America’s new class of socialist leaders is imposing its agenda on some of the nation’s cities, scaring businesses and the wealthy with tax increases while expanding services for the poor and working class, who they say have long been ignored.
In New York City, sales of luxury apartments priced at $10 million or higher fell after the July 1 implementation of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s tax on high-end, non-primary homes.
Seattle-based Starbucks laid off workers as part of a broader restructuring and announced it was expanding in Nashville, Tennessee, after Seattle’s socialist mayor, whose campaign was backed by labor unions, joined a Starbucks picket line and called for a boycott of the coffee giant.
Burlington, Vermont, is struggling with a significant and rising homeless population and a spike in crime stemming in part from previous city leadership, which imposed a socialist agenda that slashed police funding while boosting free medical care, food, and services for drug-addicted people who pitch tents and sleep on the streets or in parks. The current mayor, a member of Vermont’s Progressive Party, has been working to rebuild the depleted police department.
At least a half-dozen mayors or executives running U.S. cities are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, which now boasts more than 120,000 members and chapters in all 50 states.
The DSA’s presence in Congress, meanwhile, is expected to more than double next year with the addition of three socialists from New York who won House Democratic primaries in deep-blue districts by beating establishment picks and incumbents.
They will join socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont.
Together, they will form an influential voting bloc in Congress alongside far-left lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who are not official DSA members but embrace socialist policies such as wealth taxes, free childcare, free college and federal control over large corporations.
Rep. Gwen Moore, a Wisconsin Democrat whose primary opponent’s socialist credentials are under scrutiny, said many in the Democratic Party, who often identify themselves as “progressive,” want some of the same things as socialists, such as money to help the disabled, the elderly and the poor and to shift to more renewable energy.
Republicans, she said, are using the socialism label to try to scare voters away from Democrats.
“They want to frame all of the safeguards that we have in our capitalist society as socialist. Regulating industries so that they don’t dump poison into the water and the air. They want to call that socialist. To try to have alternative energy sources and to diminish our fossil fuel imprint, they call that socialist. So I think that Democrats have got to stop being shy about that term, which is going to be hurled at us,” Ms. Moore said on C-SPAN.
The DSA’s most prominent elected leader at the moment is Mr. Mamdani, an unabashed socialist who first upset former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June 2025 Democratic primary before defeating him again in the November general election, when Mr. Cuomo ran as an independent. Mr. Mamdani won by promising fare-free bus service, free childcare, city-run grocery stores and a rent freeze.
He has fulfilled part of his agenda, with mixed results. The Rent Guidelines Board last month approved a rent freeze on both one-year and two-year leases — the first-ever freeze on two-year leases — for the city’s approximately 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.
The rent in the city’s 1.3 million non-stabilized apartments, however, hit an all-time high this summer. Critics say part of the reason is that rent-controlled apartments push the costs onto other renters.
“For the units that don’t have rent controls, the landlords have to charge those other people higher rent. So you are just shifting costs,” Chuck Flint, executive director of the conservative-leaning Coalition for Affordability and Prosperity, said on the “Breaking Battlegrounds” podcast.
Mr. Mamdani fulfilled part of another socialist campaign pledge: taxing the rich to pay for new services. He secured a new tax from state lawmakers imposed on expensive New York City residences that are not primary residences.
The phased-in tax will likely more than double the property taxes now owed on many luxury apartments. Supporters of the tax say the city had long undervalued and undertaxed these residences.
Mr. Mamdani anticipates the new tax will raise more than $500 million annually and be used to fund free childcare and other services.
“When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today, we’re taxing the rich,” Mr. Mamdani said at the April event where Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled the plan.
The tax took effect on July 1. According to Olshan Realty’s Luxury Market Report, only one property priced above $10 million sold the second week in July. The report said it marked “the lowest total” in ultra-high-end sales since the last week of December.
Olshan Realty President Donna Olshan told The Washington Times that it was too soon to determine whether the July sales plunge indicated that the new tax, coupled with Mr. Mamdani’s anti-wealth policies, would hurt the luxury real estate market.
She called the new tax “a money-grab wrapped in deep politics” and said it has raised questions and uncertainty about who will be subject to it, which could spook buyers.
“I don’t think the New York market is in jeopardy, but we’ll see,” Ms. Olshan said. “We’ll just see how far you can push this kind of thing.”
She predicted that the tax would at most raise $320 million.
New York City “is spending a lot of money, but they don’t have money coming in,” she said.
Smaller cities are also living under socialist leaders.
The DSA calls Richmond, California, with a population of 115,000, “an epicenter of our fights.”
The city’s mayor is a socialist, and the DSA has endorsed socialist City Council member Claudia Jimenez to succeed him. She earned the most votes in the June primary and will face off against self-described moderate Ahmad Anderson in November.
Richmond has been governed by socialists for years and has implemented a $15 minimum wage, rent control and other provisions, with Ms. Jimenez’s help.
By threatening to put a refinery tax on the ballot, she helped secure a $550 million settlement from Chevron, which operates a refinery in Richmond and is the city’s largest taxpayer.
She also secured a ballot initiative that significantly raised taxes on businesses and helped launch the city’s unarmed mobile crisis response unit, Reach Out with Compassion and Kindness, or ROCK, to assist police.
Ms. Jimenez, a U.S. citizen who immigrated from Colombia, helped pass an ICE-free zone ordinance to respond to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who come to the area to round up illegal immigrants. The city law prohibits ICE from using city property and resources for enforcement.
“They are people who are not being trained and are killing our communities,” she said. “People are being murdered by militias, and we need to be prepared.”
Socialist mayors are governing in Irvine, California; Burlington, Vermont; and Seattle, where Mayor Katie Wilson recently laughed off the threat of millionaires fleeing the state because of a new 9.9% wealth tax.
“I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are … super overblown. And if — the ones that leave, like, ’Bye,’” Ms. Wilson said at a Seattle University event in April.
Her socialist agenda focuses on affordability. It includes building thousands of affordable housing units and new shelters for the homeless, as well as banning junk fees on rental applications.
Fulfilling a campaign promise to improve public transit, she recently signed an executive order to create a dedicated bus lane through one of the city’s most congested routes. The bus lane will narrow car traffic to a single lane. Critics say the change will worsen the gridlock.
Ms. Wilson’s efforts to quickly build affordable housing have fallen short. The city has managed to build only a few dozen “tiny” homes. She also appears to have dropped a proposal for a $1 billion bond to fund affordable housing built by union workers.
In a May 11 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Howard Schultz, the founder and chairman emeritus of Starbucks, blamed Seattle’s new socialist mayor for the decision to shift much of the coffee giant’s corporate operations out of Seattle.
“Seattle’s mayor, Katie Wilson, has chosen to cast business as a foil rather than a partner. Her socialist rhetoric vilifies employers, even while she continues to rely on them for revenue. She has encouraged residents who disagree with her policies to leave,” Mr. Schultz wrote.
In April, Starbucks announced plans to build a new hub in Nashville, bringing a $100 million investment to Music City and creating 2,000 jobs.
Although Seattle will remain Starbucks’ global headquarters, the company is shifting significant corporate operations to Nashville.
Some community leaders recently warned that Seattle is increasingly seen as hostile to businesses.
The Downtown Seattle Association issued a report in June warning that the city’s business climate is driving out economic growth, jobs and tax revenue.
Seattle’s downtown vacancy rate has spiked from 6% in 2019 to 32% in 2025. The city has lost businesses to neighboring Bellevue because of Seattle’s higher taxes, including a payroll tax to fund affordable housing and address climate change and a 5% social housing tax on high earners.
Those taxes were in place before Ms. Wilson took office. She is now considering expanding the payroll tax or implementing a capital gains tax to fill a $140 million budget deficit.
She walked back her call for a boycott of Starbucks in a recent interview with The New York Times.
“Those comments were not productive in the sense that they caused more harm than good,” she said.
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