New York is Not Broken

I live just a few hundred yards away from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. In the spring and summer of 2020, the arena was the site of numerous Black Lives Matter protests. Day after day, I would look out my window and watch hundreds of protestors streaming by. The vast majority of them seemed peaceful enough, but some were clearly spoiling for confrontation, chanting anti-police slogans and leaving “ACAB” graffiti in their wake on nearby signs and buildings.

Over the course of the protests, helicopters routinely hovered overhead and dozens of arrests were made around the Barclays Center. It was a time of passionate intensity, fueled in no small part by the disruptions of the COVID pandemic and the emotions unleashed by the presidential race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. On many days, I found myself wondering if the country could be on the brink of collapse.

As it happens, I also live a couple hundred yards away from a police precinct house. During the months of protest in 2020, I would often walk past the station. To my surprise, there was no sense that the precinct or its inhabitants were under siege. Indeed, on most days I would find cops out front idly chatting with passersby. The social contract didn’t feel like it was about to give way — to the contrary, it felt like things were actually going pretty well, at least in my corner of the universe.

In the years since 2020, this sense of cognitive dissonance — the feeling that somehow the world is simultaneously on the verge of falling apart and continuing to function just fine — has stayed with me, sometimes waxing and sometimes waning. In recent days, it has come back in force. 

Mayoral frontrunner Andrew Cuomo has predicated his campaign on the argument that New York is a city in crisis: dangerous, disorderly and demoralized. This kind of rhetoric echoes across the internet. The Manhattan Institute claims the next mayor will inherit “a city in decline.” According to prominent pundits, contemporary New York City is a place defined by failing institutions and broken systems, including our property tax structure, health inspection process, rent guidelines, child welfare system, street vending licensing and political culture. That’s a lot of dysfunction for a city that styles itself the greatest in the country, if not the world.

It is of course true that New York has many problems. But any honest look at the state of New York would also reveal a city that has largely recovered from the dislocations of the pandemic, a time when violence increased and many fled the city for greener pastures. The latest statistics are, by and large, good ones for New York. Crime — not all categories, but most — is down. The economy is strong and unemployment is significantly reduced from the heights of 2020. The city’s population is growing again.

But these facts don’t seem to captivate the public square. Unfortunately, the incentives that govern the behavior of headline writers, politicians and activists all point in the direction of alarmism. These actors are responding rationally to the realities of the social media era. To generate any kind of urgency for your cause these days, it is essential to frame the problems at hand in the most dire terms possible. 

Thus, crises are in bloom all around us. Among other things, we currently have a crisis of affordability, a crisis of mental health, a crisis of inequality, and, of course, a crisis of democracy itself.  This glut of supposed crises may help explain why Kamala Harris’ campaign failed to convince most voters that Donald Trump was a danger to the country — if everything is breathlessly framed as a crisis, it becomes difficult to discern what is truly an existential threat and what is just hype.

Our predilection for catastrophism is aided and abetted by an enduring truth: bad news travels fast. To paraphrase Jonathan Swift (or whoever actually said it first), a viral video can get halfway around the world before a nuanced depiction of a complicated state of affairs can even put on its boots. Thanks to social media, one example of something bad happening on the subway can instantly eclipse the thousands of positive interactions that happen underground on a daily basis.

Over time, this negativity bias leaves a mark. According to a poll from the political strategists at Honan Strategy Group, 75% of Democrats in New York believe the city is in a state of crisis. And the Citizens Budget Commission reports that just 30% of New Yorkers say that they are happy living here.

Cause and effect are difficult to disentangle — it is unclear whether the public’s sour mood reflects the media it is consuming or if the media is simply mirroring the unhappiness of its customers. Regardless, New York would appear to be a case study in what economist Tyler Cowen calls “negative social contagion.” The basic idea is simple: Negativity breeds more negativity. “When people feel bad and act badly, if only in rhetoric, they make others around them worse as well,”  says Cowen.

It is hard to gauge the temper of a city of more than 8 million residents (to say nothing of a country of 335 million people — similar dynamics of free-floating anger and generally positive statistical indicators have also characterized the United States over the past 10 years or so).  To correctly assess the mood of the public, you have to pay attention to both the words and the music of the city. The noise on social media may be mostly negative, but the underlying rhythm of the city remains upbeat. According to Dorothy Parker, in contrast to other cities, “New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.”

If you listen for it, it is still possible to discern this leitmotif in city life. (However unrealistic his policy proposals may be, with his sunny campaign Zohran Mamdani has done the best job among the mayoral candidates of tapping into the current of optimism that powers New York.) Somehow, millions of people speaking dozens of different languages and pursuing disparate (and often conflicting) goals manage to live and work and commute together cheek by jowl without the whole thing degenerating into chaos and acrimony. Far from being broken, New York is fundamentally a miracle, offering daily testimony to our ability to overcome the worst impulses of human nature and live together in something that reasonably approximates harmony.

Our online narratives need to better reflect this reality. This is important not just for our collective mental health but for our ability to address the challenges that continue to plague our city.  It is difficult indeed to solve problems if we cannot accurately assess the state of the world and we cannot summon the optimism to believe that change is in fact possible.