Currently holds the office of New York State Assembly - District 36 until December 31, 2025.
Candidate for New York City Mayor in 2025 New York General Election.
View your personalized ballot, check your voter registration, make a plan to vote, and research every name and measure on the ballot with BallotReady.
Get StartedQueer and trans people across the United States are facing an increasingly hostile political environment. New York City must be a refuge for LGBTQIA people, but private institutions in our own city have already started capitulating to Trump’s assault on trans rights. Meanwhile, the cost of living crisis confronting working class people across the city hits the LGBTQIA community particularly hard, with higher rates of unemployment and homelessness than the rest of the city. The Mamdani administration will protect LGBTQIA New Yorkers by expanding and protecting gender-affirming care citywide, making NYC an LGBTQIA sanctuary city, and creating the Office of LGBTQIA Affairs. Learn more
Zohran will create the Department of Community Safety to prevent violence before it happens by prioritizing solutions which have been consistently shown to improve safety. Police have a critical role to play. But right now, we’re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net—which prevents them from doing their actual jobs. Through this new city agency and whole-of-government approach, community safety will be prioritized like never before in NYC. The Department will invest in citywide mental health programs and crisis response—including deploying dedicated outreach workers in 100 subway stations, providing medical services in vacant commercial units, and increasing Transit Ambassadors to assist New Yorkers on their journeys—expand evidence-based gun violence prevention programs, and increase funding to hate violence prevention programs by 800%. Learn more
Zohran will make it faster, easier, and cheaper to start and run a business in New York City, so that bodegas and corner stores stay open and dollar slices come back. He will cut small business fines in half, speed up permitting and make online applications easier, and increase funding for 1:1 small business support by 500 percent. And he’ll appoint a Mom-and-Pop Czar to make sure it happens. Learn more
Zohran will ensure our public schools are fully funded with equally distributed resources, strong after-school programs, mental health counselors and nurses, compliant and effective class sizes, and integrated student bodies. He will create car-free “School Streets” to prevent traffic fatalities, improve play, and lower pollution for every school, and address student homelessness by expanding the successful Bronx pilot Every Child and Family Is Known. Zohran supports an end to mayoral control and envisions a system instead in which parents, students, educators and administrators work together to create the school environments in which students and families will best thrive—strengthening co-governance through the PEP, SLTs, DLTs, and CECs in particular. He will also work with the City and State to massively invest in CUNY—whether taxing NYU and Columbia or passing the New Deal for CUNY which he has long championed—to invest in infrastructure, pay staff and faculty a living wage, give free OMNY cards to all students, and make CUNY tuition-free for all students, as it was for 130 years. Learn more
As Mayor, Zohran will continue these efforts and lead a massive decarbonization and climate resiliency process citywide. This will include building out renewable energy on our abundant public lands and fulfilling the vision of Local Law 97 through greater enforcement and assistance from the City for middle income homeowners. He will also oversee a disaster preparedness program that prioritizes safe and resilient housing, public waterfronts, and other infrastructure at the forefront of flood protection, and use a multi-agency approach to tackle extreme heat, which kills more people—particularly New Yorkers of color—than any other type of weather event. Finally, as ConEd tries to raise utility rates by over 10%, Zohran will firmly oppose these exorbitant hikes Learn more
Fighting the climate crisis and improving quality of life are not separate issues, but are deeply intertwined. Zohran has a plan to deliver a better and cleaner New York, including an unprecedented investment in our public schools. Zohran’s Green Schools for a Healthier New York City will renovate 500 public schools with renewable energy infrastructure and HVAC upgrades, transform 500 asphalt schoolyards into vibrant green spaces, create 15,000 union jobs, and build resilience hubs in 50 schools that provide resources and safe spaces during emergencies. Learn more
Twelve percent of New York City residents are uninsured. To expand access to healthcare, Zohran will create a new corps of outreach workers to support New Yorkers navigating the healthcare system. Those workers will support patients in understanding the public resources available to them: how to find insurance, apply to programs, access financial assistance, and claim their health benefits. As Trump attacks public health, particularly reproductive healthcare, Zohran will also guarantee that these outreach workers connect every New Yorker in need of reproductive care to affordable, quality support. Moreover, New York’s public hospital system serves over one million unique patients a year and is the crown jewel of our public health infrastructure—but it faces significant funding gaps, leading to underinvestment, understaffing and overburdened caregivers. Meanwhile, we keep closing our critical community hospitals. Zohran will work with our healthcare unions and city and state partners to increase funding for H+H and end hospital closures. He will also protect NYC for future public health emergencies, including guarding against shortages of PPE, ensuring adequate surge capacity and healthcare worker safety, maintaining programs like Test and Trace to stay on top of trends, and more. Learn more
As Mayor, Zohran will reject Medicare Advantage, and reject higher copays for inservice workers. Instead he’ll partner with workers and their unions to take on the fragmented, for-profit healthcare system and lower costs for everyone. Learn more
25% of all NYC homeowners spend more than half their income on housing, a burden felt most acutely in our city’s immigrant communities and Black and Latino neighborhoods. Prior to becoming an Assemblymember, Zohran worked directly with these New Yorkers to keep them in their homes, serving as a Foreclosure Prevention Housing Counselor. He knows how the city’s property tax system favors wealthier homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods, has seen how the tax lien sale system leads to families losing their homes, recognizes how deed theft is displacing entire communities, and understands how the city lets speculators and slumlords box working class New Yorkers out of homes. And he has a plan to fix it as Mayor. Zohran will create a new Office of Deed Theft Prevention to protect homeowners from scam artists. He’ll fix the property tax system so the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods pay their fair share. He’ll help homeowners comply with Local Law 97. And he’ll end the tax lien sale. Learn more
As Mayor, Zohran will put our public dollars to work and triple the City’s production of permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes – constructing 200,000 new units over the next 10 years. Learn more
As Mayor, Zohran will immediately freeze the rent for all stabilized tenants, and use every available resource to build the housing New Yorkers need and bring down the rent. Learn more
Every New Yorker deserves a safe and healthy place to call home. That’s why Zohran will overhaul the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants and coordinate code enforcement under one roof, making sure agencies work together to hold owners responsible for the conditions of their buildings. Learn more
As Mayor, he’ll permanently eliminate the fare on every city bus – and make them faster by rapidly building priority lanes, expanding bus queue jump signals, and dedicated loading zones to keep double parkers out of the way. Learn more
The delivery app industry has transformed New York City. Delivery workers are fundamental to keeping this city running—supplying groceries, meals, and medications 24/7. Traveling around the city at breakneck speeds, app-based delivery workers now hold the most dangerous job in NYC. Despite the immense risks these workers face every day, deliveristas—80,000 Black, brown, and immigrant workers—are exploited by the app companies who demand they complete deliveries at a dangerous pace. Moreover, app companies have misclassified delivery workers as independent contractors, instead of employees, so that they can avoid providing them with the rights and benefits all workers deserve. New York City app consumers, restaurant owners, small businesses, cyclists, and pedestrians all suffer due to app companies’ predatory policies. The ever-increasing demands from app companies make our streets less safe, and deliveristas more vulnerable. To address these issues, the Mamdani administration will strengthen licensure requirements for delivery apps, expand capacity and resources to support deliveristas, and improve street infrastructure including expanding DOT e-bike programs and investing in deliverista hubs. Learn more
As Mayor, Zohran will create a network of city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low, not making a profit. Without having to pay rent or property taxes, they will reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers. They will buy and sell at wholesale prices, centralize warehousing and distribution, and partner with local neighborhoods on products and sourcing. Learn more
Zohran will implement free childcare for every New Yorker aged 6 weeks to 5 years, ensuring high quality programming for all families. And he will bring up wages for childcare workers – a quarter of whom currently live in poverty – to be at parity with public school teachers. Learn more
As Mayor, I will end the practice of using library funding as a bargaining chip in budget negotiations and commit 0.5% of NYC’s budget to libraries, ensuring we have enough revenue for robust services and well-staffed facilities. Learn more
Zohran’s revenue plan will raise the corporate tax rate to match New Jersey’s 11.5%, bringing in 5 billion. And he will tax the wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers—those earning above 1 million annually—a flat 2% tax (right now city income tax rates are essentially the same whether you make 50,000 or 50 million). Learn more
Zohran will also implement common-sense procurement reform, end senseless no-bid contracts, hire more tax auditors, and crack down on fine collection from corrupt landlords to raise an additional 1 billion. Learn more
As Mayor, Zohran will work closely with our city's powerful labor movement to ensure that union- and non-union workers alike know and can enforce their rights at work, including by fully staffing and expanding the role of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. He will continue fighting for the Secure Jobs Act, which will make it easier for workers to organize without fear of unfair or retaliatory firings. Through requiring high-road labor standards for all City contractors, City-financed development projects, and City-funded organizations and their contractors and expanding labor peace agreement requirements, he’ll ensure that all workers, including public sector workers, have the right to collective bargaining and to fight for strong contracts. Finally, Zohran will work closely with unions to pass additional sectoral extender laws that provide better wages and working conditions across entire industries, similar to NYC’s fast-food minimum wage law. Learn more
As Mayor, Zohran will champion a new local law bringing the NYC wage floor up to 30/hour by 2030. After that, the minimum wage will automatically increase based on the cost of living and productivity increases. When working people have more money in their pocket, the whole economy thrives. Learn more
View your personalized ballot, check your voter registration, make a plan to vote, and research every name and measure on the ballot with BallotReady.