The Other Side of Affordability

Solving New York City’s affordability crisis will require more than tackling the soaring cost of living. The next mayor also needs a plan for the other side of the equation: raising incomes and building wealth.

Throughout the mayoral campaign, Zohran Mamdani understandably focused on the immediate pressures New Yorkers feel every day — rising rents, childcare costs, transit fares and the price of groceries. What received far less attention was why and how his administration might improve economic mobility: helping more New Yorkers move out of poverty, achieve economic stability and reach the middle class.

Lowering costs is important, but it can only take New Yorkers so far. Since the pandemic, New York City’s median rent has risen at twice the rate of median incomes, according to the Center for an Urban Future’s analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Policymakers can’t make the city more affordable for all if paychecks continue to fall behind.

Mamdani has proposed one significant idea to bolster incomes: raising the city’s minimum wage to $30 by 2030. Boosting the minimum wage beyond the current $16.50 is an important step. Indeed, the increases from $7.25 in 2013 were arguably the leading factor in reducing poverty prior to the pandemic. But it’s not enough just to boost the number of New Yorkers who can get by in this high-cost city; a lot more New Yorkers need options that will help them get ahead. That requires more than just increasing the base wage, but also setting up individuals to access the well-paying jobs that are growing in the city’s economy and build wealth. 

The consequences of limited economic mobility are visible everywhere. Last year, 76% of New Yorkers said they cut back on basic necessities or savings. Poverty is rising again, and many households earning well above the poverty line face intensifying financial strain.

Beneath those trends is a deeper challenge: While there are now more high-wage jobs in the city than before the pandemic, more than one million working-age New Yorkers are unemployed, underemployed or stuck in low-wage jobs, according to the Center for an Urban Future’s analysis of Census data, including 556,696 full-time workers earning minimum wage, 252,500 unemployed New Yorkers, 208,454 part-time workers who want full-time jobs and 111,171 college graduates working in low-paying jobs that don’t require a degree. Unless city leaders make expanding economic mobility a priority on par with lowering costs, the city will attempt to solve a two-sided problem with a one-sided strategy, and too many New Yorkers will still struggle to get ahead.

Economic mobility, however, has almost no conventional political constituency. There are no rallies for higher college attainment rates or expanded apprenticeships. No daily headlines demanding a stronger role for nonprofit small-business lenders or more on-ramps to high-wage careers. That’s why mayoral leadership is so important: While the work rarely garners headlines, the impact can be transformative.

And while subsidizing life in the nation’s most expensive city will come at a significant public cost, major action to expand economic mobility will generate revenue over time, as more New Yorkers move into decent jobs, stable careers and home or business ownership — strengthening the tax base and the city’s economy for the long term. As of today, Mamdani proposes funding most of his biggest policy proposals by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations. But a rising tide for all would broaden the fiscal base for more robust economic mobility programs and a stronger safety net, while giving the next mayor effective options that do not require state action. 

New York already has many building blocks in place: CUNY programs that dramatically improve completion rates, employer partnerships that open pathways to good jobs, community lenders that help small businesses grow and job training models that lead to careers. What’s missing is focus and scale, along with a commitment from City Hall to champion what works and move on from what doesn’t.

Taken together, these efforts can form the backbone of a serious economic mobility strategy for New York — one that matches the scale of the affordability challenge. Here are five concrete, achievable steps the new administration can take to jumpstart an economic mobility agenda.

1. Help thousands more low-income New Yorkers earn a degree. In most of the city’s best-paying industries, 75-90% of workers hold a bachelor’s degree. Yet only 24% of Hispanic New Yorkers and 32% of Black New Yorkers have one — a gap that sharply limits access to good jobs. Expanding CUNY ACE — one of the most effective tools for boosting bachelor’s completion — should be a top priority. ACE combines personalized advising, financial support and structured pathways that increase graduation rates by as much as 40%, but it currently serves just 3% of eligible students. Scaling ACE to reach 30% of full-time students over five years, and launching a CUNY Flex model for part-time students, would enable thousands more New Yorkers to move into family-sustaining careers and generate billions of dollars in additional lifetime earnings. As a first step, the next mayor should double ACE funding to about $22 million per year and seed CUNY Flex with an initial $10 million pilot.
2. Scale up more of the city’s micro-businesses. Entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful pathways to intergenerational wealth, yet too few of the city’s 20,000 Black- and Latino-owned firms ever grow from very small businesses into medium-sized or large businesses. Minority-owned employer businesses generate just 45% of the revenue of white-owned counterparts, in part because they struggle to access capital, navigate procurement or break into major supply chains. The City Council funded a small pilot last year to begin addressing this gap, but the next mayor should take this seed investment to the next level. Launching a full-scale NYC Minority Business Accelerator — modeled on Cincinnati’s successful program — would help hundreds more small firms tap into private-sector procurement and supply chains and reach a whole new echelon of growth.
3. Launch an NYC AI Service Corps. Thousands of young New Yorkers have earned computer science degrees or completed high-quality tech training programs, yet still can’t secure that critical first job. Employers increasingly want work experience, not just credentials, leaving many talented graduates sidelined. There is now an oversupply of recent tech graduates for the first time on record, according to analysis by the Center for an Urban Future, and monthly job postings for software developers plunged by nearly 50 percent from 2021-2022 to 2023-2024, according to NYCEDC. An NYC AI Service Corps — a paid, six-month fellowship placing recent grads in small businesses, nonprofits and city agencies — would give participants hands-on experience building AI tools, improving data systems and solving real operational challenges. Fellows would gain the networks and confidence needed to enter a fast-changing industry, while helping organizations across the city modernize and compete. The initiative could launch with $10 million in city funding and a private-sector match, and later expand into a pay-it-forward model in which organizations that hire their fellows repay a portion of wages into a pool that funds future cohorts.
4. Enlist 100 of New York’s largest employers in creating middle-class pathways. The New York Jobs CEO Council — launched by Jamie Dimon and other CEOs to create clear, skills-based pathways into good jobs for CUNY students and graduates of nonprofit training programs — has already helped spark more than 40,000 hires of low-income New Yorkers into family-sustaining roles. But while this ambitious intermediary is succeeding in bridging the gaps between employers and education and training providers, only about 30 of the city’s largest employers are currently involved. The next mayor should build on this success by recruiting the next 100 large and mid-sized employers to open well-defined, skills-based hiring pathways for CUNY students and graduates of career training programs, with the goal of hiring another 100,000 lower-income New Yorkers into well-paying jobs over the next 10 years.
5. Create a citywide youth entrepreneurship initiative. Young New Yorkers are entering one of the toughest job markets in years, with very few entry-level openings and limited opportunities to earn beyond a shrinking number of minimum-wage jobs. In this difficult economic landscape, the mayor should help more young people start and scale entrepreneurial ventures. Entrepreneurship isn’t easy, and it isn’t for everyone, but it will need to become a viable pathway for more young New Yorkers to achieve economic self-sufficiency — building on the homegrown successes of entrepreneurs such as Hamid Cruz, who launched a successful business in high school before going on to become the first in his family to graduate college. Moreover, research suggests that entrepreneurial education is linked to higher earnings even for those who don’t ultimately launch businesses. The mayor should launch the city’s first major youth entrepreneurship initiative, featuring start-up competitions in schools, libraries and CUNY campuses; mentorship programs that pair the city’s top entrepreneurs with cohorts of young founders; and technical assistance geared toward turning ideas into viable ventures.

While each of these ideas can generate meaningful results on its own, expanding mobility also requires an economy that’s creating far more good jobs. That will mean reducing some of the bureaucratic hurdles that slow business growth, building a massive amount of new housing, taking an evidence-based approach to public safety and continuing to invest in the things that make New York livable and competitive — culture, parks, transit and the public realm.

The next mayor is right to do everything he can to make New York more affordable. But if the goal is to help more residents actually afford to live here, he’ll need to focus just as much on boosting incomes and building wealth as on keeping costs down.