New York's elite is at war over the cost of their immigrant servant class

Telegraph

9 hours ago

The upset victory of the Democratic socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani over the centrist veteran Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary New York City has many on the Left seeing the dawn of a new socialist era. But the election results show that the real class conflict in the Big Apple is not between the Haves and the Have-Nots, but between the Haves and the Have-Mores.
Some factors in this election are unique to New York's ethnic mix. Mamdani won the Hispanic vote, perhaps thanks to a backlash against Donald Trump's deportation policies, and as the first potential South Asian mayor of New York City (born in Uganda, he is of Indian descent) he did well among Asian New Yorkers, particularly Muslims.
What about income? The richest and poorest New Yorkers voted against him, as did the black middle class and working class. Mamdani's base is what has jokingly been called 'the Commie Corridor' in Brooklyn and part of Queens, where young white progressives have created a bohemian culture similar to that of college towns. Mamdani also did well among affluent New Yorkers in the tier below the very rich, as Michael Lange has pointed out in The New York Times: 'In tony, liberal neighbourhoods like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, known for their tree-lines streets and multimillion-dollar brownstones, Mr Mamdani trounced Mr Cuomo by more than 35 points.'
The claim that Mamdani won by campaigning on the issue of 'affordability' is hard to reconcile with the fact that he did better among upper-middle-class white voters than among working-class and middle-class black voters. But the definition of 'affordability' is subjective. Young hipsters in Brooklyn and affluent professionals in Manhattan may make more money than black janitors in the Bronx or white nurses' aides in Queens, but they feel that they are poor, because they have champagne tastes on beer budgets.
Metropolitan professionals are dependent, directly or indirectly, on the super-rich, whether as employees of major business, finance, law, and media firms, as nonprofit staffers or professors whose institutions depend on the charitable giving of the wealthy, or as civil servants in cities that depend on taxing a small number of wealthy individuals and enterprises. Nevertheless, as I can attest, having lived in Manhattan for half a decade in the 1990s, many professionals seethe with envy of the rich.
Even a six-figure income may not enable academics, journalists, nonprofit staffers, lawyers, or doctors to afford a townhouse on the Upper West Side, a weekend place in the Hamptons, or a cook and a French au pair. According to a recent study by SmartAsset, to 'live comfortably' in New York City a family with two children needs $318,406, more than £231,000, while a single individual needs an annual income of $138,570, compared to $75,000 for a single in Houston, Texas. No wonder New York is losing residents to Texas.
The division between the metropolitan rich and metropolitan professionals plays out on multiple fronts: housing, transit, and domestic help. In cities like New York, even professionals making a few hundred thousand dollars a year cannot afford to buy one of the townhouses or luxury condos they covet in nice neighbourhoods. Instead, they are forced to pay crazy rents in order not to suffer the indignity of living far from Manhattan and commuting for an hour or more each day like lowly proles. The rich can Uber or Lyft their way everywhere, but that is costly for merely affluent professionals who may be forced to endure the forecast of hell that is the New York City subway system.
But the biggest divide between the rich and the affluent has to do with servants. Truly rich households in America tend to be one-earner couples, in which the man is the sole breadwinner and the wife doesn't work (at least for wages; it can be exhausting to bark orders at the help all day). And in a reversal of the pattern for most of the last century, rich American women are now having more children than less affluent women in the US.
In contrast, the typical professional-class household in cities like New York consists of two college-educated professionals, both of whom must work so that their joint income allows them to eke out a barely-comfortable existence in one of the priciest places on earth. If they have children, they must rely on paid child care.
The truly rich can afford to pay Mary Poppins along with Jeeves quite well. But metropolitan professional households with children and two full-time working parents with professional careers cannot afford to spend much on nannies and maids. They may be progressive in their attitudes toward trans rights and DEI, but professional couples in big cities rely on a pool of low-wage, mostly foreign-born domestic workers who can be paid low wages in cash, with no payroll taxes, no benefits and no retirement security.
This explains the panic among metropolitan professionals caused by Trump's deportations. Every illegal immigrant in the US could be deported and the rich in Manhattan and elsewhere could still afford not only maids and nannies but also drivers, tutors, personal shoppers, dog walkers, butlers, and personal yoga instructors, if they chose. But without cheap illegal immigrant labour, the precarious finances of many two-earner professional couples would collapse.
One way to keep the wages of menial servants low enough for professional households to afford them is to let taxpayers pick up the tab for many of their expenditures. The public grocery stores in New York City proposed by Mamdani are for the nannies and maids and Uber drivers – not their professional class and rich employers, who will continue to shop at upscale stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. Better yet, if the maid can drop her children off at a publicly-funded daycare centre on the way to clean the professional couple's apartment, the taxpayer's assumption of her childcare costs makes it easier for her to survive on her paltry wages.
To be sure, Mamdani has proposed raising the minimum wage in New York City to $30 an hour. But everyone knows that is not going to happen, making it safe for progressive New Yorkers to pay lip service to high wages and unions while paying their menial servants in cash off the books in the black market for labour.
In this way, the benefits of cheap labour for elites are privatised while the costs are socialised. A century ago in the US, the non-Marxist crusade in favour of municipal ownership of water and electric utilities was called 'sewer socialism'. The 21st century Left has come up with something new: 'servant socialism'.
Whether Mamdani can be elected mayor of New York City remains to be seen. But the intra-elite class dynamic seen in the Democratic primary will continue to be played out in New York and other plutocratic cities around the globe. What drives it is the desire of the ambitious professional-class Haves to live like the truly rich Have-Mores – at taxpayer expense, if that can be arranged.