What the Mamdani-Voting Millennials Get Right

The big city cost-of-living crunch is a legitimate source of discontent.

Many online were quick to scoff at the Millennial, white-collar workers recently profiled by the New York Times, which invited us to “Meet the Young Business Professionals Voting for Mamdani.” My own gut reaction, though, was recognition. While I have misgivings about the prospect of socialism in New York, I recognize in these voters a familiar frustration with the economic and social bargain our generation has been tendered.

Like them, when I survey the challenges of family life in America’s big cities, I shudder. Yes, our cities are springboards to professional success and personal gratification for early-career college graduates. But for those of us who aspire to marriage and family, the sheen soon dulls. For such Millennials, steep housing costs, dysfunctional public schools, and public disorder can make life in American cities an unexpected exercise in tradeoffs. As a result, big cities are hemorrhaging young families and the people who want to form them: New York’s population of kids under five, for example, fell 18 percent between 2020 and 2024.

Take Jessica Jin, 34. Jin was born in Texas and started her tech career in San Francisco before moving to New York a few years ago. Jin’s “bare minimum goal in life,” she told the Times, is to be able to provide for her future family the way her parents did. Jin and her sister had their own bedrooms, and their parents helped them through college. But despite her professional-track career and relative financial stability (the Times guesses she makes $170,000 per year or more), Jin doesn’t think she can manage these goals in New York.

She may be right. Rent for a 3-bedroom home like the one she grew up in costs more than $6,000 at the market rate in her borough of Brooklyn—well over the common 30-percent-of-income “rent-burdened” threshold. For a household to be under that threshold in Brooklyn while affording a market-rate 3-bedroom, it would need to make $240,000. There’s a good chance Jin’s spouse earns a similar income to hers (hello, assortative mating), so the household might technically avoid rent-burdened status. But the daunting prospect of childcare costs—which, for two kids, can be as much as the rent or more—and possible tuition bills down the road make it all seem out of reach.

Obviously, no one is entitled to a life of luxury in New York. My friend Liz Wolfe, a writer for Reason, chimed in on X to argue that the standards Jin aspires to are “not required to bring a child into this world,” adding that “some of these extracurriculars and tuitions are real scams.”

Wolfe’s not wrong. But neither is Jin wrong to want her kids to have what she did or more. This hope, for one’s children to have a better lot in life than oneself, is the essence of the American Dream.

Another credible retort is that Jin could easily take the suburban offramp (which is what my wife and I have opted for). But that only reinforces the argument that making it, even for educated professionals, is pretty tough.

The sense of struggle is not without basis. When Jin and I were kids in the 1990s and 2000s, we saw our parents experience an economy that was on a palpable upward trend. We’re not experiencing that today. Since January 2021, average hourly earnings across the country have risen 22 percent, but the Consumer Price Index has risen 23 percent. By that metric at least, Americans are no better off than they were almost five years ago.

To make the generational comparison more explicit, I asked economist and chart-wizard Jeremy Horpedahl to whip something up for me:

As Horpedahl shows, inflation-adjusted wages grew at a steadily increasing clip from the mid-1990s and remained in positive territory until the onset of the Global Financial Crisis. While the long expansion that began after the 2008 crash put a lot of Millennials in a strong financial position as young adults, the subsequent tumult initiated by the pandemic and exacerbated by policy-driven inflation pushed real-wage growth negative just as many in Jin’s age range would have otherwise been starting families.

In the case of housing specifically—often the biggest concern for parents and would-be parents—the picture is grim. According to new analysis from Goldman Sachs (highlighted in these pages yesterday by Robert VerBruggen) the national rent-to-income ratio is worse today than at any time since 1980. For people in their early 30s like Ms. Jin, it’s hard to choose to have kids when you feel like you’re losing ground even as you succeed professionally.

Ms. Jin’s experience is also reflective of our country’s economic geography. Many regions of the country are thriving in their own ways. But it’s hard to deny that the real action (and the social status that comes with it) has concentrated in a handful of superstar cities where housing and growth are artificially constrained. Amid that scarcity and the heavy-tailed wealth distribution in cities like New York and San Francisco, life for the aspirational middle is not as sweet as it was in decades past.

Voters like Ms. Jin are listening to Mamdani because of his campaign’s themes: bring down the rent, create world-class public transit, and make it easier to raise a family. But it’s doubtful that the policies he’s proposed—government subsidies, higher taxes, and cost-shifting—would solve the problems of professional-class parents. What can do that is facilitating a building boom to accommodate housing demand, boosting childcare supply, and getting back to basics on public safety. The problems are real, but socialism is a poor solution.

Mamdani’s urbane, socialist populism is succeeding politically among Millennial professionals because it ties zeitgeist-y aesthetics with justified discontent. The task for those of us who see the wisdom of a capitalist economy and the folly of socialism is not to tell our peers to suck it up, but to make the case that markets are positive-sum and that, with the proper institutions in place, capitalism delivers the goods for city families.

Header photo courtesy Michael M. Santiago/Getty.