The Electricity Bill That Changed Everything: How Zohran Mamdani Learned to Fight the System

Before he was a mayoral candidate, the Queens assemblyman spent years witnessing New York's housing crisis from the ground up

The call came on a Tuesday morning in February 2018. An elderly man in Astoria was facing an electricity shutoff in the middle of winter, his utility bill having spiraled beyond his fixed income. For Zohran Mamdani, then earning $47,000 annually as a housing counselor at Chhaya CDC, it was just another case in a city where such crises had become routine.

What happened next would fundamentally alter Mamdani's understanding of power in New York. and set him on a path toward his current mayoral campaign. After spending the better part of a day negotiating with utility company representatives, Mamdani successfully prevented the shutoff. The elderly man would keep his heat. I realized I was essentially doing triage, Mamdani said in a recent interview. I could help this one person, but how many other elderly New Yorkers were sitting in cold apartments that same week? The system wasn't broken, it was working exactly as designed, just not for working people."

Learning the system from the inside

Mamdani's tenure at Chhaya CDC, a Queens-based housing advocacy organization, provided him with an education in New York's housing crisis that no policy briefing could match. Day after day, he encountered families facing foreclosure, seniors choosing between medication and rent, and young adults leaving the city they'd grown up in because they could no longer afford to stay.

The work was methodical and often frustrating. Mamdani would sit with families, reviewing mortgage documents and negotiating with banks to modify loans or prevent evictions. He learned to navigate bureaucratic systems designed to benefit financial institutions over borrowers. I saw how the rules were written, he explained. Families working multiple jobs and still falling behind, not because they weren't trying hard enough, but because wages had stagnated while housing costs soared. Meanwhile, investors were buying up buildings and raising rents simply because the market allowed it.

Those daily encounters with economic displacement would later inform his political platform. When Mamdani speaks about rent stabilization or affordable housing today, he's drawing on years of witnessing the human cost of housing policy decisions made in distant board rooms.

From individual advocacy to systemic change

The transition from housing counselor to political candidate wasn't immediate. Mamdani had been considering law school when he decided to run for the State Assembly in 2020. His experience at Chhaya had taught him that individual advocacy, while necessary, had inherent limitations.

Every time I helped someone stay in their home, I understood that the underlying problem remained, he said. I was picking up the pieces, but legislators could actually reshape the conditions that created those pieces in the first place. During his 2020 campaign, Mamdani knocked on doors throughout the 36th Assembly District, which includes Astoria and parts of Long Island City. The conversations often echoed what he'd heard during his counseling work, stories of economic precarity from people who were employed and working hard but still struggling to afford basic necessities.

One interaction particularly stood out. When Mamdani explained to a voter how predatory lending practices had contributed to the foreclosure crisis, the man responded simply: I was one of those people. The connection between his advocacy work and his political aspirations crystallized in that moment.

The hunger strike and the politics of shared sacrifice

Mamdani's approach to representation was tested in October 2021, when taxi drivers began a hunger strike outside City Hall. The drivers, many of them immigrants, were demanding relief from medallion loans that had left some owing more than $500,000 for taxi licenses that had become nearly worthless. Rather than issuing statements of support from Albany, Mamdani made an unusual decision: he moved his Assembly operations to the protest site and joined the hunger strike. For 15 days, he conducted official meetings while fasting alongside the drivers.

These weren't just my constituents, Mamdani said. These were working people who'd been sold a fraudulent version of the American dream. They'd borrowed money to buy medallions that banks and city officials knew were overvalued.

On the sixth day of the protest, Mamdani was arrested while blocking traffic during a rally. He continued operating his Assembly office from the hunger strike site, meeting with constituents on the pavement outside City Hall. The unusual arrangement drew criticism from some colleagues but demonstrated a form of political representation that prioritized direct action over conventional protocol.

The hunger strike ultimately succeeded, with the city agreeing to a debt relief program worth more than $450 million. For Mamdani, the experience reinforced his belief that effective representation sometimes requires politicians to share in the struggles of their constituents rather than simply advocating from a distance.

A different kind of political education

Mamdani's path to politics diverges sharply from the traditional trajectory of law school and local party involvement. His political education occurred in the apartments of Queens families facing eviction and in the detailed negotiations with banks that often determined whether someone would keep their home. This background becomes apparent in his mayoral platform, which includes proposals like free bus service, government-operated grocery stores, and a rent freeze on stabilized apartments. Critics argue these ideas lack detailed funding mechanisms, but Mamdani frames them as responses to specific problems he witnessed during his advocacy work.

The question isn't whether we can afford these programs, he said during a recent campaign debate. It's whether we can afford not to implement them as working New Yorkers continue to be priced out of their own city.

The approach reflects lessons learned from that February morning when an elderly man nearly lost his electricity. Individual solutions, while necessary, don't address systemic problems. Political power, Mamdani concluded, offers the possibility of preventing such crises rather than simply responding to them.

The test of citywide leadership

As Mamdani campaigns for mayor, he faces the challenge of scaling his Queens-based experience to citywide leadership. His background in housing advocacy provides expertise in one of the city's most pressing issues, but governing New York requires navigating complex relationships with business leaders, labor unions, and federal officials.

Recent polling shows Mamdani as a competitive candidate, particularly among younger voters and in progressive strongholds. Whether his approach to politics. rooted in direct service and shared sacrifice, can succeed in a citywide race remains to be seen.

What's clear is that his political identity was forged not in academic institutions or party organizations, but in the daily realities of New York's housing crisis. That elderly man's electricity bill taught him about the gap between individual need and systemic response. Now, as a mayoral candidate, he's proposing to close that gap through the expanded use of political power.

The question for New York voters is whether that approach, informed by years of witnessing government failure from the ground up, represents the kind of leadership the city needs. For Mamdani, the answer was decided on that February morning when he realized that keeping one person's lights on wasn't enough.