Ross Barkan on Who's Not Running and Why

Why don't more businesspeople run for mayor of America's biggest city? Host Jamie Rubin and political commentator Ross Barkan discuss who's not on the ballot in the 2025 mayoral race and why. They analyze Mike Bloomberg's formula for political and managerial success while dissecting former Gov. Andrew Cuomo's comeback attempt. In a thought experiment, they game out exactly how a wealthy outsider might spend $100 million to capture City Hall in a wide-open race. And Barkan delivers a brutal assessment: The current mayor, he estimates, has a 5% chance of survival in what may be the most consequential election in decades. 

You can listen to this episode, "Ross Barkan on Who’s Not Running and Why," on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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

Molly: Jamie, how are you? 

Jamie: Chaotic is what I would say. The president decided to come out with his so-called “skinny budget” last week. Somebody I know called it a “performative budget,” which I think is a funny term. It lays out the president’s hopes and dreams for what he can do to everything that the government does overall. For both my day job, which involves clean energy investing, and my night job, which involves New York City's public housing, there is potentially a lot of extremely difficult news in there. A lot of time now has to be spent figuring out what it is, anticipating, talking to other people who are similarly situated, and gearing up to be helpful — if at all possible — in the effort to negotiate something that's much better.

Molly: Trump is, at least in theory, a businessman. 

Jamie: Mm-hmm. 

Molly: A successful businessman, in his telling of the story. 

Jamie: Sure. 

Molly: Is he wielding some business-y tactics here with this “skinny budget”? 

Jamie: I think it's less a question of whether he's doing something “business-y.” The more interesting question may be, “What does it mean that we have a businessman, or alleged businessman, in that role?”

By the way, we've got them in a lot of other roles in his administration—a lot of alleged businessmen. That means something quite different for the country than when you have technocrats or former elected officials or anything else that we've had in our history. It begs the question, how come it hasn't happened more often?

Molly: Why do you think it hasn't happened more often? 

Jamie: Politically it's just very hard for business people who've never been in elected politics to craft a message that appeals to more people than some very, very small minority who think that business people know everything. Most people think that business people should stay in their lane, and they may well be right.

Mike Bloomberg tried it in 2020 that didn't go all that well, and he had been elected before. It's just a very hard thing to run a presidential campaign successfully. 

Molly: Well, let's talk about the New York City mayoral campaign, because Bloomberg was, many would say, a very successful mayor using his business acumen.

Jamie: I think they would say that, and that's what we're going to spend some time talking with journalist Ross Barkan about in this episode. Ross is a very well-known New York City-based journalist. He started his career at the Queens Tribune. He went to the late, lamented New York Observer. I think it's late — certainly it’s lamented. It was famously once owned by Jared Kushner. 

Ross covered city and national politics for The Observer, and he's now writing for a lot of different outlets including New York Magazine, The Guardian and The Nation. He's written three novels, the most recent of which — “Glass Century” — just came out. 

He wrote a book back in 2021 that was about Andrew Cuomo, so that's also timely. I think it's being reissued just in time for the primaries. It's called “The Prince,” and it followed the rise and fall of Andrew from basically the time he was elected governor until the period of the pandemic. 

Molly: Jamie, you really wanted to talk about this idea of business people running for elected office, especially in New York. How come? 

Jamie: It was interesting to me looking at the field of candidates that we have in the mayoral primaries, including on the Republican side. Why is it that despite, as you said, the fact that the last business person that we had in office was pretty much a raging success, that we haven't had anything like that since? We haven't had a serious business person as a candidate, let alone a mayor.

Molly: Well, let's hope Ross can help us figure this out.

Jamie: The operative question that got me here was this issue of: why is it that we don't have more business people running for mayor, and then being mayor, which I think is kind of interesting. 

Ross: Yeah. It's a very unusual mayoral race. We'll start there. It's not technically an open race, but it basically is an open race because of Eric Adams and all his legal troubles.

Jamie: Alleged legal troubles.

Ross: Alleged. The closest analogue is probably 1977, with Abe Beame, where he was also getting challenged by a Cuomo. But Beame was in the Democratic primary, and of course, Eric Adams has now left it. Even though Beame was so besieged by the fiscal crisis, he was in a stronger position than Adams is now.

I mean, Adams has cratered totally. I think what's interesting about this field  versus past ones is that there are a lot of people who on paper could be formidable candidates but have no interest in running. 

Jamie: So let's tick 'em off. Ritchie Torres.

Ross: Ritchie Torres, right. No interest. Would be an obvious candidate, but is passing to possibly run for governor. I actually told him, “It's easier for you to run for mayor than to run for governor against Kathy Hochul.” He doesn't seem to think that. 

Running statewide is very challenging, obviously. And Hochul, you know, has middling approval ratings, but she’s not scandal-scarred. She's not cratering by any means. That’s gonna be a bloody race for him, but he has no interest in running for mayor. 

Jamie: Alright, so, uh, Dan Goldman. 

Ross: Another one! There is an era where someone like Goldman's running for mayor. Absolutely. I think some of it is the nationalization of politics. I've written about this before, where the spotlight and the glory now is sitting in Congress and not going through New York City.

Someone like Goldman, big off the Trump impeachment — he is not thinking about running a city of 8.5 million people. 

Jamie: AOC? 

Ross: Another one! That's what Bella Abzug was, right? I mean, Bella, in some ways, was the more accomplished AOC. She was a significant historical figure.

AOC of course is mulling the presidency, mulling a Senate race. Being mayor of New York City in your thirties would be massive, but no interest, zero interest. 

Jamie: First woman mayor.

Ross: First woman mayor. I mean, she'd be formidable if she ran for mayor. In a way, it’s much more winnable than winning a Democratic primary for president for her age.

Jamie: You said nationalization, which I think is probably right. That begs the question: what kind of person wants to be the standard-bearer for some national thing?

Ross: With the mayor of New York City, you are of course a national figure. It's an incredibly demanding job and I have a theory that if you think of the way social media is now how you get attention — it is those national issues and those members of Congress who are able to seize public attention. And also, it's easier. The reality is that being a legislator — it's not a walk in the park, but let's be honest — you're taking votes in a body of 435 people versus being the executive of the largest police department in America by far, the largest education department by far.

[As mayor], you are making decisions that people live and die by. You can sit in Congress for 30 years and not do all that much. 

Jamie: I don't know if people still talk about this, but the mayor of New York used to be called the second most powerful job in America.

Ross: Second hardest. 

Jamie: Second hardest for sure, but also the most powerful. It's very powerful. You have a bully pulpit. 

Ross: And it still is. And I think it's getting underrated. And this is a challenging time to be mayor of New York City.

But when was it easy? Any era. You could say when De Blasio took over from Bloomberg, it was probably in retrospect a peachier time, in terms of very low crime, good fiscal situation. But still. When I covered his first year as mayor, he had Eric Garner. He had two cops assassinated. It was non-stop crises. The difference between being a mayor and being a member of Congress is that when a cop gets killed, you have to go talk to that family and you have to be everywhere and you are responsible for almost everything.

There's no off switch if you're doing it correctly. That's one of many of Eric Adams' problems: he never took the job that seriously and New Yorkers wised up to him. I think it's a credit to the electorate that Adams' showmanship was never enough. 

Jamie: So let's go back to your original point about the mayoral field. Your view is that in theory, this is a deep mayoral field. You've got people with experience. 

Ross: And then talented. Disclosure, I'm friends with Zohran Mamdani, but I would say objectively he's very talented. I have great respect for him. But also, he's a 33-year-old state assemblyman.

Even the fact that he's maxed out and he's polling at like 16%, which is incredible given what I just said — as he rises in the polls and voters start to think about this race very seriously, some will think, can a 33-year-old state legislator run my city? Some will say yes, and some will say no. 

Jamie: I mean, it's 200,000 city employees, or however many it is, and a $120 billion budget. Workers in every corner of the city. Massive issues of every kind. It's every managerial issue you can possibly imagine. Why would you think that somebody who's never run anything should be given that job? It's a crazy thought, objectively. Doesn't mean nobody can do it.

Ross: I think that the good faith argument for someone like Zohran would be if you put a talented person in place, they'll delegate. I think that's something that Bloomberg did very well. Obviously Bloomberg had massive, great executive experience running a company and becoming a billionaire, but I think what made Bloomberg on the balance a good mayor was his willingness to bring in smart people and trust them to do things. 

Jamie: As far as I can tell, every candidate gives some indication that that's how they wanna do things: “I want to hire good people and delegate.” But the problem with the Bloomberg model is it assumes that the delegation is kind of easy.

I've been in the business world for 30-some-odd years. Delegating is really hard. Particularly if you're suddenly the mayor of New York City. The temptation is, “I'd love to do all this stuff.” You can't, and you shouldn't. The real trick is to figure out how the delegation ought to work, and there's no reason to think that some 33 year old knows how to do that. 

Ross: Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas at 32, so you never know. 

Jamie: One of one. With all that said — all things being equal — if you said to me, “Okay, I want to find somebody who knows how to run a big, complicated organization; knows how to delegate and attract talent and deal with talent.” I would've said, “The private sector is a pretty good place to start.” And yet, except for Bloomberg, that is never what the city of New York has done. We've never elected anybody like that.

We've never really taken anybody like that seriously. Anybody who's tried has been sort of dismissed. I think about the 2021 election. We had Ray McGuire. Ray was written off. I would've thought that in New York, of all places, there's fertile ground for this.

What's the issue? 

Ross: There's a two part question. One is: Why don't voters choose them? But also: Why aren't there more Bloombergs? 

Why aren't there more people as wealthy as Bloomberg? You have to start there. If you want to run for mayor as a businessperson, with no political experience and no political base and no real name recognition, you're starting from zero.

Jamie: Zero. 

Ross: Like if one of us ran for mayor.

Jamie: Well, not me. 

Ross: [laughs] Not you. Yeah. You have not cultivated that base in any way, which politicians do. It's hard. It's very hard to do. You need to spend a lot of money. I don't think the wealthy realize Bloomberg spent a lot of money to win.

It wasn't just that, but if you look back to 2001 against Mark Green, I think he spent over $50 million, and that was in 2001 money. By ‘09, to beat [Bill] Thompson, he'd spent over a hundred million. I think that New Yorkers are open to the businessman or businesswoman running and succeeding, but that sort of candidate must get their name out there.

The average New Yorker probably barely knew about Ray McGuire when that race was over.

Jamie: Oh, I'm sure. That's right. Let's think about who credibly could do this. Could Jamie Diamond run for mayor? 

Ross: Probably not in a Democratic primary. Someone like Jamie Diamond would have to run it as a Republican or independent.

I'll give you a scenario. If someone like Michael Bloomberg — obviously a little younger, he is in his eighties now — some 60-year-old billionaire with some reputation of managing things, says, “I'm going to run as an independent for mayor in 2025,” and someone like Andrew Cuomo wins the nomination, or someone like Zohran wins the nomination, an independent who self funds like Bloomberg did would be very interesting in the general election. Either against a Cuomo or against a Zohran. Not saying they would win, but if you took a Bloomberg-like person who spent $50 million in November against Curtis Sliwa and a sort of polarizing democratic nominee, it's possible. I think there's a window there.

Jamie: So here’s what we're gonna do.

Ross: That's a competition. 

Jamie: Congratulations. It's an alternative universe. You are now Ross Barkan, but with a billion dollars. You get in, you get the signatures, and you are good to go. Cool. First question: You have a hundred million dollars you're going to spend in October and November. How are you spending it? 

Ross: I would be spending a lot on TV for sure. I would have a paid field operation, because I’d be able to afford it. I'd be sending mail too. Why not? If you have the money, you can do all of it. 

I would do TV, mail, paid field, but I would have a strong message. I think Bloomberg, to his credit, wasn't just a rich guy. He had the right message, especially after 9/11, when people were looking for a manager. 

In some ways, they're looking for a manager again. I think to an extent, you know, Cuomo is great name recognition, but look, he was governor for 11 years. I think people do care about that. 

Jamie: Okay. So what's your message, given what you’ve seen out there?

Ross: My message would be that I can manage the city; I can fix the city; I’m not corrupt. I'm an outsider. Look at the polarizing democratic nominee — Cuomo or anyone — they're gonna fail you. Point out all their failures. The Republican, it's Curtis Sliwa. Reality is, he’s not going to matter.

I would be a sort of Bloombergian style technocratic message with a little heart: we’re going to get New York back to where it is.

I think that's the kind of message I would run as a wealthy outsider, and I think that could succeed if I had a hundred million dollars. 

Jamie: And you don't think that the simple fact of your being a rich person turns off so many electoral voters?

Ross: No doubt it would be hard. There are prime Democrats who will not vote for a rich outsider. But there's a segment of the Democratic electorate that has Bloomberg nostalgia. I think you have to play to that. 

Jamie: Oh, absolutely. If you had a hundred million then you'd be flooding the airways, maybe it wouldn't matter, but I bet you'd get independent expenditure committees coming out of the woodwork. 

Ross:  You'd have to overwhelm the way Bloomberg did. You'd have to overwhelm the field and have the message, and I think Bloomberg had the message at the right time, plus the money. 

Jamie: If what you're saying is right, it still flummoxes me that some person hasn't emerged to try to do that. I mean —

Ross: There's a lot of rich people

Jamie: — a lot of people who have way more than enough money. Even if we work with the assumption that you've gotta have a billion dollars, there's plenty of them. You’re talking about five months. It's not even that much time out of your life. If it doesn't work out, you can just go back to doing whatever you were doing. You hire everybody you can possibly hire. You're not gonna get unions, I guess. 

Ross: Probably not. 

Jamie: What other blocks do you think you could count on? 

Ross: I don't think there's any endorser block. You would get individual electeds. I don't think organizations would come to you. I think you'd have to be pulling certain politicians. Once Bloomberg was mayor, he could pull unions too. That's the key. If you're an incumbent, there are lots of things you can do. I think it'd be hard to get organizational buy-in. You'd be picking off individual elected officials, which is possible.

If there are enough polls and enough momentum, anyone will flip. They all want to be on the winning side. 

Jamie: I would say, I spent a lot of time with Andrew Yang. I helped oversee the policy work for Yang, because my friend Bradley Tusk ran the campaign.

Ross: Andrew's a very nice guy. 

Jamie: He's a very nice guy. He came in with very high name recognition. 

Ross: He did.

Jamie: And he was winning. Out of the gate, he was the leader. Not a business guy, but he was as close as you were going to get. That was sort of a model for this. He had all that stuff lined up and it just didn’t work.

Ross: He struggled with college-educated and high-information voters. He couldn't quite get the buy-in from them. That part of the electorate actually is getting bigger and bigger.

Jamie: That's interesting, let's stick with that for one second. 

Ross: The college educated voters are a bigger and bigger share of the New York City electorate, certainly Democratic primary, but I think in general. We are not, for a variety of reasons, a working-class city the way we used to be.

Whereas nationally you could say, “The Democrats’ problem is they're too college educated in New York City.” You can win off a college educated vote. Eric Adams won, and the basic takeaway of that race is that the working class won. But really, if you went down deep into that race and looked at the numbers, Garcia would've really won if she had just started earlier, been a little more aggressive, not surged too late. The working class barely held on. The college educated vote — if you look between Manhattan and Brooklyn alone, and then the gentrifying parts of Queens — it's quite formidable.

Jamie: It seems to me the most obvious way to win is to just expand the electorate.

If all you're working with is a small slice of the population, figure out where the biggest next group of population is and go for them. 

Ross: I think going after college educateds — they’re voting. There’s just more of them coming in with each cycle. I'll give the example of the “gentrifier vote,” which in 2013 wasn’t that significant. De Blasio won an overwhelming primary victory. 

I always use the example of Jamaica versus Astoria. In 2013, Jamaica was outvoting Astoria; in 2021, Astoria is out voting Jamaica. That is the rise of the gentrifier, college educated vote. 

Jamie: And they’re voting for who? You think Garcia ultimately?

Ross: They were probably more Maya Wiley, but some Garcias too. Brownstone Brooklyn definitely was for Garcia. I think Zohran’s strength will be that his base is going to be a high turnout base. Will it be enough to win? Probably not. But Western Queens, Northern Brooklyn. brownstone Brooklyn — trickier for someone like Zohran.

Jamie: I don’t think that's Andrew. 

Ross: No, I think Cuomo and will live or die, honestly, on white college educated voters. I think he is strong with the Black and Latino working class in the way Eric Adams was. Adrienne Adams is not really, at least as now, pulling them away from Cuomo. But the white college educated voter in Manhattan and in Brooklyn will be very crucial in this election. 

Jamie: I just keep coming back to this question. If you had a hundred million of pocket money. Let's say, instead of right this very second, it was two years ago. It wouldn't be that hard to imagine that you hire somebody smart and say, “By May of 2025 I have to be somewhat known and not hated. What do I do?” 

I don't know what the answer is, but it has to be doable. Don't be a bad person; don't get in a lot of trouble; do some vaguely public spirited stuff; get your name out there. And there's a whole digital world that you can figure out how to do. How hard can it be? 

Ross: I have a theory. It's a theory — it's not backed up in hard data. It’s how I feel. I think the rich in New York City are less civically engaged than they used to be. 

If you go back to the 1960s and ‘70s, there was a contingent of wealthy people who wanted to be involved with New York City. You think of the Rockefellers: they could do anything and Nelson wants to be governor. It felt like there was a certain noblesse oblige in that era that has been lost.

I don't have data points for that. Looking at Bloomberg: like him or hate him, he was earnest about wanting to make a difference in New York City. My sense is that there are fewer and fewer extremely wealthy people who are earnest about wanting to improve the lives of New Yorkers that care about, oh, I want to create new parks; I want to fix the schools; I want to manage the police department. 

It feels like the rich — they're very international. They're very in and out with New York. They want to be in New York. They view it as a luxury item and get property here. But do they want to get in the muck of New York City? 

I don't know if extremely wealthy people, high net worth individuals want to do it today and subject themselves to media scrutiny. Because once you run for office, yes, people will poke around. Yes, there's going to be leaks. Yes, it's going to get harder for your personal life. Do you want to go through that? I don't know that many rich people, but my sense is that they don't. They don't want to bother. Whereas Bloomberg did; Bloomberg wanted to bother. 

Jamie: Do you feel like you want to meet more rich people? Is that what this really is? 

Ross: Maybe I should. Yeah. I have to take a census. Yeah, if I had a billion dollars or three, I wouldn't want to be mayor.

I think a lot of them don't. They figure, “I'll just manage my money and travel the world and go between London and New York and Shanghai,” and that’s it. 

Jamie: There's a lot to that. Now the problem with that is, who is the richest person we all know who has decided that he needs to get into public life desperately?

It's the president of the United States.

Ross: Well the thing about Trump is he didn’t really self-fund. That's the tell with Trump — that he's not as rich as he claims to be. If he were a real billionaire… Bloomberg, when he ran for president, self-funded. Trump, I think, put in a little money when he ran in 2016, but that was it.

He was a small dollar candidate when he was running, which is just funny to say. Now you obviously have big, huge donors donating to him. But Trump was never self-funding. 

Jamie: I think what you're saying about the civic-mindedness of super wealthy people — there's something to that. I think to some extent it's more dispersed. As you said, with David Rockefeller in 1975 in the fiscal crisis, they called three people.

They called David Rockefeller and Walter Wriston and somebody else, Felix Rohatyn, and then they would call the president and they would work it out themselves. The world really isn't like that anymore. There's nobody you could do that with in New York City. If we have a fiscal crisis, they can try, but there's not gonna be anybody who says, “Yeah, let me get all the people together and then we'll deal with it.” 

There's tons of rich people who do lots of stuff for New York and they do their own things. It's just a different version of impact — I wouldn’t want to get into whether it’s better or worse.

But the one thing it does not do is it doesn't create a class of people generally who feel like what they really want to do is run for office or be in the public eye. I think we’ve come to some conclusions about why we don't have businesspeople.

I'm gonna make you take a couple of guesses. 

Ross: Sure. 

Jamie: What are the odds that Eric Adams is our next mayor?

Ross: I mean, you're talking like 5%. 

Jamie: You think that's it? 

Ross: I think it's quite low, yes. I don't see how, as an independent, he has any constituency. I think if there's a Democrat, they'll get his Democratic base, unless it's a very polarizing Democrat. Even there, I think Adams may not qualify for matching funds. He’s going to run out of money. I think really 5%, 10% tops. 

Jamie: Alright, so we’re done with that. I think we can agree Curtis Sliwa was below that.

Ross: Yes. I think Sliwa, like Adams, is extremely low. Close to zero.

Jamie: All right. So tell me, you wrote a book about Andrew Cuomo. 

Ross: I did. It’s called “The Prince.” It’s actually being reprinted. It’s just Cuomo now.

Jamie: Congratulations!

Ross: They wanted to cash in, yeah.

Jamie: So, rather than make you speculate about Andrew being mayor, tell me something that you came away from that work thinking about Andrew Cuomo that would be important for somebody to know if they were thinking about whether to vote for him as mayor or not.

Ross: I don't know if Cuomo can delegate. I think he had talented people in his administration. 

Jamie: Immensely talented people!

Ross: He did — like you.

Jamie: There we go!

Ross: I think the challenge with Cuomo in the COVID era was — for a variety of reasons: look at his health department with Howard Zucker, his fights with [Andy] Byford — I have concerns about if he's mayor, will he follow the Bloomberg model of attracting talent and letting them do their thing?

Someone like Jessica Tisch is a great example. I think he would keep Tisch. He has a relationship with Merryl Tisch. Would he get jealous of her? Remember with Byford — Byford was the train guy trying to turn around the subway system. After a year, Cuomo throws him out. Would Cuomo say to Jessica Tisch, after a year, “Too much press”? Jessica Tisch gets a profile somewhere, she gets a lot of attention, and he doesn't like it. 

I think putting everything aside — you know I have criticisms of him — I wonder: Does he earnestly want to run the city of New York or is it about political redemption?

And I don't know. That's the thing. He's not talking to the media. He's not really campaigning. We'll see. I'm trying to be open; we'll see. 

Jamie: I would say, if you said to me, “Who of the current candidate crop is the most like a stereotypical CEO?” Based on what you just said and what I know: Andrew Cuomo. Andrew is a big personality. He has a history of being able to track talent and delegate pretty well. He believes in his own decision making powers and is willing to take risks and make decisions.

Arguably it's not the Bloomberg model necessarily, but maybe he's the CEO mayor. Without spending a billion dollars.

Ross: In a way, I want to know what Cuomo's big vision for New York City is right now. If Cuomo has big ideas like Bloomberg did for parks or for transportation, I'm open. I'm not seeing it yet. I want to see him make a strong argument for running the city beyond, “The left is crazy.” Because you can win on “the left is crazy”! But if he wins and he's well positioned, being mayor, it is a be-careful-what-you-wish-for a thing now. 

It's not like being governor. When Cuomo was governor, I covered Cuomo. You could duck in and out of the media scrum. You could not talk to the press for, let's say, a week. When you're a mayor, you're at the center of the universe. He can't do the same things he did as governor as mayor. His approval rating is going to fall very quickly. 

I think that's something he has to be aware of. You wanna be mayor? Great. You wanna rewrite your obituary? You have your comeback. I get it. Come 2026, you're in the fire now. 

Jamie: Well, unless we see a billionaire step in in the next month or so, we may have a chance to find out. Ross, thanks for doing this. Appreciate it. 

Ross: Thank you for having me. It was fun.

Jamie: A unifying theme of the conversation with Ross was what it means if New York is becoming a city of the wealthy and a city of everybody else. I think there are a couple of takeaways that tie back into that theme. 

The first has to do with what the appropriate role of the super wealthy civic elite, if you will, in the life of New York City, and how it has changed over time.

And the second is scaling down from the super elite to the merely well-off. Why is it that that group — who demand less from New York City or who need less from New York City government — are still more politically active than people who need the most?

Ross and I talked about the role of the civic elite in the civic life of New York City, and we talked a bit about the specific context of the 1975 fiscal crisis. I think the general understanding of what happened during those times is that among other things, very wealthy people stepped up and lent a hand.

If you think about what the infrastructure looked like that allowed them to participate in the life of New York back then, some of it was the family foundations that got set up. Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller all played huge roles in New York City, and they served as repositories of expertise. Whether that was right or not, they were definitely people who were knowledgeable and experienced doing that specifically for New York City. 

That has definitely changed. A lot of those foundations — the biggest ones — have all become truly global in their focus and have abandoned New York City, except tangentially. That is a loss. They went away and left a big air pocket in the understanding of what works and what doesn't work in government and public policy. It's not that folks aren't giving money; it's not that there's less philanthropic activity or civic activity.

It's that you have a different sense of where you want to invest for the long term — where you wanna donate your money, what you want to build. In a lot of cases they've just gone from make-money-give-money without a stop in between to say, “Okay, here's how we can do that intelligently and build on knowledge that we already have in place.”

Ross also talked about voting patterns. He was basically saying when a neighborhood gets, quote, gentrified, it changes the kind of candidate that it votes for — it gets more politically active. I think that's probably accurate and also very understandable and very, very hard to change. I say it's understandable because by definition the people that are gentrifying a neighborhood are probably people that are better off, better educated, and have a lot of positive reinforcement about what voting gets them.

Whereas the folks that they're forcing out or the people that are living in other neighborhoods have had a lot of negative reinforcement about what the power structures look like to them. If that's symbolized by, by what a casting a vote means for them, and if they've decided that it kind of doesn't really mean all that much, it's not surprising that they would decline to participate. 

Government has lots of little decisions every day. Having an influence over those little decisions really makes a huge difference. The people that need more from New York City, the government of New York City, are the people that are in general voting less than they were, than the rest of the city.

They should have the most influence. They should be the most aware. They should be the most catered to and they are not.

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