During my 9th-grade student council election, I campaigned in a crowded field with a simple promise: an end-of-year school-sponsored trip to Cedar Point. Needless to say, I won in a landslide. Though well-intended, it became clear to me that I had overpromised and underdelivered. Voter backlash was swift, and I did not win my next election. The same magic realism — policies that sound good on paper but are entirely disconnected from the reality of governance — that defined my student council platform also defines the platform of Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City.
Mamdani is an incredibly talented politician whose mastery of campaigning — multilingual ads, relatable TikToks and a chic visual identity — owed him his upset victory. His campaign captured the hearts of many working-class New Yorkers with a simple message: make New York City affordable. He promised rent freezes, free buses, free childcare and city-run grocery stores, among other policy priorities. However, these proposals lack economic grounding and will inevitably fail to give New Yorkers the solutions they deserve.
Take rent control, for example, a policy solution championed by Mamdani. Though a seemingly quick fix, it ignores the fact that housing unaffordability is a supply-side issue — there are just not enough homes to meet demand. Creating an artificial price ceiling in the long term discourages new development and further exacerbates housing unaffordability. Similar economic criticisms have been made about Mamdani’s other fanciful policies. The mayor-elect’s proposals are, more broadly, reflective of a tendency amongst Democrats to expand the scope and cost of government without expanding its benefits.
New York City’s budget has nearly tripled from $38 billion in 2000 to $112 billion in 2025, despite meager population growth and, in my view, the city not offering three times as many services to residents. This budget is comparable to the entire budget of the state of Florida. The Second Avenue Subway cost New York City $2.6 billion per mile, far higher than similar projects in any other municipality. And New York State spends $36,000 per year per pupil on education, nearly double the national average, yet 8th-grade reading and math scores on the 2024 National Assessment for Educational Progress were not significantly different from the national average.
There are, of course, tremendous economic inequalities and shortages of opportunity in the U.S. that need to be addressed through well-targeted policy interventions. Progressives rightfully cite New Deal era policies as examples of the transformative power of government to improve people’s lives. But when constituents face the burden of higher taxation in exchange for equal, if not worse, results, then people become disaffected by politics. They lose trust in the capacity of the government to make their lives better.
Ezra Klein, in his book “Abundance,” was one of the first theorists to write extensively on the causes of liberal policy failures. Former President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated $1 trillion in spending, yet years later, few projects have reached completion. The same can be said about the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Klein attributes these failures to bureaucratic processes and the regulatory system. Mamdani offers an alternative answer, but not a productive one.
Mamdani unrealistically calls for 200,000 new units of “publicly-subsidized, affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes” to be built by the city over the next decade. However, in the 2010s, the city added around 185,000 units in total, the majority being market-rate. Moreover, a RAND study found that affordable housing costs more than 1.5 times as much per square foot to build in California, and a Washington Post investigation reported that DC affordable housing developments cost more than double the market rate cost per unit. He further calls for the city to undertake this expansion using union labor, which the city estimates adds 23% to the cost. But is Mamdani willing to make tradeoffs that will actually reduce the cost of housing — make union workers compete with other workers, reduce environmental reviews and local say over new developments, rezone for mixed-use housing and eliminate rent control? Is Providence?
Like New York, Rhode Island also faces a cost-of-living crisis. In a 2025 report, the Providence City Council states that “Providence’s affordability crisis cannot be solved without increasing the supply of housing.” Despite this acknowledgement, Providence leaders are currently considering rent stabilization, a policy that would lead to higher prices in the market. The dissonance is striking, and I believe it displays Democrats’ broader failure to self-reflect on the limitations of good intentions alone.
The evidence from last month’s mayoral election paints an unconvincing story for those who believe that socialism is the future of Democrats: Mamdani won the mayoral race as the Democratic nominee in deep blue New York with only 50.4% of the vote, competing against a serial predator. Hardly a mandate.
The future of the Democratic Party is not TikTok progressives, but serious policymakers. Those like Gov. Josh Shapiro, who rebuilt a collapsed I-95 overpass in just 12 days by clearing regulatory hurdles. Or Gov. Gretchen Whitmer who delivered on her promise to “fix the damn roads.” Or Gov. Gavin Newsom, who recently overhauled California’s environmental review laws to encourage new construction.
As Providence considers proposals to increase affordability, it must understand the failures that led to the shortage of housing and choose solutions that are empirically grounded. And as Brown students enter the world, many in the political arena, we ought to refrain from supporting candidates based on popular appeal and grapple with the implications of the policies they espouse.
Tas Rahman ’26 can be reached at tasawwar_rahman@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
Tas Rahman is an opinions editor at the Brown Daily Herald writing about issues in higher education. When he's not coding or studying biochemistry, you can find him hiking and enjoying the great outdoors.
