When Zohran Mamdani emerged from an elevator to speak to a room of hundreds of members of the New York City business community, he was greeted with a single boo.
Bisnow/Sasha Jones
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani battled it out onstage for the business community’s votes in a private forum Wednesday.
It is no secret that the Democratic candidate isn’t favored by the corporate world. And he acknowledged just that when he hit the stage Wednesday at a mayoral forum hosted by Crain’s New York Business.
“I know that when many in the business community envisioned their dream candidate for mayor, it may not have been me on the stage,” Mamdani said. “Nevertheless, I’m excited at this opportunity, because I actually think that there’s far more commonality that is often discussed in the visions for this city.”
Mamdani and the two other candidates still in the running — former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa — brought to the forum starkly different ideas for what will allow New York City’s business community to thrive.
With the election less than a month away, Mamdani is the runaway favorite, with a 15-point lead ahead of Cuomo in the latest Emerson College poll, although that was conducted before Mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the race last week, ensuring that a new administration will take over.
Adams had been running as an independent after pulling out of contention for the Democratic nomination in April. After running in fourth place in recent polls, he was facing increasing pressure from the business community to quit the race to prevent splitting moderate votes with Cuomo.
Sliwa, who is polling at 10% and described himself as a “preservationist,” is facing a similar challenge but has said he has no intentions of ending his candidacy.
“The polls were saying he was going to have a coronation,” he said onstage, referencing Cuomo’s lead in the polls even the day before the June 24 primary election. “I am the only mainstream candidate other than Zohran.”
Mamdani’s leading contender status has come despite deep skepticism from the business community about his policy platforms, including freezing rents on the city’s 1 million stabilized apartments and increasing taxes on wealthy New Yorkers.
The state assembly member, who represents Astoria and other northeast Queens neighborhoods, used to work as a foreclosure prevention counselor. He used his time onstage to name-drop and quote influential corporate leaders to connect with the business-minded audience in the room.
“There’s a quote that comes to mind from, of all people, Jeff Bezos, a man whose tax burden I would love to significantly raise,” he said to laughs from the audience. “Jeff once said — not to me personally, but in public: ‘You have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.’”
All three candidates referred to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, beloved by the business community, as an inspiration in various ways.
Mamdani used Bloomberg’s commitment to public transit as a reflection of some of his own policy proposals. He argued that his platform, including city-provided childcare, free buses and subsidized grocery stores, centers on creating more affordability in New York City in order for businesses to attract and retain talent.
But he refused to back down from his flagship policy promises, particularly his proposed rent freezes for stabilized housing, highlighting the growing “chasm” between landlords’ profits and stagnant wages for tenants. Property owners have opposed the freeze, claiming that it would kill their last stream of revenue amid growing inflation and aging housing stock.
Bisnow/Sasha Jones
Business leaders at Crain’s mayoral forum were alert as Democrat Zohran Mamdani, independent candidate former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa walked through their policy platforms.
“The impetus here is to provide relief to a disproportionately working- and middle-class set of New Yorkers,” Mamdani said. “It is not, however, to punish the landlords of those units.”
Cuomo has also caught heat from the industry. He was the one to sign into law the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, a package of rent reforms that closed various loopholes used by some property owners to remove apartment units from regulation and drastically restricted ways landlords could raise rents.
Cuomo has reportedly admitted in private to real estate executives that the law went too far. But onstage Wednesday, he blamed the Democratic supermajority in the legislature for being against him at the time, meaning that even if he vetoed the bill, he would have been overridden.
“The right governmental answer is: Negotiate the best bill you can, get the worst things out of it, but do the best you can to get the bill palatable,” Cuomo said. “Which is what I did.”
While Mamdani has received criticism over his limited experience, Cuomo repeatedly cited his tenure as governor — which ended when he resigned amid a sexual harassment scandal — as a model for how he would run the city. Listing the times he has worked across the aisle and various infrastructure improvements that were completed under him, Cuomo said that if elected, he would have a new structural issue to take on.
“The big project has to be 500,000 units of affordable housing on 300 sites simultaneously,” Cuomo said. “I think that’s the first big project, which in some ways is harder than a LaGuardia Airport or Second Avenue Subway.”
Cuomo pledged to “redesign the whole damn government,” something he claimed to do during his time in Albany. Doing so would remove red tape for developers, he said, though he was put in the hot seat over his housing plan, which says that he doesn’t favor additional rezonings of low-density areas, “with limited exceptions such as transit-oriented development.”
“I get this political sensitivity, and I get City of Yes and what everybody went through, but it’s going to be on a case-by-case basis,” he said.
Mamdani similarly established that he aims to create more housing and praised the Adams deputies who shepherded the City of Yes to completion. His platform has largely been focused on building new public housing, but on Wednesday he promised to weave business expertise into the fabric of City Hall, cut red tape and reduce regulations that add prohibitive costs for housing developers.
“I’m eager for the relationship between the public sector and the private sector to be more of a partnership than it ever has before,” Mamdani said.
He also laid out proposals that would aid landlords’ increasing cost burdens.
“To freeze the rent does not also preclude you from working on the necessity of a property tax reform agenda that is currently part of the reason why it’s so difficult to maintain rental housing across the city,” Mamdani said.
The former governor also criticized the property tax system, calling it “totally unfair, unjust and illegal.” To change that, he said legal action would have to be taken, instead of working with elected officials.
“The problem with property tax reform is you’re going to have winners and you’re going to have losers,” Cuomo said. “The political system does not like having losers.”
Adams has failed to deliver on similar campaign promises to reform property taxes, Mamdani said, although he didn’t substantiate exactly how he would overcome similar obstacles.
Despite his comments Wednesday, Mamdani has a ways to go to win the hearts and minds of most in the real estate industry.
“Mamdani’s plan right now is to freeze rents and then try his best to cut costs. There is no promise to cut costs, only a promise to freeze rents,” New York Apartment Association CEO Kenny Burgos said in an email after the forum. “We appreciate the rhetoric around property tax reform and tackling out of control insurance costs, but at this point it is just rhetoric.”
