The Numbers Are Bad. Really Bad.

New York City's private sector added an average of 13,000 jobs in 2025. The year before, it added 95,000. That's a cliff.

Those figures come from the Current Employment Statistics program, as analyzed by City Journal's Eric Kober in an April 13, 2026 piece. The data were delayed a month because of last year's federal government shutdown, but the picture they paint is bleak regardless of timing.

Construction and manufacturing combined to lose 8,000 jobs. Retail trade — 299,500 workers — gained exactly 100 jobs all year. Home health care, which had been the city's biggest post-pandemic growth engine, hit a wall starting in April 2025.

The city's total private employment sits at just over 4.2 million. Financial services added 9,000 jobs. Professional and business services — law, accounting, consulting — actually shed 600 positions.

This is the economic backdrop Mamdani inherited. What he's doing about it remains unclear.

The EDC Has No CEO. Three Months In.

The Economic Development Corporation is the city's primary engine for job creation, real estate development, and corporate investment. It manages city-owned land, hands out tax breaks, and operates with relatively little oversight thanks to its nonprofit structure.

Andrew Kimball, the EDC chief appointed under former Mayor Eric Adams, resigned in January. That was three months ago.

Mamdani still hasn't named a replacement.

According to Gothamist's reporting by Elizabeth Kim on April 6, 2026, Jessica Walker, CEO of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, said: "The business community wants to see that the mayor and this administration is serious about economic growth. And the quickest way to show that is to fill this role."

When asked what he's looking for in an EDC chief, Mamdani said he wants someone who "understands the scale of imagination, ambition and fluency required to deliver economic justice and economic growth hand-in-hand."

That's not a job description. That's a campaign speech.

The EDC has a 35-year track record of building real things — the High Line, Cornell Tech's Roosevelt Island campus, the city's ferry system. It needs an operator, not an ideological fellow traveler.

Mamdani's Moving Forward on Bus Lanes the Feds Already Blocked

So what is the mayor focused on? According to the New York Times, he's advancing a redesign of 34th Street in Manhattan — a bus lane plan that the White House halted last year by threatening to withhold federal funding for other transit priorities.

The federal government backed off that threat. Now Mamdani is pushing the project forward.

Bus lanes are fine. New York traffic is a disaster. But when your city just cratered from 95,000 new private-sector jobs to 13,000 in a single year, and your top economic agency is still headless after three months, leading with a 34th Street redesign is a priorities problem.

The NYT also noted separately that Mamdani has NOT offered a detailed plan for job creation. That's the paper that endorsed his politics editorially — and even they're pointing out the gap.

What the Left Is Getting Wrong

Jacobin ran a piece crowing that the "rich promised to flee Mamdani's New York" and haven't. On that narrow point, they're not wrong. Median rents are at all-time highs. Manhattan commercial leasing is up in Q1 2026, according to real estate firm JLL. The mass exodus didn't happen.

But Jacobin is answering a question nobody serious is asking anymore.

The real issue isn't whether wealthy residents fled. It's whether the city is creating opportunity for the other 8 million people who live there. A hot real estate market with zero job growth doesn't help a nurse in the Bronx or a construction worker in Queens. High rents with no job gains is actually a worse outcome for working-class New Yorkers, not a victory.

Jacobin's piece is a deflection dressed up as data.

What the Right Is Getting Wrong

Some conservative outlets have framed the job slowdown as entirely Mamdani's fault. He took office in January 2026. The 2025 job data predates his term entirely. The slowdown in home health care started in April 2025 — nine months before he was sworn in.

The job collapse happened on Adams' watch. Hanging 2025 numbers around Mamdani's neck is intellectually dishonest. What is fair to scrutinize is what he's doing right now, in 2026, to reverse the trend.

And the answer, so far, is not much visible.

What Comes Next

New York City went from adding nearly 100,000 private-sector jobs a year to barely adding 13,000. The agency built to fix that has been leaderless for three months. The mayor's public economic vision so far is a bus lane and a word salad about "economic justice."

Mamdani may yet prove the skeptics wrong. For now, real New Yorkers trying to find work in this city are getting a mayor who's still hiring — for the job that's supposed to create their jobs.