Is Mayor Zohran Mamdani Competent To Run New York City?

Here’s a question that New Yorkers should start to ask. Is Zohran Mamdani a competent mayor? There’s a big difference between a public official in a legislature and one who is an executive — a distinction that Hizzoner should be learning. Delivering public services demands competence — and it’s not at all clear that Mr. Mamdani, like his DSA-style comrades in the Seattle and Chicago mayors’ office, is competent.That question is suggested by his performance on his own core campaign promises and signature initiatives: the second home “pied-à-terre” tax, the freeze on rents for price-regulated apartments, free buses and city-run supermarkets. Each of these has either been snagged in implementation or hit serious legal or practical opposition that should have been anticipated.The “pied-à-terre” tax has raised the clearest question of competence. By sending notices of potential tax liability to nearly a million New Yorkers, Mr. Mamdani forced citizens to prove where they live — and sparked both outrage among longtime residents and a lawsuit to block the tax itself. A state judge on Staten Island initially blocked the rollout on the basis of its implementation — the sheer competence of the Mamdani City Hall. An appellate court later overruled the lower court judge. Facing legal scrutiny, too, is the mayor’s rent freeze — adopted by his handpicked members of the city’s Rent Guidelines Board. After the lone landlord representative quit, charging that the decision process was “theatre” — not a careful weighing of owners’ costs and rent levels, as required by law, the freeze, too, is being challenged in state court.As for Mr. Mamdani’s “free” buses, it turns out that the mayor has no authority to set fares, whose revenue the Metropolitan Transit Authority relies on. Instead, we’re seeing an MTA crackdown on fare beaters.Nor is there a clear legal path to the city-owned and run supermarkets. Private operators, led by immigrant bodega owners, have called on the courts to block the unfair competition with markets that will pay neither rent nor property taxes. The mayor’s competence is being thrown into question, as well, by an emerging quality-of-life issue: The rash of accidents, some fatal, involving e-bikes and pedestrians. Mr. Mamdani’s sympathy for immigrant “deliveristas” has blinded him to the fear among walkers in the city — and led him to halt police issuance of citations for the e-bike traffic violations. None of this paints a picture of the competent administration that Mr. Mamdani himself has gone out of his way to promise. “We have showcased a new kind of approach to governing in our city — pothole politics,” he says. “Delivering public goods coupled with public excellence.”We’ve seen what this looks like: The extension of the Seven line subway to Manhattan’s West Side and creation of the High Line engineered by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose rezoning of old industrial areas set off a housing construction boom. No such prospects are in sight for a mayor more ideological than practical.

Is Mayor Zohran Mamdani Competent To Run New York City?

Is Mayor Zohran Mamdani Competent To Run New York City?

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