The surprisingly easy election of the Marxist Zohran Mamdani represents a critical turning point, not only for my hometown of New York, but for all the West. Mamdani’s election as mayor represents the prospect of a rising socialist mindset, particularly among the young.
This shift is fairly universal, particularly in big cities. Virtually all the leading U.S. and European cities are ruled by progressives, in Europe, like New York, often as an odd alliance of Islamists, greens and leftists. Socialists, Islamists and Greens dominated such major European cities as Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona. Toronto, once ruled by moderate conservatives, has also turned to the progressive left.
Neither ethnicity nor class are the keys to this transition, but age. Mamdani’s election epitomizes these trends; he won an astounding 70 per cent of the vote among New Yorkers under 40, while losing badly among older folks and those who grew up, or lived long in Gotham.
Many on the reinvigorated left see Mamdani’s cost of living emphasis as a promising strategy for progressives often on the wrong side of many cultural issues. In the primary, Mamdani lost many predominately Black and Latino areas like the Bronx, Brownsville and Rosedale, all who favoured Andrew Cuomo, as did traditional ethnic working class areas in places like Canarsie in south Brooklyn.
But younger people, even those making decent incomes, catapulted a totally inexperienced, pro-Hamas, self-proclaimed Marxist to run the world capital of capitalism. Cost of living was the key, as New Yorkers pay the highest proportion of their income; it has by far the lowest percentage of homeowners in the country, half the national average.
Lack of affordable housing is now widely common in English speaking countries. Ireland which just elected a far-left Marxist as president, is among the worst. In the U.S., housing affordability stands at the lowest level ever recorded while one in three Americans now spend over 30 per cent of their income on mortgage payments or rent. In the U.S., homeownership for people under 35 has fallen fairly steadily for decades and is now half that of people over 45. A similar erosion in homeownership is clear in Britain and Australia.
Canada, home to two of the world’s most unaffordable cities, Toronto and Vancouver, is in a similar fix. According to a 2024 Scotiabank poll, home ownership declined for Canadians between the ages 18 and 34 to 26 per cent today from 47 per cent just a few years earlier, in 2021. Renters are also not well off as two in five renter households in Canada spend 30 per cent or more of income on rent and utilities.
Read the rest of this piece at: Yahoo News.
Authors
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Bingjiefu He via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.
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