NEW YORK − Margaret Flint was 18 when she first moved to Manhattan from her childhood home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in 1970.
She’d just enrolled at Barnard College, and for about four years, she shared an apartment with a classmate on the Upper West Side. While living in Manhattan, she went to law school and got married. She and her husband moved to the suburbs in the early 1990s.
On Nov. 4, the day New York City elected a new mayor, Flint signed a contract to buy a two-bedroom apartment for $1.4 million in the same building she had called home as a Barnard student.
That night, the city elected 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and New York’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor.
Mamdani, whom President Donald Trump has derided as a "Liddle’ Communist," campaigned on the promise of raising taxes on corporations and those earning more $1 million per year to pay for free buses and universal childcare. He also previously advocated for defunding the police, which he abandoned during the mayoral campaign. Mamdani, who has pledged to protect Jewish New Yorkers against hate crimes, also drew criticism for his anti-Zionist views and history of pro-Palestinian activism.
