New York is too expensive. Zohran will lower costs and make life easier.

A majority of New Yorkers are tenants, and more than two million of them live in rent stabilized apartments. These homes should be the bedrock of economic security for the city’s working class. Instead, Eric Adams has taken every opportunity to squeeze tenants, with his hand-picked appointees to the Rent Guidelines Board jacking up rents on stabilized apartments by 9% (and counting)–the most since a Republican ran City Hall.

As Mayor, Zohran will immediately freeze the rent for all stabilized tenants, and use every available resource to build the housing New Yorkers need and bring down the rent. The number one reason working families are leaving our city is the housing crisis. The Mayor has the power to change that.

Public transit should be reliable, safe and universally accessible. But one in five New Yorkers struggle to afford the ever rising fare. Adding insult to injury: our city’s buses are the slowest in the nation, robbing working people of precious time for family, leisure and rest.

Zohran won New York’s first fare-free bus pilot on five lines across the city. As Mayor, he’ll permanently eliminate the fare on every city bus – and make them faster by rapidly building priority lanes, expanding bus queue jump signals, and dedicated loading zones to keep double parkers out of the way. Fast and free buses will not only make buses reliable and accessible but will improve safety for riders and operators – creating the world-class service New Yorkers deserve.

All New Yorkers deserve to be safe. But the Adams administration has failed to deliver the sense of safety and security that everyone should feel walking down our streets, riding our subways, or taking our buses. Zohran will create the Department of Community Safety to prevent violence before it happens by prioritizing solutions which have been consistently shown to improve safety. Police have a critical role to play. But right now, we’re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net—which prevents them from doing their actual jobs. Through this new city agency and whole-of-government approach, community safety will be prioritized like never before in NYC. The Department will invest in citywide mental health programs and crisis response—including deploying dedicated outreach workers in 100 subway stations, providing medical services in vacant commercial units, and increasing Transit Ambassadors to assist New Yorkers on their journeys—expand evidence-based gun violence prevention programs, and increase funding to hate violence prevention programs by 800%. Read more in the NYT, and the full proposal here.

After rent, the biggest cost for New York’s working families is childcare. It’s literally driving them out of the city: New Yorkers with children under six are leaving at double the rate of all others. The burden falls heaviest on mothers, who are giving up paying jobs to do unpaid childcare.

Zohran will implement free childcare for every New Yorker aged 6 weeks to 5 years, ensuring high quality programming for all families. And he will bring up wages for childcare workers – a quarter of whom currently live in poverty – to be at parity with public school teachers. It will foster early childhood development, save parents money and keep our families in the city they call home.

Food prices are out of control. Nearly 9 in 10 New Yorkers say the cost of groceries is rising faster than their income. Only the very wealthiest aren’t feeling squeezed at the register.

As Mayor, Zohran will create a network of city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low, not making a profit. Without having to pay rent or property taxes, they will reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers. They will buy and sell at wholesale prices, centralize warehousing and distribution, and partner with local neighborhoods on products and sourcing. With New York City already spending millions of dollars to subsidize private grocery store operators (which are not even required to take SNAP/WIC!), we should redirect public money to a real “public option.”

We need a lot more affordable housing. But for decades, New York City has relied almost entirely on changing the zoning code to entice private development – with results that can fall short of the big promises. And the housing that does get built is often out of reach for the working class who need it the most.

As Mayor, Zohran will put our public dollars to work and triple the City’s production of permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes – constructing 200,000 new units over the next 10 years. Any 100% affordable development gets fast-tracked: no more pointless delays. And Zohran will fully staff our City’s housing agencies so we can actually get the work done.

For the additional housing we need, Zohran will initiate a Comprehensive Plan for New York City to create a holistic vision for affordability, equity, and growth. This planning will allow NYC to address the legacy of racially discriminatory zoning, increase density near transit hubs, end the requirement to build parking lots and proactively chart our future.

One in ten renter households reported a lack of adequate heat last winter. One in four reported mice or rats in their homes. Half a million live in poor quality housing.

Every New Yorker deserves a safe and healthy place to call home. That’s why Zohran will overhaul the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants and coordinate code enforcement under one roof, making sure agencies work together to hold owners responsible for the conditions of their buildings. Tenants will be able to schedule and track inspections with a revamped 311. If a landlord refuses to make a repair, the City will do it and send them the bill. And in the most extreme cases, when an owner demonstrates consistent neglect for their tenants, the City will decisively step in and take control of their properties. The worst landlords will be put out of business.

In the world’s richest city, making the minimum wage shouldn’t mean living in poverty. But that’s exactly what it means for working people today, even with the hard-won increase in the state minimum wage. When incomes don’t match the true cost of living, government services have to make up the difference – effectively subsidizing low wage employers.

As Mayor, Zohran will champion a new local law bringing the NYC wage floor up to $30/hour by 2030. After that, the minimum wage will automatically increase based on the cost of living and productivity increases. When working people have more money in their pocket, the whole economy thrives.

Each year, 125,000 New Yorkers are born across our city – but the cost of living crisis can make it difficult for new families to give them a healthy start. Building on the success of more than 90 similar programs around the world, the Mamdani administration will provide new parents and guardians with a collection of essential goods and resources, free of charge, including items like diapers, baby wipes, nursing pads, post-partum pads, swaddles, and books.

Each NYC Baby Basket will also include a resource guide of information on the City’s newborn home visiting program, breastfeeding, post-partum depression and more. These are critical resources for combating postpartum maternal mortality and increasing trust in government as well. At less than $20 million a year, it’s a relatively small investment with potentially huge rewards for healthy development and family stability – as demonstrated by countless programs around the globe.

Fighting the climate crisis is intertwined with fighting for working people—cleaning our air, beautifying our streets, making our public transit high quality, fortifying our buildings against extreme weather events and more. Greening New York has been at the heart of Zohran’s time in elected office. He fought to establish the Build Public Renewables Act, the All-Electric Buildings Act, defeat a dirty fracked gas plant in his Assembly district (NRG) and to #FixtheMTA and #GetCongestionPricingRight—winning an unprecedented $100M+ in operating funds for our subways and buses and creating NYC’s first successful fare-free bus pilot. As Mayor, Zohran will continue these efforts and lead a massive decarbonization and climate resiliency process citywide. This will include building out renewable energy on our abundant public lands and fulfilling the vision of Local Law 97 through greater enforcement and assistance from the City for middle income homeowners. He will also oversee a disaster preparedness program that prioritizes safe and resilient housing, public waterfronts, and other infrastructure at the forefront of flood protection, and use a multi-agency approach to tackle extreme heat, which kills more people—particularly New Yorkers of color—than any other type of weather event. Finally, as ConEd tries to raise utility rates by over 10%, Zohran will firmly oppose these exorbitant hikes, as he has in the past.

Twelve percent of New York City residents are uninsured. To expand access to healthcare, Zohran will create a new corps of outreach workers to support New Yorkers navigating the healthcare system. Those workers will support patients in understanding the public resources available to them: how to find insurance, apply to programs, access financial assistance, and claim their health benefits. As Trump attacks public health, particularly reproductive healthcare, Zohran will also guarantee that these outreach workers connect every New Yorker in need of reproductive care to affordable, quality support. Moreover, New York’s public hospital system serves over one million unique patients a year and is the crown jewel of our public health infrastructure—but it faces significant funding gaps, leading to underinvestment, understaffing and overburdened caregivers. Meanwhile, we keep closing our critical community hospitals. Zohran will work with our healthcare unions and city and state partners to increase funding for H+H and end hospital closures. He will also protect NYC for future public health emergencies, including guarding against shortages of PPE, ensuring adequate surge capacity and healthcare worker safety, maintaining programs like Test and Trace to stay on top of trends, and more.

As Mayor, Zohran will work closely with our city's powerful labor movement to ensure that union- and non-union workers alike know and can enforce their rights at work, including by fully staffing and expanding the role of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. He will continue fighting for the Secure Jobs Act, which will make it easier for workers to organize without fear of unfair or retaliatory firings. Through requiring high-road labor standards for all City contractors, City-financed development projects, and City-funded organizations and their contractors and expanding labor peace agreement requirements, he’ll ensure that all workers, including public sector workers, have the right to collective bargaining and to fight for strong contracts. Finally, Zohran will work closely with unions to pass additional sectoral extender laws that provide better wages and working conditions across entire industries, similar to NYC’s fast-food minimum wage law. 

Zohran will ensure our public schools are fully funded with equally distributed resources, strong after-school programs, mental health counselors and nurses, compliant and effective class sizes, and integrated student bodies. He will create car-free “School Streets” to prevent traffic fatalities, improve play, and lower pollution for every school, and address student homelessness by expanding the successful Bronx pilot Every Child and Family Is Known. Zohran supports an end to mayoral control and envisions a system instead in which parents, students, educators and administrators work together to create the school environments in which students and families will best thrive—strengthening co-governance through the PEP, SLTs, DLTs, and CECs in particular. He will also work with the City and State to massively invest in CUNY—whether taxing NYU and Columbia or passing the New Deal for CUNY which he has long championed—to invest in infrastructure, pay staff and faculty a living wage, give free OMNY cards to all students, and make CUNY tuition-free for all students, as it was for 130 years.