New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani built his platform around a simple premise: The city is far too expensive, and he’s going to make it more affordable. From freezing rents and making buses free to boosting the minimum wage and increasing taxes for New York’s wealthiest residents, nearly all of the major actions Mamdani has pledged to take as mayor are aimed at lowering costs for New Yorkers and shrinking the wealth gap in the country’s biggest city.[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]“I think that the Democratic Party must always remember what made so many proud to be Democrats, which is a focus on the struggles of working-class Americans across this country,” he said in an interview on ABC.Those ambitious, affordability-focused proposals have been key to Mamdani’s unlikely rise from a lesser-known Queens assemblymember who came into the crowded Democratic primary as a heavy underdog to New York City’s next mayor. Now, as he leaves the campaign trail and turns toward governing the city, the question looms large: Will he be able to make his plans work in practice?Read more: ‘A Politics of No Translation.’ Zohran Mamdani on His Unlikely Rise“Mamdani’s going to face a lot of pressure to make good on some of these promises,” says Doug Turetsky, the former chief of staff and communications director at New York’s City’s Independent Budget Office. “They’re all feasible, and they’re feasible because they’re not really new,” he says, pointing to past mayors like Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio who were able to implement some similar city reforms after campaigning on them themselves. But Turetsky predicts that though the proposals are “good promises in my estimation,” they will be “tough to enact, and tough to enact quickly.”Housing Mamdani has vowed to freeze the rent for all tenants living in rent-stabilized apartments in New York City, while also building more affordable housing units across the city. But a mayor is unable to make such decisions alone. “The mayor does not have unilateral control over the annual rent increases or have the decision to freeze the rents,” Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, tells TIME. The annual adjustments are instead determined by the nine-member New York City Rent Guidelines Board. Mamdani has said he would appoint members of this board to aid in forwarding his plans.Currently, plans for new affordable housing are also often subject to long approval processes involving city agencies and the City Council. Multiple measures on the ballot on Tuesday, however, aim to speed things up and reduce the council’s power over certain kinds of development.Read more: How Zohran Mamdani Plans to Fix New York City’s Housing CrisisAs well as noting the limits of the mayor’s power, Gelinas posits that rent hikes are inevitable, and that freezes only push off necessary price increases that occur with inflation.“On a practical level, he’s setting a trap for himself and for the city because every year you go without a rent increase, you’re just piling up these costs,” Gelinas says. “So at some point, some future mayor would have to do a very large rent increase, which everybody would notice, and it would be much harder for people to bear.”Jayati Ghosh, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, pushes back against this idea, pointing out that rental increases in New York have outpaced inflation. “Rents in New York have gone way beyond inflation,” she says. “It is absolutely possible to have rent regulations that broadly track inflation, and most countries with rent control do that. That’s no biggie. What has happened in New York is that rents have gone up, [by] many multiples of inflation.”Ghosh, who was one of several economists who signed a letter supporting Mamdani’s policies over the summer, makes repeated references to other countries with high standards of living that have successfully enacted strict rent controls and freezes. She contends that the U.S. as a whole lacks this global perspective, which has contributed to Mamdani’s proposals being seen by some as radical.“None of these proposals is particularly radical or outlandish,” she tells TIME. “Many of them have been implemented in the U.S. in the past. Many of them are implemented in some of the countries that are seen as the most sort of free market and libertarian countries in the world,” including Singapore and Vienna, the latter of which Ghosh points out has been named the most livable city in the world. Read more: The New York Socialist Mayor Who Came 100 Years Before Zohran MamdaniIn addition to freezing rents for stabilized tenants, Mamdani has pledged to construct 200,000 new rent-stabilized homes in the city over the next 10 years. He has also said he will overhaul the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants to bolster its ability to hold building owners accountable for the conditions of their properties—including by barring landlords who repeatedly violate housing codes from operating in the city.Turetsky, the former city budget office staffer, says that Mamdani’s housing reforms, if enacted, will face fierce pushback from the real estate industry. “If Houston is an oil town, New York City is a real estate town,” he says.But he notes that de Blasio, who defended Mamdani’s proposed rent freezes, enacted his own during his tenure as mayor by appointing members to the Guidelines Board who voted against increases. Ultimately, Turetsky says, Mamdani’s plans will rely on his ability to control and sway the board.City-run grocery stores As grocery prices have increased across the country, Mamdani has proposed creating what his campaign has described as a “network of city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low, not making a profit.” “Everywhere I go, I hear New Yorkers talking about the outrageous prices of groceries,” Mamdani said in an interview. “This is a bold and workable plan.”In a poll earlier this year from non-profit organization No Kid Hungry New York, referenced by Mamdani’s campaign, 86% of New Yorkers reported that the cost of food is rising faster than their incomes, and 52% said they had taken on debt in the past year due to rising food costs.Mamdani has said that since city-owned grocery stores wouldn’t be required to pay rent or property taxes, reducing their overhead costs, they would be able to offer their wares at lower prices. His campaign also argued money currently being used to “subsidize” private grocery stores should be redirected.Other cities in states including Illinois, Georgia, Kansas and Wisconsin are either moving forward with similar proposals or already have city-owned grocery stores. Ghosh, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, economist, points to the adoption of public grocery stores in other countries, as well as elsewhere in the U.S. Such stores, she says, ensure people across the socioeconomic spectrum receive quality produce, which is not the case in grocery store chains in lower-income areas around the country. “The idea of bulk buying and ensuring reasonable, good quality produce and other essential food items to people, it’s not rocket science, and it’s practiced all over the world,” she says.Read more: Why Ground Beef Prices Are Hitting Record-Highs in the U.S.Critics of Mamdani’s proposal, meanwhile, have pointed to the closure of similarly publicly owned or funded stores, such as a nonprofit grocery in Kansas City that shuttered this summer after almost a decade of city investment. Some New York City business owners have also raised concerns that their stores would be unable to compete with city-owned ones—though the head of one such group that previously opposed the plan, the United Bodegas of America, has since endorsed Mamdani for mayor.Free busesMamdani has pledged to make all city buses fare-free, saying the current fares are unaffordable for many New Yorkers.“Today in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one in five New Yorkers cannot afford the bus fare,” Mamdani said in the campaign’s final debate. In addition to making bus travel more universally accessible financially, he has contended that eliminating fares will reduce trip times by 12% by ending backlogs of paying riders, adding up to 36 million hours for riders every year. Mamdani suggested that by giving back people their time and money through free buses, the economic benefits of the change would trump the estimated $700 million cost, which amounts to less than 1% of the city’s annual budget. Experts have warned that rigorous analysis and research should be conducted before moving to make buses free in New York City, where there are around 1.4 million paying riders each day, however.And while the cost is a relatively small portion of the city budget, for the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), fare revenue comprises 19% of its $4.8 billion bus operation budget.“The MTA, which is controlled by the state, not the city, has shown little appetite so far for putting that program in place as a citywide effort,” Turetsky tells TIME.Gelinas points out that the MTA pledges future bus fares to bond holders as a condition of borrowing money. If buses become free, she notes, those contracts will be put in jeopardy and bond holders will still need to be paid in some way for their contributions to the transit system. Expanding free childcareMamdani also plans to boost affordability by expanding no-cost childcare to all children aged six weeks to five years. His campaign website states that after rent, childcare is the biggest cost for New York’s working families. A 5BORO Institute study from 2024 found that more than 80% of families cannot afford daycare for their children. Mamdani’s campaign estimates the cost of his proposed program could reach $6 billion annually.Read more: The Childcare CrisisTuretsky compares Mamdani’s efforts to de Blasio’s initial introduction of universal Pre-K in the city, a central promise of his own mayoral campaign which was seen as equally ambitious. “It’s not a new idea,” Turetsky says.De Blasio faced pushback from then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo but was able to find the money and space to roll out the program in 2014.Mamdani’s proposal would expand free child care to New York families regardless of income. He also intends to bring up wages for childcare workers, putting more money in the pockets of both families and employees. He has offered few specifics about how he would pay for the program, aside from raising taxes on the city’s wealthiest residents, which would require the approval of state lawmakers.Raising the minimum wageMamdani has pledged to support a law to nearly double the minimum wage in New York City to $30 by 2030, arguing the state-set minimum wage is too low to keep up with rising prices in the city.Currently, New York City’s minimum wage is $16.50. “Right now if you are earning a minimum wage in the city, you simply cannot afford to continue calling it your home. We have to change that,” Mamdani said in an interview.Mamdani has said he will work with the City Council in order to pass a law to incrementally raise the minimum wage.Under Mamdani’s proposal, the city’s minimum wage would be increased to $20 per hour in 2027, $23.50 in 2028, and $27 in 2029, before reaching $30 in 2030. It would then continue to go up based on cost of living increases in the city.The Cato Institute has noted that New York City cannot establish a local minimum wage beyond the state-mandated number, meaning Mamdani would need to lobby lawmakers in Albany, the state capital, to pass a law permitting a city-specific wage increase.Taxing the 1%To fund many of his proposals, Mamdani plans to raise taxes on corporations and wealthy New Yorkers.According to Mamdani’s tax plan, the corporate tax rate would be raised to 11.5%, matching that of New Jersey, which he claims would bring in $5 billion for the city. Those earning above $1 million annually would be subject to a 2% tax. New York currently has nine income tax brackets with rates ranging from 4% to 10.9%, and a graduated corporate tax rate of 6.5% to 7.25%. Residents of the city also pay a city tax of 3.876%. New York City’s wealthiest residents already pay the highest non-federal income taxes in the country.Mamdani’s campaign contends that the city’s income tax rates are nearly the same “whether you make $50,000 or $50 million.”Read more: I’m a Millionaire. No One Needs More than $30 Million.Previous mayors have made similar efforts to raise taxes on the city’s highest earners. Bloomberg, who served three consecutive terms as mayor in the early 2000s, also pushed for steep tax hikes on the wealthy, and even proposed free transit in some places. De Blasio, who served as New York’s mayor from 2014 to 2021, also sought to “tax the hell” out of the rich through a series of tax initiatives. He ultimately failed to gain approval for such taxes without strong allies in Albany, however, leading him to accept state funding for his universal Pre-K program.Edmund J. McMahon, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and founder of Empire Center for Public Policy, a nonpartisan think tank out of Albany, New York, says that Mamdani’s tax proposals are even more aggressive than de Blasio’s, and could negatively impact the city’s budget by making it reliable on the city’s top earners.“It’ll make the tax base even more dependent on high earners, which is very risky,” McMahon tells TIME. He argues that it “actually guarantees volatility, that you won’t be able to handle it when the market goes down, when markets drop.”The inevitable fluctuation of markets, which affects the city’s top earners, creates an income source that cannot be relied upon to fund Mamdani’s ambitious programs, he contends.“He wants to commit to programs that will add billions of dollars a year to the budget, which has to be funded every year and will increase, inevitably, every year, with a revenue source that goes up and down, and that in a recession, and in particular in a Wall Street downturn, will go down by billions of dollars, inevitably, absolutely, positively. Will, not might. Will,” McMahon says.Ghosh, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, economist, argues that the ultra-wealthy as a whole must contribute significantly more to the city, however, saying that the wealth disparity now, in what she characterizes as the age of billionaires, requires top earners to contribute a far greater share of their wealth to help the lower and middle classes.Raising taxes would require approval from the Democratic-controlled state Legislature and New York Governor Kathy Hochul. Hochul endorsed Mamdani but expressed fears that significant tax hikes would force wealthy residents out of the city, ultimately opposing his proposed tax increases.Key Democratic lawmakers have supported Mamdani’s tax plans, however, including New York Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.