New York Citys socialist Mayor is “moving the goalposts” on poverty in the nations 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 from President Donald Trumps Justice Department as well as from the Manhattan Institutes Santiago Vidal Calvo, who told Fox News Digital that when the report uses a “true cost of living” to claim 62% of New Yorkers cant make ends meet in the city, its a ploy to declare a crisis that needs more government.
“What hes essentially doing is moving the goalposts,” Vidal Calvo explained. “Hes essentially saying that what the federal government qualifies as somebody below the poverty line â which is essentially like $34,000, $35,000 a year, those might be like 2024 numbers, but its pretty close to that â were 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 dont sound crazy, they dont sound, you know, high. But in all of reality, for any single person across America, $160,000 is, you know, a breadwinner. Its 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 were just attributing a problem and throwing a dart at the board and saying, ‘This is it.'”
The “reality” of the situation, Vidal Calvo says, is that you “dont 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.Â
“So the issue here is that we are focusing on a problem that the socialists in City Hall want to believeâthat if you give people more money, they essentially can access more things,” Vidal Calvo said. “But youre 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 doesnt necessarily mean that people, first, can afford that life or, second, they are able to get those salaries.”
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.”
“Thats how you lower the price of housing,” he said. “Its not by freezing rent, its not by stabilizing marketsânormally 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
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 DOJÂ 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 no
