From time to time, a piece of vocabulary comes along which the public didn’t realize it was missing and soon enough can’t live without. “Commie Corridor”—to designate the precincts of Queens and north Brooklyn overrun with youthful lefties—is one such phrase, a zippy addition to the city’s lexicon of pop anthropology. Its sudden currency was the handiwork of Michael Lange, a twenty-five-year-old political analyst and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, who used it in his Substack newsletter back in June, just as early voting in the Democratic primary began. Zohran Mamdani, Lange wrote, might just be able to win, if he could inspire staggering turnout in this “young and hungry” base; when Mamdani pulled it off, the New York Times published Lange’s analysis, bringing the coinage to a wider readership.

From the lawn of Gracie Mansion, the shores of the Commie Corridor are visible across the East River. Mamdani has said that he and his wife, Rama Duwaji, will leave their apartment in Astoria for the mayoral residence later this month. When they do, they’ll be going from a stronghold of supporters to a place—the Upper East Side—that could reasonably be characterized as enemy territory. Yet even in Mamdani’s new neighborhood it’s possible to see a microcosm of the demographic trends that propelled him there.

Lange has a patchy beard and an air of winningly earnest enthusiasm, and on the day that we met for coffee he brought a laptop brimming with election data. We were at the Mansion, a diner a few blocks from Gracie which has been open since Fiorello LaGuardia’s mayoralty, and we were sitting in a blue vinyl booth beneath photos of Eric Adams, Michael Bloomberg, assorted Cuomos, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I might try my hand at another one or two,” Lange told me, when I congratulated him on the success of his phrase. Among the areas he was considering christening: “The whole stretch of the neighborhood that’s, like, Park to Fifth, from Fifty-ninth maybe all the way up to 100th, that’s become a naturally occurring retirement community.” Sometimes shortened to NORC, this urban-planning jargon refers to areas where a preponderance of residents are aging in place—in this case, atop a cushion of phenomenal wealth. “What could you call that?” Lange mused. “I thought, Oh, the Capitalist Corridor. My father was, like, ‘No, call it Oligarch Alley.’ ”

This is the slice of the Upper East Side that has tended to define the neighborhood in the cultural imagination—the part that served as a playground for the spoiled children of “Gossip Girl” and as a personality for Charlotte on “Sex and the City,” a place of rarefied co-ops and tulip-lined avenues, of Truman Capote’s Swans and Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.” Notwithstanding the John Lindsay-era postures Wolfe lampooned, it’s a neighborhood that makes an incongruous setting for a millennial socialist. But even in the broad strokes of pop culture there are other visions of the area to be found. Picture the shabby railroad apartment that Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale’s characters, two publishing underlings, occupy in the 1998 film “The Last Days of Disco,” or the bohemian squalor of Julia Fox’s childhood—these, too, are the Upper East Side. (Fox might disagree: “I didn’t grow up in the Upper East Side, I grew up in Yorkville,” she insisted in a 2022 TikTok, referring to the area’s northeasternmost region. “The Upper East Side kids did not fuck with us. Like, they thought we were poor.”) Head east, past Second or Third Avenue, uptown and out of the Seventies, and a different landscape comes into view—one where relatively modest rentals have traditionally attracted younger residents. “The age gap in the neighborhood is so pronounced block by block, the renter-homeowner gap,” Lange said. “The renter-dense parts of the neighborhood are very defined and finite.”

Lange has a taste for granular political geography: on the eve of the general election, he issued block-by-block predictions of the results. But Yorkville is an area he knows particularly well. “I lived here almost my whole life,” he told me. Although today he has decamped to the West Side, he grew up in several Upper East Side and Yorkville apartments; one, on Second Avenue, would shake when tunnels were being dynamited for the Second Avenue Q, a long-awaited subway extension. The line opened in 2017, bringing an influx of new activity to the area. Lange, who moved back to the neighborhood in 2021, after college, recalls being startled to see restaurants from Brooklyn and the East Village establishing new outposts in the neighborhood of his youth—and surprised, too, to see the crowds gathered at the Eighty-sixth Street entrance to Carl Schurz Park during the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020. “I remember how much bigger it was than you’d think,” he said.

The affordable side streets at a remove from Central Park and the water make up the core of Mamdani’s support in his new neighborhood. At the diner, Lange pulled up a map of returns from the 2025 Democratic mayoral primary on his laptop. “You basically see the Cuomo wall along Central Park,” Lange said. “All of East End—which is, I would say, from a class and age perspective, more similar to Park than it is to Second—you see a lot of Cuomo support.” He indicated a row of blocks in between. “From Eighty-eighth, between First and Second, on up, it’s all Mamdani,” he said. “It’s very young; it’s very fifth-floor walkup.” He pointed out pockets of support elsewhere—such as a block just above John Jay Park, between York and the F.D.R. Drive, where Mamdani beat Cuomo by more than fifty percentage points in the primary. Lange toggled to look at the general-election results for the block. “Still resolutely Mamdani,” he said.

Michael Lange sits in a booth at the Mansion diner.

The week after Lange and I met, I went to visit that block, a stretch between Seventy-eighth and Seventy-ninth Streets on York Avenue. It had, I’d learned, a long history of defying expectations. A six-story complex of pale brick buildings bristling with fire escapes, it was said to be the largest low-income housing development in the world when it was built, in the early years of the twentieth century. The company that funded it, City and Suburban Homes, was run by a group of New York’s philanthropic élites, who hoped to provide an improved alternative to the era’s standard tenements. “There is light and air in abundance, steam heat in winter in the latest ones, fireproof stairs, and deadened partitions to help on the privacy that is at once the most needed and hardest to get in a tenement,” the Progressive Era muckraker Jacob Riis wrote in “The Battle with the Slum,” regarding City and Suburban’s buildings. The York development “was desirable not only because the rents were low but because the living conditions were so wonderful,” one longtime resident recalled in a 1988 history of the building, decades after first moving there, in the forties.

Today, the York Avenue Estate’s rent-stabilized studios tend to cost between twenty-two and twenty-six hundred dollars, and the one bedrooms between twenty-eight and thirty-one hundred dollars. These figures can no longer be called “low,” but, for the neighborhood, they also aren’t bad. Steve Goldenberg, who has been a superintendent there for more than thirty years, told me that many of the residents are medical personnel who work in the area’s hospitals. “Here you’ve got Sloan, you’ve got Cornell, you’ve got Lenox Hill,” he said. “During COVID, we recruited a lot of nurses and doctors.” A century ago, the building was home to nannies who cared for the neighborhood’s children and craftsmen whose handiwork ornamented its mansions. Today, it houses the kinds of professionals who help keep a NORC in working order.

Goldenberg himself had not voted for Mamdani. (He was a retired N.Y.P.D. sergeant, and the new mayor “has negative things with the N.Y.P.D.,” he said.) But, for the building’s many residents who did, “renter,” in Mamdani’s New York, has the potential to emerge as its own kind of political identity. Last week, immediately after his inauguration, Mamdani visited a rent-stabilized building in Flatbush where tenants have been organizing to protest neglect as their landlord, Pinnacle Group, faces bankruptcy. An auction of Pinnacle properties is scheduled to take place today; the Mayor has said that the city will intervene, if necessary, to protect tenants.

At issue in the Pinnacle bankruptcy is the question of how profitable an apartment building ought to be. (On the flip side of affordability is generally someone else’s desire to make more money.) For City and Suburban, which continued to operate its York building and others into the sixties, the answer deliberately established at the outset was “not very.” The company was structured as a “limited dividend corporation,” meaning owners voluntarily confined their profits to a dividend of about five per cent. Pinnacle’s business model, meanwhile, involved purchasing rent-stabilized buildings in the hope of converting them to luxury condominiums.

Housing policy has been at the forefront of the new mayor’s first days in office, and his signature proposal to freeze stabilized rents is a promise to Upper East Side tenants at the City and Suburban complex as much as the Pinnacle tenants in Flatbush—just a few of the many New Yorkers for whom an apartment constitutes not a financial asset but a place to live. ♦