Sunday, November 1, 2026
Mamdani Wants Free Buses. His Own Council Says the City Can’t Pay for Them.
Free buses were Zohran Mamdani’s signature promise. His own Council would rather not talk about the bill. At a City & State summit Friday, Council Majority Leader Shaun Abreu put the price of a free bus program at roughly $900 million to $1.3 billion — money he says the city does not have. His fix, along with Speaker Julie Menin’s: expand Fair Fares instead, the half-price program for low-income riders already bumped to 200 percent of the federal poverty line. One problem: only 41 percent of eligible New Yorkers are actually enrolled, per a June Independent Budget Office estimate, and Menin calls the application a 13-page form that is “not very user-friendly.” The city, in other words, has a discount almost nobody uses, a free version it cannot afford, and a mayor who has not ruled out demanding the free one anyway next year.
The takeaway — Socialism always starts with “free” and ends with a committee meeting about the cost. New York already has a cheaper bus program sitting right there, mostly unused, because nobody bothered to make the paperwork easy. That’s the DSA governing style in miniature: announce the moon, then quietly discover gravity.
Asbestos Dust on the Windows. The Mayor Has “No Updates.”
At the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, a steam leak coated the exterior walls of two buildings with a residue that came back positive for asbestos. “You can’t even look out the window,” 75-year-old resident Digna Torres told Gothamist. NYCHA offered temporary relocation to the 23 apartments along the affected walls; four households have actually moved. Separately, Council Member Chi Ossé flagged nine buildings sitting without heat from the same problem — NYCHA says it has since restored heat to 234 apartments across four buildings and is trucking in mobile boilers for the rest. Asked about it Thursday on WNYC, Mayor Mamdani said he had no updates, and promised “more in investment and attention to NYCHA than we’ve seen in recent decades.”
The takeaway — A pledge of attention is not a repair order. Public housing is the purest test anyone could design for government as landlord — and the government landlord is the one with asbestos dust on the windows. Capitalism gets blamed for a slumlord. Socialism just calls it “no updates.”
The Left Found a Way to Vote for Hochul Without Admitting It
Kathy Hochul is a moderate. The New York left has solved that problem by voting for her anyway, just on a different ballot line. Progressives are increasingly choosing the Working Families Party line over the Democratic one — a way to back Hochul while signaling they’d have preferred someone further left. Mayor Mamdani set the example himself, voting for Hochul on the WFP line on the first day of early voting. DSA member and political analyst Michael Lange put it to Gothamist about as bluntly as it gets: the WFP line lets leftists “have your cake and eat it, too.” The party’s own deputy director calls it “the same candidate, but a stronger message.” Hochul says she doesn’t care which line anyone uses, “as long as they vote.”
The takeaway — The left wants the governor’s results and its own brand at the same time. Back the moderate, keep the slogans, call it strategy. That’s the whole movement captured on one ballot line: the ideology is for the mailers, the moderate is for the voting booth.