Should Young Adults Live Off Their Rich Parents or Not?

Zohran Mamdani addresses supporters on election night flanked by his mother, Mira Nair, and wife, Rama Duwaji. Photo by Reuters.

For almost a week now, Andrew Cuomo has been trying to generate a controversy around the fact that Zohran Mamdani pays $2,300 per month to live in a rent-stabilized, one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens. According to Cuomo, it’s unfair that Mamdani benefits from rent stabilization since he comes from a privileged background, married into a wealthy family, and earns a six-figure salary for his job as a state assemblyman, particularly when there are so many poor and working-class New Yorkers struggling to make rent. To remedy this situation, Cuomo has proposed what he calls “Zohran’s Law,” which would bar new tenants from signing a rent-stabilized lease unless the rent on the apartment is at least thirty percent of their income. In other words, someone making $100,000 per year would be ineligible for any rent-stabilized apartment where the rent is less than $2,500 per month, since the cost of such an apartment would be under thirty percent of their salary.

In light of all the fearmongering about Mamdani’s socialism, it’s no small irony that it was Cuomo who proposed the greatest assault on the urban middle class since the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities in Cambodia. To begin with, almost half of all New York City apartments are rent-stabilized, meaning that huge numbers of New Yorkers would be effectively banned from vast swaths of the housing market at a time when the city is already battling a housing shortage. Then there’s the fact that spending thirty percent or more of one’s income on rent and utilities is the very definition of “rent burdened,” meaning that Cuomo wants to turn rent stabilization from a policy that protects tenants from being rent burdened into one that guarantees they are. No word yet on whether anyone with eyeglasses will be allowed to rent an apartment or whether doormen will be tasked with checking hands for callouses.

Credit where it’s due: “Zohran’s Law” might very well be the most extraordinary proposal by an American politician in living memory. Normally when the ruling class is cooking up an assault on the rest of the country, they’re trying to effect an upward transfer of wealth from the very poor to the very rich – for instance, slashing Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for billionaires – and they’ll often throw the middle class at least a pittance for better optics. In this case, Cuomo is directly targeting the middle class, threatening to push them out of their affordable housing for the benefit seemingly of no one. Remember, this proposal wouldn’t allow landlords to set the cost of a rent-stabilized apartment at thirty percent of a tenant’s income, such that the more a tenant makes, the more they can charge. Rents in such units would be the same as they are now, the only difference would be new restrictions who is allowed to occupy them. And since such units are already out of reach for the poorest New Yorkers, they wouldn’t be any better off than they are right now either.

For all these reasons, Cuomo’s plan is certain to go over like a lead balloon with the public, much like the rest of his mayoral campaign. In the Democratic primary, Mamdani won among voters from the lower-middle class to the upper-middle class while Cuomo prevailed among the very poor and the very rich. In other words, Mamdani appealed to voters who feel they’re straining the most under the status quo: those who make too much to qualify for public benefits, but not enough to keep up with the spiraling cost of living. Such voters represent the majority of the electorate, and Cuomo seems to be going out of his way to push them even further toward Mamdani. With enemies like these, who needs friends?

It's also worth noting how much emphasis Cuomo and company have placed on Mamdani’s family wealth during this spectacle. In his first post on the issue, Cuomo chided his opponent: “You grew up rich and married an even wealthier woman.” He later proclaimed to the New York Post: “We’re not supposed to be providing rent-stabilized apartments to the children of millionaires.” The Post’s own coverage has harped on similar themes, noting that Mamdani’s parents earned hefty salaries in their careers as a professor and a filmmaker, sent him to ritzy prep schools, and own valuable properties abroad. The implication seems to be that instead of finding an apartment he could afford on his own – recall that Mamdani moved into his current place when he was making $47,000 per year at a nonprofit – he should have gotten his family to bankroll something nicer, and the fact that he didn’t is a grave moral failure.

Considering how much the right-wing press loves to complain that young adults nowadays are too dependent on their parents, this line of criticism is particularly rich. When a survey came out in March showing that around half of US parents are subsidizing their millennial and Gen Z children to the tune of $1,500 per month, all the usual suspects were aghast at the mollycoddling. On this Fox Business segment, one panelist claimed to know people “whose parents are subsidizing them beyond what you can even imagine: to live in luxury apartments, to take lavish vacations…and so you just sit back and you say, ‘what are you teaching your kids?’” The Post also covered the survey and applauded the fact that since some families are starting to scale back their largesse, “many of these grown-up children will soon have to sink or swim.” A few months later, the Post published an op-ed encouraging parents with young adults still living at home to push them out of the house, arguing that “a little financial pressure is good. It forces young adults to budget with intention, develop discipline, and build habits that rarely form when the stakes seem low.”

So which is it: should children of privilege pursue independence – such as by getting a decent job and a reasonably priced apartment – or should they stay on the family dole indefinitely, since to do otherwise is to slum it when you don’t really have to? It’s only natural that Cuomo would say it’s the latter, since that was the choice he made for himself. Every chapter of his career in public life has been inextricably tied to his father’s legacy, whether running his campaigns or benefitting from his connections or working to discharge his Oedipal anxiety through his own achievements as governor. But I think relatively few New Yorkers would agree that rich kids should simply rest on their laurels like a medieval aristocrat without attempting to build an independent identity. Regardless, this will all be moot when Mamdani moves into Gracie Mansion next year.