The rich promised to flee Mamdani’s New York. They haven’t. |
Last year, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York gave rise to numerous predictions of an inevitable mass exodus of wealthy residents and businesses following his election. These predictions grew increasingly dramatic and dire after his victory in November, with business elites and their allies in the press frantically reporting on the coming out-migration to low-tax states like Florida and Texas. They termed it the “Mamdani effect.” Nearly six months after Mamdani’s election, however, there’s enough distance to judge how those warnings have held up so far. Though only four months into the new mayor’s term, most of the evidence points to the same conclusion: the widely anticipated exodus has failed to materialize. One of the strongest indicators of whether people or businesses are actually fleeing from a city is the housing and real estate market. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when many residents really did leave New York for the surrounding suburbs and other states, the city’s vacancy rates soared and rents dropped with demand, leading to “COVID discounts” at the height of the pandemic. This trend was even more extreme for the city’s commercial real estate, where vacancy rates doubled as more companies adopted remote work and shed office space. Today nearly every indicator points to the opposite problem: demand is running hot and supply is lagging badly, especially when it comes to housing. One of the clearest signs that New York is nowhere near an exodus is that median rents have hit an all-time high while apartment vacancies remain at historic lows. (The administration, for its part, has separate plans to address these issues, including a rent freeze on stabilized apartments along with a push to build two hundred thousand affordable units.) | 
