Andrew Yang joins in a prayer circle outside Barclays Center in Brooklyn on May 22.
Photographer: Dolly Faibyshev for Bloomberg BusinessweekAndrew Yang Hopes to Ride His Free-Money Plan to NYC’s City Hall
Yang wants to launch the largest basic income program in history. But would it work?
When Andrew Yang said he was running for mayor of New York City in January, people were thrilled. This spring he’d do something like deliver a speech outside a Brooklyn catering company, and a passing jogger would see him, stop, and jog in place for half an hour just to listen to him talk. He’d be outside a food hall in Hell’s Kitchen when a young woman would approach him and, her voice shaking with nervousness, ask him to sign the back of her cellphone case. On a subway platform, a teenage girl squealed when she saw him, then apologized for being too young to vote.
“Andrew Yang is pretty sick,” Alex Arce, 20, a student at New York University, told me in April. Arce and a friend had happened upon Yang as he stood outside a boarded‑up restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village and called for a full reopening of New York’s bars.