‘It’s not either/or’: Mayor Zohran Mamdani on what NYC owes its Black residents

Talking with journalist Charles Blow, Mamdani laid out why he believes fixing citywide costs and repairing Black-specific harms aren’t competing

Jul 30, 2026 0

‘It’s not either/or’: Mayor Zohran Mamdani on what NYC owes its Black residents

NYC Mayor Mamdani Holds News Conference On Municipal Grocery Store Announcement — NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JULY 27: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks at a food distribution center on July 27, 2026 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Mamdani announced that the five upcoming city-owned grocery stores will offer a 30 percent discount on produce, meat, bread, and milk when they begin to open next year. The discount on essential items will potentially save shoppers an estimated $90 a month, or roughly $1,000 a year, as prices for food and other items continue to rise throughout the country. The mayor has pledged one community grocery store for each borough. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Talking with journalist Charles Blow, Mamdani laid out why he believes fixing citywide costs and repairing Black-specific harms aren’t competing priorities.

Several months into his term, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is making the case that fixing the city’s affordability crisis and targeting policies specifically at Black New Yorkers aren’t competing strategies. They’re the same fight, waged on two fronts.

In a wide-ranging conversation with journalist Charles Blow, published by TheRoot.com, Mamdani laid out numbers that underscore just how much is at stake for Black residents.

The city has lost roughly 200,000 Black New Yorkers over the past few decades, he said, and the population of Black children and teens dropped 19% between 2010 and 2019 alone, a hollowing-out he described as an effective reversal of the Great Migration, driven not by a lack of love for the city but by the simple inability to afford staying in it.

Asked whether he needs policies exclusive to Black communities (what’s often shorthanded as a “Black agenda”) rather than broad affordability measures, Mamdani rejected the framing entirely. Deed theft, he pointed out, disproportionately targets older Black homeowners, often through predatory offers to “help” refinance or transfer property.

His administration has responded with a new Office of Deed Theft Prevention and a suspended, since-scrutinized property tax lien sale system, a Giuliani-era holdover he says was six times more likely to sell liens in Black neighborhoods than white ones, frequently fast-tracking families toward foreclosure.

He also stood by a 2024 written statement acknowledging New York City’s active participation in the slave trade, telling Blow he backs the ongoing city commission examining Wall Street’s complicity, though he stopped short of committing to cash reparations ahead of the commission’s findings, due next summer.

On policing, schools, and housing, Mamdani argued the throughline is the same: universal policies like child care and rent relief matter, but so does naming, and fixing, the specific mechanisms that have pushed Black New Yorkers out of the city they helped build.