‘I’m over the moon’: New York’s small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape

Red Scare? The democratic socialist mayor of New York City spent this week talking about red tape.On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani – the politician at the center of a revived rightwing panic about socialists and purported communists winning elections across America - posted a video on X of himself putting a sheet of paper with the phrase “red tape” into a paper shredder. Other pieces of paper, with phrases like “cumbersome fees and fines” and “a permit you need just to serve ice-cream”, were shredded too. The video, set to Wu Tang Clan’s If Time Is Money, shows Mamdani joining a handful of city officials and small business owners throwing the resulting paper shreds into the air like confetti.“New York’s small business owners have said it over and over: endless paperwork and the uncertainty of dealing with City government has made getting their stores up and running too difficult,” Mamdani wrote on X, announcing a package of 50 policy changes aimed at easing the financial burden of fines, fees and regulations on mom-and-pop shops across the five boroughs.At a press conference in the Bronx, Mamdani listed some of the onerous policies getting the axe. Bodega owners will no longer need a separate license to sell the same products outside the store – like fruit and flowers – as inside. Restaurants will no longer need a “superfluous” frozen dessert permit to sell ice-cream on top of the permit already required to sell food. Barber shops will no longer have to renew their permit every year, instead doing so every three years. Street fair vendor permit fees will be reduced, restaurant inspections will be sped up, and equipment registration fees will be eliminated for a year.A corresponding executive order signed by Mamdani on Monday will also expand the NYC Best program, assigning each of the city’s 180,000 small businesses – which employ an estimated 1 million people – a case worker to help owners navigate the Big Apple’s sometimes byzantine bureaucracy.“I’m over the moon,” Dawn Kelly, owner of Nourish Cafe in Queens" class="entity-link entity-location" data-entity-id="171250" data-entity-type="location">Jamaica, Queens, told the Guardian about the new reforms. She launched her business in 2016 with the help of Best. Her case worker, she said, “held my hand from the idea to cutting the ribbon”, and she’s thrilled more businesses will now have the opportunity to use the program.Over the last decade, Kelly says her business has faced challenges. Her staff, for example, would have to travel from the outer-reaches of Queens all the way to the Upper West Side to take a three-day course to get a required food-handling certificate as the course is offered at only one location in the whole city. A member of the city’s Small Business Advisory Commission, Kelly relayed this problem to the mayor’s office. She says she got “emotional” this week watching Mamdani’s press conference. Julie Su, deputy mayor for economic justice, called out Kelly by name when announcing that the city will now offer the food-handling course at multiple locations.“These people are serious. They really care about small businesses,” said Kelly, adding: “They get shit done.”Such reforms by the mayor, who took office in January, come during a trying time for small businesses, which often survive on the slimmest of margins. A recent study conducted by the city found that while 3,540 businesses opened in the second quarter of 2025, another 8,400 similar-sized businesses closed, amounting to the lowest ebb of new business formation in five years.The reforms are also at odds with the hysterical caricature of Mamdani being manufactured by Donald Trump, the Republican party, and rightwing media. The right has repeatedly depicted the mayor, and a wave of his fellow electeds from the Democratic Socialists of America, as raging anti-business radicals. Appearing on Fox News in May, Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for New York governor, alleged that if “you own… a “small business, a grocery store, a bodega, Zohran Mamdani wants to take your property.”“THE LEFT’S PLAN: CONTROL AND CONFISCATE,” read the Fox News chyron beneath Blakeman.The small business initiatives Mamdani announced this week, however, amount to a sweeping program of deregulation – a term most often associated with free-market conservatives. Some of Mamdani’s opponents couldn’t help but praise him.“Mamdani is clearly no libertarian icon,” the libertarian magazine Reason noted. “He has proposed opening government-run grocery stores, pushed for freezing the rent, and has called for higher taxes on the city’s top contributors. Mamdani’s free-market critics are well justified in opposing these policies. But if Mamdani’s critics are principled, they will welcome these pro-small business reforms.”But for JW Mason, an associate professor of economics at John Jay College at the City University of New York, Mamdani’s reforms are “completely consistent with a democratic socialist approach to governance”.“I think the reality is that when we talk about ‘pro-business government’, historically we almost always mean government that caters to large, politically connected businesses,” said Mason. “Governments that call themselves pro-business don’t particularly serve the interests of these smaller businesses that New York depends on … In some sense a lot of what being a socialist mayor, a socialist in office, means is making government simply work better.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt High Beam Coffee Roastery in Red Hook, Brooklyn, co-owner Vicki Forshee said it always feels like big businesses like Amazon – which operates multiple warehouses in the neighborhood – often seem to operate with more tax breaks, and less oversight or regulation, than small businesses like hers which “have to climb a crazy mountain just to survive”.Selina Ullrich, the cafe’s other co-owner and a veteran of the city’s food industry, pointed to how health department inspections always feel like shakedowns, prioritizing penalizing restaurants over violating obscure regulations, as opposed to just ensuring food safety. “There’s rules where nobody can explain why the rule exists,” she said. “It’s a rule that is impossible to comply with, but we all just agree that we just have to deal with it.”She’s excited the mayor is starting a process to change that: “It seems like he wants to accomplish things versus just talking about accomplishing things.”Mason, the economist, believes such an approach could pay political dividends for Mamdani, overcoming the efforts to depict him as some kind of extremist.“I think the reality is that people who are political professionals, people in the media, have this very strong kind of view that politics is all on a sort of left-right axis, and if you’re a socialist, you’re on the left … I don’t think most people see it that way. I think most people have a much more diffuse view of politics, and they like some things and they don’t like other things, and they don’t necessarily rearrange everything in the same sort of left-right way that we do in elite conversations. I think for most people, they perceive Zohran as somebody who’s come in, who’s made promises and is delivering on those promises, who can point to concrete things he’s done that make people’s lives better.”Kelly, the owner of Nourish Cafe in Queens" class="entity-link entity-location" data-entity-id="171250" data-entity-type="location">Jamaica, Queens, was a longtime fan of former mayor Eric Adams, the centrist Democrat who left office plagued by scandals. She now considers herself a fan of Mamdani.“I don’t really care about those labels nowadays,” Kelly said, when asked about Mamdani being a socialist. “I like that he stands for making sure nobody seems to feel marginalized, like we’re all in this together, we all win together.“If that’s what socialism is,” she added, “I’m all for it!”