WHEN Zohran Mamdani took the oath of office on the steps of City Hall on January 1, 2026, the skeptics began their countdown before the confetti had settled. A 34-year-old democratic socialist, a former state assemblyman with no executive experience, the first Muslim and first South Asian-origin mayor of America’s largest city—surely, the argument went, New York would swallow him whole.
Six months later, the city is still running and so is he. Within his first week, Mamdani stood beside Governor, Kathy Hochul, to announce a $1.2 billion investment in universal child care, expanding free 3-K seats and, for the first time in the city’s history, offering full-day care for two-year-olds. Then came the rent freeze on stabilized apartments, delivered through the board he largely appoints, paired with a “Block by Block” housing plan to speed permitting and encourage construction. Freezing rents without building homes only postpones the crisis and his administration seems to know it. The list runs longer than the headlines. His office has recovered over $9 million for cheated workers and small businesses and extended protected time off to more than four million New Yorkers. He is pushing the city’s minimum wage toward $30 an hour by 2030 and has proposed a $1 billion Department of Community Safety to send mental health workers, not only police, to respond to crises. He has pledged city-owned grocery stores, beginning in East Harlem and eventually reaching every borough, to challenge the food prices that punish the urban poor. Crime is down, 100,000 potholes have been filled and he secured roughly $1.5 billion in direct funding from Albany while passing city budget hours before the deadline.
Then there are the buses—his signature promise and his hardest lesson in the limits of a mayor’s power. New York’s transit system belongs to the state, not the city and Mamdani’s plan to make every bus free rested on taxes Albany refused to pass. Governor Hochul ruled out a millionaire surcharge, the transit chief called the plan unworkable and the Independent Budget Office priced it at over $1 billion a year. By spring, the mayor conceded citywide free buses would not arrive this year, settling instead for a $45 million pilot of three free lines in each borough. A retreat, but a tactical one.
The comptroller has warned of a $12.6 billion deficit over two years and President Trump has threatened to cut federal funding to the legal minimum. A city that promises more while receiving less is walking a fiscal tightrope familiar to anyone who has watched Pakistan’s provincial governments pledge subsidies they struggle to finance.
In Karachi and Lahore, as in Queens and the Bronx, the defining question of this decade is the same: Can government actually make life affordable? Mamdani has bet his mayoralty on the first answer. He told voters what he would do and then he began doing it. On both sides of the world, that alone is worth watching.
—The writer is an economist based in Washington, DC.
