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New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is “moving the goalposts” on poverty in the nation’s largest city with his newly unveiled racial equity plan to justify a massive expansion of government intervention, a top city policy analyst warns.
Mamdani released his “Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan” earlier this month, which quickly received pushback from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department as well as from the Manhattan Institute’s Santiago Vidal Calvo, who told Fox News Digital that when the report uses a “true cost of living” to claim 62% of New Yorkers can’t make ends meet in the city, it’s a ploy to declare a crisis that needs more government.
“What he’s essentially doing is moving the goalposts,” Vidal Calvo explained. “He’s essentially saying that what the federal government qualifies as somebody below the poverty line — which is essentially like $34,000, $35,000 a year, those might be like 2024 numbers, but it’s pretty close to that — we’re essentially moving the goalposts so anybody under $160,000 with children cannot afford to live in New York City.”
“Those numbers, in reality, if you live in New York City, they don’t sound crazy, they don’t sound, you know, high. But in all of reality, for any single person across America, $160,000 is, you know, a breadwinner. It’s essentially enough money to raise a family and to have children and to have a good life. So when we move the goalposts into that direction, without actually recognizing what are the underlying issues of the disease, what are the actual problems that make New York City expensive, then we’re just attributing a problem and throwing a dart at the board and saying, ‘This is it.'”
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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks at a press conference at La Marqueta in East Harlem on April 14, 2026, outlining plans for city-run grocery stores aimed at lowering food prices. (New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks during a press conference announcing a city-run grocery store plan in East Harlem.)
The “reality” of the situation, Vidal Calvo says, is that you “don’t make a place more affordable by making people earn more” but instead the city needs to “ask the right questions” about policies that drive wage growth and new housing development.
“So the issue here is that we are focusing on a problem that the socialists in City Hall want to believe—that if you give people more money, they essentially can access more things,” Vidal Calvo said. “But you’re not asking what is the tradeoff of giving people more money. And just by placing that the ‘True Cost of Living’ in New York City is $160,000 a year for people with children, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people, first, can afford that life or, second, they are able to get those salaries.”
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The high cost of living in New York City is driven by several factors, including housing, which is an area where Vidal Calvo says City Hall needs to “encourage more housing being built around the city.”
“That’s how you lower the price of housing,” he said. “It’s not by freezing rent, it’s not by stabilizing markets—normally what that leads is to more and higher prices.”
Rather than a giant administrative effort to grow government with more departments and staffers, Vidal Calvo explained that the city should instead be reforming zoning to build faster, slash permitting delays, make it easier to establish child care facilities, reduce administrative barriers, and create opportunities for employers to hire more people and recruit talent from across the United States.
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Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks during an event. (Getty Images)
Mamdani’s racial equity plan has drawn intense scrutiny from conservatives over its conclusions on race and efforts to base government action to address racial disparities, including from DOJ Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon who said she will “review” the matter.
Vidal Calvo, who recently published a New York Post op-ed on Mamdani’s plan, told Fox News Digital, “I feel like this is just another way to put DEI on the table without calling DEI.”
“And we have now found that in academia, in many government programs, in many existing architectures of social structures, DEI does not work, and unfortunately, this might be just another case in which it fails, and not because of the well-intended reason of trying to make everybody earn a living, because I feel like that’s a good intention that everybody can have,” Vidal Calvo explained. “But it’s about the solutions that they’re trying to actually approach. It’s about methodology of how they’re actually trying to approach this method. You cannot argue that just because somebody is a different race, it’s become insanely more unaffordable to make a living in New York City. That’s not how it works.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani’s office for comment.
