Incredibly, New York now promises to be a real-world test case for a new local economic model. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s programme for office could become a practical trial in building community wealth. England’s mayors should watch and learn.
While politics here in the UK as well as in the US is dominated, distracted and delayed by… well, politics, what people really want and need is not politics but policies. Practical and bold, simple and direct – manifestos that set out what change they want to achieve, and how they plan to achieve it.
New Yorkers are forced to play a real life game of Monopoly, with nearly 20 per cent of the city’s residents living at or below the poverty line. The Mamdani solution is to lower costs to make life easier. How? Through a refreshingly direct suite of proposals that tackle policy problems at their source and challenge the extractive economic model that has dominated for decades. Proposals include rent freezes, cracking down on poor-quality housing and negligent landlords and fast-tracking affordable home building – with the city stepping in to take control of persistently neglected properties where needed.
On transport and childcare, the plan is simple: make buses and childcare free, not just cheaper, but universal and reliable. The common thread across the Mamdani campaign was a commitment to rebuilding the public sector, curbing excessive profiteering in essential goods and services, and using public money to meet public needs, rather than lining corporate pockets.
Mamdani plans to fund his platform through measures like raising corporation tax and taxing the wealthiest one per cent of New Yorkers. These are never easy battles to win.
Corporations, real estate giants and billionaires did everything in their power to prevent Mamdani’s election success. But the challenge doesn’t stop there. They will no doubt continue to resist changing the Monopoly board status quo at every turn. At the same time, Mamdani’s ability to fund these changes through increased wealth taxes is constrained by the limits of New York City’s devolved fiscal powers. Without support from the state level (where resistance is already mounting), his tax reforms may face significant hurdles.
But millions of people are starting to believe again that “a better world is possible” and they have voted for it. The pressure is on for Mamdani to deliver.
The new mayor will need to get creative and leverage the city’s existing assets and financial power (known as the tools of community wealth building). Mamdani should focus public procurement reforms to prevent doing business with bad guys and instead target public spending toward non-extractive, community-rooted businesses. When it comes to land and asset ownership, he should prioritise cooperative, community and municipal ownership models. And he should explore developing a New York City public bank, redirecting the city’s $100bn in deposits away from extractive financial actors to one that invests in affordability and local economic resilience.
Using these tools, Mamdani can begin delivering his cost-of-living solutions, even without the ability to raise corporate and wealth taxes. This kind of community wealth building is known as “pre-distributive” economics. While redistribution through taxes is effective, in the absence of devolved fiscal powers, regional policymakers can look at what can be done to pre-distribute wealth as it is created (not waiting until after corporations have made their billions to then rely on taxing it). In the face of challenges, Mamdani does have room to manoeuvre. So too, do England’s mayors.
Economists don’t often get the privilege of randomised control trials in their research, but sometimes they are able to draw on real-world experiments – and New York City is about to become one such case study. If it can move away from a failed economic model, then perhaps cities and regions globally facing cost-of-living crises will follow suit with similarly bold solutions.
Mayors in England focussing on lowering the cost of living for their regions should look for bold solutions that challenge decades of austerity, privatisation and monopoly-board economics. From rewriting procurement rules, to favouring mission-driven providers over profit-maximising contractors, to launching municipal housing schemes that put affordability ahead of developer margins, to reclaiming failed private services like waste management and bus networks into public hands – transformative place-based economics is already within reach.
The Mamdani moment could be more than political – it’s chance for all of us to reimagine local and regional economics from the ground up.
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