I.
I love going to the US Open. I love passing Arthur Ashe Stadium on the south side of the 7 train and then walking down the creaky boardwalk to Corona Park. I love the shiny theme park decor, the massive screens everywhere, the aesthetic elegance that aspires to be the “Moynihan Train Hall” to Citi Field’s “Underground New Jersey Transit Plaza of Penn Station.” I love the faux decadence of the endless variety of delicious fast-casual airport slop bowls in the food plaza. I love taking a Honey Deuce selfie with my friends, and then assuring them that they let you keep the souvenir glass, so the drink is actually free when you think about it. I love the aura of eliteness that pervades the air, communicated by the giant posters of Roger and Serena everywhere, and the gentle wooings from every sponsorship and immersive branding activation. I love that for the few hours that I visit, there’s someone out there who believes that I, a twenty-six year old researcher at a nonprofit, am the target demographic for a customized Rolex, an Emirates fully horizontal first class seat, or a vintage Cadillac.
And most of all, obviously, I love being completely surrounded by the world’s best tennis players sweating through the most important matches of their lives. You can stroll over to a small court, take a seat on a set of three-runged bleachers that you might find at a little league baseball game, and instead take in a tiebreak between two of the fifteen highest-ranked mixed doubles pairs in the world. Sometimes, you get even luckier. Last year, a rain delay emptied out most of the Grandstand and I got to sit in the third row and watch Gael Monfils push eighth-seed Casper Ruud to the brink in a ridiculous fourth-set tiebreak. Two years before that, I snuck up to the front of my section after half of the stadium went home (it was 11:30pm on a weeknight) and watched Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz show me the future. Even when something like this doesn’t happen, when the most exciting matches are mobbed, I feel like I’m getting away with something every time I go. How can this world-class experience be so readily available to me just because I happen to live here?
Lately, though, that feeling has started to wane. For the past four years, I’ve gone with my friends on the first Wednesday of the tournament, usually the first day of the Round of 32, and one of the cheapest days to go. I always buy the cheapest tickets that still get you into Ashe. In 2022, I paid $35 a ticket, including taxes and fees. In 2023, I paid $48. In 2024, I paid $75. This year I paid $88. In case you were wondering, the Consumer Price Index values $35 in 2022 dollars to be worth somewhere around $38 today. It’s hard to feel like I’m getting away with something when prices spike this quickly.
I was still getting away with something though. My friend wasn’t sure he could make it, so we checked StubHub to see whether we could resell his ticket for near what we paid. The event was completely sold out, and the cheapest nosebleeds were being bought and sold for more than $300. My $88 ticket, annoyingly expensive as it seemed to me, was still an enormous discount.
This is what it’s like to live in New York City now, and everyone is sick of it.
II.
“Six thousand dollars is too [bleep]ing much,” investigative sports journalist Pablo Torre exclaimed on an episode of his hit podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out last month. “It’s absurd! It feels apolitical and bipartisan in its absurdity actually.” The absurd figure in question: the anticipated face value price of a ticket to any of this summer’s World Cup matches at Metlife Stadium in nearby East Rutherford, New Jersey. Torre’s guest, Zohran Mamdani, enthusiastically agreed with his assessment. “And we’ve just normalized this, right? When the World Cup was last in the United States, a ticket to the final cost less than $200 in today’s dollars, and here we are now selling face value tickets for more than $6000. It is absurd.”
For a democratic socialist far-left firebrand, Mamdani has demonstrated a rare and spectacular talent for identifying issues that feel apolitical and bipartisan in their absurdity. From the start, his campaign has anchored on the belief that voters of all stripes, even Trump supporters, are fed up with absurdly high rent, absurdly slow buses, absurdly expensive groceries, and absurdly inaccessible childcare. Satisfied with their near-insurmountable lead over his bumbling general election opponents, Zohran’s camp has not added much to this policy agenda to expand the coalition further since the primary election in June. He appeared on Pablo Torre Finds Out to promote one of the rare new additions: a demand for fair World Cup prices.
As per tradition, the Zohran campaign began this push with a satirical vertical video. Mamdani, clad in a suit and tie with black dress shoes, dribbles a soccer ball around a turf field semi-competently (I’m terrible at soccer, he looks like he’s much better than me) and explains the issue. FIFA will use dynamic pricing, which means they will adjust the price in real time to respond to the demand during the on-sale, they do not plan to set aside any tickets for New York City residents, and they will have a resale platform with no price cap. This means tickets will start out incredibly expensive, and everyday New Yorkers will have to compete with loathsome scalpers who view tickets as pure speculative assets, and will make an uncapped profit taking tickets away from people like you and giving them to oligarchs instead. All of this, Zohran concludes, looking directly into the camera, “means that the biggest sporting event in the world is happening in your backyard and you’ll be priced out of it.”
He asks supporters to sign a petition joining him in his call for FIFA to set aside tickets for residents, cap resale prices (which, as he correctly points out, FIFA has done in other countries), and abstain from dynamic pricing. On my feed, this seemed to play extremely well. “Brilliant press hit,” Michael Lange tweeted.
I am the ideal target audience for this. I love going to live sports and concerts, especially to the most basic, mainstream popular ones that inspire such outrageous demand. I frequently want to go to an event like this, but cannot find tickets that are cheap enough for me to justify buying. I’d love to go to the World Cup, and almost definitely won’t be able to afford to. Nevertheless, I think this is all dumb and a little concerning. It’s dumb because it won’t work, and narrowly I find it annoying when politicians propose things that won’t actually help to generate cheap positive buzz. It’s concerning because it reveals a certain mindset towards the problem of allocating scarce resources equitably in a busy, diverse, immensely, inequitably wealthy city. We’re all about to elect Zohran because he understands that this problem is the most important urgent one that New Yorkers face, much more so than crime or federal government interference or Middle Eastern foreign policy. I hope this is not how he thinks that problem is solved.
III.
Zohran is not the first politician to identify the ticket companies as emotionally salient bogeymen. After the November 2022 online “pre-sale” of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour crashed Ticketmaster and left most fans without tickets, members of Congress demanded immediate government intervention. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a “daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in.” Her message echoed not only among progressive Democrats but with elected officials from across the political spectrum, including moderate Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar, and Republican Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. A few months later, Klobuchar and Republican Senator Mike Lee hauled Ticketmaster and Live Nation President Joe Berchtold in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and a bipartisan coalition of Senators tore into him with one mortifyingly cringy Taylor Swift lyric pun after another. In response to this pressure, and eventually from a direct call from President Biden, Ticketmaster and other sellers agreed to curb “junk fees,” and to advertise the full, fee-inclusive price on the initial listing page, which went into effect this summer. President Trump doubled down in March, issuing Executive Order 14254: “Combatting Unfair Practices in the Live Entertainment Market,” which encourages the FTC to rigidly enforce the Obama-era Better Online Ticket Sales Act’s ban on electronic bots buying and selling tickets.
So there’s a wide consensus that we need the government to crack down on monopolistic middlemen, excessive fees, and armies of scalper bots, and the government has enthusiastically complied. None of this has done much to make live events more affordable. Tickets are more expensive than ever. You can see why in Ticketmaster’s groveling post-mortem on the Eras Tour fiasco, where they revealed that “based on the volume of traffic to our site, Taylor would need to perform over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she is doing)…that’s a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years.” The core problem was not the annoying fees, or the janky website. It was the fact that as expensive as those tickets were, there were twenty times as many people willing to buy them at that price as there were tickets available. You can charge less than the market-bearing price and most artists do, but this just creates a really long line, where the vast majority of people do not get tickets. There’s no system to ensure that you, a normal person who loves Taylor Swift, will get a ticket for $50. There are far too many people who want the same thing and many of them have more money than you do.
This breaks people’s brains a bit. “Who are all these people and where the hell did they come from?!?” is a pretty reasonable response. “It’s impossible that there are so many people, so some of them must be robots,” is a perhaps less rational, but still emotionally understandable response. It’s less rational because the robots themselves do not want to go to these events, they just want to sell the tickets to someone who does, someone who’s willing to pay far far more than you are. But it’s annoying to be outbid on stuff, and especially annoying to be outbid by robots. Either way, the “Why can’t we just get some of these people out of here, so it can go back to how it used to be when things were cheaper” perspective is hard to refute.
IV.
New Yorkers talk about everything this way. “It used to be amazing,” I overheard a classmate say to her friend last week, about some unnamed formerly amazing food establishment, “and then the Times put it in its Top 100 list and it’s been completely cooked ever since.” If you think the Ticketmaster queue is frustrating, try waiting in a 45-minute big dumb line for a triple chocolate croissant at the Radio Bakery in Prospect Heights. When it opened in 2017, a Mama’s Too square cost $4.50 and took approximately four minutes. After a rave from the Times, it got swamped, and now it’s $6.50 after a twenty-minute wait on line and another ten before it’s ready. Judging from how mobbed it is, Ticketmaster’s dreaded dynamic pricing system would probably send that square’s price into the teens before it cleared out the line. That would be galling, but in many situations less annoying than the wait. Either way, I wish the Times had not run that article, and that their pizza didn’t blow up on TikTok every other month since then. It’s annoying to have to compete with so many people for something that I used to have (relatively) all to myself.
New Yorkers know this feeling so well that sometimes we take action to protect our favorite spots from wider discovery. “I gatekeep tf out of this hole in the wall that sells shrimp and octopus cocktails and while it has more than doubled in price since I started going several years ago it is still a steal for ~$15 for a pint,” tweeted digital artist and memer Morry Kolman, captioning a picture of the cocktail in question that had absolutely no identifying information. “DM this to me and I swear I won’t tell anyone,” one commenter replied. Morry recognizes that by gatekeeping something from other people, he increases the chance that he will get a steal for himself. I don’t blame him for it, but there’s no other context where this mindset is considered progressive or left-wing.
The network effects of viral marketing platforms like Instagram and TikTok (not to mention New York Times feature writers with their nosy, snitching Top 100 lists) have made it incredibly difficult to maintain Morry’s omerta strategy for long. Let’s imagine that Morry was worried about this, and wanted to take his gatekeeping a step further (he wouldn’t do this because he’s a chiller). What if he wrote to his city councilmember and explained the situation. Should the city councilmember then call up the shrimp and octopus cocktail purveyor, and use the clout of the office to implore him to give Morry and other frequent clientele a permanent discount? Or instead, to institute a policy that gives anyone who lives within a five block radius of this place, or who has been coming consistently for the past five years, permission to cut the line? It is human nature to believe that if you have something, you should have it, and to feel aggrieved when it is taken away from you. But does the fact that you live nearer to something, or that you learned about it before someone else really mean you deserve it more? And do we believe that strongly enough that we are willing to insist that the government intervene, build some gates, and then keep them?
The gates are sneakily expensive. When the US Open decides to sell me an $88 ticket instead of a $300 one to someone else, they are effectively taking more than $200 from the USTA and the players and giving it to me. Maybe that’s fine, I probably need the money more than they do. But there’s an 8.875% tax on the ticket, so they’re also functionally taking ~$18 out of the tax base to give me that discount. Over the course of a two-week tournament, with more than a million tickets sold, that adds up to tens of millions of dollars in lost tax revenue, all so that real fans like me who know to log on on the second they go on sale can go to the US Open the way we used to, the way we still feel we deserve to. And that’s just from underpricing; instituting a resale cap on World Cup tickets would probably deliver a much larger hit to the tax base. Some of those tickets, if uncapped, will resell for five figures.
No one thinks of it this way, of course. By not selling my ticket, I functionally paid $300 to go to the US Open this year. If you asked me how much I paid, I would say $88 every time. That’s how much went onto my credit card bill. That’s how much I decided to spend. I irrationally ignored that I could have sold it for more because that’s what made the whole thing make sense in my brain. I wouldn’t have bought a $300 ticket, so I didn’t want to think that I basically had anyway. Whether we want to admit it or not, this is a mind-trick that only a privileged person can do. If I truly needed the money, if it was the difference between making rent or not, then I do not think I would have been able to sustain the illusion.
There’s privilege everywhere in the gatekeeping-to-keep-prices-artificially-low world, once you start to look for it. A free, star-studded Shakespeare In The Park serves Upper West Siders who feel priced out of the $900 Othello tickets on Broadway, by awarding those tickets to people who can spend eight hours on a weekday waiting on line in the park instead. Free parking spots across the city reward people who not only own a car, but are willing and able to spend a half-hour or more circling around looking for a spot, and then another forty-five minutes twice a week to abide by alternate-side-parking. These are tradeoffs that favor insiders who live nearby, who can forgo hours of work without risking serious financial harm. They’re also creaky systems that New Yorkers find ways to circumvent with money, paying someone to do alternate-side-parking or wait in the Delacorte Theater line for them. That money is paid in cash, and doesn’t go to the tax base.
Keeping prices artificially low, creating a massive line, and then giving privileged insiders discounts or sneaky ways to cut that line, this all may feel-good to a price-conscious New Yorker, but it’s not an equitable path to true affordability. We should expect our left-wing, progressive firebrand mayoral candidates to offer us something better, something that actually makes the city more affordable for everyone.
V.
The biggest, dumbest line in my life used to be the one at the original Levain Bakery on 74th and Amsterdam. When I was in high school, there was no line too long for it to stand between me and one of those cantaloupe-sized chocolate chip walnut cookies, which was good because the line was frequently very, very long. I used to obsess over the inefficiencies of the line, how the majority of people who wanted to grab a cookie and go were forced to wait for the needy few who also got coffee, how each person had to shimmy down the metal staircase one-by-one, a literal bottleneck in the system, enter the tiny storefront. “They should have four people out on the street with iPads, walking up the line and taking orders in advance,” I used to smugly explain to whoever I was with. “Then it would all go much faster.” I was convinced that the problem had to do with the point of sale mechanism, and that we needed a better, smoother, fairer payment and distribution system to expand cookie access.
But I was wrong. That line had completely vanished a few years later, not because of such adjustments, but because Levain opened up a new location around the block, and then three more around the city soon after. In response to outrageous, insatiable demand, instead of pricing the cookies dynamically, or forcing everyone to wait in an insane line, or establishing a daily cookie lottery system, instead of any of that they just opened up their Econ 101 textbook and expanded supply. The price has been relatively stable (they’ve gotten a little more expensive but not much), more people are getting cookies than ever, and the line has vanished. I don’t have to complain about waiting on line and hearing the Murray Hill new-grads in front of me talk about how they heard about my neighborhood spot on TikTok, who loudly discuss their plans to go to “West Village” afterwards. Those people are now my compatriots, because there’s enough for everyone. There’s cookie abundance.
For some things like cookies and shrimp and octopus cocktails, expanding supply should be relatively straightforward. For live events, it’s basically impossible. There are a specific number of seats in Metlife Stadium. But we can be creative. I didn’t want to shell out $700 for first-round Knicks playoff tickets ( Zellnor Myrie’s Zohran-esque call to set aside cheaper tickets for real New Yorkers didn’t pan out), so I had a great time at the free live watch party in the plaza outside the Garden, with hundreds of other die-hard fans. Then it blew up on TikTok and by the second-round, it was too mobbed to get close to the screen. They should have figured out a way to set up five more across the city. From a policy perspective, that would have been better than forgoing tax revenue to arbitrarily award me and no one else a massively subsidized ticket.
Where this actually matters most, of course, is housing. Supply can be expanded, but we’ve made it functionally illegal to do so, and it will take a herculean effort from a mayor that is maniacally focused on making housing more affordable and building as much as possible everywhere to do it. Zohran has given many many public indications that he wants to be that guy.
But there will be immense resistance. In his big Zohran profile for the New Yorker last week, reporter Eric Lach recalled an encounter between his subject and a senior pastor of a large Black congregation in Crown Heights. “Now, are the people who voted for you the same people who are pricing us out?” the pastor asked Mamdani. With the fraught racial dynamics of gentrification at play there, it is extremely hard for Mamdani to make the abundance case to that pastor and his congregation. He would get absolutely killed if he pulled out a supply-and-demand chart and explained that counter-intuitively, building flashy “luxury” highrises on top of decrepit Atlantic Avenue car-washes would actually make all housing cheaper, by expanding supply. It is much easier for him to enthusiastically agree, throw fat cat developers and monopolistic private equity landlords under the bus, and pledge to gatekeep the housing market for people who’ve lived in Crown Heights for decades, to keep out the hordes of young (white) professionals. All the incentives in that room point him, and Cuomo, and every other politician for the last forty years, in that direction.
Zohran succumbed to that pressure for the World Cup pricing, in a low-stakes, symbolic, zero-impact way. I urge him not to when he’s in office and it actually counts.