Mamdani’s victory demonstrated that housing can be a winning campaign issue—and not just in New York. The United States has constructed a housing system that is as complex as it is limited, and as expensive as it is stingy—truly the worst of all worlds. While it imposes all sorts of means testing and regulatory hurdles on both tenants and builders, the system delivers remarkably little housing that’s actually affordable.

This is no accident. It is, instead, the logical result of a system that’s primarily designed to raise property values, with affordability only a secondary or tertiary goal. As the sociologist Melinda Cooper argues in her latest book, Counterrevolution, the idea is to produce wealth without raising wages, creating a basis for prosperity without challenging American businesses’ bottom lines. Declining property values and home prices are understood as a sign of impending doom, rather than a cause for celebration, and so the system aims to keep prices on an upward slope.

This has conditioned elected officials to lower their housing horizons, and it has conditioned residents to expect disappointment. The easiest housing reforms for American politicians to achieve tend to be those that benefit landlords and developers alongside tenants and homebuyers, such as rezonings (which allow developers to build more housing) and vouchers (which pay landlords the portion of the rent their tenant cannot afford). Programs to build social housing and expand rent regulation get sidelined because they attack the private real estate system directly and challenge the logic of ever-rising rents.

Soon, however, New York will have a mayoral administration that aims to turn that logic on its head, continuing the important work of zoning reform and rental assistance while prioritizing rent control and social housing. Doing so will not be easy, and Adams is hardly the only powerful foe working to block reform. Indeed, Mamdani’s entry into the halls of power calls to mind the words of Spanish political scientist Juan Carlos Monedero, whose New Left Review essay “Snipers in the Kitchen”—published one year after Pedro Sanchez and a socialist coalition government took power in Spain—speaks directly to New York’s current moment. “Even when popular parties with redistributive agendas have won electoral majorities and gained, in principle, access to the governmental levers of power . . . they do not enter into full possession of the state, as if it were a new home,” he writes. “The rooms may be booby-trapped, the stairs barricaded; there may be snipers in the kitchen—shooters who are unseen because they are taken for granted, and all the more effective because unseen.” The obstructionists have crucial advantages, Monedero writes: “money, property, superior education, knowledge of the ‘secrets’ of rule, norms of organization, close connections with higher officialdom, and so forth.” And the obstacles they sow take many forms: “scandals whipped up out of trifles, judicial harassment, dirty tricks or political maneuvers—and this even before market pressures are taken into account.” He concludes, “If we are not to become trapped in a permanent state of melancholy, we need a careful analysis of the state’s enormous capacity for reaction in defense of capital’s interests.”

Already, the first set of traps is being laid by Adams in broad daylight. How else is New York’s City Hall booby-trapped to prevent progress on housing? What forces barricade the staircase, and what snipers lie in wait for a mayor who dares challenge the real estate state?

IN ORDER TO NAVIGATE the hostile territory of city government, Mamdani will first have to construct an administration of his own. As Mamdani’s transition team works to fill various posts, they are likely facing a common contradiction: Most people with the experience to understand exactly how the housing system works today either outright oppose, or simply cannot fathom, radical changes to it, and most people who support a radical rehauling are too inexperienced to craft a practical path forward. The Mamdani team has already identified several appointees who straddle both camps, but they are by nature few and far between. Instead, Mamdani’s ideological apparatus will have to either inculcate seasoned insiders to new ways of thinking or quickly train a like-minded but untested cohort. Both are easier said than done, which may result in high-level housing appointees who refuse to go much farther than previous mayors have, or in radical housing leaders who are easily stymied by recalcitrant veterans of previous administrations.

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