Pod Insights Odd Lots Zohran Mamdani, the Socialist Who Could Be NYC's New Mayor (Rerelease) About this episode Today's episode is a re-run of our interview from last month with Queens assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. On June 24, Mamdani won the first round of the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, making him the presumptive party nominee and the early favorite to win November's general election. So it's the perfect time to revisit the candidate and his unique platform. Endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, he's proposing rent freezes, universal childcare, higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, free buses, and city-run grocery stores. In this conversation, we talked to the would-be mayor about his socialist vision for New York, including how he plans to fund more public goods, what he would do to ensure that government-run services are up to standard, and why there should be Halal carts on every street corner. Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript 10,130 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.
0:16 Speaker 01 This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting
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2:15 Tracy Alloway? Hello, Odd Lots listeners. We are re-releasing an episode that we recorded on May 23rd with Zoran Mumdani.
2:23 Joe Weisenthal? That's right. Just last night, Zoran won the Democratic nomination to be the new mayor of New York City. He is the massive favorite going into the general election, although, of course, Cuomo is the favorite going into the nomination. So anything could still happen. But probably a lot of people are tuning into this race now for the first time and want to know what the Democratic nominee is all about.
2:45 Tracy Alloway? Yep, and we asked him a lot of questions about exactly that. So take a listen.
2:52 Tracy Alloway? Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news.
3:08 Joe Weisenthal? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
3:12 Tracy Alloway? And I'm Tracy Alloway.
3:14 Joe Weisenthal? Tracy, we might get a socialist mayor here in New York City.
3:17 Tracy Alloway? Can I tell you something?
3:18 Joe Weisenthal? Please.
3:18 Tracy Alloway? It's slightly weird. Last night, the night before we're recording this episode, I had a dream that I was in a shared Uber with Adrienne Adams, and she was the driver.
3:28 Joe Weisenthal? Really?
3:29 Tracy Alloway? So she's another mayoral candidate. She was driving, and I told her we were going to interview this particular candidate.
3:37 Joe Weisenthal? This is amazing.
3:38 Tracy Alloway? And I was asking her for good questions.
3:40 Joe Weisenthal? This is an amazing dream. You're not Maggie Lissa.
3:42 Tracy Alloway? No, my dreams are very literal. And everyone in the Uber was giving me ideas for questions and had opinions and stuff like that, but now I can't remember any of them.
3:52 Joe Weisenthal? Oh, that's really disappointing. Anyway, you know, we don't really cover a lot of New York City politics. We don't cover a lot of politics in general. We hardly ever talk about New York City politics. Who really cares about New York and the broader audience? We don't like to be too navel gazing, but you know, this is a city with a lot of people who, needless to say, work in finance, potentially have dorm- Major changes to tax rates here, et cetera, then that could have an impact on the industry that we cover a lot. There are a lot of economic stories that are sort of New York-centric, particularly relating to housing, that are very universal, et cetera. So it's not a crime to every once in a while do a New York City-focused episode.
4:34 Tracy Alloway? No, and this also relates directly to a previous all about episode we did, all about how New York gets its groceries.
4:41 Joe Weisenthal? That's right. That's the connection. Let's jump right into it. I'm very excited to say we have a state assemblyman and candidate for the Democratic nomination for Mayor Zohran Mamdani coming on the show. Zohran, thank you so much for coming on.
4:55 Speaker 04 Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
4:57 Joe Weisenthal? I mentioned you're socialist. What specific strand of socialism are you and are the other socialists, revisionists, and deviationists of various flavors? We need to know your exact, the exact category here.
5:10 Speaker 04 I will leave that to the internet. I will tell you that I am a democratic socialist, yes. And I started to call myself that after Bernie Sanders' 2016 run for president, when I finally had a language describe the way that I saw the world and the way that I believe the world should be, which is one where every person has the dignity they need to live a decent life.
5:31 Joe Weisenthal? By the way, you know, now that I am a journalist at a mainstream news organization, I do not personally have political opinions, but I can say that I didn't, wasn't always the case. And I went to high school in Vermont, and I was a volunteer on Bernie's 1996 House campaign. And there was a picture of me with Bernie. So I was a very early-
5:50 Speaker 04 You too.
5:51 Joe Weisenthal? I was a Bernard brother before it became cool.
5:54 Speaker 04 Yes. You got in early.
5:56 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
5:57 Tracy Alloway? All right. So how would you describe your platform? Is it the New York version of Sanders?
6:02 Speaker 04 It's heavily inspired by that same focus on income inequality and a recognition of the fact that 1 in 4 New Yorkers are currently living in poverty in what has now been described as the most expensive city in the country. And it is a platform at its core to make this city affordable and to use every tool at city government's disposal to do so. Because for too long, we've had politicians pretend that we are just bystanders to a suffocating cost of living crisis, when in fact, we have two choices, whether to exacerbate it or put an end to it. And we've seen Eric Adams do the former. We're running to do the latter.
6:35 Joe Weisenthal? What did Eric Adams do? When you said he did the former, what did he do, in your view, to exacerbate it?
6:39 Speaker 04 You know, the first issue that you hear from most New Yorkers when it comes to cost of living is housing. And the mayor sets the rent increases for more than 2 million New Yorkers who live in rent stabilized housing. And he came in as a self-described real estate. That's how he described himself coming into the office. And he's raised rents accordingly. He's raised them more than 9% in this year, when the Rent Guidelines Board, which is entirely composed of his appointees, found that the landlords of those million or so units that have close to 2.5 million tenants, had seen an increase in their revenues by 12%. He wanted to raise the rent once again to close to 8%. And that is one example. Another, I would say, is his relationship to Con Edison.
7:22 Speaker 04 Con Edison can only raise the rates of gas and electric with the permission of the state, and they do so through something called a rate case. The City of New York, under Eric Adams' administration, sided with Walmart in support of Con Edison's request to raise those rates by $65 a month on average. And I know that because I was also a part of that rate case, one of the few elected officials who signed in opposition to it. And I think that you can see this again and again and again in the way that he has intervened in the major costs that are driving New Yorkers out of the city.
7:50 Tracy Alloway? So, since you mentioned housing and the rent freeze, you support a rent freeze, lower rents. What do you say to people who think that you need to incentivize landlords to maintain their buildings, to build new ones? There are also people out there who think that regulatory reform is the key to the supply problem in New York. Why rent freezes particularly versus, you know, maybe loosening some of the regulations?
8:16 Speaker 04 I think that many of these things can actually be achieved in tandem. I am both a candidate who believes we need to freeze the rent for rent stabilized tenants, and one who believes that we need to end the requirement to build parking lots and reconstruct housing, who believes we need to increase density around mass transit hubs, that we need to upzone wealthier neighborhoods that have historically not contributed to affordable housing production, and we need to interrogate why Tokyo is building 10 homes for every 1,000 people, Jersey City is at 7, and New York is barely at 4. And some of that also has to do with what is often described as the mundane details of housing. But can have massive impacts on whether or not it's affordable or expensive to construct that housing, be it single staircase versus dual staircase, or the regulations that have
8:59 Speaker 04 effectively made it illegal to build SROs in this city, and the need for us to have a true diversity of housing stock. And I think the reason for the focus on a rent freeze is that that is the clearest and most direct way that you start your housing platform as the mayor of the city, given your appointing of all nine members of that rent guidelines board. But it cannot be the extent of it, because a city of 8.48 million people deserves a mayor with a housing platform for 8.48 million people, not just the close to 2.5 million that live in those units. And the other point I would make is that I have served in Albany, I'm now in my third term, and I've seen in Albany, while I have opposed it, we have passed legislation that allowed landlords to double the amount of money they
9:42 Speaker 04 can receive for IAIs, which are otherwise known as individual apartment improvements. So to your concern around incentivizing repairs and things of that nature, landlords have already just won the right to double the amount of money they can receive for those improvements. And I was in opposition to that doubling because of the immense amount of fraud that we've seen in that kind of program where expenses are not actually what they are represented to be. And the final thing I would say is, you know, the rent guidelines had that findings of the 12% increase in revenue for those landlords. If there are landlords for whom that picture is not an accurate representation, there is a program where they can apply a hardship program for relief when they show that their
10:23 Speaker 04 income from rents is not matching up to their costs at a ratio that is allowing them to continue to operate that building. And that is a program that I will intend to continue to support, because I believe it is important to ensure that we can keep all of these buildings in operation.
10:38 Joe Weisenthal? I've heard that about Jersey City, that they've actually done a fairly good job of expanding housing supply. What is the role in your vision for more affordable housing for the private developers, and the for-profit developers, and so forth? And, you know, in your view, how can we actually move the dial in terms of housing production of, and we'll get into some of the stuff about, I want to talk about the public housing too, or quote, affordable housing, but for the private landlords, what can actually, in your view, move the dial on that?
11:08 Speaker 04 I think some of it has to do with the regulations I was speaking of, the fact that we continue to have this requirement to build parking when you build housing. That's not a requirement we should have any longer. The need for us to take advantage of our unique place in this country and that we have mass transit hubs across the city, and that should be a site of more housing density. And the fact that housing production has not been evenly distributed across this city, especially in wealthier neighborhoods. But I think even beyond that question of zoning, which is what a lot of this comes back to, there's also the question of process. We need to make it faster to build this housing.
11:45 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
11:45 Speaker 04 And ensure that we don't see delay after delay after delay. And so, one of the points of our housing plan is also to move away from the piecemeal process that is the one you can describe today as being, where you have something known as member deference, where every city council member has the ultimate vote on whether or not a development goes up or down. We need to have a citywide approach, one that also fast-tracks developments that are in line with the very priorities we've laid out with regards to housing production, labor standards, affordability. Because it's been too long where we've seen proposals to build affordable housing for low-income seniors languish for years in delays, and those delays all cost money.
12:27 Joe Weisenthal? Yes.
12:28 Speaker 04 And that's also what drives up the cost of this production, and I think we need to streamline those processes.
12:33 Joe Weisenthal? Actually, let's talk about that a little bit further, because public housing, which you want to expand significantly, is very costly to build. And, you know, there are certain standards of public housing, we expect it to last a very long time, there's priorities that it be carbon-friendly, et cetera. But like, public housing production in New York City has been on par cost-wise with even some very high-end private construction. Hudson Yards on a per-unit basis came in pretty similarly. This would be important regardless of how it's financed. How do you actually get the cost down, in your view, of public housing production?
13:13 Speaker 04 So the first thing I would do is just distinguish between what kind of housing we're speaking of. When we say public housing, a lot of times we're referring to NYCHA developments across the five boroughs.
13:23 Joe Weisenthal? When I said it, I was thinking NYCHA.
13:25 Speaker 04 Okay, just to be clear, and I think that, you know, what we've seen in NYCHA is in many ways emblematic of a larger betrayal of working-class New Yorkers. NYCHA is technically underneath the auspices of the federal government, but the city and the state have an immense role to play. And we've seen over time, while the federal government has refused to fund the plan to put at least $40 billion towards NYCHA to deal with an ever-expanding amount of capital needs, the city, since the time of Bloomberg, has started to narrow the amount of funding that it provides, and the state is not stepping up in the way that it should. Now, in our housing plan, we propose doubling the amount of money we spend on preserving
14:07 Speaker 04 NYCHA housing, because what we've seen is that oftentimes it's easy to describe this housing crisis in New York City as solely one of affordability. It's also a crisis of having a safe, inhabitable place to call your home. And as someone who represents the largest public housing development in North America, Queensbridge Houses, as well as Astoria Houses, Ravenswood Houses, I have seen so many of my constituents, seniors, who are forced to walk up many flights of stairs because their elevator isn't working, who are waiting for months to have repairs be conducted, and who in a moment of a housing crisis, under Eric Adams, we've actually seen the time it takes to fill a vacant unit in NYCHA now exceed more than a year, which should be the easiest thing for city government to do.
15:05 Speaker 00 What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Greece, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.
15:21 Speaker 05 We're seeing a lot of insocial players come. Come in digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high frequency traders and that sort of thing. And folks who service institutional clients.
15:30 Speaker 00 As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reese Merrick of Ripple says.
15:37 Speaker 06 A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out. But some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80 year old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.
15:57 Speaker 00 Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.
16:07 Speaker 01 This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs. And hands on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees. With the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices.
16:50 Speaker 01 But according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there. It's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.
17:30 Tracy Alloway? I want to talk about another plank of your platform
17:32 Speaker 04 Please.
17:33 Tracy Alloway? that is of particular interest to us, and that is groceries, of course.
17:37 Speaker 04 Amazing.
17:37 Tracy Alloway? So a while ago, Joe and I recorded an episode on how New York actually gets its produce, and we learned about the importance of the Hunts Distribution Terminal and all of that. Why grocery stores?
17:50 Speaker 04 You know, we are focused on the cost of living crisis. And when you ask New Yorkers whether they're making $40,000 a year or $200,000 a year, you will inevitably hear them speak about groceries and the sticker shock they feel in going back to the grocery store and their sense that that which they could afford years ago is now out of reach for them. And ultimately, groceries and food are a non-negotiable part of being a New Yorker and living in any city in the world. You need to be able to afford it to build any kind of a life. And yet, what we're seeing is that people are being priced out of produce. And when something is critically important to that dignity, I believe that there should be a public option for it.
18:30 Speaker 04 And what we have proposed is a reasonable policy experimentation in our city of a pilot program of a network of five municipal-owned grocery stores, one in each borough, that would respond to twin crises, one of affordability and two of food deserts. Because as I was saying earlier, as the representative of Queensbridge Houses, I will speak to constituents who live in the largest public housing development in North America, and they will ask me questions for which I don't have the answer, questions like, why are there five fast food restaurants in a five-block radius, but I cannot find a place where I can get fresh produce that I can afford? And I hear that time and time again. And so what this proposal does is it not only guarantees cheaper groceries, but it
19:12 Speaker 04 also guarantees that those groceries can be in the very neighborhoods of New Yorkers that are being denied that service today.
19:18 Tracy Alloway? So some commentators have described this proposal as somewhat unusual in America. I actually don't think it's that unusual. I'm a former military brat, and I vividly remember commissaries and BXs on military bases, and those were subsidized. Anyway, how do you, I guess, address the fears of critics who worry that this is going to devolve into some sort of Soviet-style market where, you know, maybe I can only buy one specific brand of tuna fish versus like the five that are currently on offer?
19:53 Speaker 04 Well, the beauty of a pilot program is that it only expands if it's successful. Now, I'm confident that it will be successful, and yet we will have to see those results themselves. And the reason we even came up with this is because of the successes of this model in Kansas, as well as what you said in the context of military bases across the country. And what we've also found is there was a feasibility study done in Chicago to see the applicability of this kind of a model in an urban setting, and it found it not only possible, but urgent and necessary. And that is the exact kind of approach we have to take here. And I think what's been quite interesting to me is state government, in the time that I've been there, has had a similar recognition, but on a different topic, where it's said that gas prices are something that we can only allow to get up
20:38 Speaker 04 to a certain point, and when they go beyond that, we need to subsidize it to ensure that it's affordable. In 2022, the state spent more than $600 million to suspend portions of the gas tax. And yet, we are watching as New Yorkers are being priced out of bread and milk and eggs. And we are saying that this is beyond our control. And I think that the last point I would make here is that our proposal is one that would cost $60 million for all of those five together. That is less than half of the money the city is already spending on a program called City Fresh, which will subsidize corporate supermarkets in the hopes that they provide affordable groceries, but with no guarantee to that,
21:21 Speaker 04 and with no requirement for them to accept SNAP or WIC, or to engage in collective bargaining, or to actually guarantee those cheaper groceries. So this is going to save the city money while piloting a program that we are confident will actually deliver the results that we have been denied in that existing program today.
21:37 Joe Weisenthal? All right. I have two specific questions on this. One is, I understand, and I find intuitively logical, the idea that people should be able to afford produce, and it's, food has gotten very expensive at the grocery store. But grocery store margins themselves are pretty thin.
21:56 Speaker 04 About 3%.
21:57 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, so in terms of like, actually using the grocery store channel to deliver these cost savings, given that the retail stores' margins are so thin, just 3%, why is that the dial, rather than, I don't know, give people a voucher so that they can order Fresh Direct or something like that?
22:14 Speaker 04 You know, I am someone who has been skeptical of the efficacy of a voucher-based model, and what I am proposing with this idea of a network of municipal-owned grocery stores is not a means by which the city would make money and be able to increase that profit margin.
22:30 Joe Weisenthal? I'm just saying, the grocery-level margins seem very thin. No, I know you're not trying to make money. I'm just saying, the margins seem thin, so if I think like, what moves the dial significantly on affordability? The actual retail-level grocery does not strike me as where the big opportunity is.
22:46 Speaker 04 I think the opportunity we have with a city-run model is that we can actually guarantee those cost savings, right? We have heard national chains and executives speak on earning calls about how they've been able to blame COVID-era supply chain costs to increase profit margins even further, and what this would be is a clear mandate from the city, that every single dollar we save, we pass on, but beyond that, given that the mandate is not a profit-based one, that we can also pass on further savings to ensure that things like milk and eggs and bread are actually affordable.
23:20 Joe Weisenthal? So the other thing, and you sort of anticipated this question, which is, you mentioned, for example, that in existing NYCHA housing, people are waiting for a long time to get an elevator repaired and so forth.
23:35 Joe Weisenthal? How do you ensure operational success? Because I think people would say, oh, I've seen how NYCHA housing works. I guess I'm going to know how a city, a New York City run grocery store is going to work. And who knows if it's going to be open and who knows if they're gonna, you know, keep their refrigerators repaired or if they're gonna have tomatoes one day. I'm just saying like, you have already confirmed the idea that certain city run things are not run particularly well. So why should we, why should the public have confidence that even setting aside price, that these would be like run well, run efficiently?
24:08 Speaker 04 I have to earn the public's trust and I will do that every single day as the mayor of the city. And if you believe in public goods and public services, I do, it behooves you to believe in just as much in public excellence. And the first charges that you must have is to tackle that which has not displayed that excellence. I think NYCHA is an example of that. I also think one of the reasons why I focused so much on the MTA in my time in the state assembly has been because that's another example of that, where we have a world-class city and we do not have world-class public transit. I love our public transit. I love our trains, our buses. I love riding a city bike and yet I know that the way in which we are running it could be so much better. And what has excited me is that we've seen glimpses of what that excellence could look
24:53 Speaker 04 like. I mean, I remember when I went in to get my vaccine for COVID, I was in and out of that facility in 15 minutes. And that to me was an example of the public sector being able to match the efficiencies we often hear about when we describe the private sector. I think about NYCHA, which today is a story of disinvestment and of so many New Yorkers being left behind, could also be a story closer to the one of how they developed the mini fridge in this country because it was a direct result of an RFP that was put out.
25:23 Tracy Alloway? Oh, I didn't know that.
25:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, and I think there's also a story today to be told about Woodside Houses, which is a NYCHA development that is piloting a large-scale installation of heat pumps that has been shown to both increase the quality of life, but also decrease the carbon emissions and the cost. And ultimately, that is what we need to show New Yorkers. We have to earn their trust and the best way to earn their trust is to deliver the results that we're confident we can with these ideas.
25:49 Tracy Alloway? Just one more question on the grocery stores. So I take the point about their purpose is not to make money for the government, obviously. But how would you actually judge the success of them?
25:59 Speaker 04 I would judge the success in their provision of affordable groceries. I would judge their success in them meeting a need that is currently being left unmet. And I think that also means in the location of those stores, that they actually provide a grocery store in a place where currently it is too difficult to find any of that produce, and that their prices are, as we are discussing them, significantly more affordable and more in line with where New Yorkers are actually able to spend.
26:26 Joe Weisenthal? I want to talk more about public excellence in the provision of public goods.
26:30 Speaker 04 My Bernard brother, let's do it.
26:32 Joe Weisenthal? I am an avid utilizer of many of the public goods that New York City provides. My kids are in public school, they go to the park almost every day, we ride the bus together, we ride the subway together. I don't think the subway and the bus are as bad as some people say. It's certainly not as bad as the impression I would get if I didn't live here and I were watching Fox News about New York City. Nonetheless, there has been an increase in crime over the last several years. I think it's come down recently, but there is a fair amount of disrepair. My impression is, when I think about public goods in general, which is that people on the left really like to talk about them and how important they are, and then generally
27:16 Joe Weisenthal? do not seem as committed to sort of like product excellence as I would expect. For them to say be politically sustainable. Like I said, I feel, I feel very safe. I live in the East Village, I commute up here, I generally feel very safe. But you know, like, I see needles on the playground at Tompkins Square Park, there are bathrooms that are almost never open or functional, there's smoking on the subway from time to time. It's not the end of the world, but it's not very pleasant, especially when you have kids. And I'm curious like what your view is about like what seems to be a sort of tension between excellent provision of public goods and some of the law and order, as people would call
27:58 Joe Weisenthal? it, requirements for them to be clean, friendly, excellent places.
28:03 Speaker 04 You know, I think we on the left have to make it clear that quality of life is of immense concern to us because when we are fighting for public goods, for public service, for public excellence, at the core of it is that belief that everyone should have an excellent quality of life. And yet, what has happened in the last few years is that this term has almost been made to be understood as if it is solely a conservative concern, when in fact, this is at the heart of what we're fighting for.
28:29 Joe Weisenthal? It feels to me like, to be honest, that the left has conceded that. That actually, the part of the reason it's become a sort of conservative-coded term is because I perceive, and tell me if I'm wrong, it's fine, but I perceive a certain discomfort about some of the hard choices, or some of the, you know, more, maybe carceral is the right word, law and order, whatever, that would contribute to making some of these public goods safer and cleaner.
28:56 Speaker 04 Well, I think what we have to make clear is that those are not the only choices on offer, and yet we do have to still respond to that same crisis. And so often, as you were describing, living in New York City, you have a different understanding than if you were to view it through the prism of social media or TV. And yet, we can say two things at once, which is that there is an immense amount of fear mongering, and that we still have to deliver world-class goods, which we are far from doing today. And I say that as someone who loves our subway system, and who knows that when you ask New Yorkers where they feel least safe in the city, you oftentimes hear those same words. It's the subway system. And that's why, at the heart of our campaign, is a proposal
29:37 Speaker 04 to deliver that same public safety that New Yorkers have been denied under Eric Adams, a mayor who ran in 2021, telling those same New Yorkers, they need not choose between safety and justice. He's shown himself unable to deliver the former, uninterested in delivering the latter. And what we've said is that we will create a Department of Community Safety, the DCS, which understands that police have a critical role to play in public safety, and we are currently relying on them to respond to almost every single failure of the social safety net, asking them to do the work of social workers and mental health professionals, a reliance that has made it Nearly impossible for them to actually do their jobs. And we can see that in their inability to raise their clearance rates of the major seven categories of crime.
30:21 Speaker 04 And so what our DCS will do is tackle five key issues: homelessness, mental health crisis, gun violence, hate crimes, and victim services. And we'll learn from the evidence-proven models that have been successful elsewhere in the country in responding to these very issues and doing so in a manner that provides public safety and frees up the police.
31:00 Speaker 01 This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk, and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting
31:42 Speaker 01 and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.
32:23 Tracy Alloway? So another part of your platform is raising the corporate tax rate, raising income tax for millionaires. And I think one of the things we are all perhaps internalizing this week as we watch Washington DC and the big, beautiful bill currently going through its process is that raising taxes on the rich seems to be really, really difficult in America. Maybe New York is different. Maybe New Yorkers feel differently about it. But I guess my question is, A, why do you think it seems so difficult? And then, B, how can you actually overcome that particular hurdle?
33:00 Joe Weisenthal? And just to tag on, you actually need state permission to do that, right?
33:03 Tracy Alloway? Yeah.
33:04 Speaker 04 You do. You need to work with the state. And ultimately, the city is a creature of the state. And any agenda you have as a mayor that seeks to match the scale of the crisis New Yorkers are living through will require Albany. When we wanted to create universal pre-K, we required Albany. When we wanted congestion pricing, we required Albany. And I think again, and again, and again, you will look at any of the most ambitious parts of any candidate's plans, and it will require Albany. When I came into office in 2021, one of the first battles that I helped to lead was to raise taxes on the most profitable corporations and the wealthiest New Yorkers so that we could fully fund our public schools.
33:47 Speaker 04 And we eventually did so over the objections of then-Governor Cuomo, raising about $4 billion. And that allowed us to fulfill the legal requirement of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a landmark case with regards to fully funding public schools. And I think it's difficult in Washington, and it's difficult for a number of politicians to raise taxes on the rich when those politicians are also funded by the rich. Because ultimately, that clash between the interests of their donors and the interests of their constituents is one that they will oftentimes pick their donors. And we've seen that with Andrew Cuomo. He speaks a big game about fighting for working people, but he is funded by the same billionaires that fund Donald Trump. We've just seen, you know, Bill Ackman give his super PAC $250,000, and we continue
34:32 Speaker 04 To see that even with him receiving a million dollar donation from DoorDash, looking to very clearly purchase influence around labor and street safety regulations. And I think there is a real possibility of doing so, not only because it's one of the most popular things when you poll it amongst New Yorkers and amongst Americans, but because it's needed to pay for an agenda that will transform the quality of life, not only for working class New Yorkers, not only for middle class New Yorkers, but even for the wealthy. You hear this concern about the degradation of city services. And our proposal is one that meets the earlier conversation we were having about the necessity for a public good to be so excellent that even the wealthy use it and delivers that with regards to buses, with regards to childcare,
35:16 Speaker 04 and with so many of the city services that will keep this city running.
35:20 Tracy Alloway? If you're unable to raise the tax rate, for whatever reason, how much of your policy proposal is not viable any longer? And how do you actually prioritize the different things that you are proposing?
35:32 Speaker 04 So I'm confident in our ability to raise it because I've seen in every year that I've been in Albany since 2021, that the legislature has, in its own budget proposals, proposed those increases on income taxes for the wealthiest New Yorkers and on raising the top corporate tax rate. And just for one moment, if I can explain what those proposals are. Our proposal is to raise the top state corporate tax rate to match that of the radical socialist utopia of New Jersey. 7.25% here in New York to match theirs of 11.5%. That's a tax that applies to the topmost level of profitable corporations. We're talking about their profits, millions of dollars, and it would raise $5 billion just in doing so.
36:16 Speaker 04 The second part of the tax plan, which would raise $4 billion, would be to increase New York City's income tax rate on the top 1% of income earners. We're talking about people who make $1 million or more a year by a flat 2% increase. So a $20,000 increase, which is what I would argue a rounding error when you're looking at it within that larger context. Those two things together raise $9 billion, and then we raise an additional billion through good government reforms, whether we're talking About procurement or hiring fiscal auditors, or actually collecting the fines and fees that New York City is owed. So that's our fiscal policy of how we raise 10 billion. Now, you always have to prepare for every eventuality. The city also has about $3 billion in its rainy day fund and its reserves combined.
36:58 Speaker 04 It also, in times of economic growth, as we've generally seen in the last few years, sees its budget increase by 2 to 3 billion dollars. So there are a lot of different opportunities. And the final thing I will say is we have a city budget of $115 billion. I am not confident that Eric Adams has been spending every one of those dollars in the most productive way. And one of the first things that I will do when I get into City Hall.
37:24 Joe Weisenthal? Doge.
37:26 Speaker 04 But no, I mean, to be honest with you, it is, it is a regret of mine that we have allowed someone like Elon Musk to use the language of fraud and inefficiency and waste for his own ends of personal benefit. When really, if we care about public goods and public service, we should be ensuring that it is the most efficient spending of those dollars. And I think when we look, especially at the way in which we've hollowed out public capacity to instead replace it with private consultants, there's an immense amount of money to be saved, especially if we're looking specifically at the DOE and how much of our reliance on curriculum procurement has to do more with who we've already been procuring with and not having any standardized approach,
38:08 Speaker 04 when it should also be a universal approach across the department that ensures we both save money and deliver excellence.
38:15 Joe Weisenthal? I want to ask another politics question. I didn't really like to talk policy, but I think this is actually an important dimension. After the recent general election 2024, and it was clear the Democrats performed worse than they historically have among non-white voters all around the country. There's this big debate about why. And the left says, the centrists, you failed to talk to the working class. And the centrists is like, no, it's because you've made us talk about pronouns and that repelled people, etc. I'm actually not that interested in that question right now. I'm interested that intra-left, left candidates actually have not done particularly well. Mention Bernie, among poorer voters, among non-white voters, among polling.
38:55 Joe Weisenthal? I'm not gonna ask you about your own polling per se, but I saw a poll that said you were polling at 8% among black voters with Andrew Cuomo having done a lot better. It seems like left politics in this country, it appeals to educated white people, many of them who probably work in newsrooms. I haven't polled the Bloomberg newsroom, but you know, stuff like that. Why do you think that is? Why have general left candidates, whether it's the primary level, et cetera, or even just looking at, you know, New York City mayor polling, not had more progress among what is arguably the core base of the Democratic Party?
39:31 Speaker 04 You know, I think these polls that we're speaking about right now with regards to New York City continue to be polls that are more reflective of name recognition than they are of support. And what I mean by that is Andrew Cuomo is a former governor who is the son of a former governor. And when I speak to many New Yorkers who support him, I almost always hear the word Mario in their answer. And what I'm proud of is that we are the only campaign other than Cuomo to have broken double digits with every single ethnic group across the city.
40:01 Joe Weisenthal? But you know, like even like on, say like, unionization, there's a lot of excitement among unionization of grad students, for example, but you know, that's not what we think of as like, you know, the sort of like industrial beating heart of the labor movement, et cetera. It does seem to be a phenomenon that sort of more left culture or sort of left economic policies have taken hold more among educated whites.
40:24 Speaker 04 Well, look, I think you can look at DC 37 for an example. This is the largest municipal union in our city, and they represent the workers who actually keep this city moving. They are by and large, black and brown New Yorkers, and they explicitly chose not to endorse Andrew Cuomo because he created Tier Six, a new category in the pension program that took more than $100,000 out from working class New Yorkers' pockets and made them retire later after having served this city and state for decades. And I was proud to receive their endorsement. And I think that it shows me the path here is one where every single day over these next 34 days, we are going to continue to increase our support.
41:05 Speaker 04 Where we have seen ourselves, for example, just break 20% in support with Latino voters. And that is indicative of the fact that the very New Yorkers who know Cuomo the most are the ones who've been failed by his policies the most as well. And that is a responsibility for my campaign and every campaign to showcase his actual record of cutting Medicaid, stealing money from the MTA to fund upstate ski resorts, hounding the more than 10 women who courageously stepped forward to accuse him of sexual harassment, and in many ways echoing a Donald Trump-style record. And that's what we will seek to do, both at the doors, the more than 550,000 we've knocked so far, and on cable and broadcast and in mailers, because we have now raised
41:47 Speaker 04 $8 million, the most amount of money we can legally spend in this race faster than any campaign in history.
41:52 Tracy Alloway? And podcasts, I guess.
41:53 Speaker 04 Yes, this is actually our master plan. It all comes down to odd lots.
41:58 Tracy Alloway? Thank you.
41:59 Joe Weisenthal? We're gonna cut that.
42:01 Tracy Alloway? So I just remembered something from my dream, actually. One of the passengers said that what he wanted was basically, this is not a real passenger, but I think it's reflective of some things that you actually do here in New York, but he said what he wants is basically boring, old competency in a mayor. So an administrator that has lots of policy experience as opposed to someone who's maybe relatively new and trying to do some new things. And I think that is important. There's a big difference between coming up with policy ideas and actually executing them and executing them well. How are you going to get things done?
42:42 Tracy Alloway? And what do you say to the people who just want a boring continuation, not necessarily of Eric Adams, but maybe going back a little bit further?
42:52 Speaker 04 I understand that desire. It's a desire for normalcy in a time when politics has become about cronyism and corruption. And as much as Andrew Cuomo markets himself as a candidate and a campaign of competence, this is a man who couldn't even follow basic paperwork requirements to receive millions of dollars in public matching funds, someone who couldn't write a housing policy without the assistance of Chat GPT or even spell the names of its endorsers correctly in his own press releases. And as much as a frenetic, public facing schedule as I've been keeping over the last seven months, I've also been keeping a private schedule where I've been meeting with deputy mayors and commissioners from a wide variety of mayoral administrations to speak about the how of it all.
43:36 Speaker 04 Because an idea is only as good as its implementation. And ultimately, it comes back from a desire to build a team of the best and the brightest. One where we have a common thread of excellence, of fluency and a track record that binds all of those appointments and those hires. Not a common thread of having served together for 20 years, which is what it seems to have been with Mayor Adams today. And, you know, one additional point I'll say is that too often the style of leadership we've seen, whether it's from Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams, has been to hire replicas of yourself, to hire people who, with whom you have 100% agreement and who are the quickest to say yes to any one of your ideas, be they good or bad. I am not interested in that style of leadership.
44:17 Speaker 04 I'm interested in a style of leadership that understands that ultimately the buck stops with me and that I have to build a team that speaks to a wide breadth of opinion, of ideology and of track record. That not everyone is going to look and sound and be just like me. And that if I want a DOT commissioner, all I need to agree with them on is the vision for DOT, not HPD. And if I want to hire a deputy mayor, they need not agree with me on my thoughts on foreign policy. They need only agree with their purview that they're being hired for. Because it comes back to this notion that I think Mayor Koch put at best, which is, if you agree with me on nine out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12, see a psychiatrist. And that speaks to the need to have room for that disagreement
45:01 Speaker 04 and ultimately be bound by that pursuit of excellence.
45:05 Joe Weisenthal? During the 2016 presidential campaign, it was a Trump supporter, I'm looking up, it was actually the founder of Latinos for Trump, who said that if Trump didn't win, there would be taco trucks on every corner, which sounds really good to me. You have also proposed neoliberalism for halal carts, which I really like chicken over rice, so I'd be very happy to see more of them and be cheaper. But I'm curious how far you'd extend. So, reduce the permits, make it easier to open a halal cart.
45:30 Speaker 04 Increase the permits.
45:31 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah. Oh, increase the number of permits, make it easier therefore to get.
45:36 Tracy Alloway? It is true that the halal guys in Midtown, I think the original one, you go by there in the afternoon and the line stretches around the block. It's kind of insane.
45:45 Speaker 04 They used to say a chicken in every pot, I'm saying a halal in every hand.
45:48 Joe Weisenthal? Okay, what about hotels? Hotel prices are insanely expensive. Airbnb is no longer legal. I know someone visiting the city right now who had to get a place in Jersey City because it's just too crazy in New York. It's insanely difficult to build a new hotel, apparently due to opposition both from existing hotel owners to new hotels for reasons and the hotel worker unions. Do you support liberalize, in the same way that we need more halal carts, would you support liberalization of hotel development in New York City?
46:20 Speaker 04 You know, I am not as interested in the concerns of existing hotel owners, but I am very interested in the concerns of hotel workers. And I think that that is something that I would love to explore is, is there a way to expand the number of hotels while ensuring that we also retain the protections for those workers? Because so often we've seen this very fight, and it's going to be one that will intensify in the next years. There's contract renegotiations coming to a head during the World Cup, where hotel owners have put hotel workers on the front lines of so much of the work without giving them the pay that is requisite for that. With Airbnb, one of my concerns has been the transformation of what would be housing into effectively small-scale hotels. And
47:04 Speaker 04 the proposal that they're pushing, I think they've currently, they're putting, I think, more than a million dollars into spending on local races. Has the prospect of turning a double-digit number of one- and two-family homes, taking them off of the market and making them these vacant units.
47:19 Joe Weisenthal? I would just say, Tracy, as someone who has lived in multifamily housing my entire life in New York City, I'm not thrilled with Airbnb because I like to know who the neighbors are in my building. And sometimes you get loud, noisy, crazy people. Anyway, keep going.
47:32 Tracy Alloway? Well, I think that's a concern that a lot of people would share. I have just one more question. It's the most important one. But you have a little experience in Bollywood, I suppose. I'm a big Bollywood fan. Everything I know about cricket, I learned from Legan, which is-
47:49 Speaker 04 Great film.
47:50 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, great film. Okay, so here's my question. Amir Khan or Shah Rukh Khan? Choose one.
47:56 Speaker 04 Wow. Why? Why would you do this to me? Amir Khan for my head, Shah Rukh Khan for my heart.
48:04 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense to me. I think I would say a similar thing.
48:08 Speaker 04 Well, you know, why didn't we spend the interview on these questions?
48:10 Tracy Alloway? I would totally do a Bollywood episode.
48:12 Speaker 04 I would love to do a Bollywood episode.
48:14 Joe Weisenthal? Wait, for those who don't know, what is the Bollywood connection?
48:16 Speaker 04 So the Bollywood connection is that my mother, her name is Mira Nayar, she's a filmmaker. She is an Indian filmmaker who's made a number of films, my favorite of which is Mississippi Masala.
48:25 Tracy Alloway? I actually haven't seen that one. I saw Monsoon Wedding, and that was great.
48:29 Speaker 04 Great film. Great film. You have to see Mississippi Masala because it's also the reason that I'm alive. She met my father while researching for that film.
48:36 Joe Weisenthal? Zorn Mamdani, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Thrilled that we could make it happen.
48:40 Speaker 04 Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
48:54 Joe Weisenthal? Tracy, if he wins, maybe he'll come back on. We can do a Bollywood. Well, we'd have lots of other stuff to talk about, but I would definitely, I don't know much about it. I loved Legan, so we should talk more about that sometime.
49:07 Tracy Alloway? I really love Bollywood movies. I need to catch Mississippi Masala, I guess.
49:11 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah, I mean, this is mom's, yeah.
49:12 Tracy Alloway? Yeah, that was obviously a very interesting conversation. I do think, you know, there's this sort of knee-jerk reaction against socialism in America for-
49:22 Tracy Alloway? You know, that reasons.
49:24 Joe Weisenthal? For reasons.
49:25 Tracy Alloway? But, you know, examples of some of this stuff do exist. And I think the BXs and the military commissaries are a really good example of, you know, we do have subsidized groceries that exist in America and why not have them in New York?
49:41 Joe Weisenthal? I think a really key thing, which is there's this bad cycle with the public provision of goods in the US, which is just that people look at them and don't think they're particularly well-run. And then it's like, now you want to have more. And so it's like, you know, like I said, I love the New York City subway. I take it every day. Would I want a grocery store that sort of resembles the New York City subway? Probably not. I'm not saying it would, but I'm saying this is my experience interfacing with New York City public goods. Would I want a grocery store that like resembles the bathrooms at Tompkins Square Park or has similar? No, not, not at all. I mean, so I just feel like, like it's fine. I love living in New York City. I think these public provisions are great and some of them are absolutely incredible, like the libraries.
50:27 Joe Weisenthal? But by and large, I think that the tenders of public goods, for various reasons, have not done a great job of like, no, these are actually really good services.
50:37 Tracy Alloway? That's fair. And obviously the government's core competency is probably not running grocery stores, right? Like they would have to.
50:43 Joe Weisenthal? I wouldn't think so. Yeah, I wouldn't.
50:45 Tracy Alloway? They would have to learn a lot in order to get up to speed. But my point is, you know, the commissaries at military bases, they're pretty good. Like you can buy everything and service is great. They still bag your groceries, at least the last time I was there. So examples do exist. All I'm saying is it's possible.
51:04 Joe Weisenthal? For sure. You know, the other thing, and obviously we only had so much time, is I'm really interested further in this tension between deregulation is good when it's small things. Like a hall card or Zaron recently did an ad, which we didn't get around to talking about how like, you know, there should be, make it easier for bodega owners and, you know, less regulations for them, which sounds great. I like, I like all of my. Like the three local bodegas within a 45 second walk from my apartment is great. But why do those sort of basic principles of sort of liberalizing the rules around X not
51:44 Joe Weisenthal? then apply to some of the bigger things such as hotels, which are insanely expensive in New York or other areas like real estate, et cetera? He did mention allowing more single family stares. So there are all the single family stare nerds on Twitter. Well, I'm sure be very excited about that. Also, which we talked about on episode once.
52:04 Tracy Alloway? Yeah. Oh, yeah, we did.
52:05 Joe Weisenthal? Yeah.
52:06 Tracy Alloway? All right. So this is actually a core Odd Lots.
52:08 Joe Weisenthal? It is a core Odd Lots episode.
52:10 Tracy Alloway? Okay. Shall we leave it there?
52:11 Joe Weisenthal? Let's leave it there.
52:12 Tracy Alloway? This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
52:18 Joe Weisenthal? And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest, Zoran Mamdani. He's at Zoran K Mamdani. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashil Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.
52:44 Tracy Alloway? And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk to New York City mayoral candidates, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.
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