Democratic Socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani’s stunning upset in the New York City mayoral race has turned a slate of once-dismissed ideas into the city’s next policy blueprint. From publicly-owned grocery stories to free buses, the incoming mayor’s agenda has been hailed by supporters as visionary – and widely criticized, even within his own party, as unworkable.

As Mamdani begins the task of bringing his platform from rhetoric to reality, we’ve rounded up some of the most thoughtful analyses exploring how his ideas could be implemented, their potential benefits and the challenges ahead.

Comprehensive planning

Mamdani’s campaign website promises “to give the public a firmer hand in guiding housing development across New York by pursuing a Comprehensive City plan,” calling to streamline and reform the city’s “disjointed planning and zoning processes to create a holistic vision for affordability, equity, and growth”

In 2021, the Municipal Art Society of New York released a policy brief, “Towards Comprehensive Planning: Moving Beyond Our Comfort Zone,” offering recommendations on how to develop and implement a single framework that guides the city’s long-term growth and development goals across services and departments.

Rent stabilization

Mamdani has run on a broad and ambitious housing platform, the cornerstone of which has been a promise to freeze rents across the city’s 996,600 rent-stabilized apartments. It is actually possible, The City explains – if he can get help from the Rent Guidelines Board.

While critics have argued that enabling construction is the most effective way to lower rents, The Atlantic walks through how rent control can actually be an effective way to get development-shy voters on board with a pro-housing agenda and allow them to feel its effects immediately.

“In a 2022 paper, the political scientists Anselm Hager, Hanno Hilbig, and Robert Vief used the introduction of a 2019 rent-control law in Berlin to study how access to rent-controlled apartments influenced local attitudes toward housing development,” The Atlantic staff writer Rogé Karma notes. “Residents who lived in rent-controlled apartments were 37 percent more likely to support new local-housing construction than those living in noncontrolled units.”

Does this intervention come with downsides? The Urban Institute’s Yonah Freemark tells Realtor that “if [rent stabilization is] too strong, it might result in reduced investment in those units in terms of improved quality … but the magnitude of that change in quality is not well documented in the research.”

Read more about rent stabilization in New York from the NYU Furman Center’s 2014 fact brief.

Free, fast buses

Can free buses also be faster buses, as Mamdani has promised? The New York Times’ The Upshot evaluates the evidence, including a report by Charles Komanoff appraising bus fare elimination in the city.

“Doing away with fares for NYC Transit buses will wipe out $600 million a year in net fare revenues for NYC Transit and its parent Metropolitan Transportation Authority. However, it will create benefits more than twice as large — nearly $1.5 billion a year — by speeding up bus service and lifting the fare burden from riders,” Kamanoff found. “These benefits will be realized primarily by residents of the five boroughs, making it logical for the City of New York to shoulder the burden of replacing the lost revenues, rather than imposing the cost on NYC Transit or the MTA, which serves and draws revenue from seven suburban New York counties in addition to the city.”

In response to Streetsblog’s questionnaire in July, Mamdani promised to “focus on an administrative and approach-based overhaul at DOT that greatly increases capacity to expand the bus network,” “take a much more network-based approach to hitting bus lanes targets and creating a high quality bus system” and bring true bus-rapid transit to the city.

Public grocery stores

One of Mamdani’s key campaign promises is the creation of a city-owned grocery store in each borough. “Without having to pay rent or property taxes, they will reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers,” his campaign website says. “They will buy and sell at wholesale prices, centralize warehousing and distribution, and partner with local neighborhoods on products and sourcing.”

Experiments with municipal grocery stores are not new. The cities of Madison, Wisconsin, and St. Paul, Kansas, have opened publicly-owned groceries, and Atlanta is planning to open a grocery store next year. Though Chicago has backed away from a proposal, its 105-page feasibility study with the Economic Security Project and HR&A found the model “necessary, feasible and implementable.”

In New York itself, the New York City Economic Development Corporation directly administers three public retail markets in the Lower East Side, East Harlem, and East Williamsburg. These markets were constructed by the City to provide affordable, fresh food to the public and receive significantly discounted rent from the City. These complement co-op grocery stores, mutual aid initiatives and community fridges peppering the five boroughs.

“Public options have been part of the fabric of this nation since its founding, between the postal service, public libraries, and public parks,” Margaret Mullins, director of public options and governance at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, told The Guardian in its analysis of Mamdani’s proposal. “Sometimes in places where the private market won’t step in, the public can and should.”

Housing development

Mamdani has pledged to build 200,000 new, publicly-subsidized, rent-stabilized units, to double capital funding for the city’s housing authority to preserve public housing, and to fast-track any 100% affordable housing development. Mamdani also supported three successful ballot measures — Propositions 2, 3 and 4 — which were created by the 13-member Charter Revision Commission convened by current mayor Eric Adams and which aim to accelerate housing production.

Proposal 2 creates processes to fast-track the review period for publicly-financed affordable housing, as well as affordable development in council districts with the lowest rates of affordable housing.

Proposal 3 creates an expedited alternative to the existing Uniform Land Use Review process for “modest” development proposals; this would increase density allowances in medium and high density districts up to 30%, allow buildings up to 45 feet in low-density districts, and speed up city dispositions and acquisitions for affordable housing projects.

Proposal 4 creates an affordable housing appeals board — which would include the mayor, the speaker of the city council, and the borough president of the borough affected by an application — which can override the City Council’s land use decision.

Read more in the NYU Furman Center’s analyses of the measures.

YIMBY groups have been vocal advocates of all three proposals, given their ability to expedite project approval and increase the city’s housing supply. But the proposals have been contentious among supporters of affordable housing: Many community land trusts and housing organizers, as well as city council members, argued that these initiatives would put community members’ hard-earned agency back into the hands of big real estate developers.

Proponents say the most important factor is the person who will wield this power: The proposals were originally put forward by Mayor Adams while he was still running for reelection, but Mamdani has received strong support from some of the very same organizations that asked New Yorkers to vote no.

This post was originally published on Next City.