Nonprofits rule Zohran Mamdani’s New York — doing harm to everyone else

Nonprofit groups were crucial in the Democratic Socialist-led coalition that fueled the rise of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani — and this week his City Council allies will start to repay the favor.

The council is poised to vote on the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, a bill that would favor city-approved (read: politically connected) nonprofits over private buyers when certain residential buildings go up for sale.

Nonprofit service providers, or NGOs, employ an estimated 662,000 workers in New York City, including some 80,000 in social-services jobs.

The city spent $15.6 billion on human-services contracts, most paid to NGOs, in the last fiscal year. Many of these groups depend almost entirely on city contracts.

As my colleague Stephen Eide recently pointed out, the NGO sector on average offers lower pay than its private or public counterparts, but it attracts young, true-believer types motivated by leftist ideology — in other words, Mamdani’s core voters.

Cutting checks to nonprofits also avoids saddling the city with the decades of generous pensions and benefit obligations that accompany traditional public employment.

So, no surprise, nonprofit headcount has expanded dramatically over the past two decades.

The growing number of people employed in this low-paid sector probably helped fuel the appeal of Mamdani’s proposals to freeze rents and offer fare-free buses and no-cost childcare.

Yet the city extends little performance oversight over these groups, and doesn’t require them to achieve tangible improvements, like measurably reducing homelessness.  

That means nonprofits operate with less public scrutiny and accountability than the traditional public workforce, while enjoying a freer hand to engage in activism — like pushing for “community-led” housing ownership.

Nonprofit advocates claim handing buildings to nonprofits will lead to more “preserved” affordable housing.

In practice, such preservation often depends on public subsidy programs — meaning the taxpayer is picking up the tab for these units and their tenants.

Resources have to come from somewhere, no matter who owns the buildings.

For all the superficially high-minded talk about community ownership and empowerment, COPA offers a powerful vehicle for political patronage.

Its unstated purpose is to take opportunities from the private sector — including mom-and-pop landlords — and turn them into jobs for politically connected NGOs.

All while insidiously undermining private property rights, a socialist dream.

Since 2019, New York’s severe rent-stabilization regime has made it impossible for landlords to raise rents enough to cover mounting operating and maintenance costs.

Thousands of regulated apartments — particularly in 100% stabilized buildings — are already in deep financial distress and deteriorating physically.

Add higher interest rates and the prospect of Mamdani’s rent freeze, and these buildings will take on water even faster.

Many owners are trying to get out before they go under.

When they do, COPA will funnel their properties to nonprofits at a discount, as delays, legal compliance costs, and other transaction frictions imposed on market buyers dampen demand and depress sale prices.

If rent regulations push buildings into insolvency, Albany and City Hall will find it politically expedient to bail out these “virtuous” nonprofits — certainly far easier to do so than to aid their long-suffering private counterparts.

After all, New York’s far-left leaders can count on NGO employees’ votes.

All of this will translate into jobs in housing nonprofits for Mamdani’s downwardly-mobile, college-educated base.

Unsurprisingly, Mamdani’s transition committees are stacked with nonprofit-sector leaders.

Many of them worked for Mamdani ally Bill de Blasio, who more than any other mayor specialized in growing the city government without much to show for it.

De Blasio, however, inherited a strong economy: He could afford to expand the public payroll by 35,000 employees and bloat the budget by $25 billion.

Today’s weaker economic picture means that Mamdani doesn’t have the same luxury — making it even more likely that he’ll turn to nonprofits to deliver on his agenda, rather than hire city employees.

For all the hope of Mamdani as a fresh start for city government, his administration risks delivering more NGO contracts without tangible improvements in New Yorkers’ quality of life.

And putting aside the numerous constitutional problems that COPA raises, it would do nothing to address the city’s fundamental housing problem: not greedy private landlords, but the need to build much more housing.

COPA’s community ownership would also sacrifice a path to wealth-building and entrepreneurship that has long allowed New York’s strivers, especially immigrants, to achieve the American Dream.

If COPA passes, Gotham will move closer to embodying a smaller, sadder vision of success — one where a government-backed nonprofit job and a rent-stabilized apartment are deemed sufficient, while paths to ambition, achievement and upward mobility narrow.

John Ketcham is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

https://nypost.com/2025/12/14/opinion/nonprofits-rule-zohran-mamdanis-new-york-harming-everyone-else/