A concise catalog of his achievements and stumbles six months in
During last year’s campaign, many raised questions about what a Democratic Socialist assemblyman with no management experience could accomplish as mayor of the nation’s largest city.
Six months into his term, 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani has overseen some notable achievements. He has lowered crime rates, won legislative concessions for two of his top priorities in Albany, delivered a rent freeze (through the Rent Guidelines Board he largely appoints) on regulated apartments, and eked out a budget hours before its deadline, while welcoming hundreds of thousands of sports-crazed revelers from around the world into city streets this summer without major incidents. He’s won praise among many who see housing production as key to delivering a more affordable city by releasing a robust “Block by Block” plan to encourage construction as well as identifying ways to speed permitting approvals. These are just plans, of course; the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Mamdani’s job-approval ratings have steadily climbed since January, up to 58% among city residents while only 26% disapproved of his performance, according to a June Siena College poll.
Along with the accomplishments have come setbacks. Gov. Kathy Hochul refused to raise taxes on the wealthy, one of Mamdani’s core campaign promises, and Mamdani’s proposal to make buses free has stalled at the state level. He has been criticized from the left for attempting to increase police headcount while doing little to reform the NYPD even as his promise of a counterweight to police power in the shape of a Department of Community Safety is extraordinarily modestly funded and oddly constructed, almost as if the intention is to drain it of power. And he has raised hackles from the right for not installing barriers outside synagogues besieged by demonstrators, removing traffic lanes, moving to establish city-run grocery stores and overseeing a city budget that’s grown to a record $126 billion. New York’s job growth remains sluggish, and he still hasn’t hired a leader to head up the city’s Economic Development Corporation.
But delivering his administration's priorities to make New York more affordable, speed up buses, lower crime, and ensure every New Yorker has access to free childcare and a high-quality education won’t be easy going forward.
The budget
Two weeks after the mayor’s inauguration, newly elected City Comptroller Mark Levine warned that the city faced a $12.6 billion budget deficit over the next two years, far larger than had been previously disclosed.
In his first budget address, Mamdani blamed his predecessor for creating the crisis through “systematically underbudgeted services” and called on the state to increase income and corporate taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers to close the gap.
But Gov. Hochul, who was facing re-election in November, flatly refused to raise taxes. Instead, she pitched in $1.5 billion in state aid in February, which included funding for universal childcare, then boosted the total package to $8 billion four months later. Mamdani also received permission from the state to delay public pension contributions through 2037 instead of 2032, saving an estimated $2.2 billion, a highly controversial maneuver that budget watchdogs decried as a “gimmick” that echoed the deferred maintenance that led to the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis.
There were more tough calls to make ahead. By early May, Mamdani proposed several measures to trim the remainder of the deficit by reducing spending on tuition for students with disabilities, delaying a law requiring lower class sizes in city public schools and curbing the planned expansion of a rental assistance voucher program known as City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement (CityFHEPS), a program whose budget had ballooned from $25 million in 2019 to $1.6 billion by 2026 and could cost as much as $4.7 billion to run by 2030, according to the Citizens Budget Commission.
The clash over the voucher program threatened to derail the budget. The Council had passed a law in 2023 increasing eligibility for CityFHEPS, then sued the Adams administration in 2024 when the city would not implement it. Mamdani had promised during his campaign to expand the city’s social safety net but reversed his position, arguing that its rising costs were unaffordable.
In the end, Council leaders won a concession from the mayor for the City to spend $175 million on the program this year, and $125 million the following year, lower than the $300 million they requested. Both sides also agreed to settle the CityFHEPS lawsuit and the mayor increased the next year’s general reserve by $350 million, but did nothing to address the structural flaws within the voucher program.
Mamdani praised the budget as a “new era of fiscal health” and a model of how to invest in the city’s future, but city leaders did little to curb spending obligations over the long run as the budget deficit was expected to jump to $6.4 billion next year. Budget watchdogs are worried.
“Yes, next year is balanced, but the gap is closed mainly with one-shots, short-term savings, and cost shifts to future taxpayers, leaving the city to face a gaping hole next year and undue stress in the years after,” Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, said in a statement. “Still the budget is unprepared for a slowdown or recession: The Rainy Day Fund is far too small and next year’s budget cushion remains slim.”
Policing and community safety
Mamdani made his most consequential personnel decision in November when he announced that he would retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner.
Some questioned how the pair, who seemed to have little in common beyond their ages and a desire to root out public corruption, could work together. But in the intervening months, the partnership has managed to make the city safer despite predictions to the contrary.
The city has recorded the fewest murders and shootings since 1993 over the first half of the year. Major crime fell 5.9% during the first six months of the year compared with the same period last year, the largest mid-year decline since 2009. Murders fell 25.6%, burglaries dropped 16.3% and robberies tumbled 11.7%. However, felony assaults rose 0.3% compared with last year.
In the meantime, many of Mamdani’s ambitious public safety reforms have not materialized. He vowed to disband the Strategic Response Group, a counterterrorism unit that responds to mass demonstrations and has been accused of unlawful detentions, but Tisch has kept it operating. His idea to create the Department of Community Safety, a city agency that responds to mental health-related 911 calls with social workers instead of cops, stalled in the City Council. Instead, he settled for creating a smaller $260 million office, overseen by the city’s first-ever deputy mayor for community safety, through an executive order.
Tisch may also have succeeded at convincing Mamdani to avoid making major changes. Mamdani had pledged to eliminate the NYPD’s gang database but signaled he may keep it after police officials promised to make reforms. And police overtime costs, which he sought to curb, are proving more difficult to control. Overtime will once again soar past $1 billion this fiscal year and show no sign of abating as Tisch told City Council members the department would spend $92 million funding 12-hour shifts during the World Cup, America’s 250th celebrations, and the NBA finals.
But the police commissioner has not gotten everything she wanted either. Mamdani floated hiring 580 additional cops in a budget proposal, increasing its headcount to 35,555, until the city’s Democratic Socialist chapter and other progressive groups denounced the move and the mayor left it out of his final budget agreement.
Mamdani and Tisch will have to figure out how to staff several specialized departments as a wave of senior officers file their retirement papers in the coming years.
Housing
Mamdani gained traction in the election with voters not only because of his charisma and energetic campaigning, but because he vowed to address the cost-of-living crisis by freezing rents and building more affordable homes.
He fulfilled one of his earliest pledges when the Rent Guidelines Board approved zero percent increases for one- and two-year leases for one million rent-regulated homes on June 25.
It was one of his easiest promises to keep. The mayor alone cannot control the costs of rent-stabilized leases, but he does have the power to appoint a majority of members on the nine-member panel who share his policy goals. (Mayor Adams appointed four members to the RGB days before his term ended to thwart Mamdani’s plan, but some of them declined to serve).
The move could have unintended consequences. Landlords of rent-stabilized buildings cannot count on higher revenues from rents to pay for repairs of their aging properties even as the board found their operating costs and expenses rose 5.3%. Some investors have already exited the market.
Creating enough units to keep pace with the city’s insatiable housing demand won’t happen overnight. But in May, the mayor unveiled his “Block by Block” proposal to build 200,000 affordable homes and preserve another 200,000 over the next 10 years. That includes 16,000 new apartments over the next two fiscal years, with 30% dedicated to households earning less than 30% of the area median income and another 20% for those earning between 31% and 50% of the area median income.
To get to that benchmark, Mamdani proposed spending $22 billion in capital investment over the next five years, including $5.6 billion on public housing, and rezoning large swaths of the city, especially near transit hubs. He announced his first major rezoning target would be Brooklyn’s commercial corridors south of Prospect Park close to the future Interborough Express train line, while reviving plans to deck and develop the Sunnyside Yards site in Queens.
Mamdani can also credit the former mayor and current governor for giving him new tools to speed up housing development.
Last fall, voters passed three ballot initiatives written by Adams’ Charter Revision Commission that established faster approvals for publicly financed projects, expedited land use reviews for smaller ones and created an affordable housing appeals board for developers whose projects were rejected by the City Council. This year, Hochul included revisions to New York’s State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) in the state budget that would exempt most projects up to 250 units in much of the city, and up to 500 units in high-density areas from undergoing a lengthy review.
Transportation
While it’s much more modest, Mamdani has also made some progress on his pledge to speed up the city’s notoriously slow buses and eliminate their fares.
His administration has prioritized advancing several dedicated busway proposals along congested corridors, including 34th Street, Madison Avenue and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, Flatbush Avenue and Kings Highway in Brooklyn, and East Fordham Road in the Bronx, allowing buses and emergency vehicles to move more quickly through traffic.
Ahead of the World Cup, Mamdani unveiled a plan for a center-running bus lane on Broadway in Queens from 69th Street to Roosevelt Avenue, allowing the Q70 to make faster trips between the subway and LaGuardia Airport. And on match days, the Mamdani administration barred cars and restricted trucks on 42nd Street, converting the crosstown route into a corridor for local MTA buses and shuttles taking fans to New Jersey, and closed some roads near Penn Station.
Offering free fares has been a much harder lift. Mamdani acknowledged in April he could not eliminate city bus fares, a proposal that could cost $800 million per year in lost fare revenue, and he attempted to bring back a free bus pilot program.
State lawmakers wouldn’t commit to a pilot in this year’s budget, but Mamdani and the City Council reached a deal in the city budget to expand the city’s Fair Fares program, offering half-price subway and bus fares to New Yorkers earning up to 200% of the federal poverty level. That would increase the number of people who qualify for the program from 960,000 to 1.3 million.
Childcare
The high cost of childcare is one of the top reasons compelling families to leave New York City, so it made sense for Mamdani to make it a centerpiece of his affordability agenda.
The number of households with three or more children fell 17% over the past decade. That’s no surprise as the median rent of apartments with three or more bedrooms clocked in at $4,764 earlier this year, according to Realtor.com, while the average cost of childcare ranged from $1,000 to $1,700 per month depending on the age of the child.
After winning the Democratic primary last year, Mamdani began working with Hochul to invest in a free childcare program for 2,000 2-year-olds while expanding the city’s existing 3-K program. Hochul also agreed to fund an expansion of the 2-Care program next year for 10,000 youngsters.
They unveiled their $1.7 billion plan in January and announced the launch of applications for the first 2,000 seats in June. But City Hall has struggled to find enough childcare workers to fill the demanding, low-wage jobs necessary to run the program, or set aside funding to ensure they will be paid beyond the next two years.
The city’s Department of Education has encountered other challenges managing the city’s school system.
Enrollment fell by 22,000 between the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years, which prompted the city to spend $290 million next year as part of its “hold harmless” policy to prevent budget cuts at schools that have lost students. Its enrollment could drop by another 20,000 students, according to NYCDOE projections.
Meanwhile, schools chancellor Kamar Samuels is being investigated by the Special Commissioner of Investigation for his role in authorizing a $180,000 no-bid contract for foreign language instructors while he was Manhattan District 3 superintendent. The contract award appeared to skirt the department’s extensive procurement rules.
Samuels’ approach to the use of artificial intelligence has also received pushback. In March, he issued guidance allowing AI to help craft lesson plans and conduct research but could not use it to grade tests or discipline a student. But the department received 6,500 comments on the proposal and City Council members urged Samuels and the mayor’s office to pause the guidelines citing concerns about AI’s effect on mental health.
Running the city
The mayor has repeatedly spoken about the importance of getting the basic mechanics of government to work better. When a winter storm buried the city’s sidewalks and bus stops in two feet of snow in February, he offered to pay temporary shovelers $30 an hour to clear them. By the spring, he led a pothole blitz, filling 100,000 asphalt divots by early April, including a notorious dip on the Delancey Street entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge that cyclists have complained about for years. And he has created a Charter Revision Commission called the Commission on Government Efficiency, which he tasked with finding ways to make government work better for New Yorkers to put before voters on the November ballot.
What does it all add up to? In three or four years, will New Yorkers be living in a more affordable city, one that’s safer and more prosperous and governed well? That remains to be seen.
