Prominent civil rights attorney Norman Siegel teed off on the young socialist mayor's reversal on homeless sweeps throughout the Big Apple.

"He basically caved; that’s not what leadership is," railed Siegel to The Post on Wednesday.

"This is just a failed policy that won’t work."

Zohran Mamdani flip-flopped on the controversial policy this week, angering the left and drawing praise from the right

Mamdani, though, has vowed to make the sweeps more effective by going for seven days to try to connect the homeless person with services before tearing down their makeshift living space.

But Siegel said that still falls far short.

“I’m not sure you can do it within a week. People will go into the nooks and crannies. They need to make a commitment for more single rooms or get the state to use eminent domain purchase unused hotels."

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first preliminary budget is drawing fire from transit advocates.

Riders Alliance slammed the plan for not expanding the city’s Fair Fares program, despite a recent MTA fare hike and data showing one in five riders struggle to afford the fare.

Mamdani budgeted $96 million for the program in the 2027 fiscal year, around the same budget the program received in the 2026 fiscal year.

Policy and Communications Director Danny Pearlstein said the budget “appears to contain no expansion” and urged City Hall and The Council to broaden eligibility and deepen discounts so that as many as two million low‑income New Yorkers can get reduced or free subway, bus and paratransit rides.

The Permanent Citizen Advisory Committee also sent Mamdani a letter last week urging him to expand Fair Fares eligibility to New Yorkers earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level. The transit advocacy group said that expansion would cost an additional $125 to $155 million.

If enacted, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposed 9.5% property tax hike would lead to higher rents, housing industry officials say.

"Increased property taxes = a rent increase,” Kenny Burgos, CEO of rent-stabilized landlord group, New York Apartment Association, posted on X.

Landlords would ultimately pass down some of the costs of increased taxes onto renters, Jay Martin, head of the New York Apartment Association, acknowledged.

"Nothing says housing affordability like raising housing's largest expense. Property taxes.” Martin posted on X.

The now over $38 billion budget’s jump will mostly cover funds needed for the city to honor Albany’s class size law mandates, which will require the city to have class sizes of 20-25 by 2028.

Another large source of the department's increase comes from costs with rolling out the mayor's signature campaign promise of delivering universal childcare in the Big Apple.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who rose to prominence as a sharp critic of the NYPD and past supporter of the Defund the Police movement, proposed a preliminary budget Tuesday that leaves police funding largely flat and postpones his signature public safety overhaul.

Mamdani's budget proposal holds the NYPD’s budget roughly flat, from about $6.28 billion in fiscal year 2026 to $6.38 billion in fiscal year 2027, even as he warns of a broader fiscal crisis.

Pressed at City Hall during the budget briefing about on why he did not extract NYPD savings, Mamdani said he favored savings to resolve the budget crisis being spread “across every agency” as part of a 1.5% to 2.5% savings push.

"The reason for that is that this is a crisis that the entirety of city government is facing," Mamdani said.

Mamdani has made past pledges to rein in NYPD spending by eliminating units like the Strategic Response Group. 

His preliminary budget also omitted funding to fulfill a key campaign promise to launch a Department of Community Safety, a proposed $1.1 billion civilian agency meant to handle many mental‑health and crisis calls now answered by police. 

Instead, Mamdani said investments in community safety would be rolled into his executive budget. 

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards Jr. says Mayor Zohran Mamdani's threatened 9.5% property tax hike on homeowners is a "non starter."

"As I told Mayor Mamdani this afternoon, a property tax hike upwards of 9.5 percent, as considered, is a nonstarter. Under no circumstance should we consider balancing our budget on the backs of working-class New Yorkers, especially seniors on fixed incomes and public sector workers who keep our city running,” Richards said in a statement.

Queens is home to the second largest number of homeowners in the five boroughs, behind Staten Island.

“In this new era, Queens homeowners desperately need our city to reform its already broken property tax system — one that sees Black and brown homeowners in middle-class communities paying more than brownstone owners in the city’s most affluent neighborhoods. To enact such a significant property tax increase across the board would only worsen our wealth inequality and overall affordability crises, while threatening to return us to the days of the 2008 financial catastrophe, when Southeast Queens was the national epicenter of property foreclosures," he added.

Richards also urged the city's partners in Albany to work with the city on reforming the property assessment system or targeting "record-high Wall Street bonuses" toward raising revenues as an alternative.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani hinted that his affordability agenda would fall to the wayside while the city seeks to immediately solve its $5.4 billion deficit -- but that proposed solutions such as tax hikes on the wealthy or on city property owners are "structural".

"These are structural solutions that will provide us with the foundation so that we can advance not only a solution to the fiscal crisis, but also an affordability agenda," he said--later stressing that he has already announced a funding plan for one of his key campaign points--universal childcare--with support from Gov. Kathy Hochul.

"We also continue our focus on making buses not only fast, but free, taking every action we have at the city level to speed up the nation's slowest buses and continuing to advocate and work on making those same busses free," he added of his his campaign promise to make the city's busses fare-free.

New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin signaled early resistance to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s preliminary budget proposal Tuesday, warning against measures that opponents say could deepen the city’s affordability crisis.

In a joint statement with Council Member Linda Lee, chair of the Committee on Finance, Menin called the proposal “the beginning of a critical conversation” about safeguarding the city’s fiscal future while protecting residents. They sharply criticized Mamdani's suggestions to draw down rainy day funds or to impose property tax hikes, arguing those options should be shunned as New Yorkers struggle with rising costs.

"At a time when New Yorkers are already grappling with an affordability crisis, dipping into rainy day reserves and proposing significant property tax increases should not be on the table whatsoever," they said.

The lawmakers said the council believes there are additional savings and revenue options that should be considered before shifting more of the burden onto small property owners and small businesses.

Last week council members fumed over Mamdani's "tax the rich" agenda.

The council will release its own financial projections ahead of preliminary budget hearings in March.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to spend another $1.2 billion in this year’s budget proposal on migrants arriving in the Big Apple.

Mamdani’s budget plan notes that the number of asylum seekers under the city’s care has nearly halved from 68,660 at its peak in January 2024 to 30,813 last month.

"As of February 2026, there is only one remaining emergency shelter site being operated outside of the DHS system, exclusively serving single adults,” Mamdani’s budget plan notes.

The city spent a massive $3.75 billion on migrants in the fiscal year 2024 budget at the crisis’s height, and $8.11 billion between the 2023 and 2025 fiscal years.

The city estimates it will spend around $1.47 billion in the 2026 fiscal year, tipping the total over $10 billion over the last half-decade.

Mamdani says his administration is "exhausting every option" to bridge the city's looming $5.4 billion fiscal deficit -- but aggressive saving measures won't fix it.

"We have a very aggressive savings plan, one that we anticipate, as we showcase, will yield around $1.7 billion over two fiscal years," he said, but noted that mid-term findings by city agency savings officers were not likely to yield great enough results.

"If we find additional savings, we will absolutely use them, however responsibly. I cannot tell New Yorkers that that is the likelihood over these next few months," he said, again stressing that he did not want to raise property taxes.

"I do not want to raise property taxes. I have said time and time again that it is a broken system, one that we are sincerely looking to reform, which is why we're going to be sending up a proposed piece of legislation in the next few weeks."

Mayor Zohran Mamdani won't explicitly call out his political ally Gov. Kathy Hochul for declining to tax the rich.

"I am encouraged by the partnership that we have been building with Governor Hochul and I'm thankful for yesterday's announcement of 1.5 billion translates into $1.6 billion in additional state aid," he said of a yesterday's announcement of more state funding.

Still -- Hizzoner appears to be holding out for the Gov. to come around on his proposed tax hike.

"This is the beginning of both the city and the state budget process, and the most sustainable and fairest means by which we can do so is by raising taxes on the wealthiest, the most profitable corporations, and ending the drain that has long characterized the relationship between the city and the state," he said when pressed by a reporter if he would blame the Gov. if he has to raise property taxes.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani announces of the city's $122 billion a whopping 40% will go to the Department of Education. 26% will go to social services, while 12% will go to uniformed agencies. An additional 22% will go to misc. city agencies.