Who's Afraid Of Mayor Mamdani?

Here in New York City, our mayoral election is less than 3 weeks away. Crazed “Democratic Socialist” candidate Zohran Mamdani continues to hold a commanding lead in the polls, with no signs of any tightening. Among Mamdani’s announced policies are a substantial increase in the city income tax on “millionaires,” a multi-year rent freeze on rent-regulated apartments, having social workers instead of police respond to domestic violence calls, and having Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he shows up in town. Meanwhile, at both the City and State levels, destructive and impossible “climate” policies remain in place, like mandates to have 70% of electricity come from “renewables” by 2030 and to electrify most heat in large buildings by the same year.

You might think that panic would be starting to set in among the productive classes. But in fact that does not appear to be the case, at least as far as I can observe. Instead, most people are proceeding as if none of this is real. Are they right?

For example, here is some news from the real estate market. The Wall Street Journal had a piece on Wednesday (print edition) with the headline (online edition) “The New York City Office Market Is Roaring Back, and It’s Pricier Than Ever.” The gist is that in the first nine months of 2025 — including the most recent four months since Mamdani won the mayoral primary — leasing activity for Manhattan offices has been very strong, indeed outpacing the rest of the country. A few excerpts:

New York is setting the pace for the rest of the country. Manhattan leasing activity in 2025 has now surpassed its 2018-2019 levels. Nationwide, office leasing remains about 11% below its prepandemic average, according to CBRE.  Competition for prime space in Manhattan has grown so intense that many large tenants have to choose between a great location or a top-quality building.  “In most other cities, landlords only wish they had that kind of problem,” said Michael Slattery, CBRE’s research director for the New York region.

Examples of businesses driving the activity:

Accounting and consulting company Deloitte signed one of the biggest leases this year when it rented nearly three-quarters of a new Hudson Yards skyscraper under development on Manhattan’s West Side. Technology, media and advertising companies also gobbled up space this year, extending a recent run. Amazon.com, for one, expanded its New York presence by purchasing a Fifth Avenue building and leasing an additional 330,000 square feet.

As a notable instance of business tycoons proceeding as if New York will be retaining its status as a capital of capitalism, consider the giant hedge fund Citadel, headed by Ken Griffin. Citadel occupies hundreds of thousands of square feet of Midtown office space — and is planning a major expansion. Along with several partners, Citadel is developing a huge new office building at 350 Park Avenue (corner of 51st Street). Here is a rendering:

This development just sought and received a final go-ahead from the City Council on September 25, well after Mamdani had secured the Democratic Party nomination for Mayor. The New York YIMBY website on September 29 reported on the status of this development. Excerpts:

On September 25, the New York City Council unanimously approved the construction of 350 Park Avenue, a nearly 1,600-foot supertall office skyscraper in Midtown East, Manhattan. Designed by Foster + Partners and developed by Vornado Realty Trust, Rudin, and Ken Griffin, the massive 62-story structure will yield 1.8 million square feet of Class A office space with a capacity of 6,000 employees. Griffin’s companies Citadel and Citadel Securities will serve as the anchor tenants, occupying at least 850,000 square feet. The 53,000-square-foot property is located between East 51st and 52nd Streets.

1600 feet tall is way taller than the Empire State Building (1250 feet tall). YIMBY puts the overall cost of the development at $4.5 billion.

Citadel was originally founded in Chicago. In 2022 it moved its headquarters to Miami. It continues to downsize in Chicago, but to expand greatly in New York as well as Miami.

Here’s another Wall Street Journal piece from April reporting on some other big companies that are expanding in New York:

Tech companies such as Meta Platforms, Amazon and Alphabet’s Google helped spark a boom in the Manhattan office market in the years before the pandemic. . . . Now, that demand is recovering as companies have insisted that more workers return to the office. Vacancy rates, which touched record highs during the earlier years of the pandemic, have been falling in Manhattan and other U.S. business districts.

There is a notable pattern: All of these big companies have their headquarters outside of New York. In other words, the top executives, the actual billionaires, have organized things so that they do not pay New York State or City income taxes. They have big offices in New York to recruit top young talent in the areas of finance and technology.

Are the companies expanding in New York making a mistake in assuming that Mamdani will do only a limited amount of damage? I don’t have a great crystal ball, but I will note that we did have, for two terms, a far left Mayor named Bill de Blasio, who served from 2014 to 2021. De Blasio promised a very similar collection of policies to Mamdani, including rent freezes and raising the City income tax on millionaires, not to mention promising somehow to end the problem of income inequality. With some exceptions that are still with us, de Blasio was never able to implement the policies he sought. Most notably, he never got the income tax increase he wanted, nor anything addressing income inequality in any meaningful way (I’m not sure what that would have been.). In 2020, during the George Floyd panic, de Blasio announced that he would cut the Police Department budget by about $1 billion; but only a fraction of that happened, and the cut was restored by subsequent Mayor Adams. And then in 2022 de Blasio passed into the sunset as a largely ineffectual buffoon.

Meanwhile, the state-wide elections for offices like Governor and Attorney General are only a year away. Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik looks to be a strong candidate for Governor. In 2022, Republican Lee Zeldin lost the race for Governor to Kathy Hochul by only about 6 points. Also in 2022, Republican Michael Henry lost to Letitia James in the AG race by only about 9 points. James continues to make a fool of herself on a daily basis, and now stands indicted by the Justice Department on charges that look real, if relatively minor. Henry is running again. In other words, there is a very good shot of Republicans taking over the state offices a year from now, and the election of Mamdani could even enhance that probability.

We also have the strong likelihood that the so-called “climate” mandates will fail within the next four years, perhaps spectacularly.

So yes, these are crazy times. But the bet that most of Mamdani’s promises are not real is not really a stupid bet.