At the Brooklyn Pride parade this summer, as a light rain slowly dampened our clothes, my friend Emma turned to me. “I have news,” she said. Three months later, I helped pack her blue Toyota Tacoma with a lifetime’s worth of possessions and she set off for Portland, Maine.

Emma had made $21 an hour as a full-time urban farmer in New York. Home-cooked meals and roommates still couldn’t make up the difference she needed to cover living expenses, so she was forced to move from the city she loved.

Affordability has been front and center in New York City’s upcoming mayoral race. Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani has promised to increase New York City’s minimum wage from its current $16.50 to $30 by 2030.

The ambitious proposal is not only possible, but also overdue in a city where living expenses have long outpaced wages. To quote Mamdani himself: “In the world’s richest city, the minimum wage shouldn’t mean living in poverty.”

Under Mamdani’s leadership, New York City’s minimum wage would increase to $20 per hour in 2027, $23.50 in 2028, $27 in 2029 and $30 in 2030. It would then increase every year based on cost of living or advances in worker efficiency, also known as productivity increases, as tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In comparison, independent candidate Andrew Cuomo’s plan stops at $20 by 2027. Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa does not intend to raise the minimum wage.

According to MITʼs Living Wage Calculator, New York City’s current minimum wage of $16.50 does not even come close to a living wage. A single person with no children needs to make $28.04 per hour working full-time to afford basic necessities. This includes housing, food and transportation, but does not account for any amount of savings, such as for retirement, emergencies or college. The number is higher for families.

Naysayers fear that dramatic increases in minimum wage would shutter small businesses. “If you raise the minimum wage but then you lose X number of jobs as a result, the question becomes, ‘Was it worth it?’” Lauren Melodia, director of economic and fiscal policy at the Center for New York City Affairs, asked Gothamist.

But this would not be the first time New York City nearly doubled its minimum wage in six years or less. The New York State Department of Labor shows that minimum wages increased from $7.25 in 2013 to $15 by 2019. A report from the New York City Economic Development Corporation shows that the number of small businesses actually grew during this period — from about 186,000 in 2012 to just under 200,000 in 2019.

James Parrott, a senior advisor at the Center for New York City Affairs, refers to this time as “the golden age of equitable economic growth in New York City.” He says wages for the working class rose more than they had since the 1960s.

A $30 minimum wage would hardly be radical. Los Angeles will raise the minimum wage for tourism workers to $30 by 2028, and Boulder County, Colorado, plans to reach a $25 minimum wage by 2030. Both places have lower living costs than New York City.

Historically, the state legislature sets the minimum wage rate. Mamdani believes he can change that and currently co-sponsors legislation that would let local governments establish a higher level of minimum wage. A similar precedent passed in 2016 when Cuomo enacted a two-tiered system to set the minimum wage for “Downstate” (New York City, Westchester and Long Island) higher than “Upstate.”

The alternative is dire. Without a policy change, the Economic Policy Institute found that 1.68 million New Yorkers would earn less than $30 an hour in 2030. This means 36.7% of the city’s workforce would not be earning a livable wage, without accounting for inflation or the rising costs of American goods. If anything, $30 by 2030 is not ambitious enough.

New York City would be nothing without its inhabitants who put up with trash, scandal, and rats the size of dinner plates to call this city home. But a survey of 3,000 New Yorkers found that almost half were considering leaving the city due to financial pressures.

In the final mayoral debate on Oct. 22, Mamdani ended on a warning: “What we’re looking at right now is the possibility of the place that we know and love becoming a museum of where working-class people used to be able to live.”

This post was originally published on Next City.