Two Top Thinkers on Cities Dissect NYC’s Mayoral Candidates

Harvard economist Ed Glaeser and Yale Law School state and local government law professor David Schleicher don’t always agree when it comes to New York politics, but on this mayoral election they do: among the 11 candidates in the crowded field, they insist, most aren’t saying much of anything. Jamie, Ed and David run down this cycle’s policy platforms — the most overplayed, the worst, and, somewhere in the mix, the ones that might just have a shot at doing a lot of good for New York City.

You can listen to this episode, “Two Top Thinkers on Cities Dissect NYC’s Mayoral Candidates,” on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Jamie: You are listening to After Hours with Jamie Rubin, a Vital City Podcast. I'm Jamie Rubin.

On this episode of After Hours, we decided to take advantage of the fact that it's the primary season here in New York City. The primary itself is June 24th of 2025, which is a mere few weeks away. We've got a full slate of mayoral candidates who are Democrats, and then of course there's the incumbent mayor who is running as an independent.

Very little has been said about the policies that all these candidates have been putting forward, and so we decided to talk to two friends who are also experts on urban policy. The first is Ed Glaeser, who was a guest on the very first episode of After Hours. Ed is a professor of economics at Harvard studying issues of state and local governance and economics.

David Schleicher is a professor of law at Yale Law School. Also a very well-known academic of urban politics and policy, more recently on metropolitan municipal bankruptcies, of all things. They're also friends of each other. They're also longtime New Yorkers. In fact, I think they were both born in New York.

And they both have points of view. They see the world a little bit differently than I do. I try to be analytical, although not, perhaps, as analytical as a trained economist and a trained legal academic, but I'm probably more on the progressive side. It's interesting to have those points of view to bang against. 

We went policy area by policy area, but the real point is to take each of these candidates seriously on their own terms — to get the focus away from the politics, which is what everybody talks about all the time, and talk about what it would actually be like to have one of these people as the mayor of New York City. Here's my conversation with Ed Glaeser and David Schleicher.

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Ed Glaeser and David Schleicher. Thanks for being on — Ed for the second time. So you're the first repeat guest. Congratulations. 

Ed: That is amazing. I'm deeply honored. 

Jamie: Comes with a varsity letter jacket. David, unfortunately, just the first time for you. 

David: Thanks for having me. 

Jamie: No problem. And the bar goes higher, so you're not getting any varsity letter jackets for the second time — sorry. I do want to set the stage so people understand their context. Both of you are New Yorkers. How would you characterize yourselves? As center … right? 

Ed: Yeah, sure. I'm comfortable with the center-right view. I'm a traditional New York Republican. 

David: I'm a classic New York City Democrat, though on a kind of markety side of that type of understanding. 

Jamie: I would say I'm probably a more traditional left/center progressive Democrat. You know, given where the world is now, if you had to draw like a little circle — one of those scatter graphs — you’d probably capture all of us in some way or shape or form.

To start things off, do you have any high level observations around what the campaign has been so far? 

David: The campaign is interesting in that there are a lot of different candidates, and the most interesting thing to me about their platforms, broadly speaking, is that they are not addressing a New York City in crisis.

They’re not like, “The city's about to face a huge fiscal crisis,” which is what most experts seem to think. Only a few of the candidates have any ideas that are on the scale of the housing problems that New York City has, which is in sharp contrast with the City Charter Commission, which thinks that the housing problems in New York are enormous.

Ed: I mean, another way of phrasing it is they're sort of responding to the wrong crisis. In a sense, it's exactly what I worried about when I wrote my book “Survival of the City,” which was: we are in a world in which there's been building up a lot of progressive anger at real wrongs. But at the same moment, you know, Zoom has made it easier for people to depart. It’s a period in which lots of money can relocate fairly easily and continue to connect with other people. That to me feels like a replay of the 1970s, when you had the ability to exit. You look at most of these platforms and they’re only responding to the poverty, they're only responding to the inequality — they’re not responding at all to the fact that 50% of the fanciest buildings are still empty and it's never been easier for businesses to relocate. 

Jamie: I agree with all that. An interesting thing about it is that, as you both said, experts would say that there's a crisis. And if you look at polls, a lot of New Yorkers from every stratum think the city's in crisis and it's all the same stuff. Housing affordability is number one. There's public safety, there's public disorder — that class of things. And then there's sort of all others.

Okay, we're going to talk about policies of the various candidates, and we're going to have maybe a little bit of a murderers’ row of some of your “favorites.” David, do you want to kick us off? 

David: Yeah, so we mentioned the fiscal problems that the city is having. There’s the big structural deficit; the city headcount is still extraordinarily high post-de Blasio, that’s only fallen a little bit. There are some real major fiscal problems coming with the Trump administration. This city has spent a huge amount of money in the wake of getting all the COVID money and is now facing some limits. 

There is exactly one proposal from any candidate, as far as I can tell, that is responsive —or kind of discusses — some of the fiscal problems. The best fiscal idea I saw was Brad Lander's idea to impose by statute some things that were originally in the fiscal control response of the late ‘70s response to fiscal question. These are some accounting rules and other things that were imposed upon the city that are now in bond covenants but are not legally required. 

Lander has an idea to make these things statutory. It doesn't bring in money, but it is a set of fiscal rules — and a mandatory contribution to the rainy day fund — that I think are salutatory. On the worst fiscal side, I'd say there's two and they're worst in the opposite directions.

Andrew Cuomo has a huge number of tax cuts, including no tax on tips, and a truly, truly crazy one to impose the statewide 2% annual increase on single family home property taxes. New York City's property taxes are already extraordinarily weighted towards single family home homeowners against renters.

The other side of this is that Mamdani has a huge set of tax increases, including income tax increases, for people who make over a million dollars that would increase the combined tax rate to 54%. 

Ed: It's an extra two percentage points for the millionaires, right? 

David: Yeah, and he's using that money to spend on a bunch of new programs. Neither one of them is responsive to the fiscal problem. One is a huge tax increase to spend on new stuff, not to fill in the gaps. And the other one is a huge bunch of tax cuts in the face of fiscal problems. 

Jamie: So just to stop on that point for one second. The City doesn't have a whole lot of power to do anything on the tax front. I suppose the property tax proposal, I guess he could do?

David: I think it would need state legislative approval support too, actually.

Jamie: Alright, so forget that. And then, you know, you can say whatever you want about new taxes on millionaires, but that's always something that has to go to the state and never works. But I agree with you. They're not fully responsible. Ed?

Ed: I agree with that. I think the thing that feels missing to me is a sense of how we actually get more out of less money. If we think that a fiscal crunch is unavoidable, how do we become smarter about delivering services for poor New Yorkers? How do we become smarter about dealing with things in the housing space or in criminal justice? Because we are facing this crisis and we do want to, at the same time, address the sort of longstanding, progressive goals. We need to figure out how to be smarter about doing things like making life better for the poorest and most vulnerable New Yorkers.

Jamie: I had not seen the Lander proposal. Whatever you think of Brad Lander, he does know details. 

David: Yeah. The wonkiest of the candidates, for sure. 

Jamie: Wonkiest of the candidates. It sounds like there, he's sort of inadvertently going to the credit rating. He's basically saying, we're gonna highlight for investors potential fiscal instability.

David: Yeah, it's imposing some kind of fiscal constitutional rules, which are something that all states and all cities have. This is kind of a variation on them because they are things we actually already have, but it's making them a little more permanent, which I do think would be attractive to the bond market.

Obviously for New Yorkers who are scarred by the fiscal crisis of the ‘70s, that's a really relevant consideration. 

Jamie: Am I right that some of the structures of the ‘70s, like the MAC and the fiscal control board, are now gone? 

David: Gone away. 

Jamie: So those are the structures that were put in place after the crisis in the mid ‘70s and staffed in order to sort of protect the fiscal status a little bit. Has anybody proposed bringing any of that stuff back? Would it make any sense? 

David: I mean, you see a lot of efforts to do this around the country. You see a variety of versions around the country of fiscal controls imposed on cities. In North Carolina, cities' budgets have to get approved by a state official before they go into action. Connecticut had bailed out the city of Hartford and imposed some controls on it. 

Jamie: Ed, taking this idea of a potential fiscal crisis seriously as a budget matter: If the Trump budget in some version passes eventually, something is gonna happen to the state and city budgets, whether through cuts or through block granting or whatever it is — city budget is going to have to do the same thing.

Has there been any attempt to look at what that might actually mean, for example, for New York City or other cities that you know of? Or do we just not have enough information right now? 

Ed: I don't think we're confident enough about what the bill is gonna come out of Congress as, so I think it’s been relatively limited. David, have there been any good government groups in New York that have been doing this?

David: They're all guessing. As with everything coming out of Washington, by the time you've come up with the proposal, things have changed.

I do think one thing that's related is that there are a lot of things that have happened that are indirect effects of the budget that, again, are also not being talked about. There is not a single proposal in here that talks about what happens if there's a huge decrease in tourism.

Tourism is a major industry in New York City. Lots of people don't want to come here anymore and there's, like, nothing. Similarly, New York is a very trade-dependent city, and obviously is a very financially dependent city. These kinds of gyrations will have huge effects even if there's no direct fiscal change.

Jamie: Okay, so that's fiscal. How about the next category? Ed, do you want to introduce something? 

Ed: Let's talk about housing. It's gotta be done. Although I am awfully tempted with the City-run groceries to head to produce — 

David: We’ve gotta get there.

Jamie: We'll get there, You don't like City-run groceries? You don't think that’s a great idea? 

David: We should do it now that we've mentioned it. 

Jamie: Let's do City-run groceries. 

David: Of the problems facing all of this, the one thing that America does really well is we have very efficient supermarkets. The proposal to have City-run grocery stores —

Jamie: This is Mamdani, I believe.

David: Yeah. The idea that the city that has the most expensive transit projects in literally the history of the world; the most expensive jails, by an order of magnitude over others; the most expensive everything — will be more efficient and be able to provide things at lower prices than Walmart or Fresh Direct? It’s so baffling that it’s really hard to talk about.

Ed: It's mind boggling. And we already have a relatively well-functioning federal program that subsidizes food with SNAP. If you really wanted to do more to subsidize food, maybe you'd wanna think more about easing the permitting for things like big box stores.

Jamie: The grocery store policy on its face — why not? — is he trying to solve the problem of “food is too expensive” and whatever's gonna happen with inflation? Is he trying to solve the food desert problem, which in some places is an issue? 

David: Both. There's some evidence that groceries are too expensive in New York City. Jessie Handbury, a professor at Penn, has a wonderful paper that shows that the cost of high-end products in New York are cheaper on average. New York's a great place to buy caviar—there's a lot of competition for caviar. But the cost of orange juice is very high. It's not that there's not a problem to be addressed on some level.

The question is, “is this a proposal that might do it, given the high costs of City provision?” The City basically has a variety of rules to stop Walmart from coming in on labor grounds, but Walmart is going to produce cheaper orange juice. New Yorkers end up buying things from bodegas, which everyone who's bought anything from a bodega knows is very expensive, and this is because there’s limits on competition. 

Jamie: Although, to that point, my guess is you'd start to see displacement of bodegas pretty fast, which would make nobody happy. 

Ed: The other thing, of course, that's important, which feeds into this, is crime in retail. If you are selling in an area where there’s a lot of shrinkage — whatever our euphemism for shoplifting is — prices are gonna be higher to offset that. That's hard to work against. The interesting thing about most bodegas is that they're set up with a lot of human capital there, and that’s in part to reduce the amount of shrinkage, but that also adds costs and makes sure that the marginal price is gonna be higher. 

Jamie: Okay. Housing! Let's get to housing. 

Ed: Absolutely. There's a lot of housing policies which are of the form of, “we're gonna ratchet up rent control in different ways.” All of which I think are largely going to be counterproductive.

Mamdani is a Freeze-the-Rent guy. He also has a plan of housing by and for New Yorkers. He's gonna put our public dollars to work, and I quote, “triple the city's production of permanently affordable union-built rent stabilized homes, constructing 200,000 new units over the next 10 years.” 

Again, it's deeply ambitious. It lives in a fiscal dream world, where there's no attention whatsoever to the idea that like New York City has a budget and there are limitations on this stuff. It's basically like the public sector is really good at building stuff, and so the public sector is gonna build stuff. What we really want to do is hyper-control the private sector and make sure that they don't increase prices on anything. It’s a very interesting combination.

David: I want to shout out a positive one. Zellnor Myrie has a proposal for a million new homes. The details you can quibble with a little bit, but the scale of the ambition is on par with the scale of the problem. It has some things I don't like, but the broader mission of that matches the City Charter Commission's idea, which is housing everywhere in every neighborhood. 

Cuomo has a thing to avoid all the neighborhoods and only build downtown — well, there's not enough space. New York is a dense place. I like Lander’s idea of building on city-owned golf courses.

Jamie: I knew we had to get to this, we had to get to this. 

David: Cities should not be running golf courses. Certainly not four. It’s extremely valuable real estate. Golf courses are used by very few people. 

Jamie: And by the way, it's not four. I think the city has 13 and he's saying, let's take four. 

David: Let’s build on four — sorry, that’s right. 

Jamie: Do you play golf?

David: Oh, no, no, no. I play tennis.

Jamie: Oh my God. I wish people could see your face.

Ed: No, no, no. 

Jamie: Ed? 

Ed: I have no hand-eye coordination whatsoever. I was asked by my tennis teacher in summer camp to stop playing for the good of the game. 

Jamie: There’s a real anti-golf bias here, and I just think I have to call it out because it's something you're gonna have to wrestle with yourselves. But look, it may be a perfectly fine idea. The idea of then going through the process of figuring out which of the four golf courses to close — it's never gonna happen, and it'll be horrible. 

David: And it would require a state legislative vote, I think, because of the public trust doctrine. I think the broader thing on the housing bit is that it's just not on the scale of the problem. Stringer’s like, “Build on City-owned vacant land.”

Yeah, it’s never occurred to anyone that we should build on City-owned vacant land. You either think the city has a housing problem—which they all say—or you don't. And if you do, you have to approach things that will make some people angry. 

Jamie: I don't disagree. It is hard to discern in these platforms. Back to the state budget — if you look at what's in the housing piece of the state budget, it's just, it's incrementalism at its worst. It's a mystery to me at a time when everybody, including the presidential candidates, acknowledge that we have a housing crisis — I guess it's just some lingering fear of NIMBYism or something. 

Ed: It’s the same basic political force that explains why we haven't tackled this as a country or as a city for the last 30 years — which is that there are gonna be losers. We don't have a way of compensating the losers that we've all agreed on. As mayor, you're trying to create as few people who think they're gonna lose out from you as possible. It takes courage to do this. 

David: I'd also say the low turnout in these elections — this is gonna be an extremely low turnout election. All the evidence is that where you bring turnout, and or where you require public participation, you get the exact same populations of people. The only people who show up are homeowners or people who have permanent housing through rent control. As a result, the demands of housing consumers are just down the food chain. 

One of the things I liked about the City Charter Commission idea is that one of the ideas is to move the election to an even numbered year in November, and to move to a system that puts a lot of pressure into the general election rather than the primary.

Both of these ideas are about getting more voice for ordinary people.

Ed: Part of the fundamental problem here is that people who do not currently live in New York, but who would benefit from more building — they're never gonna be at the election, no matter what you do.

I agree with doing local elections on even years for sure, but you still have this fundamental issue, which is why I've always thought that some form of the state pushing back against local zoning control makes sense to me. 

David: One of the good innovations in housing policy in New York in the last couple of years has been moving to doing citywide things rather than doing everything through neighborhood rezonings.

You can see this in de Blasio's Zoning for Quality and Affordability, through Adams' City of Yes. The central idea of this is, first of all, it stops like purely neighborhood competition or limits it; secondly, it gets big interest groups involved. Your big employers and your big municipal unions have a reason to care a little bit about housing because it's happening at a citywide level, it's on the level that affects them. 

Jamie: I totally agree. I will say, one of the things that has caught my eye on a bunch of the proposals, is that while the housing piece hasn't been particularly inspiring, many of them have talked about NYCHA, which is something of a new thing for them. It hasn't been the traditional, “well, we're gonna fix NYCHA.”

Ed: So can we turn around this podcast and ask you your views on this? You know more about NYCHA than either of us do. Which of these proposals make sense to you in terms of the NYCHA reforms? 

Jamie: I think it's pretty clear — several of them, including Mamdani, have said very clearly that they're supportive of increased redevelopment of NYCHA. That implies a lot of things.

It doesn't necessarily say PACT, which is what we call the RAD program, which is rental assistance demonstration using Section 8 to bring private capital into the failing NYCHA buildings. It's been something that this team has done very aggressively and we're starting to do much more aggressively over the coming months to shrink the massive capital gap.

It's controversial, but it has been much more controversial in the past. The fact that it's made its way into even the Mamdani platform really symbolizes something, I think. Beyond that, what they all are implicitly or explicitly endorsing is that it's time to replace buildings with new buildings — tearing down old public housing and rebuilding public housing, and then building on the underbuilt land (NYCHA is massively underbuilt to its zoning) new affordable housing or new market rate housing or whatever it is. They are endorsing that. 

That is something that's very controversial — not even contemplated several years ago — and we're now doing it in Chelsea, which has the most expensive real estate in New York City. That is fascinating to me. It means that there's something in the air about NYCHA that's basically either a recognition of the need to do something aggressive or a positive sense that this NYCHA can handle it, which is great. That's good housing policy in my mind.

What do you make of landmark preservation or preservationism from a policy perspective?

David: When I teach preservation, I use one of Ed's ideas — Ed had an idea once that we need to have a preservation budget.

Ed: I love many of New York's older buildings, and I think the city would lose a great deal if some of its architectural treasures were removed. That being said, not every glazed brick post-war building needs to be preserved for eternity. There's a tendency, particularly with the districts — I see the abuse as being much more in the districts than I do in the individual buildings — to just keep on increasing the stock of preserved housing, with no sense that there needs to be any limitation on this. 

As a result, when I was looking at this 20 years ago, 15% of Manhattan south of 96th Street was in a historic preservation district, which is taking a huge amount out of the areas in which you could potentially build.

I think that we should give the preservationists some sort of fixed number of homes or fixed amount of acreage or fixed something that they can do. If they wanna stick something else in, they should take something else out. 

David: Ed, what do you think of the crime proposals? 

Ed: Shall we move to crime from this?

Jamie: Oh, please. 

Ed: We have moved away from where we were five years ago when Defund the Police was seriously on the table. I'm hostile to Defund the Police in terms of getting police out of nonviolent encounters with people. My friends who have been in the police business would say that it's precisely those non-confrontational interactions with ordinary citizens that build the muscles to actually work well with citizenry. 

I'm very wary about getting the police out of ordinary interactions with citizens. 

David: There are a few things I liked: both Stringer and Myrie had proposals that were basically aimed at improving the clearance rate. Myrie has a “hire a bunch of detectives” proposal, and Stringer has a “let's use technology more and put cameras up in lots of places.” I think that this is an interesting idea because the murder rate in New York is falling really dramatically. It's gonna be down 30% this year, it looks like — down to back to where it was pre-COVID, which was kind of a low since the middle of the last century. 

In the past, we've had an idea that the reason to improve the clearance rate is 'cause it will reduce future murders. The evidence is fine, a little mixed. Instead we could think that having lower murders allows us to provide justice to people. A lot of the proposals are about improving quality of life, not because it has an effect on the murder rate, but because the quality of life in New York could be better. 

Ed: I thought Stringer's proposals were by and large sensible. The only problem with the Stringer proposals on public safety is that they suffered from the same problem of all the proposals that were discussed at the beginning, which is like, I don't know who's gonna pay for this stuff. 

Jamie: Right. Well, that's the issue. It's 3,000 more cops, 5,000 more cops, 10,000 more.

I don't know what the average police starting salary is. I think it's probably 60,000-65,000 plus benefits… maybe it's 100,000. It's a lot of money. 

David: Stringer’s at least noted that he was just going to try to get back to the number. Everyone else had an increase in headcount. His was a little more limited. He notes that we can't fill all the positions we have now at the salaries. The police are retiring. The challenge is filling the spots much more than it's about increasing the numbers.

Jamie: Yeah, I agree with that. It is interesting overall, I agree with you. There hasn't really been that kind of rhetoric, except for when it artificially comes up. If somebody says, “what did you think about stop and frisk?” And Whitney Tilson or somebody sort of clearly is like, “Eh, maybe so,” and everybody piles on — rightly so. We were stopping and frisking 700,000 people a year in the Bloomberg era, now it's down to five digits. But there seems to be a convergence on something that looks like a middle.

Ed: I want to shout out John Tebes and Jeffrey Fagan's paper, “Do Pedestrian Stops Deter Crime? Evidence from Reforming Stop and Frisk,” which finds that basically, the places that had a lot of stop and frisk and then stopped it had no significant changes in crime. There's no evidence that stop and frisk was particularly effective on doing this. This is a paper that also finds that the areas where you threw extra police did actually reduce crime.

It's not that cops don't matter. Cops matter a lot. But this particularly abusive system of stop and frisk was not particularly a productive use of police officers’ time. 

Jamie: Let me ask a more broad question. It sounds like we're all coming into agreement that there haven't been a lot of revolutionary ideas. You mentioned the idea of building on city owned land — I mean, every year somebody tries to do that. Is it possible that there just aren't that many new ideas under the sun? Is that possible? I mean, we've been trying lots and lots of things for a really long time. It may be that if something terrible happens, we're gonna return to a fiscal control board and some other things. Is there really something that just hasn’t been thought of?

David: I guess the question is not, to me, whether there are some magic ideas out there. There are interesting urban policy ideas going on around the country in different ways. But if you look at New York in relation to other cities, what you see is a couple of big stories.

The cost of providing services in New York is just really, really, really high. New York City's taxes are extraordinarily high and New York City residents do not get — outside of police, actually — a great package of services in response. The schools are okay. The transportation is, I mean, it was mostly built a long time ago for the tax price. The thing you'd want in response to that is someone who was — maybe visionary or maybe not — relentlessly focused on producing the narrow set of public services well.

And then relatedly, they would be directly responsive to the kind of growth concerns of the city, that is to say, that the city just needs a lot of housing. That doesn't require some magic set of ideas, but it does require relentless focus. And I don't see it, man. 

Ed: I'm at the same place, David. Fix the number of services, be relentless in terms of efficiency and cost containment. I'll just give one final thing. I'm often asked about climate change in cities. I tend to think that what New York should be doing whenever it's time to do sea walls or whatever, is just figure out what Singapore is doing, figure out what Amsterdam, is doing and try not to blow up the price by a factor of 10. Take the cities that we know are global leaders in this area and just try not to make the cost go haywire.

Jamie: In closing, two things. One is on that point. I'll point you to a task force that I co-chaired for this mayor. We put out a report that wasn't highly publicized for a variety of reasons about how to pay for the resilient infrastructure that was already on the books — some of it underway, some of it not.

It’s clearly necessary at some point, unless you just don't believe in climate change. The costs were, as you expect, very, very high. It would be interesting to have a value engineering approach to those costs. One way or the other, we’re going to have to find ways to pay for that.

The one thing — to your guys' point — that I've noticed that nobody ever talks about is a city manager. I don't know if it makes sense. I would be interested to know whether it's something that has been effective in a lot of places. We don't have it and I have a hard time, I guess, seeing a mayor agree to turn over some of their power to a city manager. But it would sort of say, to your point, the mayor doesn't have to do that. The city manager's going to focus on performance. 

David: Most American cities have city managers. The New York City model is built around a very different theory of accountability, which is that the mayor should be powerful and the mayor should be electorally responsive.

If anything, the direction of movement, at least in the last couple of years, has been towards stronger mayors, on the grounds of creating some political accountability in cities. Different mayors have adopted different management techniques that aren't formal nonpartisan city managers, but are about creating, say, powerful deputy mayors who have a lot of operation.

Think Peter Powers under Giuliani or the commissioner model that Bloomberg pushed. I think that the candidates here have not been clear about what their management theories are, but you've seen radically different ones in New York City over time, all under this idea of a politically responsive mayor.

But they've had very different relationships. Bloomberg had very powerful commissioners, and Giuliani had four people in City Hall who did everything. And those were very different ideas of how to run the city.

Ed: The phrasing that I've always used is that what our crisis of the 1970s brought forth was an era of city mayor-managers who were mayors — elected mayors, as David says — but they had a deeply managerial ethos.

That's Giuliani and that's Bloomberg, and that's Richard Daly in Chicago, Tom Menino in Boston. I think that's a more plausible thing for New York. I just hope that voters, when they go into the polling booths, are looking for someone who can manage well because that's a critical element of what the city needs.

Jamie: Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with another episode of After Hours with Jamie Rubin.