{"id":768,"date":"2026-09-03T20:40:40","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T20:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=768"},"modified":"2026-09-03T20:40:40","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T20:40:40","slug":"why-would-new-york-city-elect-anyone-but-a-socialist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=768","title":{"rendered":"Why Would New York City Elect Anyone but a Socialist?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Anyone still puzzled by the fact that New York\u2019s mayor is a democratic socialist doesn\u2019t know New York.<\/p>\n

Read more Another Monopoly Allowed to Stand<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday, New York City Comptroller Mark Levine released a survey of New Yorkers\u2019 incomes, based on their tax returns from 2019 to 2024. The survey revealed levels of wealth concentration and income disparity so profound that it called to mind Metropolis\u2014the fictional city in Fritz Lang\u2019s 1927 film of the same name, where a handful of economic oligarchs rule over the literally subterranean workers.<\/p>\n

The survey\u2019s findings include these particulars:<\/p>\n

The top 0.1 percent of New Yorkers\u2014that\u2019s 1 in 1,000\u2014received 22 percent of New Yorkers\u2019 total income in 2024.<\/p>\n

Between 2019 and 2024, that top 0.1 percent received more than half of all New Yorkers\u2019 income growth. The top 1 percent received nearly two-thirds.<\/p>\n

Factoring in all the city\u2019s other residents, New Yorkers\u2019 real median income actually fell by 3.2 percent from 2019 to 2024.<\/p>\n

Read more A Casualty of a Cruel Immigration Policy<\/a><\/p>\n

Among the richest 1 percent, fully 64 percent of their income came from investments, rents, and proprietorship in 2019, which had risen to 69 percent by 2024.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that New Yorkers could roll off these statistics, of course, but their lived realities nonetheless fleshed them out. New York is a place where concentrated wealth is ostentatiously visible, as are the daily struggles just to make ends meet. Simply to live in and see the city over a period of time, and yet believe that its economy works for all therein, requires a ferocious denial of reality, the kind you can see among Wall Street Journal<\/em> editorialists.<\/p>\n

Zohran Mamdani clearly understood that running against the systemic inequality hardwired into New York life required no theoretical treatises. Freezing the rent and taxing the rich to create affordable child care were real solutions to real problems that millions of his fellow New Yorkers experienced. Due partly to its density, New York is surely the American city where economic inequality is most visible and palpable, but it\u2019s hard to miss in other major cities as well\u2014as is not the case in rural America. That\u2019s one reason why our new burst of socialism is chiefly an urban phenomenon; it\u2019s cities where the sweeping upward redistribution of wealth and income is impossible to miss.<\/p>\n

In a sense, the astonishment at the rise of American socialism is rather astonishing in itself. The economic, social, and political consequences of the deregulation of capital and the suppression of labor (with unions, battered by the increasing power of investors, declining from representing more than a third of private-sector workers to a bare 6 percent today) should lead to a rise in socialist and social democratic movements in any normal country (and, alas, to far-right tribal sensibilities as well). For most of its history, the United States has not, in this sense, been normal; its racial and ethnic divisions blocked the emergence of the socialist movements and parties common to more ethnically homogeneous nations. Today, the kind of inequality that is spiraling upward, and whose growth AI will only accelerate, is inching our country closer to being a more normal nation.<\/p>\n

Read more The Lawless Fed<\/a><\/p>\n

About time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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A new survey documents the city\u2019s towering levels of inequality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":767,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[377],"class_list":["post-768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tap","tag-tagged-cities-communities-inequality-new-york-new-york-city-on-tap-politics-poverty-wealth-socialism-zohran-mamdani"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Would New York City Elect Anyone but a Socialist? - Frontier Housing Report<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=768\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why Would New York City Elect Anyone but a Socialist? 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