What the mayor-elect can learn from the Southwest state
Zohran Mamdani’s imminent arrival in City Hall has been greeted, in conservative circles, with all the warmth owed an incoming asteroid. Many detractors say his policies are alien and untested, and will take New York City into uncharted territory.
But two of his signature proposals — universal childcare and a new Department of Community Safety — are already being implemented in, of all places, New Mexico and its most populous city, Albuquerque.
New Mexico is not typically considered a hotbed of policy innovation, but necessity is the mother of invention. For years, the state has experienced among the highest rates of law-enforcement-involved killings, and Albuquerque’s police department recently spent a decade under a federal consent decree for engaging in “a pattern or practice of excessive force.” So in June 2020, at the height of protests following the murder of George Floyd, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller launched what he described as the country’s first cabinet-level community safety department. This third branch of emergency response would “deliver a civilian public health approach to public safety,” said the initial announcement.
Similarly, New Mexico has long ranked last in the country for child wellbeing, so upon taking office in 2019, Gov. Michelle Lujan-Grisham immediately set about expanding childcare. First she created an Early Childhood Education & Care Department (ECECD), and in 2022 expanded child care assistance to families earning up to 400% of the Federal Poverty Level. This month, she eliminated the income cap entirely, making it the first state to provide child care as a universal benefit.
New York City’s scale means no other locality’s problems — or solutions — can entirely compare in scope. New Mexico’s statewide population of 2.1 million is dwarfed by Brooklyn’s (2.7 million), or Queens’ (2.4 million). Albuquerque’s Community Safety department has a budget of $17 million; Mamdani’s proposal has a price tag of over $1 billion. To make childcare universal, New Mexico is adding 12,000 children to its rolls; New York City would have to add hundreds of thousands. (The Mamdani transition did not respond to a request to comment.)
Still, New Mexico’s experiences implementing these policies highlight some challenges New York City and any other emulators should anticipate.
As in the community safety department proposed by Mamdani, Albuquerque’s took ownership of the city’s violence prevention outreach workers and support services for victims, but the biggest lift was building out a new alternative first response system — or as its founding director Mariela Ruiz-Angel put it in an interview, “to not send cops to calls that they didn’t really need to be at anymore.”
New Mexico’s experiments show how far bold ideas can go — and how quickly the hard limits of housing, staffing and services come into view.
The department rapidly expanded its reach from 9,000 calls in the 2022 fiscal year to 45,000 in 2025, far exceeding the number of calls receiving a non-police response from well-known programs in Seattle and Denver, as well as New York City’s B-HEARD pilot, which responded to 14,951 calls in 2024.
A non-police response is a needed service Mamdani often spoke about during the campaign, citing hundreds of thousands of mental health calls the New York Police Department responds to each year that other professionals would arguably be better equipped to handle.
But it’s one thing to show up for a call, and another to be able to provide the complex, often long-term services people in crisis require. Despite the growing reach of its crisis responders, Albuquerque still lacks sufficient detox facilities and housing to make those transitions successfully, said Ruiz-Angel.
That has disillusioned some Albuquerque residents, who thought the new department was going to reduce the number of people living on the streets. Instead, annual counts show the number of unsheltered people in Albuquerque rose to new heights in 2023 and 2024. “We were never going to be able to fix homelessness,” said Ruiz-Angel, but “we are being held accountable for it.”
Ruiz-Angel, who now directs a program on alternative first response at Georgetown Law School, said that the Mamdani campaign consulted with her in the run-up to the election. In those conversations, she emphasized the importance of thinking downstream and ensuring there was funding for building out those services.
She also stressed the difficulty of staffing an entirely new agency. Mamdani’s platform calls for peer-support workers in the transit system and a 150% increase in funding for the city’s existing B-HEARD program, which deploys health professionals to 911 calls in some neighborhoods. “One of the pieces of advice I gave them was: Don't be so narrow on who you're hiring. Focus on your training,” she said. Community health workers, nurses and EMTs might all be feeder professions. “What we care about is people who know people.”
As for New Mexico’s expansion of childcare, the state expects 12,000 infants and toddlers to newly enroll, but there are only enough openings for one in three babies under age 2, with the most serious shortage in rural counties.
To grow the childcare workforce, the state has raised its wages. ECECD Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky said New Mexico is the first to use a cost-estimation model, updated every three years, to ensure pay is sufficient to support stable child care businesses that provide quality care. She said that’s driven an uptick in the number of students in local training programs. “Our workforce has grown 64% and we have the fastest-growing wages” in the country, she said.
The real lesson from Albuquerque isn’t novelty but stamina: Transformative policy depends less on invention than on the grinding work of building institutions that can carry it.
Mamdani’s platform indicates he wants to raise wages of childcare workers, too, “to be at parity with public school teachers.” That would add to the price-tag, however. And the average cost per enrolled child in New York City ($20,100) is already 68% higher than New Mexico’s ($12,000), according to the Fiscal Policy Institute.
Another bottleneck is the number of facilities providing childcare in any given locality. “Access to capital is key for the sector,” Groginsky said. New Mexico created a $13 million fund to provide low-interest loans to build or renovate childcare centers, and is seeking an additional $20 million from the legislature.
The state is also trying to recruit more people to run child care in their homes, since such providers are also more likely to offer care at night or in a family’s native language. Groginsky said this would be important in New York City, too, since families there would have a diversity of needs. “That families have choice is a key component of a good child care sector, because we can't pretend to know at the state-level what a family wants.”
During the rollout of former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s universal pre-K program, home-based providers said they were left out and lost students to public schools and institutional programs, which paid staff better.
Mindful of how the sudden influx of kids newly enrolled could affect the most vulnerable residents, Groginsky said New Mexico is also holding 2,000 slots for families at the lower end of the income spectrum, “making sure they're not getting squeezed out of the market.”
For New Yorkers awaiting their new mayoral administration, New Mexico’s experiences offer inspiration and caution. Its leaders have shown that bold ideas can be translated into real programs.
They’ve also demonstrated that these programs aren’t won and done: the challenges of implementation are real, and perpetual. Transformative policy is less about invention than persistence — the long, unglamorous work of building institutions that can bear the weight of vision.