Mayor Mamdani Shares Results Of Affordability and Racial Inequity Studies At Medgar Evers College
Medgar Evers College was the site where NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani chose to release the results of long-delayed Preliminary Racial Equity Plan and New York City True Cost of Living reports. Following a heartfelt, welcome from Dr. Patricia Ramsey, president of Medgar Evers College, Mayor Mamdani cited the legacy of Medgar Wiley Evers and how the late civil rights icon’s moral compass is in accord with the goals of his own administration.
“Medgar Evers spoke at Mount Heron Baptist Church in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1957 about our obligations to one another,” Mayor Mamdani recounted. “He said ‘As men living in as highly diversified and complex a society as ours, it is our duty and responsibility to our fellow men and our children to tackle the problems that lie ahead with faith and courage.’ Nearly 70 years later, that same directive guides us in our work here in New York City, where extraordinary wealth and devastating poverty live side by side.”
Both studies were commissioned under the prior mayoral administration by way of ballot reforms passed by voters back in 2022. In grappling with this enormous undertaking, a number of prominent members of the Medgar Evers College community had a hand participating in the Racial Justice Charter Amendment Advisory Board. Among those providing leadership and insight were Esmeralda Simmons, Esq. and Dr. Roger Green.
The results of these studies will be used to address the affordability agenda the Mamdani administration not only ran on, but are currently implementing. At the press conference held in the dining hall of the Medgar Evers College’s Academic Building 1, Mayor Mamdani was surrounded by an array of leaders from within city government including New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Council Member Sandy Nurse and Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice Commissioner Afua Atta-Mensah. Among the partners in attendance were United Way of New York City Chief Grace Bonilla and Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies CEO Jennifer Jones Austin.
Mayor Mamdani pointed out the median household wealth for White New Yorkers in the city is $276,000 versus $18,000 for Black New Yorkers. He also acknowledged that while the affordability crisis touches every corner of the city, Black and Brown New Yorkers wind up being the hardest hit.
“The True Cost of Living Measure confirms what New Yorkers have long known to be true: too many people cannot afford the city that they love,” Mamdani said. “New York City is home to skyscrapers, million-dollar listings, nine-dollar lattes, and yet more than three in five New Yorkers, 62 percent, cannot keep up with the cost of living in this city. Despite the incredible wealth of our city, our poverty rate is double that of the national average, and it is getting worse year over year.”
He added, “I ran for mayor on an affordability agenda because we know that we cannot solve this crisis without reckoning with the fact that the neighborhoods hit hardest by rent and the rising nature of it, by child care costs and the suffocating manner of it, are the same ones that have been hit for years by institutional neglect and racism. In that way, New York City’s affordability crisis and its history of racial inequity are bound together.”
Following the release of the two preliminary reports, the public now has 30 days to submit comments.