Urban development in America has never been just about buildings, budgets, or blueprints. It has always been a reflection of our moral imagination—of what, and whom, we believe cities are for. To understand Zohran Mamdani’s rise, we have to place him within this longer story: the struggle over whether cities should serve capital or justice.

Should urban policy be guided by the cold precision of development economics, or by a vision of fairness and dignity? Are rising rents and deepening exclusion the inevitable byproducts of progress, or the deliberate outcomes of political choices? And if our cities have been built on inequality, are we condemned to live within them as they are, or can we construct something radically different?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once called budgets “moral docu

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