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Reihan Salam has a lot in common with the man he is trying to stop.
They went to rival New York City public high schools. Both are South Asian Muslim men with a talent for remembering faces and names. Mr. Salam, the head of the conservative Manhattan Institute, and his democratic socialist foil, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, both favor merch embroidered with the same 1970s cursive City of New York insignia.
They share something else. They are convinced that their beloved city is in crisis. For the mayor, the crisis is affordability. For Mr. Salam, the crisis is Mr. Mamdani.
“You have a couple of decades of prosperity that are slipping away,” said Mr. Salam, 46, who lives with his family in a Brooklyn neighborhood that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Mamdani. “We are squandering this incredible opportunity to show that urban life can work.”
He fears that many of his fellow New Yorkers have been seduced by what he sees as the mayor’s vilification of the city’s wealthiest residents and misled by Mr. Mamdani’s vision of free buses, free child care and frozen rent. He believes the mayor’s big plans to subsidize the costs of city life for even well-off New Yorkers (“unlimited welfarism for the near-rich,” Mr. Salam calls it) could steer New York City into a financial tailspin reminiscent of the dark days of the 1970s.
