice in this election, between a disgraced politician of the past beholden to billionaires and real estate, or our vision for a city we can actually afford. New Yorkers are hungry for a different kind of politics — one that puts working people first. That’s what I will do each and every day as your mayor.
I humbly ask for your support on June 24.
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Mamdani, a Queens assemblyman, is a candidate for mayor in this month’s Democratic Party primary.
