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Opinion
Mamdani’s Win and the Price of Urban Life: Why City Voters Are Seeking Change
The soaring costs of city life appear to be sending urban voters toward progressive leaders who promise relief, both in the US and globally.
Nov 06, 2025
From New York to California and beyond, soaring costs seem to be rewriting city politics, as voters respond to candidates who promise to ease the financial squeeze. Zohran Mamdani’s historic win in NYC underscores a shift that has been emerging in recent years—both in the US and globally—and could extend to other major cities.
For example, in Boston, progressive Democrat Michelle Wu, elected in 2021, ran on making city life more affordable with expanded tenant protections, investments in housing, and childcare support. Her most prominent challenger, Josh Kraft, son of Forbes 400 billionaire Robert Kraft, flamed out even before the election. Out west, Oakland’s progressive Democrat Barbara Lee, elected in 2025, focused on tackling homelessness and making housing and daycare more accessible for families. And in Chicago, democratic socialist Brandon Johnson, who took office in 2023, campaigned on “Green Social Housing” and other programs to lower living costs for working families.
Across these cities, the math is clear: When basic necessities like housing, childcare, and utility costs reach stratospheric levels, voters turn to leaders who offer solutions. These mayoral victories reflect the economic pressures impacting urban life and show why cost-of-living issues are now a defining feature of city politics.
Let’s take a look at how these four cities—New York, Boston, Oakland, and Chicago—stack up in terms of costs.
When a One-Bedroom Costs a Fortune
Across the US, if you’re renting a one‑bedroom apartment, you’re looking at spending about $1,495 a month as of October 2025.
But if you happen to live in one of the country’s pricier cities, that number skyrockets fast. In New York City, a simple one‑bedroom will set you back around $4,026 per month, almost three times the national average. Boston renters face similarly steep costs—one‑bedroom apartments in the city average about $3,455 per month. Over in Oakland, it’s about $2,090 per month, and Chicago clocks in at roughly $1,893 per month.
The point is clear: If you’re renting in America’s major cities, you’re paying beyond what most renters pay across the country, and that housing squeeze helps explain why affordability is a defining issue in urban politics right now.
When Daycare Drains Your Wallet
For parents juggling work and childcare, the national average cost of full-time daycare comes in at roughly $1,039 a month. In major cities where cost of living is high, that number climbs dramatically.
In New York City, center‑based care costs about $26,000 a year on average, which works out to about $2,167 per month. In Boston, families can expect rates around $2,856 per month for about 130 hours of care. In Oakland, the cost for full-day care for children above 36 months is approximately $2,600 per month in many centers. And in Chicago, estimates for full-day daycare center-based care hover in the ballpark of $2,300 per month.
It’s no surprise that voters in these cities are drawn to mayoral candidates who talk seriously about childcare. When daycare alone can eat up a significant portion of a family’s monthly budget, affordability quickly becomes a top political issue.
Basic Services Break the Budget
Nationally, households in the 50 largest metro areas spend about $310 a month on utilities (electricity, gas, heating, water). But in these cities, utility costs blow past the national average, adding another layer of financial pressure for residents.
In New York City, the average monthly utility bill comes in at roughly $571. Meanwhile, in Boston residents pay around $443 a month for utilities. In the Bay Area, the average bill in Oakland comes in at about $342 a month, which is lower than New York and Boston but still higher than in many parts of the country. Chicago households report average monthly utility bills of approximately $352.
Bottom line: If you live in one of those big‑city hubs, utility bills are another piece of the affordability puzzle that voters in these cities are increasingly factoring into who they elect to lead.
Affordability is the New Political Pulse
Rising prices are taking center stage in urban politics, affecting election outcomes and pointing to a growing trend in city governance. Mamdani’s upset in New York is already sending ripples across the country, giving a boost to candidates with progressive or democratic-socialist platforms.
In Minneapolis, state senator Omar Fateh, a progressive Democrat and longtime advocate for renter protections, ran for mayor on a platform focused on affordable housing and expanded public services. In Seattle, activist Katie Wilson, also aligned with the city’s progressive wing, is challenging incumbent Bruce Harrell, centering her campaign on housing, public transit, and the broader cost-of-living crunch.
And this trend isn’t just an American story:rising urban costs show up in political trends worldwide.
Consider Vienna, Austria. Mayor Michael Ludwig, a Social Democrat, has been at the helm since 2018, reinforcing the city’s storied social-housing tradition (which the New York Times called a “renter’s utopia”). Roughly 60% of residents live in subsidized or publicly-owned apartments, while the city continues to invest heavily in childcare and energy-efficient infrastructure. The result is a model of urban living where the cost of everyday life is more manageable.
Copenhagen, Denmark, under Mayor Sophie Hæstorp Andersen of the Social Democrats from 2021 to 2024, similarly emphasizes public housing, affordable early childhood education, and green-energy initiatives to keep city life manageable. And in Barcelona, Spain, Mayor Ada Colau of the leftist Barcelona en Comú party, led from 2015 to 2023, expanding affordable housing, rent controls, and social services.
The economy of the city is pretty much the politics of the city. Zohranomics is essentially urbanomics: the politics of affordability, writ large across city streets. In expensive urban areas, the numbers aren’t abstract, they’re votes. And as the pressures of urban life mount, politics increasingly follows the bottom line.
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Welcome Back Inflation! Thanks to Trump, Soon You’ll Be Bigger Than Ever!
When Americans hurt by the rising cost of living believed Donald Trump, they made a big mistake.
Nov 06, 2025
In 2024, candidate Donald Trump promised that “a vote for Trump means your groceries will be cheaper.”
“Prices will come down,” he vowed, “and they’ll come down fast, with everything.”
“When I win,” he pledged, “I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One.”
Trump never said how he would accomplish this wonder because, in fact, he had no idea. And he didn’t care.
Trump did not campaign on the promise, “I will raise prices, but it will all be for the best.” For Trump, the “art of the deal” was bait and switch: promise lower prices, deliver higher prices.
Surprise! Surprise! Prices did not come down “fast,” “immediately,” “starting on Day One,” or at all. They’re moving in the other direction.
In the nine months since Trump took office, here’s what’s happened to prices:
- Electricity + 7%
- Natural gas + 6%
- Gasoline + 6%
- Beef (groundchuck) + 13%
- Oranges + 15%
- Bananas + 9%
In fairness, chicken prices are the same, eggs are down, and bread is 2% cheaper. If all you eat are egg salad sandwiches, you’ll do fine under President Trump. (But hold the mayo–the mayonnaise producer price index is up 4% over the year).
Inflation is surging–and soon will get much worse. Trump’s mass deportation crusade and his tariff mania are destined to sharply increase the cost of living.
Deporting millions of law-abiding, hard-working undocumented immigrants is economic lunacy and can only drive up prices.
Undocumented immigrants are half of the agricultural workforce. In a recent Federal Register filing, Trump’s Labor Department admits that his immigration policies have brought on “acute labor shortages” that pose “immediate dangers to the American food supply.” There is now a “risk of supply shock-induced food shortages” leading to “higher prices” for food.
In a back-handed compliment to undocumented immigrants, the Labor Department acknowledges that “agricultural work requires a distinct set of skills and is among the most physically demanding and hazardous occupations in the US labor market.”
“Despite rising wages," the department noted, "such jobs are still not viewed as viable alternatives for many [U.S.-born] workers.”
A California grower explains what a labor shortage looks like: “If 70% of your workforce doesn’t show up, 70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day. Most Americans don’t want to do this work.” The outcome: “price hikes for consumers.”
Not just food prices. Undocumented immigrants are a major part of the workforce in construction, meat-packing, food processing, hospitality, and transportation. Eliminating immigrant labor means more shortages and higher prices.
Trump’s “beautiful tariffs” make things still worse. A tariff is a sales tax on the cost of everything purchased from overseas–shoes made in Vietnam, shirts and pants from Bangladesh, smartphones and toys from China, aluminum and lumber from Canada, auto parts from Mexico, coffee from Brazil, and bananas from Guatemala.
Eliminating immigrant labor means more shortages and higher prices.
The business that buys these goods pays the tariff and adds the tax to its price. If it is Canadian lumber that bears a 25% tariff, the 25%–as the National Association of Home Builders has pointed out–is a cost for builders and makes houses less affordable. If it is tomatoes from Mexico with a 17% tariff, Safeway will charge you more.
“Overall, Americans now face an average tariff rate of 17.4%... an increase estimated to cost households an extra $2,300 in 2025,” reports CNBC.
What’s the point? Trump believes increasing the cost of imports will make US manufactures cheaper by comparison. But under a tariff economy, everything actually becomes more expensive, not less.
The cost of American cars will go up under Trump’s tariffs because cars include tariff-burdened imported steel, aluminum, and part made abroad.
In theory, clothing manufacture could be returned to the U.S.A. from poor countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam and Ethiopia, where workers earn pennies an hour. But with US wages, apparel would become unaffordable: $126 to $207 for a woman’s shirt and $234 to $324 for a pair of jeans, Marketplace calculates.
Many tariffs are simply pointless. The US doesn’t have the right climate for growing coffee, so making coffee 20% more expensive will not create US coffee plantations and jobs.
Trump did not campaign on the promise, “I will raise prices, but it will all be for the best.” For Trump, the “art of the deal” was bait and switch: promise lower prices, deliver higher prices. American consumers will remain Trump’s victims unless we resist his tariff lunacy and immigration brutality.
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Trump's Murderous Policy Against Venezuela Is Part of a Bloody History
On the long tail of US intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Nov 06, 2025
If the Trump administration’s assaults on Venezuela and threats to Colombia and Mexico have a familiar stench, they should. For more than two centuries the United States government has acted as if it owned the Western Hemisphere, with the right of conquest, intervention, and interference part of the natural order.
As of this writing, at least 66 people—Venezuelans, Colombians, and possibly some of other nationalities—have been extrajudicially murdered by President Donald Trump and the US military in 17 separate reported attacks. Numerous naval ships and aircraft are deployed in the southern Caribbean, including the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, which has nearly twice the number of fighter planes as the entire Venezuelan Air Force.
All that hardware is hardly needed for the flimsy cover story of intercepting fentanyl which is not manufactured in, or transported from, Venezuela. Trump has publicly confirmed there are covert CIA operations in Venezuela.
In Caracas, there have been reports of “false flag” attacks by CIA operatives on a US warship and on the US embassy, likely intended to draw Venezuela into military confrontation. “To much of the world, it all looks like a push for regime change in Venezuela,” assessed Emily Goodin and Claire Heddles in the Miami Herald, despite recent Trump contradictions.
Military aggression, covert action, and dreams of regime change in the hemisphere are the “oldest moves in the American foreign policy playbook,” wrote columnist Gustavo Arellano in the Los Angeles Times. “For more than two centuries, the United States has treated Latin America as its personal piñata, bashing it silly for goods and not caring about the ugly aftermath.”
The story dates back to the US founders, details historian Greg Gambrill in America, América, his new survey of hemispheric relations. “It is impossible not to look forward to distant times” when the US will “cover the whole Northern, if not Southern, continent with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms,” Thomas Jefferson wrote.
President James Monroe codified that goal in 1823 in what became the Monroe Doctrine, explained Arellano. “It is known to all that we derive [our blessings] from the excellence of our institutions. Ought we not, then, to adopt every measure which may be necessary to perpetuate them?” Monroe asked.
That doctrine “sanctioned the idea that the United States has a right to project its powers beyond its official borders,” explains Gambrill. The US cited it repeatedly “as a self-issued warrant to intervene against its southern neighbors, from the taking of Texas to more recent efforts at regime change in Venezuela and Nicaragua.” In 1823, the Supreme Court gave its blessing, declaring “conquest gives a title to which the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny.”
Sovereign nations hammered by the US, many of them repeatedly, include Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
Mexico was the first target and it remains one to this day. Trump has begun detailed planning to attack drug cartels in Mexico with ground operations, NBC News reported this week. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, whose politics and gender fit the profile of leaders Trump disdains, is unlikely to welcome it. When talk of Trump bombing cartels inside Mexico surfaced this Spring, Sheinbaum said, “we reject any form of intervention or interference.”
Within a few years of the Monroe Doctrine’s enactment, pro-slavery US leaders were encouraging slaveholders to flood northern Mexico, orchestrating a rebellion to form an “independent country” of Texas that was soon absorbed as a US slave state.
President James Polk expanded that acquisition, invading Mexico in 1846, occupying Mexico City, and forcing a massive land grab of up to one-third of Mexican territory, which would become much of the US Southwest. Abraham Lincoln, then in Congress, vehemently opposed the war in speeches and resolutions. Ulysses S. Grant, who served in the war, later reflected, “to this day (I) regard the war as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
For decades after, US expansionists schemed to seize other territory in the hemisphere, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. Their aspirations came to fruition with the 1898 war against Spain that resulted in a new overseas US empire that included Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam.
In the 20th Century, the interventions and abuses accelerated. President Theodore Roosevelt—backed with J.P. Morgan’s wealth—broke Panama off from Colombia so the US could build and own a canal. Most locals were unaware of their “independence” until “an American officer raised (Panama’s) ‘new flag’,” Grandin notes. Around the same time in Venezuela, a US corporate financier and speculator engineered control of a new asphalt industry, with the help of White House battleships, to feed a road-building boom in the US–shades of future US maneuvers to secure control of resources, including Venezuelan oil, the world’s largest oil reserves.
“Rubber, ivory, and palm-oil; tea, coffee, and cocoa; bananas, oranges, and other fruit; cotton, gold, and copper–they, and a hundred other things which dark and sweating bodies hand up to the white world from pits of slime, pay and pay well,” was how W.E.B. DuBois, described colonialism and racial capitalism, in a 1916 essay, “The Souls of White Folk.”
In 1910, Mexican insurgents overthrew longtime dictator Porfirio Díaz, beginning a tumultuous decade. The new leader, Francisco Madero, was assassinated, with covert US assistance. Meanwhile, US investors, who owned nearly half of all Mexican property value, encouraged US intervention. Newly-elected President Woodrow Wilson, who had campaigned on a peace platform, soon dispatched Marines and sailors to occupy Veracruz, although Wilson subsequently said the US had “no right to intervene in Mexico.”
It wasn't until 1933, under President Franklin Roosevelt, that the US largely paused “the doctrine of conquest and began to abide by the rule of law,” said Grandin in a Nation podcast describing what became known as the “Good Neighbor” policy. “Our Era of Imperialism Nears Its End,” proclaimed the New York Times. Not for long.
By the end of World War II, with an anti-Communist crusade in full force, leftists and social democratic reformers in Latin America became as endangered as those blacklisted and imprisoned at home. Concurrently, US trade policies promoted policies of underdevelopment, resource exploitation, and massive debt.
The CIA campaign to destabilize and overthrow a democratically elected government in Guatemala became a prelude for similar assaults in Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in 1961, Brazil in 1964, the Dominican Republic in 1965, and Chile in 1973. “Washington had a hand in 16 regime changes between 1961 and 1969,” notes Grandin.
It continued, notably with President Ronald Reagan’s offensives in Central America in the 1980s. When the International Court of Justice ruled his contra war in Nicaragua was illegal, Reagan simply withdrew from the ICJ, a flaunting of the post-World War II international law order that US administrations have followed ever since.
In his Nation podcast, Grandin depicts the latest US strikes as “obviously part of Trump's drive to use violence and force and establish dominance in whatever way he can muster” with Venezuela “the entry point to a reverse domino effect” for regime change against left and progressive-leaning governments in the region.
Grandin contrasts US behavior with two centuries of efforts by Latin American and Caribbean liberal leaders in repeated hemispheric conferences to build a very different democratic, non-interventionist model, beginning with a 1826 Panama Congress led by South American independence pioneer Simón Bolívar.
Cuban revolutionary José Martí was a key figure in the First International Conference of American States in 1889-1890. Delegates, other than the US, pushed for consensus opposing wars of aggression and territorial annexation, notes Grandin, around “a general principle that no powerful nation had the right to intervene in any way in the politics of other nations.”
According to Grandin, the lesson from Latin America has been “democracy in Latin America means social democracy. The world's first social democratic constitution was in Mexico. When Latin Americans are asked to define democracy, they talk about healthcare, they talk about education.” And a respect for national sovereignty.
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On Cheney, Trump, and the Nature of Violence
As a nation, as a unified planet, we need to create a future that’s bigger than Trump, bigger than Cheney—bigger than what they could imagine in terms of global politics and power.
Nov 06, 2025
Let him rest in... peace?
I don’t know. The irony of those words is a little too much for me to grasp as I sit here contemplating the death of Dick Cheney at age 84. Cheney, mastermind and primary organizer on the “war on terror,” which, in a 20-year span of insanity, cost the United States some $8 trillion and killed (murdered) nearly a million people, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
And as though that total weren’t high enough, the project notes that this number is very much an undercount, since it doesn’t include indirect deaths of the war caused by “disease, displacement, and loss of access to food or clean drinking water.”
Revisiting these numbers in the wake of Cheney’s death throws some horrific complexity into the present-day news, that is to say, the authoritarian activities of the Trump administration: Sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement to invade American cities, bombing small boats off the coast of Venezuela, cozying up to authoritarian leaders around the globe and, of course, staying in sync with the Israeli devastation f Gaza.
Trump is just the next step in the violent nation we’ve created: the unhinged step.
President Donald Trump is such an unconstrained blowhard and fascist wannabe, totally open about his desire to arrest, deport, pepperspray, and eliminate every American who dares protest or comedically belittle his policies, that Sen. Bernie Sanders (-Vt.) recently wrote:
This may be the most consequential moment in American history since the civil war. We have a megalomaniacal president who, consumed by his quest for more and more power, is undermining our constitution and the rule of law.
We’re on the verge of losing our country, losing our democracy! I hear it. I feel it. We’re at the edge of a political cliff. But then, in the wake of Dick Cheney’s death, the Bush administration slips back into my awareness and I suddenly find myself plummeting into concern and horror that transcends Trump. Trump has yet to do anything equal to the military hell these guys inflicted on the world, or even equal to their pompous rhetoric about the “axis of evil” they were intent on destroying.
And George W. Bush and Cheney were anti-Trumpers, for God’s sake, furious that Trump took their party away from them. Is this the sin of Trump—taking away not so much our wars but the political correctness in which we swathed them? Trump is an impulsive blatherer, speaking in ordinary-guy language, spewing out whatever he’s thinking in the moment. Yeah, he’s a scary jerk, utterly untrustworthy, but is what we had before him somehow better? Are the monstrous wars—the terror—we’ve waged throughout my lifetime what we want to return to?
I guess what I’m saying is that Trump is just the next step in the violent nation we’ve created: the unhinged step. He’s loosened himself from all sense of political dignity and is free to dance before the world to “YMCA” He’s committed to trashing our Constitution and making himself Boss-in-Chief, but he loves, and is as subservient to, money as any political leader who has preceded him.
All of which leads me back to the book I’m still in the process of writing. As a nation, as a unified planet, we need to create a future that’s bigger than Trump, bigger than Cheney—bigger than what they could imagine in terms of global politics and power. That is to say, we need to create a world that knows how to wage peace. Please understand, in no way do I see this as a simple process. We are creating peace in small fragments all across the planet, but collectively we continue to organize around domination, violence, and dehumanization.
Let me put forth one small piece of the book, which begins to address the nature of violence. I begin by quoting journalist and peace activist Colman McCarthy, who once asked: Why are we violent but not illiterate? This question stuck in my soul.
In the book I wrote: We’re taught to read, of course. The implied analogy here is that violence is the same thing as illiteracy, which is nothing in and of itself, a void, a lack of knowing. Is violence also nothing in and of itself, simply the absence of knowing how to behave with calm rationality and creative compassion? Certainly that doesn’t seem to be the case. To behave with violence, at least with a high level of violence, requires a great deal of knowing. Nations couldn’t go to war if they didn’t have the capacity to organize armies and equip them with up-to-date weaponry; to do this requires an extraordinary amount of “violent literacy,” you might say.
But there is a void of knowing—or perhaps more accurately, a void of control—that surrounds violence. Unlike illiteracy, however, violence has a positive sense of itself. In retrospect, violent behavior may be defended as self-protective and necessary, but in the actual act of it, I believe violence is an abdication of self-ownership, an abdication of everything that is godlike within us: an abdication of our vulnerability. And this abdication is collective...
So why are we violent but not illiterate? Once we’re taught to read, illiteracy is no longer possible or even, in a personal sense, imaginable. Reading isn’t simply a “protest” against illiteracy; reading and writing are steps from nothing to something, channeling spoken language into a world of entirely new possibilities. So what is the nonviolent equivalent of literacy? It’s not protests in the streets; it’s not a countermovement symbolized by peace signs and clenched fists. It’s not a futile demand for an end to violence. What the world needs, and what the New Story must present to us, is the means to evolve beyond violence, in the process reducing violence, in our minds, to the equivalent of illiteracy.
The trans-violent equivalent of literacy must be both intuitive and externally structured; it must be taught. And, indeed, many such systems already exist. The problem is, they don’t reduce simply and easily to a story: a plot device. How is John Wayne atop the stagecoach, as cameras focus in, going to listen to the Apaches’ grievances, absorb the white man’s collective guilt, apologize and begin a journey of atonement? It’s so much easier, when telling a story, to remove one small, inconvenient aspect of reality—consequences—and portray violence as the tool of goodness and the solution to problems.
And thus we have the current world, trying to control its chaos by spewing out ever more state-ordered, state-financed redemptive violence, in the form of war, punishment, news, and entertainment.
Let me leave with a thought: Let’s make America great for the first time.
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