Can Mamdani’s racial equity plan fix New York City?

Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, isn’t from New York originally. But with two sons and five grandkids living in Brooklyn, he’s in the city quite a bit. For frequent visitors like him, along with residents and workers, public safety and traffic issues are key points of concern.

Sometimes, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made statements that encourage Husock to believe he shares those concerns.

“He talks about ‘sewer socialism.’ He’s going to focus on filling the potholes. If he does that, then that’s a good thing,” Husock said.

But some of the recently elected mayor’s ideas don’t strike Husock as wise. One of those is Mamdani’s racial equity plan, announced last week.

“It kind of stuns me how ambitious it is,” Husock said. “What his staff has done is look at every city service, even the most basic services like sanitation, through a racial equity—so-called—lens.” Husock, who studies municipal government at AEI, sees that sweeping approach as over the top. “I mean, if you pick up the garbage well in every neighborhood, then all neighborhoods will benefit.”

Mamdani’s administration says its plan to promote racial equity across New York City will increase the quality of life for minorities there. But many experts, like Husock, question the plan’s legality and warn it could do more harm than good by ignoring the root causes of the problems it is trying to address.

Mamdani’s racial equity plan comes alongside a report about cost-of-living problems in the city. Both documents come in response to ballot measures approved by New York City voters in 2022. The voter referendums required the city’s government to examine how minority groups experience a lower quality of life and find ways to elevate it. Any efforts to address racial inequities had to address the cost of living, Mamdani said of the racial equity plan. And any attempt to address cost of living also had to address racial inequities, he added.

The cost-of-living report found that roughly 62% of New Yorkers do not make enough money each year to meet what the city defined as necessary to “thrive.” And only about half of all residents make enough money to cover the costs of living if their ability to accumulate savings isn’t considered, it said.

The racial equity plan noted that, historically, minority residents have experienced a lower quality of life in the city than white residents have. It said the same is still true today, with the median household net worth of black residents in New York City roughly $20,000 a year, while for white residents, it’s closer to $280,000 a year, according to Mamdani’s office. The plan also listed the life expectancy for black New Yorkers at about 76 years of age. For white residents, it’s nearly 82 years of age.

The two documents outlined hundreds of ways that government agencies within the city will seek to eliminate systemic racism, solicit the contributions of minorities, and elevate minorities’ quality of life.

The racial equity document, for example, listed goals for various city agencies and strategies to achieve them: A goal for the New York City Housing Authority is to provide better rental assistance for government housing participants who struggle to make their rent payments. Goals for the Department of City Planning include hiring from more minority groups when filling vacancies and better educating its employees on “the discriminatory history of urban planning.” A goal for the New York City Police Department is to revise its hiring processes so that minorities are not disproportionately excluded. Another is to ensure police officers don’t stop and frisk minority individuals at a higher rate than other residents.

The racial equity plan lists goals such as creating a world where “all residents can live a full and healthy life regardless of identity or zip code” and “all residents live in safe, dignified, and affordable housing free of hazardous conditions.”

Mamdani’s plan is currently less than halfway through a monthlong public comment period. But already the Trump administration’s Department of Justice has signaled that it is investigating whether his proposals are even legal, due to their race-based, outcome-focused emphasis.

“The mayor’s plan appears to be another example of divisive, race-based policymaking that the United States Supreme Court has routinely held to be unlawful,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement provided to WORLD. “Racist and illegal DEI has no place in our society. The Civil Rights Division is reviewing the plan and will bring enforcement actions if necessary.”

Legal concerns aside, some experts say the Mamdani’s administration method of pursuing its goals won’t work.

“Their solution is more spending. It’s always more spending,” said Jared Pincin, a professor of economics at Cedarville University. “What they’re not focused on is why are the costs higher, right? So why is housing in New York significantly more expensive than elsewhere? And the answer to that is the supply of housing in New York. So what I don’t see in this is, how are we making housing less expensive?”

Husock, from AEI, said that the city government has overregulated the housing market, driving up costs.

“New York’s housing market is what I call deeply constipated,” Husock said. He pointed to the city’s large number of rent-regulated apartments.

“The costs can go up, but the rents can’t go up,” he said. “People have a good deal, so they stay there. So they don’t move up, they don’t move out. The churn that you need in a dynamic housing market is inhibited in New York.”

In addition to controlling rents, both the federal and local governments have subsidized huge swaths of the housing market in the city.

The New York City Housing Authority reported last year that the city had roughly 177,000 government-owned and managed public housing units. The housing authority reported that another 150,000 units were subsidized through federal government programs. The city agency serves roughly 511,000 people in public housing—nearly the population of Atlanta, Ga.

“There’s so much subsidized housing,” Husock said. “Yet the city always wants more, and Mamdani wants more and more of it, as opposed to saying to themselves, well, maybe this regulation is what has caused our problems in the first place.”

But it isn’t just rent control or housing subsidies that are to blame. Pincin and Husock both argued that the city could lower housing costs by making it easier for companies to build more housing. But the city isn’t addressing those root causes for how to make housing less expensive, Pincin said.

“Or why is food more expensive? You hear talks about food deserts. Well, for-profit companies want to serve people. They want to give you products for money,” Pincin said. “So the question is, why aren’t they going into certain areas?”

In some cases, companies don’t want to take on public safety risks by putting stores in high-crime neighborhoods. “The answer is not for a government to have their own grocery store,” Pincin said. “It’s to take crime seriously, lower crime, so that businesses want to be there and thrive.”

Mamdani’s racial equity plan found that women- and minority-owned businesses take up roughly half of the small business marketplace. But it also showed they only received about 10% of city contracts. The mayor would like to boost that rate.

But Husock argued that practices like setting aside city contracts for minority- and women-owned businesses end up hurting the intended recipients because they don’t work to be competitive. “We’ve seen [these programs] not help over the years. And so to double down on them seems like a misplaced program,” he said.

Regardless of the mayor’s goals, his plan to achieve them is likely to require impressive amounts of money—more than the city government currently has.

“They’re going to need money from somewhere, and so you’re going to see a push for higher taxes,” Pincin said. “The mayor is limited there. For certain tax increases, they have to get permission from Albany, and I don’t know if Albany is going to play ball there.”

Pincin pointed to how New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has previously refused to support certain kinds of taxes Mamdani has proposed. She has reversed her position somewhat in recent days, expressing support for taxes on wealthy individuals’ second homes if they’re worth more than $5 million. But Pincin said he expects to see a larger disconnect between City Hall and Albany on putting more taxes in place to support Mamdani’s racial equity plan.

“It’s easy to spend money. It’s easy to outline plans, but it’s harder to actually get at the core issues,” Pincin said.