Nonprofits rule Zohran Mamdanis New York doing harm to everyone else

Nonprofit groups were crucial in the Democratic Socialist-led coalition that fueled the rise of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani — and this week his City Council allies will start to repay the favor.The council is poised to vote on the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, a bill that would favor city-approved (read: politically connected) nonprofits over private buyers when certain residential buildings go up for sale.Nonprofit service providers, or NGOs, employ an estimated 662,000 workers in New York City, including some 80,000 in social-services jobs.The city spent $15.6 billion on human-services contracts, most paid to NGOs, in the last fiscal year.Many of these groups depend almost entirely on city contracts.As my colleague Stephen Eide recently pointed out, the NGO sector on average offers lower pay than its private or public counterparts, but it attracts young, true-believer types motivated by leftist ideology — in other words, Mamdani’s core voters.Cutting checks to nonprofits also avoids saddling the city with the decades of generous pensions and benefit obligations that accompany traditional public employment.So, no surprise, nonprofit headcount has expanded dramatically over the past two decades.The growing number of people employed in this low-paid sector probably helped fuel the appeal of Mamdani’s proposals to freeze rents and offer fare-free buses and no-cost childcare.Yet the city extends little performance oversight over these groups, and doesn’t require them to achieve tangible improvements, like measurably reducing homelessness.

 That means nonprofits operate with less public scrutiny and accountability than the traditional public workforce, while enjoying a freer hand to engage in activism — like pushing for “community-led” housing ownership.Nonprofit advocates claim handing buildings to nonprofits will lead to more “preserved” affordable housing.In practice, such preservation often depends on public subsidy programs ...