Haley Karinia

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Zoran Mamdani ran on a promise to make New York affordable.

Last week, he unveiled a budget that is, in a word, unaffordable.

New York City's budget has ballooned in recent years, and much of it has happened as the city has been losing the one thing that makes big government easier to finance, people.

New York City's population fell sharply amid the pandemic, with a 5% decline from April 2020 to July 2022.

The arithmetic is brutal.

A larger bill is divided among fewer payers.

New York already sits at the extreme end of the American tax spectrum.

For high earners, the combined state plus city income tax reaches 14.776%.

And federal taxes and the combined marginal rate can exceed 50%, reaching roughly 55% on certain investment income.

Zoran Mamdani's basic instinct is correct.

Focus on affordability, especially housing, but not by providing government subsidies.

These only seem to have driven up the cost of rent as subsidies naturally do.

The city's rental assistance spending rose from $263 million

in fiscal year 2020 to $1.34 billion in the most recently reported fiscal year.

That is a five times increase in a handful of years, and housing costs only got worse.

Matt Iglesias persuasively argues that the city should make it easy and routine to just build abundant market rate housing.

That will bring in more people, expand the tax base, fill the schools, and increase local GDP.