'What Speaks to Me About Abundance': My Full Interview With Zohran Mamdani

The meteoric Democratic Socialist candidate and I talk about where we disagree about policy, where we agree about politics, and how to change our mind when we're wrong.

With its projected heat index surging toward 110, New York City goes to the polls on Tuesday to choose the Democratic candidate for mayor. It’s a race that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo should be running away with. Fame and name recognition are potent assets in local politics, and Cuomo has both in ample supply. But polls now point to a dead heat with Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic 33-year-old assemblyman.

Yesterday, in my post on abundance and the left, I shared quotes from my weekend conversation with Mamdani about abundance, socialism, and his plans for New York City. The reaction to that post and my podcast episode with Mamdani was so strong—whether positive, negative, appreciative, or skeptical—that I’ve decided to release this transcript of our 35-minute Saturday afternoon conversation.

As a person, I found Mamdani enthusiastic, thoughtful, willing to weigh economic tradeoffs, and eager to improve the public’s faith in government. I especially enjoyed his final answer about how politicians should build a buffer of skeptics around them, to stress-test their ideas and moderate their worst instincts. If Mamdani wins the primary, I hope he adopts this “team of skeptics” approach for his inner circle. As for his policies, as you’ll read, I am deeply skeptical about several of them, including the benefits of long-term rent freezes and the promise of a $60 million municipal grocery store program. But I’m a huge advocate of calm conversations between people who disagree, and this was an enjoyable talk. This transcript has been condensed and edited. To listen to the full interview, check out my podcast Plain English.

Derek Thompson: Zohran Mamdani, great to talk to you.

Zohran Mamdani: Thank you so much for having me.

Thompson: In a recent speech, you said: "Government must deliver an agenda of abundance that puts the interests of the 99% over the 1%." Unsurprisingly, my ears pricked up at the language. What does an agenda of abundance mean to Zohran Mamdani?

Mamdani: As someone who is very passionate about public goods, I think that we on the left have to be equally passionate about public excellence. One of the most compelling things that I think abundance has brought into the larger conversation is how we can make government more effective, how we can actually deliver on the very ideas that we are so passionate about. Any example of public inefficiency is an opportunity for the argument to be made against the very existence of the public sector. And so to truly make the case time and time again that local government has a role in providing that which is necessary to live a dignified life, you have to ensure that every example of government's attempt to do so is one that is actually successful. That's what speaks to me about abundance.

Thompson: If Democrats are going to ask voters to give us the power to add new government functions, we have to prove that government can function in the first place.

Mamdani: Exactly. I think what's been frustrating is that we’ve allowed the language around bureaucracy, efficiency, waste to be seen as if it is a right-wing concern. It is the most paramount left-wing concern, because it is either the fulfillment or the betrayal of that which motivates so much of our politics.

My chief opponent is Andrew Cuomo, someone whose supposed strength of managerial competence [stands] in sharp contrast to his actual record. The MTA is a chief example. He was so eager to chase the headlines of saving money that he implemented a restructuring program that [eliminated] positions as soon as someone retired without any actual comprehensive plan for ensuring that we were retaining their capacity. This left us in a situation like the Second Avenue Subway where in the first phase we spent more on consultants than on construction, because we’d lost so much of that internal capacity. We didn't replace the people who retired or were fired.

Thompson: I’m curious to know what you would do to bring down costs for the most expensive subway construction project in the world. It sounds good to say that in early stages of the Second Avenue Subway, we were paying a lot of money to consultants and outsiders. But I'm also convinced that public sector unions have rules that raise costs far above what they are in other countries. I'm certainly not against public sector unions in the big picture. But when I look to why New York City builds the most expensive subways in the world while more unionized countries in Europe build much cheaper subways, one answer for me is that public sector unions in NYC have contract demands that are raising the cost of per-mile construction. Is talking with public sector unions about building transit efficiently something you plan to do as mayor?

Mamdani: I will have to work with public sector unions. I think I come to a different conclusion than you.

If, for example, we name one of those counterparts, which is Paris, where they have arguably even stronger unions, and yet the cost per mile is so much less, to me the conclusion then can't be that it is the presence of those unions' work rules or labor rules in general. To me, the thing that has really stood out about how we drive down costs is the importance of something known as utility relocation. There’s a piece of legislation that I introduced in the state assembly that would require public service corporations like Con Edison, National Grid, Verizon, other telecommunications companies to perform the work that's required to support the MTA's infrastructure improvements on a reasonable schedule and in accordance with the actual needs.

So often what happens is when the MTA does any kind of significant construction, these other entities, public service corporations typically look at that as an opportunity to get gold standard work done for whatever it is that they require. And even the city sometimes does this. And what this all leads to is a ballooning of the actual cost of that infrastructure because it's being used as this one moment where the city gets a park and Verizon gets better underground cable networking and it just continues on and on and on. And then the actual price tag is associated solely with the cost of what was supposed to just be the MTA's infrastructure as opposed to the truth of it where everyone is using this as this moment where they can finally spend as much money as possible to no cost to themselves.

Thompson: A top issue of your campaign, which I appreciate having lived in New York for seven years, is housing costs. And the top policy on your website is freezing the rent. You describe it this way on your campaign website:

A majority of New Yorkers are tenants and more than 2 million of them live in rent stabilized apartments. As mayor, I will immediately freeze the rent for all stabilized tenants and use every available resource to build the housing New Yorkers need and bring down the rent.

There is a tension in these two sentences. You want the city to cap prices for a good whose supply you're trying to increase. This is very hard to do. If, for example, you want more great grocery stores, but you declare that no grocery store can charge more than $50 per receipt, the stores just won’t stock the shelves the same way they used to. The stores will just get much worse for everyone. How do you plan to both freeze rents and build the housing that New Yorkers need?

Mamdani: Landlords of those rent stabilized units have seen an increase in 12% in their profits in the last year. These are profits with regards to tenants whose median household income is $60,000 a year. Now what we have seen with the mayor, the current one, is that he's increased the rent by 9% and he's proposed increases on top of that by about 8%. The difficulty here is that you have an economic policy that the mayor effectively controls that determines whether or not New Yorkers in large part can continue to afford to live in this city. The rent is often spoken about as if it's the only means by which these landlords are able to receive a profit. But we know that there are actually other [ways] … one of them being the individual apartment improvement. IAIs, as they're known, [allow] landlords to receive money from tenants for individual apartment improvements. I was in opposition to this, because this is a program that has been found to have a number of instances of fraud. I say all this to say that you can freeze the rent, and what that ensures is that these tenants will not actually be priced out when we know that there is this crisis of an exodus of working in middle class New Yorkers. And there still continue to be so many other aspects and ways in which landlords can continue to extract profit from these very tenants.

Beyond that is a larger question of how do we both freeze the rent and ensure that we're building more. What I've heard from a lot of developers is one of the ways in which we are driving up costs in New York City is not even the dollar cost, but actually the time costs. The time and the delay is in part because of the processes by which we approach land use.

This is also where abundance speaks to me. Look at Pennsylvania where they took an eight week permitting time and cut it down to just a few days. But also in terms of housing where we currently have a piecemeal approach where each city council member gets to determine whether or not a land use project moves forward by virtue of something known as member deference. And what we need in order to actually build enough supply for the city that we have and to get past this staggeringly low vacancy rate is a comprehensive citywide approach, one that can fast track projects, especially those that are in line with the administration's goals.

Thompson: I like the fact that you're looking around the country and thinking about borrowing certain ideas from other governors and mayors. I wonder if you looked across the Hudson River to see what they're doing in Jersey City. Mayor Steven Fulop has succeeded in building a ton of housing. Last decade, rents in Jersey City were skyrocketing. But the city changed its permitting laws and welcomed new development. Supply boomed, and literally just days ago the mayor announced that rents are actually declining in Jersey City. For tenants, that's even better than frozen. Rents actually declining. And it’s because of this boom in supply. Do you think there's a lesson to take from Jersey City?

Mamdani: It is absolutely a story of interest to me. In New York City we're building around four homes per thousand people. In Jersey City it's about seven. In Tokyo it's about 10. I clearly have ideas and politics. But ultimately beyond all of those things, I care most about outcomes. And what I'm very passionate about is making this a more affordable city, also making it a more efficient city.

We have allowed for this reverse exceptionalism to flourish in New York City. We see examples of things that have been successful elsewhere in the country or the world and we tell ourselves it could never happen here. We’ve seen this in bike infrastructure, or outdoor dining, and especially around housing. We have to bring that kind of politics to an end.

When we're talking about the need to build more housing, we need to build different types of housing. It’s a shame that we've made it functionally illegal to build SROs [single-room occupancy units] in New York City, for example. I think that we have to have conversations around even the minutia of single stairwell versus dual stairwell. These are examples that have stuck with me. They show that [sometimes] it's not innovation and competence that is driving the creation of these regulations.

Thompson: I've seen some folks associate your campaign with Brandon Johnson, the left wing mayor of Chicago who’s currently polling around 10 or 12 percent. I want to ask you about one aspect of Johnson's tenure, which is the bureaucracy of building affordable housing. In Chicago's affordable housing qualified allocation plans, 10% of points are rewarded for developers who show that they have extra accessibility features in their plans and 15% of points are awarded based on the makeup of the development team, and you get extra points if the developers are BIPOC or women. Only 3% of points are awarded based on project cost. That basically means is that affordable housing in Chicago essentially treats accessibility and workforce diversity as nine times more important than cost savings. In Chicago, you get what you plan for. The city reportedly spends almost $1 million per housing unit in a city where the average home sells for less than half of that amount. What is Chicago doing wrong?

Mamdani: I think one of the most important things is that we actually set a goal for what each unit should cost and work backwards from that, as opposed to ending up with a figure after having made all of the different criteria that we would like to fulfill. If we cannot construct it at cost that is scalable, that is the greatest failure.

The critique you're laying out is specific to Chicago. But one of the critiques I've had of the previous tax subsidy scheme in New York, called 421A, was that the cost per unit for "affordable housing" was similarly above a million dollars. There is just a lack of efficacy in the manner in which we've approached construction.

What makes our campaign distinct is that yes, like many other campaigns, we want the private market to play a significant role in the creation of new housing supply. And we think the public sector should play the role of constructing what’s immediately affordable as opposed to just [adding] more supply in the hopes that it then eventually drives down the cost of housing overall. But for all of this, it still comes back to that central point: What is the cost that we can actually do this at scale and how do we ensure that we hit that cost?

Thompson: On rent, you have a plan to mandate a price freeze. With groceries, you also have a plan to use government power to control costs. You have a plan to build a small fleet of public grocery stores. What is the problem here that you think city run grocery stores specifically can solve?

Mamdani: There are two problems. The first is a problem of affordability. There is a sticker shock that New Yorkers tell me about all the time, whether they're making $40,000 a year or $200,000 a year. When they go into the supermarket and they look at the same items that were easy for them to purchase a few years ago, they now seem more and more out of reach.

There is a second crisis which is that of food deserts, where black and brown New Yorkers disproportionately deal with a situation where there simply isn't affordable produce—or, sometimes, even produce at all—within close proximity to where they live. I represent Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing development in North America. I've heard from constituents time and again that there simply isn't high quality produce within a five block, 10 block radius. But I can find five, six different fast food restaurants in that same space.

This is a proposal of reasonable policy experimentation. We're talking about five stores, one store in each borough, across the five boroughs of New York City. It is something that would cost $60 million in total, which is less than half of what the city is currently set to spend on subsidizing corporate supermarkets through a program called CityFresh. This CityFresh program, which is set to cost about $140 million, doesn't require the supermarkets receiving the subsidy to accept SNAP or WIC. It doesn't require them to engage in collective bargaining. It doesn't even require them to have lower prices. It's just about trying to assist in their continued operation.

If it is not effective at a pilot level, it does not deserve to be scaled up. But I believe it can be effective. I think that there's far more efficiency to be had in our public sector, and I think there have been glimpses of that efficiency, most especially at the height of COVID. The speed with which city government set up testing site vaccine sites and the ability to go through that vaccine site in about 15 minutes is in stark contrast to how so many experience the public sector. Food is a non-negotiable. It's not a luxury item. I'm talking to you as a state legislator who watched our state spend hundreds of millions of dollars in cutting the state's gas tax to subsidize the cost of gas at a time when those prices were going high, but considers it a bridge too far to do anything with regards to the price of groceries.

Thompson: It's interesting hearing you talk about wanting to offer more government services while also being fixated on this north star of efficiency. You know about the sewer socialists of Milwaukee.

Mamdani: Yes.

Thompson: I assumed so. You might as well have a tattoo of sewer socialism on your back. In the early 20th century, there was a group of Milwaukee left-wing city leaders who embraced the term “sewer socialism,” which was a self-aware reference to the idea that they often bragged about how great their public sewer system was. It wasn't focused on ushering in the global defeat of capitalism. It was focused on local, tangible, concrete, measurable issues, like: Is the sewer safe and working?

More than a few people on book tour asked if Abundance was meant to revitalize sewer socialism in the 21st century. My answer was always: “Well, look, I am not a socialist. But if I were a socialist, I would definitely be a sewer socialist.” Because to me the idea of you gave us power and look at the good that we did strikes me as so much more attractive than you gave us power, we struggled to do good, things are still horrible, let’s add more government functions. Tell me a little bit about how you define your own democratic socialism in this light, in the spirit of the Milwaukee sewer socialists.

Mamdani: It comes back to exactly what you're saying, which is reclaiming the language of quality of life as a left-wing concern because it is often described as if it is somehow conservative. If we want to fight for the dignity of each and every person, and especially the working-class New Yorkers that are often forgotten. And so much of that comes back to the efficacy of the public services that they engage with. Too often we've refused to even admit to inefficiencies or critiques or waste within the public sector, thinking that by doing so we open the critique from the right. But in actuality, our refusal to admit it is even more ammunition for the right.

I think sewer socialism [means] that we want to showcase our ideals, not by lecturing people about how correct we are, but rather by delivering and letting that delivery be the argument itself. There are just far too few examples in New York City politics of any large scale interventions of city government. I think that the few that come to mind are congestion pricing and universal pre-K. They are examples of interventions that fundamentally transformed life in our city and should be used as a model for what more we can do.

Thompson: It seems to me that you changed your mind on some things. You told the New York Times that you’d changed your mind on the value of private development. And also there's defund the police. In 2020, you and other mayoral candidates embraced the rhetoric of “defund the police.” But on a debate stage this year, you said: "I will not defund the police … I believe the police have a critical role to play …We need to ensure that police can focus on crimes." In several interviews you've talked about wanting to hire more social workers to do social work so that we can have police officers doing police work.

I don't think you're a hypocrite. I think you changed your mind. And I want to know how you change your mind. Who do you talk to? What do you read?

Mamdani: I think you have to continue to fight the instinct in politics to surround yourself with people who are quickest to get to a yes or who are quickest to replicate the very idea that you've proposed to them. I've been lucky that in my time in the state assembly, there are a number of my colleagues with whom I have significant disagreements, but whom I've also developed relationships with, such that I can continue to have this conversation and always approach it with some level of humility that I could have been wrong at some time. And I think that that's a part of politics that we're also missing is the idea that leadership can also be someone who recognizes what they know and what they don't know and surrounds themselves with people who challenge them and whose commitment is not of a shared ideological approach to the world, but rather a shared track record of excellence and fluency.

The reason that I've come to different conclusions today than I've had in the past, whether we're speaking about policing or housing, is not just a function of the changing way in which I see the world, but also a result of the conversations with colleagues, with a number of friends who have always been generous with their time in interrogating the concepts that are animating our politics at any different year. And I think that's also the way that I would approach running the city is to be wedded to outcomes, not wedded to the means by which we get to those outcomes. And I think that allows you the ability to learn to grow. And I think that leadership can look a lot more like that than someone who pretends they know all the answers all the times.

Thompson: Zohran Mamdani, thank you very, very much.

Mamdani: Thank you. This has been such a pleasure.