On November 4, New York City elected Zohran Mamdani as its new mayor. A self-described democratic socialist. A state assembly member almost nobody outside New York had heard of a year ago. He beat candidates with far greater name recognition, far more money, and far more establishment support.
This article was originally published on 5 November 2025 on The Brief at sebsauerborn.com.
The political class is trying to figure out what happened.
I will tell you what happened. He ran on making the city affordable. And the city is not affordable. That is it. That is the whole story.
What New York Has Become
I have spent time in New York. I know the city. There was a time when it was the most electric place in the world — genuinely cosmopolitan, genuinely ambitious, genuinely free in the way that only a city of that scale and density can be.
That New York still exists in pockets. But the numbers tell a different story.
The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan is now above $4,000 a month. A firefighter earns around $70,000 a year. A teacher, less. A nurse, depending on experience, maybe $80,000. Do the arithmetic. These people cannot live in the city they serve.
The result is predictable: the working and middle class leave, or they commute two hours each way and burn out, or they simply never build the life they imagined. The city becomes a playground for the very wealthy and a trap for everyone else.
Mamdani offered a simple diagnosis: the city is broken for ordinary people. And enough New Yorkers agreed with him to elect him.
Why I Do Not Dismiss This
I am not a socialist. I am not remotely sympathetic to most of what Mamdani believes about economics. His policy programme — rent control, free buses, more public housing — is, in my view, a set of solutions that will make most of the problems worse.
Rent control has been tried in New York for decades. It reduces housing supply, benefits a lucky few with controlled units, and leaves everyone else to the mercy of an even tighter market. This is not controversial. It is economics.
But here is what I will not do: I will not mock the people who voted for him.
When a city becomes unliveable for ordinary working people, those people will reach for whoever is offering an answer. If the sensible, market-oriented answer is not on the ballot — or is not being articulated clearly and compellingly — they will take the socialist answer.
The lesson is not that New Yorkers are stupid. The lesson is that when capitalism fails to deliver affordability for ordinary people, socialism fills the vacuum. Every time. Without exception. Throughout history.
The Pattern Repeats
I have watched this happen across the Western world. Germany, where I grew up, has a housing crisis in every major city. London, where I spend half my year, has become functionally unaffordable for anyone without inherited wealth or a six-figure salary. Austin, my base in Texas, is now far more expensive than it was a decade ago, and the political temperature is rising.
The pattern is always the same. Asset prices inflate. Those who own assets get richer. Those who do not are priced out of the cities where the economic opportunity is. Frustration builds. And then someone comes along with a simple message: the system is rigged against you, and I am going to fix it.
The answer to this is not to defend the system. The answer is to fix the system.
That means cutting the regulatory stranglehold that prevents housing construction. It means stopping the zoning laws that artificially restrict supply. It means getting the state out of the way of builders, not asking the state to build more.
New York's problem is not too much market. It is too little market, hemmed in by decades of rent control, zoning restrictions, and political interference that have turned one of the world's greatest cities into a two-tier society.
Mamdani will not fix that. But the people who have been running the city for the past thirty years did not fix it either.
What This Means for Mobile Entrepreneurs
For my clients watching from Zurich or Hamburg or Amsterdam, the New York story is a useful data point.
High-tax, high-regulation Western cities are entering a new political phase. The centre cannot hold. The moderate consensus is breaking down. What replaces it will be some form of more aggressive state intervention in the economy — in housing, in finance, in capital allocation.
This is not a reason for despair. It is a reason to ensure that your wealth, your business structures, and your family's options are not entirely dependent on any single Western city or jurisdiction.
The window to restructure is still open. It will not always be.
Work with Sebastian
If the political direction of travel in Western cities concerns you, that concern is well-founded. The question is what you do about it. Let's talk about concrete options. Book a consultation.