New York City’s business elites are long accustomed to direct access to City Hall, where even Democratic mayors felt the need to court the city’s wealthiest and most influential corporate leaders.

That access is getting shredded by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The mayor this week fired dozens of corporate leaders from the advisory board of a multimillion-dollar philanthropic fund called the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City.

The nonprofit group uses private donors to give City Hall a pot of money to help finance its agenda. Mamdani removed all of the advisers on the group’s board, which many on Wall Street and in the development trenches saw as a sign that he isn’t much interested in their opinions.

Mamdani said he is creating a new advisory board that will include appointees with the same background as previous members, “as well as those who oftentimes have not been at the heart of the conversations of how philanthropy can build upon the work of public goods and public dollars.”

The shake-up marked the latest effort by Mamdani, an avowed Democratic Socialist, to put distance between himself and the city’s traditional power brokers.

“Twenty or 30 years ago, real estate in New York City could single-handedly stop something or make something happen,” said James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York and one of the board members who was dismissed from the Mayor’s Fund. But under Mamdani, “one has to consider whether he is looking for opportunities to pick fights to stir up the base.” … And he brought in an antitrust crusader in Lina Khan to chair the city’s Economic Development Corp., the government body that the real estate community closely relies on to execute large-scale development projects.