POST OP-ED: Zohran Mamdani is Reviving the Worst of the de Blasio Years

By The New York Post Editorial Board

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s latest rumored hire may fit his vision of a dream team, but for the rest of New York, it promises to be a recurring nightmare.

Bringing in Steven Banks to serve as corporation counsel, the city’s chief lawyer, would elevate one of the worst de Blasio administration players into an even more powerful role.

Banks spent most of his professional life at the Legal Aid Society, suing New York City; his signature achievement was forcing the city to provide limitless shelter-on-demand for homeless families (almost entirely single women and their children).

He directed Blas’ homelessness “strategy” for all eight years — a strategy that brought the number of city homeless to a new post-Depression high, doubling outlays even as roughly a third of shelter contracts went to corruption-plagued nonprofits.

You can thank Banks’ singular focus on expanding and enforcing the city’s unique right-to-shelter obligation for Gotham becoming the destination of choice for illegal migrants flooding into the country during the Biden border blitz.

The number of people living in homeless shelters in New York City is still double what it was before the migrant flood.

The city continues to burn billions a year on so-called “asylum” seekers — more than it spends on the Fire Department, Sanitation, Corrections or CUNY.

In the Blas years, Banks also oversaw the rollback of welfare reform, removing the work requirements once tied to cash assistance; as a result, welfare spending has snowballed to $2.5 billion this year in bimonthly cash handouts to more than 700,000 New Yorkers.

As the city’s top lawyer, Banks is sure to put the taxpayers’ interests last, declining to fight lawsuits and instead settling record numbers (and amounts) of claims in supposed service to “social justice.” He’ll doubtless also fulfill Mamdani’s promise to sue, sue, sue President Trump — engaging in a war with the White House that the city can’t win.

It’s like assigning a pyromaniac to run the FDNY: Banks will have a blast, while regular New Yorkers suffer the fallout.

Zohran Mamdani is reviving the worst of the de Blasio years https://t.co/XbEI7vURf6 pic.twitter.com/5smjar9O9r

— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) November 11, 2025

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