The rise of 33-year-old “democratic” socialist Zohran Mamdami to the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City has sensible political observers from right to left understandably concerned. How could the city that symbolizes the global dominance of American finance and capital be on the cusp of electing a mayor who advocates dismantling capitalism?
Downwardly mobile young people played a huge role.
Mamdami set a record for the most votes ever received in a New York City primary. “Young voters came out in droves,” WNYC reported, with their analysis concluding that the “largest voting bloc by age were 25 to 34-year-olds.”
Michael Lange, a researcher who wrote about the election for The New York Times, used the phrase the “Commie Corridor” to describe Mamdami’s voter base.
“These are the youngest neighborhoods in the city, concentrated in western Queens and North Brooklyn, kind of sloping down a little bit more to around Prospect Park,” he told WNYC. “Most people rent, most people went to college, and they are relatively ideological in terms of preferring what you would describe as a progressive or even a socialist candidate.…”
It’s easy to dismiss this as some combination of the general leftward tilt of younger voters plus woke colleges and universities filling their heads with socialist theories. But Reihan Salam at The Manhattan Institute has a sharper take that likely explains much of the appeal of redistributionist politicians like Mamdami.
“Downwardly mobile elites love Zohran Mamdami,” Salam writes.
“Researchers at the Social Economics Lab have found a strong correlation between perceiving yourself to be less well-off than your parents and zero-sum thinking, or the belief that gains for some people come at the expense of others. Moreover, roughly 40% of the nation’s 72 million millennials—people born between 1981 and 1996—live in high-cost, hyper-competitive metropolitan areas, where milestones such as owning a home or paying off student loan debt can loom as distant dreams….”
“Since people tend to compare themselves to members of their own social milieu, it should hardly come as a surprise that graduates of selective colleges living in eye-wateringly expensive urban neighborhoods resent the fact that they can’t afford a home of their own. All but the richest millennials find themselves priced out of fashionable enclaves in Berkeley, Calif., and Brooklyn, in part thanks to stringent land-use regulation and other anti-development measures. One could always move to a lower-cost, less-competitive city, where a middle-class life is more readily achievable, but to many urban millennials, doing so would be tantamount to admitting defeat.”
Many factors contribute to zero-sum thinking about the economy and one’s place in it, but the through-line here is housing. Note that Lange found that most of Mamdami’s young “Commie Corridor” voters were renters. It’s not that renting makes one left-wing. It’s likely that many of them rent because they’ve been priced out of homeownership. In addition, their rents are astronomically high because the city discourages the construction of new apartments too.
Salam points out that young, educated professionals could find homes by moving to less prestigious zip codes (assuming they could find meaningful work there). But they don’t think they should have to move away to maintain a similar standard of living to the one their parents enjoyed. And they have a point.
Manhattan Institute housing scholar Eric Kober wrote last fall of New York City Mayor Eric Adam’s “housing moonshot” plan to build 500,000 new units in a decade. That would require 50,000 new housing units a year, a figure the city hasn’t achieved since the early 1960s.
New York City allowed the construction of more housing units annually before The Beatles played Shea Stadium than after Billy Joel played the last concert there in 2008.
What slowed residential construction in New York City? A major zoning overhaul in 1961 that made private construction of residences, particularly multi-family buildings, more difficult and more expensive. There was short grace period after the zoning changes were passed. Builders rushed to complete projects under the previous rules, resulting in a peak of housing completions in 1963. Sixty-two years later, that remains the city’s highest level of housing completions on record.
The 1961 zoning rules were designed to maintain existing population levels, not to accommodate growth. As a result, building slowed. As the growth in demand outstripped the growth in supply, housing grew much, much more expensive.
This spring, rents in Manhattan and Brooklyn set new records.
All of this should sound familiar to Granite Staters. New Hampshire home prices and rents continue to set new records, and for the same reasons. Local land use regulations designed to check population growth have achieved their intended results.
In New Hampshire as in New York City, younger people are being priced out of apartments and starter homes.
Last year, the homeownership rate for 35-year-old millennials was 56%, according to data from real estate firm Redfin. At age 35, Gen Xers had a homeownership rate of 59%. For Baby Boomers, it was 61.5%.
To younger adults, this feels like downward mobility. Though their incomes are good, it takes a much larger portion of their income to buy a home or even rent an apartment.
Priced out of the neighborhoods, towns and cities where they grew up, many younger voters feel cheated. This makes them more likely to support economically harmful policies like rent control, “affordable housing” mandates and government-provided housing.
Political scientist Jason Sorens, who wrote our 2021 study of land use regulations, has found that restrictions on the construction of new housing turns places more left-wing.
“Jurisdictions with greater housing supply restriction gradually and subsequently become more Democratic; there is no evidence that Democratic-moving areas subsequently become more regulated or costly,” his research discovered.
Part of this has to do with education levels. Currently, college graduates tend to be more politically left-wing.
“Areas with more costly housing see their college-educated share of the population rise, and the college-educated have become more Democratic than the non-college population,” Sorens found.
And part of it is that, as Salam shows in New York City, when governments prohibit markets from providing the products and services consumers demand, consumers turn to government for solutions. They don’t see the hidden regulations that cause the shortages. All they see are the high prices. In their frustration, they become easy marks for politicians who blame capitalism for the high prices that government policies caused, and then offer terrible government fixes.
Some Granite Staters believe that they’re preserving the character of their communities by preventing or severely restricting the construction of smaller, more affordable homes and apartments. But this is wrong.
Instead, they’re fundamentally changing the character of their communities by pricing out their own children, not to mention their children’s teachers and the community’s police officers, firefighters, carpenters, plumbers, recent college graduates, etc.
In their place, high-income college graduates from places like Boston, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are moving in. They’re the ones who can best afford the handful of large, expensive homes that find their way onto the market each year.
Communities are always changing. That can’t be prevented. Using government force to keep communities from growing will only change them in other ways.
