It’s not often that you hear socialist politicians talk about cutting taxes, but Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic front-runner, is already acknowledging that serious solutions to the city’s affordability crisis need to go well beyond the “ Freeze the rent ” slogan that rocketed him to first place in the polls . With New York trapped in a housing emergency, Mamdani is considering some of the strategies proposed by the city’s business and real-estate elites.

“The time has come for a change to our property-tax system,” Mamdani told me as we walked down Steinway Street in his Astoria district. “I say that as someone who serves on the Real Property Taxation Committee in the State Assembly, as someone who has looked at this system, sought to introduce legislation to augment this system, and y

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