New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani hits his first 100 days in office this week. In the nick of time, his office released a long-anticipated preliminary racial equity plan and true cost of living measure report, highlighting the gross disparities Black and Brown New Yorkers face.
This was developed by the Mayor’s Office of Equity & Racial Justice (MOERJ) under new Commissioner Afua Atta-Mensah. It covers the city’s extensive Black history and centuries of discrimination, outlines how these systemic issues have continued to impact communities of color, and creates a framework for how to address these issues across 45 different city agencies.
“In terms of what we’re finding, the disparities are immense. It shows that while the cost of living crisis is affecting every New Yorker, the effects of that crisis are not applied evenly across the city,” said Mamdani in an interview with the Amsterdam News.
The racial equity report found that the median household net worth of white New Yorkers is approximately $276,900, which is nearly 15 times greater than that of Black New Yorkers, at $18,870. That “alarming” gap is a result of deliberate policy choices and a lack of commitment to action for decades, even centuries, said Mamdani.
Disturbingly, the report also found that Black New Yorkers in particular have the lowest life expectancy of any racial or ethnic group in the city.
The true cost of living report further highlights how steep the affordability crisis has become, with about 62% of New Yorkers (5 million) people generally struggling to pay for their housing, food, health care, child care, transportation, taxes, savings, and other essentials. The report also found that Hispanic New Yorkers faced the highest cost burden rate, followed by Blacks and Asian and Pacific Islanders, when compared with whites.
Mamdani held the announcement of the racial equity plan on his 96th day in office on April 6. The event was at CUNY’s Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, where he and his staff were joined by the college’s President, Dr. Patricia Ramsey, and Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies (FPWA) CEO Jennifer Jones Austin, as well as elected officials, like Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Councilmember Sandy Nurse.
“What this report confirms is what communities have been saying for generations. Inequality in New York City is not accidental — it’s systemic, and it’s racial,” said Williams at the event. “And I always want to say, you have to mention race in the solution, because race was mentioned in creating the problem in the first place.”
In March 2021, former Mayor Bill de Blasio greenlit the formation of the first Racial Justice Commission (RJC), which published a report and put together three ballot proposals that passed in 2022. The proposals called for a permanent office of racial equity and promised a “true cost of living” measure for essential needs like housing, food, or childcare. Former Mayor Eric Adams launched the office in 2023 but failed to release a report by the designated deadline, according to the NYC Commission on Racial Equity (CORE) lawsuit in 2025. Legal reps for Adams at the time blamed the delays on several lawsuits threatening the city’s federal funding if the report were released.
“New Yorkers voted to establish these as indicators in our city,” said Mamdani. “It’s been years since the city was supposed to have released this kind of a report. We are now finally following that law and that directive.”
“We are intentional about the plan, but we also recognize that the plan is not the be-all and end-all,” added Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, who is the former Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor. “That a lot of the work that we are doing as an administration is not actually even reflected in the plan. This is one tool. It’s a really important one. New Yorkers wanted it, and our job is to deliver what New Yorkers vote for.”
The Budget
Meanwhile, the city is still engrossed in budget season. Mamdani put forth his $127 billion preliminary budget for Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 in February, which included a controversial proposal to tax wealthy New Yorkers to fill the budget gap or fall back on raising property taxes. In response, the City Council and Speaker Julie Menin published their own proposal, claiming an alternative path to revenue that doesn’t consider raising property taxes, dipping into city reserves, or a tax hike on the rich. Mamdani slammed the proposal in a video response last week.
Atta-Mensah said that in forming the racial equity plan, each city agency had to create short-term, midterm, and long-term action plans on how to structure its day-to-day work with an equity focus. This included budgeting for priorities like Black maternal health, childcare such as 2K and 3K, affordable housing, cheaper transportation, cheaper groceries, and higher wages.
“This data is going to be used not only to inform the question of additional resources but, also frankly, the allocation of existing resources. We’ve brought [Office of Management & Budget] OMB into the front end of a lot of the report so that we are actually bringing this in as a framework for the executive budget, for the adopted budget, and then for policies that continue beyond that,” said Mamdani. “Because we do not want this to be a report where we say, ‘you asked for a report, we released a report, and now it’s done.’”
The next steps will be to gather public feedback for the next 30 days before releasing a final report. CORE will be holding engagement meetings across the city and in public housing developments, said Atta-Mensah.
For more information, go to nyc.gov/equity or nyc.gov/content/core/pages/community-engagement-cycle
The public can also fill out the 2026 NYC Preliminary Racial Equity Plan Feedback Survey.