New York Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani and his constituent services director Mariela Ortiz do community outreach at a recent event in New York City.Mother Jones illustration; Courtesy of Mariela Ortiz

Have you ever reached out to a customer-service helpline and fallen into a vortex of bad phone-tree options, all AI-generated, none of which have anything to do with your problem? There’s no capable human to help—even after you beg for a “representative!” across the automated line.

That’s how Jennifer M., a lifelong resident of Astoria, Queens, felt when her 66-year-old mother-in-law was widowed and fell behind on paying her rent in 2023. Debilitated by severe arthritis and addled by grief, an eviction loomed in less than two weeks. Surely, Jennifer thought, her mother-in-law qualified for some government assistance. But figuring out what kind and from which agencies took her through the frustrating and often-futile process of trying to navigate New York’s byzantine bureaucracy.

“Everyone we would call, they would give us the runaround and send us right back where we started,” she says, asking not to share her last name to protect her mother-in-law’s privacy.

That is, until she requested help from the office of then-New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who is now mayor-elect of New York City, and reached his constituent services director, Mariela Ortiz.

Ortiz has served in this role for the last three of Mamdani’s five years in the state legislature and has become well-versed in helping the people of New York’s District 36 battle slumlords and unresponsive government agencies. To prove a housing complex was illegally turning off the heat in the middle of the night, for instance, Ortiz once secured a building inspector to do a surprise inspection at midnight. (She hasn’t received complaints about heating there since). After a year of chronic outages, she pushed the city to restore gas to 20 residential customers and a beloved Mexican restaurant. She has even personally accompanied worried constituents to their traffic court and social security hearings.

“Our agencies are here to provide services,” Ortiz says of........

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