Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently made an observation that ought to command widespread agreement.
“Quality of life has come to be seen as somehow a right-wing concern,” he said. The same goes for efficiency and rooting out waste.
His point was that the left shouldn’t surrender these concerns to its opponents.
“If politics cannot deliver on the block where you live,” asks Mamdani, “why would you trust it to deliver anywhere in your city?”
It’s a good question — and a fair standard by which to judge his administration.
He has his work cut out for him.
Rents keep setting records. Child care runs tens of thousands of dollars a year. The schools spend more than $42,000 per pupil, yet about a third of students are chronically absent.
Murders and shootings have fallen to record lows, but felony assaults remain roughly 44% above 2019 levels.
Subway homicides are, on average, more than three times higher than they were between 1997 and 2019.
Mamdani didn’t create these problems. They built up over years, across administrations, through decisions made in both City Hall and Albany.
But if quality of life transcends ideology, so should the fixes.
In a new Manhattan Institute paper, we offer 50 practical ones.
Start with Mamdani’s signature issue: housing affordability.
An estimated 57,000 rent-regulated apartments sit vacant, many because state law prevents rents from rising enough to cover the cost of renovating them.
The city should work with Albany to let rents on those units rise enough to make rehabilitation feasible, returning roughly two years’ worth of new construction to the market without requiring public subsidies.
On schools, the Department of Education should hold principals accountable for chronic absenteeism.
DOE should require school staff to intervene as soon as a child falls behind, before small learning gaps become permanent ones.
Watchdogs also shouldn’t have to wait a year for chronic-absenteeism figures. Connecticut and Rhode Island update their absenteeism data at least every month — New York should, too.
A regulatory thicket makes child-care facilities hard to open. The Mamdani administration’s child-care plan should modernize building requirements and give qualified home-based providers a clear path to approval, with appropriate oversight.
And rather than make buses free, adding service on crowded routes and speeding up trips would do more for riders than giving up fare revenue.
To lower grocery prices, Mamdani should move to lift zoning limits that keep supermarkets out of suitable manufacturing districts, so more grocers can compete.
City services should leverage the latest technology to resolve residents’ complaints.
The Office of Technology and Innovation, for example, could combine 311 noise complaints, sanitation reports, police incidents, EMS calls and late-night transit ridership to flag the blocks most likely to see spikes in disorder — and send police and other responders before the nuisance starts.
On the streets and subways, the certainty of a penalty, more so than its severity, is what deters crime and antisocial behavior.
Consistent enforcement, starting with fare evasion, would restore that certainty.
AI paired with human review could also separate urgent 311 complaints from low-priority or fraudulent ones.
Mamdani should work with the City Council to scrap Local Law 97, the city’s carbon-reduction law for large buildings.
It drives up housing costs — cutting directly against the mayor’s affordability agenda — for a negligible reduction in global emissions, in the city that already has the lowest per-capita carbon emissions among large US cities.
Meanwhile, New Yorkers pay the highest combined top income- and corporate-tax rates in the country.
Yet to close a projected budget gap of at least $6.4 billion in fiscal 2028, Mamdani will likely seek even higher taxes.
Instead, he should cut the least important spending and impose a temporary hiring freeze for non-uniformed workers.
None of these moves requires New Yorkers to agree on every political question.
Getting results, though, sometimes means disappointing a political leader’s base.
The mayor has already shown he’ll do that — up to a point, at least — on policing by resisting pressure from his left flank to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
He’ll need the same independence on housing, schools and the budget to improve residents’ quality of life.
Mamdani owes less than most mayors to the interests that usually block change.
By and large, the city’s public-employee unions didn’t back him in last year’s primary, which leaves him freer to pursue ambitious reforms.
Mamdani has invited the left to take quality of life seriously. These 50 ideas are a good place to start.
Either way, we’ll judge the results by the mayor’s own standard, block by block.
John Ketcham is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at Manhattan Institute, where Sean Speer is a technical writer.