A hundred dollars, one ZIP code, first come first served
New York City’s mayor has found a thousand seats. Zohran Mamdani will announce on Tuesday that he has secured 1,000 tickets for local residents to attend the US Open, priced at $100 each, according to The Athletic.
The conditions are narrow. Buyers need a certified New York City ZIP code. The purchase window opens at 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday and the tickets go on a first-come, first-served basis.
They cover main-draw matches through Sept. 8, the opening day of the men’s and women’s singles quarterfinals, and include seats on the show courts at Arthur Ashe Stadium and Louis Armstrong Stadium.
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The resale market explains the move
The numbers on Ticketmaster make the initiative easy to read. The cheapest resale seat at Arthur Ashe Stadium on opening day was listed at $344. Courtside seats went past $1,000. A grounds pass carrying a face value of $65 was changing hands at $263, a markup of 305 percent.
Mamdani’s tickets cannot enter that market. They are ineligible for resale through Ticketmaster, which shuts the obvious loophole of local buyers turning $100 seats into secondary-market listings at four or five times the price.
Timing that is hard to miss
The tournament begins on Sunday at Flushing Meadows, and the scheme is presented as a response to concerns about surging prices at the Grand Slam. A thousand seats spread across the opening ten days of main-draw play will not move the wider market, and the mayor’s office has not claimed otherwise.
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