# Vital City
> New York City News, Policy Analysis, Data & Urban Affairs
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).
## Pages
### The Journal
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/
Last updated: 2026-02-25T12:45:10.000Z
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### Culture
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/culture/
Last updated: 2025-11-13T14:50:58.000Z
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### Charts & Data Stories
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/data/
Last updated: 2025-11-13T14:50:17.000Z
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### Historical Crime Explorer
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/explorer/
Last updated: 2026-08-07T14:23:25.000Z
Find more of Vital City’s charts and data stories [here](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/data/). Read our latest analysis of New York City crime trends [here](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/crime-in-new-york-city-trends-statistics).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/02/Treemap-desktop-5.jpg)
### Contributors Old
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/contributors-old/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T10:46:08.000Z
_No content available._
### About Us
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/about-old/
Last updated: 2026-09-03T08:17:50.000Z
### Vital City seeks to improve civic life by finding great ideas and innovative research and making them available — and understandable — to those who shape urban policy. We also make relevant data accessible to anyone who wants to get a better understanding of how cities work, because we believe an informed citizenry is a crucial pillar of a healthy democracy.

Through a policy journal, special reports, data analysis, public convenings and more, Vital City creates space for a broad range of political perspectives to engage in civil conversation — and to share new ideas and enlightening data about how to promote thriving cities. Our work is motivated by our love for New York City, our belief in the power of evidence and our optimism about the future of cities.

Vital City is underwritten by the Achelis & Bodman Foundation, Arnold Ventures, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Public Welfare Foundation, Charles H. Revson Foundation, Teagle Foundation, Tiger Foundation and Tow Foundation, as well as by contributions from individual donors and readers. We are housed at Columbia Law School and the Fund for the City of New York serves as our fiscal sponsor.
### Nuts and Bolts: Solving Gun Cases
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issue-5/
Last updated: 2026-07-29T10:35:43.000Z
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### On Drugs
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issue-6/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:38:36.000Z
How substance use shapes the city
### Crime: What Happened in 2023, and What 2024 May Bring
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/crime-in-2023-and-2024/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:38:36.000Z
Breaking down New York City's — and America's — trends in violence and victimization
### How Many People Should New York City's Jails Hold?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-many-people-should-new-york-citys-jails-hold/
Last updated: 2026-05-04T18:17:36.000Z
_No content available._
### Does Evidence Matter?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issue-7/
Last updated: 2026-08-07T10:27:07.000Z
Research meets the real world

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/07/HFGLogolockuptransparentbackground2000pxW-2.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/07/logo-banner-cropped.png)
### Congestion Pricing
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/congestion-pricing/
Last updated: 2026-05-04T18:15:48.000Z
_No content available._
### Is the Urban Doom Loop for Real?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issue-8/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:38:35.000Z
The death and life of great American cities (again)
### The Subway
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issue-9/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:38:35.000Z
Building better transit
### Inside Rikers
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/inside-rikers-jails-can-be-safer-and-more-humane/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:38:35.000Z
Jails can be safer and more humane
### The Case Against Eric Adams & Co.
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-case-against-eric-adams-corruption-issue/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:38:35.000Z
Considering the fix the mayor (and the city) are in, from many angles
### Crime: Looking Back at 2024, and Ahead to 2025
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/crime-looking-back-at-2024-and-ahead-to-2025/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:38:35.000Z
Breaking down New York City's, and the nation's, trends in violence and disorder
### Big-City Corruption
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issue-10/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:38:35.000Z
Why does it persist? And does anyone know how to solve it?
### Nonprofits and the City
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issue-11/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:38:35.000Z
Do nonprofits have too much power — or not enough?
### What Makes Cities Tick
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-makes-cities-tick/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:38:34.000Z
Vital City at Three
## Posts
### 6 Policy Reforms to Make Childcare Dollars Go Further for Families
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/cost-effective-childcare-policy-reforms-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T15:13:29.000Z
[*Just Fix It*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/just-fix-it/) *is Vital City’s running look at concrete, nonideological ways to unstick the gears of city government and make it work better for all New Yorkers.*

---

Free universal childcare for children as young as 6 weeks old was a signature plank of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s platform, and [the appeal is obvious](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/universal-child-care-could-be-a-seismic-shift-for-new-yorks-children/): Childcare is one of New York City parents’ biggest expenses, and one of the most daunting hurdles to living here. [A report by the Fiscal Policy Institute](https://fiscalpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/FPI-Migration-Pt-2.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found families with children 5 and under are twice as likely to leave the city as other households.Universal childcare in New York City would build on what is an already extensive early childhood education system. Since 2014, every 4-year-old in the city has been eligible for pre-K, and in 2017, many 3-year-olds became eligible for 3-K. Last year, about 100,000 of the city’s roughly 175,000 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled in those programs. (That count of children comes from [the Census Bureau's official population estimates](https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/datasets/2020-2024/counties/asrh/cc-est2024-syasex-36.csv?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which the State Comptroller [also uses](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-19-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); [the Bureau's household survey](https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2024.B09001?g=160XX00US3651000&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) puts it nearer to 191,000.) A separate program offers vouchers for childcare to more than 90,000 children of lower-income families from 6 weeks to 12 years old — whether before, during or after 3-K and pre-K placements — at a cost of [about $1.8 billion per year in federal, State and City funds.](https://www.centernyc.org/s/CNYCA-Child-Care-City-Budget-Memo-June-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 

Still, almost half of 3- and 4-year-olds are not enrolled in a City-provided childcare slot. Some families are handling care on their own. But other parents couldn’t find a convenient location, or the roughly six-hour, 180-day program didn’t cover their families’ real needs, or word of the opportunity simply never reached them. The voucher program reaches barely one in nine children under 5, leaving most families to cobble together coverage on their own. 

This city’s childcare system — 3-K and pre-K, contracted infant-and-toddler care and the under-5 share of the voucher program — is delivered by a complicated patchwork of providers that includes public schools as well as contractors from community-based nonprofits to individuals working out of their own homes. All told, caring for kids before kindergarten outside their homes costs the public about [$3.2 billion a year](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-19-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The City draws on at least $1 billion of its own tax dollars, and the balance comes from federal block-grant funds and state pre-K aid, leaving the system leaning on allocations that don't grow with need.

Mamdani is seeking to do more than just add seats. He wants to make care free to any family that wants it (rather than means-tested and conditioned on parents' work hours, as the voucher system is today), to raise caregivers’ salaries to attract and retain more talent and to extend the hours of some pre-K and 3-K programs to better meet parents’ needs. 

So far, the mayor has taken small steps towards his ambitious vision, [committing $5.2 million](https://gothamist.com/news/mamdani-makes-childcare-free-for-22k-nyc-families?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to eliminate the weekly copays some voucher families still pay and [announcing a partnership](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani---governor-hochul-to-launch-free-child-care-for-tw?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with Gov. Kathy Hochul to fully fund 3-K and start enrolling 2-year-olds — in most cases for 10 hours a day, 260 days a year. The first 2,000 seats are clustered in four communities chosen for economic need and where providers were ready to launch, with 10,000 more due in fall 2027\. But even that would enroll only around 13% of 2-year-olds. 

The main reason it is difficult to expand childcare in New York City is that it is very costly: On average, the City’s early childhood system runs nearly $20,000 per child, [according to the New York State Comptroller](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-19-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Covering children 2 and under, who need closer supervision and therefore a higher ratio of caregivers to charges, will likely come at an even higher price. Experts estimate achieving universal childcare for all New York City children 6 weeks to 5years old will cost somewhere between [$7 billion](https://sps.columbia.edu/news/universal-childcare-and-sustainable-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [$9 billion a year](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/nyregion/mamdani-free-child-care-cost.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). That’s more than double the funds committed right now, and [there is no dedicated funding stream](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/childcare-needs-funding-stream-mamdani-nyc/) to fill the gap. 

The City will have to invest if it wants to expand access, but it should seek efficiencies and savings as it grows these services to reach the most children with high-quality services. This column lays out six [immediate actions](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-it-will-take-to-implement-free-childcare-in-new-york-city/) City Hall should take. 

### 1) Streamline inspections for childcare sites and background checks for staff.

**The problem:**Opening a childcare center means clearing separate reviews by three City agencies and State-mandated background checks for every staff member, a pipeline slow enough to threaten the City's 2-K expansion.

**The Mamdani administration should:**Send joint inspection teams to childcare sites, the way the City did to launch pre-K in 2014, and back the Council bill that lets cleared staff carry their background checks between jobs.

**The fine print:** The City requires each childcare center to be inspected by the Health and Fire Departments and obtain [a certification from the Department of Buildings](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/dc/group-child-care-center-compliance-guide.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) before it can operate. Each review is sensible alone but together they are convoluted (as they are for housing, the topic of [a previous column](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-housing-permits-fast-track-construction-mamdani/)). Nothing in law requires the inspections to run one after another, but each agency schedules its own and in practice they run on separate calendars, with no obligation to agree. A provider can pass one agency's inspection only to fail another's a week later and be forced to start again. The costs of the idle months — rent on an empty space, staff waiting to start — end up in the prices parents and taxpayers pay.

City Hall recently launched a centralized [permitting portal](https://mycity.nyc.gov/provider/s/?language=en%5FUS&LanguageCode=en%5FUS&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for center-based childcare providers; family childcare programs have to use [a separate portal](https://ocfs.ny.gov/programs/childcare/providers/fams.php?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Building on this effort, City Hall should have inspectors coordinate their work. The City has done this before, at scale: To open hundreds of pre-K sites in eight months in 2014, teams from the Buildings, Health, Fire and Education departments [ran some 6,000 joint inspections and walk-throughs](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2014/9/4/21095327/thousands-of-four-year-olds-help-de-blasio-fulfill-pre-k-goal/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Such visits give a provider one answer, on site, instead of three answers delivered later that can contradict each other.

The same logic applies to people. Federal law requires every childcare center employee to undergo a background check as a condition of childcare funding, and the State runs them. Those checks are supposed to clear within 45 days, but hundreds don't. The City promised 2,000 free 2-K seats by September, and at an oversight hearing this spring the Council fretted about whether the background-check pipeline could keep up. [Majority Leader Shaun Abreu has a bill](https://www.healthbeat.org/newyork/2026/04/24/child-care-expansion-background-checks-backlog/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that would let a cleared worker carry their check between childcare jobs for five years instead of restarting it with every hire. (The State [keeps workers' fingerprints on file](https://apps.criminaljustice.ny.gov/pio/fp%5Fservices.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) regardless, and automatically flags any new arrest to regulators.) The Health Department has already [adopted a version of this by internal policy](https://www.healthbeat.org/newyork/2026/04/24/child-care-expansion-background-checks-backlog/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); Abreu's bill would write it into law.

### 2) Amend the “ground-floor tax.”

**The problem:**An outdated City health rule confines care for children under 2 to the ground floor and caps all childcare at the third floor, though alternative measures could make cheaper upper-floor space safe.

**The Mamdani administration should:**Amend the second-floor occupancy rule so long as childcare sites meet safety standards in other ways.

**The fine print:** [New York City's Health Code](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCrules/0-0-0-45112?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) generally confines childcare for children under 2 to the ground floor of a building, and caps all childcare at the third floor. There’s a certain logic to the rule: Infants cannot walk down stairs in a fire, so evacuating them means staff carrying them, one or two at a time. Floor limits like this entered American building codes in the 1960s, when sprinklers were rare and an upper-story nursery was a genuine hazard. The City adopted its current version in 2008, [in the Health Department's words](https://earlychildhoodny.org/pdfs/eng/ARTICLE%2047.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), “to facilitate evacuation of the youngest children in emergencies.”

But in New York, ground-floor commercial space is much more expensive than comparable second-floor space, a premium set by retailers competing for foot traffic that childcare providers are forced to pay whether they need the storefront or not.

The City already shows there are better ways to balance safety and affordability. The Health Department will approve childcare for upper floors when the Buildings Department and Fire Department sign off on sprinklers on every floor between the children and the street, two separate ways out, an interior alarm and an approved evacuation plan. That is also where [the International Building Code](https://codes.iccsafe.org/s/IFC2015/chapter-9-fire-protection-systems/IFC2015-Pt03-Ch09-Sec903.2.6?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has landed. The problem is that in New York City this standard is available only as an exception.

The rest of New York State [never adopted a flat floor rule at all](https://www.law.cornell.edu/regulations/new-york/18-NYCRR-418-1.4%29?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); the State requires only that any floor where children are cared for have adequate escape routes. Toronto shows what an alternative can look like: The city's [official childcare design guideline](https://citywidetraining.ca/assets/files/childcaredesign.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) assumes centers may span more than one story, in which case they need a dedicated elevator sized for a triple stroller.

Some New York City providers manage to maneuver through the Health, Buildings and Fire departments to get higher-floor locations approved through a special waiver, but the regulation largely confines care for the youngest children to the ground floor — the most expensive space in any building. And the third-floor cap limits where 2-K classrooms can go.

As the Real Estate Board of New York and the 5BORO Institute [urged in 2024](https://citylimits.org/opinion-we-need-to-make-it-easier-to-open-a-day-care-in-nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the City should rewrite the rule so that space meeting the waiver's existing safety standards is simply permitted, with no site-by-site petition required. Providers already know what safe looks like; what they need is a rule that says meeting the standard is enough.

### 3) Collect State childcare money the City is leaving on the table. 

**The problem:** As of July 2026, [more than 27,000 children](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/comments-on-new-york-citys-fiscal-year-2027-adopted-budget/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) sat on the waitlist for childcare vouchers while State matching funds go partly unclaimed, money the City can collect at a rate of roughly 15 State dollars for every new dollar the City invests.

**The Mamdani administration should:** Spend the last few million dollars needed to claim the full $350 million in State matching funds before the federal fiscal year ends September 30, then start to process the waitlist and budget enough to claim another $475 million in State money next year.

**The fine print**: New York State’s Child Care Assistance Program gives low-income families — those [earning up to 85% of the state median income](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-19-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [about $116,000 for a family of four](https://www3.erie.gov/socialservices/day-care-eligibility-guidelines-payment-procedures?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — vouchers covering nearly the full cost of care for children as young as 6 weeks and as old as 12 at a provider of their choosing, including in the hours before and after a 3-K day. Of the roughly $1.5 billion the program will spend this year, about $1.1 billion is federal and State block-grant money, and the City is required to contribute roughly $330 million, about a quarter of the total.

The program is a victim of its own success. After the State expanded eligibility, the City enrolled aggressively, with numbers growing [from about 7,500 children on income-based vouchers in 2022 to roughly 71,000 as of early 2026](https://www.nyc.gov/site/acs/news/s01-26/testimony-the-new-york-city-council-committee-children-youth-new-york-city-council?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But the block-grant allocation is set annually and does not grow with enrollment. So when the City spent through the allocation, it had to stop accepting new applicants: It [has not enrolled a single new family](https://nysfocus.com/2026/03/31/child-care-vouchers-ccap-applications-waitlist-new-york?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) since May 2025, outside those it must serve by law — not for lack of space at providers, but for lack of funds — and the waitlist now exceeds 27,000 children.

"This has been a huge issue, especially for family childcare programs, which are the most likely type of programs to accept vouchers," said Lara Kyriakou, senior director of policy for All Our Kin, a nonprofit that trains and supports home-based childcare providers. “It has had a real impact on programs’ ability to continue to have full enrollment.”

Albany has already offered help, with a catch. This year's State budget puts up $350 million in extra voucher money for New York City — a supplement on top of the regular block grant — but only if the City matches the sum. [The $328 million it is already required to spend on the program](https://www.centernyc.org/s/CNYCA-Child-Care-City-Budget-Memo-June-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) counts toward that, leaving just $22 million in genuinely new money. As of June, the City had [claimed less than a third of the State’s total offer](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2026/06/04/nyc-childcare-voucher-budget-grows-but-so-does-waitlist-for-kids/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), though officials [said](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2026/06/04/nyc-childcare-voucher-budget-grows-but-so-does-waitlist-for-kids/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the City planned to claim the remaining $245 million by the September deadline. A similar deal, on stiffer terms, awaits next year. These are the cheapest dollars the City will ever find.

Collecting those funds will not by itself clear the waitlist — the Center for New York City Affairs [estimates that it would take roughly $500 million](https://www.centernyc.org/reports-briefs/2026/6/4/child-care-budget-gap?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) more in City funds just to cut it in half — but it’s a start.

### 4) Shorten notification periods for 3-K.

**The problem:** Parents applying to 3-K and pre-K wait nearly three months to learn which program will take their child, whereas the same enrollment system answers kindergarten families in weeks. 

**The Mamdani administration should:** Hasten timelines for enrollment and make sure both public and private providers are on the same page.

**The fine print:** When applications opened for 3-K and pre-K in January of this year, [more than 50,000 families](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2026/01/30/nyc-3k-prek-application-surge-as-mamdani-expands-outreach-effort/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) applied in the first two weeks. Then they had to wait and wait and wait. The application window closed February 27 and offers didn't arrive until May 19\. This year, about 70% of 3-K applicants got their first choice, and 1 in 8 families was assigned a program they hadn't listed at all — better than last year, but a long time to wait for an answer many families couldn't use. Parents weighing private options often must pay deposits months before the City tells them whether they'll need them, and families planning work schedules, commutes and moves are often forced to do so blind.

None of this is inevitable, and the City's own enrollment system shows it. Kindergarten families who applied by their January deadline received offers on March 31 — six or seven weeks earlier than 3-K and pre-K families, run by the same office on the same platform. 

In coordination with City Hall’s childcare team, the Department of Education (DOE) should move up its admissions calendar, with notifications largely sent out by the end of March before families decamp for spring break, which is similar to the schedule met for kindergartners. The Mayor’s Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education should also work with private providers to align processes and contracts, automate technology and set earlier deadlines, so parents aren't forced to pay for a seat they may never use.

### 5) Offer alternatives to fulfilling the master's degree requirement for early childhood teachers.

**The problem:** New York requires that teachers earn a master's degree to keep their certification, with scant evidence to justify it.

**The Mamdani administration should:** Press Albany to open alternate routes to keeping certification that other states already employ — including experience, demonstrated competency or targeted coursework — so that a master's degree is no longer the only path. 

**The fine print:** By one estimate, the City must bring on [some 30,000 additional childcare workers](https://www.dccnyinc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Workforce-Report-7sm.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to staff a universal system. Although some roles are not subject to a master’s degree requirement, including assistants, aides, and home-based providers, every City-funded 3-K and pre-K classroom must be led by a state-certified teacher.

New York is [one of only two states, along with Connecticut](https://www.highered.nysed.gov/tcert/certificate/relatedmasters.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), that require teachers to earn a master's degree to hold a permanent teaching certificate. A new teacher's certificate lasts five years, and [the only way to convert it into a permanent one is the degree](https://www.highered.nysed.gov/tcert/certificate/exp/classroom-professional.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — no exam, experience or coursework will substitute. New York has already conceded the bar is too high: since 2023, it has allowed teachers who haven't finished the degree to [renew the entry-level certificate up to twice more](https://www.nysed.gov/teaching-initiatives/initial-reissuance?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) rather than lose them. 

There is little evidence the requirement enhances child outcomes. 

The canonical study, pooling seven major datasets on pre-K programs, found [“largely null or contradictory”](https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ756651&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) associations between teachers’ education levels and both classroom quality and children's learning. [A 2017 meta-analysis](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0183673&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the full literature reached the same conclusion, finding staff education was "not a key driver of child outcomes." The National Academies' landmark workforce report [recommends a bachelor's as the standard](https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/19401/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

The master's rule is the sharpest example of a broader pattern. Lead teaching roles in the city's contracted classrooms — where average pay runs about $44,000 — also require a bachelor's degree plus state certification, a hurdle for [the nearly 2.5 million working-age New Yorkers who lack a four-year degree](https://nycfuture.org/research/closing-nycs-college-attainment-gap?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Families across the city, in contrast, happily entrust their children to nannies and caregivers who hold none. Each requirement narrows the pool of people who can do this work, and the obstacles feed the turnover that costs parents and providers alike. 

The State need not abolish the master's route to fix this; it needs to stop making it the only route. Teachers should be able to keep their certification through supervised experience, demonstrated competency in the classroom or targeted early-childhood coursework. For example, New Mexico advances teachers to its top license tier — including those licensed for birth through pre-K — [through six years of classroom experience plus National Board certification](https://web.ped.nm.gov/bureaus/licensure/teacher-license-advancement/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a master's being just one option.

Meanwhile, DOE and the State's Office of Children and Family Services should look hard at which of their remaining credential rules actually protect children and which merely gatekeep.

This would widen the pipeline into a workforce the City must grow, and spare new teachers the cost of a degree their salary can't repay. How to better compensate childcare workers is its own hard question. Mamdani has promised to pursue pay parity between childcare providers and K-12 public school teachers, meaning equivalent pay rates for both. It’s important that this workforce be better paid, to ensure high-quality childcare and minimize worker turnover and for their dignity above all, but pay parity would lock the City into a specific, steep pay increase, driving per pupil costs sharply higher precisely as the City seeks to deliver services to many more children.

The point of amending the master’s degree requirement is not a cheaper workforce — that is why existing educators should be grandfathered. The City should also expand its CUNY partnerships for those who want the degree. And it should take up the Day Care Council’s [proposal](https://www.dccnyinc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Workforce-Report-7sm.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for a City-funded apprenticeship pairing aspiring educators with existing programs, as Honolulu, Santa Fe and Kalamazoo already offer, and accelerated credit-for-experience programs for thousands of New Yorkers already working as nannies and babysitters. The point is that a rule with little measurable payoff is standing between the City and the hires it needs.

### 6) Accelerate payments to early childcare providers.

**The problem:** The City takes far too long to pay childcare providers.

**The Mamdani administration should:** Go beyond the emergency hiring. Reduce the materials childcare sites need to submit to seek reimbursement, advance providers half their contract value as soon as it is registered, give every provider a named case manager and adopt new technologies to process invoices faster.

**The fine print:** The City’s childcare system depends on public subsidies to stay afloat, but those payments have long been plagued by delays. The [stretched timelines](https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2022/11/04/nyc-pay-pre-k-providers-delays/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) grew even longer as the City launched universal pre-K, and [did not improve](https://www.amny.com/education/nyc-early-childhood-care-providers-delayed-payments/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the following years. It often goes unstated but the childcare workforce is [disproportionately low income, minority and female](https://wccny.org/en/s-articles/tackling-the-child-care-crisis-in-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), exacerbating the feeling of injustice when payments are delayed as much as a year. Some childcare sites have been forced to [take out loans](https://nypost.com/2022/09/25/nyc-owes-child-care-providers-millions-in-reimbursements/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [cut staff](https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-day-cares-struggle-to-retain-staff-paid-less-than-doe-employed-child-care-workers?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or [close](https://abc7ny.com/post/day-care-pre-k-3-k-nyc/12755511/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), stranding families without options. Two weeks before the first 2-K classrooms were due to open this September, [many providers had still received no City money](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/27/nyregion/nyc-2k-child-care-programs-funding-mamdani.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.81A.dJrS.0Lpo3xsDwgO6&smid=url-share&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and City Hall conceded the delays were “unacceptable.”

[On Aug. 31](https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/08/31/mamdani-rushes-to-patch-up-nyc-childcare-payments-after-providers-report-delays/?utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=SCOOP%5F090126&utm%5Fsource=1&npnl=ODM2MjV8NDBjNmJhMWU3MWRmYWNlYWEzYmE2M2U5YTliODIwZWEyMTQ4NmYyYzkzYmEzZjE1Y2E2ZjE3MDQ4MDM5NDE5Yg&utm%5Fsource=ActiveCampaign&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcontent=Outside%20money%20floods%20NYC%20elections&utm%5Fcampaign=SCOOP%5F090126), ten days before school opened, Mayor Mamdani announced $43 million for the Education Department’s Division of Early Childhood Education, pledged to triple its contracting staff and promised to process approved loan applications by the end of the week. That is a real commitment, and it will set more hands to the same process and issue loans faster. But hiring at that scale takes months, and those staff will not likely be in place before late winter. 

The Adams administration also assigned a “rapid response” team to tackle a backlog of childcare provider payments that had ballooned to $400 million by 2022, but it didn’t [get far](https://cccnewyork.org/press-and-media/city-still-behind-on-paying-nyc-child-care-providers-years-after-promising-rapid-fix/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Other nonprofits under contract to the City are routinely advanced half the value of an agreement once it is registered, and the Council wrote a version of that requirement into [law](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2025/10/09/2987/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). DOE’s childcare providers largely do not receive it.

Part of the problem is paperwork. DOE must finalize a provider’s contract, which can take legal review. It then has to approve a budget, down to the dollar. The contract has to then be registered with the Comptroller’s Office. And finally, the DOE has to certify its classroom roster. Altogether, experts say the process can drag halfway through the school year before any payments are issued. Adding staff moves that sequence along faster; it does not shorten it.

Throughout the process, the provider has to submit these sensitive documents to a nameless DOE email, without a singular point of contact to offer guidance on submissions or move the process along. On top of that, experts say DOE has too few staff administering childcare. Nor has the City said where in that sequence the delays concentrate: how many contracts remain unregistered, how many of those await the provider rather than the City and how many providers hold a registered contract but have not invoiced against it. Publishing those counts each month would show families whether the backlog is shrinking, and show City Hall where to put its people.

The Mayor’s Office of Contract Services should work with the Mayor’s Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education and DOE to streamline the documents providers submit to get reimbursed, so that the process is less burdensome while still providing information necessary to ensure the integrity of the vendors. The new hiring should be aimed at that, with enough staff in DOE’s early childhood division that each provider is assigned a case manager for help with paperwork and payments. Until those hires arrive, the Mayor’s Office of Operations, which has run this kind of cross-agency push before, should convene the offices that touch these contracts and clear the backlog on a fixed timetable, reporting progress weekly. Going forward, this might be a task for the City’s new “PIT” crews, which can explore leveraging AI to accelerate approvals.

---

*This installment was prepared with the help of John Surico.*
### The City Needs 700,000 New Homes — Here’s 57,000
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/unlocking-vacant-rent-stabilized-housing-units-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T15:08:35.000Z
A draft report from the Mamdani administration made headlines with the conclusion that New York City needs about [700,000 new homes in the next 10 years](https://wherewelive.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Fair-Housing-Growth-Strategy%5FDraft-Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to meet existing demand and accommodate projected growth. 70,000 new homes a year would be [more than four times the average number of new housing units](https://www.furmancenter.org/soc-report/state-of-the-city-2025/state-of-the-citys-housing-stock-2025/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) permitted in recent years. 

To say that quadrupling the number of new homes developed next year and then repeating that feat in each of the following nine years is logistically, financially and politically difficult would be a serious understatement. Merely coordinating where this significant increase in the city’s housing stock should go given current zoning, landmarking, regulatory and local community board constraints would be a massive undertaking.

Fortunately, there is a major source of housing that already exists, needs no approvals and is distributed throughout the city: the [more than 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments](https://gothamist.com/news/57000-rent-stabilized-apartments-sat-empty-in-nyc-housing-agency-says?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that New York State’s Division of Homes and Community Renewal has reported are sitting empty. At an average household size of 2.48 people for the city, these vacant units could house approximately 140,000 people — the entire population of Syracuse, New Haven or Stamford, Connecticut.

Think about that: In the midst of a supposed housing emergency, New York City is sitting on tens of thousands of affordable units — residences that remain empty because the economics are utterly broken. This is a profound flaw in the rent regulations that control the market and other ill-considered laws piled atop them.

If landlords are supposed to be as greedy as many people say, why have they chosen to collect no rent at all for approximately one out of 40 privately owned apartments? The answer I have heard from very rational-sounding landlords is that they would lose money if they rented these apartments. 

How is that possible, and what does that say about our system?

The explanation begins with the fact that below-market-rate apartments in one of the most expensive cities in the world are rare finds and tenants are reluctant to give them up. People fortunate enough to get these units, either through luck, a personal contact or a bribe, [generally stay almost three times as long as tenants in market-rate apartments](https://www.furmancenter.org/publication/understanding-different-segments-of-new-york-citys-rent-stabilized-housing-stock/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). When tenants finally do leave, there is considerable work needed to make them ready for a new tenant. Many of these units are in older buildings and the deferred maintenance on them can be considerable. Kitchens and bathroom fixtures may well be obsolete, the wiring may be outdated and the apartments are often in bad shape after decades of neglect.

Prior to the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, landlords were able to increase the rent by 20% when a rent-stabilized apartment became vacant. This “vacancy decontrol” increase, along with the ability to increase the rent by up to 6% per year to pay for capital improvements, provided the funds to address these issues and get the apartments back into circulation. The 2019 law ended the 20% increase in rent entirely and limited the increase in rent to pay for capital improvements to 2%. It also imposed several limits on the ability of landlords to collect even this smaller amount, such as denying any increase in buildings where 35% or fewer of the total units are rent-regulated. In other words, the law almost stopped funds for renovating units.

This is not a story about market forces run amok; it’s about market forces distorted so profoundly they can no longer work the way they’re supposed to.

Since every unit and every renovation is different, there is no simple number for the cost of renovating an apartment and making it habitable for a new tenant. That said, most estimates for renovation costs in the city start in the low six digits. Landlords of rent stabilized apartments, however, have estimated that they can usually update a vacated unit and make it habitable for approximately $30,000\. They do note that these renovations could in many cases cost considerably more than $30,000\. Additionally, I note that this estimate came from large landlords who have their own staff who can do work at a much lower cost than the private contractors that smaller landlords have to hire.

Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math. First, landlords will have to recoup at least $30,000 just to break even. If we assume they borrow the $30,000 at an interest rate of 8% and repay it over eight years, the tenancy of a typical rent-stabilized tenant, a landlord would incur a monthly cost of $424\. 

Many landlords I spoke to who are keeping units vacant claim that any rent below about $1,000 per month makes a unit uneconomic to rent. Although the main expense is the cost of renovating the unit, there are clearly other expenses which fall into two categories.

The first is the increase in costs caused by having a new tenant. The largest of these is the increase in property taxes due to the landlord’s new rental income. Although the specific effect on taxes from this new income depends on many variables and is particularly difficult to estimate, a rule of thumb is that [net rental income (rents minus expenses) is taxed anywhere from 40% to 50%](https://www.nyc.gov/site/finance/property/property-calculating-your-annual-tax-blll.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Using the midpoint of 45% and taking into account the deduction for the renovation expenses, $1,000 of new rental income would increase a landlord’s property taxes by $259 per month. Clearly, there are other increased costs associated with renting the unit, such as additional expenses for water, gas, wear and tear, insurance and administration. These costs are harder to estimate, but probably somewhat less than the $259 tax expense.

Another category of expenses is potentially very significant but even harder to quantify: the costs associated with a non-paying tenant. The clear majority of tenants pay their rent, especially those with the good fortune to snag a below-market-rate apartment. But for those who do not — [an estimated 22% of rent-stabilized tenants are behind on their rent](https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/testimony-the-rent-guidelines-boards-data-supports-a-rent-freeze-in-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) according to the Community Service Society — the costs associated with evicting them as well as the months of unpaid rent can be quite substantial. New York City has [some of the most tenant-protective laws in the United States](https://www.lemonade.com/renters/explained/best-cities-for-renters/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and the City’s Housing Court process has multiple safeguards for tenants which cause the typical eviction process to take from four to 18 months (with some going significantly longer). Again, this does not occur frequently, but the potential for these substantial costs is definitely on the minds of landlords when calculating the potential profit from or loss associated with renting out an apartment.

Given that just the additional taxes and expenses of renovation would consume more than two-thirds of a $1,000 rent before any other expenses are taken into account, it is not hard to see how a landlord dealing with sharply rising costs for almost everything, particularly energy, could conclude that units renting for less than that are not worth renting. This is particularly true given that there are at least [two pending](https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/complaint-mamdani-rent-freeze-landlords.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [court cases](https://pacificlegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Tedfords-Tenancy-v.-City-of-New-York%5FCert-Petition%5F6.30.26.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that could invalidate some of the City’s rent laws and enable landlords to charge more for these apartments — something landlords could not do if they have already rented them at lower rents.

In a time of polarized politics, I think everyone should agree that turning these 57,000 or so empty apartments scattered about the city into homes would be a giant win for the city and the tens of thousands of people who would call them home. This could be easily accomplished simply by allowing landlords to pass through the cost of necessary renovations to new tenants. In many cases, prohibiting this does not stick the landlord with the cost, it just results in no renovation, no costs and no tenant.

When Mayor Mamdani was running for office, he promised to make housing more affordable. Earlier this year, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board fulfilled one of his promises by prohibiting any rent increase whatsoever for renewed rent-stabilized apartment leases, a freeze Mamdani wants to continue for a full four years. This may save some New Yorkers money, but it does not make housing more affordable. It merely shifts costs from tenants to landlords. There are at least 57,000 reasons why this policy harms the city and limits its ability to meet its housing goals.
### The Real Path to Better Government Technology
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/better-government-technologies-strategies-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T13:10:45.000Z
You don’t have to look very far in New York to find failed government technology projects. A [City Comptroller’s report released in August](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/review-of-the-new-york-city-department-of-veterans-services-vetconnectnyc-portal?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that veterans still struggle to use the VetConnectNYC online portal to access services, despite a $2 million investment and eight years of work. The City’s Office of Technology and Innovation requested an [additional $81 million in the 2026 budget](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-report-on-the-new-york-city-office-of-technology-and-innovations-mycity-system?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to shore up another failed digital service, the “one-stop-shop” MyCity app, after already spending four years and $100 million on development. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is reportedly [planning to pilot “virtual OMNY cards,”](https://gothamist.com/news/mta-plans-to-pilot-virtual-omny-cards-after-year-of-delays?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) part of a contract signed in 2017 that has suffered [extensive delays](https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/mtas-omny-system-faces-new-delays-in-connecting-lirr-metro-north-and-more/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [scope reduction](https://www.mta.info/transparency/board-and-committee-meetings/may-2024?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and [millions of dollars in change orders](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2024/05/20/mtas-demotes-omny-contractor-cubic-in-hopes-of-speeding-up-commuter-rail-fare-integration?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Failures of this magnitude are not unusual in government tech. Across a database of over 2,700 projects, researchers found that the median U.S. government IT project costs [310% of the estimated price](https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2022.2096544?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s lauded Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crews — five teams of technologists designed to swoop in to agencies and deliver the mayor’s top digital priorities — are a positive start to addressing the overwhelming amount of technical debt in city agencies. There is no question that [city government needs more professionals](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-yorks-mamdani-ny-civil-service-system/) with skills that meet the moment. However, delivering digital services on time, on budget and in ways that actually solve user needs requires addressing government functions beyond IT. Most of the tools for transforming government technology are (in the words of Matthew Burton, who wrote about the problem recently for Vital City) [“starkly non-technological.”](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-pit-crews-government-tech-problems/)

Fixing tech procurement is the most important piece to get right. Despite [recent successes by in-house development teams](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mta-new-app-subway-omny/), digital government transformation at scale requires a [hybrid staffing model](https://www.usdigitalresponse.org/resources/supporting-an-agile-delivery-model-requires-staffing-changes?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), where the talent of in-house teams is complemented by that of external vendors. Contracting out offers temporary surge capacity of software developers with niche skills. It also responds to the present realities that government tech staff are hindered by: a [lengthy and cumbersome civil service hiring process](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/what-it-will-take-to-deliver-for), comparatively low salaries and operating budget constraints. 

Which is to say, though it may make a lot of sense to bulk up government tech, contracting out will still be necessary. The key is to do it right.

Although some tech can be purchased off-the-shelf, the scale and complexity of New York City government obligations, regulations and public-sector union rules often require custom software. And here, we need a new model.

New York City and State agencies procure custom software using a linear, step-by-step model known as [“waterfall.”](https://projectresources.cdt.ca.gov/agile/waterfall-and-agile/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Requirements are fully specified at the start of a project, and modifications typically require costly contract change orders, much like a vacation package with a fully-booked itinerary that cannot be altered without major fees. Vendors are paid based on predefined project milestones, instead of being paid for the delivery of functional code. Software is delivered at the end of the development cycle, meaning that government agencies only have the chance to provide feedback at the end of a project, months or even years after requirements were drafted. Sadly, [only 13% of “waterfall” projects](https://medium.com/teaching-agile/agile-vs-waterfall-comparing-project-management-approaches-b1d1a7c9c08c?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) succeed. 

Government oversight bodies would have you believe that [exhaustive requirements and more vigilant contract monitoring](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/review-of-the-new-york-city-department-of-veterans-services-vetconnectnyc-portal/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are the only ways to improve government technology, but they are not. The [“Agile” approach](https://techfarhub.usds.gov/pre-solicitation/agile-overview/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to software procurement uses minimal requirements, clear objectives and iterative cycles of user research, development, testing and deployment that allow for continuous improvement. This is the standard for private sector software development and what actually works, if done correctly, for government agencies, too. Initiatives built using Agile [succeed at three times the rate of waterfall projects](https://medium.com/leadership-and-agility/agile-project-success-rates-are-2x-higher-than-traditional-projects-376a05e590d4?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), where “successful” means on time and on budget, with a satisfactory result.

This is clearly a wiser way to develop software that will make government work better.

The good news is that New York City doesn’t have to start from scratch. Last year, the New York State Higher Education Services Corporation (HESC) [issued the first “Agile RFP” in the state](https://hesc.ny.gov/RFP2025-01?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Built on the foundation of successful examples from across the federal government, like [Direct File](https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-25-106933.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), that RFP brought best practice to the State and did the hard part of adjusting contract terms and conditions to the New York State context. The HESC RFP, for example, shifts contract performance measurement away from checkbox fulfillment of pre-defined project requirements (the waterfall way) to assessment of vendor work based on [code quality and performance standards](https://guides.18f.org/derisking-government-tech/resources/quality-indicators/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

But if the City is serious about developing software more intelligently, it needs to change some practices. Software development using Agile implies new ways of working. Vendors work in teams of four to nine people (called [“Scrum teams”](https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-scrum-team?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Agile lingo) that are tightly coupled with a [product owner and technical lead](https://usdr.gitbook.io/talent-toolkit/talent-acquisition/hiring-process-phases/post-source-and-amplify/job-announcement-examples?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from a government agency. For early stage product development initiatives, only a single Scrum team may be required. Its work is nimble and iterative; fluid communication and integrated teamwork are key. 

The City’s current approach to procurement makes this way of working difficult, if not impossible. [Local Law 2019/174](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/ViewReport.ashx?M=R&N=Text&GID=61&ID=3659695&GUID=3E152F09-A2C4-4C0E-A65D-A496C6EBAA50&Title=Legislation+Text&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) specifies percentage goals of total annual agency expenditure for six classes of minority-owned businesses, adding up to 73.52% of total spend for professional service contracts. In my experience, procurement officers apply all or most of these percentage goals across all contracts. Requiring blanket target participation rates on a single Scrum team would imply a minimum of six distinct companies supplying staff for a four-person team — a certain (and nonsensical) recipe for failure.

To get the most from Agile procurement, the City Council, the City’s chief procurement officer, and the City’s Procurement Policy Board should unite to eliminate participation goals for these contracts. This change to procurement policy has nothing to do with whether you believe in supporting minorities and everything to do with whether procurement supports the ways of working necessary for modern software development using Agile. 

Beyond procurement, enabling a leap forward in government technology requires changes to the city budget itself. Modern software development is not a one-time capital expense, like buying Microsoft Office was in 2010\. It is an ongoing effort that requires a team (and a budget) over time to provide an experience analogous to routine updates of a Google Chrome browser. Even when vendors leave after a large digital product build, agency staff continue to respond to evolving user needs through continuous development. This implies a small but consistent budget allocation for technologists. This [“product model,”](https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-product-operating-model-how-government-should-deliver-digital-services/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) which combines Agile procurement and development with continuous improvement and funding, stands in sharp contrast to government’s traditional “project model” of one-time funding, rigid scope and time-bound outputs. 

New York’s legacy of fiscal austerity, however, haunts any increase (albeit small) to the operating budget, despite the [lower net cost and higher rate of success of the product model](https://substack.com/@pahlkadot/p-145242563?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The City’s Office of Management and Budget should get on board with a shift toward the product model and approve operating budget funding streams for technologists to support software products. In practice, this may look like [budgeting for “capabilities”](https://www.niskanencenter.org/capability-based-budgeting-a-practical-roadmap-for-getting-started/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#2-map-the-capabilities-required-to-deliver-those-outcomes) that require multiple software products or systems, rather than budgeting one product at a time. According to policy researchers at the Niskanen Center, “a[ ‘capability’ might be eligibility and enrollment, claims processing or benefits delivery.](https://www.niskanencenter.org/federal-it-budgeting-capability/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)” A block of funds would be designated for each capability, including all the software necessary for that capability, giving product teams the responsibility for end-to-end delivery of the capability. This is analogous to setting aside a budget to remodel your entire kitchen, rather than paying for the cabinets and drawers this year and leaving a gaping hole where the countertops should be until some unknown future date. 

Enabling technological transformation in City agencies also requires a shift in the way legal teams attempt to mitigate risk. General counsel and auditors often want “one throat to choke,” namely a vendor’s, when something goes wrong. With the traditional waterfall approach to software procurement, agencies try to shift all risk back to the vendor. They rely on meeting specific contractual requirements and adhering to Gantt charts to determine whether a vendor has delivered a product, regardless of whether the software meets users’ needs. Risk is mitigated through close contract monitoring and fines for late or incomplete delivery. The extraordinarily high failure rate of software projects indicates that these risk mitigation measures simply don’t work.

In contrast, software procurement using Agile begins with a statement of objectives. Government staff have significantly more control over software development because they are intimately involved in every step of the process (e.g., identifying tasks, user research, testing, quality assurance, deployment, system integration). The [“test-and-learn”](https://apo.org.au/node/330503?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) approach inherent to Agile means faster identification and correction of problems, and smaller, controlled failures. These failures can be rectified through the iterative development cycle, rather than waiting until the end of the traditional “project” model for user testing. Risk can be further reduced by [committing vendor-developed source code to the public domain](https://guides.18f.org/derisking?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a practice encouraged by the General Services Administration’s former technology branch and the [Department of Defense](https://dodcio.defense.gov/Portals/0/Documents/Library/SoftwareDev-OpenSource.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Despite the successful Agile track record, [it feels more risky than the status quo](https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2025/01/explaining-risk/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It will be uncomfortable, but necessary, for the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services, agency attorneys and the City Comptroller to accept that risk mitigation under the “product” model looks different from the “project” model. What this means, in practice, is that contract oversight must shift from output (did the vendor deliver the requirement) to outcomes (did the vendor team, under staff guidance, build something that meets user needs). The [recommended](https://guides.18f.org/derisking/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) short duration (less than three years) and low cost ($2 million or less, annually per contract) of an Agile contract allows for a quick pivot if a vendor doesn’t perform. 

Lastly, technologists cannot fix processes that agency staff struggle to articulate. It is no small task to explain “how things work,” when such knowledge is tacit, still on paper or housed in a legacy system. Agency leaders must get their own houses in order, documenting existing workflows and requirements, information that will accelerate the work of the PIT Crews, an agency’s own technologists or vendors.

In New York, the area most ripe for stalling tech projects is labor relations. Benefits obtained through the collective bargaining process are least likely to have short-term flexibility for modifications that might facilitate the adoption of new technology or permit the use of either commercial off-the-shelf software or software as a service. Rigid constraints, whether explicitly written into contracts or ossified through longstanding practice, drive custom software design and can easily increase costs. For example, unlike the majority of transit operators in the United States, subway conductors and operators in New York City select their weekly days off independently from the shifts and specific operational jobs they work (“cafeteria style picking”). This unusual procedure [impedes automation and increases costs, relative to “roster-based” job selection](https://trid.trb.org/View/917541?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (where operators select bundled days off and vehicle runs); it also precludes the use of most existing software. 

Knowing what is bendable is crucial for tech system design. Layers of memos that modify a decades-old agreement, rather than an updated and comprehensive document detailing all current aspects of a labor agreement, present major barriers to digitalization and software development. Labor relations teams must be able to communicate the restrictions of current labor agreements with precision and in a way that technologists can translate into code.

We need better government tech, but the problems preventing us from getting it are not technological. Transforming government tech depends on an overhaul of non-technological government functions. That must not wait.
### What a Better Public School AI Policy Would Look Like
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-public-school-classroom-ai-policy/
Last updated: 2026-09-10T14:55:09.000Z
New York City’s new policy on AI in schools is based on politics, not science. Still, it’s hard to blame City officials: There is no definitive science of generative AI for learning yet. 

In March 2026, New York City’s Department of Education [released a Red-Yellow-Green light model](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/nyregion/ai-nyc-classes-grades.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to guide the use of new generative AI tools in schools. Letting chatbots assign grades, write IEPs for students with disabilities and upload student data were Red, forbidden. Teacher lesson planning and finding operational efficiencies were Green, full speed ahead. Student-facing AI use was Yellow: educators should be cautious, but experimentation was allowed. 

These initial guidelines were released with little fanfare. The New York Times got an exclusive scoop on the story and printed it on page 17 of the New York edition. Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced the guidelines at a low-key event at a Manhattan high school, befitting the release of a minor piece of technocratic arcana.

Last Wednesday, Sept. 2, on the eve of a new school year, [City officials announced a much more restrictive set of guidelines](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/09/mayor-mamdani-and-chancellor-samuels-put-students-first-with-nat?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), superseding the guidance from only six months prior. The new policy bans student-facing AI in pre-K-8, sets tight limits on all screen time in pre-K-8 and removes over three dozen existing technology tools with recently added AI features. Students will only be permitted to use generative AI in high school, and their educators can only select from one of five City-approved pilot tools (from writing-assistance apps to vibe coding platforms) — and then only after students complete 90-minute modules about AI literacy. 

This new policy was announced at a [press conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P%5FtTStZAM20&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) led by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, with remarks from six City and State elected officials. Councilman Lincoln Restler provided some context for the major change in City policy when he explained, “You know, last year I got dozens of complaints from parents angry that their children were talking into AI programs to learn how to read.” (These parents are probably complaining about AI reading tutors like Amira, which provide AI-generated feedback and adaptively select texts for students to read using automated analysis.) 

Anyone interested in the politics of AI should watch the press conference. The elected officials do not look like they are wading into a fraught conversation. From their enthusiastic endorsement of the new restrictions, they appear confident that the New York City electorate widely supports restrictions on technology in schools. 

Nothing in the science of AI and education changed between March and September. There were no new major publications, and no important results showing the harms or benefits of generative AI and learning. There weren’t even any particularly newsworthy events, positive or negative, about AI in New York schools. In the parlance of our time, the vibe shifted. 

New York City parents, like folks around the country, are increasingly angry with and suspicious of both Big Tech and edtech. [Florida’s statewide school cellphone ban](https://www.the74million.org/article/florida-study-cellphone-bans-promote-academic-gains-after-a-year-or-so/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s [about-face on data centers](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/us/texas-abbott-data-centers-regulation.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and Mamdani’s reversal on AI in schools are part of the same pattern. Parents are worried about the low quality of edtech apps, about recreational screen time replacing learning time and social interaction and about the growing power of AI companies in our economies, our power grids, our politics and our daily lives. 

One of the magical features of our public schools is that politics always must give way to technocratic operations. Public schools respond to society’s most urgent questions: “How do we live together? What does it mean to be a neighbor, a New Yorker, or an American? How do we raise our children for an unknown future?” They then transmogrify those hopes, fears and longings into bus routes, lesson plans and laptop insurance. The politicians held the floor for one morning, and now the rest of the year belongs to the teachers, students and administrators who will enact, ignore and resist this guidance. 

I’ve spent the last 25 years teaching with technology, consulting with schools about integrating new technologies, and researching technology and learning at Harvard and MIT. If I were the benevolent dictator of New York City schools, the AI policy would have more opportunities for students to engage with AI tools. I find the new boundaries too restrictive for a technology widely used by young people that is poised to transform the workplace and civic life and sits at the center of this year’s most urgent policy debates. 

I have fewer quibbles with the bans for the youngest students. The evidence of [edtech’s effectiveness in young grades is limited](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674278684?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and young students have plenty to do learning how to live and work with their peers, develop fundamental skills in reading and mathematics and build habits of mind befitting scholars and citizens. But as students get older, they should have more opportunities to engage with the technologies defining their era. 

Every New York City high school upperclassman should have an intensive experience using a frontier AI model for academic or creative purposes under the guidance of a caring teacher (even if the point of that investigation is to criticize AI). I’m more enthusiastic about [Technology Civics](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/business/schools-big-tech-google-microsoft.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) than I am about [AI literacy](https://www.teachlabpodcast.com/ai-literacy-part-1-where-angels-fear-to-tread-with-sam-wineburg/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): Questions of power, politics and policy that will endure in the decades ahead are a better starting point for these new tools than lessons about prompting strategies and AI architecture destined for obsolescence. Opportunities for student leadership should be essential to district policy around new technologies. The greatest city in the world has some of the greatest kids in the world, and young New Yorkers should be leading citywide conversations, co-developing and reviewing plans for the pilots, and gathering feedback from parents, neighbors, politicians and other stakeholders. 

But I must admit: Despite studying education technology for more than two decades, my position isn’t really based on science either. Nearly four years have elapsed since the arrival of ChatGPT, which seems like a long time, but it’s actually not nearly long enough for education researchers to get a firm handle on new technologies. Google was founded in 1998; the first peer-reviewed research with demonstrably effective techniques for teaching kids how to sort truth from fiction on the internet [was published in 2019](https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1262001&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

If the Big Science of AI in education will take a couple of decades, then schools will have to forge ahead with Local Science. 

The most important element of the New York City policy is absolutely worth celebrating and replicating across the country: treating our engagement with AI in schools as a systematic experiment. The mayor and the chancellor promised to conduct this year as a trial, collecting data about teaching and learning from classrooms and continuing to gather feedback from students, parents, educators, technologists and community members. New Yorkers should hold the Department of Education accountable to those promises. In the weeks ahead, the City should publish details about the outcomes they plan to measure, the data they plan to collect, the research partners who will help them and their plans for using this year’s findings to revise next year’s policy.

For instance, one of the City’s high school pilot tools is called Quill. The city describes it as “designed to support close reading, text analysis and the use of evidence to support claims. Students will use Quill for no more than 15 minutes per week.” To evaluate this pilot, City officials and research partners might start with some basic qualitative assessment. Do students and teachers actually use Quill for 15 minutes a week? (A shocking number of edtech tools that schools pay [for are never used](https://www.the74million.org/article/schools-are-paying-for-ed-tech-that-students-never-use-could-a-new-contract-model-change-that/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).) Do they wish they could use it more? If you watch students using it, does it look like they are clicking through drudgery, or doing interesting thinking? What are the human-to-human interactions sparked by the tool? Do students and teachers have interesting discussions about the work they do inside the platform?

These kinds of anthropological observations can be paired with more quantitative analysis. On standardized assessments of reading and text analysis, do students in Quill classrooms do better than those in similar classrooms not using Quill? Perhaps the most important evidence is to be found in student work and writing. Do any schools piloting Quill have assignments (a Shakespeare analysis, a personal essay) that teachers have consistently used for several years? If so, how will the writing and thinking expressed in student work in 2023 differ from the results after the Quill pilot in 2027? 

Another pilot tool, Playlab, will be more complicated to evaluate. Playlab lets students and teachers create apps and directly interact with chatbots powered by both frontier models (like Claude and Gemini) and open-weight models (like Llama from Meta or the Mistral models from Europe). It offers some educational scaffolds and data protections that aren’t available from commercial LLM providers, but its main draw is that it provides authentic opportunities to interact with new technologies. Quill should improve student reading and writing, but Playlab could be deployed to almost any educational goal imaginable. 

Some methods of evaluating learning with Playlab may be similar to approaches to Quill: observing students or asking teachers about their experience. One should not expect much impact on test scores. City officials might consider surveying New York City employers to learn more about the skills they hope their employees show in their use of LLMs, and then evaluate projects to see whether student opportunities are aligned with the local labor market values. Or they might ask City officials and civic leaders to predict how young engaged citizens should use generative AI in the future, and map their responses onto the student projects with Playlab. 

New York City has the chance to be the most rigorous district in its evaluations, but it certainly won’t be alone in testing new approaches to AI in education. Every other school district in the country is also conducting one kind of experiment or another this year. Los Angeles announced it will be testing [a complete ban of student-facing generative AI](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/us/lausd-schools-ban-ai-artificial-intelligence.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Gwinnett County in Georgia will continue testing schools designed around [engaging with artificial intelligence ideas at every grade level](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/opinion/ai-high-school.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Some schools will test an incoherent, unplanned approach. Across the 130,000 schools in the United States, we’ll collectively try a little bit of everything. 

The challenge for educators across the country is to synthesize the lessons from those experiments as quickly as we can: Which strategies best prepare students to engage with contentious public debates about the role of AI in society? What AI experiences prepare graduates for jobs and civic life? What approaches expose young people to risks of unhealthy relationships with chatbots, privacy invasions or just an unseemly attachment to technology brands at young ages? 

The best chance of answering those questions is to approach them systematically, as New York has promised: declaring a set of hypotheses and principles, a manageable range of experiments and methods for evaluating and revising our plans. 

Politics won’t and shouldn’t disappear from school policy. But hopefully in years ahead, AI in education guidance will be increasingly informed by evidence from the kinds of experiments New York City students and teachers will be conducting this year.
### A Simple Change That Could Improve the Lives of Millions of New Yorkers
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/early-school-start-times-harm-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-09-10T14:26:16.000Z
In New York City, schools must meet [class size](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/EDN/211-D?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) requirements, monitor [air quality](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/eode/aqi-guidelines-children.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for outdoor activity, provide [universal free lunch](https://newyork.public.law/laws/n.y.%5Feducation%5Flaw%5Fsection%5F915-a?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and enforce strict rules for [lead](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdf/developers/local-law-1-of-2004-faq.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [asbestos](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/environment/air/asbestos-control-program-rules.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) remediation. But even with this broad architecture of protections, the City overlooks some of the simplest and most consequential levers it has to improve student health, safety and well-being. One of the clearest examples is school start times.

Unlike class size, nutrition or environmental hazards, the timing of the school day has no citywide guardrails designed for students. While adult workdays are strictly defined and negotiated through the [teachers contract](https://www.uft.org/your-rights/contracts/doe-and-city-contracts-printable-versions?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), there are no parallel protections for adolescents, whose biological sleep needs are far more sensitive to schedule timing. Instead of being guided by health standards, start times are dictated by labor parameters and logistical negotiations. Within those adult-focused constraints, schools too often require students to be at their desks at hours that directly conflict with their biological sleep needs, with no required consideration of commute length. This oversight has allowed [some schools to shift start times even earlier](https://epicenter-nyc.com/what-nycs-new-earlier-school-start-times-could-mean-for-your-student/?utm%5Fsource=copilot.com) in recent years, even as decades of research show that early start times harm adolescent health, safety and learning.

### Why sleep (and school start times) matter

Sleep is foundational to growth, development and just about every aspect of human health and function — especially for growing bodies and brains. Rapid physical maturation, expanding cognitive demands and heightened emotional reactivity in adolescence make sleep critical in these years. And beginning at puberty, a [two- to three-hour delay in the sleep cycle](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19546564/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a temporary change also observed in other mammalian species — makes it physiologically difficult for most adolescents to fall asleep before 11 p.m. or wake before 8 a.m. 

No amount of good sleep habits can reliably overcome this biological delay. Of late, we’ve seen growing awareness about the need for young people to stay off screens after a certain time in the evening, but this is like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. When adolescents are required to wake during their biological night, they experience insufficient and poorly timed sleep that is consistently linked to [higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, substance use, drowsy-driving crashes and impaired metabolic and immune function](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1087079215000891?via%3Dihub&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Early start times magnify these problems in students from vulnerable socioeconomic backgrounds, who already experience [worse sleep health](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36239056/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) due to environmental stressors, inconsistent schedules and nighttime responsibilities. Research consistently shows that when schools start later, students from lower-income families [benefit disproportionately](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2332858418812424?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in [attendance](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9622992/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [academic performance](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2012.07.006?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [graduation](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9622992/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) rates.

As is, New York City teenagers are doing their part to keep the “city that never sleeps” tradition alive. Mirroring national data, about 75% of the city’s adolescents get insufficient sleep on school nights, [according to a New York City Department of Health report](http://www.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/epi/databrief99.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and nearly half get six or fewer hours. 

School start times are by no means the only contributor to these statistics, but they are a major and remediable structural factor — and one that we control for all students. In fact, delaying school start times is the only measure [proven to sustainably improve adolescent sleep health at the population level](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352721817301985?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Outcome studies consistently show that when schools start later, adolescents get more — and better-timed — sleep, and the [effects of this extend across health, safety and school performance](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34991996/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including lower rates of depressive symptoms, less substance use, fewer motor-vehicle crashes, and measurable gains in concentration, attendance, grades, graduation rates and disciplinary outcomes, with particularly strong improvements among vulnerable populations. In a [landmark Seattle study](https://www.wsdweb.org/uploaded/schools/District/Administration/Communications/STET/Start%5FSchool%5FLater%5FStudy%5FSeattle.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), for example, students slept an average of 34 minutes more per night after start times were shifted later and showed measurable improvements in attendance and academic performance.

### The politics of the school clock

The evidence showing the harm of too-early school start times and the benefits of later ones is so compelling that many major health and education organizations — beginning with the [American Academy of Pediatrics](https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/134/3/642/74175/School-Start-Times-for-Adolescents?autologincheck=redirected&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 2014 — now recommend that middle and high schools start classes no earlier than 8:30 a.m. These recommendations are based on [Mary Carskadon’s seminal “perfect storm” model](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3130594/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of adolescent sleep, establishing that most adolescents need 9-9.5 hours of sleep per night and struggle to fall asleep before 11 p.m. for physiologic reasons, and assuming that they can get from beds to classrooms in under an hour.

Across the country, however, districts have struggled to change schedules. The obstacle has not been unclear evidence but, rather, school politics and logistics. School hours are entangled with transportation systems, athletic programs, afterschool activities, childcare needs and long-standing community routines. Leaders know that altering school hours can provoke intense pushback from families and staff who fear change will disrupt their lives. 

Resistance to change is to be expected, but experience from [more than 500 districts](https://www.apa.org/topics/children/school-start-times?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) shows that many anticipated problems prove to be unfounded, overblown, temporary or readily resolved. Some states — most notably [California](https://www.nber.org/papers/w35184?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — have enacted statewide legislation setting guardrails on how early middle and high schools can start class. And despite predictions that the law would be unworkable, large urban districts, even those like [San Francisco](https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2024.05834?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that had to reroute transportation systems, have found feasible and sometimes even cost-saving solutions. 

### Why New York City is primed for change

New York City is, in many ways, the easiest large district in America in which to change school start times. Unlike suburban systems, the City does not rely on complex yellow-bus routing for most students. Schools set their schedules independently, and students in grades 7-12 overwhelmingly commute on their own using public transportation. The usual suburban objections — parents needing to drop children off before getting themselves to work, buses that cannot run later, or teenagers needing to pick up younger siblings — simply do not apply. The only real constraints are state regulations mandating 990 hours of instruction over 180 days for secondary students, and the [United Federation of Teachers (UFT)](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/olr/downloads/pdf/collectivebargaining/memorandum-of-agreement-uft-final.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) contract explicitly defining a 6-hour-and-20-minute workday that cannot begin before 8 a.m. without a formal modification process. 

In 2019, City Councilman Mark Treyger introduced [legislation](https://pix11.com/news/city-council-hearing-targets-more-nutritious-food-later-start-times-for-nyc-schools/?utm%5Fsource=copilot.com) to study pushing back middle and high school start times to at least 8:30 a.m. At the time, most schools started between 8 and 8:20 a.m., and roughly 50 started even earlier, according to a [WPIX11 report](https://pix11.com/news/city-council-hearing-targets-more-nutritious-food-later-start-times-for-nyc-schools/?utm%5Fsource=copilot.com) — forcing kids to cut their sleep short on a daily basis. The bill was inspired by Seattle’s success, and Department of Education officials testified that a pilot program at five schools had already produced improvements in attendance, lateness and student performance. Yet the bill went nowhere. Statewide efforts have also stalled. [Legislation that would prohibit middle and high schools from starting before 8:30 a.m. and elementary schools before 8 a.m.](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S2631/amendment/A?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has been introduced repeatedly without advancing.

Meanwhile, some city schools have quietly [shifted earlier](https://epicenter-nyc.com/what-nycs-new-earlier-school-start-times-could-mean-for-your-student/?utm%5Fsource=copilot.com), particularly middle schools. Families often do not realize that start times matter, or that they have changed, until their children begin struggling with morning wake-ups, tardiness or declining engagement.

New York’s vast school choice network compounds the problem. Although the UFT contract provides a valuable buffer that keeps most schools from starting before 8 a.m., times still easily creep to 8:10 or 8 a.m. Such shifts might seem trivial but can translate into 6 a.m. wake-ups for students commuting 60-90 minutes each way from the Bronx to Manhattan or Queens to Brooklyn, making a full night of sleep mathematically impossible. Similar transit realities have prompted [other urban districts](https://abell.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/2024%5FAbell-Foundation%5FSchool-Start-Times-Report%5F1-9yr.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to consider 9 a.m. guardrails.

Early start times also push students onto public transportation in the dark, especially in winter. And for many middle and high schoolers, especially in underserved communities, earlier school hours translate directly into longer stretches of unsupervised time after the school day. Afterschool programs are often golden time for privileged students — but many underprivileged young people in New York City don’t have access to them. According to the [Afterschool Alliance](https://afterschoolalliance.org/AA3PM/data/new-york/demand?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the unmet demand for afterschool programs in New York leaves nearly 1.4 million children and youth without access. The [New York City Comptroller’s Office report](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/stranded-after-school/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)[s](https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh176/files/pubs/tiag.pdf%20%20and%20https:/www.strongnation.org/articles/607-afterschool-programs-keep-kids-safe-and-healthy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that despite the City spending more than $450 million annually on afterschool programs, many schools still cannot offer enough free, high-quality seats, leaving working families without needed care and enrichment. This means early dismissal disproportionately harms the very students [least likely to have structured afterschool options](https://www.strongnation.org/articles/930-from-risk-to-opportunity-afterschool-programs-keep-kids-safe?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Despite these hurdles, New York City is primed for change. There are already mechanisms in place that allow individual schools to shift their schedules. Several schools — including Bard High School Early College, Essex Street Academy and various alternative programs — start at 9 a.m. or later. The system is also capable of setting rigid parameters around time, as seen with strict state instructional mandates and contractual limits on the adult workday. The bureaucracy knows exactly how to regulate the clock for funding compliance and adult negotiations. It simply hasn’t set parameters to protect the biological needs of its students.

We cannot guarantee that every child will get healthy sleep; some will always face early commutes or family responsibilities. But we can guarantee that school schedules do not structurally deprive students of the opportunity for healthy sleep. A practical policy would set 8:30 a.m. as the earliest required attendance time for middle and high school students, incorporate commute realities into scheduling, expand flexible options such as early online classes or flex periods and treat sleep health as a basic safety standard — no different from asbestos removal or safe drinking water.

Healthy school hours should not be a luxury for the few; they should be treated as a nonnegotiable health and safety standard for all. Large, complex urban districts have done it. Entire states have done it. New York City can do it too.
### She Buys It, He Fires It
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/women-and-illegal-firearm-diversion/
Last updated: 2026-09-09T14:37:05.000Z
Over the span of seven days in early 2022,[ ](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wvnd.56047/gov.uscourts.wvnd.56047.19.0.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)Nakita Lake [purchased six handguns](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wvnd.56047/gov.uscourts.wvnd.56047.19.0.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for her brother, Gerald Tonsil Jr. Tonsil was a convicted felon, a fact also known to his sister. Lake was accompanied by Tonsil[ ](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wvnd.56047/gov.uscourts.wvnd.56047.1.1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)on [all three transactions](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wvnd.56047/gov.uscourts.wvnd.56047.1.1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at the Berkeley Springs Trading Post gun store in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. The gun store contacted the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) the day following Lake’s final purchase — of two identical Glock .40-caliber pistols — to report that they thought her activity was suspicious. Just three months later, one of the firearms purchased by Lake was recovered in a shooting in Nassau County, New York. Another firearm was recovered approximately eight months later, following another shooting in Nassau County. In March 2023, both Lake and Tonsil were charged with[ multiple federal gun charges](https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndwv/pr/martinsburg-residents-charged-gun-trafficking-conspiracy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Lake was a “straw purchaser” for her brother. Federal law prohibits[ specific categories of people](https://www.atf.gov/firearms/dont-lie-other-guy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=In%20June%202022%20Congress%20passed,legally%20prevented%20from%20owning%20one.) from buying, possessing, shipping or receiving firearms, such as convicted felons, fugitives from justice, individuals suffering from addiction to controlled substances and people with active restraining orders or prior misdemeanor domestic violence convictions. Straw purchases occur when prohibited persons use proxy buyers who can pass criminal background checks to purchase firearms from federal firearm licensees (FFLs). Straw purchasing is a prevalent problem, accounting for[ 40% of ATF gun trafficking investigations](https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/report/nfcta-volume-iii-part-iii/download?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) made between 2017 and 2021\. The[ 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act](https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/2938/text?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) enacted harsher penalties for straw purchasing, increasing the maximum term of imprisonment to 15 years and a $250,000 fine, and up to a 25-year prison sentence if the firearm is used to commit a felony, in an act of terrorism or in a drug trafficking crime.

ATF traces crime guns to their last-known sale at the request of law enforcement agencies who recover these firearms, a statistic known as [time-to-crime](https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/report/nfcta-volume-ii-part-iii-crime-guns-recovered-and-traced-us/download?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (TTC).[ ](https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/report/nfcta-volume-ii-part-iii-crime-guns-recovered-and-traced-us/download?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)A short TTC, generally less than three years, is regarded as an indicator of firearm trafficking and can provide an important opportunity for law enforcement agencies to investigate recently purchased firearms and disrupt the flow of crime guns from specific gun dealers and purchasers. ATF investigators view a crime gun with a short TTC recovered in the possession of a man and last purchased by a woman as a very strong indicator of firearm trafficking. The available research offers robust support for this investigative insight.

### Female-purchased guns are at greater risk for recovery

Gallup polls [report an increase](https://news.gallup.com/poll/406238/stark-gender-gap-gun-ownership-views-gun-laws.aspx?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in women who report gun ownership over time, rising from roughly 13% in 2007 to 22% in 2022\. However, women are much more likely to be purchasers of crime guns rather than possessors. The recent ATF National Firearms Commerce and Trafficking Assessment ([NFCTA](https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/report/national-firearms-commerce-and-trafficking-assessment-firearms-commerce-volume/download?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) found that[ women purchased nearly 20%](https://www.atf.gov/media/18636/download?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (432,608) of 2,176,698 traced crime guns recovered in the United States between 2017 and 2023\. During this same time period,[ women were the possessors of only 8%](https://www.atf.gov/media/18636/download?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of all recovered crime guns in which the possessor’s gender was known. Women are also overrepresented among gun purchasers at FFLs that experience higher levels of criminal activity. [A 2011 national survey](https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/rsfjss/3/5/58.full.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that FFLs with high volumes of crime-gun traces, relative to those with low volumes, made more gun sales to female clientele and had increased exposure to illegal activity such as firearm theft, denied sales to purchasers with prohibitions (such as convicted felons) and attempted straw purchases.

Female-purchased firearms are at much greater risk of recovery in crime relative to male-purchased firearms, suggesting female straw purchasers represent an important pipeline of illicit guns to some prohibited persons.[ A 2007 study](https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/221074.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of handguns sold in Maryland during the 1990s found that when women purchased handguns, these firearms were 57% more likely to be subsequently recovered in crime relative to handguns purchased by males. For female buyers who purchased at least one prior handgun recovered by the police, their subsequently purchased handguns were 92% more likely to be used in crime.

Firearms purchased by women tend to be[ ](https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/21/3/179?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)recovered in crimes [significantly more quickly](https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/21/3/179?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) than firearms purchased by men. For traced crime guns recovered between 2017 and 2021, the NFCTA reported that the median TTC for crime guns purchased by women was only 620 days (1.7 years) as compared to men at 1,137 (3.1 years). [Nearly 60%](https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/report/nfcta-volume-ii-part-iii-crime-guns-recovered-and-traced-us/download?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of crime guns purchased by women were recovered within three years of purchase relative to 45% of crime guns purchased by men.

High-risk gun possessors, such as violent gang members, seem to be more reliant on female straw purchasers as proximate sources of guns.[ In Chicago](https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/vol104/iss4/2/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), traced crime guns recovered from gang members were more than 2.5 times more likely to be first purchased by women (15.1%) relative to traced crime guns recovered from non-gang possessors (5.8%). An NFCTA analysis of 2017-2021 ATF firearm trafficking investigations reported that approximately[ 16% of identified firearm traffickers were women](https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/report/nfcta-volume-iii-part-vi/download?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). These women were overwhelmingly involved as straw purchasers in the investigated trafficking enterprises. ATF agents reported nearly 70% of all female traffickers were engaged in straw purchasing. In contrast, only 37% of male traffickers were reported as straw purchasers.

### Lack of knowledge, feeling vulnerable and social norms drive straw-purchasing

Operation Lipstick (Ladies Involved in Putting a Stop to Inner-City Killing), a nonprofit anti-gun trafficking organization that originated in Boston and is now active in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the United States,[ developed qualitative insights](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw0cnKHMSOckUkZXeTFhNWZRLTA/view?resourcekey=0-BZZIPDMbPOO5wfAinIRjsw&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the reasons why women become involved in straw purchasing, based on media stories of these criminal events. Many of the cases were relationship-based crimes committed by women who were straw purchasing guns for their boyfriends, male relatives and friends. These women reported feeling vulnerable or dependent on these men for protection, money or approval; some suggested they were motivated by love, loyalty or fear of violence if they refused. Female straw purchasers sometimes suggest that they need cash to support substance abuse problems, while others report they are driven by economic concerns such as needing to pay for rent, food and clothes.

Many female straw purchasers were not aware that they were committing a serious crime. They didn’t know that they could face harsh sentences and usually didn’t connect their straw purchases to subsequent shootings and other violent gun crimes. In some cases, straw purchasing was considered socially acceptable behavior and women recruited their female friends and family members to participate in gun trafficking enterprises. Women who worked for trafficking rings comprising multiple straw purchasers moved large quantities of guns to criminal consumers.

### What might help

Nonprofit groups such as Operation Lipstick and Mothers In Charge have led [community-based awareness campaigns](https://www.thetrace.org/2025/07/straw-purchasing-guns-women-philadelphia/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to make straw purchasing by women a social taboo through peer-to-peer education and leadership development. These efforts attempt to educate women on the harms generated by buying guns for people who are legally barred from possessing them. Importantly, these campaigns work to direct services and opportunities to address underlying issues, such as substance abuse or unemployment, that may make them vulnerable to participating in straw purchases. This includes supporting domestic violence victims who are being coerced to buy guns for their partners.

As suggested by the Tonsil-Lake case above, vigilant FFLs are critical in shutting down straw purchases regardless of buyer gender. Since 2000, ATF has partnered with the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) on the “Don’t Lie for the Other Guy” campaign that seeks to address this problem by educating FFLs on[ straw purchasing indicators](https://nssfrealsolutions.org/programs/dont-lie-for-the-other-guy/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and teaching prospective buyers about the harms associated with these criminal acts and the stiff penalties faced by those who participate in these illegal gun transfers. “Don’t Lie” signage in FFLs further seeks to deter prospective buyers from going through with their purchases.

Not all FFLs are willing to intervene in highly suspicious purchases.[ Malfeasance should be suspected](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ared.143271/gov.uscourts.ared.143271.149.0.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) when women accompanied by men repeatedly buy large numbers of pistols in the same make and caliber from the same store over short time periods.[ In one recent case](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.114099/gov.uscourts.wied.114099.1.0.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a woman purchasing a Glock pistol completed the federal firearm purchase form affirming that she was the actual purchaser, but then she paid for the gun using her male friend’s credit card. After leaving the store, she returned minutes later with her male friend to buy ammo using his credit card. The FFL did not deny these transactions despite the obvious warning signs. Federal, state and local partnerships to detect and apprehend straw purchasers through strategic analyses of crime-gun intelligence data may also be helpful in shutting down the flow of illegal guns through this trafficking channel. These data-driven investigations can also identify and hold accountable FFLs who allow these illegal transactions.

While there are many promising ideas, more research is needed to determine whether any of these programs work to decrease straw purchasing more generally and straw purchasing by women in particular. New studies could shed important insights on the underlying conditions associated with female straw purchasing problems, refine and expand existing approaches that seem to work, and develop innovations desperately needed to shut down this prevalent pathway through which prohibited persons acquire guns. Given the great harm generated by straw-purchased guns, it is high time these studies were funded and completed.
### Unpacking the Triggers
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/urban-gun-violence-black-women/
Last updated: 2026-09-09T13:25:29.000Z
Black women and girls connected to [“the streets”](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0095798407310852?casa%5Ftoken=IR6OpWo6IwoAAAAA:sIcLSYOV6m94SP-LCo5JQmh7Tn2y1VziWMfY7i2CSxHdfayhu70EgpV6MDEwlhuyfCp9jS5RRF6j-A&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a social world where street culture and strategies for survival shape everyday life — and the criminal justice system are critical to understanding urban gun violence, yet they are chronically overlooked. In cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Brooklyn, Wilmington and Baltimore, many of these women move through daily life to the persistent rhythm of inequality, navigating systems and interactions that shape their risks, choices, survival and, at times, involvement in street life.

We know this reality intimately through our work. One of us, Brooklynn, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, in the [Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice](https://ccjs.umd.edu/facultyprofile/hitchens/brooklynn?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), uses participatory action research, which is a collaborative approach to research conducted with communities rather than on them. The other, Necole, is the co-founder and site manager of the [Women’s Center at Chicago CRED](https://www.chicagocred.org/womens-program/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a leading gun violence intervention organization working directly with women who have been shot, are at risk of being shot or are at risk of perpetrating violence.

What we see on the ground — and what research increasingly confirms — is that urban gun violence is not randomly distributed. It is concentrated within [tightly connected social networks and neighborhoods](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/clustering-of-gun-violence-the-problem-that-wont-go-away/) impoverished by decades of government underinvestment, bearing the brunt of intensive policing and the accumulated trauma of repeated violence and loss. Understanding these patterns requires looking beyond the young men most often reflected in violence statistics and examining the broader web of interpersonal relationships and survival strategies that surround and shape their lives.

Within these networks, a relatively [small number of people](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953614000987?casa%5Ftoken=vSyc3LLIz54AAAAA:FaUmXvzO0neTu19RVpCnS-Zod2ekN%5FRC2VL9dDsFELHHmUTDRMJLjk5GqZKRtqbfdVSVEVIVfbY&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in specific neighborhoods experience and are involved in a disproportionate share of violence in urban communities. Although men are overwhelmingly the primary perpetrators and victims, Black women and girls are deeply embedded in these same social worlds — as [romantic partners, family members, witnesses, survivors and sometimes participants](https://rockinst.org/blog/second-killings-the-black-women-and-girls-left-behind-to-grieve-americas-growing-gun-violence-crisis/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — placing them at the center of the environments that drive urban violence.

In practice, this means the women we work with are often mothers raising children amid persistent institutional surveillance and threats of violence, sometimes while supporting sons, daughters or other loved ones entangled in the criminal justice system. Others are sisters, partners and caretakers connected to men involved in street life or facing charges for illegally carrying firearms, absorbing the emotional, financial and social consequences that follow. Many are themselves survivors of violence or incarceration, experiences that shape how they assess danger, build trust and make decisions about safety and survival.

These overlapping exposures are reflected in broader population-level patterns. Homicide is still [the second leading cause of death](https://vpc.org/black-homicide-victimization-in-the-united-states-national/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for Black women and girls ages 15 to 24, who are killed at significantly higher rates than other young women. They are also [4 times more likely](https://www.academia.edu/68111169/The%5FViolence%5FEpidemic%5Fin%5Fthe%5FAfrican%5FAmerican%5FCommunity%5FA%5FCall%5Fby%5Fthe%5FNational%5FMedical%5FAssociation%5Ffor%5FComprehensive%5FReform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to be murdered by an intimate partner than white women. Black women are [more likely](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15564886.2018.1468369?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to witness shootings, see the aftermath of violence or hear about violent incidents involving people they know. Black girls, too, [face elevated risks in school settings](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/ss/ss6708a1.htm?s%5Fhy%5Fyrbs2017%5Fadu&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), where they are more likely to be threatened or injured with weapons and report higher levels of physical fighting than white girls.

These exposures carry broader consequences: Black women and girls are more likely to experience [poorer physical and mental health](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5035671/pdf/atr-05-02-31475.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) tied to fear of violence and are more likely to miss school due to safety concerns. Their close social ties to Black men and boys also mean they are [disproportionately affected](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0021934710377613?casa%5Ftoken=hP60wmXQXNYAAAAA:IEnJq2DWzDI8LsFHGJdOaDe4pPHLFd4FfPEZfYgunzjkuWc8bjIMYPZl9I3hmiq91FvrEQybtJZ%5FJA&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) when a loved one is lost to gun violence.

To be clear, women are not simply on the margins of gun violence. Some are actively involved, at times fueling or escalating conflicts or even pulling the trigger themselves. Others act as peacemakers, working to mediate disputes between groups in their communities. These roles shift over time, reflecting how women adapt to the ongoing pressures of inequality, violence and everyday survival.

Three factors consistently shape their involvement in gun violence: early exposure to trauma, engagement in street life as a space of resilience and survival and entry into street networks through close relationships with men.

### Early trauma is often the entry point.

Many of the women we’ve worked with describe complex childhoods in which love existed alongside instability, violence and loss. Family bonds and care were present, but so too were the conditions that made safety uncertain and survival a persistent concern, such as parents who struggled with substance abuse.

As Angela in Chicago explained, “I’m from love and blood. I am from my granny and momma’s crib.” Dreya similarly recalled, “I have a hardworking mother who supports me in everything.” These accounts reflect the presence of nurturing relationships that coexist with exposure to harm.

At the same time, many recall experiences of abuse or neglect, which often manifested as intimate partner violence in adulthood. In [one sample of street-identified Black women](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953623000308?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) ages 16 to 54, we found that more than a third reported having experienced serious physical injury, a quarter reported sexual victimization, 10% had been shot, and nearly 20% had been stabbed. Almost all had witnessed a shooting, over half knew someone who had been chased by a gang, and nearly all had lost a friend or family member to gun violence.

Similar patterns emerge in almost every city we’ve examined. A majority of women reported regular exposure to shootings within their immediate social networks, and many described routine decisions shaped by the anticipation of violence — where to go, who to associate with and how to respond to perceived threats.

Kia in Wilmington recalled running from gunfire as a child: “Yeah, I done dodged a lot of bullets. … Bullets flying over my head, I was only about 5 or 6\. We’re running this way, and the shooter is actually shooting that way too, so we just hope that we don’t get shot in our back while we’re running. So it was just like, ‘OK, we made it!’”

Early trauma does more than increase vulnerability; it recalibrates responses to threat. Like men, women who grow up in chronically violent environments often develop what researchers describe as hypervigilance— a heightened awareness of danger that can lead to both protective and retaliatory behaviors. In this context, carrying a weapon, aligning with armed individuals or participating in violence can be understood not simply as criminal acts but as adaptations to persistent insecurity. This is not to excuse the behavior, but to explain it.

### Street life is often understood as survival, not deviance.

For Black women and girls, involvement in “the streets” can reflect resilience — [an adaptive response to concentrated disadvantage](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/jomf.12848?utm%5Fsource=consensus). It also reflects how people make meaning of their lives and well-being while navigating hardship, finding stability and purpose in conditions with few conventional pathways.

At the same time, economic precarity, housing instability and limited access to formal employment can push women toward informal and illicit economies, where exposure to violence is heightened.

Crucially, these conditions combine to foster what many women described as a logic of survival.In our interviews, they spoke candidly about the need to protect themselves in environments where formal systems — particularly policing — were viewed as unreliable or even harmful.

As one young woman in Philadelphia rationalized, “I don’t carry a gun because I fear police. I carry because I fear dying. I carry because I fear someone hurting my family. It’s not about wanting to be tough. It’s about not being caught slipping.”

This survival logic often blurs the line between victimization and participation. Women may carry firearms for protection. They may relay information between groups, de-escalate disputes, or step into conflicts involving partners, family members or close friends. These roles are fluid and situational, shifting in response to immediate risks and social ties.

### For many, entry into street life occurs through men — but does not end there.

[Intimate relationships](https://www.courttv.com/news/fl-v-alicia-andrews-rapper-ambush-murder-trial/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are a key pathway through which women become embedded in violent social networks. Romantic partners, family members and close male friends often serve as initial points of connection to street-based activity.

Across our studies, women frequently described becoming involved in high-risk environments through boyfriends or relatives already engaged in “the streets,” often characterizing their involvement as “getting caught up” in activities tied to those relationships.

Tati in Chicago married a man involved in crime, and they had five children. During the course of her marriage, she faced a series of criminal charges related to her connection to her husband and his circle, including taking a gun-related charge for him. It wasn’t until his untimely violent death that she realized just how entangled she was in his social world.

For women like Tati, these relationships offer forms of stability and status that had previously been out of reach — more consistent housing, access to material resources and a sense of reputation within distressed communities. They also provide companionship — a partner to call their own in environments where men are too often absent due to incarceration or premature death. For some, they also carry aspirations toward a more traditional sense of family life, including the possibility of partnership, stability and building a household together. In this context, such relationships can feel not only meaningful but viable — offering emotional grounding and, at times, economic opportunity.

As a result, these women can take on risky roles produced within constrained environments and mediated through their relationships with the men in their lives. They may be called upon to purchase or store weapons, acting as intermediaries in the underground gun market through a process called [straw purchasing](https://giffords.org/lawcenter/gun-laws/policy-areas/crime-guns/trafficking-straw-purchasing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Straw purchasers buy firearms from a licensed firearms dealer on behalf of another person, leading to an unquantifiable number of illegal guns on the streets. [One study](https://www.thetrace.org/2025/07/straw-purchasing-guns-women-philadelphia/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) finds that, though women in Philadelphia commit less than 10% of the city’s shootings, they make up nearly a quarter of those arrested for buying guns on behalf of people legally barred from owning them.

One of us (Brooklynn) partners with the Boston-based nonprofit [We Are Better Together](https://wab2g.org/youth-empowerment-program-y-e-p/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which helps lead Operation LIPSTICK (Ladies Involved in Putting a Stop to Inner-City Killing), a [public health and safety initiative](https://www.thetrace.org/2015/09/operation-lipstick-gun-straw-purchase/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) aimed at educating women on the dangers of trafficking, supplying and holding illegal firearms. She works closely with Ruth Rollins, a domestic violence counselor and advocate for homicide victims and their families, who lost her son to gun violence in 2007\. Operation LIPSTICK also highlights the link between women’s involvement in gun trafficking and domestic violence, showing how coercion often plays a central role, with women pressured into participation in exchange for money, drugs or other resources.

Similarly, some women in “the streets” are part of predominantly male crews or cliques and are assigned roles that involve luring men into situations where they can be harmed or robbed, sometimes referred to as [“setting up” or “backdooring”](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2056305120913877?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) men. In this context, [women often rely on femininity to secure male victims](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0891241608316645?casa%5Ftoken=T88Ft8WKQ-cAAAAA:CZjE2D-nmbOppxvajCaUh%5F0%5F244HoEgd2Z8Isei1htvJ4IdttJ9ACySMXd6hrw%5FfFaSpzgFysttb4A&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but may also face sexual and economic manipulation from the men within that network.

In short, women’s involvement in street-based violence is deeply shaped by the relationships around them rather than occurring in isolation. Understanding these dynamics is essential for moving beyond individual-level explanations and [toward policies](https://www.thetrace.org/2024/02/brady-bill-anniversary-gun-show-loophole/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that address the social conditions and relationships that magnify risk. The 2022 [Bipartisan Safer Communities Act](https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/2938/text?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — the most significant federal gun legislation since the Brady Act nearly three decades earlier — marked a recent step toward curbing illegal gun transfers and straw purchasing.

### Toward a new understanding of women’s roles in gun violence

Taken together, these findings paint a more complex picture than dominant narratives often capture. Black women and girls are not simply bystanders to urban gun violence, nor are their experiences fully captured by frameworks that treat them only as victims. Their roles are dynamic and relational — shaped by trauma, structural inequality and the social networks through which they move. Women’s involvement can range from witnessing and surviving violence to mediating conflicts, facilitating illegal activities within their networks and, in some cases, direct participation. These roles shift over time as relationships, responsibilities and circumstances evolve.

Interventions that overlook women’s connections to violent social networks — or that fail to account for how trauma and survival strategies shape decision-making — risk missing key points of engagement. A more effective approach recognizes and responds to the complicated set of pathways into risk.

First, cities should adopt gender-responsive approaches within community violence intervention (CVI) systems, particularly for women at greatest risk of causing harm. Many existing efforts have been designed around the experiences and risk profiles of young Black men, leaving women’s pathways into violence — and their needs — underaddressed. Gender-responsive CVI might include women-led outreach teams, conflict mediation tailored to women’s interpersonal and family relationships, and supports that address caregiving, housing, economic insecurity and histories of victimization alongside risks of violence involvement. Doing this well will require different program models, credible messengers with experience navigating women’s street networks and a more robust funding pipeline.

Since 2019, [Chicago CRED](https://www.chicagocred.org/womens-program/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has expanded its work to include women alongside its longstanding male-focused efforts. Women identified by outreach workers enter a structured engagement process that begins with assessment and stabilization, followed by trauma-informed supports such as trauma stress management and nonaggression programming. Each participant is paired with a multidisciplinary team that may include an outreach worker, life coach, clinician, education tutor and later a job coach, who provides support for up to 18 months. The program then moves through a sequenced set of phases — from outreach and stabilization to cognitive behavioral programming, workforce preparation and long-term employment support — with an emphasis on addressing trauma, strengthening decision-making, and expanding economic opportunity through education, training and certifications. The goal is not simply to move women out of street life, but to expand the relationships and opportunities available to them beyond networks where violence may be normalized or necessary for survival. Success means less involvement in gun violence, greater safety and stability, and stronger connections to people, institutions and economic opportunities that make a different path viable.

Second, services should be accessible outside of traditional entry points. Women connected to violence through partners, relatives and other social ties may never enter the reentry programs or violence intervention systems designed around those directly involved in violence. Embedding supports in local community-based organizations, neighborhood centers and other trusted settings can reach women earlier — and provide resources that make them less dependent on relationships that may expose them to violence, legal risk or economic instability.

Third, effective responses must be coordinated across systems. For women whose exposure to violence is embedded in intimate and family relationships, stepping away from a dangerous relationship or network may also mean losing housing, income, childcare, transportation or social support. Housing, workforce development, childcare, trauma services and other supports therefore need to work together to make safer alternatives realistic — not simply available.

Finally, sustained public investment is essential. Changing women’s exposure to violence may require changing the conditions that make particular relationships and networks necessary for survival in the first place. Short-term or fragmented programs cannot provide the stability needed to build alternative sources of economic security, social support and safety.

Together, these approaches move policy beyond simply offering women more services. They recognize that reducing women’s involvement in and exposure to gun violence also requires expanding the relationships, resources, and opportunities available to them beyond networks where violence is a recurring feature of everyday life.
### Stand Your Ground Laws and Women’s Safety
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/stand-your-ground-laws-womens-safety/
Last updated: 2026-09-09T13:25:20.000Z
In June 2015, Carol Bowne, a 39-year-old New Jersey woman, was stabbed to death in her driveway by her ex-boyfriend. She had filed a restraining order against him weeks earlier. She had also applied for a permit to buy a handgun for self-defense and was still waiting when he killed her. The Bowne case became a rallying point in the broader debate about whether the law makes it too hard for women to defend themselves — a debate that might have sounded familiar to those who powered the spread of stand your ground laws across the United States.

But 20 years of evidence on these laws tells a different story. The statutes have not protected women like Carol Bowne. To the contrary, they have made violent encounters more lethal, and they have failed many of the women they were sold to defend.

Stand your ground laws remove the traditional duty to retreat before using force, including deadly force, when a person reasonably believes they face imminent harm in any place they are lawfully entitled to be. Florida enacted the first modern statute in 2005, and more than 30 states have followed. These laws extend an older common-law principle, the castle doctrine, which defined that no-retreat right inside the home, out into parking lots, streets and other public spaces. By removing the duty to retreat, these laws can make confrontations more likely to escalate to deadly force than end without serious injury.

### What the evidence says

Researchers using state-level mortality data have repeatedly found that stand your ground laws raise homicide rates without reducing any other category of crime. In [a 2017 study](https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/52/3/621.short?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), economist Chandler McClellan and I examined monthly death records across the United States and found that a state’s adoption of a stand your ground law led to roughly 30 additional homicides per month, along with an increase in firearm injuries, but no detectable reduction in burglary, robbery or assault. [Another study](https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/48/3/821.short?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), by economists Cheng Cheng and Mark Hoekstra, examined a closely related set of expansions to castle doctrine laws. They found that these laws increased murder and nonnegligent manslaughter by about 8%, again with no offsetting decrease in other crimes. More recently, public health researcher Michelle Degli Esposti and her colleagues [examined homicide deaths](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2789154?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) nationwide between 1999 and 2017\. They similarly estimated an 8% increase in overall homicides associated with stand your ground laws, with effects concentrated in Southern states.

These studies use different data sources, different time periods and different statistical approaches, but they tell one consistent story: Stand your ground laws make violent encounters more deadly. They do not deter crime.

> In an analysis of 237 cases compiled by the Tampa Bay Times, researcher Justin Murphy found that men who invoked stand your ground laws were convicted in approximately 40% of cases, whereas women in comparable circumstances were convicted in roughly 80%.

### The legal frame that does not fit

But if we focus only on those aggregate numbers, we miss the harder problem. Stand your ground laws were designed around a particular picture of what danger looks like: a sudden confrontation between strangers, in public, with comparable force on each side. That picture rarely matches the violence women actually face.

Most homicides of women in the United States are committed by current or former intimate partners. Violence against women typically unfolds privately, over time, through escalating coercion, threats and abuse rather than in a single moment of attack. By the time a woman defends herself, the threat is often invisible to a prosecutor or jury, because it is not a discrete event but a pattern. Because the legal tests of “imminent” threat and “reasonable” fear were developed for sudden confrontations between strangers rather than the cumulative and ongoing nature of intimate partner violence, they exclude women’s defensive actions from legal recognition.

### Why stand your ground laws protect men more than women

The consequences of this mismatch show up clearly in court. In [an analysis of 237 cases](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ssqu.12402?casa%5Ftoken=b717U8m8w48AAAAA%3Ar3OgIca7D7c0PmH-xVbizHEec%5FlKozkVXnKg4zOgeog-QOXGPlssPyCL7Vb5vI83-C3r-%5FQ3-4sh-8gP&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) compiled by the Tampa Bay Times, researcher Justin Murphy found that men who invoked stand your ground laws were convicted in approximately 40% of cases, whereas women in comparable circumstances were convicted in roughly 80%. A doctrine sold as a protection for those who could not retreat has, in practice, protected men in disputes with other men.

The pattern becomes easier to understand when we look at how courts decide what counts as “reasonable” self-defense. Scholars [Mary Anne Franks](https://access.heinonline.com/HOL/mojo?timestamp=1786216460&auth%5Ftoken=CbNZc2X1tJi2THbfGUbbZpKNFFJtogCcSNPQlWzKKrE%3D&url=%2FHOL%2FPage%3Fhandle%3Dhein.journals%2Fumialr68%26div%3D40%26g%5Fsent%3D1%26casa%5Ftoken%3DjK28SDcKWdIAAAAA%3AC78K7C1VxPA%5FlyOj3VXjeh3aoubAvIvadlQcQg988547ubB5xn71vbwq7GHrcDtsMAbnNMo&referrer=https://access.heinonline.com/hol-cgi-bin/get%5Fpdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/umialr68§ion=40&casa%5Ftoken=jK28SDcKWdIAAAAA:C78K7C1VxPA%5FlyOj3VXjeh3aoubAvIvadlQcQg988547ubB5xn71vbwq7GHrcDtsMAbnNMo&paywall%5Furl=LandingPage%3Fhandle%3Dhein.journals%2Fumialr68%26div%3D40%26id%3D%26page%3D&casa%5Ftoken=jK28SDcKWdIAAAAA%3AC78K7C1VxPA%5FlyOj3VXjeh3aoubAvIvadlQcQg988547ubB5xn71vbwq7GHrcDtsMAbnNMo&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Caroline Light and Alexa Yakubovich](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-law-medicine-and-ethics/article/gender-and-stand-your-ground-laws-a-critical-appraisal-of-existing-research/AF2A985FB09F80750A4A8BEC75ED39B3?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and [Peter Squires](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315583891-7/doctrine-versus-practice-peter-squires?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have argued that stand your ground laws tend to treat men’s use of violence in public confrontations as defensive and reasonable, while women who use force against abusive partners are more likely to be viewed as having overreacted, acted deliberately or sought revenge. A woman who acts against a partner she has every reason to believe is about to hurt her, based on years of evidence she has accumulated, is often punished for not waiting until the moment of attack. By contrast, a man who stands his ground in a public confrontation is more easily presumed to have acted in fear for his life.

**Women, guns and the limits of self-defense**

This dynamic is also reshaping how women themselves are thinking about guns. A [recent study](https://www.routledge.com/A-Gun-of-Her-Own-The-Everyday-Lives-of-Women-Who-Shoot/Kelley/p/book/9781041015277?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of women in the Midwest by sociologist Margaret Kelley finds that many women describe firearm ownership as part of their responsibility to protect the people they care about as well as their broader communities. A [recent national survey](https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M21-3423?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by Matthew Miller and his colleagues shows that nearly half of Americans who became new gun owners between 2019 and 2021 were women, even though women made up only about a third of gun owners overall.

The picture that emerges is not that prepackaged political narrative of an armed citizen deterring a stranger. It is closer to the Carol Bowne story: a woman who already knows who is going to try to kill her, looking for protection in the time it will take for the legal system to act. The research suggests that lowering the threshold for using deadly force increases lethal violence and often disadvantages the very people most vulnerable to it.

**What reform could look like**

If stand your ground laws are to remain on the books, the most credible reforms are the ones that bring the legal frame closer to women’s actual circumstances. Self-defense laws generally permit deadly force when a person *reasonably* believes they face *imminent* death or serious bodily harm. “Imminence” refers to how immediate the threat is, while “reasonableness” asks whether the person’s fear and response were justified under the circumstances. Courts could clarify that these standards account for ongoing patterns of abuse and credible threats, not only what happens in the instant before an attack. States could explicitly direct courts to consider evidence of coercive control, prior abuse and trauma when assessing imminence and reasonableness in domestic violence cases involving stand your ground laws. At the same time, states should publicly report stand your ground outcomes by gender, race and relationship of the parties so that disparities become visible.

These changes would help, but they would not, on their own, solve the problem the Bowne case exposes. Most violence against women does not turn on a moment of self-defense. It turns on whether the system intervenes before that moment arrives. To deliver that help, states and localities need to offer a focused set of interventions, including risk-based firearm removal from people under domestic violence restraining orders, consistent enforcement of those orders, safe housing and legal advocacy for survivors. Research has found that [domestic violence laws can reduce abuse](https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/domestic-violence-legislation-exploring-its-impact-likelihood-domestic?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com), that [protection orders can reduce subsequent violence and injury](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12554019/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and that [firearm prohibitions for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders can reduce intimate-partner homicides](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research%5Freports/RRA200/RRA243-9/RAND%5FRRA243-9.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com). Stand your ground laws operate in a vacuum where those upstream protections are uneven or absent. Reforming the doctrine without strengthening the system around it would leave women to defend themselves with a tool that courts often will not believe they used reasonably.

### Conclusion

The promise of stand your ground laws was to enable people to defend themselves when the system has failed to protect them. Two decades on, the evidence runs the other way, particularly with respect to women. The law has raised the homicide rate without lowering any other category of crime, and it has done so while leaving in place a legal framework that gives most women very little when they try to invoke it. Until the law’s idea of a credible threat looks like the kind of threat women actually live with, expanding the right to use deadly force will keep endangering many of the people it purports to protect.
### Carrying Care
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-women-think-about-guns-lethal-force/
Last updated: 2026-09-09T13:25:12.000Z
We tend to talk about guns and violence as if they naturally belong together. In policy debates, media coverage and public imagination, firearms are most often framed through harm: [who is injured, who is killed](https://www.cdc.gov/firearm-violence/data-research/facts-stats/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [how to prevent the next tragedy](https://www.preventioninstitute.org/focus-areas/preventing-violence-and-reducing-injury/preventing-violence-advocacy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). That focus is understandable. But it leaves out something important: how most gun owners actually live with guns, which is often shaped by where they live.

[In my research](https://www.routledge.com/A-Gun-of-Her-Own-The-Everyday-Lives-of-Women-Who-Shoot/Kelley/p/book/9781041015284?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with 55 Midwestern women gun owners, including women of color (18%) and LGBTQ respondents (9%), most living in suburban areas near high-crime cities, I found that many approach firearms through the lens of care. That is, women prioritize care of others, and that can include gun ownership as part of how they look after others.

That may sound counterintuitive. We are not used to putting guns and care in the same sentence. Women talked about responsibility, not wanting to use a gun and what it would mean if they had to. Some men likely also express this sentiment, but as I note below, the research on men and guns has focused more broadly on readiness and action.

The way women think and talk about guns matters. Despite a [gender gap in ownership](https://news.gallup.com/poll/406238/stark-gender-gap-gun-ownership-views-gun-laws.aspx?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), women are also one of the [fastest-growing groups](https://americanrounds.com/the-rising-tide-womens-growing-presence-in-firearm-ownership/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of gun owners, with recent data showing they account for a [substantial share](https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/nearly-30-million-acquire-guns-amid-pandemic-including-11-million-first-time-owners/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of new purchasers. This shift has drawn attention but not always understanding. Much of the public conversation still relies on older assumptions about gun culture, assumptions rooted in masculinity, identity and political affiliation. These frameworks do not fully capture how women are coming to firearms or what those firearms come to mean in their lives.

To make sense of this, I developed the concept of a care mindset.

### A care mindset

The care mindset*,* drawing on an [ethic of care](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674970960?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), is an ethical orientation in which gun ownership is understood as an expression of love, vigilance and responsibility toward those one is committed to protecting, and the larger community.

This orientation is not exclusive to women. Men also express concern for others, but[ ](https://uncpress.org/9781469627892/good-guys-with-guns/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)research often shows it is [shaped by norms of masculinity](https://uncpress.org/9781469627892/good-guys-with-guns/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that emphasize readiness, control and aggression. By contrast, the women I interviewed approached guns less as a way to assert control and more as a responsibility to be managed, with an emphasis on restraint, limits and the consequences of being wrong.

Care shaped how they thought about risk and safety. Gloria lived in my neighborhood and, with her husband, owned 15 guns. She explained: “I think about protecting myself and my kids all the time. Randomly I’ll be on the treadmill and think, ‘OK, what if someone comes into the gym right now and starts shooting a gun? What will I do?’”

Another, Eva, who carried her gun most of the time, also described the duty to protect: “You need to know how to defend yourself. And especially with women who have kids around their home, you need to be able to protect your kids.”

The language is relational: my kids, my family, the people around me. Protection is not abstract. It is tied to specific others. I interviewed only women, so I cannot know how often men understand gun ownership in similar terms. They may well do so, though existing research shows that men also navigate masculine expectations around readiness, control and protection.

The care mindset is structured through a set of duties that define what women believe responsible gun ownership requires of them. The duties that comprise the care mindset do not push women toward violence. If anything, they pull them away from it.

Women also emphasize diligence, which in their minds typically requires training, practice and restraint. Owning a gun requires judgment about when to use it and when not to use it. Carol, for example, doubted her readiness to take a life, expressing the duty to know one’s limits: “I have thought about if someone came toward me, whether I could shoot them or not. I do think I could if I truly felt in danger and I felt like I had no other option, but all of our training has suggested that you have to have the mindset to shoot … and that’s not a mindset I have.”

Shaye was careful to avoid risky situations and said: “I don’t ever want to get into a situation where I have to use violence on another person. It’s in our hearts that we don’t want to hurt people.”

The care mindset recognizes limitations and the weight of these decisions. It encourages less lethal outcomes. Lorena, with 30 years of law-enforcement experience, put it, “I really like the work ethics of women, and they tend to use less lethal force.”

### The weight of moral injury

At the center of gun ownership is a question most people avoid: What would it take for you to kill someone? The women did not see themselves as violent people. Yet they thought about home invasions, about protecting their children, about encounters that might leave no other option.

They returned to what it would mean to take a life and whether they could live with it afterward, a concern closely tied to [moral injury](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11919856/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the [psychological and ethical harm](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Achilles-in-Vietnam/Jonathan-Shay/9780684813219?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that can follow taking a life. As Esha put it, simply understanding what a gun is capable of made the possibility of harm feel real and deeply troubling. This concern often translated into a commitment to de-escalation and doing no harm.

While public debates often assume that owning a gun means being willing to use it, many of the women I spoke with approached gun ownership through hesitation, not eagerness.

Research supports this pattern: Women, on average, [are less involved in](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2009.00149.x?casa%5Ftoken=lDlFsbc7Sl0AAAAA%3A3mwsTBkJ%5FFSie-lRv4dyyCFTU8DYDNB4cbk0uB-lWvqxzk1dCv0a6bsMPP5kbtn2SPhm3WFQrG-dkOzsnw&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [less supportive of ](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346488585%5FGender%5FDifferences%5Fin%5FAggression?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)violence across a [wide range of scenarios](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2083439?seq=1&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including retaliation and even [some forms of self-defense](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-law-in-context/article/women-and-selfdefence-an-empirical-and-doctrinal-analysis/D2E0C6333823BF77FA100D9C74B96B5E?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#ref22).

Women spoke of the moral weight of violence in ways that were deeply reflective, even anticipatory. Rosemary told me: “Unless you’re a psychopath, you will have guilt from taking a life. Somewhere during that person’s life, somebody loved them. That was somebody’s son or somebody’s daughter, and now maybe they got on the wrong side of the street.”

For these women, training is about both shooting and learning when not to shoot. Or, as one instructor put it, “I train so I’ll never have to use my firearm.” At first, this may sound paradoxical: If the goal is to avoid using a firearm, why train with one at all? Gun ownership is both practical and symbolic. It provides a tangible means of protection while also shaping how women think about responsibility, encouraging them to anticipate danger while attending closely to care and the consequences of using force.

### Living with risk (care work at home)

Public debates about guns tend to focus on dramatic moments such as acts of violence and legislative battles over reform proposals. But most guns in the United States are not directly relevant to those conversations. They are stored, maintained and lived with inside the home. Women play a central role in this hidden work.

Women’s relationship to guns is also shaped by how they experience risk. Women are more likely to report [feeling unsafe](https://news.gallup.com/poll/155402/women-feel-less-safe-men-developed-countries.aspx?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) in everyday situations, especially in public and unfamiliar spaces. They are also more likely to experience certain forms of [interpersonal violence](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-023-01423-4?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including [intimate partner violence](https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

At the same time, women are acutely aware that guns themselves [introduce risk](https://www.rand.org/pubs/external%5Fpublications/EP70757.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), especially in the home, for [accidental injury](https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/unintentional-injuries.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [unauthorized access](https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Women spend significant time thinking about safe storage and reducing harm.

They do so through what I call [precautionary care](https://research.ebsco.com/c/aq3mjw/viewer/pdf/ejlbfajjhb?route=details&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a commitment to preparing for worst-case scenarios while actively working to prevent them. This includes training, planning and building what some described as a “safety toolkit” that extends beyond firearms to include awareness, avoidance and nonlethal strategies.

Gillian’s husband was a [“superowner,”](https://www.thetrace.org/2016/09/gun-super-owners-harvard-survey/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and she described their ongoing negotiations over storage, especially after their child was born. As she put it, the guns moved “from all over the house” to “a high, hidden place,” and eventually into a safe.

These moments reveal that safety is an ongoing process. It requires attention, communication and adjustment. It is, in many ways, a form of labor, one that is often invisible and unevenly distributed. Gun culture is not only something people identify with, but also something they do in daily routines that rarely enter public view.

These accounts complicate familiar feminist narratives. Feminist scholarship [critiques the expectation](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23638964?seq=15&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that women should manage risk by adjusting their behavior in the face of structural inequality. It is seen as anti-feminist, for instance, to change one’s clothing to minimize risk of being catcalled. Yet women who own guns describe their choices in precisely these terms: as a way of taking responsibility for their own safety and the safety of those around them.

The responsibility to protect can feel heavy. Firearms can be tools of empowerment, but they also reflect a world in which safety is not guaranteed and in which the burden of security often falls unevenly.

The care mindset may look different in [urban contexts](https://www.thetrace.org/2016/09/female-urban-gun-ownership-harvard-northeastern-university/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), where density, proximity to neighbors and higher exposure to street violence all shape how women weigh the risks and responsibilities of gun ownership. The same orientation toward protection and restraint is likely present, but the conditions under which it operates and the trade-offs it entails are likely distinct.

### A different way of relating to guns

Public discussions often assume that ownership is [tied to identity](https://research.ebsco.com/c/aq3mjw/viewer/pdf/bzg2anmlyj?route=details&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as though being a “gun person” is a well-defined class of American. But my respondents did not see themselves as “gun people,” nor did they organize their sense of self around firearms.

This stands in contrast to dominant cultural narratives that often link guns to [masculinity](https://www.jstor.org/stable/48586704?seq=1&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [status](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/citizen-protectors-9780190902148?lang=en&cc=us&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or [political identity](https://research.ebsco.com/c/aq3mjw/viewer/pdf/txiuw3ht3b?route=details&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Women are aware of those narratives and resist them. Instead, guns appear in their lives in more limited, situational ways, sometimes necessary but not central to who they are.

For example, Florence was 64 years old and regularly competed at local gun clubs. She said: “Yeah. It’s not my biggest interest. I’d rather talk about crafting or something like that than guns.”

If there is a contrast here, it is not between men and women as individuals, but between different cultural approaches to guns.

American gun culture reflects what might be called [swagger](https://go-gale-com.www2.lib.ku.edu/ps/retrieve.do?tabID=T004&resultListType=RESULT%5FLIST&searchResultsType=SingleTab&retrievalId=2965ce42-17bc-4f60-9742-d66193725ed4&hitCount=1>mSearchId=cb4dadbe-c1ba-4b28-a072-5110e2c3b7bf&searchType=BasicSearchForm¤tPosition=1&docId=GALE%7CA341297484&docType=Editorial&sort=Relevance&contentSegment=ZONE-MOD1&prodId=AONE&pageNum=1&contentSet=GALE%7CA341297484&searchId=R2&userGroupName=ksstate%5Fukans&inPS=true&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), characterized by confidence, performance and the visible assertion of control. This approach is highly visible and influential, particularly where gun ownership is publicly performed and socially validated. By this I include open carrying, which is rare, and also behavior and interactions that communicate possession, such as bragging about guns or other revealing information. Men who own guns may or may not exemplify this, but it’s hard for them to be wholly outside these norms and expectations.

The women I interviewed offered something different. Most chose not to carry at all because they did not feel prepared to accept the consequences.

Women also tend to be more private about their ownership, constituting another duty. Many avoid discussing guns in public or posting about them online. They do not want attention or conflict, or to be drawn into polarized debates.

Vera was relatively new to guns and got one because she travels alone quite a bit. She explained: “Men are, ‘Yeah, I got this gun on me.’ And women are a little more … a little more conservative, quiet, keep it hidden. A little more private.”

### A different starting point for policy

What does all of this mean for a public conversation that is largely focused on the connection between guns and violence?

If we begin with the assumption that guns are primarily about aggression or ideology, we miss how people actually think about them, including the moral work of ownership and their efforts, perhaps imperfect, to reduce harm.

A care-centered approach shifts attention to:

- responsibility rather than identity,
- prevention rather than reaction, and
- relationships rather than abstractions.

It also opens up an opportunity for policy conversations that take real-world experiences seriously, such as how people store guns, how they learn, how they assess risk and how they make decisions under pressure.

Many women are already engaged in careful, deliberate practices, [seeking training](https://www.agirlandagun.org/from-curiosity-to-confidence-what-january-2026-says-about-womens-firearms-training-in-america/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), thinking through scenarios and worrying about mistakes. Policy discussions often proceed as if gun owners lack this awareness, drawing on narrow models that center on urban violence and overlook the wider range of gun-owning experiences. This gap makes it harder to design approaches that resonate with how people, including men, actually make decisions about safety and responsibility. An approach that builds on these orientations toward care would expand access to training that emphasizes [decision-making and de-escalation](https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/what-works-de-escalation-training?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), supports [safe storage practices](https://momsdemandaction.org/work/be-smart-for-kids/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Moms%20Demand%20Action%20volunteers%20partner%20with%20the%20Everytown,program.%20Learn%20more%20about%20the%20program%20at%20BeSMARTforkids.org) and recognizes that, for many gun owners, the central concern is not how to use a firearm but how to avoid using one.

Whatever our views on guns, we share a commitment to reducing firearm injury and promoting safety. A care mindset, grounded in responsibility and a commitment to avoiding harm, deserves a place in that conversation.
### The Recent Rise of Women Gun Owners
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/women-gun-owners-recent-rise/
Last updated: 2026-09-09T13:25:02.000Z
For generations, gun ownership in America has been a man’s world. But that’s changing, and fast. Between 2020 and 2022, more than [7.5 million people](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8697522/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) bought their first gun, and an estimated 60 million new firearms entered the U.S. civilian market. An unprecedented number of these purchasers were women. In recent years,[ ](https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/ANNALS-25-05181?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#sec-3)women made up [almost half of all new gun owners](https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/ANNALS-25-05181?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#sec-3), a striking shift from the historical norm, when women accounted for about 24% of gun owners. While previous reports on increased gun ownership among women [have been overstated](https://www.thetrace.org/2016/03/female-gun-ownership-debunked/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), our analysis confirms a notable uptick in female gun ownership that was widespread across geographic and demographic subgroups. What remains unknown are the implications of this trend for public health and safety.

The [General Social Survey](https://gss.norc.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (GSS) is a large, nationally representative survey of adults in the United States, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago; it has asked about household and personal gun ownership roughly every two years for the past five decades. The GSS also asks about a wide range of social, economic and political measures, supporting descriptions of how ownership trends have varied across subgroups and how the landscape of gun ownership may or may not be changing. (An important note: These are survey data and thus subject to error if people do not know or are unwilling to disclose whether they own guns. But because there are no administrative datasets that capture gun ownership or sales, survey data are the best we have to work with.)

Based on the GSS, women’s personal ownership of firearms increased substantially in recent years. After more than a decade of stable gun ownership, women’s ownership rose starkly between 2018 and 2021, going from 10% of adult women owning guns in 2018 to 15% in 2021, then up again slightly to 16% by 2024\. Other national surveys, such as Pew’s American Trends Panel, report similar trends in women’s gun ownership over this period (although prevalence estimates differ from GSS, likely due to differences in question wording and sampling). Over the same period, men’s gun ownership remained relatively flat; the percentage of men who own guns as of 2024 (36%) is now quite a bit lower than the ownership rate from two decades prior (40%). The result is a continued narrowing of the gender gap in gun ownership, which has fallen from 29 percentage points in 2004 to 19 percentage points in 2024.

In 2018, less than a quarter of gun owners were women (22%); by 2024, women made up nearly a third of all gun owners (32%).

To understand which women newly obtained guns in the past decade, we looked at changes in ownership across different subgroups, comparing averaged rates of ownership from the 2014, 2016 and 2018 GSS surveys to those in the 2021, 2022 and 2024 surveys.

Since 2018, women in nearly every category of race, age, marital status, education level and income have increased their gun ownership. In most of these cases, women’s percentage increases in firearm ownership exceeded those of men belonging to the same group, often by 50% or more.

Some of the largest relative increases were among groups of women with historically low rates of gun ownership, such as Hispanic women and those living in the Upper Midwest, who saw ownership rates more than double after 2018\. To be fair, given low baseline rates of ownership, a doubling may correspond to a relatively small percentage point change, and these groups remain less likely to own guns than traditionally high-ownership groups. Still, these historically low-propensity gun owners are narrowing the relative gaps in ownership across most demographic categories, with three notable exceptions: political affiliation, education and motherhood.

Political affiliation now marks one of the starkest divides. Gun ownership has risen among Republican and independent women, while remaining consistently low among Democratic women. From 2021 to 2024, Republican women were 3.7 times more likely to own a firearm than a Democrat, whereas in 2014 to 2018 they were only 2.5 times more likely to own firearms. For comparison, male conservatives and Republicans own guns at a little more than twice the rate of liberal and Democratic males, and these differences have remained generally stable over the past decade. Because Republican women tend to express [more support for restrictive firearm policies](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1532673X251324132?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) than Republican men, it will be interesting to track whether long-standing gender and partisan divisions in gun policy attitudes start to shift.

Educational differences in women’s gun ownership have also widened. Across all categories we examined, women with less than a high school education — about 8% of adult women — were the only group to show a (small) decline in ownership. In contrast, ownership increased among women with more than a high school education, who are now equally likely to own a gun as high school graduates and twice as likely as women without a high school degree or equivalent.

The relationship between household structure and ownership has changed significantly. Married women and women with children have seen faster growth in gun ownership than unmarried women and those without children. From 2014 to 2018, women with children were equally likely to own a gun as women without children, but by 2021 to 2024, they were 1.5 times more likely to own one. This shift has been driven almost entirely by single (not cohabitating) mothers, a group that may have been particularly affected by changing attitudes toward[ personal empowerment](https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/5057508-women-gun-ownership-america/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and[ safety concerns](https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/women-and-guns-statistics-marie-claire-harvard-injury-control-center/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) during a period of rising violence.

While the composition of female and male gun owners is similar to one another as of 2024 — they are mostly Republican, older, non-Hispanic white and live in rural areas — men and women differ in the types of guns they own and how many, as well as why they own. On average, women own [1.5 fewer guns](https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/injuryprev/26/1/49.full.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) than men, and they are much more likely to own only handguns. Women’s reasons for gun ownership focus [more on self-protection](https://socialeconomicslab.org/research/working-papers/the-universal-pursuit-of-safety-and-the-demand-for-lethal-non-lethal-or-no-guns/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), with less importance given to protecting family or to recreational uses. Past victimization and fear of violent crime are important motivators of gun ownership broadly, but [particularly for women](https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/injuryprev/26/1/49.full.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Will the rise in female gun ownership make women safer? Not necessarily. Most studies of how gun ownership affects victimization risk to women look at [community-level firearm prevalence](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2822551?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or [household gun ownership](https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-3762?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But risks associated with living with or around people who own firearms are likely different from the risks associated with owning a gun oneself. Unfortunately, [available evidence](https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/Home?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) doesn’t clearly support or refute the idea that more women owning guns has reduced fatal or nonfatal victimization of women. [National Crime Victimization Survey data](https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/Home?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from 2018 to 2024 show nationally that violent victimization rates for women have fallen even as men’s have edged upward. But the groups of women whose ownership increased the most have not been those with the greatest declines in victimization. For instance, violent victimization rates fell among white women but increased among Black and Hispanic women. Overall, comparing descriptive trends can be suggestive, but more rigorous studies are needed to answer whether owning a gun tends to make women more or less likely to be a victim of violence.

The implications of women’s gun ownership for suicide are also ambiguous. A study of [new handgun owners in California](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1916744?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that the correlation between handgun ownership and risk of suicide death was significantly higher for female versus male gun owners. Yet nationally, female suicide rates have remained relatively stable since 2018\. The share of female suicides involving a firearm has increased slightly (from 31% in 2018 to 35% in 2023), suggesting a potential shift in mechanisms used to complete suicides rather than a major change in overall risk. Notably, even as women increasingly reported personally owning guns, the percentage of women living in households with a gun remained relatively unchanged, suggesting many women who became new gun owners during this period already lived with somebody who owned at least one gun. If what matters for safety and suicide prevention is gun availability rather than gun ownership, we may not see particularly large increases in women’s suicide rates.

The growth in women’s gun ownership might not generate the higher rates of firearm homicide or injury than [prior research](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00181-018-1497-5?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) would predict, since women are known to engage in less risky behavior than men. Women are less likely to report [carrying a loaded handgun in public](https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2022.307094?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [brandishing a firearm defensively](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2831507?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or [storing their firearm loaded](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2834753?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Women gun owners also tend to engage in [fewer risky health behaviors](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/soin.12555?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (e.g., binge drinking, drug use, risky sex) than men. If women are more likely to keep their guns stored securely and are less likely to carry in public or while engaging in risky activities, their new guns may not contribute to community violence at the levels that men’s firearms have.

The longstanding relationship between American women and guns is changing. As more women become gun owners, the ripple effects — on safety, public health and even cultural attitudes — will likely change too, although we cannot yet say in what ways. What’s certain is that the old assumptions about who owns guns and why, changed markedly in the 2020s. Policymakers, researchers and communities alike will need to pay attention to how this new era of firearm ownership develops.
### What Data Can’t Tell Us
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/crime-data-gaps-women-firearms/
Last updated: 2026-09-09T13:22:34.000Z
Crime data questions are typically much easier to ask than to answer. 

We know how many NFL games were played last season, how many jobs the U.S. economy created last month and the average price of gas in every county in the United States yesterday. Writing about trends in women’s gun deaths and, specifically, domestic violence, seems like it should be straightforward from a data perspective.

But we won’t have a formal estimate from the FBI of how many murders there were in the United States in 2025 until 2026 is well past the halfway mark, and even then those initial estimates may be revised upward in 2027 based on the FBI’s habit of doing just that in recent years. 

The task of evaluating the trend of women’s gun homicides, therefore, is nowhere near as straightforward as it should be. We should be able to understand these trends as they stand now and place them in proper historical context — but can we?

There are a few conclusions we can draw from the available data.

First, homicides — and especially firearm homicides — spiked for both women and men in 2020 and have been falling at a historic pace over the last few years. The data show that women are far more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner or another family member. The number of women killed by an intimate partner or family member has been steady for most of the last 30 years, suggesting that the recent surge and subsequent drop in firearm homicides with women victims is largely driven by community or street violence rather than domestic violence.

Finally, the data show that firearms are increasingly used in killings of women. Fewer women are being murdered in the U.S., but the number of firearm homicides is shrinking much more slowly than the more rapidly falling pace of nonfirearm homicides. The share of male homicides involving a firearm, by contrast, has shrunk each year since 2021, per FBI data. 

### The data challenge

Responsibly analyzing crime trends usually first calls for evaluating the data landscape. 

The FBI’s formal 2025 crime estimates won’t be released until the second half of 2026, but there are alternative sources. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publishes monthly homicide data much faster than the FBI, and many police departments publish aggregated crime counts or raw incident-level offense data. States like Texas, Pennsylvania and Illinois publish agency-level data nearly as quickly as it comes in. 

Last year, the FBI started publishing monthly crime data for more than 10,000 agencies that participate in the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) program. NIBRS was designed in the 1980s to provide far more information on individual crime incidents than was reported under the FBI’s old system. 

Critically, NIBRS has also forced the creation of critical infrastructure for fast — in some cases daily — reporting from agencies to states to the FBI. The result is monthly reporting of crime data that previously took a year or more to make their way to the public.

Combining the FBI’s monthly data with reporting from other sources such as the [Gun Violence Archive](https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [the CDC](https://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd-icd10-provisional.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), local law enforcement and state agencies means we can describe crime trends with unprecedented accuracy and speed. This is true of all crimes but is especially true of murder, which has richer reporting from more data sources. A year’s crime trends are known in intricate detail even before the year is over. 

But there are still myriad challenges in analyzing crime and gun violence data in the United States. 

The FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) has data available through 2025, but some states do not regularly participate (most notably Florida), making it somewhat challenging to use for analysis. Additionally, reporting was incomplete in 2021, when the FBI was transitioning to the new NIBRS program, and substantially fewer law enforcement agencies submitted data. 

SHR can help answer the trends in much more detail than the CDC’s data can, but it still cannot answer difficult questions with precision. It is necessary, therefore, to combine the two to get a bigger-picture view of trends over time. 

### What the data tell us

In 2025, murder fell at the fastest pace ever recorded in the United States, with the country seeing the lowest murder rate since the FBI began collecting national data in 1960\. The near-miraculous drop in murder over the last four years has disproportionately affected men more than women. More women were killed with a gun in 2025 than were killed in 2019, while far fewer men were killed with a firearm in 2025 than in prepandemic years. 

The homicide rate rose enormously for both men and women in 2020, though it rose faster for men than women — roughly a 30% increase for men versus 20% for women in both the FBI and CDC data collections. In contrast, but likely relatedly, homicide rates have fallen faster for men than women in each of the last three years, including a 21% drop for men compared with a 14% drop for women in 2025 in the FBI’s data.

Firearms are used far more often in homicides today than they were 25 years ago, a fact that is true both for male and female homicide victims. The share of people killed in firearm (versus nonfirearm) homicides has increased in both the FBI and CDC data since 2000, and it has increased more for women than men. 

At the turn of the 21st century, more than 70% of male homicide victims were killed with a firearm, compared with less than half of female victims. The gap has shrunk considerably over the last few years as guns have become the primary weapon in a far greater share of homicides where a woman was killed. According to FBI data, as recently as 2018, around half of all women killed in a homicide were killed by a firearm, but that share has jumped to more than 60% of women killed in homicides since 2020\. 

The number of women murdered via firearm rose more than 60% in the FBI’s data between 2019 and 2022 compared with an 11% increase in nonfirearm murders. Homicides have fallen enormously for both men and women since peaking in 2022, but roughly as many women were still killed with a gun in a homicide in 2025 as in 2019\. 

More women being killed by firearms than nonfirearms is an unfortunate new trend. There was never a year between 1976 and 2019 with 500 more women killed via firearm than other means, but that has happened in the FBI’s data every year since 2020.

### Homicide relationships 

Women are far more likely than men to be killed in intimate partner violence, but the deeper you dig — analytically speaking — the more careful you must be about potential incompleteness of data reporting. 

The FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report does capture the relationship status between a victim and offender and has reasonably well-reported data going back to 1976, but the relationship is often marked as “unknown” for more than 40% of all homicide victims each year. 

The difference in relationship types between the genders provides a clue as to the ways victimization differs between men and women. More than half of men who were murdered between 2020 and 2025 had an unknown relationship with their assailant compared with 30% of women. While we can’t be entirely sure why this discrepancy exists, it seems most likely because intimate partner violence — where a victim undoubtedly knows their offender — accounts for a larger share of female than male homicides. 

Women are far more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner — defined here as any homicide where the victim’s relationship to the offender was identified by law enforcement as a spouse, ex-spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend. Intimate partners make up the most common relationship type for female firearm homicide victims. Intimate partner violence accounts for roughly half of all such victims where the relationship was identified in the FBI data. 

Men, by contrast, are far more likely to be killed by a non-family member or stranger, according to the FBI’s data. In 2025, according to data where the relationship to the victim was known, more than 82% of reported male firearm homicide victims were killed by someone with a nonfamilial relationship or a stranger, compared with 36% for women. Less than 5% of male firearm homicide incidents involved intimate partner violence. 

The share of women killed with an “unknown” relationship to their killer spiked in the aftermath of COVID-19 before dropping fast since 2023\. This suggests, though by no means provides conclusive proof, that much of the rise in women being killed after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and subsequent plunge over the last few years, were driven by community violence — [defined by the CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/community-violence/about/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as violence that occurs between unrelated individuals outside of the home — rather than domestic violence. Community violence is more random and seemingly less likely to have an identified perpetrator than family-driven violence. 

Crime data are far from perfect, but the available data paint a clear picture of what is happening even if they do not shed light on why. Gun homicides of both men and women surged in 2020, though they have come down more for men than women in the years since. While the number of women killed in community violence spiked during the height of the pandemic and has come down in the years since, the number of women killed in domestic violence — especially via firearm — remains stubbornly high. 

One way to improve our understanding of how gun violence affects women in the U.S. would be through better publishing of agency-level shooting data. A handful of cities, like Chicago and Philadelphia, publish regularly updated victim-level data on shootings, which allows for real-time evaluation of changing trends. But these cities are few and far between. 

Still, the gap between certainty and uncertainty is shrinking as data become more available. Hopefully, better data can spur a better understanding of what is driving all gun violence down and what can be done to continue these downward trends.
### That Very Blue Day
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/colum-mccann-9-11-25-years-later/
Last updated: 2026-09-05T16:00:54.000Z
We don’t need an anniversary for things we can’t forget. The memory of 9/11 still rattles the soul of New York. The miracle of it is not that we survived it — it is more that we are still living it, 25 years after the fact. 

Everyone has a 9/11 story. Whether you were in Brooklyn or Bangkok or Belfast, it doesn’t really matter. 

We all remember where we were and who we used to be. 

After a while we expect our stories to distill themselves and fade, so that one single narrative takes over. Take the Vietnam War, for instance: It has largely resolved itself as an arrogance that shifted us into a sexual and cultural revolution. Take the crash of 2008: The bankers screwed us and still made their great midtown escape. Even the pandemic seems already largely resolved in our imaginations: We got through the stunning miasma of it all, a little wounded but still intact. 

But with 9/11, the stories keep coming and the narrative keeps shifting. This is part of the city’s beauty and part of its mystery too. 

The universality of the experience is astonishing — possibly the first real-world event that was experienced more or less simultaneously by everyone, but never more profoundly so than in this gorgeous rubbish heap of a city that supposedly never sleeps. 

We were all there. 

The stories become part of public events: readings, concerts, rallies, policies. They get told, to rapt attention, at dinner parties. Even those who were not near New York or Pennsylvania or Washington, D.C., have a story to tell. But it’s difficult to find a single thread that knits this historic landscape together. 

Did it ruin us? Have we repaired? Did we become weepy and self-conscious? Did it show our resolve? Did 9/11 meld into a grief machine? Did it become an excuse for further savagery? Have we memorialized it properly? Is [the Falling Man](https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a48031/the-falling-man-tom-junod/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) still falling? Have we looked after the first responders? Have we acknowledged the pain outside our own borders? Are we prepared for another disaster in this current commonwealth of despair? 

It is near-impossible to pinpoint how New York processes the memory of what occurred on and after that very blue day. There are so many facets that still keep spinning. 

> New York has always been a city of the timeless now, where there is no order and there is no end, where day meets night with the ease of a street corner nod, and the idea of tomorrow is not worth much in the face of today, and however far you got yesterday will hardly mean a damn next week. 

On the morning of 9/11, my wife’s father, Roger Hawke, was on the 57th floor of the North Tower.He was at his desk when the building shook violently. The windowpanes wobbled. He tried to stand but couldn’t. Outside he saw a rain of the most extraordinary things: papers, concrete, shards of glass. He stumbled out into the hallway and toward the stairwell. 

The stairs were already filled with people. Smoke and dust filled the air but there was very little shouting or screaming. A line of people went calmly to the right of the stairwell, making space on the left for the injured to be carried down, or for the first responders to ascend. Rumors went around that a second plane had crashed into Two World Trade Center. 

Soon the stairs were jammed. The smoke was dense and the floors were treacherous from the emergency sprinklers. A half hour went by. Roger had descended to the 30th floor. Another half hour and he was on the 15th. After 80 minutes coming down the stairs, he heard a huge crash. He, and everyone around him, knew that Number Two had fallen. Everything went pitch black. The electricity was out. All he could do, he said, was think about his family. 

All around him the fire and police responders were showing him the way, using flashlights. He stumbled down through the darkness and eventually got to the mezzanine. A woman in front of him fell and cried that she could go no further. He helped drag her a few yards through the pools of water and then her coworkers took over. 

“When I stepped out,” he later told us, “it was like I had stepped into a morning snowstorm. It was a blinding white dust-light. Church Street. Trinity. Everything was utterly changed, destroyed. The firemen were shouting. The sirens were going off. To be honest it was difficult to know whether I was alive or not.” 

Alive he was. As were many others. He spent the next few hours walking through the dazed city, walking uptown to be greeted by his 4-year-old granddaughter, Isabella, who, when she smelled his clothes, thought he was burning. When I explained to her that there had been a fire downtown, she looked up at me and — out of the mouths of babes — said: “No, he’s burning from the inside out.” 

He took off his shoes, still covered in dirt and debris from the attack, and placed them by the door. He threw his other clothes away. For a couple of weeks the shoes sat by the door and then my wife, Allison, decided to put them carefully in a box and keep them. I asked her why. “Because in those shoes,” she said, “he walked out.” 

A couple of years later she donated the shoes to the 9/11 Museum.

I have walked past the museum many times, but I never ventured through the revolving doors where remnants of the original structure still stand. I know the museum is, in itself, a work of art, but I still can’t, after 25 years, bring myself to see those shoes. It is not that I’m overly sensitive, or that I want to forget, or that I am steeped in avoidance or anxiety or anger. The idea of how 9/11 was co-opted and turned into so many small Hiroshimas around the world still bothers me, yes, but I am confused by my refusal to visit the place where so much history is contained. I prefer to walk around outside and salute the ghost of Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker, who spanned the towers in 1974\. Yet even that confuses me. Does the memory of the man in the air span the emptiness of what once was? And how do I deal with the neon merchandise and the ringing cash registers and the tactless industry now surrounding the downtown streets? Did 9/11 grow up and become yet another hedge fund manager? What should I think about the political manipulation of a genuinely tragic event? 

I have only one answer in these times that are diseased with certainty: I don’t know. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/09/IL.2010.2.2_0.jpg)

The shoes Roger Hawke wore as he evacuated his office on the 54th floor of the North Tower. Credit: The 9/11 Memorial Museum, courtesy of Allison Hawke and Colum McCann

New York has always been a city of the timeless now, where there is no order and there is no end, where day meets night with the ease of a street corner nod, and the idea of tomorrow is not worth much in the face of today, and however far you got yesterday will hardly mean a damn next week. It has always been a city interested in changing itself and reinventing. It sticks a rude tongue in the ear of the past. 

 But what is there to do when we don’t quite know what to do? And how do we go forward when time has frozen us still? 

 There is no doubt that the museum and the environs are a brilliantly conceived memorial. The reflecting pools are an antidote to the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. The new building (I find it hard to call it the “Freedom Tower”) is iconic. Many of the downtown streets — and indeed in all the boroughs — have been renamed to salute the heroes of the disaster. Hundreds of new street signs insert an oblique history into our daily walkabouts. New parks have been built. Downtown has become residential. It is OK to see a baby stroller turning the corner toward you. In many ways the city has matured. 

 But perhaps maturity is not always such a beneficial thing. 

The French writer Simone de Beauvoir once said that there is something in the air of New York that makes sleep useless. It might have been true for the latter half of the 20th century, but a sense of quiescence has entered the city’s landscape in the past couple of decades. New York is a city that has begun taking naps. The bars that used to stay open until three or four now often close at one or two, or even earlier. If you venture out onto Broadway after a show there are not quite so many places open on the avenue as there used to be. Many of the diners are shuttered. Try finding a killer milkshake at four in the morning. Or a burger to stave off that oncoming hangover. Even the New York bodegas seem to believe in a little early-morning lie-down. 

Did the years that followed 9/11 instill a sort of lethargy? Or is it just a culture-wide dormancy? Is it more the effect of the pandemic? Sometimes it feels like New York has been usurped by cities like Tokyo or Singapore, where the 24-hour eyes-wide-open ethos still prevails. And while 9/11 is certainly not responsible for curbing the city’s wilder instincts, it does mark a waterline. 

Not only that, and against the sometimes-sentimental narrative, the city probably didn’t become a gentler, more empathetic place after the towers came down. The massive — and growing — disparity between the stacked-box glass design of Warren Street and the crumbling structures along Beekman Avenue in the Bronx, for example, is almost beyond language. 

Five miles and a whole universe. It’s not that our city is just not affordable these days; it might not even be sustainable. 

This wealth gap is not necessarily a direct and immediate result of 9/11, of course, but the fall of the towers meant the fall of so much else, not just in New York but in the wider culture. When big things fall, they shatter into fragments. They crash down and scatter over a very large landscape. It was apparent, even one day after the attacks, that so much of the world could — and would — feel the impact. Three thousand lives disintegrated into the air in New York, and nobody could have known it for certain then, but hundreds of thousands of other lives would hang in the balance — what is happening today in Iran and Gaza was built up in layers, a series of rigged and misguided brawls. 

How quickly the United States went from stunned victim to the torturer with the hoods. A slick machine grew out of the rubble and not just in the political arena, but in the commercial arena and even on occasion in the artistic realm. The cash registers of memory were totaling it all up. The TV shows. The miniseries. The bad poems diseased with sentimentality, the political one-upmanship, the clamor for a hundred other ways to describe the word *freedom*. 

One of the great shames of 9/11 was the way the New York firefighters, the police officers, the EMTs, the recovery workers, the nurses and the doctors were cast aside and forgotten. Jetliner after jetliner was flown into their lives when they were initially ignored and abandoned. That has changed in recent years with the World Trade Center Health Program and the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. [Enrollment in the World Trade Center Health Program](https://www.cdc.gov/wtc/pdfs/statistics/20260331%5FExternal%5FQuarterlyProgramSummary.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is now, in 2026, at over 150,000, with 94,000 responders and 58,000 survivors. 

But who knows how many unreported still have respiratory illnesses and mental health issues that can be directly attributed to the falling towers? 

God bless the Jon Stewarts of the world. The actor and comedian has long advocated for 9/11 victims and first responders. In talking about the firefighters and the cops and the medics, he told Congress forcefully: “They responded in five seconds. They did their jobs with courage, grace, tenacity, humility.” Stewart then challenged us all to take his challenge of civil responsibility in the same way. 

One still hopes that, on occasion, the center holds. 

The Canadian poet Anne Carson once famously wrote: “A wound *gives off its own light / surgeons say. / If all the lamps in the house were turned out / you could dress this wound / by what shines from it.”* 

 Zohran Mamdani — the zoot within the bureaucratic suit — has brought a promise of renewal to New York. Perhaps he can wipe a little bit of the sleep out of the corner of the city’s eye. There has been a petition circulated in recent months by certain family members that he should stay away from this year’s day of remembrance. But 9/11 has never been about red and blue: It is still and always will be a purple scar that we all share together. Mamdani has vowed to “proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders forever impacted by that horrific terror attack by standing alongside them at this year’s 9/11 commemoration, reaffirming that we will never forget the solemn day felt by all of us who call this city home and, frankly, by all of us who called this country home.” 

—

I have heard that there is a granite and concrete staircase in the 9/11 Museum. It was originally a series of outdoor stairs that connected Vesey Street and the WTC plaza. Now it is indoors and flanked by an escalator. It is called the Survivor Staircase. I think about my father-in-law and how, on that fateful day, he walked out. His memory is fading slightly now as he enters his 90s, but not the feeling, and he still recalls slipping in the shoes as he came down the stairs. 

There are nights that he wakes and remembers the faces of those young men and women — firefighters and police — who walked past him. 

“It still brings tears to my eyes,” he told me. “It always will. It was the faces of the firemen as they climbed the stairs to help us. They were going up the stairs as we went down. It rips me up to think of them. They came to rescue us.” 

We are all survivors in a way. And we survive because of our stories. A lot of things can be taken from us, but not those stories. 

Perhaps it is time — after 25 years — for me to go back and revisit those shoes.
### How It Felt As It Happened
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-it-felt-as-it-happened-september-11/
Last updated: 2026-09-05T16:10:48.000Z
For those of us who were here, a certain kind of morning brings it all back. A big blue sky with the first hint of autumn prickling our skin. 

Some of us dream about that day. I know I do. Airplanes crashing into buildings.

 We can’t forget… 

Furious dust storms hurtling down the canyons of Wall Street before bursting out into the harbor. A man who an hour earlier had been choosing a tie now somersaulting from the heavens, that tie flapping. Cyclones of office paper swirling up into the sky, hundreds of floating white sheets, mixing in the crisp air with the wails of sirens — first a few, then dozens, then hundreds, seemingly rising from every street in the city.

 And smoke, towering oily black plumes. During the interregnum when the towers burned but still stood, mortally wounded, they were like two 110-story chimneys fed by the very fires of hell.

 N.R. (Sonny) Kleinfield, a writer at The New York Times, summed it all up in one of the greatest and most succinct newspaper leads in history.

 “It kept getting worse.”

 No four words were ever more truly written. We could barely grasp what we had just witnessed, much less anticipate what was coming next. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Was it an accident? Was it a small plane? Was it —

 The second plane hits. We are under attack. Are there more? Are people getting out? Will the fires be ex—

 The South Tower falls. The roar shakes the city. It seems to echo on and on for minutes. Up and up balloons the monstrous cloud of dust and people. Finally, we find our brains catch up with events — we know suddenly with absolute certainty that the North Tower will fall, too. It already seems to be off-kilter. Firefighters scramble to escape; hundreds don’t make it.

 Even when our own fighter jets shriek overhead, we aren’t sure — is it over?

 By the time 7 World Trade Center collapses at dusk after burning all day, imploding into itself as if in a controlled demolition, we are inured; we barely pay attention. Any other day, any other year, perhaps, it would have been a huge story, something to talk about for weeks on end, but not on this day, this big blue day with the first hint of autumn prickling our skin.

---

I lived in a sixth-floor apartment on the border of Cobble Hill and Red Hook in Brooklyn with my wife and son, then 18 months old, our view a panorama stretching from Staten Island to Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. I gazed at it some mornings at 3 a.m. when my little son wouldn’t sleep. 

Then that view turned against us forever.

 It was Primary Day. I was a new staff editor at The Times, due in the newsroom in the early afternoon. I turned on NY1 News to check the weather as I put one leg into my pants. The screen showed the World Trade Center with smoke pouring out of a gash in the North Tower. I stared — was this live? Pat Kiernan, the anchor then and now, was “tap dancing,” in television parlance — ad-libbing while trying to figure out what was going on.

 My brain worked slowly. It occurred to me that I had a view of Lower Manhattan and so, one leg still in my pants, I shuffled over to the window and looked out. Sheets of office paper flapped by the glass. The smoke from the tower was a growing upside-down triangle slowly filling the sky. And sirens.

 Funny assumptions filled my head. Of course no one was in the building; everyone got out. Of course the firefighters were on hand and would soon have this thing under control. At first, I only saw smoke. Then orange flames licking at the base of the plume. Then more flames, shooting higher.

*It kept getting worse.* 

 I picked up my son, Dean, and stood him on the windowsill as we watched the spectacle. We were too far to see one of the true horrors of that day, the people jumping; I’d see photographs later. I knew I should leave for work, I really had to get going, but something told me I should stick around at home for a few minutes. 

 I saw the jet out of the corner of my eye. It zoomed across the harbor from the south, crazy fast. Growing up in Brooklyn, I was used to the sight of jets flying behind the skyscrapers of Manhattan. But this jet was suddenly *in front* of them. And then it was gone in a billowing, ascending mushroom cloud of orange, followed seconds later by a deafening *whooosshhh!* The windows rattled.

 “Holy shit!” I yelled, grabbing my hair with both hands, a gesture my son, clearly frightened, reflexively imitated. “A remote-controlled plane just hit the World Trade Center.”

 “What hit?” said my wife, Helene, rushing to the window, her eyes wide. “What? What is it?”

 Yes, that’s what I said. *A remote-controlled plane just hit the World Trade Center.* Where did that come from? Could my brain simply not accept that I’d just seen a hundred people die in a flash? Did it need an explanation that defied what my eyes had just undeniably witnessed?

 I’ve never understood why I said that.

---

To viscerally experience the confusion and terror of the day as it happened, to see it unfold in real time — especially the opening, incomprehensible moments — you can watch entire morning broadcasts on YouTube. I do this occasionally for reasons I can’t explain.

[NY1 News](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXPHNBTqE8U&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) came out of a commercial and, after a “This Day in New York History” segment, threw to a live shot from the top of the Empire State Building showing smoke pouring out of the South Tower and blowing almost horizontally to the east, toward my apartment. This is what I saw as I pulled on my pant leg. It’s 8:50 a.m. and 63 degrees. A remarkably youthful Pat Kiernan explains there’s a three-alarm fire in the building due to “some kind of explosion.”

 The calls start coming in — early crowdsourcing. One man says an “enormous tire” crashed to the ground in front of him, but doesn’t say anything about a jet. Then Kiernan tells him he’s been told by the assignment desk that it was, in fact, a plane. Another caller says with confidence it was “a single-engine propeller plane.” 

And then, as we watch, as Kiernan does his best — he’s begun to salt various stats about the buildings such as their age and height into his commentary, facts that are likely being fed into his ear — a second explosion blows out the side of the South Tower. For a few minutes, no one knows why.

On [NBC, Channel 4, the local news station, cut](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CsLEPkH37Y&list=PLo16m5lQdpk8pTGRzja0PFzjAxerMPjqn&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) into “The Today Show” with a shot of the burning first tower and a highly agitated caller with a thick New York City accent unequivocally saying it had been a big jet. Moments later, a shot from the station’s helicopter shows the second explosion — there is an audible gasp in the television studio — but, again, no one initially realizes it was another plane.

Obvious, yes, but also unbelievable. 

Then Janice Huff, one of the station’s meteorologists, calls in. She’s watching the events unfold on television at home but her eyes are better than those of her colleagues in the studio. “There was another plane,” she says, calm and cool, a total pro. I’ve always liked Huff — she’s been in my living room thousands of times — but if I ever meet her, it’s the professionalism and clarity she provided on Sept. 11 that I’ll thank her for.

---

Dazed survivors, ghost-white with pulverized cement, traipsing wordlessly across the Williamsburg Bridge as I inched across in the opposite direction in a borrowed station wagon with two crying women in the backseat who’d asked for a ride into Manhattan to get their children from school… 

Midtown deserted…

The acrid and weirdly earthy smell biting our nostrils… 

My buddy Dan, working as an architect, who stepped onto Seventh Avenue when the office was closed in early afternoon and looked down to the point of diminishing urban perspective where the towers once stood, and saw only smoke and sky…

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, asked about the casualty numbers, knowing as “Sonny” Kleinfield did that the day’s shocks required no more than a few words, saying only, “More than we can bear.”

The successes of his first term had been overshadowed by the shames of the second (not to mention many more shames since), crimes against men with names like Diallo and Louima, but for a few minutes at least, he got it right. He was in charge, even if he wasn’t — no one was, really. But at least he acted the part. Behind him, his police and fire commissioners looked on, stunned and seemingly struck dumb.

 I worked in the newsroom all night. Sometime around 3 a.m., my wife called me, crying. She couldn’t sleep and was looking out the window.

 “They’re gone,” she said. “They’re really gone.”
### Downtown Manhattan, Split in Two
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/downtown-manhattan-after-september-11/
Last updated: 2026-09-05T16:00:01.000Z
Sometime in the late fall of 2001, I found a place to stand in an overstuffed presentation room at Thomson Financial, my employer at the time, so that managers could memorialize the workers that Thomson had lost that September: [seven employees](https://names.911memorial.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#lang=en%5FUS&page=search%5Fresults&term=thomson) as well as several contractors and affiliates. 

I don’t remember a word that the speakers said, but I do remember thinking that the event was awkward, and that I wasn’t feeling whatever I was supposed to feel for these people I hadn’t known. Too many people had died, and here was a snapshot of a few of them; just like The New York Times’[ Portraits of Grief](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/sept-11-reckoning/portraits-of-grief.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), published daily then, it was both too little and too much to absorb — full of generic platitudes but at the same time heartbreakingly individual. A few weeks after the attacks, I had gone to a Brooklyn Duane Reade to buy sympathy cards to mail to the addresses Thomson provided, but the sympathy cards were sold out. 

Sometime before or after that memorial, I sat at a conference table in a different, smaller room, as executives talked to us, in batches of a dozen or so, about the air quality in and around 195 Broadway, our headquarters, the closest surviving office building to the World Trade Center site. Preparing for our return on October 24, 2001, as the federal, state and local governments gradually reduced the no-go “[frozen zone,”](https://timeline.911memorial.org/timeline/10686/images/69/228?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the building management had stripped out and replaced the carpets, including the fabric on the cubicle walls, and had scrubbed every desk clean; everything was or looked new, except for someone’s dusted-off desk plant, which the cleaners had saved. 

These were executives I didn’t recognize, and they spoke in a well-rehearsed script. The government had said the air was safe, the managers told us. As most other people and I already knew, EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman had repeatedly said, including [in the week just after 9/11](https://www.epa.gov/archive/epapages/newsroom%5Farchive/newsreleases/75aef680e69adf6585256acc007c2fc8.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), that the “air is safe to breathe.” We could express our concerns at this meeting, and we could wear company-provided disposable masks if we liked. But just as nobody would end up wearing the masks, nobody expressed their concerns — at least not strongly enough that I remember. This was not a work-from-home era; after six weeks of working from the couch or doubled up in satellite offices elsewhere in New York City, we would be back yards from Ground Zero, eight hours a day, five days a week. 

The 9/11 attacks almost perfectly bisect my life — I was 26 then, and I am 51 now. From 25 years on, it would be easy to revisit every point of decision-making during this time as absurdly misguided. 

But it’s hard to see how anyone, including me, could have done anything differently or better. What is most eerily strange from today’s perspective is not the retrospective horror of walking to and from work through a long-lingering cloud of moist ash as smiling photos of the “missing” stared out at us from beneath withered flowers and tattered teddy bears [affixed to the fence](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/13/opinion/l-chapel-s-memorial-fence-335762.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of St. Paul’s Chapel, so that we could seamlessly continue putting out a magazine and website about global infrastructure — but how, after the first few days, it *didn’t* seem horrible at all. 

---

One thing I didn’t notice about 9/11 at the time, because I was so young myself, was how young the victims were. At our company, the youngest person killed was [Amy Elizabeth Toyen](https://names.911memorial.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#lang=en%5FUS&page=person&id=3569), 24, and the oldest,[ Ruth Sheila Lapin](https://names.911memorial.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#lang=en%5FUS&page=person&id=4324), was 53\. The average age of these two victims mirrored [the average age](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm51spa6.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the New York City 9/11 victims: 39\. When I read about Amy, I was sad for her family, especially because [it seemed like](https://www.legacy.com/legacy/memorial/amy-toyen?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) they could be my family — middle-class people from New England whose college-grad daughter got a good office job. But I didn’t focus on her age as a particularly ghastly aspect, nor the fact that all four of her grandparents survived her. 

New York City, particularly Lower Manhattan, was a city of young people. I had arrived in New York two years before, after college graduation, sliding into the city’s economy with ease. It was near the height of the dot-com boom, and financial-journalist jobs abounded. In the weeks before Labor Day 1999, I sat on the hard red futon in the living room of my then-boyfriend (now husband)’s rent-regulated south Brooklyn apartment,, and went through the Sunday Times want ads for jobs. I showed up to the first interview to learn that it wasn’t a journalism outfit, but a scammy — or at least shady — private-detective group. 

The second was at a publisher called [Risk Waters](https://names.911memorial.org/?%5Fgl=1%2A1rxz963%2A%5Fgcl%5Fau%2AMTg1NDczOTU5MS4xNzg4MDAyNjg1Li0uLS4xNzg4MDAyNjg0LjU2NjE4MjA2Ni4xNzg4Mjk3ODE4LjE3ODgyOTc4MTg.%2A%5Fga%2ANTQ5NjE5OTExLjE3ODgwMDI2ODU.%2A%5Fga%5FX4Y9LN6DZW%2AczE3ODgyOTc4MTckbzQkZzEkdDE3ODgyOTc4MTgkajU5JGwwJGgw&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#lang=en%5FUS&page=affiliation&id=115), which covered financial technology. An editor interviewed me, asking me what I would do in certain reporting scenarios. What if I needed to know something about a company, but nobody at the company would talk to me? Who else might I call? What if I didn’t know anything about a particular technology in the news; how would I know which experts to trust? How might I cultivate sources? He gave me glossy back issues to take home, and I walked back down Broadway from the SoHo office pleased with myself, but not in a surprised way: Things were going well, as they were supposed to. Even though I had no job yet, I stopped in the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore [at the lower tip](https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/13/nyregion/a-shakespeare-co-to-exit-the-scene.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of Manhattan to buy a book, and glided up to the 79th floor of One World Trade Center to meet my boyfriend at his office and tell him how it had gone.

My third interview was at Thomson, and that job seemed like the best fit. At Thomson, I would be covering financial deals themselves, rather than the technology behind the deals. I understood finance, having worked at an investment bank for three years in college, but I knew little about technology. My boss would be in London, not in New York, an arrangement that seemed both sophisticated and convenient. 

And I immediately liked my London editor’s slightly off-putting, flat-affect attitude, even through the speakerphone for my in-person interview. When I effused that I was excited to work in finance because I was attracted by the fast pace of deals, he bemusedly observed that it took months, even years, for each infrastructure deal to close, and he seemed satisfied at my immediate, self-parodying pivot to saying that in that case, I would enjoy the slow pace of the in-depth research. 

A woman from human resources, with a spiky short-blonde haircut and red leather pants, asked me if I was sure that I could hold my own with the investment bankers about whose deals we would be writing. Could I be assertive, when they pressured me to write what they wanted and not write what they didn’t want? Yes. I declined the second interview at Risk and started work at Thomson in mid-September, first at an office at One State Street Plaza, with red-lit views of the Statue of Liberty at sunset, then at a midtown office, and, finally, by the year 2000, at Thomson’s corporate headquarters at 195 Broadway. 

The World Trade Center was the shimmering backdrop to my Lower Manhattan life. I bought my first office clothes at the Banana Republic in the basement mall. I opened my bank account at the bank beneath the complex, for the convenience of its ATMs there. For lunch, my colleagues and I would walk through or around the Trade Center to the Hudson River and Battery Park. 

My boyfriend’s 79th-floor office was a furnished-office outlet at International Office Centers. On the days I waited in the lobby for him to come down, I would watch the people in their skirts and heels, dress pants and shiny shoes, walking to and from the elevator bank. Other days, I would go up to meet him, getting off at the sky lobby on the 78th floor, and taking the escalator up one more level. I got to know the security guards who would record my name before printing out my visitor badge; once, I asked a guard why he had to record me every single time. We both smiled at the silliness of bureaucracy. I made anodyne office talk — the weather, the new job, the commute — with the [managers of my husband’s office](https://names.911memorial.org/?%5Fgl=1%2A1rxz963%2A%5Fgcl%5Fau%2AMTg1NDczOTU5MS4xNzg4MDAyNjg1Li0uLS4xNzg4MDAyNjg0LjU2NjE4MjA2Ni4xNzg4Mjk3ODE4LjE3ODgyOTc4MTg.%2A%5Fga%2ANTQ5NjE5OTExLjE3ODgwMDI2ODU.%2A%5Fga%5FX4Y9LN6DZW%2AczE3ODgyOTc4MTckbzQkZzEkdDE3ODgyOTc4MTgkajU5JGwwJGgw&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#lang=en%5FUS&page=affiliation&id=82). 

It was going to be the new millennium, and then it *was* the new millennium; we didn’t have to go [to a party underneath the Statue of Liberty](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/business/media/03carr.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to feel special and lucky, but also not special and lucky, because it was just how things were. We ate dinner — nearly all the time — at the Tall Ships at the Marriott World Trade Center, chomping into buffalo burgers as we listened to the chatter of bankers and business travelers. We often ate with friends, and one thing I remember about that time was that nobody ever noticed or cared who paid for dinner. Sometimes, you would pay, and sometimes, the other people would pay, and it never seemed like a big deal. 

It’s not 9/11 and its aftermath that seem strange from a quarter-century on, but fragmentary memories like that one, against the default, today, of the annoying ritual of carefully parceling out who owes what after a dinner, even though, with all those extra years of working and saving, we theoretically should worry about money less, not more, than we did then. 

Another economic vignette: In late 1999, I complained to human resources that my boss had given a new hire the “senior reporter” title, even though she had only three months’ seniority over me. The human-resources woman froze with a look of panic, and said that they couldn’t give two people the senior reporter title, but that she would give me a $12,000 raise; would that be all right? Every month, someone put a fresh unlimited MetroCard pass on my desk. Our health insurance was free. Again, those practices, and our taking them for granted, are the things that seem strange to me now. 

I was aware of terrorism; I had grown up watching and reading stories about the mysterious and scary Middle East, and was particularly interested, as an addictive-reader child, always into an age-inappropriate novel, in [Salman Rushdie](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/12/nyregion/salman-rushdie-fatwa-satanic-verses.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); how could someone face death because of a book? My uncle had served in the Marines in Beirut. When I got my ID badge at Thomson, the security officer explained why we had to badge in at every floor, which was unusual at the time: It was because of what had happened across Church Street a few years earlier, at the World Trade Center, [in 1993](https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/world-trade-center-bombing-1993?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). I knew about al-Qaida; I had read the Times Magazine [article](https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/25/magazine/inside-jihad-u-the-education-of-a-holy-warrior.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). One time, walking by the big planters outside the World Trade Center, I wondered if it was wise to offer such potential hiding spaces for bombs. 

---

During the OpSail[ parade of ships](https://nypost.com/2000/07/04/at-last-new-york-our-ships-come-in-4-million-to-watch-sail-parade/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the summer of 2000, we went out with friends to a fancy restaurant downtown — it had the word “bakery” in the name — and got too drunk to go home. We peered out at the ships through the Trade Center’s slatted windows, watching the lights of planes flying below us, and fell asleep on the office floor. In May 2001, my boyfriend left that office; we packed up his things in a couple of boxes and said goodbye to [the staff.](https://names.911memorial.org/?%5Fgl=1%2Aiw6m77%2A%5Fgcl%5Fau%2AMTg1NDczOTU5MS4xNzg4MDAyNjg1Li0uLS4xNzg4MDAyNjg0LjE4MTY4NDA3NjYuMTc4ODAwMjY4NS4xNzg4MDAyNjk5%2A%5Fga%2ANTQ5NjE5OTExLjE3ODgwMDI2ODU.%2A%5Fga%5FX4Y9LN6DZW%2AczE3ODgwMDI2ODQkbzEkZzEkdDE3ODgwMDI2OTkkajQ1JGwwJGgw&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#lang=en%5FUS&page=affiliation&id=82) I forgot to return the key to the 79th-floor ladies’ room that an office manager, [Olabisi Layeni Yee](https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/11/nyregion/nation-challenged-portraits-grief-victims-work-volunteers-two-brothers-answered.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), had given me. 

If the World Trade Center complex was a failed urban-planning experiment, as the conventional wisdom would insist later, the people who worked, visited and were beginning to live downtown didn’t know it. It worked fine for us. 

\*\*\* 

The first thing I remember about post-9/11 was how nice all the bankers were. “Thank God you are OK,” said one infrastructure banker, in his smooth South African lilt, with an emotion that startled me. Humor existed: “You’d never think he could have run so fast,” said another banker about his portly colleague and their escape. For a while, we talked about 9/11, mostly on the landline phone (I didn’t have a cellphone) in those weeks working at home. But it was a short while — by mid-fall, nobody talked about it anymore. It wasn’t until at least a decade later that the spouse of a young colleague startled me by asking me blithely at a party if I had been in New York on 9/11\. 

Post-9/11 Downtown had a soundtrack, too. To this day, I viscerally recoil from Jeff Buckley’s [version](https://www.reddit.com/r/LetsTalkMusic/comments/1sblyyr/jeff%5Fbuckleys%5Fcover%5Fof%5Fhallelujah%5Fis%5Fbetter%5Fthan/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of “Hallelujah,” which street performers downtown played incessantly. Enya’s “[Only Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wfYIMyS%5FdI&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)” and “God Bless the USA” blasted from the card tables of the people who had come from elsewhere to help out at Ground Zero, but who didn’t seem to have much to do as New York City’s government quickly secured and professionalized the site. 

The most sustained backing track was the incessant beep-beep-beep of heaving demolition carting trucks as they crisscrossed the World Trade Center site all day and all night. Most of the time, we weren’t looking out of the windows on the back side of our office at the recovery work, but we could never shut out the sounds. It didn’t take long for vendors to arrive downtown, to hawk souvenir brochures to the tourists who began to gather; it took longer for the truthers to show up with their pamphlets. 

It’s harder to re-conjure the post-9/11 smell, feel and taste — the air I could feel clinging to my skin as I walked down Broadway, and that smell of burnt plastic, but sweeter. Wind would blow droplets from the fire hoses still trained on the fires nearby. Most days, I walked by[ the Chelsea Jeans store](https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2006-09-08-voa52/313586.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) window display, the 9/11 dust caking the denim and cotton behind the glass. 

Did I really trust what Christine Whitman and the Bush administration were saying about the air quality? My actions implied trust; educated people with resources and choices surely do not purposely, repeatedly put themselves in danger for no good reason. 

But to see and feel the air near Ground Zero was to suspend disbelief and common sense when heeding Whitman’s words. If we were lied to, we consented to the lie. Why? People wanted to get back to work, and act as if things were normal, and so we ignored external abnormality for an interior normality. One evening that fall, waiting for a bus on Church Street, just north of the World Trade Center, a strong wind forced a gust of ash down my throat, and I felt it burn my core. 

Every evening that fall, as the light waned ever earlier, I would walk the few steps to the barrier cutting us off from Ground Zero and watch as metalworkers arced their fire to reduce the achingly delicate but stubbornly sturdy remains of the World Trade Center lobby facade, until eventually, nothing was visible from our side of the fence. For a while, too, the [remnants](https://litkicks.com/bordersclosings/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the Borders bookstore at Five World Trade Center, a favorite pre-9/11 coffee spot, were visible from our windows; as we watched demolition workers dismantle them one evening, a coworker and I remarked to one another that the faster they were done with the demolition work, the faster they would rebuild. 

For months, I never thought there would be another option but to rebuild, and that the term “rebuild” was to be taken literally: that is, we would re-create what had been lost. The mayor had [promised](https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/se/date/2001-09-12/segment/33?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) just a day after 9/11 that “the skyline will be whole again.” As I [attended my first government meeting](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/nyregion/slowing-down-at-a-cost.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — and started grappling with the complexities of New York’s state and local politics — I gradually realized that this seemingly obvious inevitability would not in fact happen. I started writing op-eds, and the newspaper printed them. 

By the time I left my 195 Broadway office in May 2005, the World Trade Center site was still a pit — a neat grid from which smoke and ash no longer emanated, but still years away from becoming a busy construction site. What New York eventually built is a generic 21st century global-city complex of office buildings, shops and restaurants. The memorial supposedly defines the site, and yet it’s also easy to avoid if you want, a neat real-estate trick that actually makes sense. For me, the more poignant memorial is just nearby: the metal[ Koenig Sphere,](https://www.911memorial.org/connect/blog/sphere-symbol-resilience-and-survival-rededicated-liberty-park?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) once the centerpiece of the pre-9/11 World Trade Center plaza, now in its forever dented post-9/11 state in Liberty Park.

Though they seemed so at the time, it’s hard, anymore, to view the delays and the eventual outcome as failures. In 2002, 2003 and 2004, we seemed to be moving forward so painfully, inexcusably, cravenly slowly, or not at all. But today, those dates seem compressed so close to 9/11 as to be indistinguishable from the attacks. New York’s political process was imperfect, yes, but sometimes we don’t do the right thing on the right schedule, and that’s fine. 

---

It has occurred to me that statistically, I had a better chance of dying on 9/11 than some of the people, like me in age and career, who did die. Amy Toyen, two years younger than me, lived and worked in Boston, and had come to New York just that morning, to attend the[ Risk Waters conference](https://www.risk.net/comment/7871711/in-memoriam?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at Windows on the World atop One World Trade Center; 16 Risk Waters workers, as well as many attendees and restaurant workers, also perished.[ Andrea Haberman](https://www.911memorial.org/connect/blog/remembering-andrea-haberman?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), months younger than me, had arrived the night before, for her own business trip near the top of the same building. They hadn’t spent two years of their lives geographically defined by the Twin Towers and the people in and around them. 

I think not only of the five people at International Office Centers who died, but of all of the people I brushed by in Lower Manhattan during 1999, 2000, and the first eight months and 10 days of 2001\. I talked to them, if briefly and trivially, I smiled at them, I walked the same lobbies, sidewalks and river promenades with them, ate at the same lunch spots with them, went up and down with them in the same elevators. Before 9/11, we all lived the same lives, and had the same certainty that an elevator that brought you up in the morning would bring you down again. Loose ties and low-stakes interactions are the fabric of urban life, [all part of Clotho’s thread](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotho?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and 9/11 severed some of these loose ties. 

On that September day, the collective Lower Manhattan world split irrevocably into victims and survivors; the former left the rest of us behind, in a new world they would never know, a world that quickly became so normal that what came before seems the aberration. I still have my key to the 79th floor of the One World Trade Center ladies’ room on my keychain — just a normal, shiny piece of metal, seemingly indestructible.
### A City Forgets. Maybe It’s Supposed To.
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-nyc-changed-since-9-11/
Last updated: 2026-09-08T15:07:23.000Z
Thirteen years ago, I marked the 12th anniversary of 9/11 by getting back-of-the-envelope figures from the Department of City Planning on how many New Yorkers who were here on that dark day were still here. At that point, fully half of the city had turned over in just over a decade. 

Today, more than three-quarters of the city has turned over, as people were born, died and moved in and out (and sometimes back in) to New York City. Three mayors have come and gone. 

The admonition after the attack — at a time when the question on many minds was if it would ever be safe here again, if anyone would still want to live here — was “never forget,” a mantra in tension with the fact that people will, and need to, forget. It’s part of what it is to be a person, and finite; part of what separates us from the divine and perhaps also the machines.

[A hundred million Americans alive now](https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1071094355367341) weren’t yet born on 9/11 or were too young to remember it. 

Of course there are many people here to whom this was a fatal or formative event, and it’s no disrespect to any of them or the first responders who gave their lives that day or the even greater number who have died from 9/11-related illnesses since then to recognize that other people have moved on, with time, and that the city of today is not the same as the one that those sacrifices were made and suffering endured in. 

And New York City’s whole history is wrapped up in not being too wrapped up in its own history, in being a place of and for reinvention. Curt Schilling isn’t right about much, but mystique and aura really are just dancers in a nightclub.

There’s a fragment from Heraclitus that’s often misquoted as something like “No man ever steps into the same river twice, because it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” 

He never wrote that, but the ancient Greek philosopher was quoted as saying that “On those who step into the same rivers, ever different waters flow — and souls are exhaled from the moist things.” It’s no wonder that Heraclitus was nicknamed “The Dark One” and “The Obscure.”

Something I didn’t think about when I was helping out at Ground Zero, or when [I wrote about the attack 13 years ago](https://www.nydailynews.com/2013/09/11/12-years-is-a-long-time/?share=at0w11nsl0ytndosywns&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but that seems central now to what needs to be remembered, and understood, was how it led directly to the creation in 2003 of the Department of Homeland Security, and a massive new budget line and reordering of the federal government — one that eventually and perhaps predictably brought the surveillance tools developed by the military for the war on terror back home. 

There’s a line from all that to the election of the city’s first Muslim mayor last year, in a city that our native-son president once deemed an [“anarchist jurisdiction”](https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/department-justice-identifies-new-york-city-portland-and-seattle-jurisdictions-permitting?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for trying to maintain its own values and not merely comply with what a federal government hell-bent on mass deportations demanded. (Mamdani, not incidentally, is also the city’s first “real” immigrant mayor since the 19th century, not counting Abe Beame, who came here from London as an infant.) 

If a budget is an expression of values, as Mario Cuomo liked to say, that first $30 billion appropriation to DHS in 2004 may have been when the die was cast as President George W. Bush declared that the war on terror had set urgent priorities for the nation both home and abroad.

---

A city doesn’t just change hands; it changes ages. The New Yorkers who were here that morning are 25 years older now, and the ones who’ve filled in behind them — in the classrooms, apartments and trains — were mostly kids then, if they were born at all, or living somewhere very different. For many of them, 9/11 is something that helps explain the cops with long guns at Penn Station and some of the shape of the city’s politics, but doesn’t organize either. It isn’t the rallying cry it was, or the touchstone, or that one seemingly apolitical stretch of days when most everybody in the five boroughs was grieving the same thing at the same time. That’s what time does to an event, and probably what it’s supposed to do. The anniversary keeps its date; the city keeps moving. To get more of a sense of what moving has actually looked like, I called [John Mollenkopf](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-evolution-of-flatbush/), a distinguished professor of political science and sociology and director of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, for a more structured perspective on what’s changed in New York, and specifically in its political demography, over the last quarter century.

Mollenkopf, who’s working on a book about the impact of immigration on New York City’s politics, had a lot to say about the changing state of a city that now has a much diminished Italian American population, offset by growing Arab, South Asian and Central American populations. More than half of the voting-eligible population, he noted, is now made up of naturalized immigrants and their children, though they probably aren’t yet quite half of the actual voters.

There isn’t a simple moral or fable to be drawn, of course, from all the changes happening all of the time in this one river that men and women are always stepping in and out of, but there are some striking observations. 

“Italian Americans were the most conservative, most Republican‑leaning of the white ethnic groups,” Mollenkopf said, and they have had by far “the biggest percentage drop of any group” on his chart tracking the population of voting‑age citizens by the race, ethnicity and nativity of household heads — helping to explain why the city’s politics no longer track those of the older, union‑machine and white‑ethnic-coalition-dominated ones that defined the city’s politics in the late 20th century. 

Symbolically, you can see the shift in the once Italian American strongholds that often defined the city in popular culture and people’s imaginations that are now almost entirely different. There are still great Italian restaurants on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, but most of them are owned by Albanians now. There are great delicatessens left in Bensonhurst, but Bay Ridge, the setting for “Saturday Night Fever,” now has what Mollenkopf says is “probably the biggest concentration of Arabic‑speaking people on the East Coast.”

“Everybody talks about gentrification in Williamsburg and blah blah blah… but they don’t talk about how basically all the outer‑borough home‑owning neighborhoods that used to be white ethnic are now either West Indian or Chinese, and that’s just as important to the city’s cultural dynamic and political dynamics as anything else.”

Layered on top of all the ethnic turnover is a generational and occupational shift that has less to do with 9/11 directly than with what followed: the tech and knowledge‑industry boom that flourished in the long shadow of the attacks and then the Great Recession.

“The number of young people, say 21 to 35, who work in knowledge‑intensive industries in New York City doubled just in the last 10 years,” Mollenkopf told me. They mostly don’t live in Manhattan. Instead, they’ve settled in what he calls “the corona of neighborhoods around the Manhattan CBD: Western Queens and Williamsburg and down even through Sunset Park with little clusters out on Staten Island and even in the South Bronx,” as people both can’t afford and don’t necessarily want to live in Manhattan. 

That cohort, he argues, “has also helped to change the electoral geography of the city as the old ethnic map has been overlaid by a new generational and class map, organized around knowledge work, housing costs and proximity to the Manhattan core.”

At the same time, South Asian communities that often found themselves squarely in the sights of the new Department of Homeland Security and its allied agencies after 9/11 kept growing and began pushing for more political representation. 

Bangladeshis, he said, have been the most left‑leaning of those groups while “the median sentiment” among South Asians had remained “culturally quite conservative,” even as many are “very working class,” with “higher than normal” rates of self‑employment and small business ownership. 

Mollenkopf recalled watching a mass meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America (he called himself a mostly lapsed member) that helped launch Zohran Mamdani’s ascent, long before City Hall was in view. 

Mamdani’s key pitch, as Mollenkopf heard it, was that he could win “all the normal Commie corridor types,” but also “reach out to groups that are culturally conservative… but who’ve been ignored and who could be mobilized” — starting with South Asian Muslims. 

“I would say that he was half successful in doing that,” Mollenkopf said, as those neighborhoods gave Mamdani “a much higher Democratic share than they typically do in presidential elections, but it wasn’t a sweep.” 

Part of Mamdani’s strategy, Mollenkopf noted, was aesthetic, and meant to tap into the cultural conservatism of the communities’ uncles and aunties, while also offering assurances to other convincible Democrats that the newcomer on the political scene wasn’t nearly as radical as the caricature his opponents tried to make of him:

“It’s interesting that Mamdani has presented himself always in a suit and tie” and as “visibly culturally conservative in a lot of ways,” said Mollenkopf, calling that “obviously a very deliberate” choice by the young politician.

It’s one that paid off, big time, in a race where the demographic shifts that had been registering at the margins of the city’s politics broke through and reshaped its political maps. 

By the time Mamdani was knocking doors, he was walking through that entire history: the hollowed‑out Italian base, the ring of knowledge workers around Manhattan, the West Indian and Chinese homeowner belts, and the South Asian communities first organized by federal suspicion and only later by their own ambitions. 

It’s from that map, not the one New Yorkers carried in their heads on 9/11 and that some politicians were still holding to 25 years later, that the city’s first Muslim mayor emerged.
### The City We Remember, the City We Become
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/9-11-a-muslim-american-reflection/
Last updated: 2026-09-08T15:07:01.000Z
I was born here in New York City, but not the New York City you’re thinking of. My New York City was Brooklyn, but not the Brooklyn you’re thinking of, either. I am a native son of the deepest edge of Brooklyn, the part of the city that no one really thinks of as “The City.” Where I grew up, English might have been spoken as a third language. Everyone knew you and your family. Life moved at a slower pace, and everything you needed was within a 10-block radius. That was home. The place we called *Manhattan* — “The City” — was something far off and different; we looked to it with conflicting feelings of aspiration and envy. Maybe one day we’ll make it there. Or maybe we won’t. They don’t think much of us there, anyway. Growing up, Manhattan was always a symbol, until one day it wasn’t.

I got the news that the Twin Towers had been attacked while watching TV in my childhood apartment. Unlike most 8-year-olds at the time, I wasn’t in school that Tuesday. I had just returned from a family trip overseas and fell ill upon our return. It was the moment that Manhattan ceased to be just a symbol, but I was too young to fully know what I was seeing unfold before me. A part of the city was destroyed, but a new city would be born from the embers, and the question arising from that rebirth is one I engage almost every day in my line of work as a public historian and walking tour guide: How do we remember New York?

For a long time, September 11 was a date I preferred to not think about, because it evoked a double trauma for me: The first was of the attack itself, and the second was of being told that I could not mourn the attack. In fact, the mourning was sometimes channeled into a weapon, and I was its target. Muslim New Yorkers were never fully allowed to grieve as New Yorkers because we had to constantly defend ourselves as Muslims. The vocabulary of our city had changed: terms like “national security,” “terrorism” and “surveillance” gained a new, charged valence, and they all involved people who looked like me and my family. 

Downtown Manhattan is where the towers were and where they fell, but the question of what our city became after the attacks was answered in neighborhoods in all five boroughs, from Brighton Beach to Fordham Heights, Tompkinsville to Jamaica. While the new memorial was being built on Ground Zero, real memories were being forged in the everyday lives of New Yorkers, where our social trust *for* each other would be tested against our social fears *of* each other. “If you see something, say something,” the phrase became. This was the city I came up in. 

Over a decade after the attacks, when I had reached college, I co-founded with a group of friends a Muslim faith-based charity organization dedicated to fighting food insecurity. Our project was simple: We’d collectively chip in some money each week from our allowances or internships and use it to buy groceries, which we’d then deliver to families all over town. This was how I spent my weekends and how I made new friends. One of those friends grew particularly close to me, volunteering often with my charity, getting to know everyone around me, and even sleeping over at my place. 

I was to later learn that this young man — a teenager like me — was a police informant. And like me, he was targeted by New York, though differently. He was a troubled youth of South Asian Muslim background who was arrested on drug charges and told that his options were to either surveil for the police or face jail time. And so, he did what most of us might’ve done if we were in his circumstances. My friends and I were the targets of his surveillance, and yet both he and I became victims of a city that decided that neither of us truly belonged or mattered. 

It wasn’t long until I would be convinced to join a lawsuit led by a clinic at CUNY Law School and the ACLU to challenge the NYPD for surveilling not just me, but the entire Muslim community of New York City. We were all suspects in a post-9/11 city, and the social devastation and loss of trust that it engendered had taken a tremendous toll on us. Our lawsuit lasted several years, and as I transitioned from college into the professional world, we won [a settlement](https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/second-and-final-judge-approves-settlement-nypd-muslim-surveillance?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that finally brought relief: The discriminatory surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers would come to an end, civil liberty protections would be put into place for all New Yorkers, and a new chapter of the city would be written.

The truth is that New York did not have a clean, romantic story after September 11\. My own ordeal demonstrates that there are things we could have done differently. In our remembrance of those whom we lost, we forgot who we were, and for some of us, the post-9/11 city was not experienced through solidarity but through surveillance. We had to fight to be included in the city’s collective memory. But there is something that makes New York different — and that is the fact that the city did become a better version of itself. Not only did we end the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims, but our city also elected a Muslim mayor (who happens to be my good friend).

People often ask me how I can love a city that surveilled me. My answer is simple: I refuse to surrender to those who say that I don’t belong here. I guess that stubbornness is what most makes me a New Yorker. To choose to love New York is to enter a toxic relationship: You’ll say you love the city, but it will find a million ways to test your love and then dare you to love it again. Sometimes that can be a dispute with your landlord, or it can be a shouting match with a driver who turned too quickly as you were crossing the street, or it can be the police targeting you for who you are. New York forces you to redeem it. And it was through the city’s redemption that I came to love it once more.

Today I serve as the official borough historian of Brooklyn. The same city that once surveilled me has entrusted me with the enormous responsibility of remembering and sharing the stories of its most populous borough. I run my own walking tour company, where I do exactly that on the streets where memories are made. I also teach New York City history to college students — nearly all of whom were born after September 11 — and give guided tours at the Museum of the City of New York. My job is to help you remember. But I cannot shed my activist skin, and in that vein, my job is to help you imagine what’s possible, what New York can become.

Very recently, I came to realize that as a late millennial, I belong to the youngest generation to have a working memory of September 11 and its aftermath, and one day I will be part of the last generation to tell those stories. “The City” is no longer just a symbol; it’s very real. And I know the greatest tribute that I can offer to it at this moment is not to simply remember it as the city that once was, but to build it as the city that, after all these years, it is still trying to become. I will do exactly that.
### The Terrorist Threat, Then and Now
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-terrorist-threat-before-and-after-9-11/
Last updated: 2026-09-08T15:06:39.000Z
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the threat to this country materialized as hijacked commercial airliners used as kinetic weapons. In New York, 2,753 people were killed. It was the single deadliest terrorist attack in history, and it happened in the heart of America’s largest city, on a clear Tuesday morning.

U.S. law enforcement and the intelligence community have spent much of the quarter century since that day implementing measures to keep it from happening again. The work is continuous, because the threat keeps evolving and our defenses are always adapting. By the time one of us became secretary of homeland security in 2005, the institutions meant to prevent the next attack were still taking shape, and many of the hardest questions were still unanswered.

Before 9/11, we organized American security around foreign threats and largely through the Defense Department. When the Berlin Wall fell, it felt like the end of an era and a time when great dangers were lessening. The attacks made clear that threats weren’t lessening, only morphing: They were now from networks that opposed our way of life and could reach symbols of American freedom on a clear Tuesday morning. When the new millennium dawned, the homeland felt secure. After that day, it did not.

### A coordinated response

The post-9/11 response reshaped how our country defends itself. The Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security to unify the fragmented security apparatus and to break down the silos between federal agencies that weren’t built for information sharing. The guiding principle was unity of effort, and a single line of sight across the agencies responsible for securing America.

For most Americans, visible changes arrived first in airports. Aviation security and the entire experience of flying were reimagined and federalized. That made sense, because it was airplanes that had been converted into missiles on that darkest day.

New York City correctly adopted extensive measures. The city turned the NYPD into a counterterrorism force with an intelligence division that posted detectives in cities overseas and a Domain Awareness System that drew cameras, license plate readers and sensors into a single picture. The Lower Manhattan financial district was hardened with bollards, checkpoints and surveillance. Taken together, these measures have made the city far harder to attack at scale than it was on September 11, 2001\. The progress made should not be lost; it’s not an accident that the country and the city haven’t suffered another mass-casualty attack in a quarter century.

### The threat changed shape

And yet the threat has continued to evolve. It changed shape, and the most important adaptation is a challenge to detect. We’ve moved from large terrorist organizations to lone-wolf operators, radicalized individuals intent on maiming and killing just the same.

In 2001, a complex, coordinated attack required years of physical sanctuary, face-to-face vetting and structured training camps. Money moved, people traveled, conversations were intercepted. The very scale that made al-Qaida dangerous also gave us the surface area to find it. 

The lone attacker provides a fraction of that trail. 

The sharpest evolution is the asymmetric attack enabled by technology. The 9/11 plot demanded a mastermind, the planning of a Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the reach of an Osama bin Laden. Today a person can self-radicalize online in a matter of weeks and carry out an attack of real impact with no organization behind him, no handler and no border to cross. The plotting phase is now stripped down to a single individual, which is far harder to see coming.

New Yorkers have witnessed this progression firsthand. The 2009 plot to bomb the subway, directed by al-Qaida from a location in Pakistan, was an organized conspiracy our defenses were designed to catch, and we caught it. The attacks that followed were smaller and more self-directed: the 2016 Chelsea bombing, the 2017 pipe bomb at the Port Authority and the 2017 truck attack on the West Side Highway that killed eight, the deadliest terrorist attack in the city since 9/11\. Each required less organization than the last and each was harder to see coming.

The cast of adversaries has widened as well. Back then it was individuals motivated by a distorted, radical reading of Sunni Islam who were the chief threat. In recent years, Iran has repeatedly sought to assassinate former U.S. government officials and Iranian dissidents on American soil, increasingly working through criminal networks to distance the plots from its intelligence service and to evade the FBI. Violent domestic extremism has become a category of its own, with dedicated prevention units and threat assessment teams. The most concerning plots no longer fit a single profile.

Concealing plans for working plots has also gotten easier. The operational milestones of modern plots are increasingly shielded by technology. From pre-attack surveillance conducted through open-source satellite imagery to coordination over encrypted messaging apps, the digital footprint of a conspiracy has become far harder to trace. The windows that law enforcement and the intelligence community once relied on to interrupt an attack have narrowed.

At the same time, the battle lines are no longer divided between the digital and the tangible. Modern adversaries seek a dangerous convergence, using cyber exploits to disable physical security systems, manipulate air traffic control data or disrupt critical infrastructure like power grids. A well-timed ransomware or operational technology attack could blind first responders or paralyze defenses at the very moment a kinetic or drone incident begins.

Drones are the clearest point of convergence. Twenty-five years ago, the weapon was a passenger jet, and today the airspace faces a decentralized threat from commercial drones, the unmanned aircraft systems whose range and payload grow cheaper and more capable every year.

These systems have proven themselves in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the danger reaches well beyond aviation, to the parades, festivals and sporting events at the center of community life. In 2022 outside Chicago, a sniper on a rooftop opened fire on the crowd gathered along the route for Highland Park’s Fourth of July parade. What he reached from a rooftop, a drone could now reach from the air.

Looking ahead, artificial intelligence is the development to watch most closely, because it cuts both ways. It lowers the barrier to sophisticated cyberattacks and to disinformation convincing enough to move a market or start a panic. Indeed, an attack that could use AI to shut down hospitals, petroleum pipelines or banks would be a new form of terrorism, one that spreads fear without a single explosion. The very same tools will also help us defend, sharpening detection and speeding decisions under pressure, but they will not replace human judgment. The most difficult calls must involve a human in the loop.

### Vigilance and remembrance

The question, 25 years on, is what the next generation of homeland defenders and public safety officials will do about it. They must keep adapting, because the adversary does. Detection must shift from finding networks to recognizing individuals before they act, which is far harder and leans on families, schools, clergy, mental health professionals and online platforms as much as on any intelligence agency. We must defend the seams where cyber and physical meet. And we must protect the open gatherings that make city life worth living without being overly intrusive.

Two things have not changed in 25 years. The first is the dedication of the law enforcement officers, intelligence professionals and analysts across the intelligence community, DHS, DOJ, DOD and local agencies who work to protect this country. We have seen their dedication up close. It does not waver. 

The second is the aim of our adversaries, even as the adversaries themselves have changed. The target profile remains a deliberate mix of private sector and government entities, chosen to exploit vulnerabilities, instill widespread fear and inflict maximum harm.

We will always be reminded that the human cost of 9/11 has not ended. Twenty-five years later, we continue to lose first responders to cancers and illnesses that trace to their exposure during the response and recovery operations at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The men and women who ran toward the danger in 2001, and who returned to the wreckage in the weeks and months that followed, are still paying a price for their service.

The responders are not the only ones still falling ill. The office workers, residents and passersby who survived the towers, breathing the same toxic air as they fled Lower Manhattan, have in the years since developed the same diseases. The toll of September 11 is measured not only in the lives taken that morning, but in the lives quietly shortened among those who rushed in and those who barely got out.

New York will mark the 25th anniversary of September 11 as both an ongoing target and a symbol of endurance. The city is far safer against the complex plots that defined 2001, and the harder task now is to see the less sophisticated attacks on the horizon: the lone figure radicalized in the privacy of their home, the inexpensive drone over a crowd, the line of code that opens a backdoor and the artificial intelligence that makes each one easier to plot and harder to see. That is a more difficult kind of vigilance, and recognizing it is how we must continue to adapt.
### Much More Than Two Towers
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/evolution-nyc-architecture-world-trade-center/
Last updated: 2026-09-08T15:06:16.000Z
Vertiginous doesn’t begin to describe the experience of the original World Trade Center, home to my career’s beginning, birthplace of my adulthood. The towers, glowing, hopeful, almost innocent, stood in stark contrast to the raw streets and sidewalks of late 1980s New York. Crack, AIDS and homelessness raged. The city was still crawling out of the too-often-forgotten fiscal crisis of the 1970s, but it was also the land of the free and the home of the brave. For many a freshly minted graduate, it was the cult of Bret Easton Ellis — preppy by day, Palladium by night. Vodka and tap water were interchangeably clean. Nancy Reagan’s dictum to “just say no” fueled our Xer cynicism: we worked hard to pay for rent (in my case in cash — an illegal sublet from Shah and his wife, Candi, always with an “i”), jaw-dropping student loans, and lip-smacking contraband, all while not giving a hot damn.

I hadn’t fully heard my life’s calling in architecture, in part because I was partying too much to listen, but mainly because the sirens that engulfed the city were not the kind that inspired. Much like today, most developers built banal rental apartments and boring office buildings. Highfalutin luxury condos weren’t yet a thing. There were no shiny new museums. The subways had improved but were still a train wreck. Famed and now shamed architect Richard Meier had proposed — wait for it — a plan to fix Penn Station that, shockingly, failed. Contemporary architecture in New York before 9/11 was zero sum: Form followed finance.

Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Towers, inspired by Gothic architecture that similarly reached for the sky, were the exception. Despite being loathed at the time by many, the skyscrapers were gargantuan yet delicate in a way that is inconceivable today. Each held twice the square footage of just one of the portly buildings at Hudson Yards, but they were far more elegant. Yamasaki chamfered the corners, developed a glimmering aluminum alloy with Alcoa for the facade, and worked with brilliant structural engineer Les Robertson to create the lightweight ribbed structure that would give the towers their soar. The lobbies were luminous with structural “forks” that opened to the light, reminiscent of the famed cathedrals in Chartres, Rouen and Amiens. The towers and their awkward surrounding step-cousins formed the infamous plaza that drew the derision of urban planners — “windswept” was its ubiquitous descriptor.

Altogether, the complex lacked “human scale,” according to the emergent postmodern ethos, having none of the charm of older European squares. But in the F. Scott Fitzgerald sense of two contradictory things being true at once, many of the rightful criticisms belied a beauty we will never again see. On Liberty Street, there was a small staircase that skirted past World Trade Two; there you ascended to the plaza on the plinth, and could stare directly up the side of the edifice, no setbacks to mitigate the scale, no material changes to distract the eye, just 1,362 feet of vertical aluminum ribs merging into heaven — it was the audacity of dope. So for fuck’s sake, Mrs. Reagan, just say yes.

Within weeks of the murder of 2,977 innocents and the city’s most unapologetic modern landmark, architects and planners began publicly decrying the towers. Out of scale and anti-urban they were. Replaced they could be, with a memorial, museum, commercial office buildings and a train station that could double as an atrium for blaring chain stores. Few asked themselves why the World Trade Center was the target — twice — instead of, say, the Empire State Building or the Chrysler. In that determined choice, the terrorists had a horrifying clarity many of my criticizing comrades lacked. The fundamentalists understood that the Twin Towers were a beacon of universalism that threatened any jihadist, abroad or here. They housed companies from around the world. Every walk of life worked to keep that massive facility ticking. Its architecture was not a European high modern import, like Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building; it was American, designed by a brilliant son of immigrants born in Seattle.

The physical being of New York City, its corpus, would forever change after that fateful day, for good and for bad. Without 9/11, a billionaire named Mike Bloomberg would never have become mayor. Recovery from the tragedy, a far more tenuous prospect than people today begin to understand or imagine, demanded the steady hand of a manager and his subject matter experts, hard chargers like Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and City Planning Chair Amanda Burden, under whom I served as Manhattan planning director. Each of us in our own way enabled the corporal transformation — Doctoroff in terms of Hudson Yards and countless other massive citywide development initiatives, Sadik-Khan in her eventual introduction of shared bikes and “road diets,” and Burden in terms of the High Line, the waterfronts and the city’s public realm. As her aide-de-camp, I fought the wars at the Trade Center site alongside her, especially for the successful reintegration of Fulton, Cortlandt and Dey streets. In that sense we had metabolized the critique of the WTC complex and helped to break down its superblock, the right thing to do for a different era. But for me at least, I wish it were all still there, I wish Elvis hadn’t left the building.

The original World Trade Center was insanely irrational in a wondrous sense because it was a public-sector building endeavor taken on by the State and supercharged by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and his visionary brother David in a questionable effort to revitalize the then-moribund Lower Manhattan — no developer would or could have built such a gargantuan structure. Of course, most of us now condemn the urban renewal that enabled the Twin Towers’ construction. But today, save for our current efforts at Penn Station and our aesthetic new mayor’s talk of Sunnyside Yard, one wonders whether there are any ambitious public-sector building endeavors — particularly of the “make no small plans” variety — even when they don’t entail eminent domain and do demand public input. Save for some scattershot climate and transit one-off projects, there have been few truly bold public construction initiatives since the “bad old billionaire” Bloomberg days of the High Line, the extension of the 7 train line, and remade streets, parks and waterfronts.

During the subsequent years, that imperative was replaced by a transactional mindset largely focused upon building affordable housing as widgets without the glue of meaningful public spaces and good design that create actual places. Of course, there is fair criticism that the Bloomberg emphasis on quality of life, which was the agenda we enacted to pull the city out of its post-terrorist tailspin, resulted in a widespread lack of affordability. But given the larger national forces that would play out ranging from the subprime mortgage crisis to the pandemic to rapid technological change, it’s not clear whether Bloomberg policies caused or simply correlated with the affordability crisis that ultimately overtook the nation. And when we speak about Brooklyn and Queens in particular, I cannot help but notice that it is the gentrifiers who most loudly complain about gentrification.

The Bloomberg years did bring to our city a new emphasis on design, especially in the public realm, something I largely attribute to the efforts of Amanda Burden. The competition to replace the World Trade Center, led by the late Alex Garvin, put Pritzker winners on the front page of the Post. Luxury condominiums, enabled by both the cheap money of the early aughts and the enormous growth of both the financial and tech industries in New York, resulted in the marketing of architecture, with the neighborhood around the High Line and the far more grotesque supertalls along 57th Street engaging serious design talent to largely mediocre ends. More recently we have seen a surfeit of star-studded museum projects from MoMA to the Frick to the Studio Museum to the New Museum. If on the day before 9/11 you told one of the city’s machersthat Renzo Piano would design a new Whitney Museum *in the meatpacking district,* you would have been laughed out of town.

Imperfect as many of these cultural projects may be, the city is better for them. Quality is contagious, and must now pervade the dialogue of equity to convince a more progressive public that great design can be for everybody, as opposed to just the elite.

Lastly, one of the biggest differences I note in the quarter century since 9/11 is how divided we are as a city and nation versus the galvanizing horror of that day. My family and I lived downtown in the days, months and years that followed, and in that gut-wrenching aftermath I remember little talk of class warfare, of the Democrats at each other’s throats, or of left and right questioning whether we are indeed one nation. Perhaps in the next quarter century, by the 50th anniversary of this tragedy, we might find a path back to our national narrative, to our city with its statue in the harbor.

Architecture plays a small but important role in that national narrative; when design excellence is executed with public purpose, as it was, however imperfectly, during the City Beautiful movement and Roosevelt’s WPA, we were reminded that we are all in this together. We are surrounded by a new brand of politics that does indeed make us feel like we are a nation torn asunder. If after 9/11 we found both some unity and some belief that our physical world matters to the lived experience of our daily lives, perhaps in this next quarter century, we can bring these sentiments together, and build again — not only for our greater good but as a reminder of our common bonds as a city, nation and people.
### Why the City Council Must Confirm John Mangin
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/john-mangin-bsa-chair-nyc-city-council/
Last updated: 2026-09-01T13:33:55.000Z
In the two decades since I first joined the New York City Council, I have seen a significant transformation — for the better — in our city’s conversation around housing. In the coming weeks, the City Council has a chance to continue that momentum, and to take another step toward a more affordable city by confirming John Mangin to chair the Board of Standards and Appeals.

Today, there is no denying that New York has a housing crisis. Leaders across the political spectrum recognize that we need to build more housing of all types to bring down costs. That is a remarkable shift from when I first joined the City Council and even from when I began my work as director of the Department of City Planning (DCP) four years ago. Affordable housing proposals that might have been dismissed on arrival in the 2000s and 2010s now receive serious consideration. While each individual proposal still receives scrutiny, policymakers are now treating the housing crisis as the existential threat to our city that it is.

This is important progress. And while many people have contributed to this transformation, one person has undeniably been pushing our policies forward in that time: John Mangin. Recognizing John’s quiet leadership in unheralded roles over the past decade, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has now nominated him to chair the BSA, a relatively minor board that nonetheless plays an important role in considering new development proposals. The BSA can approve some kinds of development proposals, depending on whether they meet certain “findings,” such as whether a proposed building fits into the neighborhood character or whether a property faces a unique hardship, like an unusual lot shape, that might prevent its ordinary use. Last year, New York City voters also approved a change to the City Charter that created a new “fast track” review process by which the BSA can approve affordable housing proposals.

I can think of nobody better for the role of BSA chair. John has been central to the city’s affordable housing efforts and would be a thoughtful and effective leader of the BSA.

At the Department of City Planning in 2015 and 2016, John helped craft Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, which required affordable housing to be delivered with new housing developments. He was also a key architect of City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, which is expected to deliver [more than 80,000 new homes](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/nyregion/nyc-housing-city-of-yes.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across the city. Our five neighborhood plans that the City Council approved in 2024 and 2025 will bring [another 50,000 new homes](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/09/most-pro-housing-administration-in-city-history--mayor-adams-cel?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as well.

These transformative projects will also be paired with billions of dollars in investments and new programs across the city — from more resilient sewers to new schools to safer streets. In his role at DCP, John has been central to these efforts and has helped drive home the need for housing policies that meet the scale of the housing crisis in our city.

But the end product of John’s work on these proposals is not the entirety of why he would be a worthy BSA chair. As a City Council member, I saw zoning as complicated and inaccessible, so when I became director of DCP, I knew we had to rededicate ourselves to public outreach and education. John went above and beyond, meeting with community boards, local advocates and nonprofits, and faith-based organizations across the five boroughs.

As chair of the BSA, John would be responsible for weighing community input on housing proposals alongside complicated legal and financial details. I saw him do exactly that in his time at DCP, speaking with community boards and elected officials and crafting modifications to zoning proposals that meet our shared priorities. He has shown a remarkable dedication to serving New Yorkers and addressing the most pressing issues facing our city.

Some members of the City Council have scrutinized John’s past work and writings, asking whether he will fairly weigh community voices if he is confirmed to the BSA. I have seen John’s dedication to community engagement firsthand and I am confident that he will continue that work at the BSA. He regularly collaborates with community boards, nonprofit and faith-based organizations, and other civic groups to explain zoning proposals, and to ensure that their feedback is reflected in those proposals or in other commitments that accompany them. He will carry this commitment to true public service through to the BSA as he hears public testimony on the projects before the Board.

For as much progress as we have made in recent years, there is still work to do. With the right leadership, the BSA can be a much stronger tool in addressing our city’s housing crisis. John Mangin is the right leader for the job, and I hope the City Council will vote to confirm him.
### Mamdani’s Childcare Strategy Should Focus on Equity
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-universal-childcare-equity/
Last updated: 2026-08-31T19:44:33.000Z
Central to the rise of democratic socialists from New York to Seattle is the promise of free childcare and pre-K for all families. It’s the seductive Scandinavian dream that feels so urgent, such a no-brainer when set aside [President Trump’s effort to decimate Head Start](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-the-major-changes-head-start-faces-under-trump-proposal?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

The impulse is understandable. Breathtaking pre-K bills shatter household budgets, forcing middle-class parents to [flee](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/10/22/nyc-families-flee-child-care-school-crisis-mamdani-agenda/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) cities and erode birth rates nationwide. In New York City, the average annual childcare bill can be [upwards of $18,000](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/child-care-affordability-and-the-benefits-of-universal-provision/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

The question is whether to attack the problem by creating a new universal entitlement for all kids under 5 — what Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised during the campaign and now seeks to deliver for an estimated [$9 billion a year](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/nyregion/mamdani-free-child-care-cost.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — or to work hard first to lift up poor and working-class kids who fall behind even before kindergarten. 

The first approach risks spending billions while failing to narrow gaping disparities in children’s early learning. Indeed, by dodging the question of how he will lift the fortunes of working-class children, Mamdani may ironically reinforce inequities before kids start school, not reduce disparities.

It is to Mamdani’s great credit that he cares about this issue. Yet by focusing solely on economics, he defines fairness as the offer of a cost-free entitlement to as many families as possible. Others — myself included — see fairness as the provision of policies that yield more equal [results](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/preschool-is-important-but-its-more-important-for-poor-children/2014/02/09/79ff4ab4-8e96-11e3-b227-12a45d109e03%5Fstory.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for children, narrowing gaping inequities in early health and learning.

Children’s early mental and social skills have [climbed](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X20931078?casa%5Ftoken=dp%5FD547s7PQAAAAA:CV9GSWXcQt8pTc9E6fP%5FKFNYKmUxiBRVYoahOjwjKeWuHOoo9t3cnJWvfHosZc1BsVeek4zKPUjO&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in recent decades, thanks to rising maternal education levels and wider access to pre-K nationwide. Still, most of the achievement gap suffered by elementary students is [observed](https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/82571568/reardon%5F20whither%5F20opportunity%5F20-%5F20chapter%5F205-libre.pdf?1648075416=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DThe%5FWidening%5FAcademic%5FAchievement%5FGap%5FBe.pdf&Expires=1786130981&Signature=QKCuLT81OnjszCsglPqemH-6x0JXM9QPRz04sVqYPOelQtxSlq0nmwtMLbPX5RMyQmoX1knITxuM7fxwZmm1AscWzaU4p33mwgb4mrEH0~hnW5ggzqTv0DUT6boN~ydTaHEXmoKboaB4czwzWih6guniMlqvxibKlasZtcYx5aj4wRQj2slLUSiH~coXzGI8lH3U0iMm7F126hK2-lqjrE4zjIRob68F~djAkOIGQADaPrhAPaF4fYEdrVljRJOeaBt7~5fXjWzxpwuqXFMfE09byeMNMSH2pig0GuRYrYNgoHgtfh1cOTxPjSyzBA5iF289cUpsk-XuzI3d8-Fw7A%5F%5F&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) before youngsters enter school.

Just over [half](https://www.childhealthdata.org/browse/survey/results?q=12082&r=1&g=1260&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of all children under 5 thrive in kindergarten. The remaining share, most raised in poverty, fails to recognize letters, struggles to cooperate with peers and suffers from chronic health [afflictions](https://mchb.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/mchb/data-research/nsch-data-brief-state-variation-readiness-2022-2023.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) like tooth decay — some [120,000](https://data.cccnewyork.org/data/map/98/child-population?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#10/16/3/16/132/a/a) young children in the city. In contrast, three-fourths of preschoolers from upper middle-class homes — now winning pre-K entitlements — already surpass these gauges of school readiness.

We know that gaps in oral language and preliteracy skills are well in [place](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0739986315571113?casa%5Ftoken=R3eAMOxEo-0AAAAA:j6DmZheKi5QYzq3UNUZDJ1cScGCq7TwxjtcPbSpzaIKXVD0CPyOgYCgOLVdpoqnrrX8otagat7tW8g&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by 2 years of age, which is why Mamdani’s attention to toddlers is so welcome. But progressives will not achieve equal results for poor children until slots expand steadily for their families and pre-K or caregiver quality matches quality found in better-off parts of the city.

In New York City, for example, nearly two-fifths of children under 5 already benefit from publicly financed childcare or preschool. Since Bill de Blasio’s initiative in 2013, kids from comfortable families have [enrolled](https://www.ibo.nyc.gov/content/publications/2024-march-freeze-frame-a-snapshot-of-pre-k-and3-k-students-in-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in pre-K at higher rates than blue-collar peers. Well-heeled parents reap the greatest savings. My research group finds the same regressive [distribution](https://laist.com/news/education/early-childhood-education-pre-k/transitional-kindergarten-public-preschool-affluent-income-report?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of benefits in Los Angeles as free preschool reaches more 4-year-olds.

Mamdani should be careful not to make the same regressive mistake. He clearly grasps the trade-off between elevating poor children and rewarding his many young professional fans. The first 2,000 slots for additional 2-year-olds will be located largely, not exclusively, in [working-class](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/nyregion/mamdani-2k-nyc-child-care.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) neighborhoods. 

But as he moves toward 55,000 new spaces, watch out for regressive distribution to families in Dumbo and Brooklyn Heights.

The pursuit of universal entitlements also risks thinning out classroom and caregiver quality. My team has tracked pre-K quality in the Big Apple over the past decade, [revealing](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0885200622000333?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) stronger teachers and richer learning activities in centers serving mostly white or Asian-heritage children. 

Little is known about the quality of licensed homes in the city — who will serve many of the new 2-year-olds under Mamdani’s program — and whether quality varies between low-income and well-off communities. The national [evidence](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/debating-childhood-and-preschool-9780197808542?lang=en&cc=us&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that licensed homes advance early learning remains discouraging, while offering safe and culturally familiar places for many kids.

New Mexico, awash in oil revenues, now entitles families with children under 5 to free childcare and pre-K. But rapid expansion has pulled in pre-K's and home caregivers with [low-quality](https://www.nmececd.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Universal-Child-Care-Brief%5F41526.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) ratings. The state’s doubling of per-child allocations over the past two years may raise teacher quality and invigorate classroom activities, but time will tell.

In 1997, Quebec began a quasi-entitlement to serve all children under age 5 for just $5 per day. The count of publicly financed slots nearly [tripled](https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/126667/pol.20170603.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), accompanied by little training of teachers. [Scholars](https://irpp.org/wp-content/uploads/assets/research/family-policy/quality-counts/vol11no5.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) tracking a large sample of Quebec’s home-based providers, many serving toddlers, rated 71% below “good” quality. These licensed homes lacked well-trained staff, relied on TV to occupy kids and rarely organized learning activities to lift their young charges. 

Back in New York, the cost of serving infants and toddlers in formal centers remains prohibitive. So government must pump dollars into parental vouchers, which help cover the cost of babysitters or licensed home care. But without higher per-child allocations — costing another [$5 billion](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/nyregion/mamdani-free-child-care-cost.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — families can expect uneven quality, [researchers](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53ee4f0be4b015b9c3690d84/t/6a6d04b1e32038665934e570/1785529521698/Introducing+a+Universal+Child+Care+Cost+Model+for+New+York+-+CNYCA.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at the New School detailed earlier this month. That’s assuming the policy pursued is an entitlement to all.

Policy designers in other states appear more serious in making early education affordable *and* narrowing gaps in children's early learning. That means making strategic decisions about which families to invest in and when. This progressive model resembles how health insurance socializes the cost of aiding the stricken or those in pain, not those enjoying the beach.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers established free pre-K for all 4-year-olds last year. California then focuses another $8 billion each year on toddlers and 3-year-olds raised in poor and true middle-class families earning below $130,000 annually.

This so-called *fair entitlement* is closing disparities in children’s learning. Berkeley economists recently [discovered](https://gettingdowntofacts.com/reports/who-benefits-public-prek-expansions-increased-k-5-spending-dynamic-complementarity?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that kids raised in homes with limited English who attended pre-K at age 3, then universal preschool at age 4, surge one half-year ahead in reading and math by the third grade, relative to non-pre-K graduates. These findings are consistent with a half-century of [research](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/handbook/abs/pii/S1574069222000058?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) detailing how quality pre-K — replete with embracing teachers, rich language and playful learning — best elevates children from lower-income homes.

Beyond California, [Boston](https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/138/1/363/6701924?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Tulsa](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.13752?casa%5Ftoken=roHH2Fz-KIsAAAAA%3APB65FkeUanKihOfonlQMAUKoCZsrrMaqG1cz5TEskaAj4bLmbndKV7yNvGantqIU7vS-Zcbp8-FG1xnO&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have rigorously assessed how local entitlements shape children’s early vitality. Both programs have centered on 4-year-olds over the past quarter-century. Each initiative shows lasting gains for children well into elementary school, most enjoyed by youngsters raised in lower-income and blue-collar families.

Kudos to the democratic socialists and their eagerness to make childcare and pre-K more affordable for all. But accenting the price of early education, including for the well-off, should not distract from the question of how, and which, children reap gains in early learning. 

Nor should government squander scarce resources on families who can afford to pay. Even the mother of all entitlements — Social Security — taxes better-off retirees to help pay for Medicare.

The young socialists must not dampen their idealism. They might also learn about the institutions they wish to fix and not forget America’s rather old commitment to fairness, to lifting the children that benefit most from quality childcare.
### Pragmatic Philanthropy: Appreciating Nathan Straus
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nathan-straus-philanthropy-andrew-fisher-book-review/
Last updated: 2026-08-27T15:41:31.000Z
The 1844 edition of the widely used schoolbook written by William H. McGuffey, “[Newly Revised Eclectic Fourth Reader](https://archive.org/details/mcguffeysnewlyr00mcgu/page/44/mode/2up),” includes a dialogue about the difference between “true and false philanthropy”:

*Mr. Fantom: I despise a narrow field. O for the reign of universal benevolence! I want to make all mankind good and happy.*

*Mr. Goodman: Dear me! Sure, that must be a wholesale sort of a job: had you not better try your hand at a town or neighborhood first?*

As the discussion continues, the lesson becomes clear. Mr. Fantom’s approach is too ambitious to accomplish much, while Mr. Goodman’s, if narrower in scope, was likely to be more useful in practice.

### A donor with mundane objectives

Andrew Fisher’s biography of a Gilded Age New York department store magnate, [“Nathan Straus: From Macy’s Magnate to International Humanitarian,”](https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/nathan-straus/9781978843479?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) suggests that Mr. Goodman would likely have applauded Straus’ approach to philanthropy.

Many of Straus’ contemporary philanthropists were setting lofty goals for their giving. In oil magnate [John D. Rockefeller’s case](https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/about-us/mission-and-vision?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), it was promoting “the welfare of humanity throughout the world.” For steel tycoon [Andrew Carnegie](https://carnegie.org/about?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), it was “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.”

Straus pursued more mundane objectives that included championing milk pasteurization. Although his efforts are not as well known today as those of his more ambitious — and wealthier — counterparts, they accomplished a lot and showed that what might be called “retail giving” can have far-reaching effects.

### A successful immigration story

The [Straus family came to the United States from Germany](https://archives.nypl.org/mss/2905?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the 1850s during the [first big wave of Jewish immigration](https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jewish-immigration-to-america-three-waves/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Lazarus Straus, Nathan’s father, followed a familiar path for Jewish immigrants at the time, beginning as a peddler and eventually establishing his own store in the small town of Talbotton, Georgia, where the members of his family were the only Jews.

He prospered, became a respected citizen, owned slaves (customary at the time, Fisher explains) and saw that his children received good educations, including in their religion.

Then the Civil War upended the family’s life, first by [reviving antisemitic prejudices](https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/georgia-jewish-history?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and eventually by destroying the family’s business.

Starting anew in New York City, Lazarus and his older sons, Isidor and Nathan, began to sell imported china, glassware and other crockery to retailers in the Northeast and South. One was [Rowland H. Macy](https://www.macys.com/s/brand-heritage/history/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), who had founded an eponymous store that was on the cutting edge of what Fisher calls a “retailing revolution.”

Macy’s innovations included stocking large inventories of many kinds of merchandise, competitive pricing, extensive advertising and providing a variety of services like public restrooms and a cafeteria to make shoppers’ experiences more pleasurable.

Aided by the rapid urban and economic growth of the late 19th century, the model flourished. Department stores displaced smaller, specialty shops. Other retail powerhouses, such as Bloomingdale’s and Lord & Taylor, soon competed with Macy’s.

The Straus family sold their wares at Macy’s. After Rowland H. Macy died, the Straus family became partners with its new owners. By 1896, the Strauses owned the store outright. And Macy’s was expanding: Its owners bought another department store in Brooklyn and created a flagship building on Manhattan’s Herald Square, which Macy’s still occupies.

Although overtaken by new challengers such as Walmart and Amazon, when measured by sales, Macy’s remains the largest traditional department store (measured by sales) in the United States. 

### His philanthropy journey begins

While Isidor Straus oversaw the store’s internal operations, Nathan focused on the company’s external activities, such as purchasing, marketing and dealing with government and business leaders. Perhaps inevitably, this led to a series of public appointments for Nathan Straus and even a short-lived run for mayor of New York.

(A third brother, Oscar, pursued a career as a politician and diplomat, eventually becoming secretary of commerce and labor under President Theodore Roosevelt and the [first Jewish member of a presidential cabinet](https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/oscar-solomon-straus?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).)

However, as Nathan and his wife, Lina, became wealthier, they increasingly devoted their attention to a series of philanthropic projects.

In 1893, the U.S. entered a four-year economic depression, the worst one it would face until the 1930s. As unemployment in New York City rose, Nathan Straus used his merchandising skills to address the needs of the jobless and poor.

He created a number of “depots” near tenements and boarding houses that sold coal, food and fuel at discount prices. Fisher, Straus’ biographer, rightly calls these early examples of what is now known as [“social entrepreneurship”](https://www.ienyc.edu/the-blueprint/social-entrepreneurship?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): the application of business principles to solving social problems. He claims Straus “may have relieved the suffering of more New Yorkers than any other one [philanthropist](about:blank).”

### Making milk less deadly

As these efforts were getting underway, Straus also launched into what would become his major preoccupation: promoting pasteurized milk.

In New York City in the early 1890s, Fisher writes, “the annual mortality rate among children under five was about 15 percent,” or 18,000 infants and toddlers per year. A main cause was consuming raw milk, which, unless certified by inspectors, was likely not only to contain a variety of pathogens, such as [tuberculosis bacteria](https://doi.org/10.1002/vms3.70556?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but also to [spoil easily travelling from farm to table](https://www.usdairy.com/news-articles/how-long-can-milk-sit-out?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Certifying milk was also expensive.

Although doctors and scientists had long known that heating milk could make it safer, doctors and public health officials worried that sterilizing milk might also destroy its valuable nutrients. Indeed, the process was initially developed by Louis Pasteur to improve wine.

Straus, who had lost one of his own children to what he believed was a [milk-borne infection](https://doi.org/10.11599/germs.2012.1020?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), built on his projects for the unemployed by working with New York social service agencies to develop pasteurization plants and infant-milk stations near low-income neighborhoods.

They sold sterilized and refrigerated milk at below-wholesale prices or donated it to those who could not afford to pay. Businesslike efficiency kept costs low, as did donations. Multilingual ads publicized the product’s availability, doctors and nurses advised parents on child-rearing and careful recordkeeping aimed to assess the program’s health benefits.

Straus and his wife devoted much of their time and money to this work. In addition to [establishing 297 milk stations in 36 cities](https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazine/the-milk-man/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), they also spoke and wrote widely about the merits of pasteurization.

By 1908, their efforts paid off when the [U.S. Public Health Service endorsed pasteurization](https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/SERIALSET-05353%5F00%5F00-002-0702-0000?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and state and local governments began requiring that milk sold in their jurisdictions be pasteurized. Raw milk remained available in many states, and debates over its safety [continue to this day](https://farms.extension.wisc.edu/articles/raw-milk-in-the-united-states-regulation-public-health-risk-market-spillovers-and-policy-implications/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

As a result of this and other Progressive Era measures, New York City’s health commissioner estimated that infant deaths [dropped by two-thirds](https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5800204-straus-milk-advocacy-impact/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) during the first two decades of the 20th century, with similar declines elsewhere in the country.

### Other causes

While most of Nathan Straus’ efforts occurred in the U.S., he used his trips to Europe for Macy’s to promote pasteurization on the continent.

During a 1904 visit, he toured the Mediterranean and stopped in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Impressed by the early Jewish settlements and holy sites he saw, Straus became an ardent advocate for creating a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, an unusual position for a Jewish businessman of that era, according to Fisher.

On a subsequent trip, he changed his plan to return to New York on the maiden voyage of the Titanic in order to continue working in the Middle East. [His brother Isidor](https://www.titanicbelfast.com/history-of-titanic/titanic-stories/a-love-story-for-the-ages/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and sister-in-law Ida, with whom he had been travelling, went ahead as planned and lost their lives when ship sank.

In the U.S., Nathan Straus worked with leading pro-Zionist figures and organizations, while in Palestine, his chief contributions involved supporting a variety of health care and economic development activities, including [Hadassah](https://www.hadassah.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the women’s health and community development organization founded by Henrietta Szold.

The [Israeli city of Netanya is named in his honor](https://www.torah-box.net/news/news/the-story-of-the-city-of-netanya%5F1445.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

### No foundation to be remembered by

That is one of the few testimonials to Nathan Straus’ achievements as a philanthropist. He did not create a grant-making foundation that outlasted him, as Rockefeller and Carnegie did. And many of the projects he supported did not carry his name.

In fact, by the time of his death in 1931, Straus had donated much of his fortune. Fisher writes that Straus used to [invoke an old Hebrew proverb](https://www.sefaria.org/Da'at%5FZekenim%5Fon%5FExodus.25.3.2?lang=bi&ref=vitalcitynyc.org): “Money given in health is gold. Money given in sickness is silver. Money given after death is lead.”

Unlike other affluent Jewish immigrants from Germany, such as the [financiers Jacob Schiff](https://thenytrust.org/news/jacob-h-schiff/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Felix Warburg](https://aura.american.edu/articles/thesis/Felix%5FWarburg%5Fand%5Fthe%5FImpact%5Fof%5Fnon-Zionists%5Fon%5Fthe%5FHebrew%5FUniversity%5F1923-1933/23890542?file=41888628&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), his giving went far beyond the burgeoning network of communal organizations set up to assist the growing population Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

As Fisher notes, this pattern of philanthropy resembles that of Straus’ friend and pallbearer, [Julius Rosenwald](https://www.rosenwaldpark.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the longtime head of Sears, Roebuck and Co. Both supported Jewish causes but are better known for major initiatives aimed at helping others: In Rosenwald’s case, it was schools for African-American children in the South, while for Straus, it was milk pasteurization in New York City and beyond.

Fisher’s thorough account should help give Straus the credit he deserves for his philanthropy. It should also show that donors do not have to aspire to “make all mankind good and happy” to make an important difference.

In many ways, Nathan Straus was an old-fashioned do-gooder, responding to the needs he saw with innovative solutions. As a result, he wound up accomplishing a lot of good.

---

*A* [*version of this article*](https://theconversation.com/a-little-remembered-gilded-age-millionaire-helped-make-milk-safe-for-american-kids-through-his-retail-giving-276257?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *first appeared on* [*The Conversation*](https://theconversation.com/us?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to sharing the knowledge of academic experts with the public.*
### Time to Take on Small Business Insurance Premiums
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/small-business-insurance-reform-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T15:37:28.000Z
Despite every local politician extolling the virtues of New York City’s small businesses, small business owners continue to struggle under a plethora of economic upheavals and governmental constraints. Rents are high, competition from online retailers is fierce and the government holds up too many hoops to jump through. Attempts to streamline bureaucracy and reduce punitive fees, particularly under the Adams administration,[ never seem to amount to much](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/comptroller-review-finds-citys-small-business-forward-program-failed-to-cut-red-tape-or-limit-fines/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

But hope springs eternal. The Mamdani administration recently unveiled[ OPEN for Small Business](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani-announces--open-for-small-business---over-50-refor?ref=vitalcitynyc.org),a package that includes 50-plus reforms aimed at reducing permits, duplicate paperwork and unnecessary fines. Some of these reforms have already taken effect while others require regulatory, legal and policy reforms.

What Mamdani hasn’t addressed, however, is the[ relentless rise of](https://www.westmonroe.com/insights/insurance-outlook?atrkid=V3ADWED098667%5F169620915302%5Fkwd-371037429757%5F%5F725868049191%5Fg%5Fc%5F%5F%5F&utm%5Fterm=trends%20in%20insurance&utm%5Fcampaign=Search+%28Outlook%29+-+Insurance&utm%5Fsource=google&utm%5Fmedium=cpc&utm%5Fcontent=!acq!v3!169620915302%5Fkwd-371037429757%5F%5F725868049191%5Fg%5Fc%5F%5F&hsa%5Facc=1259219762&hsa%5Fcam=21081074825&hsa%5Fgrp=169620915302&hsa%5Fad=725868049191&hsa%5Fsrc=g&hsa%5Ftgt=kwd-371037429757&hsa%5Fkw=trends%20in%20insurance&hsa%5Fmt=p&hsa%5Fnet=adwords&hsa%5Fver=3&gad%5Fsource=1&gad%5Fcampaignid=21081074825&gbraid=0AAAAADQx%5FsnCmL3kqkK-37Nw1Md2V5Sr4&gclid=CjwKCAjw5s%5FQBhAdEiwADD%5FgBlzkzss2Ue4uTdfGeYN9s12nhE4%5F8HMxgasXm1DlGFUSZyKHcYBYixoCxtkQAvD%5FBwE) business liability insurance, which has been increasing by [10% a year](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2026/04/29/3115/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). For some small-business owners interviewed for this article — including bakery owners, retailers and hospitality operators — a single claim was followed by a substantial premium increase (though the effect varies by insurer, coverage and claims history).

The root of the problem is the structural neglect of small businesses in the insurance marketplace. In New York, the “small group” market covers businesses with up to 100 employees. But here’s the problem: Small enterprises lack the bargaining power that larger businesses can take advantage of. 

One solution is a bill introduced by Speaker Julie Menin that would establish a first-of-its-kind Office of Insurance Accountability.[ Intro 685](https://intro.nyc/0685-2026+?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is moving its way through the City Council with the purpose of providing greater visibility into the insurance marketplace. This office would track deceptive practices and issue recommendations to stabilize insurance costs. On the[ Max Politics podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/city-council-speaker-julie-menin-on-economic-development/id1143579069?i=1000778023314&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Menin made the case for this approach by pointing out that greater visibility into insurance premiums has been shown to lower costs. As always, it’s not quite that simple.

[Evidence from health insurance](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26240250/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) suggests that more transparency on rates can help restrain premium increases when paired with strong regulatory review. Whether a city-level transparency office alone would materially reduce small business insurance costs is unclear.

Menin’s insurance-accountability proposal is fine as far as it goes, but it is small-ball politics. It may diagnose the crisis, but it does not change the underlying structure that creates it.

A better idea is for the City of New York to stop trying to fix a broken insurance market on the back end by fundamentally reshaping the small business insurance market on the front end. In another realm, the Mamdani administration has already demonstrated interest in this approach.

Through the City’s Economic Development Corporation, in partnership with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the Housing Development Corporation, the City is developing a publicly backed insurance program for affordable and rent-stabilized housing. In June, the Mamdani administration committed $100 million over three years to launch the initiative, which is intended to lower property and liability insurance premiums by at least 20% for a meaningful share of that housing stock. The City aims to insure its first 20,000 homes in 2027.

The same could be done by New York City’s Department of Small Business Services. Such an initiative, however, would be far more effective if New York State first reformed its insurance policies around group pooling, following the lead of states like[ New Jersey](https://www.nj.gov/dobi/division%5Finsurance/riskretention%5Fpurchasing.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and[ Texas](https://www.tdi.texas.gov/insurer/purchase.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). If the State modernized its regulations to facilitate broad commercial pooling, SBS could organize businesses into shared purchasing pools while state regulators oversee a mix of suitable insurance options. Public capital could absorb a limited layer of risk, enabling private insurers to offer more stable coverage at a lower price. The larger and more diverse the pool, the more it would spread risk and smooth volatile rate hikes.

Given the importance of small businesses to New York City’s economy, this is no minor matter. According to a[ recent report](https://www.osc.ny.gov/press/releases/2026/03/dinapoli-small-business-owners-are-backbone-new-yorks-economy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from the New York State Comptroller’s office, small businesses in the city account for 3.7 million jobs — 45% of total employment. Meanwhile, the headwinds are only getting stronger. It’s not just general[ business liability insurance](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2026/04/29/3115/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that’s been rising sharply;consumerprices in the[ New York metro](https://www.bls.gov/regions/northeast/news-release/consumerpriceindex%5Fnewyork.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) area were 4.1% higher in June than they were a year earlier, energy prices rose 16.2% and rent rose 4.2%.

This is not an argument for the City or State to replace private insurance. It is an argument for public institutions to act as capable partners: setting a mission, convening the market and attaching clear public-interest conditions to public support. If the public helps reduce risk, the resulting gains — in stable premiums, fairer claims practices and stronger commercial corridors — should be shared with the businesses and communities that made that investment possible. 

The renowned economist Mariana Mazzucato has been making this case for years. Governments should do more than fix market failures at the margins; they should set a clear public mission, convene private partners, invest where the market will not and shape the rules so that innovation and risk-taking produce broadly shared value. In this case, that means moving beyond transparency and oversight toward building an insurance market capable of delivering stable, affordable coverage to the businesses that sustain New York’s neighborhoods.
### Will New York City Ever Get Open Primaries?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/why-nyc-needs-open-primaries-elections/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T13:00:09.000Z
When the Charter Revision Commission decided not to place open primaries before New York City voters this year, it was a disappointment for the city's 1.2 million independent voters. Many of these voters [had testified before the Commission](https://vitalcity-nyc.github.io/nyc-coge-testimony/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), hoping that New York would finally join the [overwhelming majority](https://www.nlc.org/resource/cities-101-partisan-and-non-partisan-elections/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of American cities that allow independent voters to participate in public primary elections. 

The idea of open primaries is simple. Today, only registered Democrats and Republicans choose who makes it to the November general election ballot by participating in separate, closed primaries, which are typically low-turnout affairs. In an overwhelmingly Democratic city, that means that the primary, in which more than a million independent voters cannot participate, often winds up choosing the mayor. By contrast, open primaries are open to all voters, leading to general elections in which the candidates on the final ballot have been broadly chosen by all eligible voters.

Open primaries have been considered before in New York City, so some might think this is just another swing and a miss. I don't see it that way. I think this go-round has clarified something that those of us working on this issue have been slow to recognize. For more than 20 years, reformers in New York have approached open primaries as a strategic challenge. They have tried to find the right campaign, the right coalition, the right ballot initiative, the right legal theory, the right poll, the right messaging. Each effort has been more sophisticated than the last. Yet despite broad public support, the result has been a consistent failure.

The reason is *not* that New Yorkers oppose open primaries. [Poll](https://www.einpresswire.com/article/920243284/new-poll-majority-of-nyc-democrats-favor-open-primaries-40-of-democrats-are-actually-independents?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) after [poll](https://manhattan.institute/article/assessing-the-race-polling-2025-nyc-mayoral-election?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) shows that they support giving independent voters access to publicly funded primary elections. The problem is that reformers like me have been trying to solve the wrong problem. What is needed is not a better strategy but a stronger movement. Strategy matters, but movements are built by people who come to recognize themselves as part of a common cause. Until that happens, even the best strategy has nowhere to take root.

Ironically, this latest Charter Commission defeat may have done more to build that movement than many other things those of us who believe in open primaries have tried in recent years.

Throughout the hearings, independent voters appeared before the Commission in remarkable numbers. They came from every borough and every walk of life. Teachers, immigrants, union members, veterans, entrepreneurs, students, retirees and lifelong New Yorkers all stood before the Commission to tell remarkably similar stories. They were asking why they are excluded from public elections that they help pay for and that often determine who governs their city.

That question deserves an answer.

New York City administers and funds its primary elections with taxpayer dollars. Political parties have every right to organize themselves, recruit candidates, develop platforms and advocate for their beliefs. The question is whether government should pay for all of this. Why should participation in a public election be contingent on membership in a private political organization? The freedom to make one's own political choices, including the choice not to join a political party, is a fundamental part of our democracy.

Imagine telling Democrats they must register as Republicans before they could vote. Imagine telling Republicans they had to become Democrats. The objection would be immediate because we instinctively understand that government should not compel political association. Yet that is precisely what New York asks of more than one million independent voters every election cycle.

By rejecting open primaries out of hand despite support for the ideas being repeatedly and passionately expressed, the Charter Commission ultimately revealed something much larger than institutional resistance to one reform. It revealed how dramatically New York's political institutions have fallen behind the electorate they are supposed to serve. 

Independent voters are not a small or marginal constituency — they are increasingly the center of American political life. [Majorities of Gen Z and millennial voters identify as independent.](https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [Fifty-four percent](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2025/7-21-2025-charter-revision-commission-adopted-final-report-digital.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of New York City's independent voters are people of color. Nationally, [independents now make up the largest segment of the electorate](https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/16/politics/cnn-poll-political-parties-independent-democrats-republicans?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

The future of American politics is becoming increasingly independent. The future should be allowed to vote.

That is why Mayor Zohran Mamdani's recent statement that he is “content” with New York's closed primary system was so disappointing. I don't question his commitment to expanding democracy; he [never would have been elected without bringing many more people into the political process](https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/young-voters-power-mamdani-victory-shape-key-2025-elections?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But I would invite him to do something that no report or briefing book can accomplish: spend an evening with independent voters. Listen to their thoughts on why they have chosen political independence and what it feels like to be told that they must join a political party whose agenda they do not support in order to participate in the public elections that they help fund. 

The problem with telling Mamdani to do this is obvious: Independent voters are, well, independent. By definition, they are not members of an organization that holds regular meetings. 

But the recent Charter Commission hearings suggest that this may be changing. The independent voters who participated did not sound like a disconnected collection of individuals — they sounded like a community that had begun to recognize itself. 

Hundreds of people who had never met one another described remarkably similar experiences of exclusion. They spoke different languages, came from different neighborhoods and held different political beliefs. What united them was the experience of being told that their political independence disqualified them from participating in elections that belonged to every taxpayer.

That is how movements begin.

For years, those of us working on open primaries have tried to persuade commissions, legislatures, judges, editorial boards and elected officials. That work remains essential. Litigation is opening important constitutional questions. Legislative opportunities will continue to emerge. Research continues to strengthen the case. None of that should stop.

But real democratic reform has never been achieved simply because the arguments in its favor became overwhelming. It has happened because the people affected became organized. The women’s suffrage movement did not prevail because it finally discovered the perfect strategy memo. The civil rights movement did not dismantle barriers to voting because it produced better polling. Those movements changed America because excluded citizens built organizations, told their stories relentlessly and created enough civic power that the political system eventually had no choice but to respond.

I believe the movement for open primaries is reaching that moment.

Washington, D.C., offers an important lesson. Voters overwhelmingly approved open primaries in 2024, but implementation stalled when the local political establishment resisted. Reform moved forward only because citizens continued organizing long after the election was over. They built enough civic power that ignoring them became politically impossible. They did not simply win a vote. They built a movement and, as a result, Washington fully adopted open primaries this June.

With the [possibility of an open-primary question returning to the ballot](https://www.politico.com/newsletters/new-york-playbook/2026/08/18/open-primary-proponents-eye-2027-as-their-year-in-nyc-01039777?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 2027 now being discussed, it is tempting to work backward from a date on the calendar. But movements don't work that way. Any campaign for open primaries will be successful only if it first gives the people who are excluded the opportunity to find one another, organize and build the civic power needed to win. That work takes time, and any specific campaign for change must be the culmination of the work, not the starting point.

The Charter Commission did not put open primaries on the ballot this year. But it did something almost as important. It gave independent New Yorkers an opportunity to see one another, hear one another and begin imagining themselves as something more than a voter registration category.

Movements begin that way, and when they do, history has a habit of catching up.
### The State of Crime in New York City, Midyear 2026: The Detailed Picture
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-crime-midyear-2026-felony-assaults-rape-murder/
Last updated: 2026-09-08T17:30:02.000Z
New York City is now in its fourth consecutive year of declining major crime following the pandemic-era surge. Murders in the first half of the year fell to 128 — the lowest count in history — 34 fewer than in 2025\. Shootings dropped to 322 and major crime overall went down 5.6%. New York remains [one of the safest large cities in America](https://crimeindex.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and the improvements have been felt all across the city, almost without exception. Yet the same six months of successes also produced three developments that a headline might miss. One category of serious violence, felony assault, has now risen for six consecutive years. A second, rape, appears in the data to have risen sharply but, on closer inspection, has not risen at all. And many of the increases in the city’s crime statistics this year, particularly in the subway, do not necessarily reflect more crimes committed against New Yorkers, but rather heightened enforcement by the NYPD. This is an important distinction because some recorded offenses are as much a measure of police activity as of the underlying behavior. A rise in fare evasion complaints, for example, may reflect greater police attention to fare-beating rather than an actual increase in the activity itself. 

### The big picture: The city is safer than it was at this time last year

All categories of major crime except felony assault and rape declined in the first half of 2026\. Murder was down 21%, burglary 15.2%, robbery 11.8% and car theft nearly 10%. Measured against 2019, the last year before the pandemic-era crime surge, murder was 12.9% lower and shootings were 11.3% lower. By these two measures of serious violence, the city is now safer than it was before the pandemic. But major crime is still 25% higher than it was prepandemic.

Crime counts are notoriously noisy, which is to say a small percentage drop in crime is often the result of one or two unusual months. But in New York so far in 2026, this has not been the case. These declines have been consistent across the first six months, with every month seeing less crime than the year before.

The decline is also picking up speed. Major crime fell 5.6% in the first half of 2026, compared with a 4% decline at the same point last year and a 0.7% decline the year before. Murder shows the clearest improvement, down 21% after declines of 14.7% and 7.8% at the two preceding midyears. Burglary fell 15.2% after barely changing a year ago. Even crimes that are still increasing are rising more slowly: Rape rose 6.9%, compared with rises of 21.8% and 11.9% in the prior two years, and felony assault rose just 0.4%, compared with rises of 1.2% and 7.6%. The pattern is not uniform: Robbery, grand larceny and car theft each posted stronger declines earlier in the postpandemic recovery. But taken together, major crime is falling at its fastest pace since the pandemic-era surge. 

### Six years on, New York has recovered from lethal violence and little else 

As rosy as the numbers may be when compared with 2025, they look less favorable when compared to 2019\. Murders and shootings are the only two categories that have fallen below their prepandemic levels. Every other major crime remains above where it stood in 2019: robbery by 8.6%, burglary by 8.6%, grand larceny by 8.2%, felony assault by 48%, car theft by 171% and rape by 19.5% (more on this number, which is complicated by definitional changes, in a moment). Taken together, major crime is still 25.5% higher than it was in 2019\. In other words, New York City has recovered from lethal violence, but it has not yet recovered from the rest.

Converted into the rhythm of an ordinary day, this city of 8.6 million averaged about 0.7 murders, 1.8 shootings, six rapes, 30 car thefts, 36 robberies, 82 felony assaults and 120 grand larcenies every 24 hours in the first half of 2026\. Two of those figures are lower than they were in 2019\. The other five are not. 

### New York City’s murder decline is real, but it is smaller than those recorded in comparable jurisdictions

Measured over 12 months against 2019, murders across all reporting jurisdictions in the United States are down 21% and 33% across the Northeast. New York City’s total is down 10%, behind essentially every regional and national benchmark available. Six years on, this city has recovered less ground than almost any of its peers. 

The first half of 2026 stands out within New York City’s own recovery. Murders fell 21% from the same period last year, the steepest midyear decline since murders began falling after the pandemic-era surge. That improvement came after several consecutive years of declines, making the first six months of 2026 particularly strong by the city’s recent standards.

But New York’s longer-term decline in murder is not unusual among large American cities. Murders began falling after 2022 in cities with very different policing strategies, prosecutors, budgets and political environments. Some cities have experienced even larger declines than New York. So two things can be true at once: 2026 has been an exceptionally good year for murder reduction in New York City, while New York’s broader recovery has lagged that of its peers.

### The Bronx improved the most, but most of the improvement was in property crime

The decline was not evenly spread across the city. Major crime fell 11.5% in the Bronx, 6.2% in Manhattan and 5.2% in Brooklyn, while Queens and Staten Island barely moved at all. The Bronx accounted for roughly half of the entire citywide reduction despite being home to about a sixth of the city’s population. 

That progress should be read against where the borough started. Even after the largest decline of any borough, the Bronx still records more major crime per resident than anywhere else in the city.

Most of the 1,757 fewer major crimes recorded in the Bronx this year were property crimes. Grand larceny accounted for 619 fewer crimes, a 13.7% decline; car theft accounted for another 583, down 26.5%; and burglary fell by 160, or 11%. Together, those three offenses accounted for more than three-quarters of the borough’s overall reduction. Robbery also declined. Felony assault, however, barely moved, falling by less than 1%, compared with a 0.4% increase across the rest of the city. 

That distinction matters especially in the Bronx, which has long had the city’s highest violent crime rate and which saw an especially stark pandemic-era rise. So while major crime has fallen meaningfully there, the topline decline masks an uneven recovery: Property crime is down substantially, while less progress has been shown on violence. 

Notably, the NYPD recently reorganized the borough: In February, Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced that Patrol Borough Bronx would be divided, and on[ May 20, the two new commands launched](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR008/commissioner-tisch-launches-new-patrol-boroughs-bronx-north-bronx-south?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Each command now has its own homicide squad, evidence collection team, narcotics unit, auto crime unit and Neighborhood Safety Team, giving the Bronx the specialized capacity the other boroughs have had for years. How this reorganization affects crime rates will be worth watching through the end of the year and into 2027.

### On paper, two major crimes rose, but one of those increases gets an asterisk

For the sixth consecutive year, felony assaults rose. The NYPD recorded 14,802 felony assault complaints in the first half of 2026, up 0.4% from last year, and 48% above prepandemic levels.

Mapped by precinct, 41 of the city’s 78 precincts recorded more felony assaults than a year ago, while 37 recorded fewer or the same. The exception is the 20th Precinct, which covers the Upper West Side from West 59th Street to West 86th Street and went from 32 felony assaults to 67\. That is the largest increase in the city in percentage terms and the sixth largest in complaints added, in a precinct that otherwise ranks 72nd of 78 on volume. The total citywide increase was 57 complaints — and 35 of them were recorded in the 20th Precinct.

The complaints’ locations might give insight into the reason for the increase. Of the 35 additional felony assaults, 14 were recorded at homeless shelters, which recorded none at all in the first half of 2025, and 14 were on the street, up from six. Five were at public schools and four in the subway, neither of which recorded any felony assaults the year before, while complaints in apartment buildings and in public housing both fell.

Because felony assault has climbed while nearly every other major crime type has fallen, it now occupies a share of New York’s felony crime that it has never occupied before. In the first half of 2006, it comprised 8,214 of 82,242 felony complaints, or 1 in 10\. In the first half of 2026, it accounted for 14,802 of 88,009, or about 1 in 6\. Over the same 20 years, it moved from the 10th most common offense category the NYPD records to the sixth. 

### The other increase, rape, reflects a change in the law rather than in behavior 

At first glance, it looks like rape has increased significantly in the first half of the year, up about 20% compared to 2025\. Taken at face value, that is a serious deterioration in a city seeing declines in most other major crimes. However, these numbers don’t represent additional victims, but rather a reclassification of penal law.On Sept. 1, 2024, New York’s expanded rape definition took effect, bringing oral and anal conduct within the statutory definition of rape. That conduct had always been a felony, but previously, it had been charged as a criminal sexual act, and under an older statutory label of sodomy.

After 2024, sodomy complaints almost disappeared, with a corresponding increase in rape complaints. This is what one would expect to happen, as those sodomy cases were redefined as rape. Another way to understand this change is to look at male victims. Under the old statute, being a male victim of rape was close to a definitional impossibility, but men now account for around 10% of rape cases.Overall, if we combine rape complaints and sodomy cases, they are actually down by 5.2% since 2019, and have stayed near steady since 2024\. Meanwhile, sexual abuse complaints, which the 2024 change did not touch, were at 2,420 in the first half of 2019 and 2,445 this year. This all strongly suggests that the number of rapes has not actually increased in New York City. What has changed, rather, is what is legally defined as rape. 

One potential explanation that some have put forward for the increase in rape — that more people are reporting incidents from prior years — does not hold water. The share of complaints filed a year or more after the incident was 17.7% in 2019 and is 16.2% now, and the percentage of rapes reported in a week after they happened has not meaningfully changed. 

### Total crime is near a 20-year high, and the growth is split between what New Yorkers report and what the NYPD initiates 

The seven major felonies receive the most attention in crime reporting, and they make up the national index because they represent the most serious violent and property crimes. But by volume, they represent a relatively small share of the crimes experienced by New Yorkers: They account for only about one-fifth of all crime reported in the city. The NYPD recorded 279,513 complaints of all kinds in the first half of 2026, of which roughly 55,000 were major crimes. Total complaints fell 3.2% in the first half of this year, from 288,617 over the same period in 2025\. But they remain 25.5% above the first half of 2019 and 8% above the first half of 2006.

Complaints are up 25.5% since 2019, an increase of 56,807 offenses. That growth reflects two very different things. About 40% of that increase came from offenses that are heavily shaped by police enforcement rather than reports from victims or witnesses. Vehicle and traffic offenses alone rose 342%, from 3,218 to 14,224 complaints, accounting for roughly one-fifth of the total increase (nearly all of that growth sits in a single unlabeled misdemeanor category that barely existed before July 2022, the month the City[ announced its crackdown on illegal and forged license plates](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2022/07/transcript-mayor-eric-adams-crackdown-vehicles-illegal-license-plates?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)). Fare evasion, drug offenses and offenses involving interference with police or other government activity, such as resisting arrest or obstructing governmental administration, account for much of the rest.

The remaining 60% of the increase came from crimes reported by victims or witnesses, including 8,072 additional harassment complaints and 7,501 additional petit larceny complaints. That is the portion of the increase that more closely reflects what New Yorkers are experiencing in their daily lives, rather than changes in how intensively police are enforcing the law. 

Compared to last year, 11 of the 15 largest offense categories recorded fewer complaints than in 2025\. The four that rose were vehicle and traffic offenses, up 8.9%, offenses against public administration, up 7.7%, harassment, up 1.3%, and felony assault, up 0.4%. 

### Serious crime in the subway is rare and falling. Enforcement there has nearly tripled since 2019.

Relative to the number of riders, serious crime in the subway is rare. There were 1,071 major felonies in the first half of the year across nearly 650 million rides, which works out to fewer than two for every million rides.

Counts of major crime in the subway also fell by 2.2% compared to the same period last year. Grand larceny — which in the subway mostly means phones snatched from riders’ hands and wallets and bags lifted in a crowded car — is the most common major crime on the subway and fueled the decrease, down almost 10% from last year. Violent crimes, robbery and felony assault increased in the first half of the year by about 7%.

Compared with prepandemic 2019, the total count of major crime in the system is down nearly 8%. However, this does not take into account the reduction in ridership. Per million rides, subway crime is still about 20% higher than it was in 2019\. There is less crime in the system than before the pandemic but more of it per rider. 

All crime in the subway, counting felonies, misdemeanors and violations together, fell 4.3% this year, from 17,945 complaints to 17,180\. Fare evasion complaints fell 11.5%, administrative code violations 12.8% and weapons offenses 14%, while drug offenses rose 28%, criminal trespass 29% and offenses against public administration 24%. Misdemeanor assault, which improved this year above ground, rose 15.9%.

Compared to 2019, subway complaints are up 178.5%, from 6,168 to 17,180\. Almost the entire difference sits in a handful of categories that exist because an officer stopped someone rather than because a rider reported something. Fare evasion complaints ballooned to 6,594 in the first half of 2026\. Violations of the city administrative code, which covers offenses like unlicensed vending and open containers, went from 1 to 1,882\. Drug offenses rose 451%, and criminal trespassing increased from 12 complaints to 480\. Weapons offenses, chiefly knives turned up during a stop or a bag search, rose 285%. And offenses against public administration rose 633%. Crimes in that category include resisting arrest, obstructing an officer or giving a false name, none of which can happen unless an officer has already stopped someone. 

Take those categories out and the same system recorded 5,548 complaints in 2019 and 4,945 this year, a decline of 10.9%.

### Criminal court summonses hit an eight-year high, and nearly half the increase was due to transit rules 

A criminal court summons is what an officer issues instead of making an arrest for a low-level offense, ordering the person to appear in court. Such offenses include drinking in public, disorderly conduct, being in a park after hours, breaking transit rules. The NYPD issued 58,415 criminal court summonses in the first half of 2026, the highest first-half total in the eight years of available data and 31.5% above the 44,412 issued in the first half of 2019\. 

The increase was largely driven by subway enforcement. Summonses for transit rule violations nearly doubled, from 2,489 to 4,907, and that single category accounts for 46% of the entire citywide rise in criminal court summonses this year. These are offenses such as smoking in a station, disobeying subway signs and breaking other transit rules. 

### The Knicks won their first title in 53 years, and felony assaults rose 31% on the nights they played

Vital City has reported several times on the increase in felony assault, the one major crime that keeps increasing year after year. In June, the city ran something close to an experiment on it.

The Knicks reached the NBA Finals and beat the Spurs in five games, winning their[ first championship since 1973](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/knicks-champions-new-york-why-it-matters/). On these five nights, all of them with tipoff at 8 p.m. or later, a very large number of New Yorkers did the same thing at the same time: watch basketball and party. To see what that did to crime, we compared each Finals night against the same weekday one week earlier and one week later, and against the same date a year before, counting complaints between 7 p.m. and 4 a.m. 

The shape of the night is the most convincing part. While the games were on, crime fell: Complaints were down 9% at 7 p.m., 9.4% at 8 and 11.1% at 9\. Then the games ended. Complaints ran 4.8% above normal at 10 p.m., 8.2% at 11 p.m., 16.9% at midnight and 38.7% at 1 a.m., before falling back below normal by 3 a.m.. Conclusion: A city watching basketball is a city not doing much else (and committing less crime). A city leaving bars and partying in the streets is another matter. 

Across the whole window, total complaints barely moved, averaging 617 on a Finals night and 603 on a comparable night, a difference of 2.3%. But violent crime, specifically felony assaults, did jump — and jump substantially.

Misdemeanor assault rose 9.2% and robbery 8.3%. Felony assault rose 31.4%, from 38.5 complaints on an ordinary night to 50.6\. 

The increase in felony assaults happened on every game night — weekdays or weekends, home or away, victory or loss. Wednesdays, which hosted Games 1 and 4, ran 22.3% above their ordinary counterparts. Friday, Game 2, was 35.1% higher. Saturday, the night the Knicks clinched the title, was up 31%. The largest increase of all, 49.9%, came on the Monday of Game 3, which the Knicks lost. Winning a championship and losing a game both produced the same effect, which argues that this is about a lot of people being out late together rather than about celebration. 

Perhaps the most convincing evidence that the games had an effect on violent crime was the fact that most of the increase was in Manhattan, where Madison Square Garden, the outdoor watch parties and many of the bars where people watched the games are located. Felony assault was up 108.5% in Manhattan, 32% in Brooklyn, 26% on Staten Island and 10.8% in Queens; in the Bronx, it fell 0.8%. 

An additional 12 felony assaults a night on each of five nights adds up to about 60 complaints. The city’s entire year-over-year increase in felony assault, across all six months and all 78 precincts, was 57\. Put differently, five basketball games moved the same quantity of violence that separates this year from last.
### 13 Fixes for New York City Government That Go Beyond the Charter
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-coge-charter-reform-government-operations-fixes/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T15:08:04.000Z
*The job of mayor is not just about laying out grand visions; it’s about improving operations to make New York’s government work better. As Mayor Zohran Mamdani noted in* [*his 100-day speech*](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/transcript--mayor-mamdani-delivers-100-day-address?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*, a leader’s governing philosophy “can only be judged by its delivery.”* [*Just Fix It*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/just-fix-it/) *is Vital City’s running look at concrete, nonideological ways to unstick the gears of city government and make it work better for all New Yorkers.*

*Last month, after hearing testimony from hundreds of New Yorkers, the administration’s Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) approved five ballot amendments to the City Charter for voters to decide on in November. They include accelerating timelines for street safety projects and outdoor dining, improving the lengthy procurement process, consolidating the maze of permitting for construction and setting a savings target for the City’s rainy day fund. Vital City* [*summarized*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-mamdani-coge-government-efficiency-ballot-reform-recommendations/) *the ideas with a simple message: good, but keep going.*

*Although altering the Charter is one way to make government work better, the City has the ability, every day, to make changes in operations big and small that will significantly improve city life.*

*This column puts forward thirteen fixes where the City of New York can — and should — do more, regardless of what happens in November.*

---

### Ensure government delivers results that matter.

**The problem:** With a $125.8 billion budget and more than 300,000 employees, the New York City government affects every aspect of residents’ lives. But the City rarely asks itself the “How’m I doin’?” question made famous by Mayor Ed Koch and then figures out how to do better. How could the City focus agencies on results and not just activity?

**Response 1:** The Mayor’s Office of Operations (MOO), which is charged with measuring the impact of City agencies’ work, produces a report each quarter that contains thousands of indicators. It should refocus on a narrower group of results that matter, and then use those metrics to drive performance. 

**The fine print:**Each year since 1977, the Mayor’s Office has released a scorecard of how the city is doing, otherwise known as [the Mayor’s Management Report (MMR)](https://www.nyc.gov/site/operations/reports/mmr.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Its scope is unparalleled, but over time agencies have come to report mostly routine activities they undertake: how many arrests they made, how many young people they placed in summer jobs, how many trees they pruned. As [seasoned municipal leaders have pointed out](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/expert-advice-for-mamdanis-commission-on-government-efficiency/), the MMR fails to document many key results for actual New Yorkers: What share of crimes did those arrests clear? Did those summer jobs keep young people employed and safe? Are those tree-lined streets cooler and more walkable? Indicators that do not allow the City to make better decisions do not represent accountability, just more paperwork. 

[Experts convened by Vital City](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/expert-advice-for-mamdanis-commission-on-government-efficiency/) suggested concrete ways to improve this ecosystem of accountability. First, consistently measure results rather than activity. Second, reduce the number of indicators reported by each agency from the 100 or more that some now track to just a couple dozen. And third, find ways to get City Hall to pay more attention to the indicators and more meaningfully involve MOO in governance, so that the feedback it provides about outcomes plays directly into further decisionmaking. According to the former City Planning chair Carl Weisbrod, the MMR “should be used for goal setting (not just for measuring what has happened).” And that means MOO needs to be working closely with City agencies to set and meet those goals. 

**Response 2:** The Mayor’s Office of Contract Services (MOCS), which oversees how agencies award and manage contracts, should publish all contracts above a certain size. 

**The fine print:** Each year, the City pays roughly $40 billion to outside vendors for providing goods, performing services and constructing facilities. These contractors play an essential role but can also be the source of cost overruns or corruption. The City already publishes notices of contract awards above $100,000 in the City Record — but a notice lists little more than the vendor, the dollar amount and a one-line purpose. The contract itself — its scope, its pricing, what the vendor actually promised to deliver, what neighborhood would receive the services — is not typically published; getting a copy of a contract could require a records request that takes months, or an in-person visit to inspect a paper copy. MOCS, whose PASSPort system already holds every agency’s contract documents, should post any contract above a reasonable dollar threshold. That way, New Yorkers can know who their government is doing business with, how performance is being measured (if it is being measured at all) and what’s at stake.

### Streamline and strengthen the structure and process of government.

**The problem:** Today’s government is loaded up with layer upon layer of responsibilities and requirements that inevitably reflect decades of past initiatives — and there is rarely an opportunity to step back and ask: Is this still necessary? The Fire Department still maintains [thousands of street-corner pull boxes](https://www.untappedcities.com/nycs-fire-alarm-call-box/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and its efforts to retire the 19th-century technology have been blocked by the courts. A Tammany-era anti-graft measure still forces public construction projects above a certain size to hire four separate prime contractors instead of one, [inflating costs and delays](https://www.city-journal.org/article/politics-and-the-wicks-law?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

**Response 1:** The City should launch a quadrennial review of each agency’s capacity to deliver. 

**The fine print:** Each successive mayoral administration inherits some of its predecessor’s projects and spending priorities, deciding what to cut and keep. That’s an opportunity to assess whether past commitments can or should be met given the agencies’ own resources and capacities. Every four years, the City should examine the operating capacity of each agency to carry out policies — through their procurement processes, hiring practices, technology or capital projects — and then, in the words of [former First Deputy Mayor (among many other roles) Maria Torres-Springer](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/expert-advice-for-mamdanis-commission-on-government-efficiency/), “own the plans to close the gaps.” Programs established in law can’t easily be discarded by the executive branch, but many others can and should be routinely reassessed.

**Response 2:** The Mayor’s Office of Operations should review offices and agencies for consolidation.

**The fine print:** It is common for mayoral administrations to reshuffle or create entirely new offices and departments, frequently to show that they’re paying sufficient attention to a given issue, but this proliferation can weaken regulatory cohesion and agency accountability. The City now has an Office of Urban Agriculture, an Office of Nightlife, an Office of Sports, Wellness and Recreation, and an Office of Marine Debris Disposal and Vessel Surrendering — each created for a reason, and each another box on an organizational chart that few New Yorkers, or even City workers, can navigate. (Indeed, those who seek to find City government’s org chart online are [met — as of publication](https://www.nyc.gov/main/your-government/citywide-org-chart?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) —[ with a message](https://www.nyc.gov/main/your-government/citywide-org-chart?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): “The New York City Organizational Chart is being revised. Please check back later.”) MOO should regularly review the City’s organizational chart to identify opportunities to consolidate overlapping and duplicative structures. Where agencies and offices can be eliminated by the executive without legislative action, that should happen swiftly. Where action by the City Council or state Legislature is needed, the Mamdani administration should press to make that happen. And the org chart should be publicly available.

**Response 3:** The mayor should revive the dormant commission that exists to kill needless reports. 

**The fine print:** According to a recent analysis by Tal Roded, the creator of the [NYCuriosity substack](https://www.nycuriosity.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the City’s own records list [2,231 separate reporting requirements](https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/Government-Publication-Required-Reports/9azj-tmjp/about%5Fdata?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) spread across 183 agencies — and nearly half have no record of ever having been filed. Year after year, the pile only grows: An independent tracker of Council legislation counts more [than 5,000 standing obligations imposed on agencies since 2014](https://www.nycuriosity.com/p/nyc-agencies-answer-to-over-5000?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including roughly 67 new recurring reports every year, none of which expire unless the Council repeals them. The tool already exists: A Charter-created [Report and Advisory Board Review Commission](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCcharter/0-0-0-3197?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — composed of the Council speaker, two council members and four mayoral officials — can waive obsolete reporting requirements, subject to the Council’s veto (so even mandates they’ve previously imposed can be retired). But since RABRC’s creation in 2010, it has [only eliminated 28 reports](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2026/proposed%5Ffinal%5Freport%5F20260723.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — while local laws have required or revised over 1,500\. And despite the fact that the commission is required to hold a public hearing every year, it hasn’t convened since December 2024\. COGE itself found that [City agencies spend more than 125,000 staff hours each year on reports](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2026/proposed%5Ffinal%5Freport%5F20260723.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and recommended eliminating duplicative requirements, but did not address them through its ballot proposals. City Hall should require every agency to submit its full list of required reports each year, with an account of how each informs decisions; the Mayor’s Office of Operations should then compile the evidence showing which are vestigial, beginning with the hundreds that never appear to have been filed; and the commission should do the culling it has already been assigned.

**Response 4:** The Mayor’s Office of Contract Services should review the multiple routine processes that exist across many agencies for contract review and execution to identify reasonable time savings. 

**The fine print:** The City often operates on timelines set by rule rather than by best practice or common sense. COGE itself found that the median solicitation remains open for 50 days, agency evaluations take another 130 days and oversight approvals add another 100 days, all before a contract reaches the City Comptroller, who has 30 days to register or object. Almost none of these timelines are fixed in law and are instead the result of the City’s own rules and habits. The result is that [more than 80% of the contracts registered in fiscal year 2024](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/FY24-AnnualSummary-ContractsReport.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) arrived after their start dates had already passed. One of [COGE’s ballot proposals](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-mamdani-coge-government-efficiency-ballot-reform-recommendations/) begins to fix this by trimming pre-contracting paperwork, allowing the mayor to delegate contract approvals and replacing a mandatory hearing with a comment period. But City Hall shouldn’t stop there. MOCS already runs a yearly push to get contracts registered on time, and City Hall should review every stage’s timeline, build a dashboard to clock every contract and make it a public target to end retroactive registration altogether.

### Improve how government spends money to get better results. 

**The problem:** Mayor Mamdani has an expansive and expensive agenda, yet the City’s fiscal future looks fragile. In coming years, this tension will put pressure on City Hall, which now oversees [a $125.8 billion budget](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2026/06/30/3166/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), to become more efficient in its use of taxpayer dollars if it wants to achieve signature goals, like delivering universal childcare (credibly [estimated to cost $9 billion annually](https://www.centernyc.org/reports-briefs/universal-child-care-cost-model-new-york?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) or eliminating fares on buses (which the [Independent Budget Office estimates would cost $1.1 billion a year](https://www.ibo.nyc.gov/assets/ibo/downloads/pdf/infrastructure/2026/2026-june-next-stop.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)). The administration’s [designation of chief savings officers at each agency](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-signs-executive-order-to-require-chief-savings-off?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was a good first step, but it needs to go further. 

**Response 1:** The Mayor’s Office of Contract Services should make paying for results standard practice.

**The fine print*:*** The City pays outside vendors [roughly $40 billion a year](https://nyc.gov/site/mocs/resources/citywide-indicator-reports.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for everything from homeless shelters to mental health programs, yet contracts are typically for activities performed, not results achieved. With so much of government contracted out, this creates an accountability problem: The City does not have a systematic way of knowing whether contracted services are working and can neither correct failures nor replicate successes. There are exceptions. The City itself launched the nation’s first “social impact bond,” a 2012 effort to cut recidivism at Rikers Island with an elaborate financing contraption. (It [missed its targets and cost taxpayers nothing](https://nonprofitquarterly.org/what-we-learned-from-the-failure-of-the-rikers-island-social-impact-bond/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).) And the Human Resources Administration, the City’s main social services agency, has long [paid its employment vendors based partly on job placements and retention](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hra/downloads/pdf/news/press%5Freleases/2016/Employment%20Services%20RFP%2011-16-2016.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Other cities are building on that practice. Denver, for example, now [ties payment for supportive housing to verified results](https://bloombergcities.jhu.edu/news/cities-take-next-step-paying-performance?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) such as fewer days in jail. MOCS, which manages and regulates City contracts from City Hall, should launch a yearlong pilot embedding performance-based payment in a set of contracts in areas that the administration is prioritizing, like mental health response or violence interrupters, with the goal of making it a standard practice rather than a boutique experiment.

**Response 2:** Albany should grant capital agencies the freedoms that the City’s fastest builders already have. 

**The fine print:** When New York City wants something built fast, it goes around its own rules. In the late 1980s, school construction was bogged down by the State’s Wicks Law, which forces public projects to hire and coordinate separate contractors for plumbing, heating and electrical work, rather than contracting with one builder. So the State created the School Construction Authority (SCA) as a public benefit corporation and exempted it from Wicks and the usual lowest-bid statutes, allowing the SCA to prequalify builders, award single contracts and hire outside the civil service system. Similarly, the City formed the Economic Development Corporation (EDC) in 1991 as a nonprofit to build on the City’s behalf, outside its procurement rulebook. That contrasts with the Department of Design and Construction, a City agency created in 1996 to unify construction for the transportation, environmental and general services departments but still subject to every constraint. Consolidation without freedom didn’t deliver speed. Former transportation commissioner Polly Trottenberg [has suggested](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/expert-advice-for-mamdanis-commission-on-government-efficiency/) extending the procurement and hiring powers of an EDC or SCA to the agencies that carry out the City’s capital budget — a change that would require Albany’s assent. Yale Law School professor David Schleicher has suggested going further and pulling all construction into a single off-budget, mayor-controlled entity. While neither idea could happen quickly, both deserve serious study.

### Lift barriers to using and improving the public realm.

**The problem:** New York City oversees a vast public realm — the Parks Department alone stewards more than 30,000 acres, 14% of the city’s land — but has never fully funded its upkeep. A web of outside partners has filled the gap: [at least 6,000](https://urbandesignforum.org/initiative/public-space-partners-survey/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) volunteer “friends of” groups, block associations, conservancies and other nonprofits. Their admirable work is distributed unevenly across the city, however, exacerbating inequities. The City compounds the imbalance with rules that make it difficult for these partners to raise revenue, mount programming or even tidy up. 

**Response 1:** The Office of Management and Budget should fund the upkeep of what the City builds.

**The fine print:** The deepest reason the public realm decays is structural: The City budgets to build new parks, plazas and recreation centers, but the dollars to clean, prune and repair them — drawn from the scarcest budget lines — often never follow. The Charter [already requires](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCcharter/0-0-0-972?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the executive capital budget to state the likely impact that staffing, maintaining and operating each capital project will have on the expense budget. But no rule requires the budget to actually carry those costs. OMB should close the loop by baselining every approved project's maintenance estimate in the financial plan, so the dollars are in place the day the ribbon is cut — and the Council should lock the practice in by requiring an annual public reconciliation of maintenance estimates against dollars actually funded.

**Response 2:** The mayor should pare back the rules that keep concessions out of public spaces. 

**The fine print:** Concessions — the cafes, kiosks, markets and boat rentals that operate on public land — are among the main ways public spaces come alive, and among the few ways they generate revenue for their own upkeep. Yet spaces where concessions could thrive too often sit empty because of [onerous requirements](https://nycfuture.org/research/expanding-concession-opportunities-in-new-york-citys-parks?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), most imposed decades ago as the City moved to shed liability and cost after the 1970s fiscal crisis. There is no playbook for applying for a concession; license terms let the City terminate at will, which scares off lenders; and operators are expected to shoulder capital repairs on deteriorating properties. Those burdens have narrowed the pool of willing applicants to a few well-resourced operators, perpetuating the same dynamic that squeezes the volunteer groups and small nonprofits that steward these spaces, leaving poorer neighborhoods with the least. That means less foot traffic, fewer amenities and less revenue for the City. Approvals run through the Franchise and Concession Review Committee, a little-known panel chaired and controlled by the mayor. The mayor should direct it, with input from the private sector, to review and pare back the requirements that pose the biggest barriers to entry, benchmarking against public landlords that lease space under nimbler rules of their own. The nonprofit EDC already rents out City-owned piers, markets and industrial buildings under its own streamlined guidelines rather than the City’s rulebook, and it’s been a huge success, reviving spaces that had been underutilized for years. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority runs a program that licenses vacant subway retail spaces rent-free and has recently [turned long-shuttered newsstands into art installations and puppet theaters](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/nyregion/subway-newstand-west-4th-station-nyc.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.3FA.qApv.iZKtXj92Ur0f&smid=url-share&ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

**Response 3:** The Office of Management and Budget should allow agencies to keep a portion of revenue when activities affect maintenance. 

**The fine print:** When a concert, street fair, film shoot or concession generates rent or fees on public property, the money does not stay with the agency that manages the space, but rather flows to the City’s General Fund, to be divided up during budget season. This practice stems from [a century-old charter rule](https://a860-gpp.nyc.gov/downloads/6d570228m?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that was entrenched by the 1970s fiscal crisis. The result is a perverse incentive: An agency that welcomes a revenue-generating activity pays for the wear and tear and the cleanup out of its own budget, while every dollar generated by the activity goes elsewhere. There is a better way: Private nonprofits that manage certain parks under special agreements with the City, such as the Central Park Conservancy, are permitted to keep a share of the concession revenue their parks generate and plow it back into upkeep. City Hall should direct OMB to fix this for everyone else. When private activity on an agency’s property generates rent or fees, the agency should retain a slice sufficient to cover the maintenance that activity requires.

### Implement innovative hiring practices so government can recruit the right talent at fair pay.

**The problem:** New York City has a staffing problem. It can take City agencies [months, if not years](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-yorks-mamdani-ny-civil-service-system/), to follow the procedures laid out by the archaic civil service rules that are required to bring on new applicants. Too often, talented applicants grow tired of waiting and seek out jobs in the private sector instead. The crunch is sharpest in sectors like technology, where the City can take a year to make a certified offer, while a university or startup hires within a few months. This helps [drive up vacancy rates](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/city-agencies-face-20-percent-vacancy-in-critical-positions?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which then [plug up project delivery](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/understaffed-underserved?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). And the brain drain deepens the City’s reliance on outside consultants, at [several times the cost of in-house talent](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/expert-advice-for-mamdanis-commission-on-government-efficiency/). Public service requirements are largely dictated by Albany, so the City needs creative ways to more quickly attract and retain talent. 

**Response 1:** City Hall should launch a tour-of-service technology fellowship.

**The fine print:** Not every talented technologist or manager wants a career in government — but many would give it two or three years. Since 2024, with money from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Cornell Tech has embedded [a handful of mid-career Urban Innovation Fellows](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-right-path-to-better-government-coge-mamdani/) inside City agencies for two-year tours, during which the fellows work on everything from housing to sanitation to procurement. The City should scale this and formalize it, recruiting people with skills it cannot secure through permanent hiring, at market speed, while seeding a bench of people who understand how the government actually works.

**Response 2:** The Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), which runs the City’s civil service system, should align recruitment strategies with skills gaps. 

**The fine print:** The share of an agency’s positions that are vacant may reflect the agency’s inability to keep up with private-sector hiring practices. Often, the qualifications and skill sets required of public-sector applicants are out of sync with current training programs or private-sector hiring practices. For example, well-paying urban forestry positions at the Parks Department may be [out of reach](https://forestforall.nyc/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/LearningAndGrowing%5Freport%5FFINAL%5Fweb.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for applicants without proper certifications, while private-sector competitors often have flexible apprenticeship and training programs. DCAS should launch an effort to modernize job titles and position descriptions and update recruitment strategies so they keep pace with the job market. Meanwhile, the City should continue to pursue [broad civil service law changes in Albany](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-yorks-mamdani-ny-civil-service-system/) to reform its hidebound hiring system. 

*This installment was prepared with the help of John Surico.* 

*Send your ideas to* [*justfixit@vitalcitynyc.org*](mailto:justfixit@vitalcitynyc.org)*; if you wish to remain anonymous, we will honor your request.*
### Mamdani’s PIT Crews: Government Innovation, or Innovation Theater?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-pit-crews-government-tech-problems/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T16:11:34.000Z
On July 3, the Mayor’s Commission on Government Efficiency published [a preliminary report](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/commission-on-government-efficiency-releases-preliminary-report-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that included the most accurate diagnosis of government IT dysfunction I've ever read from a political body — and I’ve read a lot, having led federal implementations of Congressional legislation and White House executive orders. Typically, such publications focus on vague notions of innovation and technology trends. But in its recitation of testimony COGE received, the report cited operational inefficiencies around processes like procurement and hiring as the real culprits of public sector technological mediocrity: “Why does it take so long to buy technology in government? What do we do about the fact that by the time we get through the procurement process, the technology we thought we wanted is obsolete? Why can’t we hire and retain the talent we need so that we are less dependent on outside vendors?” The individuals who provided this testimony were 100% correct: Government technology isn’t technologically difficult. It’s an administrative headache. 

Ten days later, City Hall announced its PIT Crews: five small product teams, hired by the Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), that will parachute into agencies and build digital tools for the mayor's signature policy initiatives. 

Together, the COGE initiative and the PIT Crews looked like a smart two-pronged strategy: Lay the groundwork for agencies to improve their IT through better procurement and hiring practices, while simultaneously employing a bureaucracy hack to accelerate the arrival of results. 

But then, on July 23, COGE released [its final report](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/coge-releases-5-ballot-proposals-and-final-report-to-make-govern?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), laying out five proposals for voters to approve or reject on the November ballot. The IT and bureaucracy reform ideas were gone. There were no draft ballot initiatives to require technology procurements to support modern technology practices, or to require the City to offer civil service exams for IT positions more than once a year. [What survived](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-mamdani-coge-government-efficiency-ballot-reform-recommendations/) were proposals to speed up street redesigns, tweak procurement, streamline housing permitting and the like.

Where did the good ideas go? They were relegated to a summary of discarded ideas on the final page of the report, in a section called “Building the government of the future.” Contrary to the testimony cited in the preliminary report that procurement and hiring policy were the levers for reforming technology, the final report claimed that OTI was already “working to transform how City government operates.” This is a huge task for a City Hall office with relatively little authority over how individual agencies operate. COGE could have recommended a charter revision that gives OTI real power — for example, authority to kill contracts that don’t follow certain standards — but curiously opted not to. This was perhaps COGE’s greatest missed opportunity. 

The timing makes it hard not to draw conclusions: The preliminary report had real ideas for technology reform, OTI and its PIT Crews stole the scene and COGE delegated the matter of government reform to them. 

But as currently envisioned, the PIT Crews will not provide any durable improvements to City technology. Their goal is to build one-off digital products, following the playbook of the U.S. Digital Service (USDS). COGE’s final report cited USDS as an inspiration for OTI’s efforts. (New York City’s new Chief Technology Officer and OTI Director Lisa Gelobter is a former USDS official.) 

Consider how USDS performed its work: When the White House deemed a federal agency incapable of building a digital companion to a policy initiative, USDS would “parachute in,” build the product for the agency, put agency branding on it, and depart victorious. Relying on preferential treatment from agency staff, USDS received fast approvals for cybersecurity accreditation, new staff, IT infrastructure changes, data access, Privacy Act review and other processes that take all other IT programs months or years. The contractors that supported USDS often received competition-free contracts, reducing a years-long procurement process to a few months. And USDS staff [often used outside, non-federal systems](https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2024/06/defense-digital-service-directors-tapped-unauthorized-tech-without-proper-waivers-watchdog-finds/397078/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to perform their work, a violation of protocol that only White House staff could get away with.

These are expedient hacks that I’ve used myself. They’re the tactics civil servants employ in an emergency. They are not strategies for government reform at scale. For every system that gets the political cover to take these administrative shortcuts, there are thousands of invisible, unglamorous systems that keep governments afloat. Making those systems better requires labor, and the people who would provide it are stuck in hiring and procurement backlogs. 

Yes, the state of federal IT is bleak, and working strictly within the confines of the system would have kept USDS from getting anything done. But instead of bulldozing the bureaucracy for the benefit of every IT program, USDS just walked around it, celebrating a handful of wins while leaving the walls in place for thousands of other, less-glamorous systems. Combined with the fanfare and go-karts that accompanied the mayor’s [July 13 announcement](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani-launches--public-interest-technology--pit--crew--t?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), this history makes the PIT Crews feel like innovation theater. Everyone in public sector technology knows that it’s possible to build great technology when there are far fewer administrative constraints. The challenge — which COGE articulated so well in its preliminary report — is to change the constraints for government IT at large. 

There are real opportunities to do so, without state intervention or City Charter amendments. First, the City must change the way it procures software services. The typical contract is full of specifications about what a vendor shall build, and bundles everything into one large, complex, “big bang” effort. This not only slows the procurement process down, as it makes standardization across contracts impossible — it also delivers worse results. Overspecification was a primary cause of two of the City’s biggest software modernization failures: CityTime, the City’s employee timekeeping system, and Emergency Communications Transformation Program (ECTP), an attempt to overhaul the 911 system. In both cases, the City entered into large contracts with vendors confident about what had to be built, despite the enormous administrative complexities that each system had to navigate. Repeated modifications to the scope ballooned the [CityTime contract](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/reports/pdf/2014/2014-07-25-Pr13citytime.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from $63 million to $700 million. ECTP was delivered [10 years late and $1 billion over budget](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/documents/SR15%5F063S.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

This practice of pre-defining extensive, detailed functional requirements is generally known in the software industry as “waterfall development.” Over the past 30 years, the waterfall methodology has been displaced by the Agile methodology, which emphasizes fast iterations of evolving requirements based on constant feedback from users. This prevents teams from having to make guesses about what customers will want in several years when the project is complete. With Agile, the focus is always on what customers want right now. And by distilling an impossibly large, “big bang” effort into many smaller, more achievable pieces, it increases the odds of success.

OTI heard this lesson in advance of the MyCity contract, but didn’t internalize it: According to a [Comptroller audit](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-report-on-the-new-york-city-office-of-technology-and-innovations-mycity-system/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the MyCity program, OTI staff claimed they “used an agile approach,” yet they still contracted a firm to develop functional requirements. The use of the word “agile” is telling: Agile, with a capital A, is a professional term of art. I routinely see government contracts for software services that call for traditional waterfall methods, yet are littered with the word “agile,” as if simply repeating an adjective will impart its characteristics upon the author. Even the Comptroller’s final recommendations for MyCity reached the wrong conclusion, stating that OTI should “develop a clear and detailed project plan for MyCity’s end state, with detailed functional requirements and time and cost benchmarks.”

To prevent future software boondoggles, the City should require software development services contracts to be short and simple: devoid of product-specific functionality requirements, and phased in a way that requires a program to make progress before committing more funds to the effort. OTI does not have the power to force agencies to do this, but the Procurement Policy Board and the City chief procurement officer do.

For better hiring, one PIT Crew should be dedicated to the task of building better recruiting tools for every City agency. The City employs over 4,000 IT staff. While the City may have little control over [the application process for these jobs](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-yorks-mamdani-ny-civil-service-system/) (that’s the purview of the State, and largely constrained by a century-old civil service system), it can do a lot to improve its marketing of these positions and attract better candidates. For most vacancies, the status quo is what we call “post and pray”: Post a job announcement to a web site, and pray that good candidates find the announcement and apply. [USDS proved that a strong online brand and a call to mission will attract great candidates](https://govciomedia.com/usds-developing-innovative-approach-to-private-sector-hiring/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This is one page from the USDS playbook that the City should follow. After all, PIT Crew marketing has already inspired thousands of candidates to join public service. 

Rather than limiting this success to dozens, why not empower every agency to recruit in the same way, drawing thousands of great people into the City HR pipeline? 

Upon landing, PIT Crews will quickly discover that their host agency’s infrastructure is not ready for a modern web product. To make their products work, they will need to fetch data from, and write data to, legacy agency systems that were built in the 20th century before the internet was contemplated, and have no modern interface for such data transactions. Many of these systems won’t even have documentation that explains to PIT Crews how they work. In the most extreme cases, the PIT Crews will encounter [entrenched vendors](https://www.niskanencenter.org/vendor-capture-and-the-limits-of-fast-government-reform/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) who are the only people who can answer such technical questions, but do not want to relinquish control of a public system that they consider proprietary. A recent Comptroller audit found that such [integration challenges](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-report-on-the-new-york-city-office-of-technology-and-innovations-mycity-system/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) were one cause of the failure (thus far) of the MyCity program. 

It’s too early to know exactly which legacy systems PIT Crews will encounter, but here is a hypothetical example presented simply in order to make it more tangible: A Click to Cancel digital product might conceivably need to connect to a City financial system like the Financial Management System for Accounting (FMS/3) in order to levy non-compliance penalties against a business. What will happen when a PIT Crew knocks on the door of the Financial

Information Services Agency (FISA) and asks to connect their new web application to FMS/3? Perhaps it cannot happen without great technical effort; a recent [Comptroller report](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/documents/fn-10.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) said that FISA’s systems are “old and fragmented.” Or maybe such integration is technically possible, but the FISA staff cannot explain how the system works; the same report says that FISA staff are inordinately retirement-eligible and are not being replaced due to insufficient recruiting efforts. Or maybe the incumbent vendor, whose contract expires at the end of 2027, does not want to help an effort that could render them less essential.

While daunting, these problems present the PIT Crews’ biggest opportunity for citywide IT reform — assuming they approach their job more expansively than it seems they’re poised to. Unlike the other, non-technological barriers to innovation like hiring and procurement, the solution here lies in software code. In all likelihood, PIT Crews will overcome such problems with technical ingenuity and tenacity. They will have two options: stop streamlining the legacy system the moment it begins working with their own product, or go the extra mile, polishing their workarounds and publishing documentation for how they work. A workaround for one product can become a City-wide service that every system can leverage, unlocking data and interconnections that will benefit countless other City systems beyond those that are politically important to the mayor. While unglamorous, this is the true work of government modernization. 

Finally, PIT Crews can promote better technology culture via a single mantra: *Demos, not memos*. Government agencies traditionally fail to rigorously monitor the progress of IT projects. In recent years, the City Comptroller has [published](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-report-on-the-human-resources-administrations-vendor-performance-evaluations/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [multiple](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-report-on-the-administration-for-childrens-services-vendor-performance-evaluations/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [audits](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/documents/ME20%5F068A.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that found that New York City agencies aren’t performing basic evaluation of vendor performance. 

This happens because governments measure progress in terms of paper: To demonstrate work completed, a vendor will typically show a PowerPoint deck with [Gantt charts](https://www.apm.org.uk/resources/find-a-resource/gantt-chart/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), rather than showing the actual results of their work. Contracts routinely tie vendor performance to metrics that are wholly unrelated to whether the vendor is building a functional product, such as whether the vendor is submitting its monthly reports on time. In the case of the aforementioned 911 system upgrade, the Department of Investigation [found](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/reports/pdf/2015/2015-02-06-Ectp%5Freport%5Fand%5Fpress%5Frelease.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that City officials “pushed workers to ‘sanitize’ documents in order to make progress and overall health appear better than it actually was,” while failing to notice that subcontractors were overbilling for products and services by 600%. In the case of CityTime, a fraud ring [exploited](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/statement-manhattan-us-attorney-preet-bharara-guilty-verdicts-mark-mazer-gerard-denault?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the City’s lack of visibility into project progress and stole $100 million. Three people, including the City’s own project manager, were sentenced to 20 years in prison. This culture of lax oversight needs to be disrupted, and tech culture might be the answer. 

For digital products, there is only one thing that matters: Is there working code? Is the team producing an actual, real-life product that users and leaders can put their hands on as it comes together? This question is seldom asked in government IT programs. But it is standard in the tech sector, where digital teams put live demonstrations of their unfinished products in front of audiences on a daily basis. Such demos by PIT Crews will likely catch agency staff off guard, as they are used to a much different type of program oversight. This is a good thing. PIT Crews should not only insist on this type of briefing, they should expose as many agency staff to this behavior as possible. Of all the barriers to public sector innovation I’ve seen, perhaps the biggest is government staff’s lack of exposure to the right way of building technology. They need someone to model this behavior for them, and the PIT Crews could be that model.

The COGE final report concluded, “If the City embraces this moment, technology can help create a government that is faster, more responsive, and easier to navigate.” This is true. Technology is now the engine of almost every government mission, the primary engagement medium for the public it serves. But technology as a tool on its own will never fix government at the scale required. For technology to achieve its potential to transform government, the tools needed are starkly non-technological.
### Zohran Mamdani's Promise and the Reality of Supermarket Prices
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-city-run-grocery-stores-economic-challenges/
Last updated: 2026-08-25T18:41:30.000Z
No promise of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was more concrete than his promise to make groceries cheaper, and he’s moving fast to try to deliver. In April, the City named [La Marqueta](https://edc.nyc/press-release/mayor-mamdani-announces-la-marqueta-first-site-identified-citys-public-grocery-stores?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in East Harlem as the first site in what’s envisioned to be a network of five stores, one in each borough, and in May the administration added The Peninsula in Hunts Point. In July, it published a [vision plan](https://edc.nyc/sites/default/files/2026-07/NYC-Groceries-Vision-Plan.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and issued a [request for proposals](https://edc.nyc/nyc-groceries-operators-rfp?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for private operators. The way the mayor describes it, five City-owned stores, one per borough, will sell a core basket of fresh produce, meat and seafood, along with selected dairy, frozen and pantry goods, at an average of 30% below market prices. The City, which has committed $70 million in capital funding, estimates that it will save participating households roughly $90 a month. The Hunts Point store is scheduled to open late next year, followed by the La Marqueta store in 2029.

Two promises are bundled inside the plan, and they should be judged separately. One is about access. Putting a full-service store in neighborhoods that lack one means fresh produce and meat that were previously hard to get will become available, and the chosen sites — arguably in places insufficiently served by high-quality groceries — reflect that logic. On this, I have no qualms, though neither can I say these are the smartest sites.

The other promise is affordability, resting on that 30% discount. That one will determine what the program costs and whether it lasts. But it runs into something the City cannot fix, and it’s something I know a bit about as [a food economist](https://www.canr.msu.edu/people/david%5Fortega?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The flaw is in the premise, not the execution: The forces that set grocery prices — herd sizes, harvests, climate, tariffs, fuel, labor — are national and global, and any single store, however well run, sits downstream of all of them.

Consider beef, which is doing more damage to New York grocery bills right now than almost anything else. Ground beef now averages [nearly $7 a pound nationally](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000703112?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and can run well over $10 in some New York stores. It’s one of the cheapest beef products on the counter, and pretty much everything else goes up from that. Why? The American cattle herd is the smallest it has been in [75 years](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/summary-findings?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Years of drought, high feed costs and herd liquidation have constrained cattle supplies, and rebuilding a herd takes years. A rancher in Nebraska who keeps a heifer this year rather than selling her is making a decision that reaches a butcher counter in New York City a few years from now. [USDA expects](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/summary-findings?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) retail beef prices to keep climbing, and no local purchasing agreement can reverse a national cattle shortage. The City can decide who pays for a steak in the Bronx. It cannot decide what that steak costs.

The wider pattern looks much the same. Grocery prices rose [11.4%](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/summary-findings?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) nationally in 2022, part of the worst year for food inflation since 1979\. The war in Ukraine, avian influenza and broad inflation arrived within months of each other, with drought tightening supplies behind them. Increases then slowed, but slowing is not falling. When economists say inflation has normalized, they mean prices are rising at a normal rate again, not that they are coming back down. The 2022 increases are the new baseline. That is why the data can say the crisis has passed while the receipt says it hasn't, and the political energy behind this plan lives in the gap between the two.

The forces pushing prices today come from different directions, none of which originates in the five boroughs. Some pressures are slow and biological. Herds rebuild over years, and a weak wheat or vegetable harvest takes a season or more to work through. No mayor can speed that up. Other pressures move fast and are driven by policymakers. Tariffs, trade disputes and uncertainty around farm labor can reprice a tomato within weeks, but those choices are made in Washington rather than at City Hall.

In fairness, some shocks also unwind. Egg prices are [falling](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/summary-findings?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as flocks recover from avian flu, and grocery inflation is running a little above its 20-year average. That is uncomfortable, but hardly a catastrophe.

The mayor's rhetoric has suggested the City-run stores will be cheaper because they answer to the public good rather than to profit. The plan itself is more candid. It says holding these prices down will require sustained public investment; that the City will cover rent, property taxes and construction; and that this is not a standalone solution. That is more candor than most policy documents offer. 

Still, let’s all be clear about what is being built. This is not a new model that finds a novel and sustainable way to deliver lower prices. This is a subsidy, delivered through a storefront. It will genuinely help households that live near one. But it does not make food cheaper. It pays part of the food bill on the shopper’s behalf, with tax dollars. What that means is that it has inherent limitations. It could work in a small network. It almost certainly cannot work at scale, not unless the City is prepared to treat groceries as a permanent public good, funded in the expense budget year after year the way schools and street repair are.

Nor is there hidden efficiency waiting to be unlocked by cutting out a middleman. Look again at eggs: Prices at the farm are [falling](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/summary-findings?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) faster than prices at the register. That gap is not, by itself, evidence of gouging. That gap reflects, in part, the cost of processing, trucking, refrigeration, packaging and labor, which do not necessarily fall when a commodity price drops.A City-owned store in Hunts Point pays those costs like every bodega in the borough.

This raises a question that is not being discussed enough: The City has [committed $70 million](https://edc.nyc/program/nyc-groceries?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in capital funding for store construction and fit-out, but it has not published the recurring affordability payment needed to maintain an average 30% discount on the core basket. Nor has it defined the benchmark. The omission follows a familiar pattern in public budgeting: The money to build the playground gets announced, the money for the grounds crew that keeps it open does not. To judge whether this experiment is worthwhile, the public needs to see what that adds up to.

A 30% discount is only meaningful against a stated comparison. The mayor has [described](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/transcript-%5Fmayor-mamdani-unveils-30--discount---including-all-p?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) it as 30% below *typical retail prices*, but the City has not said whose prices, or at what kind of store. Prices vary widely by store format and neighborhood, so 30% below a citywide average and 30% below what a given shopper actually pays are different promises, and the difference determines what families save and what taxpayers owe. The 30% target is an average across the core basket rather than a fixed markdown on every item, and the plan allows prices to be reset as markets move.

Nor should we forget: When beef and produce costs run high, the City’s obligation rises with them, so the program costs the most in exactly the years it matters most. A 30% discount on $7 ground beef costs the City $2.10 a pound; at $14, it costs $4.20\. The shopper's savings double, and so does the taxpayer's bill. That is not a design flaw, and every pilot refines its cost estimates before opening. But everyone quotes the $70 million in capital. The number that will really determine whether this program survives the next year of high food prices is the *annual affordability payment*, which has not yet been published. The City is asking bidders to estimate it, which means it will know the figure when it picks operators. It must be public before the doors open.

Supporters [often point to military commissaries](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/government-is-already-in-the-grocery-business/), subsidized government groceries that have operated for generations. It is a fair comparison, and worth a close look. In 2022, the Government Accountability Office [found](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-104728?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that the Defense Commissary Agency ran 236 stores on roughly $1 billion dollars a year, targeting a 23.7% discount. It had shown neither that it hit that target nor that it was weaning itself off appropriations. The agency, GAO concluded, could not accurately estimate the discount its customers actually received. Commissaries serve a closed military population under a different mandate, so the analogy only goes so far. 

The lesson worth borrowing is about measurement. Hundreds of stores and real purchasing power were not enough to answer the only question that matters, which is what shoppers save. New York proposes five stores.

Meanwhile, the City already benefits from a food-purchasing program reaching roughly 1.7 million residents, and it works at authorized retailers across the city. It is called SNAP, and it is [shrinking](https://citylimits.org/more-new-yorkers-are-forgoing-food-stamps-amid-federal-overhaul/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). [More than 22,000 New Yorkers](https://citylimits.org/more-than-22000-new-yorkers-lost-snap-benefits-last-month-due-to-federal-work-rules/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) lost benefits in June alone under new federal work rules, many of them in Brooklyn and the Bronx. The New York City Food Policy Center [notes](https://www.nycfoodpolicy.org/how-nyc-households-are-navigating-snap-benefit-losses-in-2026-2/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that most working-age recipients already work, which suggests many lost benefits over paperwork rather than eligibility.

City Hall cannot rewrite those federal rules, but it can reduce the friction, meaning the outreach, documentation and recertification that decide whether an eligible household stays enrolled. Improving enrollment and retention should be a central part of the City’s food-affordability strategy. SNAP does not solve this alone, and plenty of enrolled households still come up short. But it is among the City’s most scalable affordability levers, and it is losing ground.

In sum, grocery affordability in New York represents several problems, not one. The price of the food itself is set by herds, harvests and trade policy, all of it national, slow and beyond any mayor’s reach. The cost of getting that food onto a shelf is local, running through rent, permits and labor. The City’s own plan promises to reduce regulatory burdens and streamline permitting so more full-service stores can open. That may be the document’s most durable affordability idea, and it sits in a subordinate clause on page 14\. [Zoning, parking mandates and permitting delays](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-grocery-cost-explained/) raise costs at every store in the city, not just at the five City-run locations. A household’s ability to pay is more broadly reached by benefits that travel with the shopper rather than waiting at one address.

If Mayor Mamdani is going to build these stores, he should be clearer about the limitations of the experiment. And he should do what the Pentagon never managed to do: publish the affordability payment. Publish how the basket is priced and against what benchmark. Then let someone independent verify what shoppers actually save. Start before the day the doors open.
### Appreciate Mamdani’s Housing Achievement
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-housing-production-plan-achievements/
Last updated: 2026-08-12T18:21:05.000Z
This week, those who want to build more housing in New York have been grappling with Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s reversal on a plan to build affordable housing for seniors and homeless New Yorkers where the [Elizabeth Street Garden](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/11/nyregion/mamdani-elizabeth-street-garden-housing.html?smid=tw-share&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) now sits. It’s a real disappointment, albeit one tempered by the fact that the Adams administration made the task much harder on its way out the door by designating the garden as [parkland](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/nyregion/elizabeth-street-garden-parkland.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a move only Albany can reverse.

But we can’t lose the forest for the garden’s trees. Any upset at Mamdani on this one Lower East Side site should be tempered by a clear-eyed recognition of what this mayor and his administration have already accomplished. It’s fair to say that by offering the most robust housing agenda of any mayor in memory, Mamdani has reframed the debate over apartment production in New York City. It’s remarkable indeed that a democratic socialist has made clear that this is not about developers and communities being in competition — but about how the broader needs of the people of the city are up against an old, ossified bureaucratic and political machinery that for too long has prevented the city from producing the homes it desperately needs.

One number should anchor every discussion on the issue: 1.4%. That is the city's net rental vacancy rate according to the [Housing and Vacancy Survey](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vacancy-rate-reaches-historic-low-1-4-percent-demanding-urgent-action-new?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In a city with roughly 2.36 million rental apartments, fewer than 34,000 of them are available. And the deeper you go, the worse it gets. Apartments under $1,100? A vacancy rate of [0.39%](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vacancy-rate-reaches-historic-low-1-4-percent-demanding-urgent-action-new?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

New York City’s rental market is failing the low-income residents who need it most. It is no surprise that the city’s homeless population remains so high, with the [Coalition for the Homeless](https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/dhs-hpd-census/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) calculating that a staggering 87,145 New Yorkers have slept in New York City's shelters every night in the month of June alone. Of those, over 28,000 are children. 

This was the situation waiting for Mamdani when he was sworn in as mayor. He won running on affordability, powered by renters convinced that developers are the villains of this story. But with the vacancy rate near 1%, the problem could never be put at the door of developers, and well into his first year, it’s clear that Mamdani, whatever his ideology, fully understands this reality. The democratic socialist mayor has spent his time in office assembling a supply-side housing agenda, lending his political capital to the deepest environmental review reform Albany has passed in 50 years, and setting public deadlines he can be held to. 

This formula (just build!) has worked elsewhere. The question is whether Mamdani will be able to see it through. It is worth noting that a young, far-left mayor in America’s largest city has the most pro-housing agenda of just about any local leader anywhere. I say this as a Democrat who was skeptical that a member of the DSA would ever subscribe to the ideas of the YIMBYs — the coalition of people who seek to solve the housing crisis with an emphasis on adding more supply, including private development. 

### A scarcity the city built for itself

New York was not always this stagnant. The city built constantly for most of its history, with housing more or less keeping pace with population, until the 1960s. At that point, production fell behind and has stayed behind for 60 years. 

As [Annemarie Gray of Open New York](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/new-yorks-housing-crisis-self-inflicted-and-solvable) has argued, plenty of the rules now strangling construction started as legitimate safeguards before calcifying into vehicles of obstruction. For decades, the idea of changing the character of a neighborhood has been seen as a deadly sin in many circles. Member deference gave every council member an effective veto over rezonings, environmental review piled years onto harmless projects and downzonings shrank what could legally be built. 

The winds of change began to blow during Eric Adams’ administration, with the passage of City of Yes and the approval of four pro-housing ballot measures in November 2025\. The City was turning toward growth before Mamdani arrived. His job now is to hit the accelerator. 

During the campaign, New York’s [real estate industry spent heavily](https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/04/business/mamdani-housing-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to keep Mamdani out of Gracie Mansion. When he won, they braced for a mayor who would freeze rents and fight the builders. 

They were not wrong — Mamdani did freeze the rents. By my reckoning, this was a mistake. It is the one lever in Mamdani’s housing agenda that pulls against every other lever. 

But while the battle over the rent freeze garnered the lion’s share of the headlines and traffic on social media, Mamdani also did something unexpected: he adopted much of the real estate industry's diagnosis of what keeps new housing from getting built. 

On Jan. 1, his first day in office, he [signed executive orders](https://citylimits.org/everything-zohran-mamdani-did-on-housing-during-his-first-days-as-mayor/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) creating the [SPEED task force](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/executive-order-05?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), charged with stripping delay from the affordable housing pipeline, and [LIFT](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/executive-order-04?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), tasked with finding City-owned land for housing. March brought the [Neighborhood Builders Fast Track](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/03/mamdani-administration-launches-new-program-to-deliver-affordabl?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which cut developer selection on public land by eight months, and the first use of the voter-approved Expedited Land Use Review Procedure. May brought the [SPEED (Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development) report](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mamdani-administration-releases--speed--reforms-to-deliver-affor?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), his [first executive budget](https://www.amny.com/news/mamdani-cut-affordable-housing-lottery-delays/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the [Block by Block plan](https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2026/05/5-things-know-about-mamdanis-big-housing-plan/413771/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). And at the end of the month, Gov. Kathy Hochul [signed a state budget](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/let-them-build-governor-hochul-signs-legislation-delivers-generational-reforms-make-it-easier?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) containing “Let Them Build,” an overhaul of the state environmental review law. Mamdani was an active, public ally in this fight.

### Mamdani’s first six months 

Any assessment of Mamdani’s first six months on housing should start with SPEED. The task force gathered [more than 500 recommendations](https://commercialobserver.com/2026/05/mamdani-speed-overhaul-housing-lottery-speed/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from builders, advocates and city agencies, all aimed at one target: reducing the time from approval to move-in. The report commits to cutting timelines for all affordable projects by eight months, and by as much as two years for projects that need a zoning change. The targets are specific, which I like, because specific targets make for simple evaluation. 

The task force also sought to address the worst bottleneck for rezoning projects, a single review called pre-certification, which takes about two years to process. SPEED compresses it to roughly six months. [Citizens Budget Commission research](https://www.amny.com/news/mamdani-cut-affordable-housing-lottery-delays/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) puts the cost of that two-year wait at about $82,000 per apartment. SPEED also halves the delay that stings most: Today, a finished building sits a [median of 210 days](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mamdani-administration-releases--speed--reforms-to-deliver-affor?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) between completion and move-in, seven months during which a family waits in a shelter. The plan has an ambitious commitment to shorten that to fewer than 100 days.

These reforms [require no vote](https://hanfordsentinel.com/news/national/mayor-zohran-mamdani-aims-to-streamline-process-to-lease-build-affordable-housing-in-nyc/article%5F74944b3c-11f8-599b-baef-d01cf446ef9f.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the state Legislature or the City Council, and none touch the City's discretionary review, the case-by-case approval that big projects must win before breaking ground. That is why Mamdani could move fast. Mayor Adams tried this tactic with his [Get Stuff Built report](https://www.city-journal.org/article/mamdani-speed-affordable-housing-new-york?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which offered a nearly identical diagnosis. But announcing reform and delivering it are different jobs. SPEED will be judged on whether, a year from now, that 100-day move-in target is real. 

The most substantial change to New York's production landscape so far this year came from a fight Mamdani did not have to pick. Hochul's Let Them Build agenda, the [first major legislative streamlining](https://www.cuddyfeder.com/let-them-build-agenda-will-they-come-what-to-know-about-seqra-reform/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the State Environmental Quality Review Act since 1975, exempts qualifying New York City housing of [up to 250 units](https://www.citizenscampaign.org/whats-new-at-cce/2026/6/1/seqra-reform-splits-new-york-lawmakers-snagging-budget-talks?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (500 in the densest districts) from environmental review entirely; the [State's own analysis](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/let-them-build-governor-hochul-signs-legislation-delivers-generational-reforms-make-it-easier?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found SEQRA can slow housing projects by as long as two years. 

Mamdani endorsed the proposal early, calling it a way to [“deliver an affordability agenda on the timetable needed,”](https://www.governor.ny.gov/let-them-build/support-let-them-build?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and Hochul [enlisted him](https://nysfocus.com/2026/05/27/new-york-budget-seqra-housing-environment?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to help push it past a reluctant Assembly. A democratic socialist mayor spending capital in Albany on an environmental review rollback developers have sought for decades — who had that on their bingo card during the mayoral campaign? It is also a significant step toward achieving SPEED's most ambitious target: The pre-certification cut depended in part on State action, and the State acted.

The Block by Block report expands upon that by focusing on scale. The estimates add up to a whopping [$22 billion in capital over five years](https://www.newsweek.com/mamdani-wins-rent-freeze-battle-can-fix-nyc-housing-crisis-12124839?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to build 200,000 new affordable, rent-stabilized homes and preserve another 200,000 over a decade. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) gets $5.6 billion, its largest capital commitment in decades, plus a reboot as a developer on its own land. And there is a homeownership track in a city where [7 in 10 households rent](https://gothamist.com/news/mamdanis-new-housing-plan-will-outline-clear-pathway-to-ownership-for-some-renters?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). That is real ambition next to [de Blasio's 300,000](https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2026/05/5-things-know-about-mamdanis-big-housing-plan/413771/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) built and preserved combined, or Adams' 500,000-unit “moonshot” that never bothered to specify exactly how much would be affordable. 

Importantly, Mamdani aims squarely at the bottom of the market, where the 0.39% vacancy rate lives. But almost all of the planned housing is subsidized, rent-stabilized and union-built. This does the most for the poorest tenants, but it will not, on its own, move the citywide vacancy rate. Only pairing this effort with market-rate construction can achieve this goal. The good news is that the rest of Mamdani’s agenda serves that goal, helping to shorten approval timelines and to lower costs for every builder, not just the subsidized ones.

But the most important thing Mamdani has done in his first six months shows up in no single plan. For a generation, New York's housing politics ran on a forced choice: You were for building, or you were for protecting tenants. So far, Mamdani has refused to choose. In his telling, the enemy is the machinery that stalls new housing. That reframe earns him something his predecessors never had — permission from his political base to speed up construction because the thing being sped up is delivery for them.

Eric Kober of the Manhattan Institute calls Mamdani a [“left-YIMBY.”](https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/04/business/mamdani-housing-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Alex Armlovich, my former Niskanen colleague, [describes his coalition management](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/a-housing-roadmap-for-new-yorks-next-mayor) as a deliberate split: market liberalism for new housing, aggressive protection for the old stock. Everyone gets the half they care about most, and the mayor gets to build. The center-left has spent two years arguing, mostly in theory, over whether it can still build things at all. Mamdani is putting this idea to the test, and doing so from the wing of the party most suspicious of developers. If he succeeds, every Democrat will eventually borrow the script.
### New York Needs New Ornamental Architecture
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-needs-new-ornamental-architecture/
Last updated: 2026-08-25T18:42:32.000Z
By definition, “ornaments” have no functional or structural purpose. Buildings can stand safely without statuary or fluted columns or gargoyles. But this is not to say these architectural details serve no purpose at all: Ornaments exist to be beautiful or interesting.

Though structural integrity is paramount, this aesthetic purpose should not be undervalued. Aesthetics are practical if not strictly necessary. For example, ornaments help buildings age gracefully — there’s an example of this at the southeast corner of Washington Square Park, on an NYU building with an ornate arch around its entrance. The bottom half of the arch was renovated, and because soot and dirt have yet to settle into the pits and grooves of its pattern, we can see a stark seam between old and new. The old half is stained with the patina of time, giving the design better contrast that makes it both easier to see and lovelier to behold.

![The archway at 50 W 4th St, graphite on paper.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/08/archway-no-border-1.jpg)

The archway at 50 W 4th St, graphite on paper. Credit: Megan Gafford

Ornamental architecture looks better with age, while buildings with smooth façades often seem in need of a pressure wash. Even in extreme decay, ornamental architecture becomes a romantic ruin, whereas unadorned buildings tend to look blighted. 

But the greatest purpose of ornament is more fundamental than a list of practical benefits: Ornaments are part of the human condition.

People have been decorating their walls for tens of thousands of years, at least since the cave paintings in [Chauvet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet%5FCave?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [El Castillo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave%5Fof%5FEl%5FCastillo?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Ornamentation is so ancient and persistent across all human cultures that I suspect we have evolved to adore it. How else could it be so universal? Ornaments give our eyes a place to explore, our minds a subject to contemplate. We marvel at the craft and attention to detail necessary to design complex patterns and the craftsmanship required to execute them — at human talent.

Humans have spent centuries heavily ornamenting our most sacred buildings, like the twin-spired Gothic cathedral in Cologne that took 632 years to build. Last winter, the final piece of the central tower in Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família was finished after 144 years, and completing all of its ornaments will take almost another decade. The characteristics that make ornaments high quality — excellent craftsmanship, rich materials, intricacy of design — subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) communicate that a building is precious.

We love ornamental architecture so much that people have risked their lives for it, like the firefighters who saved Notre Dame. Others have died for it, like photographer Richard Nickel, who documented and preserved the architecture of Louis Sullivan, the “father of skyscrapers” and mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1972, while Nickel was salvaging pieces of Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange, the partially demolished building collapsed on top of him.

Ornamental architecture became unfashionable thanks to Modern architects like Adolf Loos, who wrote in 1908 that [ornament is a crime](https://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary%5FSL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) because he believed that unadorned surfaces were timeless, with no ornaments to go out of style. Modern architecture was also meant to be place-less, which is why the Museum of Modern Art christened it the International Style in its [first architectural exhibition](https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2044?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 1932\. MoMA [identified](https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/international-style?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) how “plain, unadorned architecture of rectilinear forms built of steel, reinforced concrete, and glass ... transformed the skylines of many major cities around the world.”

Modernists championed functionalism instead, but even they succumbed to the siren song of ornamentation. Le Corbusier, an acolyte of Loos who is widely considered the father of Modern architecture, helped design the first glass curtain wall skyscraper in New York — the UN Secretariat Building on the East River. Its east and west faces are glass sheets held in steel frames, while its narrower north and south sides are clad in Vermont marble, which gives the tower a touch of opulence. Le Corbusier also painted parts of his concrete city in Chandigarh, India, in bright, rainbow patterns. Yet his[ idiosyncratic color theory](https://www.archdaily.com/1003880/le-corbusiers-color-theory-embracing-polychromy-in-architecture?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is no more functional than Renaissance frescoes or the painted beasts stampeding across the Chauvet cave walls.

Similarly, in Tom Wolfe’s 1981 broadside “Bauhaus to Our House,” he[ mocked](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From%5FBauhaus%5Fto%5FOur%5FHouse?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) modern architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for his work on the Seagram building, a Modernist icon in Midtown: “American codes required that structural steel members be encased in concrete or some other fireproof material. … What \[Mies\] did was enclose the steel members in concrete, as required, and then reveal them, express them, by sticking vertical wide-flange beams on the outside of the concrete, as if to say: ‘Look! Here's what's inside.’ But sticking things on the outside of buildings ... Wasn't that exactly what was known, in another era, as applied decoration? Was there any way you could call such a thing *functional?”*

![The Seagram Building at night, graphite on paper.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/08/Seagram-Building-at-Night-copy.jpg)

The Seagram Building at night, graphite on paper. Credit: Megan Gafford

Or consider the Barbican Estate in London, the crown jewel of Brutalism, a Modern style dominated by the use of raw concrete. Completed in 1976, the Barbican mixes dense residential flats with an arts center, school facilities, and a conservatory garden. On a recent trip, my architecture tour guide emphasized that, contrary to the anti-ornamental ideals that birthed the style in 1950s London, the Barbican[ includes](https://www.fashionablylatetakes.com/p/architectural-studies-02?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) many ornamental flourishes.

Most conspicuously, the Barbican is full of plants: Extensive landscaping features fountains with water dyed green, balcony gardens overflowing with red geraniums and the conservatory overgrown with a tropical collection. At the Barbican, foliage *becomes* architectural ornament. 

But there’s ornament carved into the buildings, too. Dramatically, it took 11 years for a select group of craftsmen to jackhammer textural effects into the concrete, after which many permanently lost feeling in their fingertips and developed lung disease from inhaling dust. The architectural ornaments at the Barbican Estate have demanded care and sacrifice for decades.

![The Barbican Conservatory, graphite on paper](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/08/Barbican-Conservatory.jpg)

The Barbican Conservatory, graphite on paper. Credit: Megan Gafford

So, upon closer inspection, even the most austere architectural styles are decorated with intense devotion. Given this reality, the question is not *whether* we should have ornamental architecture, but *what kind.* The idea that humanity could end its millennia-long love affair with ornamental architecture was always absurd. It is in our nature.

But ornament — however much it has been discretely smuggled into austere buildings — has yet to make a strong comeback since Modernism took hold. Contemporary buildings may come in novel shapes, but most of their surfaces are plain. There is substantially less complexity in the slick glass “neo-Art Deco” Brooklyn Tower, built in 2022 as the tallest skyscraper in the outer boroughs, than in any Art Deco building from the 1930s. The interior of Moynihan Train Hall in Midtown, renovated in 2021, is streamlined, while its historic exterior is detailed. Even the new wing of the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side, completed in 2023 as a place for childhood wonder, resembles a polished cave wall grafted incongruously to the side of the elaborate Victorian Gothic original.

When ornamental buildings are torn down, they’re almost certainly replaced with something unadorned. Perhaps the most egregious example in the city’s history is the demolition of the old Penn Station, to be supplanted by the eyesore that is Madison Square Garden. Because we build so little new ornamental architecture, when we don’t maintain and preserve the historic buildings, ornaments slowly disappear from the city. That is why, if you want to live somewhere beautiful in New York, you probably look for a prewar building. You trade the newest amenities for cornices and crown molding.

This makes it all the more a shame that the ornamental arch at the corner of Washington Square Park was renovated badly. Close up, you can see that the new half is made from an inferior concrete. It has a rougher, flaky texture, and is colored a cool gray that appears deadened compared to the warmer cream of the original stone. Even once the patina of time settles into the recesses of the renovated pattern, it’ll never match the rest of the building. That inconsistency will always look like a patch, drawing attention to imperfections and making the archway appear shoddier than if the rough concrete seemed like an intentional design choice, rather than a regrettable byproduct of repair work. The ornament is the same design, but the craftsmanship suffers.

![The seam between old and new, in the archway at 50 W 4th St, graphite on paper.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/08/archway-close-up-no-border.jpg)

The seam between old and new, in the archway at 50 W 4th St, graphite on paper. Credit: Megan Gafford

Ornamentation is not a virtue in and of itself. It should go hand in hand with craftsmanship: a trained precision, with not just attention but *devotion* to detail, that is a commitment to quality and beauty. In Modern architecture, craftsmanship is sometimes how simplicity is beautified, as when my Barbican Estate tour guide explained that the men who lost feeling in their fingertips from jackhammering a rough texture into the concrete were “select craftsmen” whose labors lasted 11 years. Their expertise, effort and suffering imbue the texture with a kind of intellectual beauty: Whereas before our eyes might linger on the texture but briefly, knowledge of how it was made holds our attention by giving us an interesting story to consider, and encouraging us to look closer at the blue granite embedded in the concrete that the texture exposes.

Obvious ornaments show off craftsmanship that need not be explained to be appreciated. Tour guides have much to say about ornamental architecture, too, but you don’t need one to help you find the beauty in the first place. When people look at architectural gems in New York like the newly restored Flatiron Building or Waldorf Astoria, it is self-evident they were built and rejuvenated by select craftsmen.

Historic preservation of masterpieces is good but insufficient. We also need new ornamental architecture. New York has always been a city animated by ambition and innovation; this is not the kind of place that should feel like a museum, as does much of Europe. The hallmark of New York architecture — the skyscraper — was born out of dynamism and technological progress, as the invention of elevators and steel skeleton frames led to an entirely new type of architecture. New York would be unrecognizable without these innovations.

There are New Yorkers intent on harnessing new technology to advance more detailed, ornamental architecture today, like[ Monumental Labs](https://www.monumentallabs.co/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Brooklyn, where artists, fabricators and carvers are using robotics and AI “to revive the ancient craft of stone carving, to bring sculpture and ornament back to our built environment on a mass scale, and to build cities of unmatched splendor using the world’s greenest construction material.” Each piece is hand-finished by artists whose traditional craft is being preserved by technology driving down the cost of sculpting stone. Along with preserving historic buildings, New York could have new ornaments to delight us with fresh expressions of human talent and ingenuity.

We must make pivotal choices: Ornaments hold meaning, demanding decisions about what to communicate and what should be taken from history. Some motifs have ancient lineages, like the acanthus leaf, which has recurred in Greco-Roman, European and Islamic designs since the ancient Greeks began using them in their scrollwork and column capitals. Acanthus leaves are plentiful on New York’s Beaux-Arts landmarks like Grand Central Terminal, the Public Library Main Branch, the Metropolitan Museum and many brownstones. My favorite example of an ornament sampling history in New York is the inlaid wood veneer on the Chrysler Building elevator doors, which have designs found in the tomb of Tutankhamun.

And we should steal from Modernism, too. We can consider whether our botanical motifs should be sculpted or grown out of stone, and there’s no reason why we can’t keep the sweeping views afforded by the glass sheet walls of our tallest skyscrapers, while adding ornaments that break up the boring monotony of a flat expanse. Modernism does not need to be disavowed; it needs to evolve.

The minimalism of Modernism is inherently limiting, because there’s only so much you can pare down, only so much you can strip off a naked building. At some point you run out of things to take away, with few available combinations to make out of what’s left. The more you subtract, the less complexity is possible — the very complexity that delights people when they look at ornament, because we tend to admire intricate parts coming together to form a cohesive whole. And complexity, in turn, makes variety possible. With enough complexity — with enough potential combinations of visual elements — is there any limit to the number of new aesthetics we might create?

The goal, contra Adolf Loos, is not to invent a timeless style, for there is no such thing as an aesthetic unmoored from its age and divorced from history. Modern architecture is an aesthetic as distinct as any other. It defined the “look” and sensibility of much of the 20th century, just as every previous aesthetic shaped its era. It is no more timeless than any of the ornamental styles it supplanted.

Rather, the goal should be to invent aesthetics to define our age. Architectural styles remind us of past generations, as we walk under the archways they built and turn the same doorknobs centuries later. We can scarcely imagine historical events without the aesthetics that defined their time — try to picture New York during the Jazz Age without seeing Art Deco.

Ornament is often conflated with historic pastiche, but the problem is, most contemporary architecture just looks like a pastiche of the plain surfaces popularized by 20th century Modernism. And unless we wish to remain derivative of the last century for much longer, we should draw more inspiration from the millennia of ornamental styles that preceded it. The list of influences visible in Art Deco, for example, seems endless: Greco-Roman, Gothic, Byzantine, Mayan, Egyptian, Chinese, Social Realism, the hubcaps and hood ornaments of Chrysler automobiles … all blended together in unprecedented ways. Though these influences are clearly apparent, Art Deco emerged out of them as a distinct aesthetic all its own. It was the last new style of ornamental architecture before unadorned glass towers and naked, concrete angles became the dominant trend.

How do we want our descendants to remember us when they walk through the archways we build today? In 100 years, will the aesthetics we invent loom as large in their imaginations as Art Deco does in ours? Do we believe that 21st\-century New York can look as iconic as 20th-century New York?
### How To Make Driverless Ride-Hail Work in New York
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/waymo-driverless-ridehail-strategy-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-12T18:10:50.000Z
Waymo spent seven months proving its technology could handle New York.

From August 2025 to March 2026, it ran eight robotaxis, each with a trained safety specialist behind the wheel, in a circumscribed testing zone covering [Manhattan below 112th Street and Downtown Brooklyn](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/08/mayor-adams--dot-announce-approval-of-first-application-to-test-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). By the Department of Transportation’s account, [no collisions were reported](https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/04/06/waymo-driverless-cars-testing-roads-autonomous-vehicle/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This was a successful pilot, and New Yorkers might have expected that success to encourage growth: more Waymo vehicles, in a larger zone, operating in the evening as well as the day, such that more people could try the service, and the service could demonstrate its value in these broader contexts.

Then the permits expired. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has not renewed them. Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed bringing robotaxis to the rest of the state, but has now withdrawn even that. Nor has she asked her DOT to relax any of the existing regulations restricting automated vehicles.

Robotaxis will get to New York City eventually. They are already on the streets of 11 American metros, and as Silicon Valley types like to say, the technology today is both the best it’s ever been and the worst it will ever be. New York is the largest for-hire market in North America, and no robotaxi firm will want to leave it unclaimed forever. So the question is: On what terms should the City let them operate?

The next time Waymo or Zoox or Tesla knocks on the door at City Hall, the administration should make three moves. It should require firms to buy medallions for their robotaxis from the New Yorkers who hold them. It should send the first fleet to the transit deserts in the city. And it should strike the bargain soon, while the City still has leverage. Otherwise, it’s reasonable to think that Congress, or even the White House, will make the decision on the City’s behalf. 

### But are they safe?

Before exploring those moves, let’s consider whether the City *should* want to make them. Are robotaxis actually safer than the human ride-hail drivers they would replace? 

A [report released in July by the Sam Schwartz Transportation Research Program at Hunter College (with Open Plans)](https://www.openplans.org/how-for-hire-autonomous-vehicles-impact-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) suggested that this is a good question to ask. Waymo’s marketing team prefers comparing its technology to a benchmark of the average driver, but it’s not average drivers that a robotaxi would replace. Instead, they crowd out professional drivers, who (the report claimed) are much safer than average; according to the report, these drivers are involved in serious crashes at one-fourteenth the rate of the average city vehicle. That means, the report said, Waymos are involved in crashes causing death or serious injury at [1.5 times the rate of New York’s for-hire fleet](https://www.amny.com/news/robotaxis-nyc-study-street-safety-report/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a figure widely circulated at the time. 

Unfortunately, within days, the authors were forced to retract the safety portion of their analysis, citing “data discrepancies” in the city crash records underlying it. This means the question of whether Waymo is safer than, less safe or as safe as New York’s ride-hail fleet is still open. Until it is settled more definitively, we can rely on the fact that Waymo, throughout its history, has never been found at fault in a crash causing a death or serious injury. 

So while no one yet knows whether robotaxis are safer than New York’s professionals, their record so far is by at least some measures comparable and arguably superior. This suggests that the City should provide the robotaxi firms with an opportunity to prove that they can drive safely on New York City’s famously-complicated streets, where bicycles and pedestrians and buses and double-parked vehicles and so many other road-users interact.

That said, the City should provide this opportunity on the City’s terms. 

### Make the robots buy their medallions from drivers

In most cities where Waymo operates, ride-hail driving is gig work — part time and short term. That’s not New York. In the [Taxi and Limousine Commission’s 2024 driver survey](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/tlc/downloads/pdf/driver%5Fexpense%5Freport.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), 81% of for-hire drivers reported driving at least 32 hours a week; 56% had driven for five years or more; and 80% relied on driving as their sole income. Roughly 9 in 10 are immigrants. And they are organized: the New York Taxi Workers Alliance claims some 28,000 members, while the Independent Drivers Guild says it represents more than 80,000 app drivers.

The yellow cab drivers and their driver organizations remember bitterly the last time a new mobility technology came to town. Before Uber and Lyft, taxi drivers needed a “medallion.” These permits were capped by the City, pushing their value on the secondary market to [over $1 million](https://hrlr.law.columbia.edu/hrlr-online/distressed-drivers-solving-the-new-york-city-taxi-medallion-debt-crisis/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Then ride-hail arrived; though Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to contain their numbers, it was a losing fight. In the face of new competition, medallion values fell below $200,000; many drivers, who had taken predatory loans to get one, fell into a debt spiral. The City eventually backstopped and restructured the drivers’ loans, but only after several drivers killed themselves and, in 2021, a number of drivers and their supporters went on a [hunger strike](https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/10/21/nyc-cabbies-go-on-hunger-strike-taxi-medallion-debts/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

One of those strikers is now the mayor.

Like most new transport companies, Waymo’s standard playbook for bringing its service to a city aims to persuade *riders* of its value, not *drivers*. Drivers are the opposition, the targets of disruption, and engaging them cedes advantage and time. Whether that strategy is praiseworthy, it is certainly sound — or it has been in other cities, where the drivers are less organized and the City isn’t set up to protect their interests. 

But in New York, the Taxi and Limousine Commission has a mandate to protect licensed drivers, cap vehicle supply and set a minimum pay floor. Ignoring the drivers won’t work here — yet that is, more or less, what Waymo proposed. The New York Times[reported](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/technology/waymo-driverless-taxis-politics.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that in late 2025 Waymo made an offer to the governor: In return for legislating robotaxi access, Waymo would set up a $20 million fund to benefit displaced workers. Given that the Commission licenses [180,000 drivers](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/tlc/downloads/pdf/annual%5Freport%5F2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), that proposal works out to a mere $111 per person — once.

There is a better way. Since the Commission is already in the business of issuing taxi medallions and looking out for the financial welfare of its holders, it should take one further step and say that each robotaxi needs one of its own — and the City won’t issue new ones. In other words, any robotaxi that wants to operate in New York City in the future must make a deal with a human holding one today. ([Int. 94](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=7861537&GUID=B342439D-217A-40C3-95D5-7F244E767B03&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a bill by Council Member Gale Brewer being considered by the City Council, proposes something like this.) 

Medallion holders could lease their medallions to a robotaxi company, exactly as medallion owners leased their cabs to fleets and shift drivers for decades, at a price set by the market. Or, if they want a lump sum, they could sell it, subject to whatever concentration limits the City prefers. (One caution from the last collapse: thousands of medallions now sit with fleets and the lenders who foreclosed on drivers, so the rules should put the minority who still own and drive their own cabs at the front of the line.) Lease income will be small while fleets are small and grow as the robots multiply. That’s how transition payments should be shaped, with the money arriving in proportion to the displacement. 

It’s true that medallion owners are a minority of the driving workforce: more than [80,000 drivers work the app platforms in any given month](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/tlc/downloads/pdf/annual%5Freport%5F2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and hold no medallion at all. Given that the platforms they worked for crashed the city-regulated medallion market in the first place, it’s hard to say what justice demands here, but if offsetting their losses is what it takes to bring the robotaxi in, there are options. The City could [impose a per-trip surcharge on every AV ride](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/opinion/waymo-uber-new-york.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to feed a driver-transition fund and give ride-hail drivers the right of first refusal on the depot, cleaning and remote-assistance jobs a robotaxi fleet will create; in fact, [Uber was already providing this service in Austin and Atlanta](https://waymo.com/blog/2024/09/waymo-and-uber-expand-partnership/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) under its former Waymo partnership. If we are honest, we must admit that those jobs won’t be as pleasant as driving, but promising that this technology will make no one worse off is beyond anyone’s power. The most the City can promise is a transition that pays off the people it displaces. 

Would operators pay? Waymo’s pitch to its investors is that removing the driver removes most of the marginal cost of a ride; the [$16 billion it raised in February](https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/waymo-raises-usd16-billion-investment-round/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) says that investors agree. The economics of driverless ride-hail generate enough surplus that robotaxi operators can buy out the humans they’re replacing and still make a profit. With this much money to make, there’s a deal to be had. And New York has made deals before: The TLC imposed a pay floor and a vehicle cap, the strictest ride-hail rules in the country, and Uber stayed. 

### Send the first fleet to the transit deserts

It’s understandable that Waymo wanted to test in southern Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn. Those areas are densely populated and full of cars, cyclists, scooter-users and jaywalkers. These streets are the most challenging environment in the country, good for training the AI systems that pilot robotaxis, and full of people wanting to take rides. 

It’s understandable, but not in New Yorkers’ interests. Waymo was operating in the most transit-rich territory in the city, meaning it was throwing more capacity to a saturated market. Worse, robotaxis can roam the streets indefinitely while waiting for a fare (what insiders call ‘deadheading’); by the Schwartz report’s estimate, [Waymos in California log almost 15% more empty miles per passenger mile than Ubers in New York](https://www.openplans.org/how-for-hire-autonomous-vehicles-impact-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

There are parts of the city that are far from saturated, and that’s where the robotaxis belong at first. In 2016, the [Regional Plan Association ](https://rpa.org/work/reports/the-triboro?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)found that 43% of outer-borough residents live beyond a reasonable walk of the subway. That fact combines uneasily with a relative lack of car ownership: roughly [37% of Queens households, 60% of Bronx households and 55% of Brooklyn households](https://www.hunterurban.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Car-Light-NYC-Infographics-May-2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are car-free. Lots of New Yorkers can’t easily reach the subway but don’t have a car, and robotaxis could serve them well — especially those who want to go somewhere other than Manhattan. The radial subway was set up to serve trips from the outer to the inner, not from the outer to another: Brooklyn to Queens [averages about an hour by transit](https://ace-usa.org/blog/research/research-democratic-governance/the-interborough-express-examining-pros-and-cons-in-nycs-transit-future/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and the Bronx has no direct rail link to Queens at all.

New York has run the outer-borough experiment before. The green boro taxi program, created in 2013 to address this problem, has had little success. There were never more than 6,500 of these vehicles, and there are far fewer today, as competition from Uber and Lyft has [collapsed the market to a few hundred working drivers](https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/04/09/green-cab-boro-taxi-drivers-hail-uber-lyft/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The ride-hail vehicles charge fares that make using them for a daily commute unaffordable. Robotaxis, which promise cheaper rides, might be able to solve that problem.

The Schwartz report, skeptical as it is of robotaxis, points in the same direction: one of its recommendations is to limit robotaxis in the city’s transit-rich commercial cores. The TLC already conditions licenses on wheelchair accessibility; in the same fashion, it could condition robotaxi licenses on operation in transit deserts, and on offering discounts on trips that end at the subway or a bus stop. The trade should be explicit: Service in transit deserts is the price of admission, in time, to the Manhattan core, where the money is. 

### Strike the bargain soon

New York’s for-hire sector moves roughly [856,000 trips a day](https://automarketplace.substack.com/p/nyc-tlc-market-update-yellow-cab), with Uber and Lyft alone handling about three-quarters of them. That’s a stark contrast to Waymo: its entire national operation, across 11 metros, runs only about [500,000 paid rides a week](https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/27/waymo-skyrocketing-ridership-in-one-chart/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The company can’t afford to leave New York out of its growth plans, which may be why the company still lists New York on its [“up next” map](https://waymo.com/updates/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Waymo needs New York considerably more than New York needs Waymo.

But the City’s leverage has a shelf life. In Washington, the [SELF DRIVE Act](https://reason.com/2026/05/01/the-self-driving-car-fight-in-congress-isnt-really-about-safety-at-all/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) would let firms deploy automated vehicles over state and local objections, once those firms file the right safety paperwork. The Act has been stalled since February, but its sponsors intend to attach it to the surface transportation bill. That attempt may succeed, or it may not, but if it doesn’t, it’s reasonable to expect that something like it *will* pass, someday. Whether such a law would affect the TLC’s licensing powers is a question for the courts, but City Hall should not bet on the courts to preserve the status quo. 

The smart move is to use the City’s leverage now, before Washington grants its own permission. It could look like this: Albany passes driverless authorization with the New York City carve-out [Assemblyman Brian Cunningham’s bill already contains](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A4901?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), so the City gets to write its own rules. The Council passes the medallion and transit-desert requirements, not to mention requiring what every city should: independent, public, per-mile crash reporting (a case [Bryant Walker Smith and Matt Wansley have already made in Vital City](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/waymo-nyc-robotaxi-future/)), so everyone can judge the robotaxi safety record for themselves, benchmarked against the professional fleet, with standardized severity definitions, and with fault noted on every crash, so that a car rear-ended at a red light stops counting against the technology. The mayor should seize the moment, putting terms on the table publicly rather than waiting for the company’s next private offer.

Waymo has begun to prove it can drive in New York; true, its pilot consisted of only eight cars, operating during the day, but they ran for over seven months, and the collision log is empty. What Waymo and its rivals need to do next is to show that robotaxis will be good for all New Yorkers. The City can make a deal whenever it wants, but time is not on its side. Robotaxi companies know that in the long run, they can circumvent City Hall. So City Hall should bring them to the table in the short run, and get the best deal for New Yorkers that it can.
### Come Again Another Day?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-rainy-day-fund-improvements-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:47.000Z
In 2019, the Citizens Budget Commission and I, then its outgoing president, played a key role in advocating [for a City Charter amendment](https://cbcny.org/sites/default/files/media/files/TESTIMONY%5F03112019%5F0.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that would enable New York City to create and maintain a revenue stabilization fund, generally referred to as a rainy day fund. Most states and cities across the country have such a fund. Generally speaking, rainy day funds are an important way for government to set aside revenue when the economy is strong for use in times of extreme need, instead of spending it entirely in the year it is generated. 

This year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Commission on Government Efficiency has put forward a ballot item purporting to strengthen the city’s rainy day fund — but it’s much less than meets the eye.

First, a bit of history. During the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, New York City’s finances were subject to a state law requiring compliance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), which disallow saving revenue from one year to the next. This meant that the City was not allowed to have a rainy day fund. But crises over the past 25 years — the Sept. 11 attacks, the Great Recession, Trump administration funding cuts — have shown that there is a need to have resources in reserve in times when dramatic economic swings cause City revenues to decline so that serious cuts in services or tax increases can be mitigated.

The 2019 Charter Commission was responsive to our recommendation and [proposed an amendment](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/coib/downloads/pdf2/charter%5Frevision/2019-charter-revision-final-report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) stating that the City “may” maintain a Revenue Stabilization Fund (that’s the technical term for a rainy day fund) “to serve as a year-to-year reserve account … created and operated in accordance with any applicable state law.” This essentially meant that the fund could be created if and when state law was amended to allow it. 

Unfortunately, contrary to our admonition that the fund include guardrails, the provision missed a major opportunity — neglecting to include any rules about how much should be deposited or withdrawn or when. We were told that guidelines for deposits and withdrawals would be a topic of later legislation, once the charter amendment was adopted and state law was modified to permit the existence of the fund.

That never happened. The charter amendment was passed in November 2019 and state law was amended six months later, allowing the creation of a City revenue stabilization fund. But no rules were included [except that](https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/general-municipal-law/gmu-sect-25/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) “no more than fifty percent of the total amount of such fund may be withdrawn in any fiscal year unless the mayor has certified that there is a compelling fiscal need … including, *but not limited to*(emphasis added), a national or regional recession, a reduction in total revenue … a natural or other disaster, or declared state of emergency.”[ ](https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/general-municipal-law/gmu-sect-25/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)In other words, no amount of deposits is required and the mayor has the authority to withdraw up to 50% of the fund at his/her discretion and the remaining 50% if they identify a compelling fiscal need as they define it. That’s as close to a blank check as it gets.

Years later, no more specific guidelines for deposits or withdrawals have been established. And despite City revenues consistently exceeding projections, there has been only one significant deposit to the fund of $1.455 billion in 2022\. [The fund now contains just $2 billion, with a recession long overdue](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/strengthening-the-citys-rainy-day-fund/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

That brings us to today — and the amendment offered by the mayor’s Charter Revision Commission, to be voted on this coming November. That [fifth ballot proposal](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/coge-releases-5-ballot-proposals-and-final-report-to-make-govern?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) would amend the rainy day fund authorization to create a target fund balance of 12% of City tax revenue; require the mayor’s Office of Management and Budget (in consultation with the City Comptroller) to create a formula for determining annual deposits; and require what is already required in state law, namely that if the mayor decides to withdraw more than 50%, they must certify that there is an immediate fiscal need. 

Though the amendment makes it appear as though the administration is taking a serious step in the direction of fiscal responsibility, it is not clear to me that the amendment is a positive step. It creates a misleading impression that the inadequacies of the current law have been addressed while doing almost nothing to enhance the rules governing the fund.

First, a 12% target balance, which would be approximately $11.5 billion, is not enough. [CBC and the City Comptroller have both argued](https://cbcny.org/research/nyc-budget-blueprint?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for a figure of 16% to 18%, or approximately $15 billion to $17 billion, of annual revenue, based on analysis of the deficits that would need to be covered in the event of a two- to three-year recession.[ ](https://cbcny.org/research/nyc-budget-blueprint?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)More importantly, the proposed provision doesn’t require regular deposits or even apply the target balance to the rainy day fund per se; it allows any amounts held in other stabilization funds, including money that should be kept segregated in the funds used to pay retiree health benefits, to count toward the 12% target.

Second, the amendment calls for OMB, the mayor’s budget office, to create a “methodology” to determine deposits and withdrawals in consultation with the comptroller but without requiring the comptroller’s approval, and to publish it regularly. In other words, deposits and withdrawals will continue to be determined by the mayor. That puts this essential fiscal question right back in the control of a single elected official.

It is true that more specific legal rules for deposits and withdrawals would be more stringent than what the State law permitting the rainy day fund requires. But it is appropriate that the Charter and local law be the vehicle for more stringent rules. Indeed, [State law governing the State’s own Rainy Day Reserve Account](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/STF/92-CC?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) limits withdrawals to very specific circumstances, which could serve as an appropriate model for the City’s fund as well. 

When the Financial Control Board convenes next week (it still exists, although the formal controls are dormant), the governor, comptrollers and other independent members should express concern about the shortcomings of the proposed Charter amendment. And the Charter Revision Commission, which is authorized to continue until next November, should begin deliberations to submit a revised amendment that is more than symbolic and ensures that money is steadily deposited in the rainy day fund in good times and can only be withdrawn under very limited and set circumstances.
### Complexity on the Menu: The State of New York City's Restaurant Industry
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/state-of-nyc-restaurant-industry-andrew-rigie/
Last updated: 2026-08-06T13:53:28.000Z
---

*Andrew Rigie was 5 years old when he started rolling rugelach at his grandfather's Brooklyn bakery at 4:30 in the morning. Now he runs the New York City Hospitality Alliance, which represents an industry that employs more than a quarter-million people, pays more than $11 billion in wages and generates around $2.8 billion a year in sales tax revenue. In this episode of "After Hours with Jamie Rubin," Rigie explains why the handful of restaurants you can't get a table at is a misleading picture of the other 24,000, how Bloomberg's letter-grade rating system saw Health Department fines spike without a corresponding drop in foodborne illness — and how a $30 minimum wage threatens to turn a busy neighborhood restaurant's $100,000 profit into a $380,000 loss.*

*As always, you can listen to the episode on* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/complexity-on-the-menu-the-state-of/id1794619189?i=1000779985293&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *or* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/4kEVNHRSR639rVuHmXNGkG?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*
### Mamdani Is Hitting Many Milestones on Childcare. Except One.
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/childcare-needs-funding-stream-mamdani-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:48.000Z
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made childcare a major part of his administration, [launching 2K programs](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mayor-mamdani-announces-first-2-k-providers-ahead-of-june-2-appl?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [expanding 3K programs](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mayor-mamdani-doubles-number-of-3-k-seats-to-be-added-across-all?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and even [declaring](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/bringing-universal-child-care-to-new-york-city--mayor-mamdani-de?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that childcare is a “public good” and “essential infrastructure” — all as he works to make good on a campaign promise to deliver universal childcare to all New Yorkers who want it. All of these actions speak to bolstering an industry that has been constantly overlooked and teetering on the brink of crisis, both for the people who work in it and the families who struggle to find workable solutions for their children. 

Still, all of the City’s progress on childcare misses the mark on one major piece — the piece on which, in the long run, everything else depends. 

The administration has not yet identified a standalone revenue source for childcare. And without it, the positive incremental steps that have already been taken can be easily undone. Just as important, the system will lack the stability needed to grow effectively and meet demand in the years to come.

Mamdani is in good company with other states and localities. The states that have funded childcare programs most ambitiously so far (and arguably, most effectively) are Vermont and New Mexico, both of which have identified an external source of ongoing revenue. In Vermont, it is a 0.44% [payroll tax](https://tax.vermont.gov/business/child-care-contribution?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), split between existing workers and employers. The tax exempts retirees or those not in the workforce. In New Mexico, it was cracking open the Land Grant Permanent Fund via a [ballot measure in 2022](https://ballotpedia.org/New%5FMexico%5FConstitutional%5FAmendment%5F1,%5FLand%5FGrant%5FPermanent%5FFund%5FDistribution%5Ffor%5FEarly%5FChildhood%5FEducation%5FAmendment%5F%282022%29?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which now provides dedicated funding to early childhood education. 

In New York, Mamdani has so far funded his expansion of childcare programs using one-shot [state and local investments](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani---governor-hochul-to-launch-free-child-care-for-tw?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from general budget revenue: $1.2 billion from the State of New York, and $40 million from the City. This sort of priority investment is laudable and reflects positively on the working relationship between the mayor’s office and that of the governor. But the money is a shot in the arm, not a reliable or predictable revenue stream. [A new cost model](https://www.centernyc.org/reports-briefs/universal-child-care-cost-model-new-york?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by the Center for New York City Affairs, however, projects that a universal childcare system for all children under 5 could cost the City $9 billion a year. Childcare, like our elementary and secondary schools, needs steady year-over-year funding if it’s going to be delivered to families in a sustainable fashion. Without that, programs face cuts based on yearly budgets or changes in government, creating uncertainty for families and educators alike, all of which make the industry LESS stable at a time when leaders like Mamdani want it to be strong.

Those worried about what might happen here need only look to [Oregon](https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2025/06/17/oregon-senators-agree-to-cut-45-million-in-funding-for-early-childhood-programs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Washington](https://imprintnews.org/top-stories/state-cuts-in-washington-scale-back-once-ambitious-preschool-options-for-low-income-families/265616?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), both of which are rolling back early childhood education expansions because they lack the state budgets to follow through over the long term. 

The need for a stable funding source becomes even more important because of Mamdani’s commitments. He’s said that he wants childcare workers to have [pay parity with K-12 educators](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-universal-childcare-policy-questions/), which would amount to a major boost, from average salaries of around $32,000 for childcare workers to average salaries of around $62,000 for kindergarten and elementary school teachers. Without the dedicated revenue source, he is likely to face the same challenge that Washington, D.C. has faced. In 2023, the nation’s capital implemented a Pay Equity Fund. Within the first year, it had brought up childcare worker [salaries to the tune of $10,000 or more](https://wamu.org/story/23/03/14/preschool-teacher-pay-bump-dc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The D.C. government then [spent the next three years](https://www.the74million.org/zero2eight/pay-equity-fund-for-d-c-s-early-educators-faces-possible-elimination/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) nearly killing and then belatedly resuscitating the program, to the chagrin of the childcare workers whose livelihoods were on the line. Currently, the program has [been extended through 2027](https://app.cfo.dc.gov/services/fiscal%5Fimpact/pdf/spring09/FIS%20Fiscal%20Year%202027%20Budget%20Support%20Act%20of%202026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Advocates are hopeful that with a new mayor elected this fall, Pay Equity will have a secure future. But without a dedicated funding source, each year, Pay Equity is effectively up for debate, demanding intensive advocacy efforts to allow the teachers to keep their higher salaries. 

There is another advantage to having a dedicated funding source: cost containment and control. Both Vermont and New Mexico have dedicated funding and this has given both states sufficient leverage to add cost controls, rather than solely rely on the market. Vermont has established a [fee-increase cap](https://dcf.vermont.gov/cdd-blog/child-care-tuition-increase-limit?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which caps the annual tuition increase families would face and requires providers to make their tuition rates available to the public, while New Mexico has [established reimbursement rates and wage floors](https://www.nmececd.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Wage-Scale-ECECD-Report%5F12825.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Year-by-year budget processes dependent on state budgets, won’t give the public sector the same strong influence over the market.

Dedicated funding is also necessary to boost long-term supply of childcare seats, which goes hand in hand with long-term supply of providers. In Vermont, the dedicated revenue stream has allowed childcare programs to reliably count on receiving higher subsidy payments each year, and such certainty is one of the reasons why [more programs have opened than closed in the state](https://www.the74million.org/zero2eight/family-child-care-providers-see-gains-under-vermonts-new-child-care-law-2/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), reversing a near-decade-long trend. New York City [currently has](https://council.nyc.gov/jennifer-gutierrez/2026/04/16/city-council-holds-hearing-on-early-childhood-educator-pipeline-warns-of-looming-staffing-crisis-without-coordinated-workforce-plan/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) between 33,000 and 40,000 childcare workers, and to meet projected future enrollment under a universal childcare system, that workforce will need to double in size. 

Finally, a steady funding stream reduces reliance on constant advocacy campaigns. Vermont passed Act 76, which created that dedicated revenue source, only after an eight-year campaign [costing over $76 million](https://letsgrowkids.org/client%5Fmedia/files/LGK%2010%20Year%20Campaign%20Impact%20Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). If the funding source were up for debate each year as part of state and local budgets, “we would need an organization to continue advocating every year just to keep what we have,” Erin Roche, the state’s director for First Children’s Finance, told me. 

Where might New York find such a funding source? It doesn’t have a land grant fund like New Mexico does. But it does have the option for a childcare trust fund, which [was created in 2025](https://portal.ct.gov/governor/news/press-releases/2026/06-2026/governor-lamont-announces-historic-investment-in-the-early-childhood-education-endowment?language=en%5FUS&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (and generously funded in 2026) in neighboring Connecticut. Another intriguing model is San Antonio. In 2012, backed by Julián Castro — a charismatic mayor with his own national political aspirations — San Antonio voters passed via ballot measure an [eighth-cent sales tax increase to fund early education](https://www.texastribune.org/2012/08/09/decision-castros-pre-k-funding-initiative/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). There was little precedent at the time for a standalone sales tax for early childhood; the measure passed narrowly. Pre-K 4 SA was created to provide preschool for 4-year-olds, and eight years later, when it was up for reauthorization, it passed with [over 73% of the vote](https://www.bexar.org/DocumentCenter/View/28532/November-3-2020-General-Election-Media-Report?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Pre-K 4 SA has since expanded to include 3-year-olds and has launched infant and toddler pilot programs. Its leadership [anticipates strong support](https://www.the74million.org/zero2eight/how-san-antonio-built-one-of-americas-most-ambitious-pre-k-programs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) when the sales tax is up again for reauthorization in 2028\. This has become the early education classic [example](https://www.the74million.org/zero2eight/how-san-antonio-built-one-of-americas-most-ambitious-pre-k-programs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of “if you build it, voters may opt to keep it.”

In San Antonio, the funding mechanism of a sales tax may have helped bolster support. Sales taxes are regressive and hit lower-income residents harder than higher-income ones, but they may face less blowback than property or income taxes. “\[They are\] smaller costs spread across many people in everyday purchases, so they’re less noticeable and less likely to trigger strong pushback,” [says](https://www.the74million.org/zero2eight/how-san-antonio-built-one-of-americas-most-ambitious-pre-k-programs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Larrisa Wilkinson, deputy CEO of Pre-K 4 SA.

The sales tax revenue source has been steadily growing for over a decade, allowing the Pre-K 4 SA program to flourish and establish public-private partnerships, including [the recent opening](https://prek4sa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Pre-K-4-SA-South-Groundbreaking-Release-2.26.24-FINAL.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of a brand-new $33 million center in what had been considered a childcare desert. 

And Mayor Julián Castro reaped the rewards. Even after raising taxes in 2012, he was re-elected to a third term the following year, the same year the first Pre-K 4 SA center opened. In 2014, he was tapped by President Barack Obama to serve as U.S. secretary of housing and urban development. His willingness to support early childhood education, with the sharp teeth of a dedicated revenue source, helped launch him to the national stage. If Mamdani envisions having a strong record on childcare and charting a similar path, he needs to investigate exactly where and how to create a dedicated revenue stream. Otherwise, he risks seeing childcare deprioritized by a future mayor or during a future budget crisis — and sending New York families back to where they started.
### Bureaucracy Is Just People
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-nonprofit-contracting-reform/
Last updated: 2026-08-05T19:21:50.000Z
Last November, at the SOMOS conference in Puerto Rico, where New York’s elected officials, agency leaders and nonprofit organizations gather each year to talk about the future of the state and city, a veteran government executive, who takes pride in her arcane procurement expertise, pulled me aside.

“You’re not a procurement expert,” she said.

I was offended. By then I had spent years leading some of the City’s largest procurement-related management initiatives: [clearing billions of dollars in delayed contracts](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2022/07/mayor-adams-city-has-unlocked-more-4-2-billion-contractual-dollars-for?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [coordinating citywide nonprofit-contracting reform](https://www.cityandstateny.com/nyn-media/2025/12/new-york-city-has-reduced-its-nonprofit-contract-backlog-52-year/409835/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and serving as [executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Nonprofit Services](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/01/mayor-adams-appoints-michael-sedillo-executive-director-mayor-s-office-nonprofit-services?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (MONS). Procurement had become the defining issue of my professional life. Who was she to tell me I wasn’t an expert?

But she was right. I am not an expert on procurement. New York City already has thousands of them: attorneys, budget analysts, contract managers, auditors, spread across dozens of agencies, who understand the intricacies of the City Charter and the Procurement Policy Board Rules far better than I ever will.

Government’s problem was never a shortage of expertise. It was getting all that expertise aligned and moving in the same direction.

That idea shaped how I thought about one of the City’s most stubborn, least glamorous problems: paying the thousands of nonprofits that regularly deliver [$15 to $20 billion worth](https://www.nyc.gov/site/mocs/resources/citywide-indicator-reports.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Citywide%20Total-,Procurement%20by%20Industry,Appendix%20B%20for%20agency%2Dby%2Dagency%20breakdowns%20of%20procurement%20by%20industry.,-Procurement%20by%20Industry) of essential human services on behalf of the City each year. Shelters where individuals and families without access to a home bed down. Meals for older adults. Legal aid for immigrants. After-school programs. Mental health counseling. 

After decades of inaction, the City finally moved. During the 2021 transition, Mayor-elect Adams and Comptroller-elect Lander convened a task force. Six weeks into their terms, Adams and Lander released their findings under a pointed title: [“A Better Contract for New York: A Joint Task Force to Get Nonprofits Paid on Time.”](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nyc-mayor-eric-adams-and-comptroller-brad-lander-release-five-key-actions-for-a-better-contract-for-new-york/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) The City, Adams admitted, had not been “holding up its end of the bargain.” It was still climbing out of the pandemic, and nearly $12 billion in nonprofit contracts sat unregistered. The City, as thousands of providers will attest, cannot pay a provider on an unregistered contract, even when the provider is already providing the services and incurring the costs, and no matter how badly a provider needs the money.

To cope with this, providers delayed hiring. Executive directors spent their weeks negotiating bridge loans instead of running programs. Staff worried about payroll while still showing up for people who could not afford an interruption in care.

### Everybody blames the rulebook

For those who rolled their eyes and gritted their teeth, the instinctive explanation for the problem was always the procurement system itself: [too many rules](https://council.nyc.gov/press/wp-content/uploads/sites/56/2025/04/nonprofit-procurement-brief%5F041425.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [too much paperwork](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/nyregion/new-york-city-nonprofits.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [too many approval steps](https://www.amny.com/oped/op-ed-nyc-nonprofits-reliable-payments/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). There is truth in that. New York’s contracting system reflects decades of efforts meant to protect taxpayer money and guarantee fair competition, and to some extent, these rules act as roadblocks — both to a seamless process and corrupt actors. 

In 1989, the New York State Commission on Government Integrity spent a year investigating the City’s contracting system and published its findings under a title that, let’s just say, is apt: [“A Ship Without a Captain.”](https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/feerick%5Fintegrity%5Fcommission%5Freports/1/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) The commission found a system that was, in its own words, “a crazy quilt of inconsistent policies and procedures,” chaotic enough to scare off vendors and invite corruption. But tellingly, when it came time to recommend fixes, four of the commission’s five recommendations were not about process at all. They called for a nationwide search to recruit real procurement experts, a deputy mayor whose sole job was owning the reform, a chief contracting officer in every agency, and serious training for the staff already doing the work. Only the fifth recommendation touched process itself, and even that one was about who got to review what, not which form they filled out. 

A commission staring straight at chaos still concluded that the fix was mostly about people.

I came to essentially the same conclusion in 2022, when I ran the City’s Clear the Backlog initiative. To attack the nearly $12 billion dollars in unregistered contracts, we did not rewrite a single rule or add a single form. Rather, we asked commissioners to assign a point person who would lead their agency’s charge, gave them a deadline, tracked their data every week, and made sure City Hall was visibly watching the whole time. After the 12-week sprint, we had unlocked $6 billion in unregistered contracts — real relief for providers who needed it months earlier. 

Unfortunately, the progress didn’t stick. After the initiative, City Hall’s attention moved on, understandably, to pressing matters like the asylum-seeker crisis that would consume much of the next two years. Meanwhile, the nonprofit backlog crept back up, eventually climbing past where it had started, because the only thing that had ever been holding it down was people paying attention to it, and the people paying attention had moved on to something else.

That is when I started to suspect all of us in the policymaking class were misdiagnosing the disease. The procurement process was not delaying payments. *People* were. Not out of malice, but because each one was carrying out their essential role in the process. Budget analysts reviewed budgets. Attorneys reviewed contract language. Procurement staff checked compliance. Comptroller staff registered contracts. In the Clear the Backlog initiative, the same reviewers did the same work under the same rules, only faster, because City Hall was tracking their progress every week and everyone doing the work knew it. Once that attention moved on, the steps did not change and the people staffing them did not get worse at their jobs. They simply stopped being watched, and work nobody above you is tracking quietly slides down the list. 

Anthony Shorris, the new head of the New York City Economic Development Corporation and a former first deputy mayor, [said on a panel last fall](https://cbcny.org/advocacy/mayoral-smart-choices?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): “The power of government comes from alignment. And you have to send those signals of alignment … we at City Hall have to send that signal what matters, what we’re trying to achieve.” Staff in any large bureaucracy read signals about what matters from what leadership is paying attention to, and for a while, City Hall was paying attention to something other than nonprofit payments.

We call this “bureaucracy,” as though it were some machine operating beyond anyone’s control. It is not. Bureaucracy does not answer emails. It does not build trust. It does not decide whether to pick up the phone and call a nonprofit back and help solve a problem.

People do.

### What actually moved the needle

If the diagnosis was ownership, the treatment had to be too.

Flash forward to January 2025, when I was appointed to lead MONS, where we started by fixing who owned the problem. In January 2025, then-Mayor Eric Adams signed [Executive Order 47](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/01/mayor-adams-issues-order-requiring-city-agencies-designate-chief-nonprofit-officer-improve?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (thankfully [repromulgated by Mayor Zohran Mamdani on his first day in office](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/executive-order-02?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)). It required every agency with substantial nonprofit contracting to name a chief nonprofit officer, someone whose job was, in part, to wake up each morning thinking about how nonprofits experience City government. Eighteen agencies now have one. It sounds bureaucratic. It is bureaucratic; that was rather the point. It turned “someone should really look into this” into an actual person who owned their agency’s relationship to its nonprofit providers.

Ownership needs a feedback loop. Beginning in 2025, MONS started running a quarterly Provider Sentiment Survey, essentially asking nonprofits a question government far too rarely asks the people it serves: How are we treating you? Scores climbed steadily. Government usually measures what is easy to count: contracts registered, invoices processed. This measured what actually mattered.

Then came the part that keeps people honest: a quarterly performance-management convening called ContractStat, which tracks key nonprofit payment indicators citywide and by agency and puts the results in front of people with the authority to fix them. In calendar year 2025, when ContractStat was launched, [the City reduced its nonprofit contract backlog by 52%](https://www.cityandstateny.com/nyn-media/2025/12/new-york-city-has-reduced-its-nonprofit-contract-backlog-52-year/409835/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Not by changing the process — but by paying attention to it, and to the people who have a role in carrying it out.

None of this works if the people doing the paperwork do not believe it matters, so we trained them, literally. [I led contract managers and budget analysts through a customer service training built around treating nonprofits like customers instead of vendors](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nonprofits/downloads/pdf/MONS%20EOY%20Press%20Release%2012-16-25%20-%20Copy.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In a pretraining survey my team conducted, 40% of trainees viewed their job as customer service. Afterward, nearly 70% did — an increase of 29 percentage points. And in August 2025, [the office held the City’s first Excellence in Human Service Delivery Awards at Gracie Mansion](https://www.amny.com/politics/city-celebrates-nonprofits-public-servants-human-service-awards/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), honoring the contract managers and nonprofit staff who go above and beyond to deliver excellent service delivery to their clients. Some colleagues called the ceremony purely symbolic. They were right. It was symbolic. Organizations become what they celebrate, and we sent a signal that we celebrate excellence from people within the bureaucracy.

### The hardest fix left: Council-allocated discretionary awards

None of this work is finished, and the numbers say so plainly. Over the four years of the Adams administration, the [City’s nonprofit contracting backlog fell from $11.8 billion to $2.3 billion](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nonprofits/downloads/pdf/MONS%20EOY%20Press%20Release%2012-16-25%20-%20Copy.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Real progress, but there is much more work to do. Earlier this year, for the first time ever, MONS successfully led the push to add human service contracting indicators to individual agency chapters in the [Mayor’s Management Report](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/operations/downloads/pdf/pmmr2026/2026%5Fpmmr.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the City’s operational report card. I invite you all to closely follow the City’s progress.

Before I go any further, a concession. In this essay, I argue that the focus should be on people, not process. I genuinely believe that as an overarching management principle. However, there is one place in nonprofit contracting where a process fix really is the whole answer, a silver bullet if ever such a thing exists in government.

By far, the single most common issue we tracked through MONS’s constituent service inquiries was not about the City’s largest contracts. It was about the smallest ones, and it fell hardest on the smallest nonprofits, many of which are new to City contracting. 

At the start of each fiscal year, the City Council releases what’s known as [“Schedule C”](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/schedule-c/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which lists the nonprofit organizations that have been granted discretionary awards from the City Council. 

These [awards](https://www.nyc.gov/site/mocs/resources/citywide-indicator-reports.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#AgencyIndicatorsReport:~:text=Appendix%20D%20%2D%20City%20Council%20Discretionary%20Contracts%20%28Excel%29) regularly make up two-thirds of the City’s nonprofit backlog because they are backlogged by definition: Schedule C comes out about the same day the services are meant to start. Then, after both the Council and the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services (MOCS) complete their consecutive (duplicative?) vetting processes, the lucky mayoral contracting agency (more often than not, the Department of Youth and Community Development) gets to *start* the registration process, which takes more than a year to complete on average and is largely no different for a $10,000 award than for a $10 million competitively bid contract. 

In short, thousands of tiny contracts are consuming the same scarce administrative attention the City’s most complicated procurements need. 

This fiscal year, the City piloted a fix: certain [discretionary awards under $25,000 were processed as grants instead of contracts, cutting 13 steps out of the process](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nonprofits/downloads/pdf/MONS%20EOY%20Press%20Release%2012-16-25%20-%20Copy.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Under the grant model, which the Department of Cultural Affairs has been using for decades to process its Council-allocated discretionary awards, providers get paid 100% of the award upon grant agreement. Moreover, these grants no longer must go through the registration process required for higher-dollar, competitively procured nonprofit contracts. Expanding this model to all discretionary awards would take a huge chunk out of the City’s remaining backlog and would free up agencies to focus on more complex transactions. 

Mamdani’s new [Commission on Government Efficiency, led by the indefatigable Ann Cheng](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mayor-mamdani-announces-commission-on-government-efficiency-to-m?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [attempts to bring a solution to nonprofit payment woes in its final report](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2026/proposed%5Ffinal%5Freport%5F20260723.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); unfortunately, it missed an extraordinary opportunity to formalize the grant pilot and give agencies the Charter authority to process Council discretionary awards as grants. As a result, the pilot expansion will be left to the whims of and ability to align internal bureaucrats both within the administration and at City Council to align on a path forward. That was a big mistake.

I think often about that conversation in Puerto Rico. The bureaucrat who told me I was not a procurement expert probably does not remember saying it. I do, because she gave me a gift: a reminder that expertise and leadership are different things. Government does not lack people who know the rules. What it has lacked, at times, is enough people who could see a clear signal from City Hall that this work mattered and that it was core to service delivery rather than an afterthought.

The longer I worked in city government, the less interested I became in fixing bureaucracy, and the more interested I became in helping the people inside it succeed. Because when enough people start working differently, the bureaucracy changes too, not because the rules disappeared, but because thousands of people stopped seeing themselves only as custodians of their own piece of the process and started seeing themselves as stewards of one shared job.

Bureaucracy was never the main thing standing in our way. It was mostly just people.
### How to Survive in New York City, According to Spider-Man
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/spiderman-brand-new-day-nyc-lessons-culture/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T15:39:25.000Z
Anyone who hangs on to the very end of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” as viewers have been conditioned to do by decades of after-the-credits Marvel surprises, will discover an uncomfortable truth: Despite taking place in New York City, almost none of the moviewas actually filmed locally. The fine print reveals that the “New York” that Spidey swings through is actually located in [various parts of Scotland and England](https://www.timeout.com/news/spider-man-brand-new-day-the-surprising-filming-locations-behind-the-new-marvel-blockbuster-072926?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Despite this fakery — which might make the sets feel a little bit off to anyone who knows the city well — *“*Brand New Day” is very much a New York movie. The film even closes with a long, loving montage of ordinary people doing ordinary things on real New York streets. It’s the filmmaking equivalent of a big wet kiss to the city.

This is only appropriate: Ever since he first swung on to the scene in August 1962, [Spider-Man has been deeply intertwined with New York City](https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2026/07/tour-new-york-city-55-years-spider-man-comic-book-covers.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

“Brand New Day” honors this connection viscerally with its scenes of Spider-Man swinging through Manhattan, which manage to capture the breathtaking scale and density of the city’s skyline. A distinctly New York energy can also be found in the relationship between Spider-Man and the Punisher. Affectionately bickering underneath their superhero identities, Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) and Peter Parker (Tom Holland) come across as uniquely New York (stereo)types: outer-borough wiseasses. They embody the great Toni Morrison line about how to survive in the city: “Talk shit. Take none.” They also represent different New York qualities. The Punisher, with his predilection for violence, speaks to the brutal, unrelenting nature of the city while Spider-Man channels the hope and optimism that fuels the ambitions of so many New Yorkers. 

You don’t have to know anything about New York City to appreciate the chemistry between Bernthal and Holland. That’s a good thing, because the vast majority of Spider-Man’s fans likely have no relationship whatsoever to New York City. He is, by many measures, one of the most beloved fictional characters on the planet. Over the years, his adventures have resonated powerfully with literally billions of readers and viewers across the barriers of geography, language and culture.

The core themes of Spider-Man are universal: How do you weather the inevitable storms of growing up? Is it possible to meet the demands of your job while also having a fulfilling personal life? How do we honor our loved ones while being true to ourselves? Anyone who has ever felt like their responsibilities outpaced their competence can recognize themselves in Peter Parker.

But Spider-Man isn’t a generic fable about an everyman hero. Peter Parker isn’t from Anytown, USA — or Krypton, via Kansas. He’s from Forest Hills, Queens. When he isn’t using his webs to get around the city, he takes the subway. Many of his most important moments have occurred in and around famous [New York City landmarks](https://www.spidermancrawlspace.com/2024/03/spider-tracer-the-top-ten-nyc-landmark-battles/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including his failure to prevent the death of his girlfriend Gwen Stacy, which happened at the Brooklyn Bridge.

It’s not just his zip code that makes Spider-Man a New Yorker — it’s his mentality. You can see it in his sense of humor — jokes used as a coping mechanism and a weapon at the same time. You can see it in his inventiveness — by building his own web-shooters and sewing his own suit, Peter Parker MacGyvers the tools he needs to fight crime. And you can see it in his capacity for improvisation. When Spider-Man’s plans fall apart in the middle of a fight, he always manages to come up with a new way to win. That’s a hustler’s ethic. It’s also how you get by in a city that doesn’t hand you anything.

Spider-Man’s connection to New York isn’t a random narrative choice. He was dreamed up more than 60 years ago by Stan Lee (née Stanley Lieber, the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants), working alongside a team of (mostly) Jewish writers and artists in Marvel’s headquarters in Manhattan. 

Plenty of scholarship has been devoted to exploring [Superman’s Jewish](https://ajhs.org/supermans-jewishness-from-page-to-screen/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) origins. So it should come as little surprise that elements of his creators’ New York immigrant experience, and the promise and peril of assimilation, managed to find their way into the Spider-Man comic book. Peter Parker struggles with the pressure of living up to the expectations of his Aunt May and Uncle Ben. Feelings of generalized guilt and a desire not to be different are recurring themes in the Spider-man canon.

While echoes of the New York immigrant experience happen at the level of subtext, the decision to locate Spider-Man’s adventures in New York City served an explicit purpose, adding a dose of verisimilitude to inherently outlandish stories. “So many other characters lived in cities like Gotham City and Metropolis,” [Stan Lee](https://www.wral.com/archive/18003586/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) said in a 2004 television documentary, “but I suspect the readers knew those cities were just made up.”

In contrast, the New York City setting helped make Spider-Man more relatable. There’s no such thing as a real superhero, but Spider-Man is realer than the rest. Superman’s adventures often take him around the world and across the universe, while Spider-Man is usually trapped in the city, struggling to make a living and maintain his sanity amidst the hassles and cacophony of a teeming metropolis. Spider-Man and New York City are a marriage made in heaven: an imperfect hero for an imperfect city.

An enormous box-office hit, “Brand New Day” merits a place in the top tier of superhero movies. But, despite being filmed an ocean away, it also deserves an honorable mention in any listing of [great New York movies](https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/fun-city-cinema%5F9781419747816/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It may not be as artful as “After Hours” or as funny as “Quick Change” or as over-the-top as “Escape from New York,” but, like these films, “Brand New Day” has something important to say about the city where it takes place. Like other great movies about the city, “Brand New Day” offers a primer on how to be a New Yorker: Look for the humor when times get tough, rely on your own ingenuity, don’t hesitate to argue with those around you and never let anyone see how hard you're working to hold things together.
### A Smarter Way To Roll Out the Pied-à-Terre Surcharge
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-pied-a-terre-surcharge-tax-rollout-mistake-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T14:08:11.000Z
Last week, the Department of Finance set off a citywide panic. It [published](https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2026/07/28/some-city-homeowners-blast-pied---terre-tax-rollout?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a list of more than 900,000 properties tied to the new pied-à-terre surcharge and [mailed](https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/07/28/mamdani-pied-a-terre-tax-list-outrage/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) about 17,000 letters warning owners their property “may be subject” to it.

Longtime New Yorkers opened envelopes suggesting they owed a charge meant for luxury second homes. The City’s defense — that state law made it publish the whole roll — doesn't hold: The statute told Finance to make the records of covered property available for public inspection, not to release every home in the city under the banner of a new surcharge. But the roll is out, the letters have landed, people are frightened, and the more useful question now is what Finance should do next.

Here it helps to be clear about two very different lists. One is the roll — more than 900,000 properties, essentially every home in the city, which Finance published and which tells you nothing about who owes. The other is the far smaller set of properties that could actually be subject to the surcharge. Conflating the two is most of what caused the fear.

To untangle this, let’s start with the number that shows the way forward. The surcharge applies to homes that aren’t the owner’s primary residence — houses Finance values at $5 million or more, and condos and co-ops at $1 million or more. Filter the huge roll for properties that clear those lines and you get about *24,000*, not 900,000\. That alone should have been the public list.

Yet Finance didn’t mail 24,000 letters. It mailed about 17,000 — which is a sign that it clearly screened some properties out before mailing. We can’t see exactly how, but the pattern points to the abatement: In one co-op I examined, eight units cleared the value threshold, yet only three owners received letters: the three who don’t receive the co-op/condo abatement, a tax break that requires the home to be a primary residence. That’s consistent with Finance using the abatement to clear owners before mailing. 

If so, it proves the screen is possible — and that it was left unfinished. Put differently, Finance has the tools to identify likely primary residences from data it already holds. The task now is to finish the job.

Here’s how.

**First, use what Finance already knows.** Finance grants several exemptions that already require a home to be a primary residence — the senior, veteran and STAR exemptions (STAR is the State’s School Tax Relief break, which lowers the school-tax portion of a homeowner’s bill). It also runs the co-op/condo abatement — the City’s single largest property-tax break, about $748 million a year — which likewise requires owner-occupancy and which Finance recertifies annually. Owners who already carry one of these shouldn't be getting letters asking them to prove, through the very system Finance uses to grant the break, what Finance has already accepted. Clear them first, and far fewer letters go out.

**Second, use what the State can confirm.** The surcharge’s own test rests on the New York State income tax return — the address you report as your home. Finance doesn’t hold that data, but the State does, and the statute expressly lets the two tax departments share it. Between what Finance knows and what the State can verify, the City could clear the large majority of these owners without asking them for anything.

This also explains a genuine surprise in the data: the number of ordinary one- to three-family houses on the list — 6,802 of them at or above the $5 million line, far more than anyone expected.

Why so many? Two reasons, and neither is that they’re all secret second homes.

Part of it is income. The exemptions that would flag these as primary residences are capped: The senior exemption phases out around $110,000 of income, and even Basic STAR cuts off at $500,000 — well below what the owner of a multimillion-dollar house typically earns. So the longtime owner of a valuable house often carries no exemption at all, not because the house isn't their home, but because they earn too much to qualify for the programs that would have said so.

Part of it is bookkeeping. STAR used to sit on the City’s rolls as an exemption Finance could see. Since 2015 it has been closed to new homeowners, who now get STAR as a check from the State instead — a credit Finance never sees. So even a house that gets STAR may look, in Finance’s records, like it gets nothing.

Either way, a home’s lack of an exemption is not evidence of a second home. It’s evidence that the City’s own signals miss much of the market — some owners for income reasons, some because the record now lives in Albany. All that is one more reason to ask the State, whose return carries the home address and none of these gaps.

**Third, tell the owners who remain exactly what to do.** After those two screens, a specific set of harder cases is left: homes held in a limited liability company, or LLC (those owners don’t get the abatement, so there’s no easy signal), homes in trust and homes rented out or lived in by a family member. These are the owners who genuinely need to come forward — and Finance knows why each wasn’t cleared, because it knows which signal was missing. 

The letter should say so. Instead of “our records indicate your property may be subject” to the tax, it could read: You own through an LLC and don’t receive the abatement, so if this is your primary residence, here is exactly what to send — with a different, specific instruction for a trust, or for a unit rented to a New Yorker who lives there. A letter that tells you why you got it and what to do is a public service. One that just says “you may owe” is a scare.

Two smaller fixes follow. Finance should publish the roughly 24,000-property list — not the 900,000 — with a plain note that clearing the value threshold isn’t the same as owing the surcharge. And it should let worried owners check their status online without the code that now arrives only by letter. Both fixes shrink the fear without exposing anything confidential: Value is public data, and the residency screening stays private, where it belongs.

In fairness, the City’s instinct to over-include is not carelessness — it makes a certain sense. Clearing too many properties risks a specific, public failure: the audit that surfaces the taxpayers it let slip through, the headline that Finance went easy on luxury owners. Including too many homes risks only diffuse, private annoyance — a frightened homeowner rarely makes the front page. Faced with that asymmetry, erring toward the broad list is the safer institutional bet.

The trouble is that it didn’t work. The frightened homeowner made the news anyway, and over-inclusion didn’t spare Finance the “government doesn’t know what it’s doing” story — it wrote it. The roll was so sweeping it included the finance commissioner’s own home and a former mayor’s, both well under the threshold. In fact, the roll included every elected official who owns a house or condo in the city — not a sign of who owes, but of how indiscriminate the list is. And letters still went to thousands of owners the City’s own records already flagged as primary residents.

The deeper answer is that fear of criticism shouldn’t keep an agency from boldly trying, and correcting course when it falls short. No rollout is perfect. The aim shouldn’t be to avoid every mistake — it should be to err on the side of fairness to the people it serves, and to fix what it gets wrong. The screens I’ve described are simply how an agency does both at once: cautious and accurate together, instead of trading one for the other.

None of this is beyond the City’s reach, and it will likely collect close to the $500 million projected this year regardless. The question is whether it collects it like an agency that knows its residents — or one that treats them as strangers who must prove themselves.

Here’s a vision of tax administration worth aspiring to — call it the AARP model. On your 45th birthday, a letter simply arrives: Welcome, here’s your card. Banks do a version of this too, telling account holders when they reach the age that requires a minimum retirement withdrawal — the government reaching out to say what you’re entitled to or owe, rather than waiting for you to guess. Imagine a letter to a senior that read: it’s your birthday, you now qualify for the senior citizen exemption, and we’ve already lowered your bill — here it is. Not “prove you deserve a break,” but “we know you qualify, and we’ve taken care of it.”

That’s the standard worth reaching for. The data and the tools are there. What’s missing is the instinct to treat people as residents the government already knows — rather than suspects who must clear their names.
### The Big Hole in Mamdani’s Housing Plan
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-housing-production-plan-financing-challenges/
Last updated: 2026-08-13T15:26:01.000Z
On May 29, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Deputy Mayor for Housing and Planning Leila Bozorg released a 99-page housing plan, [“Block by Block.”](https://www.nyc.gov/content/dam/nycgov/nyc-main/pdf/2026/block-by-block-report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) The plan offers a wide-ranging strategy for housing policy, including zoning and administrative changes to expand the number of potential sites available for affordable housing, tenant protections, preservation of affordable housing, major renovation projects at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and homelessness reduction efforts. The core of the plan calls for the construction of 200,000 new units of affordable housing.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### The Road to Producing More Housing Passes Through Meaningful Local Zoning Reforms
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/increasing-housing-production-zoning-reform-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-07-30T14:12:53.000Z
There’s a lot to like about the [bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act](https://bipartisanpolicy.org/issue-brief/inside-the-deal-whats-in-the-final-21st-century-road-to-housing-act?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which became law in July. It curbs institutional investor control over housing, reduces construction costs for manufactured housing and develops pilot programs for home repairs, small-dollar mortgages and housing conversion grants. It also positions the federal government to influence zoning codes, the local rules that dictate what gets built where. Among other things, the Act directs the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to set up [two grant programs](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/6644/text?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#d1359e3721-intro-1) for states, regional agencies and local governments to tackle zoning reform. But Congress left out a key part: requiring that these grants actually result in more housing.

For planning and implementation grants, for example, the [new law](https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hr6644/BILLS-119hr6644enr.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) outlines fundable activities in very general terms, including increasing the amount of available housing, reducing barriers to housing development and updating zoning codes. For “innovation fund” grants of up to $10 million, the law would reward localities for initiating zoning reforms like “increasing by-right” multi-family housing and “revising minimum lot size requirements.” The law does not, however, establish how faran applicant must go in order to receive these grants. Without high, measurable benchmarks, American taxpayers stand to waste tens of millions of dollars on window dressing. HUD, the federal housing agency implementing the law, needs to write ground rules that hold grant recipients accountable for reforms that actually create housing. 

HUD’s challenge is that zoning is complicated. In fact, it’s the most complicated regulatory area in the American legal canon. Fifty state legislatures authorize more than 33,000 local jurisdictions to zone. The fragmentation of zoning across these jurisdictions, and the complexity of zoning codes, has created an information gap. No one has ever calculated how many localities zone, much less what their codes say.

Furthermore, few understand how all the regulatory levers of zoning work together. My research shows that jurisdictions zone by a [thousand cuts](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=3792544&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), creating hidden barriers to housing. A city that permits apartments, for example, might look good on paper. But if the zoning code requires proposals to undergo public hearings, which are [often attended](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neighborhood-defenders/0677F4F75667B490CBC7A98396DD527A?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by existing residents who object to new housing, those apartments might never be built. Such projects may also fail to pencil out when the zoning code caps building heights, requires oversized lots or mandates too many parking spaces. These are just some of the many restrictions that HUD needs to root out in its implementation of the 21st Century Road to Housing Act.

As a starting point, HUD can consult a free public resource that begins to fill the information gap. The [National Zoning Atlas](https://www.zoningatlas.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which I helped build, enables nonpartisan, apples-to-apples comparisons of zoning codes where two-thirds of Americans live. Our team has standardized the inconsistent, technocratic and convoluted language of over 1.2 million pages of zoning texts, and we’ve digitized zoning maps, many for the first time. To ensure we can calculate prevailing regulations, we have developed a unique process of creating “slices” that merge base zoning districts with any applicable overlays (which can sometimes modify base-district rules). The resulting interactive atlas reveals how different rules apply to more than 90 million parcels across the country. Also available are summary [snapshots](https://www.zoningatlas.org/snaphshots?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) summarizing the percentage of land allowing single-family housing, apartment, small-lot housing and mixed-use developments, among other things — for each jurisdiction, county and metropolitan area.

A close look at National Zoning Atlas data confirms that, contrary to those who see Congress as sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, intrusion is necessary: Jurisdictions thwart affordable, accessible housing in far too many ways. At a basic level, they eliminate the number of units that can be built on any given parcel. Across the jurisdictions in the Atlas, which covers two-thirds of the country’s population and acreage, [81% of residentially-zoned land](http://zoningatlas.org/single-family?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is devoted to single-family housing *only*, mostly on huge lots of [an acre or more](https://www.zoningatlas.org/lots?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Even in cities, just [29% of residentially-zoned land permits four-or-more-family housing](https://www.zoningatlas.org/multifamily?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by right; that figure drops to 9% in the suburbs. 

Beyond number-of-unit zoning, the Atlas also documents the significant extent to which jurisdictions require public hearings, [parking](https://www.zoningatlas.org/parking?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [minimum lot sizes](https://www.zoningatlas.org/lots?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), setbacks, floor-to-area ratios, lot coverage caps and height caps that can make new housing infeasible. All of these data points, assembled at scale for the first time, can be analyzed against parcel boundaries to identify exactly how much housing can be built within a jurisdiction under current zoning rules. 

Atlanta’s zoning code illustrates just how important it is to understand how all of these rules work together to influence housing production. On the surface, the City [appears moderately permissive](https://www.zoningatlas.org/snapshots?jurisdiction=3556&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), allowing four-or-more-family by right on 30% of residentially zoned land (right at the national average). But a closer look at the code reveals that myriad dimensional and developmental constraints on apartments are buried in nearly 900 pages of zoning text. Other types of housing are also restricted: A quarter of single-family land has minimum lot sizes of a quarter acre or more, and more than half of single-family land prohibits accessory dwelling units. My suspicion is that a [new draft code](https://www.ajc.com/opinion/2026/04/metro-atlanta-communities-must-reform-zoning-to-create-more-affordable-housing/?gift%5Farticle%5Fcode=c21ZdWlYc1R1Ukh0dXM0NHBDV2phalN5WjFlV0pWNHhZX1VUYWRORU5CZzoxNzc4MDczMTYxOjFmODdlZDk4ZmVjNmJkN2I&utm%5Fcampaign=articlegifting&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) would likely make this all worse, with a more bloated text and more complex regulatory approach than the status quo. If the City moves forward, we will geocode any adopted reforms and calculate whether they actually enable more housing. 

HUD has shown no great interest in undertaking similar before-and-after calculations itself. A [$50 million HUD competition](https://www.grants.gov/search-results-detail/362005?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) now open, for example, offers grants for “enactment or implementation of less restrictive zoning” rules that increase capacity for housing. But the program does not specify how to calculate zoned capacity. And HUD doesn’t seem to require independent verification of jurisdictions’ calculations. These types of measurements are crucial to understand the effectiveness of federal interventions intended to shape zoning. 

A cautionary tale for HUD comes out of Massachusetts, where the bipartisan MBTA Communities Act, adopted in 2021, required 177 communities in the Boston area to rezone an area around their transit stations for multi-family housing. Our [analysis of zoning before and after the change found that only 1% of land](https://www.zoningatlas.org/massachussetts?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was rezoned as a result of the statute, with at least some of that land highly unlikely to ever see an apartment because of its configuration or current usage. Even when a developer finds a rezoned parcel suitable for development, she will often run up against the “thousand cuts” that localities have stubbornly maintained on rezoned land. Perhaps the legislature would have more to show for the tremendous amount of political capital used to pass and implement the law if members had established specific, ambitious benchmarks — at a minimum, the percentage of land required to be rezoned. 

That’s what I hope HUD understands as it sets up these new zoning-related grant programs. While zoning can be tricky, measuring regulatory change is now possible at scale. For federal intervention in zoning to make a difference, policymakers must understand what it will take to achieve meaningful increases in housing supply.
### When Rent Regulation Makes Sense
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rent-regulation-upsides-nyc-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-07-29T16:26:30.000Z
In late June, Mayor Mamdani delivered on one of his central campaign promises, as [the Rent Guidelines Board voted to freeze rents](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/nyregion/nyc-rent-freeze-vote-mamdani.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on nearly one million rent stabilized apartments. The freeze, applying to both 1- and 2-year leases, undoubtedly pleased most rent-regulated tenants by providing them a modicum of relief from cost-of-living pressures. Nevertheless, as an economist with a long involvement in affordable housing, I believe the mayor’s freeze is misguided housing policy that may undermine the stability of older rental housing.

Does this mean I’m foursquare against all rent regulations as unacceptable distortions of the housing market, a position thought to be the norm in my discipline? No; to the contrary, rent regulations can make a lot of sense, especially in a city like New York. I’m opposed to Mamdani’s rent freeze precisely because of the risk it presents to the larger rent regulation system — not because it’s a normal application of that regulatory tool.

I’ve long been [one of the few economists](https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/04/magazine/at-the-intersection-of-supply-and-demand.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) who defended the appropriateness of well-designed rent regulation laws in New York and other “superstar” cities that are subject to rapid increases in market rents in gentrifying neighborhoods. In most stable cities and suburbs, I believe rent regulations are superfluous, if not actually harmful, but in a handful of the largest cities — New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, maybe Boston — the benefits of “second generation” rent regulations outweigh the costs. 

By “second generation,” I mean regulatory regimes that allow for annual increases in rent that are consistent with the general rate of inflation (or possibly somewhat more), or are tied to some measure of landlord operating costs (as in New York City). Such regimes usually also exempt newly constructed housing, provide incentives for capital improvements to regulated properties and/or apartments and allow for readjustment of an apartment’s rent to prevailing market levels upon vacancy. Such systems address some of the biggest economic objections to rent regulation while maintaining their principal benefit: providing security of tenure to existing renters.

But having a subset of units with restricted annual rent increases has value in a place like New York because it mitigates bargaining power that is inherently unequal. Put differently, when an apartment is vacant and a potential tenant views it, there is relatively equal bargaining power between the prospective tenant and the landlord. If the tenant thinks the asking rent is too high, they can easily look elsewhere, and there is little additional cost in doing so. However, once a tenant signs a lease and moves in, the tenant-landlord bargaining dynamic changes. 

Households typically organize their lives around the location of their residence. They may choose a job depending on the ease of commuting to their home. They may place their kids in a particular school depending on its proximity to their residence. They may join a religious congregation based on its proximity. They may choose to buy a car depending on the ease of parking at that location. They and their children may forge friendships with neighbors or schoolmates.

When the lease comes up for renewal, the relative bargaining power of the tenant and landlord has changed. If the lease is not renewed, the tenant now faces tangible moving costs and, more importantly, may face significant “disruption” costs. It’s now an asymmetric bargaining situation favoring the landlord, and both parties understand that the negotiating leverage has shifted away from the tenant. The landlord could exploit that bargaining asymmetry by hiking the renewal asking rent beyond what the tenant would be willing to pay if they were a new prospective tenant with the option of costlessly looking elsewhere. 

In a city like New York, there often aren’t suitable available rental units in the immediate vicinity of the tenant’s current apartment. Even a move of one mile could cause significant disruption effects in terms of commuting to work, access to schools, friendships, and more.

In stable real estate markets, tenants also have some leverage when negotiating lease renewals. Landlords will typically want to minimize revenue losses due to vacancies, and if the tenant has reliably paid their monthly rent, the landlord also faces risk in finding an equally stable replacement tenant. Consequently, it is not uncommon for building owners to give reliable existing tenants rental discounts upon renewal. 

In gentrifying neighborhoods where market rents are increasing rapidly, that logic could be turned on its head. Frequent tenant turnover may actually become a revenue-maximizing strategy for a landlord. The frequency of landlords asking for traumatic rent increases for lease renewals would consequently be increased, as would their magnitude. 

Gentrification, defined as middle- and upper-middle income people (of whatever race) moving into an urban neighborhood in large enough numbers to change its demographic composition, is a sensitive topic in urban politics. It offers many positives for big cities. It strengthens a city’s economy and fiscal balance, and it may help to desegregate neighborhoods and deconcentrate poverty. It [can improve the lives of existing neighborhood residents](https://www.jstor.org/stable/26328274?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by stimulating retail services and local job creation, improving schools, enhancing street safety, improving the aesthetics of the built environment and building wealth among minority homeowners. Nevertheless, it is often fiercely opposed by communities, primarily because they fear that rising market rents will force existing residents out of their neighborhood.

Rent regulations that allow landlords reasonable renewal rent increases while also preventing them from imposing financially traumatic rent increases on existing tenants are thus justified from a policy viewpoint. The policy goal should be to smooth the adjustment of neighborhood rents to new levels of market demand while protecting existing tenants from large, sudden rent increases that serve as de facto eviction notices. Regulations shouldn’t attempt to regulate the rents of vacant apartments since there is no incumbent tenant to protect. In other words, rent regulation shouldn’t be used to regulate the price of apartments, it should be used to regulate tenant-landlord relationships.

Critics of rent regulation often argue from ideological or theoretical priors and exaggerate the negative effects found by economists who have studied second-generation regulations empirically. For example, while [rent regulations may moderately affect the supply of rental housing as landlords convert rentals to condominiums](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137725000221?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), there is little evidence that rent regulation reduces the market supply of housing overall. Similarly, critics of regulation take it almost as an article of faith that they inflate rents in the uncontrolled sector, but evidence of that is ambiguous. According to [Dirk Early and Jon Phelps](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10835547.1999.12091948?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), who studied that issue explicitly, their “results suggest a positive and statistically significant relationship between the introduction of rent control and price in the uncontrolled sector. However, the link between controls and prices declines through time and may completely disappear after 20 to 30 years with no new construction subject to controls.” 

My purpose is not to dismiss all purported negative effects of rent regulation, for there surely are some. Rather, I suggest that the negative effects of rent regulations must be balanced against their effectiveness in achieving what should be seen as their primary purpose — minimizing the economic displacement of existing tenants, particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods. [Lance Freeman and I found](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249052109%5FGentrification%5Fand%5FDisplacement%5FNew%5FYork%5FCity%5Fin%5Fthe%5F1990s?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that Rent Stabilization in New York City substantially reduces the odds that households headed by a tenant without a college degree (a proxy for being working class) will move from their dwelling unit in a gentrifying neighborhood during any given time period. 

In one of [the most influential recent studies of rent regulation](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20181289&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian found:

*“On average, in the medium to long term the beneficiaries of rent control are between 10 and 20 percent more likely to remain at their 1994 address relative to the control group and, moreover, are more likely to remain in San Francisco. Further, we find the effects of rent control on tenants are stronger for racial minorities, suggesting rent control helped prevent minority displacement from San Francisco.”* 

When I was executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council of New York (1994-2006), we advocated for a “decontrol-recontrol” Rent Stabilization system, similar to that used in San Francisco. Under such a regulatory system, an apartment is rent stabilized when a tenant moves in, but allowed to rent at market value if the tenant vacates. Once a new tenant moves in, the apartment is re-controlled.

Critics argue that a decontrol-recontrol system increases the incentives for landlords to harass tenants out of units if market rents are rising rapidly. That is true, but there are laws against tenant harassment and those laws should be taken seriously and enforced.

In the late 1990s, state legislation moved New York City towards a decontrol-recontrol system. Landlords were allowed to increase rents for vacant apartments by up to 20%. However, revisions to the State law in 2019 moved the City back towards a rigid rent regulation system, ending the vacancy allowances, eliminating provisions that permitted some units to be decontrolled and curtailing owners’ ability to recapture the cost of capital improvements through rent increases.

It is ironic that many of those who purport to care the most about affordable housing championed these deleterious laws. The effect of those changes has been adverse for rent-stabilized rental housing in New York City, especially older buildings in marginal market areas. The deterioration in the financial condition of stabilized housing [has been documented](https://www.furmancenter.org/publication/data-brief-legacy-90-rent-stabilized-properties/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [extensively](https://citylimits.org/opinion-rising-costs-flat-rents-and-a-crisis-in-new-yorks-housing-stock/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

This brings us back to Mamdani’s rent freeze. In light of the tightening of the regulatory system in recent years and the deterioration in the financial condition of stabilized housing, I believe it is both counterproductive to affordable housing and represents a further, dangerous politicization of the regulatory system. 

The freeze will accelerate the deterioration in the financial and maintenance condition of older rent-regulated housing. Regardless of its form of ownership, housing needs adequate cash flow to cover its operating expenses and to provide for periodic capital improvements. The freeze, combined with the 2019 changes to the stabilization law and rising operating costs, will squeeze the operating margins of older buildings (which have a disproportionate share of stabilized units) and inevitably result in deteriorating living conditions for tenants.

To say this is not to say that rent-regulation itself is inherently unworkable. For more than 40 years, New York’s Rent Stabilization system worked fairly well. Neither owners nor tenants were ever completely happy with the Rent Guidelines Board’s decisions, but the general public largely treated it as the technocratic arbitrator it was established to be. Tenants-in-place were protected while the City and its real estate sector prospered. The City’s housing abandonment plague of the 1960s and 1970s abated and living conditions for most tenants improved. 

The injection of Rent Guidelines Board decisions into mayoral politics began with Bill de Blasio, who also campaigned on a rent freeze and pressured the RGB to deliver three. De Blasio, however, at least did so with the justification that overall inflation was very low and so rent increases weren’t justified. Mamdani dangerously furthered the politicization of the RGB by centering a four-year rent freeze in his campaign despite the RGB’s own research showing that building operating costs are increasing rapidly. It’s now unlikely that we can go back to an environment in which the RGB is seen as an independent panel trying its best to balance landlord and tenant interests. We’re hurtling either towards a successful legal challenge that rocks the existing regulatory system, or to a low-rent housing crisis that does the same.
### For Inspiration on Mayor Mamdani’s Vision for Community Safety, Look to Newark
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/newark-community-safety-lessons-for-nyc-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-07-30T14:26:15.000Z
Though pilloried by many, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign vision for putting community safety at the heart of public safety is an achievable reality. While the mayor has taken initial steps to create the Office of Community Safety (OCS) and made key appointments, including tapping Renita Francois as the city’s first deputy mayor for community safety, [Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch](https://www.amny.com/news/city-council-presses-tisch-mamdani-community-safety/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)’s recent statements about coordination between the NYPD and OCS reveal that nearly six months into the administration, the work to build this vision has “not yet commenced.” The city need not fear what this future might hold. To see what community safety smartly integrated into the public safety architecture could look like, New York should peer across the river to its neighbor Newark. As a former assistant attorney general for New Jersey who led [efforts to build the state’s community safety playbook](https://www.njoag.gov/cvi-le-guidance/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), I helped model many of our public safety policies on lessons from Newark. New York should do the same.

Community safety offers a point of contrast to traditional public safety approaches, which are led by law enforcement who rely on investigation, arrest and prosecution. Community safety is led by trained community members who take proactive approaches to preventing crisis and violence. They respond to incidents in non-punitive ways that focus on solving root causes of the issue, bringing to bear a capacity law enforcement simply doesn’t have by using their credibility as peers in the community and their skill at persuasion to help individuals choose a different path. 

Community safety approaches do not replace law enforcement but they can supplement it. Take for example a crime scene after a shooting: Police are there to start the process of finding and bringing the perpetrator to justice, while groups that focus on violence prevention (“Community Violence Intervention” or “CVI”) also go to the scene but for a different purpose. They are there to contain the fallout of trauma and retaliation, to find the victims and people who are hurting so they can start the healing process with therapeutic services — an essential step towards stopping further violence. They may get to the heart of the beef that caused a shooting and work towards reconciliation so no further violence happens, or they may provide critical support to a grieving family member that steers them out of desperation and away from retribution. Meanwhile, the police continue conducting their investigation. With police and community working in parallel, the perpetrator may be brought to justice *and* no further violence occurs as a result of the shooting.

No other major city in the country has achieved the level of adoption within government of community safety approaches to reduce violence Newark has. The foundation has been the consistent leadership of Mayor Ras Baraka who has pursued the vision over three terms through investment and intentional reworking of relationships at the top of city government. The results have been [historic reductions in homicides and shootings that outpace national declines](https://www.nationalcivicleague.org/ncr-article/newark-new-jersey-using-community-engagement-to-improve-public-safety/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). For example, both New York and Newark have experienced decreases in shooting incidents, but Newark’s declines outpace the city’s: Comparing 2019 to 2025, [shootings in New York dropped 11%](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/crime-in-new-york-city-trends-statistics/) whereas in Newark they dropped 49%. 

Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, with a population of 320,000 — roughly twice that of the Lower East Side — has a decades-long history of violence. And while shootings have declined at a faster rate there than in New York, data shows that the shooting rate is still much higher in Newark. 

But cutting shootings in half over six years means something right is happening — what can New York learn from its neighbor that could save more lives?

Since Baraka took office in 2014, he has steadily implemented his vision for having community take ownership of safety through five concrete steps: (1) driving integration between his police force and community violence prevention by setting expectations and forcing relationships at the top; (2) making the coordination between police and community responders non-negotiable by building it into procedures that front-line workers must follow; (3) empowering his community safety leaders to get the help of other agencies who can help address the drivers of violence, and backing this policy with a mandate to follow through; (4) reshaping public perception so violence prevention is seen as "real" public safety and (5) investing in community safety in key ways that help them scale the work. 

To be sure, Newark never took its focus off of traditional law enforcement approaches, but it did invest in making sure policing was smarter: for example,[ early adoption of body-worn cameras, stronger policies and training on use of force](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/nyregion/newark-police-federal-oversight.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [piloting the Trauma to Trust program, where community and police meet in groups to talk about the psychological pain each has experienced](https://www.thetrace.org/2022/01/trauma-to-trust-newark-police-department-reform/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and [working with the county, state and federal authorities to pursue prosecution of the most dangerous individuals](https://www.nj.gov/oag/dcj/agguide/directives/ag-Directive-2021-10%5FEstablishing-Statewide-Gun-Violence-Reduction-Task-Force.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), all while promoting more constitutional policing under a federal consent decree. But, Newark shows that community safety is not a replacement for or a threat to traditional public safety, it can occur in parallel to it as a dynamic complement. 

New York already has the programmatic elements in place, mainly in the form of its network of Community Violence Intervention (CVI) providers, who make up the Crisis Management System (CMS). CMS consists of over 20 community-based nonprofits led by professionals who use their credibility in the community and skill at persuasion to prevent violence and stop retaliation by helping people choose a different path. Although evidence of the effectiveness of CVI is [somewhat mixed nationally in part due to inconsistencies in implementation, including in what methods are being used and the quality of ](https://vrc.umd.edu/sites/vrc.umd.edu/files/2025-05/TC25-Spring25%20%28dragged%29.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)execution, New York’s investment has shown that when you put trained violence prevention professionals in some of the neighborhoods that experience the most violence, this strategy can work: By one estimate, over a 12-year period, violent crime declined nearly 10% more in New York neighborhoods where violence prevention groups were active than in neighborhoods where they were not.

The question for New York is whether it has the willingness to position the pieces on the board into a functioning strategy. The City needs clear direction from the mayor and a set of processes that ensures that all arms of government are working towards this goal — starting with the NYPD — building relationships and following directives to coordinate and solve problems in concert with community providers. 

Here are five specific lessons from Newark about how Mamdani can get there, lessons I have gathered largely from working with and learning from Newark Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Lakeesha Eure, who is a walking blueprint for bringing community strategies into the mainstream of public safety. These lessons focus on violence, which is only one aspect of the broad scope of the new Office of Community Safety, which also includes mental health response, crisis response, domestic and intimate partner violence response and a range of other services. But the lessons here apply to all areas of community response, and what Newark did can guide OCS. 

The **first lesson is that Mamdani must drive integration between the new Office of Community Safety and the NYPD**. As Tisch revealed in a June City Council hearing, discussion between the NYPD and OCS on specifics about roles and what coordination will look like hadn’t started six months into the administration. Even still, coordination takes more than just starting conversations. In Newark, successful coordination occurred because Mayor Baraka chose to direct the flow of information in a way that forced police and community groups to work productively together. When there was a shooting, he expected updates from one person, and that was Eure in her then role as head of the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery (OVPTR), the Newark equivalent of OCS. It meant she had to know everything — who was shot, what happened and where the victim was. It meant law enforcement had to get *her* the information so she could relay it to the mayor; and if she didn’t have the information, it probably meant law enforcement hadn’t shared it. The mayor didn’t just tell them, “you have to coordinate”; he required a deliverable that forced them to. In one instance, the mayor called into a meeting of department heads while he was on a trip to Africa. He made it clear to agency heads that he wanted one update, and it was to come from Eure: “What is the violence and violence response report?” In other words, police were no longer at the permanent center of the city’s response to violence.

Eure relates stories of how Baraka would take her to task in meetings when she didn’t have the information he requested. But she came to realize what he was really doing was signaling to all the other agency heads — particularly to their head of police — that while Eure might be in the hot seat, she was there because others hadn’t worked with her. Baraka was not just *hearing* reports — he was checking to see whether the system was actually integrated. Are agencies aligned? Are people talking? When there’s no follow-up with a shooting victim by the violence prevention teams, where’s the holdup? Over time, the shift in expectations changed the culture. 

It also led to a close relationship between police and community safety officials. Before meetings with the mayor, the public safety director and Eure would talk and coordinate to make sure their data matched, that they had a clear plan for how trauma recovery, victim response and retaliation prevention would be coordinated. They each had their lanes, but they coordinated to make sure that they were able to do what was needed to meet expectations. Out of that process, they built trust and a lasting relationship.

Mamdani can foster a similar relationship at the top by convening Tisch and Francois and setting common expectations. For example, he can require joint updates from both the NYPD and the deputy mayor for community safety around the same data points: Mismatches will reveal breakdowns in coordination, but when there is consistency, it is a strong signal that coordination is happening. The relationship will be built from this work.

Second, **the mayor must put together teams that create playbooks for how community members can contribute to safety in coordination with the NYPD**. One clear way Newark accomplished this was through a mandate that the police notify the Office of Violence Prevention after every shooting so they can deploy social workers and other professionals immediately to the victim and family — a critical step in addressing trauma and tending to needs like food or childcare that can ratchet up stress during already highly tense and vulnerable situations. This is critical to avoiding retaliation. 

Partnerships between community groups and the NYPD are happening throughout the city, but it is not a function of a uniform policy or a comprehensive strategy — it’s happening where it is, like in the innovative [Brownsville Safety Alliance](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/04/nyregion/brooklyn-brownsville-no-police.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), due to the efforts of local NYPD commands and precincts who’ve decided to work with the community. 

The City can make efforts like those in Brownsville the norm by putting together planning teams to scale the work across neighborhoods. The mayor can create working groups of law enforcement members, other emergency responders and violence intervention groups to build joint protocols for how all systems should respond and coordinate around instances of violence and community crisis, with mirror policies that reflect their respective roles. He must then back up their recommendations with mandates to implement, and a process for ensuring that adoption and implementation run out of City Hall. The NYPD commissioner and the deputy mayor for community safety could lead this effort, with support from other senior officials. While culture can certainly eat policy for breakfast, it won’t if Mamdani builds both methodically.

Third, the **Office of Community Safety needs to be empowered to be a driving force within city government across agencies**. This isn’t just about giving OCS a leadership role as a convenor of actors and agencies; it must be given a mandate to resolve policy differences. This means more than just putting the new deputy mayor and the commissioner on the same page. It means making clear that the deputy mayor has the power to twist arms, if not knock heads, in other agencies — another key lesson from Newark — because public safety outcomes are also determined by health, housing, parks, transportation, sanitation, children’s services, schools, probation, corrections and finance. Other agency heads must know that if they’re not moving on a joint initiative, they will have to answer to the mayor. In Newark, Baraka made this explicit to his agency heads: If the city doesn’t reduce violence, we all fail. That directive makes clear that when something breaks or falters, the responsibility for failure is shared across departments. 

To operationalize this, the City could adopt a cross-agency task force for integrating the public safety mission. The task force would establish joint policies, and agencies would then have to turn these into hundreds of pages of procedures for their staff. OCS can serve as a lead organizing force or key advisor, identifying the opportunities for improved collaboration, so agencies can put together joint policies. But OCS also needs to be empowered with clear direction or support from City Hall to speak up when other agencies slow down, get stuck or oppose change. So, if an OCS provider has identified someone — a crime survivor, or someone who is at high risk of victimization — who needs a housing referral to get out of a situation that is dangerous and could lead to retaliation or victimization, the housing agency will know they must deliver and cannot get away with the casual drop-off or bureaucratic churn that leads to the referral failing. 

Examples of executing this approach are both legion and mundane: When the community identifies crime hot spots that need more lighting, the Department of Transportation should respond with urgency; when schools see bubbling conflicts between kids, the Department of Education should provide direction to connect them to violence prevention outreach workers so feuds don’t spill into bloodshed at dismissal; the Department of Homeless Services should direct shelter providers to move swiftly to relocate someone if they’ve placed them in an area where they have beefs; and youth in detention under the Administration for Children’s Services need to be given access to mentors from the community who can help stabilize them during high trauma periods.

The task force can methodically catalog the hundreds of instances where policies and systems clash, with clear recommendations for resolution. Then City Hall can guide implementation, forcing agencies to contend with recommendations through clear expectations, and ensuring that when there is interagency conflict, it is escalated and resolved. 

Fourth, **we need to transform how the city at large sees this work**. Communities do not always see violence prevention and trauma recovery as “real” public safety. Even in Newark, when the city was [converting an old precinct that had been the locus of decades of protest due to its involvement in the police violence](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/nyregion/newark-police-federal-oversight.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that sparked the 1967 uprising, the new trauma and healing center that was to take its place was perceived by some residents as a threat to safety. The Newark public safety director backed the change, and eventually the community came to see the value. 

The police force has centuries of institutional legitimacy behind it (even if that legitimacy is not always felt in every pocket of every community). Community safety offices and agencies, on the other hand, are relatively new. Law enforcement should extend some of its credibility to community safety workers through something as simple as sending a clear message from the police department that it values the community’s role.

As part of this process, the rest of our public safety system, city government and the public at large need to be informed about what community safety is. In Newark, community-based work was organized across multiple lanes that did not just focus on gun violence, but also trauma response, mental health and other functions. City agencies, elected officials and other community leaders learned the roles, understanding where responsibility began and ended. This matters because confusion kills coordination and can dash public hopes and expectations. Right now, “community safety” still sounds mushy to many New Yorkers. Mamdani should make clear what he’s talking about.

Fifth and finally, **for community safety professionals to become a permanent part of our public safety system, we have to resource them and require accountability**. Right now, the NYPD has data, technology, infrastructure and vast resources; violence prevention professionals, for example, do not. The NYPD is funded to work 24/7 and gets overtime; violence intervention responders, whose job is to run into high-risk situations unarmed, with only their wits about them, are underpaid and do not get overtime. They typically work weekday shifts even though most violence happens in the evenings and over the weekends, which means they often are called to do the high intensity parts of their jobs during hours when they receive no compensation. It can’t be government policy to rely on their compassion and charity. Elevating community safety into a dependable and realistic strategy means treating violence prevention workers with mutual respect. If police receive resources, violence prevention groups must also receive investment. If police stand before the press after a street shooting, leaders in prevention must stand there too, because their role in healing the community is part of public safety. That goes for obligations too: If police have to report data, so must community safety, telling us what services they are deploying, and where and when they are deploying them, so that we can gauge whether they’re putting resources to work in the places and with the people we need them to.

When these pieces come together, we get safer and stronger communities with less violence. I have worked with countless law enforcement professionals who have come to cherish what the community has that the police don’t: the trust to get people in moments of extreme grief and distress to put the gun down and take a different course. 

Progress towards these goals is not always straightforward, and Newark has certainly had its share of bumps, which Baraka has attributed to the difficulty of merging the two cultures of policing and social work. For example, in 2024, the arrest of antiviolence activists underscored a potential rift between the Newark Police Department and the city’s violence prevention office, [with police accusing community of obstructing their work](https://patch.com/new-jersey/newarknj/newark-police-union-community-groups-clash-mayor-urges-unity?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This incident shows that even after years of implementation, conflict can still arise between rank-and-file police officers and violence prevention professionals over their respective roles, and we have to keep up training of all parties. [Other incidents](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/newark-and-the-limits-of-criminal-justice-reform/) show that the police still need training in de-escalation. The police union has also opposed efforts to resource Newark’s equivalent to the Office of Community Safety, specifically the reallocation of 5% of the police department’s budget to violence prevention — New York has not proposed such a measure, but would surely meet opposition if it did. Finally, changes in police leadership bring durability challenges: Newark’s former head of police, Brian O’Hara, [had been instrumental in building community-oriented approach to public safety](https://www.thetrace.org/2021/04/newark-police-no-shootings-mayor-ras-baraka-consent-decree/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but subsequent chiefs have not always had this same zeal, either not understanding community safety approaches or not always believing the rules governing officers allow for coordination. This means that governance over the integration of community safety — the systems, mandates and accountability measures — has to be continuous. What matters is how a city recovers from challenges like this and whether it keeps going. 

New York has laid much of the groundwork for successfully knitting together policing and other community safety strategies. The irony is that it started this work before Newark, but has now been surpassed by its smaller neighbor who has made it a permanent fixture in government infrastructure. Now, New York needs leadership and alignment across city government, and more investment. Its New Jersey neighbor points the way.
### Modern Community Safety Includes More than Police
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/community-safety-police-reform-nyc-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:49.000Z
In recent weeks, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has begun to staff up his [Office of Community Safety](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/03/mayor-mamdani-appoints-renita-francois-as-deputy-mayor-for-commu?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), charged with implementing “a whole-of-government” approach to challenges ranging from gun violence prevention and mental health and behavioral crisis response to hate crime prevention, victim services and subway safety. It’s an important start to creating a broader [ecosystem of community safety](https://www.law.georgetown.edu/cics/wp-content/uploads/sites/43/2026/05/No-Longer-Alternative.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that can both produce better outcomes and be more cost-effective than public safety approaches that rely more heavily on traditional enforcement. Although the mayor’s approach is sensible, evidence-supported and [generally popular](https://veraaction.org/serious-about-safety/policing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), it faces stiff headwinds. The difficulty lies partially in the inherent complications of implementing a new approach to an issue as complex as community safety in a city as large as New York. But the even larger challenge is the set of assumptions and misapprehensions —not to mention vested interests — supporting the status quo. For New York City’s new approach to realize its potential and to endure, the Office of Community Safety will have to minimize missteps (and be afforded some grace to course-correct when the inevitable one occurs), and a critical mass of New Yorkers will need to recognize (as millions across the country do already) that being [“serious about safety”](https://www.vera.org/explainers/what-do-we-mean-by-serious-about-safety?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) requires rejecting tired “tough on crime” tactics that over-rely on police and instead adopting what research and experience tell us works to promote safety and build vibrant communities. 

There is no shortage of evidence- and experience-informed [guidance for jurisdictions](https://www.law.georgetown.edu/cics/wp-content/uploads/sites/43/2026/04/DC-Community-Safety-Blueprint.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) seeking to create a broader community safety ecosystem, including guidance [tailored specifically to New York City](https://www.vera.org/publications/department-of-community-safety-an-implementation-guide-for-mayor-mamdanis-first-term?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). These expanded safety ecosystems often center around [“community crisis response”](https://www.law.georgetown.edu/cics/alternative-first-response/arrc-white-paper-series/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (or [“alternative response”](https://www.law.georgetown.edu/cics/alternative-first-response/2026-alternative-response-convening/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)), an umbrella term given to programs that operate alongside 911, police, fire and EMS as a sort of [“fifth branch”](https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1255347227/the-fifth-branch?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of first response. Community crisis response can include not only licensed clinicians responding to mental health or behavioral health crises, but also [support by peers who have had similar experiences](https://nashp.org/states-use-of-peers-in-the-mental-health-crisis-continuum/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)[ and conflict mediation](https://csgjusticecenter.org/publications/expanding-first-response/program-highlights/dayton-oh/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) programs that can handle garden-variety neighborhood disputes. [Street outreach](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/outreach/street-outreach.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) programs, in which social service workers go to people in need rather than waiting for those people to come to them, are also part of this ecosystem. Still another part of the community safety ecosystem focuses on community violence intervention, [a range of strategies used to prevent violence](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00469580251368725?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including hiring community members who work to [interrupt cycles of retaliation and de-escalate neighborhood conflict](https://www.vera.org/community-violence-intervention-programs-explained/violence-interrupters?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including with [victims of gun violence who are still in the hospital](https://everytownresearch.org/report/hospital-based-violence-intervention-programs-a-guide-to-implementation-and-costing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Other community violence intervention programs may also seek to identify the small number of individuals responsible for gun violence in a community and [focus deterrent efforts](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/whats-behind-baltimores-drastic-reduction-in-violence/) — and incentives to desist from violence — on that group; or provide skills training and support to [help often traumatized kids better regulate their emotions](https://rocainc.org/the-roca-impact-institute/rewire-by-roca/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); or implement [victim support and trauma recovery](https://evidence2impact.psu.edu/resources/lets-talk-about-the-science-of-victims-services-talking-points-for-advocates/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) programs that, in addition to providing critical relief, recognize and break the link between being hurt and hurting other people. 

The lessons being learned from this growing ecosystem are too varied and robust to recount in full here, but it is worth focusing on some key takeaways specific to community crisis response. One of those lessons is that it can be safe and cost-effective for cities to send community crisis responders — whether licensed mental health professionals, mediators, or trained peer advocates, rather than police to a broad range of calls that don’t require handcuffs, a badge and a gun to resolve. In recent months, [Greensboro, NC](https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/greensboro-expands-behavioral-health-response-213846429.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Columbus, OH](https://www.axios.com/local/columbus/2026/05/28/civilian-911-response-team-rollout?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Chicago, IL](https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2026/05/13/mayor-brandon-johnson-expansion-mental-health-emergency-response-teams?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), have joined groundbreaking cities like [Albuquerque, NM](https://www.cabq.gov/acs/services?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Durham, NC](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/07/18/police-north-carolina-podcast-mental-health?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [hundreds of others across the nation](https://policingequity.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/CPE-ARIG-Data-Brief.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), in demonstrating how. 

You’ve probably observed a situation in which a person seemed to need help from *someone*, but it didn’t seem like that someone needed to be a law enforcement officer. Maybe you have observed an individual obviously in the midst of some sort of mental health or behavioral crisis on the subway, or been concerned about someone who appeared to have nowhere to go and had fallen asleep in the corner booth at a coffee shop on a cold day. Or maybe it was a different kind of problem — a conflict with that new neighbor who won’t stop practicing the drums late at night, or that other neighbor who won’t keep her dog out of your flowers. Or different still, maybe you are the parent of a child living with a serious mental illness who is fine most of the time, but not always. 

In addition to being familiar with incidents like these, you likely know that, on relatively rare occasions, they [end tragically when police respond](https://www.fountainhouse.org/news/replacing-police-in-mental-health-crises-these-nyers-have-a-plan?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But you, like most people, might be surprised to learn that [up to 20% of the time police spend on calls they are dispatched to](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=5748225&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is spent on behavioral health-related concerns, making up a significant portion of their [overall workload](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/upshot/unrest-police-time-violent-crime.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as well as taking up more time on a [per-call basis](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10986111211035002?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

It is true that some calls need a police response. But it is not the case, as some have argued, that it [almost always](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/policing-alternative-response-cahoots/) makes sense to send the police, either on their own or [as part of co-response teams](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-mamdani-gets-wrong-about-severe-mental-illness-and-crisis-response/) that might include mental health professionals, social workers and others. The portion of calls that can be safely and effectively handled by community crisis responders instead of police will vary by jurisdiction, but research and experience make clear it’s substantial. [One study showed](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10986111251383548?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that nearly half of police call types, comprising up to a quarter of police service time, could be safely handled by non-police responders. Another [study](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=5748225&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) estimated that up to 20% of police dispatch time is spent responding to behavioral health-related concerns, ultimately concluding that “the true unmet need for alternative response — and the deaths alternative response could avert — in U.S. cities is far greater than previously thought.” 

Two of the nation’s leading community crisis response programs demonstrate how it is possible to free up a significant portion of police time and yield better outcomes. Durham’s HEART program saved Durham police officers [more than 5,500 hours ](https://tradeoffs.org/2025/05/02/how-durham-north-carolina-got-police-onboard-with-unarmed-crisis-response/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)in its first two years of operation. This included calls like a response to a “barricaded suspect” scene where responders talked a distraught man into leaving the home and getting the help he needed — with no injuries or even force used. More routinely, HEART responds to individuals in mental health crises or without a place to go and, unlike police, make what are known as “warm handoffs” to available services. Responding to similar calls, Albuquerque’s Community Safety Department [freed up over 31,000 hours for police and fire](https://www.cabq.gov/acs/documents/acs-quarterly-report-q3-2026fy-final.pdf/%40%40download/file/acs%2520quarterly%2520report%2520q3%25202026fy%2520final.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), responding to more than 42,000 calls in 2025 alone.

How do programs like these safely respond, instead of police, to such a large portion of community need? In the most well-developed programs, community crisis responders are deeply integrated into the first response architecture, where risk assessment is part of the dispatch decision. They can be directly dispatched by 911, are GPS-tracked and carry radios with emergency buttons in case they need to ask for EMS or police backup. Just like EMTs and firefighters, they are trained and prepared to safely respond to uncertain situations. 

And this preparation is working. In Durham, N.C., [where the police department reports a violent crime rate comparable to New York’s](https://projects.csgjusticecenter.org/tools-for-states-to-address-crime/50-state-crime-data/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the HEART program requested police backup in only .02% of the [over 45,000 calls it handled over the past four years](https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiMWQ1YzViMGYtYmI1MC00NWM3LTg1NWUtMjdjNzk3NWNlYzU0IiwidCI6IjI5N2RlZjgyLTk0MzktNDM4OC1hODA4LTM1NDhhNGVjZjQ3ZCJ9&pageName=ReportSection7606ef27f6ee056e6f9f&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and responders reported feeling safe 99% of the time. Albuquerque’s Police Department reports violent crime rates almost double that of New York’s, but Albuquerque Community Safety responders also called for police assistance [less than 1% of the time](https://www.cabq.gov/acs/documents/acs-quarterly-report-q3-2026fy-final.pdf/%40%40download/file/acs%2520quarterly%2520report%2520q3%25202026fy%2520final.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This makes sense when you think about it; both firefighters and EMTs respond to other health-related calls without needing police to clear the scene first; experience and research indicate that most behavioral health crises can be treated the same.

> Ultimately, even the most patient, well-trained, well-suited police officer still arrives wearing multiple weapons, a badge and handcuffs — any of which can on their own escalate a situation dealing with person in crisis.

In addition to allowing police to focus on policing issues, community crisis responders can prevent outcomes that are routinely subpar and occasionally tragic. It is important to recognize that bad police outcomes are generally not the result of bad police. Most police officers are well-meaning and many are quite skilled at de-escalation. It’s simply that we ask police to respond to calls that — predictably — would be better handled as non-enforcement issues by non-enforcement responders. We demand that police routinely handle a wide variety of behavioral health and other noncriminal issues, including substance use and homelessness, even where the ideal resolution is not a jail cell, but rather a connection to services. Unlike community crisis responders, it is not the job of police to know and make those connections. And the threat of enforcement and force carried by a police officer, whether explicitly named or not, can contribute to escalation that makes that connection much more difficult to make — and sometimes results in tragedy. On the rare occasions when police backup does become necessary, community crisis responders can be patched directly into the 911 computer-aided-dispatch systems just like firefighters or EMTs.

Community crisis response teams can include licensed clinicians with advanced degrees; peer advocates who have similar life experiences battling mental health challenges, addiction or homelessness; and other people with the right backgrounds and temperament for the job. [Regardless of their background](https://www.law.georgetown.edu/cics/wp-content/uploads/sites/43/2026/05/Who-Responds-Matters.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), community crisis responders [typically receive weeks or months of initial and in-service training](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1579787/full?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that prioritizes recognition of mental illness and substance use crises, conflict resolution, motivational interviewing, a knowledge of community resources, cultural sensitivity and a breadth of de-escalation skills. 

Given this different mandate and orientation, community crisis teams are more likely to get people help that avoids future contact with the criminal legal system, rather than funneling them into it. An [evaluation of Denver’s STAR program](https://www.urban.org/research/publication/aligning-crisis-response-community-needs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found a statistically significant reduction in arrests in the year post-contact compared to a police-only response. Analyses of [Durham’s HEART program](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-department-of-community-safety-where-theory-meets-practice/) have found that it reduces [crime reports, arrests](https://www.rti.org/publication/study-of-alternative-strategies-to-traditional-police-response-du?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [and response times](https://www.nber.org/papers/w34344?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Mobile crisis teams — an intervention closely related to community crisis response — appear to [lower rates of arrest and hospitalizations and increase informal resolutions, connections to services and provision of follow-up services](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39752036/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as compared to both law enforcement-only responses and co-responses made up of law enforcement paired with a clinician. A multi-site study found that the likelihood of arrest in the year post-contact [was 45.2% lower for](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40932840/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) mobile crisis teams. 

Additionally, community crisis responders are not armed, meaning there is virtually no risk they will [unnecessarily kill a person in crisis](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/us/nathan-stotts-louisville-police-shooting.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or turn a call about a minor crime [into a wrenching tragedy](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/us/mississippi-shooting-shoplifting.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). People with mental illness account for between [a fifth](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [a third](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11052937/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) ([or more](https://www.tac.org/reports%5Fpublications/overlooked-in-the-undercounted-the-role-of-mental-illness-in-fatal-law-enforcement-encounters/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) of those killed by law enforcement. To be clear, compared to the number of interactions police have with persons in mental health or behavioral crisis, police killings of people in crisis are relatively rare. But when they happen, they are not only incalculably tragic to the loved ones of the person killed, but they undermine the legitimacy of policing writ large. Even setting aside the use of deadly force by law enforcement, police are 1.4 to 4.5 times more likely to use force against people with mental illness, and people with mental illness [report feeling vulnerable and fearful of police](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10488-008-0188-5?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

A police response also fuels the overcriminalization of mental illness. 25% of all people with mental illness [are arrested at some point in their lifetimes](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27079990/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). One study [summarized the problem](https://www.emerald.com/pijpsm/article/29/4/578/323220?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): “Arrest may be the most convenient, efficient and pragmatic disposition option, even when officers recognize that it will not best serve the needs of the \[person with mental illness\].” More colloquially, when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. 

It’s unrealistic to [hope](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/policing-alternative-response-cahoots/) we can train police into being something they are not. Police have a different mandate — one that includes enforcing the law and apprehending criminals, [using violent coercion, consistent with the law](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-306-48039-3%5F11?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as deemed appropriate. Police training thus [prioritizes quick control and the projection of authority](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891241609342230?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), all as part of how officers are taught to ensure scene safety in criminal situations. This runs directly [counter to what someone in crisis needs](https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/2/e055393?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): an approach that slows a situation down, includes the person in decision-making, and creates space to de-escalate so the person can regain their own sense of control. Ultimately, even the most patient, well-trained, well-suited police officer still arrives wearing multiple weapons, a badge and handcuffs — any of which can on their own escalate a situation dealing with person in crisis. Co-responder programs, in which police and clinicians team up to respond to calls, can mitigate some but not all of these inherent disadvantages of a police response, and they have been found to be less effective than a non-police community crisis response. Similarly, Crisis Intervention Training teaches police about mental illness and how to better approach such situations, but [research](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31551327/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and experience indicate it is no substitute for a community crisis response approach. 

While community crisis responders are proving effective at reducing arrests, freeing up police resources and successfully resolving crises in neighborhoods across the country, there is plenty of work to be done before the approach embodied by the Office of Community Safety, and ultimately a new Department of Community Safety, can work at scale in New York City. Alongside the challenges of implementing new training, technology and equipment to make this approach work is the even harder challenge of dismantling decades of misapprehensions about what the police should do given the widespread belief that they’re the best answer to public safety-related challenges. But New York City has done it before. There was a time when [NYPD officers were the City’s sanitation workers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New%5FYork%5FCity%5FDepartment%5Fof%5FSanitation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Most would agree that reassigning those duties to other public servants made sense. If New York’s new Office of Community Safety is allowed to live up to the vision Mayor Mamdani outlined in his campaign, it might someday be looked back on as an equally sensible advance in public safety that transformed the public safety landscape in New York City, to the benefit of everyone who lives, works or visits.
### Mayor Mamdani's First 200 Days and What Comes Next
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mayor-mamdanis-first-200-days-and/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:18.000Z
*This conversation* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/mayor-mamdanis-first-200-days-and) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on July 28, 2026 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

On Thursday, July 23, 2026, members of The New York Editorial Board appeared at a live-audience event hosted by The Association for a Better New York (ABNY) to discuss Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s tenure thus far, broader New York political trends, and a little bit of what comes next. The conversation, held at The Greene Space, included 9 of the Board’s 11 members, and featured audience Q&A. Emma Pfohman, ABNY’s CEO, gave opening remarks. (*photo by Mara Zalite Photography for ABNY*)

*Participating journalists: Juan Manuel Benítez, Nicole Gelinas, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Myles Miller, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Zagare.*

**Full Transcript**

**Emma Pfohman**  
Hi, everyone. Good evening. And welcome. My name is Emma, I’m the CEO of the Association for a Better New York, and I want to thank you all for being here. And thank you to The New York Editorial Board for joining us. I also want to start by thanking Matt Wing and his civic studio Wingspan for sponsoring tonight’s festivities.

And because our first podcast recording was such a hit, we’re thrilled to be back for another political nerd fest here at The Greene Room. So for those of you who are new to [ABNY](https://abny.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), we aim to strengthen New York civic fabric and create opportunity for New Yorkers by convening 260 nonprofit, corporate, labor, and philanthropy leaders in partnership with government. Many folks know us through our convenings and events. We also do research and grant-making through our foundation.

We launched a recent breakfast salon called [At the Table](https://abny.org/abny-events/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with city commissioners that we kicked off with DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn. We had a power breakfast with the police commissioner. We have an upcoming tour of the Gateway’s Hudson Tunnel Project next week. And we recently released a report at an ABNY Talks panel on defining economic justice called Making Growth Matter that really looks into the state of the New York City workforce and how to make sure economic growth provides opportunity and mobility. We also had a really exciting trip with the ABNY Women Leaders Network to see New York’s newest team, Gotham FC, trounce the Washington Spirit at Citi Field. And with the Knicks triumphant win and the 39 days of World Cup mania, it has been quite a summer of sports. And since I worked on the World Cup when I was at City Hall, I wanted to make sure that in my role here at ABNY that we were bringing the fun and the economic benefits all across the city. So we launched the [World Cup for All](https://abny.org/abny-foundation/world-cup-for-all-community-grant-program/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) initiative and partnered with about 30 organizations across all five boroughs to bring watch parties and youth tournaments and community festivals to every corner of the city.

So we’ve been quite busy. But since the primary, I’ve actually just been kind of emotionally counting down to tonight’s podcast taping with a brilliant team at the Editorial Board. And for those of you who aren’t familiar, The New York Editorial Board is an informal group of veteran journalists working to fill some of the space left by the retreat of newspaper editorial boards from civic life. You may have read or heard some of their candidate interviews before the last primary, but I will say this, we are all just smarter sitting in this room with them.

So I’m excited to hear their thoughts about the recent primary. Also, we’re about 200 days into Mayor Mamdani’s tenure, and eager to hear their thoughts on what’s next for the general, and start thinking of your questions because we’ll have time at the end. So think of them now. And without further ado, I’m going to introduce Ben Max, who will introduce all of the folks on The New York Editorial Board.

**Ben Max**  
Thank you to Emma. Thank you to ABNY, and The Greene Space, and most importantly, all of you for being here tonight. I’m Ben Max…I work at New York Law School. I’m the Program Director at the school’s Center for New York City and State Law. And we have set up there a journalism project to help give some infrastructure and support to initiatives like The New York Editorial Board. So very happy to have that connection. I’m going to briefly introduce the members of the Board who are here and then we’re going to get into our conversation. We had 11 members of the Board at the start of it, and everyone’s still participating. So we’re missing two of our folks tonight, Christina Greer and Josh Greenman, who we miss.

But let me introduce everybody who’s here. And many people here have other parts of their titles, but I’m going to give you the brief ones.

\-Ben Smith is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, and he took the initiative to get this group going in the first place, and he’ll be our moderator tonight.  
\-Juan Manuel Benítez is a professor of local journalism at Columbia University.  
\-Akash Mehta is editor-in-chief and founder of New York Focus.  
\-Alyssa Katz is editor-in-chief of The Forward.  
\-Myles Miller is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News in New York.  
\-Liena Zagare, next to me, is editor of the Manhattan Institute’s The Bigger Apple policy newsletter.  
\-Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.  
\-And Harry Siegel is a senior editor at the City Reporter.

Many of you in this room are probably familiar with all of those outlets and institutions. Many people on this stage have their own podcasts as well, which I didn’t mention, but you can find them all. And Ben \[Smith\] is one of those people, and I’ll turn it over to you.

**Ben Smith**  
Thank you! Thank you Emma, thank you Matt. Thank you for that introduction. It’s really so fun to see the hardcore of the sickos who are obsessed with New York City here. And also among the many, many friends and familiar faces, including the great Bob Liff, who when he was at the Daily News, taught me to not treat politicians with too much respect, which is something that, it’s hard to learn as a young reporter, but when I heard him, the way he talked to people on the phone, it was like, OK, yeah.

So anyway, this project is really about the role of journalism in New York civic life and really was sparked by our shared frustration when The New York Times got out of the business of endorsements, which were one of the few pulls toward a kind of public spirited conversation with politicians who mostly just deal with special interests all day. If you’re running for office, all you do is have meetings with people who want very, very, very specific things out of you. And I think our view is this kind of conversation is a way to sort of pull people back toward a kind of shared interest and often to challenge people who don’t spend a lot of time talking to people who don’t necessarily share their worldview.

And it was one of the best things about New York politicians is that with, I think, the sole exceptions of Andrew Cuomo and Jack Schlossberg \[the two candidates who did not accept New York Editorial Board invitations for interviews\], they’re eager to engage with the media. They see the media as a really important and valid part of, they see journalism as a very important and valid part of civic life, which was really reassuring actually in this process.

And when we kicked it off, we were interviewing mayoral candidates, and I think Brad Lander and Andrew Cuomo were sort of the obvious credentialed two people were going to. And Akash, you were like, no, you have to talk to this Assemblyman, who I had never heard of, from Queens. And so Zohran was, I think, the second interview. Over my total skepticism, honestly, I don’t know how other people felt. I just wanted to go back there. What did you see in Zohran Mamdani in that moment that made you think, wait a second, this guy is one of the really serious candidates for this office?

**Akash Mehta**  
I don’t remember it this way, but I will take the credit.

**Ben Smith**  
Just go with it.

**Akash Mehta**  
Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting [document](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/zohran-mamdani-interview-transcript) to look back on now because he was polling at 2%. And it was, I think, the first really substantive conversation he had. And I remember being really impressed that, despite the fact that this was his first, in some places at least, tough interview, he was so ready with, I mean, like we asked questions, we stopped doing this, but for the first few interviews, we would ask questions about specific facts and sort of budget numbers and he blew them out of the water, like he knew his stuff, despite never having worked in city government.

And I think in retrospect, I don’t think any of us had a theory of the case at that time, but I think in retrospect, looking at his tenure as an Assembly member, it is really interesting to see…I mean, of course he had statements and he was in the press conferences on the biggest things that you would expect a DSA member to be on, like the Tax the Rich campaign. But what he repeatedly did was to make issues sort of not at the center of New York politics, like the [taxi worker strike](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/nyregion/mamdani-taxi-drivers-nyc.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), like [his bill](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/bl/segments/how-taxing-columbia-and-nyu-can-fund-cuny?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to have Columbia and NYU pay property taxes and send that money to CUNY, and of course, [his bill](https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2023/05/socialist-legislators-back-bill-block-new-york-charities-funding-israeli-settlements/386485/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to strip charities that are funding illegal settlement activity in the West Bank of their nonprofit status. He would center these issues that sort of spoke to larger conversations and then get a huge amount of media and mobilization around them. And that’s what he did in the campaign.

**Ben Smith**  
Yeah, I think we all lived through the campaign, so I’m gonna skip ahead to the mayoralty. And I think just ask some of you who’ve studied a number of these issues so deeply, how he’s doing and what you see as his central challenges. And I think I wanted to start with public safety, which is, I think Mamdani would actually probably be the first to say, kind of the table stakes of a successful mayoralty. And Nicole…you know, we’re living in a moment of really unprecedented low crime in America and in New York, even though people don’t necessarily feel that way. So what is your report on the state of public safety in New York and how Mamdani is doing?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Well, thanks Ben, and thank you everyone for coming to see us this evening. This holds true across the issues that Mayor Mamdani campaigned on, with one exception, which we can talk about later: Mamdani does well as a mayor and as an executive when he is either repudiating or ignoring the very things that brought him to the mayoralty. So last year—

**Ben Smith**  
Spoken like a Manhattan Institute fellow.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Once he saw that he actually could win, he made it very clear he was no longer a “defund the police” candidate. He had been posting in 2020, 2021, very clear that he was an ideological ‘defunder.’ Ran away from that very quickly in the campaign once he actually started to get some traction. One of his campaign proposals last year, though, was to create a Department of Community Safety — billion dollar-plus agency a year that would take over many of the aspects of the police department, particularly the police department dealing with people in mental distress. But this was kind of splitting the difference between defund and fund the police. We are going to take a lot of these NYPD jobs where the public sees these interactions that end up in tragedy and move them from the police.

Never did that. We have an Office of Community Safety, very different from a department, where a department would need a City Council vote and need to be created. This office only has a couple of people and so far, seven months into his mayoralty, it really hasn’t taken any duties away from the police. So it’s a long way of saying the Mamdani NYPD looks a lot like the Eric Adams NYPD, including, of course, who is commissioner. And the Jessica Tisch NYPD tried-and-true preventative policing tactics, updated for a new age, is basically what is letting Mamdani say that crime is down on his watch, which is true. If you look at the seven felony index crimes, down about 7% this year. Murders are at extraordinary rates. I mean, we may end this year with less than 300 murders for the first time in 10 years.

Other felony crimes, assaults, although they’re down this year, they’re still 1/4 higher than they were before 2020\. But that’s not something that we can blame Mamdani for. He is now the third mayor — de Blasio, Adams, and now this mayor — where we have gotten away from this idea that we want to bring total index felony crime back down to where it was before 2020\. And the further we normalize these levels of assaults, that’s not good, but certainly any idea that we were going to see an explosion of crime on the watch of a democratic socialist mayor— he knew, because he’s very good at what he does, that would not be good for him or for the city. And so far, that has not happened.

**Ben Smith**  
And what do you make of…and maybe it’s just that like every summer in the tabloids is the summer of blood, obviously. There’s never been a year in the city…Obviously any crime is too much; there was a [very scary stabbing](https://gothamist.com/news/man-accused-of-stabbing-2-on-upper-west-side-charged-with-hate-crimes-police-say?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the Upper West Side today. But what do you make of the sense that…I’m curious if you could elaborate a little in the sense that kind of broad crime is down, but there are very visible categories that are freaking people out right now.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Yeah, I mean, people are not crazy to perceive public safety differently than they did from, say, depending on how long people have been around, 1990, of course, was the peak of crime until 2019\. Virtually all types of crime steadily fell every year. You could see this slow and steady, sometimes fast and steady, progress and basically feel safer every year.

In 2020, 2021, we had a 53% increase in the murder level. That was the biggest such increase in such a compressed time period ever. And assaults soared. And we see that continuation. Murders and shootings are down because the police has always been good at and is still good at containing the gang crime, the gun-related crimes in the hotspot, high-crime neighborhoods, particularly in the summer months. Random assaults continue to be a serious problem, both above ground and below ground \[in the subways\]. They’re up compared to seven years ago. And it just seems, you’re not likely to be the victim of a random assault, but if you’re thinking about “how do I protect myself from crime?” it’s very difficult to figure out what you can do as a person to avoid being the victim of a random assault on the subway. So this is both a perception and a reality that drives public concern.

**Ben Smith**  
And Ben, just to sort of tick through the big issues on the Mamdani agenda, housing is another place where…I’ll just ask broadly, how’s he doing? And how is he doing compared to, I guess, what we expected when we talked to him?

**Ben Max**  
Well, I think we’ve seen from him even an acknowledgement, and action to back it up, that he’s rethought some of the sort of older progressive approaches to housing development and taken what you might call abundance-minded politics and has taken an approach that I think he’s even called an all-of-the-above approach, which I think has a lot of appeal to a lot of people. And he’s, I think, trying on housing and other issues to kind of do it all, which I don’t know how long that can last. And I’m always reminding myself, you know, he’s been in office X number of months, not even 7 at this point. So all these points that we’re making up here tonight can quickly shift.

But I think it’s extremely important for his political brand that he came through with the rent freeze. Is that good policy? That’s another conversation, right? I mean, there’s a lot of questions about what’s going to happen with the rent-stabilized housing stock in this city, especially some of the most distressed properties that are largely rent-stabilized. That’s a real issue. And I think there’s a lot to discuss on that about the question of whether he and some of the people in his administration want that housing to become more distressed so they can help buy it up or help nonprofits do so. That’s a very interesting theme to watch.

On the other side of the equation, he’s seemingly taking a very pro-growth, pro-housing supply approach. We still need to see what that looks like because he hasn’t had to make a lot of decisions on that yet. They put out a housing plan that’s got a lot of interesting elements to it. But one of the biggest things that’s in that plan that we’re going to have to see how it comes to fruition is a promise to go even further than the City of Yes did on transit-oriented development. And that’ll be a fascinating piece of the puzzle because it’s going to coincide with the development, we think, of the Interborough Express. And so they’re already talking about some of those rezonings. And I think these are going to be very interesting tests, not to mention the very specific projects that come up along the way, about whether he is a very sort of YIMBY mayor or not.

**Ben Smith**  
Yeah, we talked to a handful of the socialist candidates and my impression was a lot of them hadn’t…weren’t so much like motivated by hostility to the private sector as having never really dealt with it, having spent their lives in academia or nonprofit or political work. And it was very interesting to see Mamdani kind of discover on the campaign trail this other path to building housing, which was private markets. And Myles, you as the voice of capital: How is Mamdani doing with business in New York? And it’s particularly, you know, people love to talk about small business and Mamdani loves to talk about deregulating bodegas, but like this is ultimately…Most employers, the big employers in New York are huge businesses, huge global businesses. How is that going?

**Myles Miller**  
I think this week’s announcement of Lina Khan as chair of the Economic Development Corporation \[EDC\], obviously we heard from the Partnership for New York that they have concerns with that.

**Ben Smith**  
Triggering.

**Myles Miller**  
Right. Correct. Our \[Bloomberg\] Terminal customers shudder when they see Lina Khan do anything, really, considering that at the FTC, she was very focused on the consumer and sort of making sure the business world was sort of in line. When you look at the pied-a-terre tax and what is going on today with [the mailers going out,](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani-notifies-property-owners-of-new-pied-a-terre-tax?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the business community still is very cautious about Mamdani.

But you do hear from members, I mean, he’s got a good number of folks in the business community who’ve met with him and have liked their conversations and their experiences with him. But what was going on with EDC was of particular concern. Specifically, EDC has for decades been focused on economic growth in this city. Bringing in a person like Julie Su, who has always focused on sort of worker rights and worker injustice and labor, and to focus on economic justice, was a marked change. We did an interview with her right after she took office, and I was shocked because in the interview, the first thing she wanted to talk about was city-run grocery stores. And as I’m sitting in the Governor’s Room at City Hall, I was like, “oh, that was a real thing.” I was shocked. I was like, “are you serious?” And she’s like, “yeah, we’re scouting locations.”...

On his economic message, I think he’s been sort of very upfront about what his economic focus is going to be. And no one should be shocked by any of the things that he does from an economic perspective. Bringing in [Tony Shorris](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani-appoints-veteran-city-leader-anthony-shorris-as-pr?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is not exactly the, how do I say this? as a former de Blasio person, worked in the de Blasio administration, it’s not exactly innovative, but it is interesting, right? A steady hand at an agency that really needs a steady hand right now. Andrew Kimball was a powerhouse, and to have no leader for quite some time puts the business community really in disarray.

**Ben Smith**  
What is Mamdani’s and sort of his administration’s theory of economic growth?

**Myles Miller**  
Julie Su should answer that at some point. And I say this as a person who really likes Julie Su from my time covering her at the Labor Department. But I would love to see that realized. You know, when I go to them and ask them about having people on Bloomberg or talking about sort of like economic growth, what Hunts Point will look like, all of that, you know, the focus is always on small business, which is great. But big business is what moves the city. And so the more we can—

**Ben Smith**  
You’re warming a lot of hearts at ABNY. Feel free to jump in here.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
What I would say is that I think it’s a little shocking that Mamdani got elected saying that he wanted to cater to the working class in New York City, and here we have a politician who, after how many months, seven months in office, he’s still in his messaging, his policies, he’s still laser focused on that same community of voters and New Yorkers that he was trying to address from the beginning. We had another mayor, Eric Adams, who, he loved to say that he was the first working class mayor of New York City. And then as soon as he got elected, he started traveling lavishly to many different world locations.

**Myles Miller**  
He didn’t start. He continued.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
He continued. He spent his nights at Zero Bond, socializing with the rich and famous and lobbyists. And now we have this mayor who initially said, like, “this is the group of New Yorkers who need some attention right now. So that’s what’s going, that’s going to be my focus at City Hall.”

But then we hear all the business community and the wealthy in New York City. “Well, what about us? What about our interests? What about, we are the leaders of the city and we’re the ones giving you economic growth?” And do they really need that much attention right now? When it comes to getting attention from the city government, when we have a middle class and working class in New York City who can barely afford childcare or many different things that would be basic in a city like New York.

So I’m trying to be less, in a way, cynical and I’m trying to be less cynical because I think we have right now a politician that is once in a lifetime. I think he’s a generational talent. We saw that when we interviewed him. And he’s trying to appeal to the voter who is tired of being cynical. I think a lot of voters, they vote for a politician, and at the end of the day, they say, politicians, they’re all the same. And right now, Mamdani, at least for now, his message is, this is what I said that I was going to do; some things are going to take more time than others, some positions might have to change a little bit because he’s not an ideologue. He’s more of a pragmatist. And I’m going to cater to those New Yorkers who feel that they’re being squeezed right now.

**Ben Smith**  
How do you fit that theory of how he’s operating into the conversation about socialism? And like you say, he’s not an ideologue. He comes out of a genuinely kind of ideological and sort of sectarian group. But I mean, was he using them? Are they using him? What do you think of his relationship to a more ideological system?

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
I love that we are in 2026 and still in this city, in this country, you hear the word socialism and people believe that we’re going to go back to the Soviet Union or something like that. He talks like an average or like a mainstream social democrat in any European country. And I think as one of only two immigrants on this stage I think right now, I can say that you leave the U.S. and the world sees politics or the political spectrum in totally different terms and certain words. And I’m saying this because Mamdani himself is an immigrant. He comes from Uganda and grew up in other countries. So he has a different political culture, I think. And when it comes to the political spectrum, he is measuring things in a different way. So, OK, so he’s just like proposing things that at the end of the day, they are not that radical. Radical is just like getting elected and then just giving your back to the people who put you in that position.

**Ben Smith**  
I want to tick through a couple more of the really big issues. There was relatively little discussion of education, which is the biggest city agency. It’s what the city spends its money on. Liena — and I won’t make you weigh in on the Soviet Union where you were born — but you know, a week when everybody’s talking, it’s sort of the annual week of talking about selective high school admissions. You [published something today](https://thebiggerapple.manhattan.institute/p/nyc-school-attendance-crisis-shsat?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) kind of looking at the broader statistics about the education system.

**Liena Zagare**  
Everybody likes talking about the SHSAT tests that admit very few children of color. And so what I wanted to do is look at the bigger picture and actually who gets to take this exam and the reasons behind it. And what comes across is that attendance is the biggest issue that is facing the school system. And it is the one thing that gets no attention that I’ve seen. And it affects about a third of the city’s children, which is 300,000 children who are missing about a month or more of school every single year. And 150,000 of them, or half, are Hispanic children, which is like every sixth child in the city. And those numbers are just crazy. And not to be talking about them is also kind of unconscionable.

The focus of the Mandani administration has been entirely on expanding early childhood education, which is a nice thing to do, which affects a relatively small number of children. But at the same time, we really, really should be talking about how we get children, including…a lot of the children who don’t show up, are kindergartners, are first-graders. So this is a question of families being responsible enough and understanding that it is important that children go to school, and getting them there. Because by the time you get to high school, everyone skipped class every now and then, but it’s a very different story about a fourth-grader or an eighth-grader that needs to be there to get ready for their exams to advance to different schools.

So yeah, that was startling to look at that data and realize that we really are not talking about something that we should be talking about. And something that honestly, Mayor Mamdani, given that he has such a platform and he is so popular that he really could move the needle on attendance if he really focused on messaging that school really, really matters and that it’s a responsibility of the families and the children to show up. His Office of Mass Engagement could go out there and get the kids back to school.

**Ben Smith**  
Let’s see…a core part of his politics is Israel-Palestine, not necessarily part of the day job of mayor, and he is not in fact going to [arrest Benjamin Netanyahu](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZuV5L0QL04&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But I guess, Alyssa, the Jewish community, parts of it are incredibly stressed out about this mayoralty. How’s that going, Alyssa?

**Alyssa Katz**  
Where to begin? I mean, New York City, as with Jews around the globe, has so many Jewish communities. And I think the statistics are [about at least 1/3 of Jews](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/zohran-mamdani-new-york-city-mayor-election-jewish-voters-executive-orders-eric-adams-israel?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Jewish voters in New York City, voted for Mamdani. It could be more, it could be less. And what you have is this intense polarization where you have major parts of the Jewish community, including significant parts of the Jewish establishment, not limited to the Orthodox Jewish establishment, although certainly including much of it, although also not all of it, because you have both Zionist and anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews — but these establishment institutions, establishment rabbis, who went out of their way from the very beginning to paint Mamdani as a threat, with, to be clear, a lot of substantial basis for that. I mean, when you have a mayor who his leadership experience, his grounding in politics, was entirely based in pro-Palestinian politics that were extremely hostile to Israel.

And at the same time, when you actually look at what, I can’t speak to his record before he was in politics and before we could really widely see what he was saying and doing, but certainly since he’s been in New York political life, Mandani has been incredibly astute at drawing an incredibly bright line where he is on the one hand extremely, he’s been an activist more or less against the existence of Israel as it stands now, which is as a Jewish state. And I believe he said that to us in [our editorial board interview](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/zohran-mamdani-interview-transcript), right? We interrogated him a bit on that.

And where at the same time he has, in fact, if anything, as he has become mayor, been more strident against Israel as a Jewish state, and to be clear, not just for its existence, but specifically around Palestinians’ lives and experiences and the militarization in the West Bank, obviously the war in Gaza. This was the movement for their rights and for Palestinian liberation was the movement he had come out of. And we’ve just seen this week, Mamdani really intensify these efforts in a way where we don’t quite know where the next chapter will go, but it will be very interesting with his threat to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, that he is now backing down from, but he’s in fact continued to escalate, using his platform as mayor now, his official social media channels, his official desk at City Hall, to draw this line saying Israel cannot go on as it has, but he’s specifically targeting Netanyahu, which is interesting.

But at the same time, as he’s doing all this, he’s hugging Jews and Jewish communities closer and closer and closer, and saying, “we care about you, we’re going to protect you.” He made a very significant choice in keeping Jessica Tisch as police commissioner. That was a really kind of threshold decision. And one that really pissed off his base. He had a lot of people who’d come out of the movement who are very angry and continue to be as he has had the NYPD respond to protests at synagogues and as Tisch has marched in the Israel Day Parade, the movement folks are very pissed off at him.

But, so when you say, how is the Jewish community doing? What the balancing act that Mamdani has been trying to play is to try to assure Jewish community safety, which at the end of the day, he cannot guarantee it, right? But he’s pledged to do what he can and to work with Tisch to do what he can. And again, now he gave us this indictment on video saying “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. I can’t arrest him, but the federal government should. And the right to protest is a bedrock of our democracy.” Now he said it in a very careful way. He’s essentially urging people to step up and I don’t, we don’t know what will come of this energy.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think it’s working? Like the sort of ‘criticize Israel, try to hug New York Jews?’ Is it calming people down? Is it working in the Jewish community?

**Alyssa Katz**  
It’s escalating tensions significantly with Jews who are strongly committed to Israel as remaining a Jewish state and as the place of the Jewish people. He actually escalated things today. It’s Tisha B’av and he escalated things by last night saying, “OK, may you have an easy fast” and so on. Tisha B’av is the holiday commemorating the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, right? So I think he’s really escalating tensions with that faction. But overall, I think he’s in a very strong position, including with a lot of New York Jews.

**Myles Miller**  
…You have to look at the Jews he’s surrounded himself with, right? You think of the ones in City Hall, but like to go to [Devorah Halberstam’s house](https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/2051434956149457140?lang=en&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and to meet with Devorah and to, you know, make that a conscious effort is one thing. To go to the Satmars and to be with [Rabbi Niederman](https://x.com/ZohranKMamdani/status/1976673044169969727?lang=en&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is another thing, right? The Satmars are very much, I guess, sort of independent of the folks in Crown Heights. It was very meaningful to Devorah to have that audience with him and to really speak about what atrocities happened to her son, but also to understand the differences in the communities and the differences in what they need to continue having a presence outside of [770 Eastern Parkway](https://www.npr.org/2026/01/29/g-s1-107742/car-rams-into-chabad-headquarters-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and to continue to fight for safety and when there is an issue in the community to sort of be out front about it. And then you have the measuring stick, which is like, “well, how soon did he tweet or how soon did he condemn?” That continues. But to make those inroads is notable and important because, from what we heard on the campaign trail, people did not believe that was going to happen.

**Ben Smith**  
Yeah. I love the level of detail of mapping the Jewish community required to be a New York journalist or politician. Like, nobody needs to be told what happened, we know what 770 Eastern Parkway is. Akash, before I get to Harry, Alyssa said something about his base being mad at him. You’ve covered the New York left a lot. Can he actually alienate his base or is his base with him no matter what? Is it like Trump? He could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue?

**Myles Miller**  
It would be in the [Commie Corridor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commie%5Fcorridor?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), actually.

**Akash Mehta**  
That’s a good question. The New York City DSA has—

**Ben Smith**  
AOC fell out with them and paid no political cost. Like, seems like maybe it’s 100 people on Twitter, is the sort of the outside perception. Do you think there’s a base that can hold him accountable to what he had promised on, say, policing?

**Akash Mehta**  
Yeah, I mean, so the New York City DSA objected to his plan to hire 500 more cops and unclear if it was in response to that criticism, but he did sort of [zero that out](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQb67rQ8gKE&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). I think it’s still sort of and we’re circling around this, I don’t know what it means to be a socialist governing New York City, and seven months in, I still don’t really know what that means. And I don’t know to what extent, four years in, we’re going to be thinking of this as a significantly different mayoralty than the type that de Blasio had, or as the same kind of mayoralty with way better and more compelling communications and politics for a lot of people.

And I think actually EDC is a really interesting place where we’ll maybe start to answer some of those questions, where some of what it does is like give private schools tax breaks for their renovations and do a lot of corporate tax breaks that there’s a lot of debate about whether or not it in fact creates jobs. You could imagine because it’s unencumbered by the city bureaucracy it doing lots of really interesting new projects that are instantiations of his sort of socialist vision of a muscular government doing new things.

The thing I really want this agency to do is create a public option for funeral caskets, because anyone who’s ever had to deal with a funeral home is, you know, like every part of that…now I’m really going off on a tangent.

**Ben Smith**  
No, this is great. I don’t know if anybody, is anybody from the administration here? Please take notes.

**Akash Mehta**  
No, I mean, my grandfather died earlier this year and I was just on the phone with a bunch of funeral home companies and they’re required to maintain an itemized price list, but they’re not required to give it to you until like long into these negotiations. They’re not required to post them online. They really should be. Sam Levine and Lina Khan tried to do this actually at the federal level and maybe they’ll do it at the city level. But then the individual things that they’ll try to sell you on, and upsell you on…like a cardboard box should not cost $600\. And so anyway, I am curious to see if EDC is sort of re-envisioned in a way that wouldn’t have happened under, say, de Blasio.

**Ben Max**  
I think the grocery stores is one of the most perfect examples of a little bit more of the actual socialism coming in here, because I totally agree with what Juan Manuel was saying before, and I’ve said for a long time, if you didn’t know Zohran Mamdani came out of the New York City DSA, you’d be like, “oh, he’s like Bill de Blasio.” The platform was similar. It wasn’t, you know, this was not some massive sort of radical movement. And I think the grocery stores are one of these areas that could really, I think, actually sabotage the whole thing. I think there’s like boondoggle potential there that could really be a problem for him, but not getting into all those details now.

**Myles Miller**  
Wait, what specifically? I’m interested in that.

**Ben Max**  
Oh just, the cost of building these places out could become just an ongoing scandal and fodder for like, “you can’t manage a capital project.” Then there’s the question of whether the prices are going to hurt the local bodegas. I mean, it just seems like endless possibilities of bad headlines and stories for him for, I’m not sure what the best case scenario really is, that, you know, is this an eight-year project where they wind up with five in each borough? Well, then that’s something extremely different. What is this going to become?

**Alyssa Katz**  
I just want to weigh in on a bit of a tangent, but an important one when you say headlines and stories, because we are all here because the New York Times abdicated a very important part of its local civic role. And we all in a different ways are part of the media ecosystem. But Mamdani is testing the proposition, and I think he is prevailing, that he can govern regardless of what is happening in the media and that he controls his communication platforms. I mean, other mayors have tried, Adams tried, de Blasio tried. Mamdani may be the first you can actually get away with that. I don’t know if others agree with that.

**Myles Miller**  
He was hurt certainly during the big snowstorms with the amount of snow deaths and you know the hardest thing for a new press team was a spokesperson [saying](https://nypost.com/2026/02/12/us-news/mamdani-admin-dismisses-questions-about-7-new-yorkers-who-died-of-hypothermia-in-their-homes-as-outdoor-death-toll-climbs-to-19/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) “people die all the time.” And luckily for that team, that story sort of went away, but that was not good, very not good. And as much as you use new media to get the message out, the headlines will stay. And Legionnaires’ is another one. It’s like on these two big health issues, it’s weird, like, there’s something…

**Alyssa Katz**  
But they’re not part of this platform. I think there’s a distinction, and there could be a narrative that we end up seeing that, and this is something that Julie Menin, the City Council Speaker, was already kind of holding him to, is saying, you know, “you’re forgetting about the basics here as you’re chasing the grocery stores and the childcare and everything.” So that could be—

**Myles Miller**  
Ben, do you have a question about Julie Menin later?

**Ben Smith**  
No, but would you like to talk about Julie Menin?

**Myles Miller**  
She wrote that op-ed and it got a [really unfortunate headline.](https://x.com/C%5FSommerfeldt/status/2079903924685840685?s=20&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) “The mayor’s minions bungled Legionnaires’.”

**Nicole Gelinas**  
On the issue of the cold weather deaths, that was an example of the mayor showing he will quickly be very flexible and give up what appeared to be an important principle to him when it looks like that’s going to be bad for him and bad for the city.

So one of his issues last year, he said multiple times and answered multiple questions, is “we are not going to do involuntary commitments. It will only be a last resort.” And he never defined what last resort means. It already by definition is a last resort. And once we went into this cold freeze in January, February, despite the fact that there’s actually still no evidence that this year saw more cold freeze deaths than previous years, the Department of Vital Statistics puts it out every year. Unfortunately, people do die every year from these types of deaths, and we had a particularly cold winter this year. He’s actually the one who brought up the fact that people were dying. This was what got the press attention on this in the first place. And as soon as he saw that not using involuntary commitment is going to be a problem here, he reversed himself and not only reversed himself, but started to say every day how many people that they were committing on an involuntary basis.

So a particularly striking example of how being flexible in, whether it’s a cynical or a not cynical way actually ends up being good for the governance of New York City and the flip-flopping from a bad position is good.

Another example of that was the rental ripoff hearings. So he held these five hearings, one in each borough, so that tenants who are not the people who show up every year to protest against the rent regulated rent increase, market rate tenants, other people not used to this process, could come and basically complain about their landlords. And the first iteration left out NYCHA tenants. You couldn’t go if your landlord was NYCHA. It immediately became a place where he got tremendous criticism and you had people funding these trucks outside the rental ripoff hearings: “You’re silencing NYCHA.” You had people wearing coordinated t-shirts in the hearings saying, “let us talk, let us talk.” Many mayors would have maintained this fight on principle. Mamdani immediately said, “you know what? We’re going to set up a table for NYCHA. We’re going to listen to NYCHA,” and solved the problem immediately, where you had a couple hecklers stand up at the Bronx hearing that he attended and say, “you’re ignoring NYCHA, you’re not listening to NYCHA.” And he just shut down the heckling by saying in a very calm, friendly manner, “I hear you. That’s why we have the NYCHA table.” It’s a very efficient and seemingly obvious way of neutralizing problems and criticism, but many elected officials with years and years in office never learn this lesson.

**Ben Smith**  
And we want to get to both some of the statewide and federal races and to your questions in a minute. But Harry, I want to call on you as the house historian here before we get off Mamdani. Where do you place him in the…post-war New York mayors. Like, how do you sort of situate him historically?

**Harry Siegel**  
So listening to everyone here. I’m going to answer a slightly different question.

**Ben Smith**  
That’s fine.

**Harry Siegel**  
Look, here’s how Mamdani is significantly like Bill de Blasio, and unlike every other mayor: he ran for office on stuff he cannot do.

We just saw this with the arrest Netanyahu thing, which he knew was practically nonsense when he was at 2%, when he was a front-runner, when he was the nominee, and now as mayor, he’s been sort of forced to concede that. And is still succeeding in that as a moral message. It was a smart thing for him to bring up, but he was playing dumb about that part.

He ran on Tax the Rich — not he’s going to tax the rich, Albany needs to tax the rich. Same as Bill de Blasio. It’s a really interesting thing to do and it is a theory of the case. And the theory is we’re going to build so much political momentum and this wave is going to rise, the things that aren’t possible are going to become possible and my election is the proof of that. which is an extension of the same ridiculous flywheel and having great success in opponents’ timing, running in Trump’s second term when regular Democrats are just absolutely sick of all the other options they have, recognizing this exhaustion with austerity. So he runs on stuff he cannot deliver sensibly. And his theory is, “bring me in, I’ll show that I’m decent, I’m trying, I’ll be able to deliver it.”

Now, how is he not like de Blasio? First off, his timing is much better. The wave is still rising. He’s doing something to help that. But a lot of it is, you know, he’s actually keeping up with rather than doing that, number one. Number two, de Blasio got pre-K, did not get his, you know, “cup of coffee a week” [tax hike](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/nyregion/mayor-closes-in-on-pre-k-funding-but-not-with-tax-increase.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that de Blasio talked about and sort of gave up. And he’s like, “I have a thing. I’m going to pocket it. I’ll implement that one thing and that’s it.”

So you have an energetic mayor who knows that his mass engagement office is very important, that he needs to keep churning. He needs to show that momentum is still rising, which brings us right into the congressional races, and is aware that messaging is the first thing. And if he does that and he shows goodwill, that he’s interested, he’s going to dance with them that brung him, that’s who he’s interested in, first and foremost, that he has space to keep generating momentum, and that and messaging, [as he said to us](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/zohran-mamdani-interview-transcript), back when he was at 2%, what’s most important in a mayor: “I’m a messenger.” That’s what’s going to allow this to continue. And so far, that theory of the case is really playing out.

**Juan Manuel Benitez**  
I’m going to disagree with Harry, because I do believe that—

**Ben Smith**  
I was just thinking, like, it’s amazing these politicians came in and talked to such a kind of cantankerous group.

**Juan Manuel Benitez**  
He ran on things that he can’t *fully* deliver, but he is really good at setting an objective and settling for something that goes midway. So he promised New Yorkers he was going to freeze rents, right? And people thought he was going to freeze every single rent. But then seven months in, the Rent Guidelines Board has frozen the rent for rent-stabilized buildings. That’s…a million apartments in the city. So that’s something that many New Yorkers are going to feel and they are going to see. It’s something concrete. He ran on free and fast buses and OK, they’re not free, but now the Fair Fares program, the discounted fares program is now wider, and now there are some routes where the buses are going to be faster. He ran on taxing the rich, and today we saw the first mailing going out to pied-a-terre owners, telling them what to do to see how much they’re going to have to pay. Those are concrete things that New Yorkers who are right now excited about the new mayor and new charismatic, energetic mayor who sounds principled, who sounds—

**Harry Siegel**  
I totally disagree that you’re disagreeing with me. This is his theory of the case. It’s “as long as people sense goodwill and that I’m moving toward this and that the city is getting a little more affordable and breathable, no one cares that much about the fine print,” which really was and continues to be things he cannot deliver on, as you were actually just running through, as Nicole was mentioning with the Office of Community Safety, which is nonsense at this point.

**Ben Max**  
But again, it’s six-and-a-half months in. We have to look at this as at least a three-and-a-half year project that he’s undertaking, until he has to run for re-election.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So he got the one promise that matters to his re-election. He was very systemic last year in the three concentric circles of voters that he needed. So the DSA base, it’s a place to start with. No candidate had competently exploited this base, and nobody with his charisma had looked at these voters as a valuable resource. But he couldn’t win office just with the DSA base. So then he needed the de Blasio progressive voters. He worked on making them comfortable. But the third group of people that he needed were people who were thinking about voting for Andrew Cuomo. He made them comfortable with two things: promising to keep Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, which he did during the general election, not during the primary because he needed those Cuomo voters for the general, but also the rent freeze because you’ve got 900,000 households, many of whom, actually most of whom, are not ideological DSA people. They’re not sitting at home reading socialist tracts, but they see, “I can save a couple hundred bucks a month and I’m gonna vote for the guy who’s promising that.” And it’s bad policy over the long term, but that delivers him that third block of votes that was critical to his winning.

But the bad news or the challenging news for him is he needs to do that again. Once you’ve done a rent freeze once, you can never raise the rent. It’s like the subway fare from 1904 to the 1950s. He’s put himself in a trap, really.

**Juan Manuel Benitez**  
He’s trying to do everything he promised or close to the things he promised year one, because then New York City mayors are going to encounter many different big crises and everything is over for them. They need to get everything year one when they have political capital.

And let me say one thing about Jessica Tisch because we’ve talked about her a lot. Yes to everything we’ve said here about Jessica Tisch, but she also has a job right now because she is damn good at what she does. And she was really good as a commissioner of the sanitation department, and she had roots in the NYPD from many years back. So she is a good person to have in your team too — she’s effective, right? So I think sometimes we tend to see all this…it might be a political play, obviously, but at the same time, she deserves to be there.

**Ben Smith**  
There’s obviously this kind of pragmatism to Mamdani, and “there’s no Democratic or Republican way to pick up the garbage.” And one of the things that struck me in our conversations was, even as this year, as Mamdani was making a lot of very pragmatic choices, we talked to his chosen candidates for Congress, who were both very new to politics, and I think particularly Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier — Lander is somewhat sort of a different category — and also, I would say, not that particularly pragmatic. [Claire Valdez](https://open.substack.com/pub/nyeditorialboard/p/claire-valdez-on-mamdani-aoc-and?r=af159) told us that she didn’t really believe in housing being constructed by anybody other than the government. And [Darializa](https://open.substack.com/pub/nyeditorialboard/p/darializa-avila-chevalier-on-housing?r=af159) said that she didn’t believe in borders or prisons, just sort of full-stop; bordering, sorry. And I guess I’m curious… if you’re a member of Congress, it’s obviously a different job. Do you think that the left is continuing to rise and that we’re going to see more really potentially successful socialist challenges against everybody to, I don’t know, Yvette Clarke to Hakeem Jeffries, or is there kind of a moderation following there?

**Myles Miller**  
I mean, challenge Yvette Clarke if you want. I don’t think you’ll be successful. I think [stepping into](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/nyregion/mamdani-osse-dsa-endorsement.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the Hakeem Jeffries challenge by Chi \[Osse\] was very smart, but there are, I mean, challenging Yvette Clarke is kind of crazy.

But to talk about Claire Valdez, it was very clear, and you saw it in the [transcript](https://open.substack.com/pub/nyeditorialboard/p/claire-valdez-on-mamdani-aoc-and?r=af159) from our interview…what’s a nice way to say this? It wasn’t clear that she knew what she was going to do if she got to Congress, right? Like it just was like, “who would you find coalition with? What are some things you’ll take on? Who are some members of Congress you know?” And it was brutal.

**Ben Max**  
Well, she’s a perfect example of the DSA movement candidate. Mamdani was not that. He was tied to the movement, of the movement, but also his own star. AOC is her own star. Then there’s candidates for federal or state office who are kind of just like movement candidates who are not necessarily as distinct on their own and would probably have no chance of winning or no chance of making a big amount of noise if they didn’t have that movement and now the stars of the movement behind them. And so I think there’s interesting distinctions there.

There was a big difference between Avila Chevalier coming in and talking with us. She may have said a bunch of things that people find objectionable or whatever it is, but she was ready to go. And Claire Valdez was much more unsure of what she seemed to believe in or want.

**Myles Miller**  
That was a great race. I mean, Reynoso is like…But it just was, it was such an interesting race because here’s this guy who’s devoted so much time to this neighborhood, this community, and could not break through, like truly couldn’t break through. And I just wonder— the [interview](https://open.substack.com/pub/nyeditorialboard/p/antonio-reynoso-on-mamdani-immigration?r=af159) was so fun, but he just couldn’t break through.

**Harry Siegel**  
Voters don’t care about any of this stuff. They don’t care about what people like us think. They don’t care about editorial boards right now. They want to throw these bums out. They’re sick of it. And candidates with very different approaches and very different settings made that clear.

And so in that moment, it’s still our job to vet these people and make sure voters have that information. “What are you going to do if you get to Congress? Are you thinking about who you’re going to align yourself with? Do you want people who think that the very concept of borders or jails is morally obscene?” And voters said, “that’s fine. Don’t be that guy.” And that’s it.

And so someone like Reynoso, who’s a natural, who’s talented, who’s come up through part of this movement, but is tied to the establishment, it’s like “we just, we don’t care.” And you just saw that in race after race after race. And our job is to take people through these motions and then they decide.

**Ben Smith**  
And yet, Kathy Hochul, a pure creature of the establishment, is sailing to re-election right now through a [pact with Mamdani](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/zohran-mamdani-kathy-hochul-endorsement-essay/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), through the usual kind of Republican ineptitude. What, and I guess Akash, say what you were going to say, but then tell us, what is term two Kathy Hochul once she’s gotten through this and no longer needs Mamdani? What’s that going to be like?

**Akash Mehta**  
Just on the point before, there is a question about what is DSA going to do and do they continue to field candidates — they will. I’m curious what the Democratic Party establishment does in response and whether they try harder because they’re just not trying very hard. And the best thing I read on the election was an analysis by the [researcher Michael Kinnucan](https://www.facebook.com/michael.kinnucan/posts/theres-a-bit-of-cope-happening-about-nyc-establishment-dems-about-how-the-massiv/10103929935035510/) who looked at Erik Dilan’s seat — Dilan is an Assembly Member who represents Bushwick and Cypress Hills, a twelve-year incumbent. The DSA ran a candidate against him four years ago and came within 200 votes of beating him. Erik Dilan scraped by with 2,500 votes in a 130,000 person district. Four years later, the DSA candidate won, Christian Celeste Tate. And Eric Dilan posted those same 2,500 votes. He had four years. He had a warning shot. He knew that they were on his heels. And he and the party and all of the…he got all the union support in the race — 1199, 32-BJ, etc. — they could not marshal a single more vote.

And Andrew Cuomo did not run very hard.

They did spend $400,000 against the DSA candidate in this \[Dilan\] race through a Super PAC. And in general in this race, the DSA overcame a literally unprecedented level of Super PAC spending. But, you know, [Errol Louis](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/primaries-mamdani-dsa-nyc-democratic-establishment.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has also written about this. The Democratic Party establishment has just lost the ability, which it once really did have, to organize voters and to show people that it’s, you know, delivering for them.

**Ben Smith**  
Except for Kathy Hochul.

**Ben Max**  
Well no, because in 2022, she only won by 6 points because a lot of Democrats stayed home. And that is, I think, her bet with Mamdani is “please get some percentage of your voters out for me,” because in New York City in 2022, she struggled very, very deeply with turnout. It wasn’t a big Republican wave that helped Lee Zeldin. It was similar to what happened for Kamala Harris. It was Democrats and people who had voted Democrat were not enthusiastic and stayed home. And so that’s her problem. She needs voters to come out. And so she has no New York City base. She’s from Western New York, obviously. I think she’ll win, but—

**Ben Smith**  
Anybody have a theory of what she’s going to do once she wins? It is amazing how little we talk about the governor of New York always in New York City.

**Juan Manuel Benitez**  
You don’t have a Republican Party in the state that can field a candidate that can be credible all over the state.

**Ben Smith**  
So let’s move on to that because I think that’s a really interesting question. To me, one of the most entertaining conversations we had was with \[Republican\] [John Catsimatidis](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/john-catsimatidis-on-donald-trump)…who, when we asked him about how they were going to reach out to immigrant voters who had voted for Trump and presumably would be willing to vote for Republicans, said that actually they were illegal and didn’t exist, which he knew because the vibes. And it was just— maybe Nicole, this goes to you, maybe you and Liena too, but what is wrong with the right? I mean, talk about parties that cannot bring people out, like the Democratic Party obviously has its problems, but the Republican Party in this state just seems in a state of total collapse.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Yes, Liena, tell us.

**Ben Smith**  
Are there any signs of life?

**Liena Zagare**  
I don’t think so. Have you seen it?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
We have more Republicans in the City Council over the past seven years. I mean, they’ve gone from three to six. So there is some evidence that—

**Liena Zagare**  
And a lot of that was over education.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And crime.

**Liena Zagare**  
And crime. So those two in Southern Brooklyn in particular?

**Ben Max**  
There’s also a relationship between Trump being in office again, like there’s a bigger context here, right? Bill de Blasio bumbling through a second term on the way out, sort of ham-handedly trying to get rid of the SHSAT. You know what I mean? It’s a lot of response politics, right?

**Myles Miller**  
Mike Lawler should have run \[for governor this year\]. It’s just like, I think about that all the time. Like, I think he would have been a really interesting, strong candidate. He’s doing it from the sidelines with his race and trying to tie his race to.

**Ben Max**  
He knew he wasn’t going to win in a Trump mid-term.

**Myles Miller**  
Yeah, but he’s got that, he’s got that fight in him though. You know, like, who else, like, Bruce Blakeman’s not bringing the fight.

**Ben Smith**  
I’m going to ask two quick federal questions. Is AOC going to run for president? Anybody here?

**Juan Manuel Benitez**  
She should.

**Ben Smith**  
Why do you think?

**Juan Manuel Benitez**  
She’s a great communicator. She’s a great messenger. She has a lot of energy. And I think if there’s something that the Democratic Party needs in Washington, DC right now to energize the base, it’s to feel candidates who are younger, who know how to communicate in the new environment and in the new media and information environment. And she is one of the best people to do that. Is she going to win? That’s another thing, right? But I think she would be a formidable candidate.

**Ben Max**  
She has to give up her seat in the House to run for President or Senate. She could probably walk into Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat, whether it’s against him or if he doesn’t run.

**Ben Smith**  
That’s my other question. Is \[Schumer\] going to run for re-election? Who knows? OK, Bob. Do we have a mic \[for audience questions\]?

**Catherine Vaughn (audience member)**  
Thank you. Catherine Vaughn from Abundance New York.

One thing I wanted to touch on was kind of, I think Mamdani has tried to make public sector excellence and efficiency part of his brand, from the “pothole politics” that we saw over the past six months to the “pit crew” announcement around in-house tech teams. But some of the bigger fish there — like New York Focus [recently reported](https://nysfocus.com/2026/07/06/ny-helps-hochul-mamdani-nyc-vacancies?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on Mamdani planning not to opt into New York Helps to speed up civil service hiring. You know, he’s kind of not going for that. And so curious to hear your thoughts on, you know, is it all sizzle and no steak? Do you think that Mamdani is really pursuing government efficiency to the maximum that he could?

**Ben Smith**  
New York Focus?

**Akash Mehta**  
Yeah, to me this is like at the core of also that same question of what would it mean to have a socialist mayor of the city. The pothole politics thing, someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think like, yeah, he’s filled more potholes than mayors have for the past like three years or five years or something, but it’s really just the average for like the past 15 or 16 years.

**Ben Smith**  
But better TikToks about potholes.

**Akash Mehta**  
Yes, exactly. So it is funny that that has become the synecdoche.

For me, the biggest question, yeah, absolutely civil service rules, but for me, the very biggest sort of barometer here is the relationship between the city staff and contractors, where the city spends more money right now on contractors than it does on salaries and core to a sort of socialist vision of governing a city is bringing those in-house. And also the abundance movement and the sort of civic tech movement and a point of agreement in at least a lot of sectors. And, there have been a couple of contracts, including the McKinsey one, which is interesting, that he’s cut, but broadly he has not broadly, and or maybe it’s too early to see whether he will, but—

**Ben Smith**  
If he is bringing this stuff in-house and so focused on sort of civic excellence, does this at some point bring him into conflict with public sector unions?

**Akash Mehta**  
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, those unions are why he, for instance, is not opting into the rules to essentially to get rid of the civil service examination process.

**Ben Max**  
But bringing more in-house is good for the unions. So I think that’s the positive there. I think the risk with the unions is, what’s he going to insist on in the next round of contract negotiations? Like, is he actually going to dig in and ask for any reforms, which Eric Adams did none of, in exchange for salary increases and other things?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Well, Myles brought up Speaker Menin before. It was striking in this year’s budget, and actually after the budget, that it’s Speaker Menin who has positioned herself as the fiscal moderate, but she wanted more spending on traditional Democratic constituencies. So we have this new $325 million [payout to the teacher’s aides](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/nyregion/nyc-mamdani-teachers-union-bonuses.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that Menin and the Council just voted on outside the budget. And you have Mamdani saying, “we’re going to try to see if there’s a way for us not to do this.” And the same thing with the [housing vouchers](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/nyregion/budget-mamdani-housing-cityfheps.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which is the traditional Democratic nonprofit constituency. It was the City Council who added this new spending in resistance to the mayor.

So it’s kind of a weird situation where we already spend so much money that we can’t afford socialism. And Mamdani actually seems to realize that. He is trying to carve out a little tiny space in the budget for his priorities, and that’s already very difficult for him to do because the union money, the non-profit contracts, I mean, this is all just inertia.

**Ben Smith**  
And Liena, what’s in the education space? In the early childhood space, there’s sort of a tussle over the public sector union’s role, I think, as well?

**Liena Zagare**  
Yes, in terms of the workforce and bringing pay equity and unions are very much involved in that.

**Ben Smith**  
Bob?

**Bob Liff (audience member)**  
Juan Manuel was talking about the working class basis of the rhetoric. But the DSA, now the DSA nationally is far more rigid and authoritarian than the New York City DSA. But you know, I went to Brooklyn College, I remember my socialism and the Leninist vanguard of the proletariat. This is a vanguard without a proletariat. This is, you know, you have essentially the affordability argument appealing to Gen. Xers who can’t afford to live in this city, and that’s real. I’m not, you know, I’m not dismissing it, but with the exception of the Espaillat race, where you had the complication that a lot of Harlem had not forgiven him for going up against Charlie Rangel years earlier, you know, this is not a minority-based movement, and even if their candidates have tended to be from communities of color. So it’s a very complicated analysis.

**Juan Manuel Benitez**  
I think more than Gen. Xers…

**Ben Smith**  
Yeah it’s Millennials. Come on.

**Juan Manuel Benitez**  
It’s more Millennials and Gen. Zers.

**Bob Liff**  
I was born in the Truman administration, so they’re all—

**Ben Smith**  
You’re an old millennial, Bob.

**Juan Manuel Benitez**  
And what we see is that we have all these new, young New Yorkers who are moving to the city or who grew up in the city, who did everything right, what they were told to do, they went to school, they got a degree, and now they’re trying to get a job, and they realize that they cannot afford the city. So I think that’s a constituency that he was looking for as part of his base.

I think we talk a lot about the DSA. In reality, the DSA is a great movement that can help you knock on many, many doors, something that is needed if you want to do this kind of retail politics and door-to-door politics that has been so effective, I think, with all these candidates. When it comes to the Espaillat and all these other candidates, I think there is an anti-establishment feeling among a wide sector of the Democratic Party. They don’t care about their positions that much these new, younger, candidates, Democrats, they just want the other guys out. They think that the House Democrats are not doing anything to counter Donald Trump.

And then one more thing, because we’ve spoken about this, but I think the Palestinian issue is a generational issue. It’s a defining political issue of this generation. And I think we live in a bubble, obviously, here in New York City and in the U.S., but the moment you leave the New York City and the U.S. bubble, you realize that most of the world agrees with Mamdani when it comes to his positions on Israel, on Benjamin Netanyahu. And obviously he knew he couldn’t arrest Benjamin Netanyahu. However, he’s going to make his life miserable if he decides to come to the U.N. General Assembly in September. And those images all around the world of the Prime Minister of Israel coming to the U.N. and being not welcome in New York City and having all these protests that he’s already alluding to, I think it’s going to be great messaging also for the mayor.

**Ben Max**  
I also think it’s — and this is not an original thought, plenty of people have pointed this out — but it’s almost better to think of Mamdani and the movement as a populist movement, not a socialist movement, right? There’s 13,000 members of the New York City DSA by their numbers. I don’t know if…I’m not sure I believe this, but they had over 100,000 people volunteer on the campaign. So it’s different. It’s anti-establishment, it’s youth, it’s lots of, I think, old school sort of socialists and liberals who are just sick of the Andrew Cuomo types and wanted a Bill de Blasio who’s just better at being Bill de Blasio — you know, what Bill de Blasio promised, but not corrupt, enjoy being mayor, and run the government a little better.

**Myles Miller**  
Cooler. You know, good looking. I wonder like what’s the reason why...you saw the fight on the [cover of the New York Post](https://nypost.com/2026/07/20/us-news/black-nyc-politician-slams-dsa-as-white-supremacy-as-growing-dem-feud-spills-onto-social-media/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), right, with \[Queens Borough President\] Donovan Richards and saying like, this is white supremacy and stuff...But it does raise a good point in like how does the DSA start to look more like the communities that the candidates they’re going to be running against look like? You know, for a good part of the last 10 to 15 years, the Working Families Party sort of filled that role. And you saw that fight between Claire Valdez and Antonio Reynoso, that is the question that sort of needs answering. It’s like, I think Bob raises a good point about…the groups in these neighborhoods where they’re running, like how do you get more Black support? How do you get more Hispanic support? And sure, there are Black and Hispanic people who have voted for these candidates. But I think we all understand what I’m getting at.

**Ben Max**  
But you’re also getting at one of the biggest stories of New York politics, which is labor unions don’t move votes anymore. There’s a bunch of attention on UAW Region 9 — maybe they are just picking the right horses, I don’t know. I mean, I’m interested in…is there any evidence that the unions are moving votes?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
They don’t move votes, but they can make life miserable for a mayor who really—

**Ben Max**  
100% agree.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
I mean, this is the story of John Lindsay. He wanted the police to work at night, and they didn’t want to. He wanted efficiencies to waste collection, and they resisted that. And I think Mamdani’s smart enough, just as every mayor since Lindsay has been smart enough, not to go near them, which is a big part of our fiscal problem.

**Alyssa Katz**  
And just to take your example of UAW Region 9, that is a movement that is not for the mainstream Democrats. That is a movement that is front and center in the Mamdani moment, and particularly on pro-Palestinian advocacy on the anti-AIPAC campaigns that took out Espaillat, that defeated Reynoso. Valdez and Chevalier both worked for, and were members of UAW.

**Ben Smith**  
Not as auto workers.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Not as auto workers. I mean, they’re organizing academics, you know, Columbia University, libraries, museums, they’ve been very intentionally as an international going into these left politics.

**Ben Max**  
Anti-rich, like “tax the rich,” very sort of “the corporatists are bad.”

**Ben Smith**  
I think we have time for one more question.

**Mike (audience member)**  
Doesn’t that present that it’s not as much socialism as it is an anti-colonial and anti-colonialism, whether the colonialism is the ultra-rich in New York City or the struggle in Palestine or gentrification or affordability, it’s really more of an anti-colonial movement than it is socialism, but the DSA happens to be the vehicle for it?

**Alyssa Katz**  
Absolutely, I think the answer is yes. I 100% agree with you. I think that is the common denominator here, and I think there’s a lot to contemplate about what that means about New York City, about people’s perceptions of New York City, why Mamdani won. I think that is absolutely the right analysis.

**Ben Smith**  
Now we have time for one more question, because that was such a short answer, which was just, you’re right, Mike.

**Audience Member**  
So, you know, I work at DCAS as a city worker. I’m a lonely technocrat in a populist world. Man, what do I do? They’re coming for me. No, my question is, if you are like an abundance-minded, not necessarily moderate, but there’s definitely an overlap, how do you, to use Gen. Z lingo, bring the sauce to the kids? Like, do establishment Democrats just need more vertical form videos? Is that it? Is it a TikTok? Should they just have Temple Run on their foreheads while they do speeches to get the visual stimuli going? Or is it rather that we need an entire new faction of Democrat that’s also running against the establishment and really it’s like a kind of like a three-way triangulation thing going where it’s like, I don’t necessarily want to overthrow capitalism, but I also don’t want Sleepy Joe. He’s a real nice guy, but you know, he’s not exactly the picture of dynamism—

**Ben Smith**  
Where are the liberals going to get their shock troops other than him?Does anybody see? Because I think it’s totally like abundance has sort of captured the intelligentsia, but does not seem to be able to produce 10,000 people to knock on doors. And does that seem likely to change? Does anyone see it?

**Ben Max**  
You have to have a vision. This was Andrew Cuomo’s problem. What’s your vision? We’re in a time where you have to promise people something, you know, interesting, good, exciting. So I don’t know, I’m not going to write a prescription for the abundance movement, but you’ve got to show it better. Like, what’s the next wave of the New York City subway system? Run on that, you know? Something.

**Ben Smith**  
Ezra Klein for mayor.

**Ben Max**  
Well, but it’s not about the process and, it’s about the outcomes, right? That’s what Mamdani understood. It’s, what are you promising people you’re actually going to do for them?

**Juan Manuel Benitez**  
I think we have another question in the back.

**Zach Jaworski (audience member)**  
Hi, how’s it going? My name is Zach Jaworski. I think one of the really fascinating things about this administration, obviously you guys have talked all night about the changes in the city itself and the vibes, but I think one thing, especially all of you being journalism adjacent at least, that’s been really fascinating is the transformation of the press and how they’re covering Mayor Mamdani. You’re seeing the gentleman up here mention vertical form videos. I never thought in a million years I’d see \[CBS 2’s\] Marcia Kramer do an Instagram reel, but you’re seeing people adapt to it. How do you think that has changed under this administration and where do you think journalism goes forward when it’s all about getting views on social media now as opposed to holding power to account?

**Ben Smith**  
Yeah, maybe I’ll take that one. I mean, I think what Mamdani is sophisticated about actually is that he understands that the press has a role, if a diminished one. I think there’s an impulse for particularly successful new politicians to think the media has no role for the first six months of their honeymoon and then realize that it does. And New York media is obviously still very relevant.

Yeah, but I think in a way what you’re getting at…there’s always a moment with every, each particularly these new digital technologies we’ve lived through that people think like, “oh, only one side, only one slice of the ecosystem can figure this out.” Like there was a sense the internet was for liberals. Like Facebook was of the left and Obama went and visited there. And there was just this conventional wisdom when I was coming up as a reporter that only Democrats were on the internet. It was because Democrats were younger and younger people were on the internet. And then it turned out that Trump and Republicans could also be on the internet.

And I think there was this sense for five minutes that like only socialists can do vertical video. And I think this is obviously not true. And the sort of technocrat who is crushing it at this, your guy, is Dan Lurie in San Francisco, the most popular elected executive in the country, and just does these very kind of dorky moderate videos about how he’s like cleaned up a section of a street and there’s a restaurant opening. And I think you’re just going to see sort of mass adoption of these new forms in a way that like it isn’t going to be only the left, only the right, only the mainstream, only the fringe can do it. Mamdani is so adept at them and is a little ahead, but I think that’s not, that’s not an enduring advantage.

**Juan Manuel Benitez**  
But if you can tell us a little bit, because you’ve been covering Mamdani doing vertical video for the last six to eight months or more. And you’ve been in those press conferences. So do you see as a young journalist coming in that the whole thing is changing?

**Zach Jaworski**  
I think that in the last six months there’s definitely been a significant shift towards vertical videos. I mean, like I was mentioning, you’re seeing mainstream outlets doing it now, where that wasn’t necessarily the case pre-Mamdani. And I think that is sort of endemic of having a mayor that is a national figure for a not bad reason like the last one, I suppose, where Eric Adams was making national news because he was being indicted by the federal government. Mamdani is making national news because candidates he’s endorsing are going on to win primaries in contested districts. And he’s sort of viewed as a national leader of this new leftist movement.

I think that part of what the media is seeing and what people who are going into it are seeing is that there’s sort of an immense potential to get engagement online from somebody \[Mamdani\] like this. And I think that people and news outlets are trying to use that engagement to go towards their print or their broadcast. If that’s necessarily working, I’m not entirely sure, but I do think there’s been a significant shift towards that.

**Ben Smith**  
That’s probably what’s so special about him. I think what Trump said when they went to meet \[Mamdani\] was like, “you see all these cameras? Like, this is amazing. I have heads of state in here and they don’t have so many cameras.” That was the sort of core of the goodwill of that meeting was Trump was just so impressed with how many cameras had come. And I do think, I mean, ultimately, one of you wrote this, but just Mamdani’s capacity to focus attention is so extraordinary.

Well thank you for your focused attention. Thank you all for doing this. And thank you, thank you, Emma, for hosting us!
### What Mamdani's Efficiency Commission Got Right — and Where it Fell Short
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-mamdani-coge-government-efficiency-ballot-reform-recommendations/
Last updated: 2026-07-30T15:49:27.000Z
For the Mamdani administration, making New York’s vast bureaucracy work better has been a consistent and concerted campaign. A little more than six months in, the mayor has launched a number of admirable efforts, including a [SPEED task force](https://www.nyc.gov/content/dam/nycgov/nyc-main/pdf/2026/speed%5Freport%5F051326.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to accelerate housing development, [Public Interest Technology crews](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani-launches--public-interest-technology--pit--crew--t?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to overhaul agency operations and [a push this week](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani-announces--open-for-small-business---over-50-refor?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to streamline small business regulations. Such measures are particularly important when paired with the mayor’s expansive, expensive plans to increase the reach of government, including a more comprehensive early childcare system. 

Mamdani’s Commission on Government Efficiency, which this week proposed meaningful changes to what is effectively the City’s constitution, continues in the same vein. The commission will vote on the recommendations on Thursday, and approved proposals will appear on the November ballot. Although the commission’s work was rushed and its charge limited, it started an important citywide conversation about the nuts and bolts of government. 

Still, close analysis of the commission’s proposals underscores that if this essential work is a New York City marathon, Mamdani remains in Brooklyn on the third or fourth mile of the race. The hard work of improving local governance requires more imagination and ambition than pruning back overgrown procedures. And the great majority of the work will lie less in changing the charter than in re-orienting the everyday work of City agencies to focus relentlessly on performance, and in the process tune up both the effectiveness and the efficiency of government. 

The [Commission report](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2026/COGE-proposed-final-report-executive-summary-July-20-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) recognizes that government “cannot seem to get out of its own way,” and its five draft ballot measures are worthy as far as they go. But many could have achieved greater efficiencies. And one significant reform to city government will not be put before voters in November at all.

Taken one by one:

- Restaurants and public space advocates asked to speed up approval for outdoor dining by removing it from the “revocable consent” system, under which the City grants a business individually negotiated permission to occupy a stretch of sidewalk or roadway — permission the City can withdraw at any time. Getting one takes months. The first ballot measure helpfully proposes streamlining it — but stops short of moving outdoor dining onto standard permit footing, leaving restaurateurs with a bespoke arrangement they can’t fully count on.
- The second question focuses on the City’s expensive and time-consuming procurement process, including by tailoring onerous vendor questionnaires to the size of the contract or business, requiring the board that writes contracting rules to meet and allowing agencies doing the buying to handle certain approvals now routed through the mayor’s office. All that amounts to real improvement. But it does not include possible solutions for other major complaints about delay and payment, for example, time limits for registering contracts or enforceable standards for paying vendors on time, which seem necessary to alter the City’s behavior. The Commission said the City has promised to adopt some related measures outside the charter, but that leaves them vulnerable to changes from administration to administration.
- Street safety is arguably the arena where the Commission most closely rose to the city’s needs. The third question proposes streamlining the process for street redesigns and seems likely to expedite roadway improvements and save lives. And it includes another smart measure no hearing witness asked for: letting the City sell the unused development rights above landmarked buildings like courthouses and libraries through the expedited review process the Council recently granted to every property owner, save the City itself. Together with sales of small surplus lots, this would raise a projected $200 million.
- Housing advocates, on the other hand, have reason for disappointment in Question 4\. They asked to make the Department of Buildings the city’s single permitting authority, [consolidating approvals now scattered across more than a dozen agencies](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-housing-permits-fast-track-construction-mamdani/?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email). Instead, COGE settled chiefly for proposing a shared website on which builders can apply for permits in one place, with every agency retaining the power to review and approve on its own schedule. This was helpful but not especially bold, leaving too much bureaucracy unaltered.
- And the rainy day fund target called for by the Commission in its Question 5 — with a target 12% of tax revenue and a deposit methodology written by the very entity (the mayor’s own budget office) that it means to constrain — is a step forward but falls short of the [more prudent 16% target that history shows is necessary to cover full revenue losses during a recession.](https://cbcny.org/research/cbc-recommends-coge-strengthen-proposed-charter-rainy-day-fund-language?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

To be clear, all five proposals would deliver meaningful gains to New Yorkers who expect the gears of their government to turn with reasonable speed, and therefore merit approval by the Commission and then passage by voters. The Commission members deserve praise for their work; the perfect ought not be the enemy of the good. But Vital City will press the Mamdani administration to continue improving government effectiveness with all the levers at their disposal.

The types of ideas Vital City’s [Just Fix It](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/just-fix-it/) project would like to see the administration embrace include [those floated in our published roundtable of government veterans and scholars](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/expert-advice-for-mamdanis-commission-on-government-efficiency/). Primary among them is for the government to be guided by performance and results, not mere activity or “counting” metrics as is too often the case today with the Mayor’s Management Report. That also means a mechanism for relentless accountability, in the same way that the city’s police department so many years ago paired new measurements of crime with a departmentwide management structure, Compstat. A city can approve, permit and procure at twice the speed and still not know whether its programs are serving the needs of its residents. 

We also support a commitment to work with the State (who exercises much of the control) [to fix a civil service system](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-yorks-mamdani-ny-civil-service-system/) that makes hiring employees exhausting, time-consuming and discouraging of top talent; creating an independent body like the Congressional Budget Office to score the fiscal impact of legislation before it passes; and starting budgeting from evidence of what works rather than last year's baseline. That kind of thinking will not be on the ballot in November. 

Not least, the reform [urged by more COGE hearing witnesses than any other](https://vitalcity-nyc.github.io/nyc-coge-testimony/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — opening up closed and generally low-turnout mayoral primaries so that all of the city’s voters can have a say in the electoral contests that tend to be decisive — is not among the proposed ballot measures. While a move to open, nonpartisan primaries would have ultimately required Albany’s approval, it is unquestionably the type of proposal that ought to be put to voters, as it bears directly on how they pick their leaders. The same cannot be said of every other ballot question. Open primaries would have allowed more New Yorkers to take part in the electoral process, making local government more accountable to the people. It is a shame the City missed this opportunity.

Expand the full catalog 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-23-at-10.09.04---AM-1.png)
### How New Jersey Got a Head Start on AI
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nj-government-ai-innovation-authority/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T14:37:59.000Z
[Vital City](https://soundcloud.com/vital-city-604970448?ref=vitalcitynyc.org "Vital City") · [How New Jersey Got a Head Start on AI](https://soundcloud.com/vital-city-604970448/how-new-jersey-got-a-head?ref=vitalcitynyc.org "How New Jersey Got a Head Start on AI")

---

*This is the fourth installment of Borrow and Steal, Vital City’s monthly interview series profiling evidence-backed policy ideas from around the world and the people translating them into reality.*

*Our guest is* [*Dave Cole*](https://innovation.nj.gov/about/team/dave-cole/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*, chief innovation officer for the State of New Jersey. Dave’s team — the* [*New Jersey Innovation Authority*](https://innovation.nj.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *— was codified into state law in January 2026, turning what since 2018 had been a temporary grant-funded office into a permanent state agency. The team takes on tasks like building resident-facing digital services, identifying AI use cases and setting AI policy and running data-driven outreach to connect New Jerseyans to public programs.*

*New Jersey is an interesting case study in digital service delivery in part because it was the first state to make a generative AI tool — something known as* [*the NJ AI Assistant*](https://innovation.nj.gov/projects/ai-assistant/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *— available to all its employees. Cole’s office led the rollout and has also helped build a range of more advanced AI applications. For example, his office used machine learning to clean data from various state programs to identify students eligible for* [*federally funded summer meals*](https://innovation.nj.gov/projects/summerebt/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*. It also built a computer vision tool for the state Economic Development Authority to help process PDF applications, cutting review time by 20 days.*

*Nationwide, cities and states have struggled to reckon with how to harness the benefits of AI while minimizing risks to workers and residents. In New York, AI emerged as a focal point in the* [*contentious NY-12 congressional primary*](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/nyregion/ai-money-bores-lasher-primary.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*. Gov. Kathy Hochul recently signed* [*a moratorium on new data center construction, while simultaneously praising the technology’s utility*](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-07-15/ny-gov-on-using-ai-to-clean-up-the-state-s-legal-code-video?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *in helping the state review and clean up antiquated laws. Meanwhile, in the city, Mayor Zohran Mamdani* [*quickly shuttered a botched AI chatbot* ](https://themarkup.org/artificial-intelligence/2026/01/30/mamdani-to-kill-the-nyc-ai-chatbot-we-caught-telling-businesses-to-break-the-law?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*launched during the Adams administration — and announced a new push to deploy* [*Public Interest Technology crews*](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani-launches--public-interest-technology--pit--crew--t?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *to fix digital services in select agencies.* 

*In our interview, Cole walks through how the state built its robust digital service and AI infrastructure, how it decides which use cases to pursue and which to avoid and what he’d tell other government agencies earlier in the journey.* 

*The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.* 

---

**Cara Eckholm:** Can you explain what a chief innovation officer does, and how the New Jersey Innovation Authority differs from a CTO’s office?

**Dave Cole:** The Innovation Authority encompasses the state’s digital service operation, a policy team focused on innovation guidance to agencies and the governor’s office, and a communications and engagement team that uses data-driven marketing to ensure residents — particularly underserved ones — are aware of and accessing government services. It’s a multidisciplinary team focused on using technology to improve outcomes.

**Cara Eckholm:** And does New Jersey have a separate CTO’s office? What’s the relationship between innovation and IT?

**Dave Cole:** We do, and I think the New Jersey model is fairly unique and effective. My role sits in the governor’s cabinet, which gives us direct access to the governor’s team — particularly important with a new governor (Mikie Sherrill), who came in January with a strong focus on operational excellence. The CTO leads the Office of Information Technology and is a close colleague. The rough division is that they start with core IT infrastructure — networks, servers, cloud providers — while we start with resident needs and program outcomes. We meet in the middle. Under our authority structure, the CTO also sits on our board and my role is written into law to advise and support his office.

**Cara Eckholm:** So you’re doing the user research, defining agency needs, developing the strategy and then collaborating with the CTO’s office on the build?

**Dave Cole:** We do a lot of the development and building ourselves, either with our internal team or with partners. To me, innovation is about using available tools to get effective outcomes — very often that means doing something differently. We’re not focused on R&D for its own sake; we’re focused on solving core problems facing New Jersey residents. The CTO’s office might provide cloud platforms like AWS or Azure; we might use those platforms to develop a resident-facing web service.

**Cara Eckholm:** Can you walk us through the history of the Innovation Authority? My understanding is the office was philanthropy-funded for a period before being codified into law.

**Dave Cole:** The predecessor, the Office of Innovation, has operated since 2018 on a state budget grant — essentially an appropriation that funded our team. As our scope grew, particularly through the COVID pandemic, it became increasingly clear we needed a dedicated statute that gave us a clear legal basis for the work we do with agencies. That bill passed and [was signed in January](https://nj.gov/governor%5Fmurphy/news/news/562025/approved/20260105b.shtml?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The authority structure also lets us continue receiving state appropriations and, where helpful, private grants to scale experimental work or areas where we lack state resources.

**Cara Eckholm:** What does the team look like today?

**Dave Cole:** About 80 full-time, plus contractors. The core disciplines are product management, human-centered design and research, content design and software engineering. We also have data analysts, communications and engagement specialists and operations staff who make it all run.

**Cara Eckholm:** Your office has taken the lead on AI policy for the state and on identifying productive use cases. How do you set policy in such a rapidly changing environment, and how do you determine when AI is actually the right tool?

**Dave Cole:** We started with a whole-of-government strategy. The previous governor established an [AI Task Force](https://innovation.nj.gov/projects/ai-task-force/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that I think was effective at setting principles: take advantage of generative AI to improve service delivery, but with a clear focus on equity — don’t let the technology exacerbate existing inequalities. We bring technical expertise to the evaluation so we know what we’re getting into, and ensure guardrails are in place where necessary.

We built training available to the entire state workforce covering what generative AI is, common use cases and key considerations — including that AI models may reflect biases from their training data, and that any AI-generated work requires human review and accountability, not just a cursory sign-off. We also knew that prohibiting the technology outright rarely works: People are already using it in their personal lives. So we paired the training with practical tools.

**Cara Eckholm:** Tell me about the NJ AI Assistant. Who has access, and how widely is it used?

**Dave Cole:** The full state employee list has access through single sign-on. We pair it with the training — employees can test prompts in real time as they go through the training, then continue using the tool afterward. About 20% of the state workforce has logged in, and we’ve now seen over 1.2 million prompts generated through the platform. Usage ranges from people who log in once during training to employees who use it daily as a core productivity tool.

**Cara Eckholm:** How would you describe the tool’s functionality? Is it essentially a ChatGPT-style interface, or have you built more advanced capabilities into it?

**Dave Cole:** Think of it as a chat interface — you send requests, upload documents, get analysis — but hosted on state infrastructure with appropriate data and security controls. We use an open-source framework so we can add features over time, though we’re deliberate about keeping it accessible. For more advanced use cases, development teams across the state use AI for code generation — tools like Claude Code or open-source alternatives — backed by models procured through state cloud platforms.

**Cara Eckholm:** How did you decide to build your own tool rather than give employees enterprise access directly from one of the foundation model companies?

**Dave Cole:** Partly, we already had something in development for our own team. When we partnered with [Innovate US](https://innovate-us.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to build out the training, building on state infrastructure gave us the most control over IT security. We had access to OpenAI models through Azure and Anthropic models through AWS, so we could offer the latest commercial models hosted on our own infrastructure with our own security regime in place.

**Cara Eckholm:** What was your timeline relative to the 2023 moment when ChatGPT changed everything?

**Dave Cole:** We released the assistant about six to nine months after ChatGPT’s release. Our earliest generative AI use cases were just using ChatGPT directly with public information — once we saw those early use cases land, we invested in building an application connected to the models via API rather than through the public chat interface.

**Cara Eckholm:** How do you choose between models as the landscape evolves?

**Dave Cole:** We have a general-purpose model for the main chatbot and then for custom applications we’ll score a variety of models against the specific use case. Cost is a real factor — some inference tasks can use more efficient models, others need higher reasoning capability.

**Cara Eckholm:** What use cases are most popular among state employees?

**Dave Cole:** Within the AI Assistant itself, pretty traditional generative AI: drafting and reviewing documents, brainstorming, data analysis from uploaded spreadsheets. The tool includes built-in reminders about human review and checking results. When we work with specific agencies, we don’t start by assuming AI is the answer — we identify the user need first. But there are recurring patterns. Document uploads come up constantly: tax clearance certificates, eligibility documents for benefits programs. The underlying problem is consistent enough that we’ve built reusable tools around it.

**Cara Eckholm:** Your website mentions a tool you built for the Economic Development Authority. Can you walk me through that use case?

**Dave Cole:** For small business economic development programs, uploaded documents were sitting in review queues for up to three weeks before someone could verify accuracy. We built a tool that uses an AI model to cross-check uploaded documents against a template and a prompt listing what to look for — validating that required fields are present, dates are current and that the document is the right one. The reviewer is now just checking AI outputs against source material rather than doing the review from scratch, which dramatically compresses cycle time. We also surfaced that validation to applicants at upload: If there’s a potential issue, we flag it and let them fix it before submitting. That check alone can save another three-week cure cycle.

**Cara Eckholm:** Did the Economic Development Authority come to you with the problem, or did you surface it?

**Dave Cole:** They came to us. They were concerned about customer experience and processing time, and asked whether tools existed to speed things up without sacrificing quality. That led to a pilot, which produced good results, and we’re now scaling the document review tool across human services, labor, education and other programs through funding from a [Public Benefit Innovation Fund](https://www.publicbenefitinnovationfund.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) grant we received last year. The goal is a general-purpose platform that multiple agencies can access independently.

**Cara Eckholm:** Do you have outcome data on processing time reductions?

**Dave Cole:** Yes. In the EDA case, the baseline review cycle was around 21 days, and intricate documents could take an hour for a human to check manually. The AI model essentially eliminates that review cycle if it’s available at the point of upload. For memo generation from large source files, we’ve heard of processes that previously took a full week of staff time compressed to 15 to 30 minutes of AI-assisted drafting, followed by an hour or two of review.

> There are real inefficiencies in government, but there’s also a heightened standard. We have to earn resident trust, which means considering factors private companies might not.

**Cara Eckholm:** What other big wins stand out?

**Dave Cole:** The AI training and assistant framework itself, as a model for responsible adoption — not blocking the technology but clearly communicating trade-offs and constraints so employees can proceed with the right tools. Beyond that, two examples stand out.

In partnership with the Department of Labor, we used AI to rewrite email and print notification templates in plain language. A designer on our team used AI prompts to automate much of that generation and then reviewed the outputs. The result was roughly 30% faster response rates from residents receiving notices — people took the required action more quickly because the language was clearer. We’ve now done over 100 template updates in just one program (unemployment insurance). Those Figma files and the research brief are [available open source](https://www.figma.com/community/file/1242850667740493704/unemployment-insurance-email-template-kit-v1-0?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) so other states can build on it.

The other is the [Summer EBT program](https://www.govtech.com/artificial-intelligence/n-j-uses-ai-to-find-kids-eligible-for-summer-food-benefit?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Students enrolled in SNAP, TANF or Medicaid are eligible for summer meal benefits, but deduplicating enrollment lists across those programs is complex. We built a matching tool using traditional machine learning — not generative AI — to cross-reference datasets and eliminate duplicates. The result was cleaner program integrity and access to roughly $20 million in additional federal funding flowing to New Jersey families for summer food assistance.

**Cara Eckholm:** Government is often cited as a sector with lots of low-hanging AI fruit. Are there use cases you’ve tried that didn’t pan out, or areas where you think the hype outpaces the reality?

**Dave Cole:** Honestly, there are more use cases we’ve deliberately avoided than ones we’ve tried and abandoned. We try to be very careful upfront about whether AI is actually the most efficient and appropriate tool for a given problem. There are real inefficiencies in government, but there’s also a heightened standard. We have to earn resident trust, which means considering factors private companies might not.

One concrete area we’ve avoided is public-facing chatbots. If content is hard to find on a government website, the answer is usually better content design and information architecture, not a chatbot layered on top of a broken site. We’ve found chatbots more effective as internal tools where staff have enough domain knowledge to recognize when outputs aren’t quite right.

**Cara Eckholm:** So a chatbot isn’t going to fix a bad website.

**Dave Cole:** That would be my position.

**Cara Eckholm:** How are you thinking about AI’s labor implications for the state workforce?

**Dave Cole:** Both governors I’ve served under have been clear: AI is not a job replacement tool in New Jersey. We do see cases where work is repetitive and could benefit from automation to reduce human error. So we’re looking at applying AI where it can improve quality of life for employees or expand capacity in areas where we haven’t been able to hire. We’ve had open conversations on our own team about this. Viewpoints range from skepticism to cautious optimism, and we value all of them. In the private sector it’s a different story, and I wouldn’t presume to speak for those decisions, but I’ll note that there’s a lot of capital moving around and AI often gets used as the narrative for layoffs that have other drivers.

**Cara Eckholm:** What’s your advice for states earlier in their AI journey? And relatedly, how replicable is the Innovation Authority model?

**Dave Cole:** They’re intrinsically linked. The reason we were able to move quickly on the AI Assistant is that we had years of investment building a team that understood the technology and the state’s IT ecosystem. That capacity is the foundation, before any specific AI initiative.

Many states are doing this now; we’re not alone. But we benefited from being early, and the team we’ve been able to attract is what makes it possible. For any state without that investment yet, the team is where to start. There are flexible models — we began as a budget grant backed by a nonprofit for staffing support, and evolved into a formal authority. I am always happy to talk to anyone in the public sector trying to figure out how to get started.

The other prerequisite is leadership alignment. Gov. Sherrill came in with a clear agenda around government efficiency — not just cost-cutting, but measuring and improving outcomes. When that direction permeates cabinet and agency leadership, it becomes much easier to do this work. People understand it’s okay to try things differently and that there will be support for it. AI fits within that foundation rather than having to justify itself against institutional inertia.

**Cara Eckholm:** You’ve used both “innovation authority” and “digital services” — are those synonymous in your mind?

**Dave Cole:** Generally, yes, though we think of the Innovation Authority a bit more broadly. We have four core functions: a resident experience team (digital services for residents), a business experience team (same for businesses), a communications and engagement team focused on performance-based marketing for public benefit programs, and a data and policy team. The C&E work is something I don’t think many states have: It’s essentially data-driven marketing applied to government programs — making sure people know about available benefits, and that outreach reaches communities equitably rather than just those with existing access to information. Any state can start with digital services as the specific focus and the broader structure can follow.

**Cara Eckholm:** So you’re actually optimizing ad spend for public benefit programs.

**Dave Cole:** That’s right. It’s a core part of the C&E work.

**Cara Eckholm:** Are there other states at a comparable level of maturity that people might not have heard about — especially outside the coasts?

**Dave Cole:** The [Beeck Center at Georgetown](https://beeckcenter.georgetown.edu/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) maintains a digital state network with a comprehensive index of programs across the country. On specific states: California has a range of organizations and can teach us a lot about how to scale digital services. Pennsylvania has strong emerging talent under its new governor. Maryland and New York — at both the state and city levels — have active efforts. Colorado has done significant work on benefits access. Virginia has recently revitalized its digital services work. There’s a good support network for practitioners doing this work.

**Cara Eckholm:** Last question: What is your relationship to New Jersey’s cities?

**Dave Cole:** Our primary mandate and funding is tied to state programs, but we engage with local governments wherever those programs intersect. I’ve spoken at conferences of mayors and League of Municipalities events, and we’ve worked with individual municipal leaders, particularly around permitting reform, which sits at the state-local boundary. Our resident-first orientation helps here. If someone needs a building permit, they need it resolved quickly and correctly. Whether the relevant authority is the Department of Environmental Protection, Department of Transportation, Department of Community Affairs or a local agency is our problem to bridge, not theirs. [Gov. Sherrill’s permitting initiative](https://www.nj.gov/governor/news/2026/20260618b.shtml?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) follows that model: convene all parties, share information and work collaboratively across jurisdictional lines.

**Cara Eckholm:** Thanks so much, Dave. This was a great conversation, I learned a ton.

**Dave Cole:** Thank you — and thanks for raising awareness of our work.
### Flooding in New York is a Policy Choice. Mayor Mamdani Should Reject It.
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-floodproofing-cloudburst-rain-policy/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:51.000Z
After a week of torrid temperatures and wildfire smoke, New Yorkers woke up to another climate disaster — flash flooding on July 18\. 

If it felt familiar, that’s because it was. Just two months ago, on May 20, a flash flood paralyzed much of the city. During that storm, New York City’s [FloodNet](https://dataviz.floodnet.nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) sensor network — a series of roughly 431 flood sensors managed by NYU and CUNY — detected flooding across 98 sensors. One sensor in [Hollis, Queens recorded 46 inches of street-level flood water](https://dataviz.floodnet.nyc/viz?v=XXJBN68L5NbrjP0zNfBRA&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in under two hours. This time around, a sensor in [Fresh Meadows, Queens recorded 29.3 inches](https://dataviz.floodnet.nyc/viz?v=CuKkUqUoR8INKmpGalZ-K&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in about an hour.

It’s not actually the total amount of rainfall and street-level flood depths that are the most alarming; rather, it’s the sudden deluge in a very short period of time. Meteorologists have confirmed that in the worst-case scenarios, the brunt of the rainfall can come down in just 20 to 40 minutes. That is truly the epitome of what we call a “cloudburst” event. 

Believe it or not, New York is better equipped to handle flash flooding than it was 10 or 20 years ago. After Hurricane Ida in 2021, the City’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) made significant investments in a Cloudburst Management program that aims to alleviate the impacts from these sudden, heavy downpours. The most famous example is the[ award-winning sunken basketball court, modeled after similar projects in the Netherlands, at NYCHA’s South Jamaica Houses](https://www.aslany.org/awards/south-jamaica-water-square/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Building on that work, a series of Cloudburst projects were announced in Corona, Kissena Park, Parkchester and East New York, followed by a recent $95 million investment from Mayor Mamdani in Homecrest, Brooklyn earlier this year. 

Communities across New York City are also taking it upon themselves to prepare their communities and neighbors for the next big storm. In Gowanus, artist Tiffany Baker is[ transforming flood-impact stories](https://rebuildbydesign.org/rycn-rainproof-gowanus/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from Gowanus residents into an outdoor mural campaign accompanied by practical flood prevention education. In Hollis, the Southeast Queens Residents Environmental Justice Coalition is[ documenting the story](https://rebuildbydesign.org/rycn-sqrejc-flood-education/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of flooding in parts of the neighborhood that have no sewers. In Bed-Stuy, the First Nigerian SDA Church trains [local youth](https://rebuildbydesign.org/rycn-rainproof-calvary/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to perform peer education across the community. There is even a flood preparedness[ play](https://rebuildbydesign.org/rycn-flood-sensor-aunty/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that has been performed in chai shops and parks throughout the city, and the development of an AI chatbot[ for renters](https://rebuildbydesign.org/rycn-floodchat/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

It all amounts to real progress — but it’s not nearly enough.

In fact, allowing our public transit system, roads, homes, and businesses to flood like they do is a policy choice. The City’s sewer system is designed to handle 1.75 inches of rainfall per hour, so when we see 2 inches in a mere 20 minutes, floodwaters will naturally travel to the nearest low-lying area, which is often street ends and basements. At DEP’s current pace, which is roughly $1 billion per year, it would take approximately [30 years](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/water/stormwater/2024-stormwater-analysis-report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to implement capital improvements in the 80+ stormwater priority areas they have identified. A full build-out to modernize our system would cost upwards of $250 billion. In the meantime, New Yorkers end up footing the bill for lost wages due to disrupted commutes, property damages and long-term health conditions from toxic water and mold. 

Mayor Mamdani can reduce these impacts by emboldening every city agency to capture, absorb and store water where they can. In his announcement of the City’s [newest Cloudburst project](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani-announces--95-million-cloudburst-project-to-manage?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the Mayor made it clear that “as climate change accelerates, investments like this are not optional. They are how we deliver a city that is resilient, equitable and prepared.” There are promising signs of Mamdani’s mandate across some city agencies. The Department of Transportation has been unleashed to upgrade and improve the network of bike and bus lanes. The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection has adopted an aggressive enforcement posture to protect consumers and gig workers. 

Alongside strong city agency leadership, the mayor should embrace the power of community leadership and visioning. In response to Hurricane Ida, Rebuild by Design and One Architecture & Urbanism convened New Yorkers representing 16 government agencies, 20+ non-profits, 12 neighborhood organizations and 10+ academic, private or philanthropic institutions. That convening, known as Rainproof NYC, was a six-month process aimed at developing recommendations to address the increasing flooding from heavy rainfall in New York City.

Mayor Eric Adams largely shelved those recommendations. Now, as we are into his successor’s first cloudburst season, which typically runs from July through September, it might be time for some literal sewer socialism. Here’s what that would look like.

First, there needs to be a clear leader on “rainproofing” New York City — someone with the authority to convene an interagency task force that tracks metrics and holds each city agency accountable for their role. The burden of climate adaptation cannot fall on DEP and New York City Emergency Management (NYCEM) alone. Instead, the City must orchestrate an all-agency approach that should begin with an inventory of communications assets across every agency to determine how the City can educate and prepare New Yorkers, especially on dry days. 

Then comes infrastructure, starting with City-owned property. The late Chinese landscape architect, Kongjian Yu, inspired an entire generation with the [“sponge city”](https://www.turenscape.com/topic/en/spongecity/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) concept. By replacing impervious surfaces with rain gardens, green roofs and urban wetlands, and by using landscapes to slow down and store stormwater, sponge cities challenge us to reimagine our relationship with water. 

To embrace that challenge, the City should utilize every piece of property it owns to delay and store water. That’s 362 million square feet of land across nearly 5,000 parcels. Streets, public plazas and buildings should all be part of a network of green infrastructure that works to safely drain stormwater before it becomes floodwater. 

Perhaps the best places to start are where other benefits can be leveraged. For example, [New York City parks](https://rebuildbydesign.org/nyc-parks-as-climate-infrastructure/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) face the compounding risks of high flood vulnerability, high heat vulnerability and high social vulnerability. Across the Hudson River, [the City of Hoboken ](https://nwpark-cityofhoboken.opendata.arcgis.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)has successfully lowered flooding by 88% by investing in resilient parks. This can be replicated in every neighborhood. Creating sophisticated infrastructure to reroute water from surrounding streets to underneath our parks would be a win-win situation, reducing the chances of flooding while creating well-paying, local green jobs. Mayor Mamdani’s latest [$4.5 million green infrastructure workforce pilot](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/news/702-26/mamdani-administration-launches-4-5-million-pilot-the-doe-fund-train-new-yorkers-green?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/0) in East New York and South Ozone Park is a great start to the green jobs pipeline.

At the same time, we have to harden the subways, which flood chronically, against extreme rainfall. The MTA is making an investment in flood mitigation, but they need massive resources to shore up the whole system. You may have seen examples of this such as elevating street-level stairs — having the rider step up two steps, to go down — and covering ventilation grates on the sidewalks so floodwater doesn't enter from above. It works, but given the scope of the challenge, we’ve only seen changes around the margins so far.

Private property, including homes and businesses, also has a critical role to play in flood prevention. To encourage more on-site capture, New York City should create a new incentive program, similar to Philadelphia's [Rain Check](https://www.pwdraincheck.org/en/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or Washington D.C.'s [RiverSmart](https://doee.dc.gov/service/riversmart-homes?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) program, which can be tailored for private properties in under-resourced and high flood risk neighborhoods. 

Lastly, on the neighborhood scale, the research is clear that [social infrastructure](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/palaces-for-the-people/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) – the strength of the connections neighbors have to one another – can be a life-or-death determinant in severe weather events. By collaborating with community leaders to educate local residents, the City can build capacity block by block to help New Yorkers survive these increasing disruptions.

It is possible to imagine a greener, more resilient, and safer city — even when it rains. Now it's up to the Mamdani administration to make it happen.
### Government Efficiency Through Stronger Ethics
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/coge-mamdani-department-of-investigations/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:51.000Z
The final ballot measures released yesterday by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Commission on Government Efficiency are a missed opportunity for the administration to be a nationwide leader in public integrity. Why? Because the Commission failed to include proposals for reform that would strengthen New York City’s oversight agency, the Department of Investigation. The DOI Commissioner, in her testimony on June 30th, had asked that the Commission’s proposals include an independent budget for DOI, more robust protection from termination for the agency’s commissioner and the codification of certain key DOI authorities, currently established by executive order. These asks were not new: In 2025, a Commission formed by then-City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams in the wake of the prosecution of Mayor Adams included these DOI-related proposals in its final report, but the Commission’s proposals were bumped by mayoral proposals and never reached the ballot. 

The goal of COGE, according to its executive director, is to “build a government that can deliver services for New Yorkers more swiftly and effectively.” The commission’s final [proposals](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2026/COGE-Preliminary-Report-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) focus on streamlining government processes, including by eliminating cumbersome approval requirements across multiple agencies, but they do not include measures to strengthen DOI. This is unfortunate because DOI should be viewed by the administration as a force-multiplier in the effort to build a more efficient government and should be structured and resourced with that role in mind. DOI (which I led from early 2022 to January of this year), showed remarkable independence, resilience and effectiveness in combating corruption at the highest levels of city government over the past four years. But the challenges of the last mayoral administration, as well as the federal government’s efforts to thwart independent oversight, make very clear that an oversight agency’s budget, key authorities and leader’s tenure should not be left solely to the discretion of the executive. COGE’s proposals should have sought to codify these critical components of DOI’s effectiveness and independence in the City Charter. 

As an initial matter, DOI’s mission and COGE’s mission are fundamentally consistent: to ensure that city government serves its constituents as effectively and efficiently as possible. Indeed, making recommendations for policy and procedural change that seek to streamline processes while simultaneously complying with laws and policies is DOI’s bread and butter. 

DOI has made such recommendations in critical areas such as[ New York City Housing Authority micro-purchase contracting](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/press-releases/2024/February/06DOI.PPRs.NYCHA.02.06.2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org),[ nonprofit contracting](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/press-releases/2024/October/39DHSRptRelease10.17.2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the[ administration of the City’s Summer Youth Employment program](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/nyregion/nyc-atm-scam-investigation.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). DOI’s recommendations, grounded in diligent and objective fact-finding inquiries, have a high rate of acceptance and implementation by City agencies. And DOI’s recommendations are of particular value because it acts independently of city government and makes its policy proposals based solely on the judgment and experience of its career staff, rather than partisan or political considerations. 

> Streamlined processes can increase corruption risks by concentrating approval authority in a more limited number of personnel.

Second, while streamlining government processes is critical to government efficiency, the anti-corruption oversight that DOI provides is equally critical. DOI’s [continuing investigations and prosecutions of senior officials within the Adams administration](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/press-releases/2026/June/FC%20et%20al.%20Indictment%20Press%20Release.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) make clear that government cannot serve its constituents effectively when senior officials use their authority to enrich themselves and to act in their personal interest as opposed to the public interest. DOI’s recent investigations and related prosecutions of senior agency and City Hall officials highlight “pay to play” schemes that allow individuals who pay bribes to jump approval lines, increasing wait time for those who play by the rules, and, as alleged, deliberate efforts to sabotage worthy public projects in exchange for personal gain.

DOI seeks to improve the functions of government by ensuring that those who abuse their authority at the expense of their constituents will be investigated and held accountable. After the past four years, it is well-established that the agency can conduct rigorous investigations that result in criminal charges and significant jail sentences. DOI’s work also serves as a deterrent to future misconduct, helping to maintain the effective government COGE seeks. In fact, deterrence is particularly important should COGE’s final proposals be codified in the City Charter, because streamlined processes can increase corruption risks by concentrating approval authority in a more limited number of personnel. These contemplated processes, while important drivers of efficiency, highlight the need to ensure that DOI can continue to provide robust oversight to counter that increased risk.

Third, at a time when inspectors general and the project of independent oversight are under significant stress at the federal level, strengthening DOI would have shown this administration’s commitment to independent oversight and its recognition that such oversight makes an important contribution to transparency, integrity and productivity in government. 

At the appointment of DOI Commissioner Nadia I. Shihata in February of this year, Mamdani stated that “\[t\]here will be zero tolerance for self-enrichment or corruption in my City Hall” and rightly recognized that “words are not enough, they must be backed up by action.” Shihata, an extremely well-qualified and experienced former prosecutor and criminal defense attorney, was to usher in a “new era of accountability, where we build a government New Yorkers can trust.” As Shihata stated in her testimony before COGE in support of these ballot proposals to strengthen DOI, these proposals “do just that.” 

Unfortunately, to date this administration has yet to provide the agency with sufficient funding to fully fulfill its mission. While DOI — having lost over 100 employees over the past four years due to repeated cuts — thankfully avoided further budget reductions, the most recently adopted New York City budget provides only the bare minimum to stabilize the agency by maintaining its headcount as of the last fiscal year. Truly embracing independent oversight means increasing DOI’s funding so that it can conduct investigations in scope and scale necessary to prevent corruption that impacts the delivery of City services, identify and pursue additional cost savings and take additional steps to ensure the citizens of New York receive the services that they need. Proposing an independent budget for the agency set at an appropriate percentage of the City’s budget would have been an ideal way to do so. 

That step — along with a proposal to provide further protection from termination for the commissioner and to codify certain of DOI’s key authorities — is what’s required to truly prioritize independent oversight and accountability. It is disappointing that this Administration to date has failed to back its statements of support for accountability with action, but it is not too late. The mayor — and the City Council — will have other opportunities to convene Charter Revision Commissions. They should do so, and when they do, strengthening DOI should be at the top of the list. And in the meantime, City Hall should prioritize DOI’s needs in the next budget season.
### A Sweeping Critique of America's Justice System
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/david-garland-law-and-order-leviathan-review-criminal-justice-critique/
Last updated: 2026-07-22T14:16:21.000Z
David Garland’s new book, “Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment,” is a sweeping historical and sophisticated critique of our penal and policing institutions — and it is only 219 pages. Given the book’s extraordinary ambition, one might think that it would need to be at least twice this relatively short and readable length. But such a conclusion ignores what this review contends, namely, that it is foolish to attempt to understand the significance of “Law and Order Leviathan” without placing it in the larger context of Garland’s overall opus.

Starting with “Punishment and Modern Society” (1993), retrospectively creditable as a founding text of the sociology of punishment, Garland showed how particular theoretical frameworks from those of Émile Durkheim to Michel Foucault have influenced how societies respond to criminality writ large. In “TheCulture of Control”(2002), he went on to become more empirical as well as theoretical, looking at how neoliberal responses to crime developed in Britain and the United States. But it is in his last two books — “Peculiar Institution” (2010) and now “Law and Order Leviathan” (2025) — that Garland offers two specific case studies in the most neoliberal society of all, the United States. 

Indeed, both his last and present book deal with American exceptionalism, arguing that America is an outlier when it comes to capital punishment and in being the most punitive society in the world. The goal of “Law and Order Leviathan,” writes the author, is “simple”: to explain the development of yet another peculiar American institution, the scale and power of our system of policing and punishment in the United States. He notes early on that his challenge now is to explain the “three distinguishing features of America’s penal state: its monstrous, extraordinary nature; its grounding in popular fear of violence and disorder; and its authorization by the American electorate.” 

Across all of Garland’s impressive work, too, runs meticulous use of research and exemplary writing: Without doubt, he is one of the most effective social scientists of his era in presenting clearly written, jargon-free analyses. His characteristically powerful argument here is best summarized in the book’s preface: 

*This book explains … America’s peculiar penal state by showing that it is grounded in, and indirectly caused by, the structures of America’s political economy — a set of structures that, like the penal state, is highly unusual in comparative terms.*

*I argue that because of that political economy, American criminal justice operates against a background of social dislocation, impoverishment, and gun violence to a degree unknown in other developed nations. In contrast to more conventional comparative accounts, I argue that it is not racism, nor religion nor punitive culture that sets America’s penal state apart …What sets it apart is the socioeconomic context and material conditions in which America’s criminal legal system operates … the restructuring of political economy that occurred after the 1960s served to deepen social dislocation and lethal violence, while limiting the extent to which government could deploy positive means to remedy them. It was in these circumstances, and from these causes, that America’s law and order Leviathan first emerged.*

Importantly, Garland does not pretend that this leviathan evolved in a vacuum; he does not shy away from detailing America’s extraordinary levels of violence coupled with the easy availability of guns. In an era marked by little to no political nuance, he makes a complex argument about high levels of violence in the United States stemming from high levels of inequality, concentrated poverty and social exclusion, none of which can be separated from our history of slavery and segregation and an extremely weak welfare state. That such levels of violence would then be used as political capital by elected officials to further America’s punitive turn, as opposed to addressing the racialized political economy that created these conditions in the first place, is part and parcel of and indeed quite fundamental to Garland’s explanatory framework. 

Garland is skeptical of prison and police abolitionist arguments, contending, a la Durkheim, that all modern societies will have some level of crime and require ways to deal with people who either don’t comply with community-based sanctions or commit acts so heinous that coercive control is called for. Since, for Garland, it is the political economy itself — namely American capitalism, mediated and hugely amplified by race, racism and our history of slavery — that primarily explains the origins of our punitive state, some may complain that the issue of race is downplayed as an independent driver of our massive carceral state. But Garland’s point about political economy’s primacy has not been emphasized nearly as much or as well in contemporary sociology and criminology as it is elaborated here. 

Would I agree, though, that police budgets need to be “improved” to provide materially better training and supervision? No, since there are plenty of ways to do this without additional funding. But this is a minor disagreement in terms of Garland’s overarching analysis. 

Garland importantly posits that local governments in the United States are capable of mediating the powerful influences of the national political economy since our criminal justice system is in fact hyperlocal. Consequently, meaningful and sustainable criminal justice reform can and should occur. In Garland’s words, “even if Nordic or Western European levels remain out of reach, there is nevertheless the real possibility of life altering improvements in policing, punishment, and public safety within the U.S. bandwidth … activists, reformers, open-minded officials, and the members of the public who support them can take steps to reduce the power and reach of America’s law and order Leviathan without waiting for that larger transformation.” 

Here, Garland is articulating an immensely meaningful and relevant dynamic — namely, how to find a balance between working to achieve a fundamentally democratic and non-discriminatory society while prioritizing the immediacy of desperately needed reforms. It is not simply that achieving deep and sustainable societal reform will take a long time at the national level. In addition, the hyperlocal nature of the American criminal justice system — 17,521 state and local police departments, 3,100 jail systems, 50 state prison and parole systems, 2,300 elected district attorneys and 1,900 county probation systems — suggests that even significant national economic, political and social reform will not necessarily result in immediate changes in criminal justice policy at the local level given the decentralized nature of our system of justice. 

That means it is not just essential but also a moral imperative to work on reforming our systems now. For some, just the word “reform” has a pejorative connotation as opposed to “structural change” or “abolition.” But I would argue that whether one defines oneself as an abolitionist or a reformer, or something in between, change must happen at a local level. We cannot simply wait for the larger structural transformation of society to occur. At the same time, local reform efforts can and should work together with broader efforts at making national structural change.

Garland lists a host of successful criminal justice reforms, to which I add a few, that are not meaningless tinkering but have improved the lives of millions of people. Many of these reforms have happened at the same time overall indicators of equality and poverty were getting worse, not better. These include a decline in the nation’s imprisonment rate from [754 per 100,000 in 2008](https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p08.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to [580 per 100,000 last year](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/factsheets/pie2026%5Fallimages.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); a drop in the NYC jail population from over [20,000 in 1991](https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ji91.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to [under 7,000 this year](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/boc/downloads/pdf/BBJ-Report-July-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); a [25% reduction](https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/ckle24.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the nation’s homicide rate in the [last 30 years](https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/htius.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); an almost [75% reduction](https://www.sentencingproject.org/policy-brief/youth-justice-by-the-numbers/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the nation’s rate of youth detention in the last 25 years and a [more than 40% decrease](https://www.drugpolicyfacts.org/table/total%5Farrests?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in police arrests nationally from 2006 to 2020.

Then too, both New York and Illinois have enacted significant reforms in their systems of cash bail; Georgia, Mississippi and Oklahoma have all enacted sentencing reforms and even Texas invested hundreds of millions of dollars in community-based drug treatment and mental health programs and subsequently closed several prisons.

New York City has a [plan](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/reports/smaller-safer-fairer/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to further reduce its jail population and close Rikers Island; the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors has [voted](https://ceo.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/JCIT-Motion.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to close its Men’s Central Jail (the Los Angeles version of Rikers); and the prison systems of [New York](https://www.vera.org/ny-data-hub/prison?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [New Jersey](https://www.nj.gov/corrections/pdf/offender%5Fstatistics/2026/2026%5FPopulationCharacteristicsReport.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [California](https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-prison-population/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have decreased by about 50% since [2000](https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p00.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Even the [Louisiana](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/LA.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Mississippi](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/MS.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) systems declined by about 30% over the same period. Finally, [10 states](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-and-federal-info/state-by-state?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have abolished the death penalty in the last 20 years, leaving a total of 23 states that no longer use capital punishment.

The work to shrink the footprint of harm caused by our “Law and Order Leviathan” is, as Garland points out, both local and essential. Through decades of academic work, Garland has labored intellectually to provide high-level social and economic analyses of how we got to where we are. The obstacles to reform can seem overwhelming. But even in our current toxic national political environment, the possibilities for serious criminal justice reform at the local level are real in many places, especially since local governments have to make concrete and difficult decisions about how to spend limited tax dollars.

For someone like myself who has spent the better part of his life in the trenches of state and city justice reform, it is both illuminating and frustrating to perceive how small your place is within the larger sociological and historical picture that Garland brilliantly paints across his books. In that larger context, the project of local reform work can seem daunting, particularly the prospect of making significant change in literally thousands of different jurisdictions across the country. But it does also remind one of that old adage about how you eat an elephant: one bite at a time.
### New York Needs a Better Noise Strategy
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-noise-regulation-history/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:52.000Z
In New York City, noise is the [number one complaint made to 311](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/realestate/311-complaints-new-york-city.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), outnumbering the next-closest complaint by more than 200,000 calls per year. And according to the New York State Comptroller’s 2018 [report](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/special-topics/pdf/health-noise-in-nyc-2018.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), only 7% of New Yorkers felt positive about the sound of their neighborhood. But the issue of noise receives relatively little political attention. During the four debates leading up to the 2025 mayoral election, for example, only [one question](https://www.youtube.com/live/133Gqfx1Ydg?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was asked about how the candidates would address noise. And the answers were dismal: Two candidates provided no responsive answer at all, and the third (now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani) said only that he would seek to reduce congestion. That is not a bad suggestion, but it was clear that no one running had a comprehensive plan to address the problem. This is the current paradox of noise: It is tremendously important to residents and workers, yet these days it receives little political attention. 

Last spring, I was walking my 1-year-old daughter to daycare when an ambulance approached, sirens blaring. I covered my ears, but then thought better, and covered my daughter’s ears instead. The ambulance passed, my ears throbbed, and my daughter cried. I thought to myself, “Do sirens have to be *this* loud?” 

At first, I resisted the urge to look into it. Not my area of expertise; out of my control. But the sounds of New York stalked me. On my way to work, I watched as New Yorkers covered their ears when the subway screeched to a stop. As I focused on other things at my desk, a plane thundered overhead. And then at the playground, I watched as helicopters (en route to the Hamptons) drowned out the sound of kids playing, and made the slide shake.

So I gave myself a week to indulge my curiosity. What’s happening with sound in New York? Do New Yorkers care about it? Is it harming them? How is it regulated? And is there a better way to regulate it? A week turned into a year, and here I am, with some answers.

I learned three big things. First, noise is not just annoying, but can be [physically harmful](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/09/health/noise-exposure-health-impacts.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), leading to increased rates of hearing loss, dementia, heart attack and stroke. Second, noise is disproportionately distributed. Almost every neighborhood has its particular noise issues, but on the whole, low-income neighborhoods [suffer the most](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/urban-noise-pollution-worst-poor-minority-neighborhoods-segregated-cities?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) due to, among other things, being proximate to highways, above-ground trains and airports. And finally, there is tremendous room for improvement in how the City handles noise. For a century, the City’s noise strategy has been to punish individuals for making too much noise. This has meant banning jazz musicians back in the mid-1900s, confiscating stereos in Central Park in the 1980s, raiding gay bars in the 1990s, and, more recently, turning noise enforcement into a feature of broken windows policing. This focus on individuals has come to the exclusion of addressing other sources of noise, such as subways, helicopters, sirens and highways — which studies [show](http://osc.ny.gov/files/reports/special-topics/pdf/health-noise-in-nyc-2018.pdf?%5F%5Fcf%5Fchl%5Ftk=sIvYCxivBo8XHhQZqjTdZ3Gpvi3wOFFHOwEPivU8AUs-1782277347-1.0.1.1-uU2IL8xIoTCHsWjCJOoh8OpEh3yNh40HezpRR.HjXgw&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are even more prevalent and harmful. 

Moving forward, the City should break from this long tradition of myopically targeting individuals and should instead develop a broader approach that looks at all sources of noise and how they can be managed for the benefit of New Yorkers. 

### New York’s noise problem 

But first, it is worth asking whether there is in fact a problem worth solving. There is disagreement about this. Some New Yorkers find it annoying when other New Yorkers complain about noise. *It comes with the territory*, they say. *If you don’t like noise*, *move to the suburbs.* 

The premise of this sentiment is that noise is an inevitable feature of living in a big, dense city. Of course, some noise is. But it is also true that many large and dense cities are quieter. [Tokyo, Paris and Toronto](https://en.as.com/latest%5Fnews/not-london-or-tokyo-two-us-cities-among-top-three-noisiest-in-the-world-new-study-reveals-n/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are a few examples. And even though New York is only the 22nd largest and the 100th densest city in the world, it has been repeatedly cited [as one of the loudest](https://www.unep.org/resources/frontiers-2022-noise-blazes-and-mismatches?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In other words, the level of noise in New York is not an unavoidable consequence of its size and density. New Yorkers are entitled to ask for a quieter city and achieving one is possible. 

Other New Yorkers recognize how noisy New York is but suggest that they “get used to it.” If that’s the case, then maybe noise is not a problem to be solved, but one that we need to adjust to. But while it is true that we can psychologically adjust to noise, and maybe as a result feel less annoyed, the underlying physiological harm endures unabated. Studies [show](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3971384/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that whether you are bothered or not, loud noises harm your hearing and your heart. 

According to the [World Health Organization](https://www.who.int/europe/publications/i/item/9789289053563?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), harm is triggered not just by hearing momentary loud noises, but also by experiencing high average noise levels over the course of your day. For example, while noises above 70 decibels are associated with hearing loss, average noises in the 40-50 decibel range [are associated](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/09/health/noise-exposure-health-impacts.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with heart conditions and decreased lifespan. For reference, a quiet room is roughly 30 decibels, a busy street is around 70, arriving NYC subways have been measured around 75-95 decibels, and sirens are typically over 110\. When sounds over 70 decibels enter our ears, they permanently destroy the tiny cells that enable our hearing called cilia, of which we only have a finite amount (about 16,000). And [studies show](https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/how-does-noise-damage-your-hearing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that once we lose more than half of those cells, we start to notice irreversible hearing loss. 

Exposure to noise also triggers a stress response in the amygdala, which scientists have [linked](https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/how-noise-pollution-may-harm-the-heart?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to a series of other harms, including heart disease and decreased lifespan. A recent [study](https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/how-noise-pollution-may-harm-the-heart?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) showed that each five-decibel increase in the average 24-hour noise level of an individual caused a 34% increase in strokes, heart attacks and other significant heart problems. Another recent [study](https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/41/6/772/5643958?login=false&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that, controlling for other relevant factors, individuals who experienced high levels of transportation noise were more likely to experience major cardiac events within five years.

Then there is the issue of sleep, and New Yorkers lose a lot of it due to noise. A recent [study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214140518302536?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Of%20them%2C%2078%25%20were%20disturbed,4.2%2C%20p%3C0.0001%29.) found that 2 million New Yorkers are being woken up at least three times a week from noise. And sleep disturbance is serious, causing a range of harms from emotional distress to increased rates of cancer. 

Any way you slice it, New York City has a noise problem. It is not an inevitable one, and it is not one that goes away by getting used to it. It is one that must be addressed head-on. 

### Failed efforts to address noise

To its credit, New York has historically taken noise seriously. The problem is not about the attention the problem has gotten but the ineffectiveness of the government response. In July of 1905, the New York Times ran [a feature](https://www.nytimes.com/1905/07/02/archives/new-york-the-noisiest-city-on-earth.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in their Sunday edition titled: “New York the Noisiest City on Earth.” At that time, New York had only one noise ordinance, which prevented carting improperly packed steel pipes on cobblestone streets. Since then, the city has added one prohibition after another. In 1909, for example, the city [prohibited street vendors](https://www.nytimes.com/1909/07/15/archives/ordinance-puts-the-lid-on-noise-whatll-the-hotcorn-man-do-and-how.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from making “any improper noise tending to disturb the peace.” Then, in 1930, the city decided to [ban loudspeakers](https://www.nytimes.com/1929/11/13/archives/bill-aims-to-curb-radio-din-in-city-baldwin-proposes-muffling-loud.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Not long after Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia came to power in 1934, he launched a “War on Noise.” This war was prosecuted against street preachers in Harlem, cab drivers across the city and jukebox operators in Brooklyn. LaGuardia particularly disdained singing on the street. “Impromptu quartettes on street corners,” LaGuardia [warned](https://www.nytimes.com/1935/10/01/archives/mayor-orders-end-of-noises-at-night-day-drive-is-next-october-is.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), “will find hostile audiences in patrolmen on their beat.” “Imported customs such as serenading under windows,” he added with a nod to his own Italian immigrant community, “will be taboo.”

These early efforts to manage noise — all of which targeted residents and workers rather than government or corporate sources of noise — presaged the next century of punitive noise policy. Mayor Ed Koch, for example, targeted partygoers, [jazz musicians](https://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/05/arts/jazz-combo-sounds-protest-note-on-cabaret-law.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and people listening to the [radio](https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/26/nyregion/radios-restricted-at-sheep-meadow-and-4-beaches.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Central Park. Mayor David Dinkins [launched](https://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/13/nyregion/street-crackdown-s-aim-turn-down-that-stereo.html?searchResultPosition=1&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) “Operation Soundtrap,” which penalized people for playing music loudly from their cars.

Mayor Giuliani took office in 1994 and came to view the issue of noise in the context of his broader agenda to address “quality of life” issues. Noise, it was [reported](https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/02/nyregion/neighborhood-report-west-village-a-motorcycle-free-zone.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 1997, was the “quality of life campaign’s scourge de jour.” Giuliani [doubled and tripled](https://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/15/nyregion/council-votes-to-increase-fines-sharply-for-excessive-noise.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) fines for noise violations, and established new, muscular enforcement regimes. 

Then came Mayor Bloomberg, in 2002, who launched “Operation Silent Night.” In the program’s first month and a half, the city increased noise enforcement by 300% and in addition to issuing thousands of fines, also [arrested](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/25/nyregion/it-never-sleeps-but-city-does-demand-quiet.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 500 people. The Bloomberg administration also oversaw an overhaul of the noise code, which, among other changes, added more specific decibel limits in place of the traditional “unreasonable noise” standard. Mayors de Blasio and Adams, for their part, kept things relatively stable. While they did make changes, such as improved [data tracking](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/news/25-030/dep-launches-new-innovative-mobile-app-better-understand-city-s-noise?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/0) and more investment in noise cameras, they did not alter the underlying structure and focus of New York’s long-running anti-noise efforts. 

While there have been commendable exceptions over the years, such as Gale Brewer’s [effort](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=7861498&GUID=22F1F0CF-A786-4183-B8E3-0209EBC63AFE&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to modify the siren sound, the predominant feature of New York’s noise program is personal and punitive. Over and over, the City hears that residents hate noise, and responds by ticketing or arresting residents. This may have had some impact on noise, but it has limits: For all the sound and fury, New York remains one of the noisiest cities in the world. 

### A new noise paradigm

The problem with the City’s approach — in addition to the harms it imposes on targeted New Yorkers — is that in its myopic focus on individuals, it misses huge sources of noise. 311 data does indeed show that New Yorkers complain about other New Yorkers quite a bit; a [spike](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/megan-rickman-blackwood-ph-d-666313a8%5Fcan-you-detect-new-york-knicks-finals-excitement-share-7471279601386897408-kCUj/?utm%5Fsource=share&utm%5Fmedium=member%5Fdesktop&rcm=ACoAADIprJMBk0Ht9TYgJopbyQQNG-bNmlfssWI) in complaints during the Knicks finals is just one example of this. 

The 311 data, however, is not the whole picture because while people will certainly call 311 on a neighbor having a party, they are less likely to do so when an ambulance goes by, when a garbage truck does pickup or when a plane flies overhead. But that does not mean that these sources are any less serious. A 2016 [survey](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/special-topics/pdf/health-noise-in-nyc-2018.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by the New York State Comptroller, for example, found that the single largest source of noise cited by respondents was sirens. Other major sources were garbage trucks, motor vehicles and air traffic. The “War on Noise” of the past century has almost entirely ignored these sources.

Why has the city taken the punitive road for so long? There are many reasons. One is that to increase a fine is a relatively easy legislative task. So is adding something to a list of prohibitions. These acts are much easier than, say, building technology to make the subways quieter, or working with federal counterparts to manage aircraft noise. It is also politically enticing to blame noise on individuals rather than on the government, which, according to the comptroller’s report, is a much greater source of noise. 

Two other dynamics also tip the City’s enforcement towards individuals in its noise management efforts. One is federalism. The City has the power to fine and punish its residents, but it has more limited power over planes, trains, buses, helicopters and sirens — all of which are substantial sources of noise but are partially controlled by state and federal law. The other issue is business. Often, noise is the inconvenient byproduct of profit or at least otherwise productive activity: the tourist helicopter, the building under construction, the planes landing at LaGuardia or even the trash being collected. Sometimes (but not always), seeking to address noise sends you headlong into a wall of corporate interests — or at least into the interests of people trying to do helpful and productive activities. 

In order to move away from its punitive past and to create a better-sounding city for the well-being of New Yorkers, the City needs a regulatory regime that is centralized, proactive and hard-wired to navigate federalism and business interests.

As a starting point, I propose that City Council and the mayor create a Department of Sound. Current noise enforcement is conducted within the Department of Environmental Protection, but that Department lacks the resources to think proactively about regulating noise, and in any event, its attention is spread thin among other pressing responsibilities, such as the city’s access to safe drinking water. Further, the fact that hardly anyone knows who is responsible for noise reduces accountability. A Department of Sound would alleviate that problem. New Yorkers could know who to count on and the Department would have the resources to be counted on. 

But the Department of Sound should not simply take over the enforcement from the DEP. Instead, the new Department would need to be forward-looking and creative in generating solutions, rather than just being the body that investigates and enforces noise code violations. The Charter currently [instructs](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCcharter/0-0-0-7792?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the DEP “to eliminate noise pollution.” One important improvement would be to instead charge the Department of Sound with “designing and maintaining a soundscape in New York that is optimal for human health and wellbeing.” Already, by reframing the agency's aim, we would be creating a new vision for regulation that incorporates proactive steps towards sound design. Maybe we think not just about removing bad sounds, but also about adding good ones, like birds or bachata. 

Another possibility is charging the agency to increase its use of systemwide design to address noise. For example, rather than just imposing fines on people for having loud cars, the agency should also implement a systemic reform measure, such as placing more highway barriers or rethinking street design. This would mark an important shift from the punish-first and often punish-only regime that has existed and failed for so long. 

Finally, the Department of Sound’s authorizing statute should do what it can to help the agency manage the challenges of working with the state and federal government, and navigating potential tension with business interests. One tactic on the federalism front would be to instruct the agency to create an Inter-Governmental Sound Co-ordinating Committee, with seats assigned to members across city, state and federal governments. Of course, the city officials cannot coerce the state and federal officials to participate, but the structure at the very least increases the chances of coordination. 

As to managing the business interest dynamic, the department could prioritize noise reduction efforts that do not harm businesses. For example, the City should procure quieter garbage trucks before punishing carting companies. It should build low-traffic neighborhoods before ticketing cab drivers for honking. It should redesign the siren before fining small businesses for noise violations. Of course, sometimes business interests will need to be challenged for the health and well-being of New Yorkers, but there is so much work to be done related to noise that there is room to start with efforts that minimize harm to businesses. 

Broadly, rather than relying solely on its power to punish, the City — through a newly created department — should also invoke its powers of procurement, street design and intergovernmental coordination to address noise. There may be limits to this proposed approach, but after a century of punishing New Yorkers for noise with little to show for it, it is time to try something new. Otherwise, New York appears poised to continue on this punitive and ineffective path indefinitely, leaving us with ever more fines and ever more noise. New Yorkers deserve a soundscape that doesn’t harm us every day. And more than that, a soundscape that is actually pleasant to live in. Imagine that.
### The Lifeguard Fiefdom
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/lifeguard-hiring-problem-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-07-15T14:51:54.000Z
---

*In the summer of 2022, families in New York City were waiting six hours in the heat to swim for one hour. Julie Sandorf, who ran the Charles Revson Foundation for nearly two decades, decided to find out why — and what she found was a lifeguard program that had been controlled by a single union official for nearly 50 years, accountable to no one, operating under certification requirements that exist nowhere else in the country, with exactly one test site in all of New York City. Jamie talks with Julie about how a Chicago after-school program from 2000 ended up being the model for fixing the problem, and what it actually means to be a smart, catalytic private funder in a city government this complicated.* 

*You can listen to the podcast on* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/30rxUzdZBDPCILfJiBlZ6S?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *and* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lifeguard-fiefdom/id1794619189?i=1000775908197&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*
### An Agenda for New York City’s Sidewalks
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-department-of-sidewalks-agenda/
Last updated: 2026-07-15T14:25:00.000Z
All of us step on it every day, but few of us think about its crucial and delicate role in knitting the city together. I’m speaking of the humble sidewalk — a terribly underappreciated, hotly contested piece of public real estate that deserves another look, and a policy agenda to meet the times. 

In cities like New York, sidewalks are everywhere we turn. They connect us to work, recreation and culture. They literally connect us to one another. In so doing, they dictate how mobile we can be and in what ways, how safe and accessible our communities are and who can take advantage of a city’s vast array of opportunities. 

But that’s not all. Sidewalks are also sites of commerce, from dining to advertising to vending and more. They’re sites of speech, protest, picketing and art. They’re sites of policing and surveillance — indeed, they’re some of the most heavily [policed](https://tminstituteldf.org/how-many-stops-act-analyzing-nyc-police-data/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [surveilled](https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/06/20/191603369/The-Business-Of-Surveillance-Cameras?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) spaces in cities today, sometimes with [deadly](https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000010668660/new-video-analysis-reveals-flawed-and-fatal-decisions-in-shooting-of-pretti.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [consequences](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/nyregion/eric-garner-police-chokehold-staten-island.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). They’re where some people sleep or make a living. They’re where we put much of the infrastructure that keeps a city running. And they’re where many of the challenges of the future, from climate change to new technology, will play out.

We often talk about “the public square” — usually thought of as a public space in the center of town — but the concrete strip that lines every street has a much more powerful role in shaping who we are.

This is true in cities and towns across the country, but nowhere is it more true and more salient than in New York City — the titan of the American sidewalk, with [more than 12,000 miles of it](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/infrastructure/sidewalkintro.shtml?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). We New Yorkers truly live huge swaths of our lives on the sidewalk. The policies that govern these spaces are, however, long overdue for a second look.

First is the question of governance. In New York City as in many other places, it’s not the government and the public at large, but rather individual owners of adjacent property, who shoulder the burden of [clearing snow and ice](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCadmin/0-0-0-26213?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from the sidewalk and even of [repairing](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCadmin/0-0-0-218000?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) it when it cracks or becomes uneven. The City’s Department of Sanitation even has a [website](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dsny/what-we-do/cleaning/sidewalk-slobs-contact.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) reminding people that “property owners are required by [law](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCadmin/0-0-0-26068?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)to clean the sidewalks and 18 inches into the street outside their properties” and allowing them to report their neighbors as “Sidewalk Slobs.” Why this arrangement? It’s partly an artifact of history — this is just how it’s been done for centuries — and partly because governments simply find it easier to offload these responsibilities onto the nearest people. But it’s not because of property law. In fact, the private property line of that adjacent home or business [often ends before the sidewalk even starts](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCadmin/0-0-0-225728?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

What this means is that New Yorkers are obligated by law to care for property they don’t even own. Moreover, when people are injured because those sidewalks have not been kept in safe condition, city law places the [liability](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCadmin/0-0-0-4164?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on those same property owners. The City, which does own the sidewalk land, is only liable under narrow circumstances. Again, no deep legal reason beyond the City’s convenience.

In addition to being fundamentally at odds with basic property law, this arrangement often just doesn’t work all that well. Private property owners don’t necessarily have the interests of the whole city at heart, and even if they do, they might not have the ability or the resources to do these jobs well. This means that the quality of a neighborhood’s sidewalks can rise and fall with its residents’ fortunes.

Some cities are reevaluating this approach. For example, the voters in Denver, Colorado, decided in 2022 to [make sidewalk maintenance a city responsibility, funded by a regular assessment imposed on property owners](https://denverite.com/2024/09/16/denver-sidewalks-fee-150/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Some of our [neighbors](https://www.news10.com/news/city-of-hudson-to-charge-homeowners-sidewalk-fee/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [upstate](https://www.cityofithacany.gov/219/Sidewalk-Policy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have done the same. 

New York City should explore something similar. It would guarantee more accountable centralized responsibility, improve accessibility and lift up poorer neighborhoods by using money from folks on the Upper East Side to repair sidewalks in the South Bronx.

Second, we need to rethink how we balance a seemingly endless range of sidewalk uses. The panoply of activities that take place on the sidewalk are part and parcel of what makes New York City vibrant and exciting. The famous urbanist (and West Village resident) Jane Jacobs found great beauty and harmony in what she called the sidewalk “ballet.” But it’s zero-sum: Each sidewalk activity competes for limited space, and the space that each one uses leaves less for the others. 

Sidewalk dining, for instance, is great for business and for customers, but it intrudes on the pedestrian thoroughfare, particularly for people with mobility limitations. DoorDash delivery drivers on e-bikes sometimes zoom on and off the sidewalk, and that’s likewise perhaps useful for restaurants and customers, but it risks endangering everyone else. Scaffolding and trash — whether containerized or not — both occupy space and make the environment less appealing for business or recreation. The [national homelessness crisis](https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-AHAR-Part-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) represents another demand for scarce sidewalk space.

A protest can intrude on socializing, business, residents and more. Indeed, when it comes to protest, sometimes the intrusion is precisely the point.

New York City wants to build thousands upon thousands of new housing units. Growth will make the city’s narrow sidewalks more and more crowded. And armed with new technology, entrepreneurs across the country are putting sidewalk space to more and more private commercial use, from dockless scooter rentals to [electric vehicle charging ports](https://edc.nyc/press-release/hyundai-cradle-itselectric-partner-deploy-curbside-chargers-electric-vehicles-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [delivery robots](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/25/los-angeles-delivery-robots?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and even [autonomous roving vending machines](https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/04/tortoise-pivots-away-from-robotic-delivery-towards-mobile-stores/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Because none of these uses is necessarily “better” than the others, it is essential to focus on harmonizing them with an eye towards *expanding* community opportunity rather than shrinking it. Otherwise, sidewalks are poised to become the modern tragedy of the commons, where too much uncoordinated pursuit of good or justifiable things risks depleting the resource for everyone. Perhaps they already are.

We’re quite unprepared to do this well right now. Regulatory responsibility for managing this mess is [scattered](https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol122/iss4/2/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across an array of city agencies that don’t always harmonize very well. Departments of Transportation, Parks, Sanitation, Buildings, Consumer Affairs, Homeless Services, Health, Fire, Police, Media and Entertainment and more all overlap. But none of them is well-equipped to see the whole picture. This means that gaps get left and unintended conflicts get created.

Consolidating and coordinating these functions into a Department of Sidewalks would be a huge step in the right direction. Such an agency would be charged with developing a wide-angle lens — with stepping back and seeing how the space works, what demands are being placed on it now and in the near future and how they interact with one another. It would then engage in more coherent regulation, with an eye toward ensuring that they lift one another up rather than tear one another apart. It would offer businesses and residents one-stop-shop permitting, more efficient and accountable maintenance and more equitable responsibility.

Even without a Department of Sidewalks, there’s so much the City can do better right now. We need to widen sidewalks in our most congested neighborhoods, like Fifth Avenue and the Theater District, where clogged sidewalks are dangerous, inaccessible and just plain frustrating for everyone trying to use them. We need to think proactively about new technology: if we want to see it deployed, our leaders need to build both the space and the regulatory architecture for it *now*. We need to more thoughtfully regulate deliveristas and businesses that use the sidewalks to ensure that these critical spaces are not only lucrative, but safe and inviting for everyone. We need to keep [paring back](https://gothamist.com/news/mamdani-eyes-fewer-shorter-lived-nyc-sidewalk-sheds-with-new-scaffolding-rules?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [improving](https://abc7ny.com/post/new-colorful-sidewalk-sheds-going-york-city/19283809/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the omnipresent scaffolds that throw our sidewalks into darkness, threatening commerce, recreation and pedestrians alike. And we need to keep advancing more humane approaches that get people experiencing homelessness off the sidewalks and onto their own two feet in stable and secure housing.

Our sidewalks are a big part of what makes New York City the greatest city in the world, but they are also its Achilles’ heel. Without careful planning, they can easily descend into chaos as the range of uses grows and grows. In short, that “sidewalk ballet” that Jane Jacobs described over 60 years ago could use a choreographer in City Hall.
### The Origins of ‘Lived Experience’
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-origins-of-lived-eexperience/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:53.000Z
Perhaps you’ve noticed the phrase in the Mamdani administration’s press releases: “lived experience.” A program for peer-led recovery claims to bring “[a level of trust and lived experience that can make the difference between isolation and engagement](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mayor-mamdani-invests--12-million-to-expand-peer-led-substance-u?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).” Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for People With Disabilities Nisha Agarwal has “[irreplicable insight that comes with lived experience](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/02/mayor-mamdani-announces-key-appointments-to-three-city-agencies-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).” Rebecca Jones Gaston, the Commissioner of the Administration of Children’s Services, promises to partner with “[those with lived experience](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani-appoints-rebecca-jones-gaston-as-commissioner-of-t?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)” to improve the city’s children’s services.

Mamdani is far from the only New York City mayor to embrace the term. Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams’ teams also used the expression. On the national level, [Kamala Harris claimed](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/joe-biden-democratic-presidential-candidate-kamala-harris-60-mintues-interview-norah-odonnell-2020-10-25/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 2020 that she would share with Joe Biden her “lived experience, as it relates to any issue that we confront.”

For as long as I have heard the phrase, it has perplexed me. What confused me was not the appeal to experience, but rather the addition of the “lived” prefix. Isn’t all experience inherently lived? Why, instead of saying “from my experience,” were people suddenly saying, “from my lived experience”? The intent seems to be to convey the prioritization of lives too often ignored by those who make public policy. But where did this phrase come from?

The answer: 19th-century German phenomenology, a branch of philosophy that seeks to understand people’s subjective experiences. So how did this phrase travel from turn-of-the-century Berlin to 21st-century New York City?

The first step is understanding the phrase’s linguistic origins. Its clunkiness — the “lived” prefix to experience — is the result of translation. The term “lived experience” is a translation of the German word *erlebnis*.

German has two words for “experience,” each corresponding to subtle differences in how English speakers use the word. [According to Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/experience?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the noun “experience” is defined as:

1. Practical knowledge, skill, or practice gained from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity.
2. Something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through.

The first definition corresponds to the German word *erfahrung*, which contains the root *fahren*, which means “to journey.” *Erfahrung* represents how experience is used when one says, “The professor is very wise because he has a lot of experience.”

The second definition maps onto *erlebnis*, with the root *leben*, meaning life. *Erlebnis* is something that you live through, not cumulative experience. It would be used to say something like, “She wants to have the experience of going to a theme park.” 

In the late 19th century, *erlebnis* became a key concept in German philosophy. Philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey was the first to popularize the phrase. In his works about the difference between the natural sciences and the human sciences (what today roughly maps onto the distinctions we make between the humanities and social sciences), Dilthey argued that the human sciences should not be understood through pure reason. Instead, scholars should take into account *erlebnis*, or how humans subjectively experience the world.

When translating Dilthey’s works into English, translators added the adjective “lived” to “experience” in order to distinguish *erlebnis* from *erfahrung*.

In the early 20th century, Dilthey’s work inspired the philosophical movement of phenomenology, which explored the nature of subjective human consciousness. It employed Dilthey’s concept of *erlebnis*. German phenomenologists simply used the word *erlebnis*, while French phenomenologists used the phrase *l’expérience vécue* — in English, “the lived experience.”

Through a subset of French phenomenologists, the French formulation of “lived experience” became tied to the study of marginalized identities. Jean Paul Sartre employed the idea in relation to Jews in “Anti-Semite and Jew”; Franz Fanon wrote about “the lived experience of the black man” in “Black Skin, White Masks.” In “The Second Sex,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote about how women’s “lived experience” influences their own self-image as weak and inferior to men. De Beauvoir wrote that lived experience demonstrates how one’s self-conception is not fixed, but rather constructed through engagement with the world.

Through the 1980s, it was mainly philosophers who used the idea of “lived experience.” Then, in the 1990s, social science disciplines began more widely adopting the phrase. Though it appears in a wide range of studies — such as on the “[lived experiences of persons with heart transplantation](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147956324002036?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)” or “[the lived experience of feeling very tired](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0894318403256417?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)” — it became particularly popular as a corrective, focusing on groups with a history of having been ignored in research and policy. The 2024 book “[Disrupting the Academy with Lived Experience-Led Knowledge](https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/disrupting-the-academy-with-lived-experience-led-knowledge?ref=vitalcitynyc.org),” by University of New South Wales professors Maree Higgins and Caroline Linnette, says “when lived experience experts lead the way, their knowledge of how to address social injustices can enrich, transform and decolonise research, teaching and advocacy.” Mahmood Mamdani, the Columbia professor and scholar of postcolonialism who also happens to be the father of Zohran Mamdani, uses the concept in his own work.

Over roughly the past decade, the phrase has taken on a new moral weight. While it used to mostly be an analytical tool, denoting an exploration of how experiences shape understanding, many now use it as something else entirely. Now, “lived experience” is often cited as a source of information to be held in the highest regard, trumping other data and evidence.

The phrase has only grown in popularity. Compare it to another piece of philosophical jargon, “intersubjectivity.” While the two words were found with identical frequency in books in 1980, “lived experience” now appears more than three times as much as “intersubjectivity.” The phrase is so common that, as per Google’s Books Ngram Viewer, [it appears more than “brunch” and “selfie” in books, though still slightly less than “podcast](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lived+experience%2Cbrunch%2Cselfie%2Cpodcast&year%5Fstart=2000&year%5Fend=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case%5Finsensitive=true&ref=vitalcitynyc.org).”

Not everyone embraces the new usage. [Naomi Schafer Riley](https://www.aei.org/op-eds/the-problem-with-lived-experience/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a child welfare researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, worries about the focus on lived experience in policymaking. It’s possible that the people sharing their lived experiences may be a self-selecting subset of those who feel comfortable sharing the de vogue opinion. Additionally, lived experiences — as those like Dilthey and de Beauvoir knew — are subjective, because humans’ perception of reality is never 100% accurate.

Still, for the politicians and civil servants who use the phrase, “lived experience” is always due the utmost respect. At his nomination, Mamdani’s Taxi and Limousine commissioner, Midori Valdivia, said as much: “no amount of degrees or meetings in boardrooms compare to the day-to-day lived experience of being a transportation family.” In other words, past jobs may give a policymaker experience in the professional sense, or *erfahrung*, to serve the public. But what is equally if not more valuable is having a shared “lived experience,” or *erlebnis*, with those whom they are tasked with serving.
### Cities Aren’t Putting Police Officers Where They’re Needed Most
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/cities-arent-putting-police-officers-where-theyre-needed-most/
Last updated: 2026-07-07T14:00:48.000Z
Big city police departments have struggled to hire enough police officers for years. But while these officer shortages are a problem, they’re also unevenly distributed across neighborhoods. In Chicago and Washington, DC, the most violent neighborhoods also have the greatest officer shortages. Even New York, which pioneered Jack Maple’s “[cops on the dots](https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/caseconsortium/casestudies/127/casestudy/www/layout/case%5Fid%5F127%5Fid%5F886.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)” strategy in the early 1990s, has huge disparities in staffing by borough. That leaves too many cops worked to the bone, and residents with far less protection than they deserve. 

We could do a much better job putting officers where they’re needed most. That would make cities safer, and have enormous benefits for our most vulnerable neighborhoods. It would also make it easier to ensure that officers spend time proactively engaging with the communities they’re supposed to protect, rather than simply jumping from crisis to crisis. 

### Violence is concentrated, but cops are not

In most cities, a small number of blocks account for a disproportionate share of violence. Concentrating officers on these “hotspots,” at the times when violence is most likely to occur, can have a significant impact on safety. [Systematic reviews](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8356500/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#cl21046-sec-0360) of published studies show that these efforts drive meaningful reductions in overall crime. 

Crucially, the most effective forms of hotspot policing involve “problem-oriented policing” interventions, where officers dedicate time to understand and proactively address crime, rather than simply focus on incident response. A [2020 review](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cl2.1089?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of high-quality studies on problem-oriented policing interventions found that they delivered a 34% reduction in crime and disorder, on average. 

But hotspot policing isn’t very effective if departments don’t put officers in the hotspots. In Chicago, for example, violence is heavily concentrated in a subset of the city’s South and West Side neighborhoods, but the police force is spread more evenly across the city. The result is a yawning imbalance in resources relative to need.

On the North Side, there are generally between 30 and 60 patrol officers on staff in each police district for every reported homicide (data for all the cities and districts referenced in this article [is available here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A--8bjY5Kv5DeqgeOHMt85T%5FQhNymXO9/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108294813592245621314&rtpof=true&sd=true&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)). The city’s best-staffed district, which covers Wrigleyville and Lincoln Park, among other neighborhoods, had 94 patrol officers per homicide last year. But across Chicago’s South and West Sides, most districts report fewer than 15\. The worst-staffed district, South Chicago, has just 6.4\. There are more officers per capita in South and West Side neighborhoods, but those numbers pale in comparison to the need. 

The results are predictable. Officers in high-violence neighborhoods are worked to the bone, with little time for the sort of proactive engagement necessary to drive down crime. Residents [suspect](https://www.injusticewatch.org/criminal-courts/police/2024/911-calls-response-delayed-traffic-stops/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that emergency response times are slower, and are less likely to call 911 in the first place. 

Chicago tries to close the gap by surging specialized tactical teams into high-violence neighborhoods. But as a [2017 Department of Justice investigation found](https://www.justice.gov/d9/chicago%5Ffindings%5F1-13-17.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), those tactical teams are rarely equipped (or instructed) to engage with neighborhood problems. Instead, they roll in to make arrests (or traffic stops, as the case may be). Unsurprisingly, residents are more likely to see unfamiliar, non-uniformed officers as an occupying force rather than partners in public safety. In a particularly twisted outcome, [Chicago’s Inspector General found](https://news.wttw.com/sites/default/files/article/file-attachments/Chicago-Police-Department-911-Response-Time-Data-Collection-and-Reporting-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that because residents in high-violence neighborhoods believe that police will only show up in a timely fashion if there’s a threat of violence, some callers will falsely report the presence of guns in order to accelerate response times. 

These gaps shrink (but do not disappear) when analyzing the ratio of officers per major crime or officers per call for service. But homicides are the right place to start. They matter more than assaults or burglaries. And because homicides come with a body and are matched against death records, they are [almost always captured](https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ntmh.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in crime statistics. By contrast, [just 40%](https://counciloncj.org/when-crime-statistics-diverge/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of other violent crimes are reported to law enforcement. That’s in part because residents in some neighborhoods don’t believe that police will respond in a timely fashion. A neighborhood with a high homicide rate but low robbery rate isn’t safe – it’s a neighborhood where residents have given up reporting robberies. 

Fortunately, in spite of this problem Chicago’s murder rate has declined dramatically in the last few years, falling [9% in 2024](https://citythatworks.substack.com/p/scoreboard-how-did-chicago-do-in), and a whopping [27% in 2025](https://citythatworks.substack.com/p/scoreboard-how-did-chicago-do-in-8a9). The city’s ongoing officer misallocation represents additional low-hanging fruit. Moving more officers to high-violence neighborhoods is one of the best tools the city has to continue to drive down violence in the coming years.

### Big cities aren’t protecting the neighborhoods that need it most

Notably, this dynamic is not unique to Chicago. Relatively few departments publish their staffing data by district, but stark gaps emerge in many of the departments that do. Washington, DC, has 11 times more officers per homicide in its 2nd police district (59) than it does in its 7th (5.4). 

In New York, the relatively low level of homicides per precinct make a similar analysis difficult. But a similar pattern emerges at the borough level. Even as the city touts its [zone-based strategy](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nypd-zone-strategy-crime-drop-analysis/) of officer allocation, at the borough level there is an eight-fold gap between the ratio of officers per homicide in the Bronx (29) and Staten Island, which reports an extraordinary 244 officers per homicide. 

Keen observers will see another pattern in the data. For the cities with the three biggest staffing gaps, the districts with the highest levels of staffing are generally in the whitest and often wealthiest parts of town, including far Northwest DC (DC’s 2nd district), Chicago’s North Side, and the New York boroughs of Staten Island and Manhattan. 

The districts with the lowest levels of staffing are all in heavily or majority Black neighborhoods, including parts of Chicago’s South and West Sides, Southeast DC (which is covered by DC’s 7th district), and the Bronx. And while Philadelphia doesn’t release its district-level staffing, the City Controller there identified a similar pattern [in a 2022 study](https://controller.phila.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/PPD-Review-Final.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Left-wing critics of policing are right about one thing: In city after city, we have prioritized white lives over Black ones. But that’s not because we have too many police officers — it’s because we fail to use those officers to protect Black neighborhoods. 

Crucially, a greater presence of uniformed patrol officers, charged with working regular beats and getting to know their neighborhoods, could also do much to repair police-community relations. Officers who look and act like part of the community are a lot more likely to build trust – especially if it’s an explicit part of their job. And residents are more likely to call 911 when they think they’ll get a timely response. 

### This is a political problem 

Police departments know this. In Chicago, at least [four separate workforce allocation studies](https://chicagoreader.com/news/police-study-consent-decree/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have come to the same conclusion since 2010\. The executive summary for a fifth such study was recently released, noting that the Department needs to either reallocate or hire [270 patrol officers](https://www.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/WFA-ES.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to protect neighborhoods with the highest levels of violence. 

The problem is that pulling officers out of safer neighborhoods is likely to provoke pushback — especially when those neighborhoods tend to be wealthier and whiter. And it’s reasonable for everyone to want a baseline level of safety, regardless of how many murders happened on their street last year.

But this is an opportunity to exercise some political courage. The murder rate is one of the most important things that voters grade politicians on. And crime rarely respects political boundaries. Disrupting networks of criminal activity in high-violence neighborhoods is likely to deliver more safety citywide. 

There are also opportunities to add officers to understaffed neighborhoods without draining them from safer ones. A good first step would be to cut down on the number of centralized and tactical units, releasing them back into uniformed patrol in the neighborhoods where they’re needed most. 

That’s just the start. Far too many departments still have sworn officers, writing parking tickets and working desk jobs in HR and IT. The [Police Executive Research Forum](https://www.policeforum.org/assets/Civilianization.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) notes that this can not only free up officer capacity, but also help control costs and improve service. And most departments have just scratched the surface here. As Jeff Asher noted for The Argument earlier this year, when New Orleans [hired a private contractor](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/cities-cant-find-enough-cops-heres?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to respond to noninjury traffic accidents, emergency response times plummeted and homicide clearance rates improved. 

Officers are one of a city’s most valuable resources. They have to be put where they can be most useful, trained and held accountable for their performance, and then re-allocated as patterns of violence change. 

That won’t be easy. But the recent fall in violent crime has given cities time and space to make structural reforms. If we take advantage of this moment, we can secure safer streets and far more protection for the neighborhoods that need it most.
### Expert Advice for Mamdani’s Commission on Government Efficiency
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/expert-advice-for-mamdanis-commission-on-government-efficiency/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:54.000Z
*Zohran Mamdani's Commission on Government Efficiency, known as COGE, has a deceptively modest mandate: put proposals on the November ballot that will speed up infrastructure projects, deliver city services faster and give agencies room to do their jobs. The harder question underneath is whether any of that is achievable — whether a big, blue, heavily regulated city like New York can be governed well, and whether the machinery of government can be bent toward a mayor's priorities instead of swallowing them. The commission expects working recommendations by the end of July and proposals before voters in November. That's a short runway for a large ambition.*

*So Vital City convened people who have actually run and studied that machinery up close. Moderating was our founder, Elizabeth Glazer, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw criminal justice policy for a New York mayor and governor. Around the table: Sarah Feinberg, who led New York City Transit through the pandemic; Robert Gordon, a federal budget and government-performance veteran; Maria Torres-Springer, a former first deputy mayor now president of the Revson Foundation; Polly Trottenberg, the city's former transportation commissioner and now dean of NYU's Wagner School; David Schleicher, a Yale Law scholar of city governance and finance; Michael Samuelian of Cornell Tech's Urban Tech Hub; and Carl Weisbrod, a veteran of city government — founding president of the Economic Development Corporation and head of the Department of City Planning, as well as a member of two recent charter commissions.*

*We weren't after consensus or a tidy reform agenda but unglamorous ideas that might really move the needle: the procurement fix, the data-sharing rule, the civil-service hiring fix. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of the conversation.*

**Elizabeth Glazer:** I almost feel we could spend the whole hour on today's news — the indictment of former Mayor Eric Adams' chief of staff, Frank Carone — and it bears directly on our topic, because it makes the questions at stake for COGE so vivid. Are blue cities governable? Can governance and operations actually drive a leader's priorities, or are we condemned to performance politics? And can anything make cities resistant to corruption, given the real price we already pay, in layers of regulation, for the pursuit of absolute integrity? The charter is hardly the only place to make a city more efficient, but it's where we'll start. David, take us in.

**David Schleicher:** My first question is simply: What problem is COGE addressing? I'd argue New York City government is, in many ways, the worst in America at translating tax dollars into services. It isn't true of every service, and the services aren't low-quality — but in terms of the tax price of services, New York is at or near the bottom. So one idea: build comparative effectiveness into the comptroller's audit function and every agency's reporting — require agencies to report how they're doing relative to other cities. Call it a pushback on New York's parochialism. Of course we're different — a costlier labor market, a costlier housing market — but forcing officials to ask whether they're doing as well as Philadelphia or Boston, and encoding that comparison in the charter, would make government study its own effectiveness. If the point is to show whether government is excellent, in Mamdani's word, that's where I'd start.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** So the charter is singularly lacking in any mechanism or standard for performance. David's idea fits a bigger question: how do you drive performance at all? Polly, you ran a capital-intensive agency — reactions?

**Polly Trottenberg:** Without passing the buck, I'd say that so many of the factors driving our costs sat a level of government above us. City and state procurement law drove much of the cost bloat, as did an extraordinarily convoluted, redundant oversight structure. So I wouldn't leave the report card only at the agency level. It has to be owned at the city and state level too. I wouldn't want agencies hit with "Why aren't you as cheap as Boston?" — and I don't even know that Boston is cheap. "What can the Council, the mayor and Albany do to help city government operate efficiently?" is at least as deep a question.

> New York City government is, in many ways, the worst in America at translating tax dollars into services.

**Sarah Feinberg:** I'm with David on where you get the most bang for the buck, and with Polly that if we try to solve it where it can't be solved, we'll just frustrate everyone. My idea is close to David's: be far more transparent about what the city spends and where the money goes — post the labor contracts, make them searchable, do a genuine deep dive on where specific taxpayer dollars land. And it's so rare to get something on the ballot. We don't get many bites at this apple, so we should ask what we actually want voters to see.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** Maria — as a former first deputy mayor who's held nearly every job — what do you make of how the city can drive performance?

**Maria Torres-Springer:** What I struggle with in every charter commission is that the charter can only do so much to fix very large problems. We should still spend time on tangible things that can go on the ballot. But the idea I keep coming back to is a recurring government capacity review — a charter-level mechanism to answer one question: can government actually deliver? We spend enormous time debating what government should do and far too little on whether it has the capacity to do it. There's precedent: a [past charter commission created a racial equity commission and a cost-of-living index](https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11666-new-york-city-voters-approve-racial-justice-ballot-measures?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), setting a permanent management discipline in the charter. Could we do the same for capacity? Every four years, review and publish on our core operating systems — to my mind, procurement, workforce modernization, technology and capital project delivery. It wouldn't judge whether the policies are good; it would force government to say whether it can deliver, and to own plans to close the gaps. This isn't novel — the [U.K. ran cabinet-level capability reviews starting in 2005](https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/assessment-of-the-capability-review-programme/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), focused not on policy but on execution and management quality. The fair critique is that there are already too many plans and commissions, and I live that. But we measure so much in government — what we spend, where, how long it takes — and none of it tells us whether government is getting stronger or weaker.

Search, sort and filter the full New York City Charter. [Open full screen ↗](https://joshgreenman1973.github.io/nyc-charter-explorer/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 

**Elizabeth Glazer:** Put more flesh on it — take one area. What would you actually measure? And is every four years too slow?

**Maria Torres-Springer:** Maybe every three. Four at least guarantees no administration finishes a term without answering for its capacity to execute. For workforce, you'd track vacancy rates, time-to-hire, critical-skills shortages, retention. On capital delivery, schedule performance and cost overruns. On technology, legacy-system modernization and digital-service quality. You'd have to do the painstaking work of defining the measures and the staffing, and there isn't time before the end of July — so what goes to voters is the larger discipline, not the metrics.

**Robert Gordon:** I'd pick up on workforce, where there's a nearer-term item for voters: a body focused specifically on building the workforce to deliver for New Yorkers. New York is an outlier, and not in a good way. Vacancy rates are about double what they were before the pandemic. Time-to-hire for civil service runs 14 to 15 months from exam to job. The city still leans on dated civil-service exams for a huge range of white-collar positions, a restrictive "rule of three" that limits hiring managers, and thousands of job classifications — far more than other cities — which makes moving up needlessly complicated. And pay for jobs the city desperately needs isn't competitive. The usual fix is workarounds for your top priorities, which gets you those priorities but not a well-functioning city. A time-bound commission, with labor at the table, could get a lot done.

> We spend enormous time debating what government should do and far too little on whether it has the capacity to do it.

**Michael Samuelian:** To build on Robert and Maria: How does the city embrace the gig economy? How many of your kids want to work anywhere for 30 years? We created the [Urban Innovation Fellows program](https://urban.tech.cornell.edu/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), placing talented people in government for two years — Cornell could hire and place them in four months, which is mind-boggling, because it's a workaround, and the city has relied on workarounds for two decades. When I worked for City Planning, I was hired through the Economic Development Corporation because City Planning couldn't hire me fast enough. Imagine a corps doing two- or three-year tours, like Teach For America for government — better talent, quickly and nimbly. And think about a digital-first charter: every agency offering a fully digital option, so no one's forced to show up in person. One more, from [a report we put out five years ago](https://tech.cornell.edu/news/cornell-techs-urban-tech-hub-releases-final-rebooting-nyc-report/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — "tell us once" government: a shared database so residents aren't giving the city the same information over and over, which forces agencies to share data and strips out friction that falls hardest on the most vulnerable.

**Carl Weisbrod:** Maria and I may be the only two here who've run both a city agency and an off-budget agency, and the difference is enormous. An Economic Development Corporation's (EDC) ability to handle procurement and capital delivery simply doesn't compare to a city agency's — which is exactly why city agencies turn to EDC to deliver their capital programs, faster and cheaper. That's not about personnel; it's about process. So one big question is how you migrate the strengths of an off-budget agency into the on-budget ones. A lot of people here have touched on how: civil service and work-rule reform, and procurement change to the extent it can be done at the city level. The third goes to Maria's point about measurement — take the [Mayor's Management Report](https://www.nyc.gov/site/operations/reports/mmr.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (MMR) and give it real teeth. The MMR began in the 1970s, and it began with teeth: a permanent, essentially apolitical staff of technocrats who used it to reform agency processes. Today it tells us police or fire response times went up or down, and that's about it. It's used to report, not to manage — and the only way to change that is with serious, permanent staff that transcends administrations.

> The Mayor's Management Report measures activity, not outcomes — it's like a lamp that isn't plugged in.

**Polly Trottenberg:** I'll be the procurement and capital-delivery person, since that's where I lived. People constantly said to me as transportation commissioner, "If only you could do what the School Construction Authority can do." My question was always: why can't I? Rather than slowly migrating powers to the other capital agencies, we should start from the premise that every agency should be able to procure and hire and do what an EDC or School Construction Authority can — and note both of those still have plenty of checks; they're not as freewheeling as you'd think. On the Mayor's Management Report: I think we track far too many things. My old agency had something like 80 indicators, and there were real perverse incentives in how they got tracked. The classic is miles of roadway paved: because you had to hit an annual target, it pushed my crews toward the roads easiest to resurface — which is why the Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) Drive went unpaved for years, since it took forever and cost five times as much. It's an important tool; I just don't want to fetishize it.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** It measures activity, not outcomes — it's like a lamp that isn't plugged in.

**Maria Torres-Springer:** The MMR tries to answer "What did agencies do this year?" rather than "What are the biggest problems, why are they happening, and what will we do about them?" To make it a management tool, it needs to focus on the real cross-agency priorities — if every administration named the 20 things that truly matter and explained why they weren't working, it becomes something a senior leader might actually wrestle with. And it still has to cover the plumbing: procurement, technology, workforce. Maybe the tool we already have just gets reformed rather than replaced — but there has to be a mandated review, so the plumbing isn't left to a few people's heroics.

**David Schleicher:** There have been two silos of ideas here: information-forcing and executive authority. On information-forcing — the MMR — two things. It should focus on outcomes, not effort: the greatest information-forcing tool the city ever produced is [CompStat](https://compstat.nypdonline.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Whatever the cheating around the edges, I know how many murders happen each day and whether they're rising or falling — that's good for the public, good internally, and it creates the right incentives. And it should focus on cost: how much are you spending to achieve these ends? On executive authority — what Carl and Polly raised — one idea, which I think was raised at a public meeting, is increasing the mayor's rulemaking authority: writing a strong, [Chevron-style deference](https://www.dlapiper.com/en-us/insights/publications/2024/06/chevron-overruled-in-loper-bright-v-raimondo?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) into the charter for rules created by city agencies, so courts can't as easily second-guess them. Two buckets, and you can design either one in different ways.

**Carl Weisbrod:** Polly's idea — taking all construction out of the city agencies, EDC and the School Construction Authority and putting it into one big construction agency, in effect abolishing EDC — would save the city enormous money and time, if it's run as a genuinely efficient entity. We don't appreciate how little we know about the value we get for our capital dollars. Putting it all in one place — which under current law would have to be off-budget, but mayor-controlled — would add real efficiency.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** It would also put every project in one place — $18 billion for jails, billions more for housing — so we could finally see what we're spending our capital budget on, and how we decide.

**David Schleicher:** It also hits something the transit-construction reports keep finding: agencies effectively taxing other agencies. The Marron Institute's [report on the Second Avenue Subway](https://transitcosts.com/transit-costs-study-final-report/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found a huge share of the cost overruns came from inter-agency fighting over who's responsible for what.

**Polly Trottenberg:** The other bite at the apple is simply that whatever off-budget agencies are allowed to do, there's no reason on-budget agencies shouldn't. There's no underlying logic to the distinction — people accumulated all these complicated steps that, as the School Construction Authority shows, aren't necessary.

**Carl Weisbrod:** But that requires changes in state law on so many levels.

**Polly Trottenberg:** It does — and this is something I hit constantly at the Department of Transportation (DOT). A lot of it runs through Albany: civil service, procurement. I fought a lonely battle in Albany for years just to get the city a limited amount of design-build on bridge construction. A preposterous waste of time and energy.

> Every agency should be able to procure and hire and do what an EDC or School Construction Authority can.

**Maria Torres-Springer:** That's where I'd push. When I was a policy analyst — my first government job — a construction commission recommended a super construction authority, so this idea is 25 years old. You'd have to believe whatever gets stood up off-budget would survive the Albany gauntlet and not end up a watered-down version only marginally better than the Department of Design and Construction (DDC). But built with the right tools and flexibility, it would obviate DDC and the separate construction arms of every agency.

**Robert Gordon:** The point about the powers off-budget agencies have, which the rest of government lacks, is powerful and true at every level. On the transportation thread: that Second Avenue report also has an extended discussion of reliance on outside contractors as a driver of huge costs — tied directly to the inability to hire inside government. You end up paying three, four, five times more for a contractor's time than to bring that talent in-house. That's both a striking fact and a rationale for fixing government hiring.

**Polly Trottenberg:** Picking up the Albany thread: I'd make a strong pitch for bringing Albany colleagues into this conversation. It's a great moment — the mayor arrives with a lot of popularity and influence. It isn't charter reform, but it would be the moment to circle back on procurement, capital projects and civil service. The city owns a piece and the state owns a piece.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** Let me put in my own two cents on the river running through several of these. There's data — the access within every agency to see where the problems are, whether it's serious mental illness or crime. The time spent hacking through a jungle of internal data-sharing agreements is absurd; it's been solved elsewhere. Another: Should the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issue a standing instruction that whenever money is set aside for a pilot, there's an assessment of how it went? Otherwise you get a barnacled accumulation of projects you can never pull back and never replicate. And one more: we spend billions settling claims, and no one ever asks what the Law Department is doing. Some kind of ClaimStat — do all those claims add up to systemic failure? — so the department isn't simply making the donuts.

**Carl Weisbrod:** You touched on OMB. I give it enormous credit for keeping the city's fiscal house in order for half a century. But it's also a priesthood, especially on the capital budget, which has never been properly analyzed from the outside. The starting point is always the baseline — there's no notion of zero-based budgeting on the capital side.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** A thousand percent. There's a micro penny-pinching that sidesteps the real question: what does an agency actually need to be effective, and are we allocating people and money to get there? OMB could be a real force for good.

**Michael Samuelian:** Agencies are not good at sharing data with one another, and we have a frontline view of forcing that sharing. Standardize the data, share it, and you can do almost anything with it. New York's open data law was ahead of its time on sharing data publicly, but it's been frozen in amber since. Marry that to David's point on the MMR and make it about service delivery: the MMR shouldn't be about the mayor; it should be about whether residents are getting services on time. We build our systems to protect bureaucrats, not to serve residents — we should be thinking about the user experience (UX) of government. And if someone successfully pilots a service, they should be able to sell it to other agencies immediately.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** It's all about the plumbing, and the charter is about the bones. So many of the results you want depend not on how one agency operates but on how agencies operate together — and cross-agency coordination is exactly where the performance work has to live.

**Polly Trottenberg:** One more on the Law Department. A huge source of payouts is trip-and-falls on sidewalks. At one point the Law Department wanted us to shave tree roots and patch bumpy spots. My answer was: can I see the data? — both for the places that genuinely needed repair and to spot patterns, certain neighborhoods or certain lawyers bringing trip-and-fall cases the city just settles. Their answer was, essentially, "No data." I was ready to roll up my sleeves and find savings — the city pays out hundreds of millions on these — but I couldn't without data. There's a desperate need for transparency and actionable data across city agencies.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** And think about bad-actor employees — the enormous claims now coming in, the assaults at Rikers, the police-misconduct cases, much of which might have been caught in advance.

**David Schleicher:** One theme here is that it's good when the mayor has more control and there are fewer rules — that's the separate-agencies point. But information can constrain as well as formal rules: requiring you to report on things is a different kind of check than making you follow complicated procedures. So there's a natural pairing — a more powerful mayoralty combined with strong information-forcing. You remove certain checks, but add ways for the public to do the checking. That's how a lot of governments work; Britain has both a lot of executive authority and a lot of information-forcing.

**Polly Trottenberg:** We keep picking on the Law Department, but the city does produce a lot of now-searchable information — I was there when we were aggressively digitizing and trying to make things findable.

**David Schleicher:** The city is actually one of the best in the world at producing information — crime data especially. That was one of the great Bloomberg innovations.

**Polly Trottenberg:** I wouldn't describe all of this as mayoral power. Some of it is, but a lot is just encrusted process and over-lawyering. Clearing that out doesn't let the mayor get away with more; it just makes things easier to do. I used to joke, though I meant it: if you wanted to build something major in New York and let the natural processes run their course, it would never get done — you had to be in hands-on problem-solving mode the whole way. It's less about giving the mayor grand new powers than clearing the gunk so he can do what he's supposed to do.

**David Schleicher:** But the gunk is legislative — it's laws passed by the legislature.

**Polly Trottenberg:** Some of it. Some is legal, some procedural, some City Council, some Albany.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** And Carl, and maybe many of you, would say that if you actually want to get something done as an agency head, you keep your head down and avoid City Hall.

> The Council has nothing like a Congressional Budget Office to score legislation.

**Polly Trottenberg:** On policymaking, maybe — but to build a major bridge, City Hall mostly just wants you to do it competently. Let me toss in one more idea, picking up Carl's point about OMB: I have a student who wrote [a piece on the City Council's unfunded mandates](https://thebiggerapple.manhattan.institute/p/nyc-keeps-passing-laws-it-cant-afford?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and it blew my mind. The Council has nothing like a Congressional Budget Office to score legislation. At the federal level, contentious as it is, every bill gets a nonpartisan, permanent group of professionals doing its best to estimate long-term costs. The Council has nothing comparable.

**David Schleicher:** That might be the single best piece of civic infrastructure — and we lack it outside government too. You get occasional reports from the [Citizens Budget Commission](https://cbcny.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but Washington has the [Congressional Budget Office](https://www.cbo.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Yale Budget Lab, a dozen others. There's nothing comparable at the local level.

**Polly Trottenberg:** It's Tal Roded, one of my most brilliant students, who wrote it. It resonated because the Council passed the [streets master plan](https://intro.nyc/local-laws/2019-195?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and I had to testify endlessly: you didn't give me the money, the people I could hire quickly or the facilities, you didn't clear the community-board process — and now you're mad I didn't deliver. That might be a charter reform: a serious, permanent, nonpartisan group, at the Council or city OMB, to score this. Social services is another area drowning in unfunded mandates. It's better for everyone to understand the math of what they're asking for, because too often they don't have to own it.

**David Schleicher:** You could do it inside an agency, or give it to one of the other charter entities — require the comptroller, say, to issue a cost report before any legislation passes. It's not strange to have an independent entity do the scoring, at some remove from the legislative process.

**Polly Trottenberg:** I have a lot of issues with how the comptroller's office is set up — it's highly politicized, and I don't think it's a good model. In other governments, the financial-oversight agencies aren't run by people who aspire to run for president. It creates real political misincentives.

**David Schleicher:** Separate local executives are probably a bad idea in general — we arguably shouldn't have a comptroller or a public advocate at all. But if we're going to have them, we can at least give them real responsibilities, because right now they're jobs without clear purposes.

**Polly Trottenberg:** We do need serious scoring of city legislation; how you do it is the question. I won't claim the CBO produces fiscal discipline — we're the government with a multi-trillion-dollar deficit — but it produces fiscal knowledge. People find ways around it, but to some degree they have to own what things cost.

**David Schleicher:** I agree. The hard question is whether a scoring agency sits with the mayor or apart from him — an executive agency or a legislative one. That's the complicated part.

**Polly Trottenberg:** Rereading the charter, I keep thinking: so many agencies, so many offices. Don't create anything new — merge some, and make better use of what you've got.

**David Schleicher:** One principle should be to make the charter shorter. Being efficient includes cleaning up the charter itself.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** Love it — the same way one way to reform the MMR is to cap it at 15 pages, no more than three results per agency.

**Polly Trottenberg:** For DOT, maybe you track 15 or 20, but 85 is goofy.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** Ridiculous. Thank you all — a rich discussion, and we'll torture you again soon.

---

## Ideas that surfaced in this session

**Comparative-effectiveness reporting.** Require the comptroller's audit function and every agency to report their performance against peer cities, forcing New York to confront whether it's actually delivering value for its tax dollars rather than assuming its scale and complexity excuse underperformance.

**Radical spending transparency.** Post labor contracts and city spending data in searchable form so voters can actually see where their money goes.

**Recurring government capacity review.** Add a charter-mandated review (every 3–4 years) assessing whether government has the operational capacity to deliver — covering procurement, workforce, technology and capital delivery.

**A workforce modernization commission.** Create a time-bound commission, with labor included, to fix outdated civil-service exams, the restrictive "rule of three" hiring rule, excessive job classifications, and noncompetitive pay.

**Gig-economy/rotational talent pipeline.** Build a Teach-For-America-style rotational corps for short-term government tours, make every agency service available fully digitally.

**Migrate off-budget agency powers to on-budget agencies.** Since off-budget entities like the EDC and School Construction Authority can procure and deliver capital projects faster and cheaper than city agencies, extend those same procurement and hiring powers citywide.

**Consolidate construction authority**. Merge all city construction functions (EDC, School Construction Authority, agency-level construction arms) into one off-budget, mayor-controlled entity, an idea with 25-year-old roots in a prior charter commission proposal.

**Reform the Mayor's Management Report.** Give the MMR real teeth again by staffing it with permanent, apolitical technocrats (as in its 1970s origins); focus it on outcomes and cost rather than activity counts; and cap its length to avoid perverse incentives.

**Create** **stronger mayoral rulemaking authority.** Write language into the charter clarifying the precise role of agency rulemaking, reducing the ability of courts to second-guess executive rules.

**Centralize data-sharing across agencies**. Resolve the tangle of internal data-sharing agreements between agencies (e.g., on mental illness, crime) and standardize open data practices, which have stagnated since New York's early leadership on the issue.

**Write an Office of Management and Budget pilot-program accountability rule.** Require OMB to mandate an objective assessment whenever it funds a pilot program, preventing an unreviewed accumulation of one-off projects.

**Create "ClaimStat" for the Law Department**. Systematically analyze the city's legal settlement claims (which run into the billions) to detect patterns of systemic failure rather than treating each claim in isolation.

**Move to zero-based capital budgeting**. Challenge OMB's practice of always starting from prior-year baselines on the capital budget.

**Create an independent legislative cost-scoring body.** Create a permanent, nonpartisan entity — modeled loosely on the Congressional Budget Office — to score the fiscal impact of City Council legislation before passage.

**Shrink and consolidate the charter itself.** Rather than creating new offices or commissions, merge redundant existing ones and shorten the charter document as a matter of principle, treating textual bloat as its own inefficiency.
### The Right Path to a More Efficient New York City
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-right-path-to-better-government-coge-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T14:00:08.000Z
I want to tell you about something called the windshield survey.

Every two years, teams of New York City Department of Transportation inspectors drive along the city’s 6,000+ miles of streets and manually assign pavement condition scores to what they see, which then inform which streets get prioritized for repair. It has always been a deliberate and somewhat subjective practice, but it worked well enough. Then two things changed: the roads began carrying more and heavier vehicles, and climate change intensified. Road deterioration now accelerates faster than a two-year inspection cycle can keep up with, and a process that was once adequate has become a liability.

One of the fellows in the program that I oversee at Cornell Tech — the [Urban Innovation Fellowship](https://urbaninnovationfellows.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — is now implementing a computer vision solution at DOT that processes high-resolution street imagery with AI. It compresses that two-year inspection cycle to six months (and one day, that may be even less). This approach will produce more consistent results, and will eventually support a comprehensive digital inventory of roadway markings the City doesn't currently have. The tech isn’t new — it has existed for years, and DOT staff have wanted to use it for years. What is new is having a skilled person with the right mandate, embedded in the right place, with enough time to earn the trust of the people who actually run the streets.

This is one of the many stories the new Commission on Government Efficiency needs to hear, because it reveals something a charter commission can easily miss: that the path to government efficiency runs through people and capacity, not just rules and regulations. COGE is Mayor Zohran Mamdani's newly-formed Charter Revision Commission, charged with reviewing the New York City Charter and recommending reforms for the November ballot. Its first public hearings, focused on infrastructure, small business and government technology, began in June.

### COGE, not DOGE.

Mamdani was right to name this the Commission on Government Efficiency. Not because the contrast to Elon Musk's DOGE is clever — though it is — but because he's right that government efficiency is a necessary component of good governance, regardless of your politics. The Commission’s chair, Patrick Gaspard, made this connection explicit at the Commission's opening meeting. "While this is a commission on efficiency," he said, "efficiency is not the end goal. Efficiency is in the service of affordable housing, affordable childcare. It's in the service of mass transit that works well." The mayor himself made the same point more [concretely](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mamdani-administration-releases--speed--reforms-to-deliver-affor?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): two-year delays in affordable housing construction, the seven-month average lag between construction completion and tenant move-in, and eight-month permitting backlogs are not abstract bureaucratic failures. They're the reason apartments don't get built. At the Department of Buildings, he noted, only six people can approve permits for housing. Six! "That is not a recipe for being able to build enough housing to keep up with our ambitions for the City."

This same logic runs through every agency with a role in delivering the Mayor's ambitious agenda. You can't run universal childcare through a hiring process that takes nine months from offer to start. You can't fight climate change through procurement rules that make it nearly impossible for City agencies to work with the startups developing the technologies we need.

### Necessary but not sufficient.

But if COGE only focuses on rules changes, which is mostly what charter commissions do, it will miss the deeper problem. New York City government isn't just over-regulated. It's also under-resourced in ways charter revisions can’t fix on their own.

Certainly, there are rules worth changing: outdated procurement requirements, [civil service classifications that predate the smartphone](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-yorks-mamdani-ny-civil-service-system/), and hiring timelines that would make any private-sector recruiter flinch. But as Commission member Kathy Wylde observed at that first meeting, there is "no philosophical fix" for these problems. The work is "in the weeds," and it is "grinding." Rule changes are necessary but not sufficient. The City also needs to *build* technical capacity inside agencies, talent pipelines that civil service pay scales can't support alone, and cross-agency knowledge networks that the current siloed structure actively works against.

The Urban Innovation Fellowship was designed to do exactly that. Over the past year and a half, seven fellows embedded directly in seven City agencies (alongside some truly remarkable full-time agency employees) have been doing the painstaking work of building innovation capacity where services are actually delivered. What we've found is that the hunger for this kind of support is real and too often unmet.

There's a persistent assumption in government reform that the most important decisions happen at the top of the org chart. And that by electing the right leaders, we can fix what the last person failed to. Maybe that's where the power is. But it's not necessarily where the work happens.

The work happens at the Department of Environmental Protection, which manages 6,800 miles of water mains, many of them more than 80 years old. And at the Department of Sanitation, which oversees the collection of 44 million pounds of trash every day. And in the Sustainability office of the City Housing Authority, trying to decarbonize the largest public housing system in North America. And, yes, at the DOT, driving every single street on a two-year cycle.

More than 300,000 City employees work across 50-plus agencies delivering services to New Yorkers daily, while City Hall itself employs roughly 300 people. The innovation signal that comes from City Hall weakens the further it travels from the executive suite. There are tech-savvy people in or near the Mayor's Office. Fewer at the agency level, and fewer still inside the divisions where the actual decisions get made: which data to collect, which processes to automate, which vendors to call. That gap is what the Fellowship exists to address.

Our fellows certainly bring unique skills to their projects, but they also bring a fresh perspective to problems that have bedeviled the public sector for years. For example, our Mayor's Office of Contract Services fellow redesigned procurement workflows that had been largely unchanged for decades. Some timelines are now 75% shorter, not through deregulation but through common-sense, human-centered process design. That kind of work requires someone with enough expertise to spot the bottleneck and enough credibility to persuade agency staff to try something new. Our NYCHA fellow identified wastewater heat recovery as a viable technology for decarbonizing domestic hot water, secured grant funding from the State, and will soon launch a demonstration project that could scale across hundreds of similar buildings. This technology has been around for years, but nobody had done the work of putting all the necessary pieces together. (You can read about these and other fellows’ projects in greater detail in our [interim report](https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.coecis.cornell.edu/dist/4/371/files/2026/03/UTH-Urban-Innovation-Fellowship-Interim-Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).) 

Charter reform alone wouldn't have been enough to make any of this happen. It required skilled people embedded in agencies, building trust with civil servants who already understood the problems, and bringing outside expertise to bear in a way that produced solutions neither side would have reached alone.

### Yeah, a commission’s cool. But have you tried a permanent office?

Charter reform and executive action can create some of the conditions for change. But conditions alone won't deliver it. Someone has to own it. And right now, nobody does.

The reforms above, and the slew of smart reforms the Commission is sure to propose, aren't necessarily new ideas. They are the kinds of ideas that smart people in government have been advocating for years. And they’re the kinds of reforms that happen in fits and starts. Meaningful reform keeps happening in disparate corners of government, piecemeal, without an overarching strategy and without anyone with the authority to push through solutions that span agencies. Flagship programs succeed when senior leaders babysit them, or when enough political attention gets focused on a specific initiative to force the system to respond. But as Jennifer Pahlka, author of Recoding America, [has written](https://statesforum.substack.com/p/making-government-work-for-the-people), that is not the same as fixing the system. The goal has to be: "let's not just fix it for my pet project. Let's fix it globally."

So COGE should recommend more than charter amendments. It should recommend the creation of a Mayor's Office of Government Transformation, an empowered City Hall team with one job: to close the gap between policy intent and operational reality across all of City government. Modeled on the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability that drove the first PlaNYC, it should sit in the First Deputy Mayor's portfolio for real coordinating authority across agencies, and once the work of the Commission is done, COGE’s Executive Director, Ann Cheng, should become the head of this new Office. It should find chokepoints, pilot solutions in a few agencies, measure results, and scale what works. And it should have actual authority to act, not just recommend. Because an office that can only recommend becomes just another study group, and the City already has enough of those.

There are 300,000 people who show up every day to make this city run. They know their systems, their communities, what's broken, and often how to fix it (or at least, how to work around what’s broken). What they need are the tools, the talent, and the room to act on what they know.
### A Striving Government for a Thriving City
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/a-striving-government-for-a-thriving-city-coge-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:55.000Z
For many New Yorkers, government inefficiency is a personal experience. It is the months an apartment building [waits](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-housing-permits-fast-track-construction-mamdani/) for a permit — a delay that shows up later in higher rents. It is the extra time a family spends in a shelter because an [intractable process](https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/04/10/affordable-housing-crisis-vacant-units-delay/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) cannot get them into an available home. It is sidewalk sheds that [sit](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/government-improvements-mamdani-can-tackle-in-the-first-100-days) for years and road [repairs](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-first-100-days-scorecard-nyc/) that never come. It is unanswered 311 requests and energy costs that ratchet up while clean energy sits untapped. When the City lets inertia get the best of it, residents suffer through lost time and higher costs — or are forced out due to high costs and a lack of services.

Judging both by what he says and his actions thus far, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani understands that a better-functioning government is necessary. He also understands that for voters to trust him with higher taxes and more ambitious programs, they need to see a government capable of delivering what it is already assigned. His Commission on Government Efficiency — a charter revision commission that follows in the footsteps of his SPEED Task Force on housing production, the naming of Chief Savings Officers to deliver efficiency in agencies, and more — is his latest effort to shake New York out of its inertia. We testified before the commission and came away encouraged. The commissioners, a diverse group that brings deep expertise, pushed on the substance, and the staff is eager to engage ambitiously with big ideas.

### Powers and limits of the charter

The City Charter is often referred to as New York City’s constitution, but it’s less powerful than that and easier to change. The charter is a creature of the state, which means that it cannot override (and indeed can be overridden by) the state Constitution and state law. Within the city, the parts of the charter that establish the framework for city government (i.e., what offices exist and how we elect them) require a referendum (usually proposed by a [charter reform commission](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/charter-revision-politics-nyc-primer/)) to change (e.g., the city eliminated the Board of Estimates in 1989 after the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional). Within those margins, the Council can change the charter on its own (e.g., by changing the responsibilities of a department). 

Within city government and politics, though, charter reform commissions have an interesting role. The commissioners are often (but not always) less bound by the traditional stakeholders of city politics as they do not have to be reelected and the brief nature of the assignment tends to bring an air of creativity that is not always present in permanent legislative bodies (even if they may have the same or greater power). Last year's charter commission is a good example. The commission's [final report](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2025/7-21-2025-charter-revision-commission-adopted-final-report-digital.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) put five amendments before voters last November, four of which passed. The outcomes that those amendments sought — faster City approvals and a fairer distribution of housing — likely could have been pursued through legislation, but the Council, and indeed state legislature, had been obstacles for years. The charter gave reform a path that bypassed member deference (the practice of voting with the member affected by zoning change or project siting, which often resulted in blocked projects) and put the question to voters directly. That combination of a big change that powerful incumbents may resent can be the sweet spot for COGE. 

### Our proposals

Abundance is about making it easier, faster, and cheaper to build what New Yorkers need, primarily housing, faster transit, and clean energy. We see government capacity as essential to an [abundance agenda](https://www.abundanceny.org/agenda?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) because of what it unlocks. To name a few examples: a government that spends less time hiring can spend more time delivering services; reducing the cost of a new subway station can enable the MTA to extend subways further on the same budget; and private developers can build faster when we find ways to reduce friction in builders’ interactions with the government. 

For too long, government at all levels has insisted that all kinds of projects need to follow the same approval processes and that process should be as strenuous as what we would have the biggest, most complex and most odious project go through. For the smaller, simpler, clearly beneficial projects, we simply shrug and explain that’s how it is. But it doesn’t need to be. The City can change the rules to benefit projects that we decide that we want more of — electric vehicle chargers, solar panels, and bike lanes — and keep hurdles for projects that we do not prioritize. The government, democratically elected, can express an opinion on what to build via the process it does or does not require. 

Here are seven proposals that we think would meaningfully improve how the government works that would be worth a charter amendment to achieve. 

- **Require the mayor to submit a five-year government workforce plan, modeled on the capital strategy.** More than [13,000 city jobs](https://www.amny.com/politics/nyc-government-job-vacancies-budget-crisis/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) sat vacant as of January 2026\. The Department of Buildings (DOB) and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), each critical for solving the housing crisis, had vacancies above 10%. The path from a civil service exam to a start date can [run well past a year](https://nysfocus.com/2026/02/11/mamdani-civil-service-exams-hiring?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Those gaps are filled through overtime that has [climbed](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/a-framework-for-structural-nypd-overtime-reform/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to $2.71 billion and outside contracts that have [reached](https://www.osc.ny.gov/press/releases/2024/07/dinapoli-nyc-contract-spending-rises-7-billion-fy-2019?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 22% of operating expenses, both substantially up from what they were 10 years ago. The capital strategy is a 10-year plan of what major projects the city intends to build and where; funding for the plan is approved by the council as part of the budget and informed by community boards citywide. By requiring the mayor to submit a workforce plan covering hiring targets, hiring and management process reform, and training, the charter would create a regular checkpoint to modernize hiring rules, inform the city’s collective bargaining strategy, and staff the administration's policy goals. The federal government builds the staffing actions into its biggest programs — changing hiring rules for the Biden Administration's [infrastructure bill](https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2022/02/infrastructure-law-will-require-thousands-new-feds-and-biden-team-giving-special-permission-hire-them-quickly/361464/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [CHIPS and Science Act](https://www.factorysettings.org/p/hiring-damned-if-you-do-damned-if?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and more generally to meet the unique hiring needs of [disaster recovery](https://www.fema.gov/careers/paths/core?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Further, the state's NY HELPS program — by which the Civil Service Commission has waived exams and streamlined hiring for state and local government (by opt-in) positions, which the City can and should also opt into — has [demonstrated](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-creates-more-opportunities-access-state-jobs-allowing-work-experience?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that hiring flexibility works without the corruption [critics predicted](https://www.pef.org/articles/news/pef-opposes-civil-service-plan-to-make-40-more-titles-eligible-for-ny-helps/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).
- **Modernize the Department of Buildings by granting it singular permitting and inspection authority and giving it the ability to change the building code through rulemaking.** Between 2010 and 2023, a new building of five or more units [took](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2025/7-21-2025-charter-revision-commission-adopted-final-report-digital.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) about 18 months to permit, with four years often passing between filing and occupancy — time owners spent paying taxes, debt service, and insurance on a project that is not making money. One project may need permits from DOB, the Fire Department, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the Department of Parks and Recreation, and HPD, each on its own clock. The mayor's [SPEED Task Force](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mamdani-administration-releases--speed--reforms-to-deliver-affor?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) released a roadmap for progress, but bigger change is required. Agencies with charter authority to run permitting operations will not relinquish that power voluntarily. San Francisco consolidated intake and [recorded](https://www.sf.gov/news--28-decrease-processing-time-over-counter-building-permits-speed-construction?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a 28% drop in processing time. As for the building code, New York already [amends its construction code](https://dos.ny.gov/code/code-development?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by rule everywhere in the state other than the city.
- **Consolidate clean energy permitting — rooftop and community solar, battery storage, heat pumps, and interconnection sign-offs — in a single office at the Department of Environmental Protection.** Installing a heat pump or battery storage system can [require](https://citylimits.org/bill-promises-to-make-it-easier-for-new-yorkers-to-install-rooftop-solar-panels/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) sign-offs from DOB, the Fire Department, and Con Edison — each on its own clock. New York carries [among the highest residential electricity rates](https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/new-yorks-electricity-prices-among-the-highest-in-the-country/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the country, and fragmented permitting suppresses the distributed generation that would add supply and lower bills. The state showed the single-forum model works for large projects through the Office of Renewable Energy [Siting](https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/Clean-Energy-Siting-Resources/Siting-for-Large-Scale-Renewables/Office-of-Renewable-Energy-Siting?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [extended](https://www.cullenllp.com/blog/new-yorks-rapid-act-intended-to-accelerate-the-environmental-review-and-permitting-process-for-siting-both-renewable-energy-and-electric-transmission-line-projects/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) it to transmission through the RAPID Act. We can make similar progress in the city by centralizing the permitting process for these projects, which may also lead to streamlining with Con Edison too.
- **Speed the city's own capital projects through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) — waiving review for projects at or below $5 million and expediting it in districts that do not have their fair share of a given facility type.** Last year, voters approved streamlining ULURP reviews for housing projects and specifically for projects in areas that have not built their share of affordable housing. This proposal applies that logic to public capital projects. City projects must go through ULURP, which [lasts](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2025/7-21-2025-charter-revision-commission-adopted-final-report-digital.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at least seven months, and means that New Yorkers must wait for the simplest minor projects, e.g., a new water fountain or public bathroom. By waiving ULURP for minor city projects ($5 million is roughly the [median](https://www.nyc.gov/site/capitalprojects/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) project size), we can get these smaller projects done faster and focus limited public attention on bigger issues. Further, the City has a fair share framework that does roughly what you would expect it to do — direct that things New Yorkers want (e.g., parks) and things they don’t want, but the city needs (e.g., garbage truck garages) are fairly distributed. However, multiple audits have [found](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/fair-share-siting-new-york-citys-municipal-facilities/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that the framework is not enforced. The expedited ULURP process introduced by last year’s charter reforms presents an enforcement mechanism that the commission should use.
- **Improve procurement by raising the small-purchase threshold and clarifying that the mayor is in the driver’s seat.** New York City registered more than $42 billion in contracts in fiscal year 2025, [spread](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/citys-contracts-spending-hit-record-for-adams-admin-nearly-13k-contracts-for-total-of-42-45b/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across nearly 13,000 individual procurements, and a dense set of rules set by the Procurement Policy Board and the charter govern how those dollars can be spent. The small purchase threshold — below which agencies can buy without formal competition — has sat at $100,000 since the 1989 charter and has not been adjusted for inflation. Routine purchases get routed through a pipeline built for major contracts, tying up agency time and contributing to a payment backlog the comptroller [found](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/comptroller-lander-spotlights-nonprofit-payment-delays-in-follow-up-report-launches-audits-of-3-agencies-with-worst-delays/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) tops $1 billion in unpaid invoices. Reform proposals wait for the Procurement Policy Board (PPB), which [does not meet](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/comptroller-lander-proposes-procurement-reforms-to-fight-corruption-improve-transparency-and-support-mwbes/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on any regular schedule and has often lacked clear direction. The federal government’s equivalent to the small purchase threshold is now at $350,000 and is tied to inflation. Doing the same for the City — and giving the mayor the ability to act when the PPB is silent, subject to its override — would free agencies to focus oversight where it belongs.
- **Amend the charter to direct the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) to weigh housing impact when it designates historic districts and approves apartment consolidations.** The 2025 Charter Revision Commission[ examined](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2025/2025-Charter-Revision-Commission-Preliminary-Report-DIGITAL.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) historic districts, which[ cover](https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/designations/maps.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) much of Manhattan — about 30% of its lots — and add barriers to new housing. Research by the National Bureau of Economic Research and New York University's Furman Center[ found](https://www.nber.org/papers/w20446?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that historic designation cuts new construction by about 14 units a year citywide and 22 in Manhattan, where it forecloses the redevelopment of low-rise lots into denser housing. Further, studies show that since 1950, New York City has[ lost](https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2023/08/24/100k-apartments-lost-to-house-conversions/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) more than 100,000 homes through apartment consolidation — the combining of units into larger ones — which occurs more frequently in historic districts. As pro-housing advocacy group Open New York has[ argued](https://citymeetings.nyc/meetings/nyc-charter-revision-commission/2025-02-11-0500-pm-brooklyn-public-input-session-on-housing-and-land-use/chapter/testimony-by-annemarie-gray-executive-director-from-open-new-york-on-specific-charter-reform-proposals-for-housing-equity/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), an amendment could require the LPC, in consultation with the City Planning Commission, to analyze the housing impact of proposed districts in low-growth neighborhoods and to weigh neighborhood-wide effects when approving consolidations in landmarked buildings. The residents of historic districts are[ disproportionately](https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/how-can-historic-preservation-be-more-inclusive?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) white and college-educated, and a process that now passes over housing tradeoffs would have to reckon with them—producing fewer designations in low-growth neighborhoods and more in places that carry their share. Other states have moved the same way, with California[ allowing](https://cayimby.org/legislation/ab-1061/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) new construction in historic districts without a discretionary hearing where no contributing structure is altered and Washington[ requiring](https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1801300?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) owner consent for most new designations on residential parcels.
- **Reform approval processes so electric vehicle (EV) chargers and outdoor dining can be deployed at scale.** The city has a[ goal](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/electrifying-new-york-report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of rolling out 10,000 EV chargers by 2030, but as of January 2026, the city had installed only 92 curbside chargers while EV registrations[ grew](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/03/mamdani-administration-opens-electric-vehicle-fast-charging-stat?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 14% year over year. Part of what is holding us back is that the charter requires a revocable consent (a formal OK from the City that can be taken back anytime) for streetside chargers, or any private object put in the public right of way. The problem for EV charger companies, according to [testimony](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2025/7-21-2025-charter-revision-commission-adopted-final-report-digital.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) provided to last year’s charter revision commission, is that while the company works with building owners to access their spare electricity on a compensated basis, it is the building owner and not the charger company who must apply for the revocable consent, which introduces a high barrier of complexity for deploying at scale. The revocable consent regime is inconsistent in other areas too. Sidewalk cafes are [exempt](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2025/7-21-2025-charter-revision-commission-adopted-final-report-digital.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from standard revocable consent review while [roadway dining](https://www.openplans.org/curbside-dining?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is not, illustrating the inconsistent ways we manage public space. The permanent Dining Out NYC program for outdoor dining [requires](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2025/04/23/2852/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a revocable consent and a license, which could take five months or more to approve. An amendment could allow for citywide permits for routine infrastructure in the public right of way and introduce more consistency in the case-by-case revocable consent process for sidewalk and in-street dining. Other cities have moved faster on EV chargers by decoupling charging from property ownership. Portland[ adopted](https://www.portland.gov/transportation/electric-vehicles/ev-charging-row?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a right-of-way policy in 2023 that lets companies install curbside chargers under a master lease—one permit per site — and Seattle has[ run](https://seattle.gov/documents/departments/sdot/newmobilityprogram/evcrow%5Fevaluation%5Freport.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a similar pilot.

We are excited about the work COGE is undertaking. The commission does not have much time — proposals must be ready by the end of July to make the November ballot. Still, if there is more work to do, the commission can continue its work through next year (which we hope they do). Given the potential for impact on the lives of real New Yorkers, we hope this commission remains ambitious.
### What Has Mamdani Done So Far?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-has-mamdani-done-so-far/
Last updated: 2026-08-07T21:16:41.000Z
During last year’s campaign, many raised questions about what a Democratic Socialist assemblyman with no management experience could accomplish as mayor of the nation’s largest city. 

Six months into his term, 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani has overseen some notable achievements. He has [lowered crime rates](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR009/nypd-fewest-murders-shooting-incidents-shooting-victims-recorded-history-the?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), won legislative concessions for two of his top priorities in Albany, delivered a rent freeze (through the Rent Guidelines Board he largely appoints) on regulated apartments, and eked out a budget hours before its deadline, while welcoming hundreds of thousands of sports-crazed revelers from around the world into city streets this summer without major incidents. He’s won praise among many who see housing production as key to delivering a more affordable city by releasing a robust “Block by Block” plan to encourage construction as well as identifying ways to speed permitting approvals. These are just plans, of course; the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Crime in New York City Midyear: The Big Picture
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/crime-in-new-york-city-midyear-the-big-picture/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:56.000Z
New York City reached the midpoint of 2026 with one of its strongest first-half declines in major crime in two decades. But not all the news is good news.

Murders and shootings led the way, both falling to their lowest midyear levels in decades. The city recorded 119 murders through late June, 9.8% below the previous midyear low set in 2017\. Shooting incidents fell to 318, 3.3% below the previous low, set just last year.

Major crime fell 5.9% compared with the same period last year, the third-largest midyear decline on a percentage basis since 2006, behind only 2009 and 2007\. The drop was especially pronounced for several high-profile offenses: murders fell 25.6%, the largest first-half decline since 2006; burglaries fell 16.3%, the second-largest decline over that period; and robberies fell 11.7%, the third-largest decline since 2006\. 

Of the seven categories of crime considered “major” (murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny of motor vehicle), every one fell except rape and felony assault. The rape increase may not reflect a true rise. New York broadened its legal definition of rape in 2024 to include more offenses, which can push reported counts up on its own, but felony assault rose 0.3% since last year. 

The longer view is less rosy. Compared with 2019, before the pandemic, major crime is still up about 25%. Every category except murders and shootings remains above prepandemic levels. While most crime categories are slowly bending back toward prepandemic levels, felony assault is a stark exception. It has now risen for six straight years and sits 47.7% above its 2019 level. Misdemeanor assault, a lower-level assault category, also increased, rising 1.8% from 22,146 to 22,535 complaints, [according to Compstat 2.0](https://compstat.nypdonline.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

The gap shows up plainly in daily crime rates. Before the pandemic, the city averaged about 55 felony assaults a day. In 2026, it is averaging more than 80\. Grand larceny remains the most common major crime by far, with nearly 120 occurring per day. By contrast, murders and shootings are relatively rare and concentrated: the city now averages 1.8 shootings and 0.7 murders a day. The declines in murder and shootings matter, but they are small in absolute terms. The city recorded 11 fewer shootings and 41 fewer murders than at this point last year, against thousands of felony assaults and more than 20,000 grand larcenies. And another feature affects the impact of these crimes on the lives of New Yorkers: murders and shootings are highly concentrated by geography, while assaults and larcenies are geographically dispersed citywide.

The decline in major crime was not evenly distributed across the city. The Bronx saw the largest decrease, with major crime down 11.6%, nearly twice the citywide decline of 5.8%. Manhattan also outpaced the citywide trend, while Brooklyn saw a slightly smaller decline. Queens and Staten Island were essentially unchanged from last year. But even after that drop, the Bronx continues a decades-long pattern as the borough with the highest crime rate in both categories. Its YTD major crime rate stands at 449.8 per 100,000 residents, ahead of Manhattan at 388.7, Brooklyn at 244.1, Queens at 238.9 and Staten Island at 149.8\. For violent crime the Bronx rate stands at 216.2 per 100,000, ahead of Manhattan at 114.4, Brooklyn at 106.4, Queens at 87.5 and Staten Island at 63.6.

At the precinct level, a few areas stand out. The 83rd Precinct, in Bushwick, has had the largest percentage increase in major crime, rising 31.6%, or 224 additional incidents, from 2025\. The 113th Precinct, in South Jamaica, has also seen a notable increase, up 22.4%, or 124 additional incidents. By contrast, the 70th Precinct, in Flatbush, has had the largest percentage decline, with major crime falling 28.6%, or 206 fewer incidents. In absolute terms, the 43rd Precinct, in Soundview has seen the largest decrease, with 368 fewer major crimes.

Crime in the transit system held roughly steady. Major crime on subways and buses was essentially flat, with 1,085 reported incidents in 2026 against 1,093 in 2025\. The mix shifted, though. As is usually the case underground, most major crimes were robberies, felony assaults or grand larcenies. Robbery rose 9.6% and felony assault rose 4.4%, while grand larceny fell 7.2%. 

The rarest events moved in small numbers: Murders on transit rose from two to four, and reported rapes fell from six to three from 2025 to 2026.

This is a preliminary summary, published with data available at publication. The up-to-date data released by the Police Department (in its CompStat reports) is limited: It reports the counts of major crimes, as well as the counts of some misdemeanors and shootings. The more detailed data (NYPD's year-to-date complaint file on NYC Open Data with information on the date, location, offense and basic victim and suspect information) is what permits trend analysis by neighborhood and demographics. But this information is released on a lag and is not available today. Our full midyear report will follow once that is made public.

*This analysis covers Jan. 1 through June 28 for each year. Figures for 2026 and 2025 come from NYPD CompStat and are preliminary and* [*subject to revision*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/real-crime-numbers-nyc-nypd/)*. Historical comparisons use the NYPD complaint files, current and historic, via NYC Open Data. Crimes are counted by report date. New York broadened its legal definition of rape in 2024, so reported increases may not reflect a true rise.*
### Assessing Mamdani Six Months In
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/assessing-mamdani-six-months-in/
Last updated: 2026-08-07T20:44:18.000Z
Elected officials — executives especially — are typically two things at once. They’re politicians who run for office, usually because they want attention and validation and power. And they’re leaders responsible for the actual functioning of whatever they run. It’s still early in Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty, but now that we’re six months in, it’s worth taking a measure of his performance on both fronts.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### The History That Was Made at Bowling Green
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-history-that-was-made-at-bowling-green/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:57.000Z
The Declaration of Independence may have been written, edited, discussed, and signed in Philadelphia 250 years ago, but when it came to turning words into action, it was made in New York. 

New York City’s America 250 story might have begun on July 4, 1776, but while John Hancock and his smaller-print cohorts endorsed the Declaration that day and 12 of the 13 colonies voted “yes,” New York abstained. Something about waiting for instructions from home. 

Five days later, with or without our seal of approval, one of the quickly printed copies of the Declaration made its way to Manhattan. And on July 9, General George Washington himself ordered that it be read aloud to the assembled troops massed to hold this island for the newborn country.

The reading of the Declaration at what is now City Hall Park caused a sensation. We don’t know for certain whether it was its promise of freedom — all (white) men created equal — or its infuriating litany of crimes against the colonies by the English King.

Whatever inflamed them, these New Yorkers stampeded downtown toward the Battery, arousing fellow New Yorkers along the way. By the time they reached Bowling Green, the city’s oldest park, they had come up with a plan: to rid the green of every vestige of British rule. And they would start with the 4,000-pound, monumental equestrian statue of King George III that had loomed over the neighborhood for six years.

The statue was made of gold — or so it long seemed as it glinted in the sunshine. In truth, it was molded of lead, painted over with a coat of gilding, as if concealing the rot. (Sound familiar?) There was no stopping the revolutionaries. They swarmed through the park gates, lassoed the metal horse and rider with ropes, and sent the statue crashing down.

Not yet content, the crowd turned a symbolic gesture into a practical one. Perhaps this crumpled lead could now be melted down to make bullets to fight the very oppressors who had erected it. So it was out with the axes and hammers, smashing what was left of the effigy to bits. In those days, the main posts of the iron fencing around Bowling Green Park featured their own royal adornments: little gold crowns to signal that a king pranced within. In a final gesture of defiance, the patriots sawed off those ornaments, too. 

The other morning, I headed down there myself from City Hall Park to film a segment with NY1 News. Here, I unexpectedly encountered Robert Tierney, former chair of the New York Landmarks Commission, enjoying the now-peaceful site between downtown appointments. Just north, tourists were clamoring for selfies with the banal bronze Wall Street bull crouching on nearby Wall Street, oblivious to the real deal a few blocks away.

“Bob,” I asked, “is this fence really the original?”

“I believe it is,” said the landmarks expert. “Repaired here and there, but still standing.”

“So, this is the actual landmark of the first act of defiance of the American Revolution.”

“That’s right,” Tierney agreed. Then we looked around, squinting at the skyscrapers that now block the sun, and tried imagining the 1776 crowd, the fury, the courage, the small scale of the young city. Most of all the statue that wasn’t there. And the thrilling opening act of the American Revolution here.

With many scenes to follow.

The British were not about to abandon the greatest natural harbor in the New World. Before long, ships laden with British soldiers sailed into Manhattan and took back the streets. George Washington tried putting up a fight in Brooklyn but fell back toward the East River. Only the cover of fog and darkness enabled his troops to escape back to Manhattan by boat. For a while, they held another line of defense far uptown, but that effort collapsed as well. Washington and what remained of the Continental Army fled to New Jersey to fight another day. 

New York remained an occupied city for the rest of the war. It was a friendly occupation for the pro-British Tories who stayed behind and thrived, delighted that their treasonous neighbors had departed. But higher powers intervened. Rampant disease went largely untreated. A huge fire in September leveled as many as 1,000 buildings. And British ships anchored on the Brooklyn side began taking on patriot prisoners, confining them in such brutal conditions below decks that some 15,000 died of illness or malnutrition before the war ended—more than perished on the battlefields of the Revolution.

Not until November 21, 1783 — seven years after one George came tumbling down at Bowling Green — did the British finally abandon New York, allowing the other George to return in triumph. For generations, the event was celebrated as a municipal holiday — Evacuation Day — suspended only when it was subsumed by Thanksgiving.

If we look hard, we can still glimpse vestiges of New York’s defiant patriotism: Alexander Hamilton’s grave at Trinity Church; nearby St. Paul’s, where Washington worshipped; the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Harlem, which he briefly used as a headquarters; and the “African Burial Ground” on Duane and Elk Streets — then outside the city limits — where enslaved and free Black New Yorkers were once carted off for internment.

Of course, Bowling Green Park still stands near the shoreline. Benches still invite leisurely contemplation. The mammoth statue that no longer looms over visitors casts its own kind of imagined shadow.

Uptown, at the recently and brilliantly expanded New York Historical, the new Tang Galleries feature a sound-and-light show that reimagines the big 1776 takedown. In perhaps the earliest example of New York attitude, the topplers preserved the horse’s tail — and here it rests in the museum, a final in-your-face to Mad King George.

Paintings and engravings of the statue-toppling survive, too, but they are unreliable. Some show men and women hauling it down together, implying a social equality that did not exist. One depicts an American Indian looking on, perhaps only to symbolize the mixed emotions of the original inhabitants watching yet another set of white colonizers claiming their onetime land. Yet another image suggests that the actual work of hauling down the statue had fallen to enslaved Africans, the bitterest irony of all, since people of color would be denied the guarantees of the Declaration for another four score and seven years.

We haven’t lost our taste for iconoclasm. In recent years, statues of Confederates (Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson) and so-called colonizers (Christopher Columbus) have come tumbling down, too. A few years back, the City Council voted to banish the statue of the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, that had long graced City Hall. Adopted by the New York Historical, it now anchors the installation in Tang Hall.

Now, President Trump is threatening to build a new National Garden of American Heroes cluttered with effigies of celebrities of his choosing (most already honored elsewhere). It makes far more sense this Independence Day to remember precisely what it means to create — and erase — heroic statuary. The removal of George III from Bowling Green once sparked a titanic fight for liberty. Contemplating its absence can still inspire New Yorkers — far more than new statues can — to fight for freedom deferred, delayed and denied.
### New York: The Revolutionary City We Forgot
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-york-the-revolutionary-city-we-forgot/
Last updated: 2026-06-29T19:44:13.000Z
New York has a Revolutionary War problem.

Boston has the Freedom Trail. Philadelphia has Independence Hall. Both cities preserved enough of their 18th-century streetscapes that visitors can still imagine the American Revolution unfolding around them. New York preserved almost none of it.

The largest city in British North America, the site of the war's longest military occupation, the strategic obsession of both George Washington and the British Empire, and the nation's first capital somehow became the American city least able to see its own Revolutionary past.

Yet New York's inability to preserve that past may be making it the most interesting place in America to commemorate the nation's 250th birthday. As America turns 250, the city's missing Revolutionary landscape is forcing historians, educators, museums, and technologists to develop new ways of recovering a past that can no longer be experienced through preservation alone.

The answer starts with understanding what was actually lost and why it matters.

The British occupation of New York lasted seven years, from 1776 until Evacuation Day in 1783\. For nearly the entire war, Manhattan served as the headquarters of British military operations in North America. The Crown was forced to garrison thousands of imperial troops on a single island for nearly the entire duration of the conflict, tying down enormous resources that could not be deployed elsewhere. New York was not a side theater. It was the center of gravity. The struggle for control of the city shaped campaigns stretching from Canada to the Carolinas.

And when independence finally came, the serious work of building a republic didn't begin on the banks of the Potomac. New York City had served as the seat of government under the Articles of Confederation since 1785\. When the new constitutional government came into being in 1789, it was inaugurated here: George Washington took the oath of office at Federal Hall on Wall Street, and the first Congress debated and sent the Bill of Rights to the states from the same building. The capital moved to Philadelphia in 1790, but the republic's first acts happened in Lower Manhattan.

Yet unlike Boston or Philadelphia, New York rarely presents itself through that history. Part of the reason is practical. The city changed too quickly. Fires, immigration, industrialization, real estate development, and relentless infrastructure investment transformed the landscape. Colonial New York was not preserved – it was absorbed and buried. New York is a city that has always been more interested in building the future than memorializing the past. The result is that even many lifelong New Yorkers have little sense that their city stood at the center of the Revolutionary War. 

But that absence may be creating an unexpected opportunity. Across the city, institutions are experimenting with new ways of recovering a lost urban landscape. This summer, visitors can encounter Revolutionary New York through exhibitions, harbor events, public programs, walking tours, and digital experiences. Advances in digital modeling, mobile computing, and augmented reality have made it possible to reconstruct parts of the lost city in ways that would have been prohibitively expensive only a decade ago. At the Museum of the City of New York, [The Occupied City](https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/occupied-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) uses computer-generated reconstructions to help visitors explore the streets, waterfronts, and marketplaces of colonial New York. Sail250 is bringing tall ships and international visitors into New York Harbor, echoing earlier anniversary commemorations while introducing a new generation to the city's maritime history. 

Some of the most intriguing efforts, however, are happening outside museum walls. Through our work at the [Gotham Center for New York City History](https://www.gothamcenter.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the [NYC Revolutionary Trail](https://nycrevolutionarytrail.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), we have spent years confronting a basic challenge: How do you teach Revolutionary New York when there are few remnants of that time left to see? The question becomes especially urgent in classrooms across the CUNY system. Our students come from every corner of the world. Many are first-generation Americans, the children of immigrants, who did not arrive here with inherited family narratives about the founding or access to preserved colonial neighborhoods. For them, New York’s revolutionary history is largely invisible.

If a 21st-century office tower stands on top of an 18th-century street, the answer cannot simply be to point at a plaque and ask people to imagine harder. New York demands something more.

This summer, the Gotham Center is launching [Echoes of Revolution](https://www.echoesofrevolution.com/nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), an augmented reality walking tour of Lower Manhattan built on the same spatial mechanics as Pokémon Go and the historical environments of Assassin's Creed III. A student or a visitor can stand at Bowling Green, hold up a smartphone, and watch the gilded lead equestrian statue of King George III materialize on its marble pedestal, the same statue that New Yorkers tore down with ropes on the night of July 9, 1776, hours after Washington's troops heard the Declaration of Independence read aloud for the first time. Elsewhere, users can explore colonial waterfronts, military installations, and domestic spaces that disappeared generations ago. The modern skyline recedes. The buried city returns.

The goal is not nostalgia. It is orientation.

0:00 

/0:56 

1× 

Echoes of Revolution teaser video. **Credit: Ubisoft & Sugar Creative*

New Yorkers walk across some of the most consequential sites in American history every day without knowing it. The augmented reality tour makes those invisible landscapes visible again. That is a genuinely different model from what Boston or Philadelphia offers. Those cities demonstrate what preservation can achieve when a society decides, early enough, that a landscape is worth protecting. New York demonstrates something else: what becomes possible when a city that doesn't preserve its past is forced to find new ways of transmitting it.

The challenge extends beyond the Revolution. New York is constantly negotiating the relationship between memory and change. Every generation inherits a city rebuilt by the generation before it. The question is never whether the city should change; change is New York's defining characteristic and always has been. The question is how to carry historical understanding forward inside a place that refuses to stand still.

That is why New York's approach to the 250th anniversary may prove especially relevant, and not just for New York. Cities across the country face versions of the same problem: a past no longer visible in the landscape, a population that didn't grow up within the founding narrative, and a need to find new methods of transmission that go beyond preservation and plaques.

![Echoes of Revolution in downtown Manhattan.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/06/4-EoR_NYC_FireSuspects_Landscape.png)

Echoes of Revolution in downtown Manhattan. **Credit: Ubisoft & Sugar Creative*

New York may simply be further along the curve. What is becoming a challenge for many American cities has been a reality here for generations. The Revolution helped create modern New York. Now New York is helping to create new ways of experiencing the Revolution, ways that don't require cobblestones, that can follow people into neighborhoods where the 18th century isn't on display, and that can reach students who arrived here from elsewhere and are still learning what it means to be part of this place.

For a city often accused of forgetting its past, that may be the most revolutionary thing of all.
### After the Rent Freeze: What Happens to New York City’s Regulated Housing Stock Now and in the Future
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-rent-freeze-conversation/
Last updated: 2026-07-07T17:40:21.000Z
*Friday, June 26, Vital City hosted a conversation about what comes next for New York City’s rent-stabilized housing — and for tenants and landlords more broadly — in the wake of the rent freeze championed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The night before our event, the Rent Guidelines Board* [*voted to freeze rents on the city’s rent-stabilized apartments*](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/nyregion/nyc-rent-freeze-vote-mamdani.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*, delivering on Mamdani’s campaign promise.*

*The cheering in the room was real, but so was the harder morning-after question about the ramifications of preventing any rent increases on rent-regulated units at a time when property taxes, energy costs, insurance costs and other outlays are rising.*

*The question turns out to have very different answers depending on which building you’re standing in. A unit in a mostly market-rate building is not a unit in a 100-year-old walk-up that depends entirely on stabilized rents to pay its bills, and treating the two the same is how good intentions curdle into deferred maintenance, distress and the kind of disinvestment New York spent the 1970s learning to regret.*

*To sort out where the freeze helps, where it hurts, and most importantly what policy proposals city and state leaders should pursue next, Vital City contributing writer Errol Louis sat down with three people who have thought long and hard about these tradeoffs: Rent Guidelines Board member and NYU Stern economist Arpit Gupta, who cast the RGB’s lone dissenting vote; Michelle de la Uz of the Fifth Avenue Committee, who builds and operates the affordable housing in question; and Howard Slatkin of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council.*

*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Video of the full conversation is posted above.*

**Errol Louis:** Welcome to “After the Freeze: What’s Next for New York City Housing,” presented by Vital City, which seeks to improve civic life by finding great ideas and innovative research and making them available and understandable to those who shape urban policy. I’m Errol Louis, political anchor at Spectrum News NY1 and a contributing writer for Vital City.

We’re glad to have a chance to talk about this issue right after it became newly relevant, following last night’s vote of the [Rent Guidelines Board](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). For the next hour, I’ll be talking with some interesting people who have interesting things to say. We’ll talk for a bit, and then we’ll invite you to join in using the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen.

Joining us this morning are Arpit Gupta, a Rent Guidelines Board member and an associate professor of finance at NYU Stern; Michelle de la Uz, executive director of the [Fifth Avenue Committee](https://fifthave.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a nonprofit community development corporation that develops, preserves and manages affordable housing and community facilities; and Howard Slatkin, executive director of the [Citizens Housing and Planning Council](https://chpcny.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a research and policy organization focused on housing, zoning and neighborhood planning across the five boroughs. Welcome, and thank you all for joining us.

I want to jump right in with you, Mr. Gupta, because you were, as they say, in the room where it happened. What was it like being at that fairly raucous hearing last night?

**Arpit Gupta:** It’s similar to every year, to be honest, especially for the final vote. We have hundreds of people in the room, and the venue was at capacity. The owner member sitting next to me made a prepared statement, and I couldn’t hear a word of it from a foot away. So it’s a very raucous moment, and I understand it’s a great experience for many tenants. I appreciate the energy everyone brings to the process.

**Errol Louis:** Does the board meet or have discussions between these public hearings?

**Arpit Gupta:** We do. There’s a requirement that any discussion involving five or more members be reported to the public, so we have a lot of discussions involving four or fewer people.

**Errol Louis:** And one last scene-setting question: Has it occurred to the chair that they could keep order in the room at some of these hearings?

**Arpit Gupta:** I can’t speak for chairs in past years. I imagine the thought has occurred to them, but it’s a real challenge to find a way of doing so while respecting the democratic process and people’s rights to free assembly and speech.

**Errol Louis:** Fair enough. Let’s get into the substance, then. As a board member, what’s your understanding of the legal requirement to balance the data and the other factors — the overall economy, tenants’ ability to pay, affordability concerns — against the hard data about the cost of operating a rent-stabilized building?

**Arpit Gupta:** We have a very broad mandate. The board’s enabling statute sets out three basic things for us to look at. The first pertains to building and housing conditions. The second relates to cost-of-living measures. The third is essentially other data the board wants to consider.

So even the conventional framing of what the RGB does — balancing affordability for tenants against cost pressures for owners — is interpreted primarily out of that third leg of the mandate, along with the cost-of-living indices. The statute doesn’t give us that much to work with, and the courts have interpreted quite liberally the ability of boards like ours to weigh the data and balance the competing interests we’re meant to serve.

**Errol Louis:** Michelle, in your capacity as a longtime builder and operator of affordable housing, what have costs been like in recent years? We keep hearing from the apartment associations and other landlord groups that expenses have been skyrocketing while rents have not. From your point of view, what’s the situation?

**Michelle de la Uz:** Thanks for having me. There’s no question that the cost of owning and operating housing, including affordable housing, has gone up. Insurance costs in particular — we’ve heard a lot about this — have risen anywhere from 25% to more than 200%, depending on the property, and there’s concern they’re going even higher for 100% affordable projects. Water and sewer rates have also gone up. That’s been our experience.

**Errol Louis:** And to the extent that we now have this freeze in place, how will it affect your ability to do your work? Do you have buildings that will be affected?

**Michelle de la Uz:** We do. Tenants need housing — they need affordable housing — and owners need rents to pay the bills associated with maintaining the properties. The challenge is that people’s incomes have not kept pace with the cost of living. We definitely have properties that will be challenged, and quite honestly already have been challenged, in terms of paying our mortgages.

For context: all of our units are rent-regulated, and they’re also under regulatory agreement with the city or state of New York. So we have a belt-and-suspenders approach to ensuring affordability, and all of our tenants are low- and moderate-income. Any rent increase is a real challenge for them — but all of our properties are underwritten by government to assume revenue, meaning rents, increases of 2% a year, and expense increases of 3% a year. We’ve seen expenses go up well beyond 3%, certain categories even more. Meanwhile the revenue side, especially with this rent freeze, will be flat.

That said, we understand why our tenants can’t support paying more. And we know there needs to be another public-policy solution to help address our cost needs as owners.

**Errol Louis:** We’re definitely going to get to that. But in the short term, after a vote like last night’s, do you contact the city and say, listen, the assumptions under which we struck our deal no longer hold —

**Michelle de la Uz:** We’ve already contacted the city. They know.

**Errol Louis:** Seriously, though, what do they say? Much of the impetus for last night’s vote came from City Hall.

**Michelle de la Uz:** They knew this going in, and I think they recognize the strain it’s going to place on those of us who own 100% affordable housing for low-income tenants. They recently launched a set of new programs to help owners and managers of affordable housing address some of the gaps that exist — not just because of the RGB vote, but because of other strains that go beyond it.

Even absent any rent increase, we’ve had tenants falling behind, especially since COVID. We have higher arrears rates than we used to, and housing court is taking longer to resolve cases, with a backlog at the city’s HRA office. Meanwhile, our lenders still expect their mortgages, Con Edison and National Grid expect to be paid, DEP expects to be paid, and our insurers all expect to be paid — and must be, if you don’t want to default. We’re committed to preserving our affordable housing in perpetuity, but the math is getting harder.

**Errol Louis:** Howard Slatkin, balancing all these competing needs to make sure we have a stable, if not expanding, stock of affordable housing is something you spend a lot of time thinking about. How important is the distinction between “good” landlords and “bad” landlords? Are the motivations as important as the market forces?

**Howard Slatkin:** I think the outcomes are what’s important. The goal for landlords’ responsibility should be to deliver quality, sound, well-maintained housing for residents — which is what we all think residents deserve. The challenge is that owners have different pools of resources to do that with. As I’ve said before, a good landlord who’s broke can’t really be a good landlord. You can have all the good intentions in the world, but without the resources to deliver maintenance and services, you won’t be a good landlord to your tenants despite those intentions.

The thing we like to highlight is that rent is two things at once, and we have to keep both in mind. The RGB process is almost the opposite of that — it’s basically an either/or decision. Rent is an expense for tenants; it’s the biggest household expense for most renters in New York City. But it’s also the primary source of operating revenue for the buildings they live in. So when you shortchange that, it comes back to tenants too. They live in the consequences of whether their buildings are adequately funded. That’s what makes getting this set of policies right so important.

**Errol Louis:** Is the issue that rent is due every 30 days, but the effects of an underfunded building won’t be felt for months or even years?

**Howard Slatkin:** That’s certainly part of it, though sometimes the effects come faster than that. What you can see in the data that some portfolio managers have shared is that, because of all the bills Michelle just ran through — utilities, taxes, the mortgage, none of which are optional — the thing that gets shortchanged is the physical investment in the buildings, especially the non-emergency work that can be put off. Those things pile up and turn into bigger bills down the road.

One data point I find instructive: the [Community Preservation Corporation](https://communityp.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) put out a brief on its rent-stabilized portfolio in New York. Over five years, operating expenses increased 27% while rents increased only 11% — and every category of operating expense rose except one: repairs and maintenance. That’s worrisome, because it means that, by covering all the non-optional obligations, things that really shouldn’t be optional are becoming optional for people managing affordable buildings.

**Errol Louis:** Michelle, ultimately the HPD inspectors come knocking, right? Maintenance isn’t really optional.

**Michelle de la Uz:** That’s right. We have an obligation to provide habitable apartments and properties, so it’s not optional. But it’s what Howard is describing: you might take longer to get an extra bid, to find a vendor willing to do the same work for less, you stretch the timeline. That’s not something we want to do, and we avoid it, but the reality exists.

This is why owners of regulated affordable housing have been alarmed for more than a year — going back to the prior administration, even when the RGB was voting for increases. We were seeing expenses rise at an alarming rate and rent collections come in below historical norms. There’s an existential crisis on the affordable-housing side. The city has invested billions of dollars in affordable housing for low- and moderate-income tenants, and for our regulated stock we don’t pay property taxes, unlike the for-profit-owned rent-stabilized stock. We’ve been saying for a while that we’re not on a good trajectory. If we don’t invest in this housing stock, the buildings will suffer, the tenants will suffer, and the investment the city has made over generations is at risk. The whole vision of an inclusive city, where people of all races and incomes can survive and thrive, is at risk.

So we need a variety of public-policy solutions. That said, we know tenants right now — especially low- and moderate-income tenants — cannot afford more. They’re at a breaking point. Add what’s happening with cuts to SNAP and Medicaid and new requirements there, and you reach a breaking point. I think that’s why you saw the fervor last night. For tenants in rent-stabilized housing across the city, this is potentially a question of survival.

**Errol Louis:** Arpit, Mumbai is often cited as a worst-case scenario, from more than half a century ago. From an economist’s point of view, explain the nightmare we want to avoid.

**Arpit Gupta:** Let me take an example closer to home: the New York of the 1970s and ’80s, when we had massive distress in the rent-stabilized segment. The Bronx was burning. We saw widespread distress among owners and steep declines in housing value. This was also the period when rent stabilization began. It ultimately led to roughly 100,000 units coming under city control through in rem foreclosure — essentially because the buildings couldn’t generate the revenue to pay their taxes. Today that’s more commonly done through tax-lien sales. But in that period, the city took just under 100,000 units that were unaffordable for private owners to operate into government hands, with the intention of running them as affordable housing. And the conventional wisdom is that it didn’t go well.

So when we talk about the bad scenario, the worry is tangible. You have, as Michelle put it so well, a cap and a freeze on the revenue you can bring in, while costs are not capped.

This whole system is frustrating to sit in the middle of, because it’s pitched as owner versus renter — but the government is in the background controlling all of it. The government controls insurance regulation, which drives the liability exposure and lawsuits spiking insurance rates. It controls property taxes, which Michelle doesn’t pay on her units but which account for about 31% of expenses for rent-stabilized buildings overall. The [Furman Center](https://furmancenter.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has done great work showing the inequitable burden property taxes place on rental housing generally, and rent-stabilized housing in particular. The Water Board is government-controlled too. So the government controls most of the costs owners face — and then it stands up this board and gives us a mandate to translate those government-set costs into burdens on tenants. We get caught in the middle.

The risk is that if the board sets rent adjustments one way while government does not control costs, costs keep rising, revenues are frozen, and a number of these buildings become unviable. It starts, as Howard said, with deferred maintenance — and the Furman Center has highlighted that we’re already seeing the beginnings of it. That leads to violations and building-condition problems that HPD can try to address in the short run, but only so far. Then you get failures to pay lenders. The nonprofit lenders tell us that maybe a third of rent-stabilized buildings in their portfolios currently don’t have the cash flow to pay their mortgages. They’re dipping into reserves to do so, and once those run out, the buildings go into distress and foreclosure. Eventually the property taxes don’t get paid, it lands in government hands, and you get either government control, as in the ’80s, or tax-lien sales.

This also changes who owns the buildings. The landlords who would buy distressed rent-stabilized properties may not be the same kind of landlord we’ve had — I worry they’d be much more extractive. So there are real, tangible concerns about the future of rent-stabilized housing in a world of capped revenue and uncapped costs.

**Errol Louis:** It’s interesting that you say “the government,” but this new city government was voted in by the people. As is often the case in a democracy, we have to look at each other and take some responsibility. Arpit, you cast the only dissenting vote last night. Even taking into account what you just said, what were you trying to convey with that vote?

**Arpit Gupta:** I wasn’t trying to convey anything beyond doing the job. We have a mandate to execute, which has been interpreted as balancing competing interests. I’m just trying to do my best in public service to make what I think is the best decision in the interest of the public I represent as a public member.

I’d be entirely in favor of a rent freeze if it came under conditions that warranted it. This isn’t widely known, but the rent freezes under the de Blasio administration happened either under the extraordinary conditions of COVID, or, in an earlier instance, when the commensurate measure the board uses to track cost changes over time was actually negative — prices were falling — largely because energy costs were declining. In that case, the freeze was a positive adjustment relative to building costs. So rent freezes, even rollbacks, are completely within the board’s mandate and judgment if costs are under control.

And the city can control a lot of these costs. It’s entirely open to the administration to say, “We’re cutting property taxes, we’re capping insurance expenses,” as it has plans to do, in ways that would justify a freeze or a reduction. But the data we were presented this year showed those cost-containment efforts still incomplete, and a cost picture for owners that is quite high across every category. To freeze rents under those conditions presents a real challenge. I certainly acknowledge, as Michelle pointed out, that tenants face substantial hardship too. It’s no easy task to ask hundreds of tenants who come to us in public testimony to bear more. I’m very cognizant of that, and my hope is that we find better solutions.

A [piece that just went up on Vital City today](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-rent-freeze-agenda-nyc/) tries to advocate for programs that strike a better balance — protecting and capping rental expenses for low-income tenants without defunding buildings, which leads to the drastic outcomes we’ve seen here before.

**Errol Louis:** Right.

**Michelle de la Uz:** And there is one cost that, at least, local government doesn’t control — the cost of debt, for the for-profit owners of rent-stabilized housing that isn’t otherwise regulated. And it’s important to recognize that the rent-stabilized stock is not homogeneous. You need policy solutions crafted to its different segments. Some owners bought rent-stabilized properties in a low-interest-rate environment that has since changed, expecting external circumstances that didn’t hold. In some cases they over-leveraged and are now stuck. A building with a few rent-stabilized units that’s mostly market-rate is very different from a building that’s entirely rent-stabilized with very low-income tenants. A lot of our rent-stabilized buildings date to the 1920s — they’re 100 years old, walk-ups. We also have newer affordable housing. The needs are very different.

**Howard Slatkin:** Let me piggyback on that. I was describing the finances of rent-stabilized buildings recently and said it’s a bit like describing NBA basketball in New York as a general proposition. You can say it’s the greatest year ever — but you still have the Nets. And I’m a Nets fan, to be clear. The point is that rent-stabilized housing is very far from being one thing.

Michelle named the most important distinction: there are buildings that are entirely stabilized, where the building’s income comes entirely from stabilized units. When rents are frozen, those revenues are frozen accordingly. Then there’s another third or so of the stock that sits in buildings that are mostly market-rate, which puts those units in a completely different financial position. When you average the two, you get the Bill Gates-walks-into-a-room problem — everyone’s income goes up on average, but it doesn’t change what’s happening in the 100% affordable subsidized stock, or in the pre-1974 stock that’s almost entirely still rent-stabilized. That’s where you need specific public policy targeted at the revenue problem.

**Arpit Gupta:** I completely agree with that characterization, and I think it sheds light on something people find confusing. They hear from politicians that profits went up 6% or 10% this year, and if you’re a tenant whose building conditions are bad, you reasonably wonder where the money is going. I understand the concern. But that 6% or 10% is an average of two opposite trajectories. The part of the stock mixed in with market-rate units — because of regulatory abatements, or because some units were deregulated over time — is doing fine; those buildings are seeing record profits. The remaining half of the stock that is 90%-plus rent-stabilized is seeing declining profits and declining valuations. So we need different tools for them. In [my Vital City piece](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-rent-freeze-agenda-nyc/) I think a lot about how to make more of the stock resemble that mixed stock, which I think makes for a much more resilient housing stock.

**Errol Louis:** Everyone should read the Vital City article he’s referring to — I found it very helpful. Let’s go deeper into solutions. There are well over 100 people on this webinar, many of them journalists, and the public discussion is happening right now. Michelle, what are the two or three things government should focus on to move the needle, now that we have this new playing field with a two-year freeze?

**Michelle de la Uz:** A few things affect affordability. One is rental subsidy for eligible tenants. Only about one in four people eligible for [Section 8](https://www.hud.gov/helping-americans/housing-choice-vouchers?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) actually receive it in our city. The state has stepped up recently on rental subsidy, but the need outstrips the supply, and there’s real concern about the hole it could create in the city’s budget. Still, providing rental subsidy at scale for people who need it is one solution.

Another is workforce development. We train more than a thousand people a year and place them in living-wage jobs. A big part of this is that wages haven’t kept up, so we need to train people for the jobs of today and tomorrow and help raise their incomes.

And for those of us who own and manage regulated affordable housing: we’re no longer in a low-interest-rate environment, so we need to revisit our underwriting and pay down some debt — release these properties from debt obligations, because the math, as they say, ain’t math-ing.

**Errol Louis:** Howard, give us some solutions.

**Howard Slatkin:** I’ll build on Michelle’s list, which covers the essential components. First, we need a concerted set of policies to keep costs down, and that’s hard because it’s a collection of individual issues — wrangling insurance rates through various reforms, water-rate assistance for affordable housing (which was increased this year, but more is needed). DEP has to cover the cost of operating the water system and faces a similar bind, while affordable-housing operators have no new revenue to pay higher water rates. There are also the administrative costs that jump out of the Community Preservation Corporation’s analysis — the cost of navigating code enforcement, which is important but can be cumbersome and inefficient.

Second — and I’ll admit I haven’t yet read Arpit’s piece, so any overlap is just great minds thinking alike — we should take the tenant-facing half of rent and address it separately from the building-revenue half. Look at solutions that reduce a tenant’s responsibility for rent without reducing the flow of revenue to the building. That includes the supply of Section 8 vouchers, which isn’t where we’d like it, and [CityFHEPS](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hra/help/cityfheps.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which helps tenants pay the rent needed to keep the building operating. It’s powerful, and it’s costly, so we have to maximize our ability to deliver it.

There are also programs that already exist — [SCRIE](https://access.nyc.gov/programs/senior-citizens-rent-increase-exemption-scrie/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [DRIE](https://access.nyc.gov/programs/disability-rent-increase-exemption-drie/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the rent-increase exemptions for senior citizens and people with disabilities. They’re effectively a rent freeze for people who qualify with incomes below a certain level. The state legislature just expanded eligibility from $50,000 to $75,000 in income, which is great. The idea is that if you have people who can’t afford an increase, you address their need specifically without taking revenue from the building — because those programs issue the landlord a rent-abatement credit in the amount of the increase, as if the rent had gone up, while the tenant doesn’t pay it.

Those are the kinds of solutions we need to look at, because as long as costs keep drifting out of line with people’s ability to pay, this problem only gets worse.

**Errol Louis:** Arpit, talk about some of what’s in your article, because you’re on a similar track — more means-testing, more tightly focusing where subsidy and support go.

**Arpit Gupta:** Absolutely, and I’ll talk about SCRIE to make this concrete. With a program like Section 8, you cover essentially the entire rent for the tenant, which is powerful but very costly. It’s a funded program, so people line up, some get vouchers, and many don’t. The city programs like SCRIE cover only the incremental increase. That provides stability — households can plan for what their rent will be — and it’s a lighter-touch intervention. So I advocate expanding SCRIE-style protection, including a new program for low-income renters who aren’t elderly or disabled. That’s one pillar: protecting the lowest-income households.

A couple of others. Given the heterogeneity in the stock, the guidelines should be tailored rather than one-size-fits-all. There are many ways to do this; the way I prefer is to condition the rent-guideline increase on building conditions. This follows testimony from hundreds of tenants who told me the same thing: if you’re a slumlord, you get a rent freeze, while if you operate your building well, with no violations and no eligibility for the city’s [Alternative Enforcement Program](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/alternative-enforcement-program-aep.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which targets the worst violators, you’d get a different adjustment. Tying the adjustment to conditions does a few necessary things. It aligns incentives for proper maintenance. It ensures the worst actors get a worse deal. And, more importantly, it creates an incentive, because with rent-stabilized housing there’s a line out the door for every unit, so an owner can get away with deferring repairs since the tenant is effectively stuck in place. Separate guidelines keyed to building conditions would push against that.

The third, longer-term direction is to make more of the affordable stock look like that mixed-income stock. We have a couple of existing templates. There’s a program called [Mix and Match](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/mixed-income-program-mix-match.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that ensures a building has tenants at different levels of ability to pay. There are new NYCHA developments — in Chelsea, for example — that combine market-rate and public-housing units in the same complex. My idea is to make this happen for more rent-stabilized buildings. You might have a stabilized building with certain vacancies and convert some toward market rate in exchange for deeper affordability on other vacant units, preserving building-level affordability while giving owners flexibility. You could add density on rent-stabilized properties and make the incremental units market-rate, providing the ballast to improve conditions for existing tenants. These solutions are better socially — there’s a lot of evidence that mixed-income buildings produce better outcomes — and financially, because the surest way to make these buildings less dependent on what the RGB decides is to give them a separate revenue source from market-rate tenants who cross-subsidize the lower-income ones. If more buildings looked like that, we could also have more rent freezes in the future, because not all of a building’s revenue would depend on the RGB.

**Errol Louis:** I liked the part of your article where you talked about pairing apartments within a building — a market-rate unit alongside a subsidized or stabilized one. We have dozens of questions coming in, and I urge people to use the Q&A function. Let me start reading them.

Here’s one from Ilan: The mayor told us there’s a city fund to help cover expenses when rents don’t match them. Any idea what it is? Michelle, do you know about this?

**Michelle de la Uz:** For those of us who own the regulated stock, it’s part of that TOOLS package to help preserve existing affordable housing that’s rent-stabilized and under regulatory agreement. Howard may be aware of something broader, but that’s what I’m tracking — and we’re eager to apply. I understand things start next month.

**Errol Louis:** Every so often we report on a relief fund nobody has applied for, because it doesn’t quite match people’s needs —

**Michelle de la Uz:** Yes. I’m forgetting the name, but I think that was for vacant apartments in need of upgrades, with a certain amount of money attached.

**Howard Slatkin:** I’m not up on the latest there. It was an effort to get at units that needed capital investment and would otherwise not return to the market — an outcome nobody wants. Setting that aside, there’s a broader set of tools worth emphasizing. The state recently reauthorized the [J-51](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/tax-incentives-j-51.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) tax incentive for the preservation and rehabilitation of existing housing, which is important, and the City Council needs to authorize it and get it running so the city has that tool.

At the same time, none of us wants to reach the point where distress gets beyond what can be handled building by building. If individual buildings come in and work out their finances with the city, that’s great — but there are a lot of buildings. There are almost half a million units in the pre-1974 rent-stabilized stock alone, and there aren’t going to be 400,000 preservation agreements. At some point you have to address these issues at scale, not through one-off arrangements. It’ll take a combination of tools in the toolkit to get there.

**Errol Louis:** Here’s a question about last night from Jay: Why didn’t we see multiple proposals, as in past years? Arpit?

**Arpit Gupta:** There was a consensus among the other board members about the proposal to be passed, so the board moved ahead with that one.

**Errol Louis:** Is the assumption that you have until next year to see how this works, or are there interim decisions the board can make?

**Arpit Gupta:** We have a season — we start around March and go through this final vote, and now we’re done. The remaining board will reconvene next year, and we’ll see where things stand.

**Errol Louis:** This is from Adam Daly at amNewYork: Christina Smith alleged in her resignation letter that the board’s outcome was predetermined and that questions about the RGB’s data and methodology went unanswered. Do you agree with any part of that? What was your understanding of whether the board weighed the cost data before the vote, and did Smith raise concerns internally before resigning?

**Arpit Gupta:** One thing I can say is that, unlike in some previous years, I observed no interference by the administration in individual members’ decisions. I have to credit the administration on that independence, and I have to credit the professional, hardworking staff who provided excellent data and services. I stand firmly on those two points. As we discussed earlier, how to interpret the mandate is largely a matter of discretion left to the board.

That said, I hear where Christina is coming from in her frustration about what we do as a society if we have a board able to systematically set these adjustments through a freeze. The mayor, as you know, campaigned on four years of freezes. Will we keep freezing for four years regardless of cost? Everyone agrees we need costs to come down — but the city faces fiscal constraints. If we do all the things we’re discussing — property-tax cuts, more vouchers — that pulls resources from other parts of government. So what actually happens when the rubber hits the road and costs stay elevated while the resources aren’t there? How does Michelle underwrite her properties? If you’re a lender, what do you put down for future rent adjustments? There are real procedural questions about a body, appointed by a mayoral appointee, making decisions that become very challenging for everyone to live with. I hope we find solutions before then.

**Howard Slatkin:** I know this wasn’t the question, but I’d be remiss not to add my two cents: we should get beyond the gladiatorial spectacle of the Rent Guidelines Board and to the policy issues underneath it. A lot of what Arpit just said gestures at that. The RGB is not in a position to fix the affordability crisis. It has a mandate and has to decide within the parameters it’s given, and that alone will never solve the crisis. It’s the other issues we’re discussing that have to be layered on. We obviously need to pay attention to the RGB process, but we shouldn’t limit our imagination to the decisions before that board.

**Michelle de la Uz:** Can I pick up on that? I hear you on the gladiatorial spectacle, but I’d love — and Fifth Avenue Committee and Neighbors Helping Neighbors, our affiliate, had tenants in the room — to say that this was historic for them. They’ve been fighting for this; it affects their daily lives. What the RGB hearing process does is make tangible how public policy shapes people’s lives, because they get to participate every year and they understand how it works. I wish other democratic processes were as well understood by everyday people. If we could bottle that energy and bring it to Washington, we’d have dramatically different outcomes. We saw some of it in action in Tuesday’s primary here in New York City. We need that level of civic engagement at every level, all the time. It’s hard to sustain, but it’s what we need to address the other policy problems we’re discussing — because ultimately this is about political will and investment at scale, and that comes only with the kind of pressure we see at the RGB applied to other areas where people are suffering.

**Errol Louis:** Speaking of vouchers, the City Council is battling right now to finish the budget, and one proposal on the table would expand the CityFHEPS program so that perhaps 20,000 more people could get vouchers. Michelle, thinking of you as a landlord more than as an advocate, would that help?

**Michelle de la Uz:** Absolutely. We have people who’d be eligible but, for lack of additional resources, aren’t receiving it yet.

**Errol Louis:** Howard, the budgetary question is that CityFHEPS is expanding at about 4% a month, so the cost of the program would double — it’s around $1.74 billion now — and there are deficits ahead if expansion continues unchecked.

**Howard Slatkin:** There’s a budgetary question underlying all of this, and trade-offs embedded in it. But vouchers are a great example of a solution worth the cost. Section 8 is an incredibly powerful tool for aligning the interests of tenants and landlords — everyone wants the full rent paid and the paperwork moving so you can recertify every year. The availability of those funding sources to support building revenue and keep people securely housed is enormously powerful.

For budgetary and other reasons, we should also look at solutions like the SCRIE expansion Arpit mentioned. We’ve recommended the same — extending SCRIE-style protection to a category of lower-income residents — because it addresses stability. It’s not as powerful as a voucher, but it’s far less costly and could be scaled more broadly. Balancing those tools is an important piece of this.

**Errol Louis:** Howard, was your organization on record for, against, or seeking amendments to the [2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act](https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/articles/2019/new-rights-tenants-housing-stability-and-tenant-protection-act-2019-1?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)? The apartment association points to it as a key piece — to put it simply for the audience, it closed off vacancy-deregulation provisions that had long been in place. Landlord groups say it made it impossible for many units to become profitable.

**Howard Slatkin:** That precedes my time at the organization, but my understanding is that we didn’t take a position. To be clear, we’re not a landlord organization; we’re a housing-policy organization more broadly. That said, there have clearly been consequences of the 2019 HSTPA — some unintended, some untenable — that need to be addressed.

Embedded in all of this is the challenge of having to address both sides of the issue. One unfortunate consequence of a rent freeze can be seen in a building full of low-income seniors, where everyone has a Section 8 voucher to make up the difference between what they can pay and what it costs to operate the building. With a rent freeze, those tenants wouldn’t pay an increase no matter what — and their rent was already effectively frozen for them. But absent a freeze, if rents went up 2%, the building would receive 2% more per apartment from the federal government. With a freeze, you don’t get that. The rent is now frozen for the building too. That’s a consequence of the one-size-fits-all shape of the rent laws and the way they apply across every category of housing. We need to think creatively about sustaining revenue to those buildings in particular — the ones we spent billions of public dollars to create as long-term, sustainable affordable housing — and be partners in keeping them going.

**Errol Louis:** I should mention that Arpit Gupta has had to step away — we knew we wouldn’t have him for the full hour — and we thank him for his time.

Michelle, do we need to think differently as a city about all of this? A theme throughout this hour has been that there’s far more complexity than our current structure for setting affordable-rent policy takes into account. We have new digital tools, we have AI — the catch-all answer to everything — but we do have the ability to build more nuance into our policy, don’t we?

**Michelle de la Uz:** We do. To the mayor’s credit, the housing plan — “block by block,” as the deputy mayor has described it — is an all-of-the-above approach. There’s an acknowledgment that building and preserving 200,000 units of affordable housing each will take multiple tools. I think we’re clear on the need and aligned on the ambition. My concern is whether we have the funding to realize it. There’s a lot of political will, and quite a bit of alignment on the all-of-the-above approach. There’s also a sense of urgency among those of us who already own and manage affordable and rent-stabilized housing that we need these solutions yesterday, and at scale. That’s where the alignment isn’t there yet.

**Errol Louis:** On the credit side, some banks — Signature Bank, New York Community Bank — have voluntarily or involuntarily exited the affordable-housing lending business. Have other players stepped up? Is there relief or innovation there you’d recommend?

**Michelle de la Uz:** The Community Preservation Corporation did step up in acquiring the Signature portfolio. I’d love to see the philanthropic community come together with government to create a multibillion-dollar fund that provides blended, lower-interest debt, so we could swap out higher-interest debt on our affordable properties for lower-interest debt — but at scale, in the billions.

**Errol Louis:** What would that enable you to do?

**Michelle de la Uz:** What I just described. We have permanent mortgages on affordable housing at 6% or 7%. Bringing that down to 4% or 5% would meaningfully improve cash flow and help us address property needs. I’d also point to the underwriting assumptions. When Fifth Avenue Committee goes to the city to build affordable housing, the assumptions are 95% rent collection a month, 90% occupancy, 2% annual increases in income, and 3% annual increases in expenses. Those numbers are a fantasy right now. We need to reset them to the new norm.

**Errol Louis:** Exactly.

**Michelle de la Uz:** I’d like to deal with reality. I call myself a pragmatic progressive — let’s achieve the same goals, but realistically, together. We need to adjust these expectations to realize the same vision.

**Errol Louis:** Howard, your thoughts?

**Howard Slatkin:** I want to add to Michelle’s point about scale, and raise a caution that’s shouting in my head. We have many segments of the housing stock that will need help, and we can’t forget the long queue of obligations already in front of us. We have our public-housing stock, where we’re partway through a massive generational reinvestment — through [RAD](https://www.hud.gov/hud-partners/rad?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), through [PACT](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycha/about/pact.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and through the [Preservation Trust](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycha/about/public-housing-preservation-trust.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — to recapitalize buildings neglected for decades. We can’t shift resources away from that.

We have the [Mitchell-Lama](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/mitchell-lama-program.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) stock, which is in many ways a cautionary tale. You can find buildings there that had rents frozen for seven, 10, 12 years and then faced massive increases at the end — not only huge and dislocating for tenants, but higher than what you’d have needed had you simply sustained revenue along the way, because of the accumulated disinvestment and the big capital needs that piled up.

So we have that stock to assist, and the stock Michelle is partly responsible for, and that doesn’t even cover the private, unsubsidized rent-stabilized stock. My concern is that even after we marshal the resources for the buildings the government has direct financial obligations to as a partner, there’s the private stock that may also need resources — and, as you noted, private lending isn’t growing in that space. When you stack multiple years of a rent freeze on top of that, the terms on which an owner can secure a loan become that much less favorable. That’s going to be challenging.

**Errol Louis:** That brings us to the end of our time. To Seth and others who asked whether the conversation will be available afterward: an enthusiastic yes. Go to the Vital City site, where it’ll be posted. For now, I want to thank Michelle de la Uz, Howard Slatkin and Arpit Gupta for a great discussion. I learned a lot, and I think our viewers did too. Keep watching this space — meaning Vital City — for an ongoing conversation as we get closer to a sustainable housing policy, which we all agree New York badly needs. Thank you all for joining us.
### After the Mamdani Rent Freeze
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-rent-freeze-agenda-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:58.000Z
The Rent Guidelines Board, on which I serve, has just voted to freeze rents on New York City’s roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, fulfilling a key campaign promise by Mayor Zohran Mamdani. This settles what will happen to rents this October, but raises the question of whether the rent-stabilized stock is still going to be standing, habitable and occupied in 2046\. On its current trajectory, a large share of it will not be — especially if Mamdani and his appointees on the Board follow through on the mayor’s pledge to freeze rents every year of his term.

One mistake we often make with rent-stabilized housing is to talk about it like it’s a single thing. This stock is at least two things headed in opposite directions.

The first part of the rent-stabilized stock is mixed buildings: units with regulated rents which sit alongside market-rate units. This happens when rent-stabilized units are deregulated over the decades, or in newer apartments built with tax incentives which mixed these two units from the beginning. There are roughly 200,000 such units. When operating costs rise for these buildings, as they have risen relentlessly in recent years due to the increasing price of insurance, taxes, energy and labor, the market units absorb the shock and cross-subsidize the regulated ones. A rent freeze on the owners of these buildings pinches the owners at the margin, but does not really threaten their existence. A recent Moody’s report [affirmed](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/03/nyregion/rent-freeze-nyc-moodys-landlords.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the financial health of these buildings even with a rent freeze. 

The distress is instead entirely contained elsewhere.

The second type of rent-stabilized building is entirely or almost entirely rent-stabilized. These buildings were typically built before 1974 and are located outside of lower Manhattan, disproportionately in the Bronx, Upper Manhattan, and central Brooklyn; they became rent-stabilized in their entirety after the passage of Rent Stabilization Laws in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The NYU Furman Center [refers](https://www.furmancenter.org/publication/understanding-different-segments-of-new-york-citys-rent-stabilized-housing-stock/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to these as the “legacy 90%+” segment. They count roughly 456,000 of these units, close to half of the stabilized stock. These buildings have no market cushion to absorb costs, with the below-median rent buildings within this segment facing particularly dire financial pressure. And, after New York State’s 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act stripped out landlords’ ability to raise rents between tenants, high rent deregulation, and the ability to increase rents to help pay for substantial capital improvements, the Rent Guidelines Board became essentially the only way these buildings have of raising revenue.

The numbers on these buildings have gone from worrying to alarming. The Community Preservation Corporation, a substantial nonprofit lender to rent-stabilized buildings, [estimates](https://communityp.com/insights/nyc-rent-regulated-portfolio-data-2026/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that it costs $1,250 per month to run an older multifamily building, while the Rent Guidelines Board’s data puts the median collected rent in pre-1974, fully stabilized buildings at $1,343 citywide, and just $1,212 in the Bronx. This leaves just a minimal financial cushion before debt service on the buildings and negative cash flows in the Bronx. The Citizens Budget Commission [estimates](https://cbcny.org/advocacy/how-nyc-can-better-track-condition-rent-stabilized-housing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that the nominal net operating income in pre-1974 stabilized buildings outside Core Manhattan fell 9% between 2020 and 2023, even as it rose for buildings in the first category of rent-stabilized buildings, those with market-rate offsets. 

We already see disturbing signs of these crushing economics. The Furman Center has [highlighted](https://www.furmancenter.org/wp-content/uploads/ee-legacy/Preservation%5FChallenges%5FRGB%5Ftestimony%5FVersion%5FIII%5FApril%5F10%5F040925%5Frevised%5F041825%5F%281%29.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) lower spending on maintenance over the years, as owners cut back on these buildings. Especially worrying is the number of stabilized units registered as vacant with the State, [which rose](https://gothamist.com/news/57000-rent-stabilized-apartments-sat-empty-in-nyc-housing-agency-says?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from around 49,000 in April 2024 to over 57,000 in April 2025\. Some of these vacant units reflect normal turnover and new buildings in lease-up, but the risk is that a growing number of them describe apartments for which renovation costs exceed any income the unit can legally generate. In other words, they’re apartments that it simply doesn’t make any financial sense for the landlords to keep inhabited. This represents a huge loss of naturally occurring affordable units unavailable to tenants, and, if it persists, offsets the supply increases the city can achieve elsewhere.

Both parts of the stabilized stock — one half with a natural shock absorber in the form of market-rate units, and another which has essentially no other way to make up the gap — are hit with the same freeze. For the latter, the system risks entering a doom loop: Costs keep going up and revenue does not, so maintenance is the only margin left to cut until conditions decay and the units exit through vacancy, deterioration and ultimately a lien sale or in rem foreclosure until the apartment becomes property of the state. The lesson from the 1970s Bronx is that this process can happen faster than you think. 

The average sale price of buildings with any rent-stabilized units [declined](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/2026-MSR.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from $398,181 in 2019 to $289,478 in 2025 (a 28% decrease) and was just $146,038 for pre-1974 buildings with at least 50% stabilized tenants. Many advocates and politicians like to quote statistics that show that profits on rent-stabilized buildings as a whole have risen. While technically true, this estimate is misleading about a large segment of the stock. In reality, the mixed buildings have done quite well, while the pre-1974, highly stabilized segment of the stock has seen substantially deteriorating financial conditions. This diverging status makes it even harder to impose one-size-fits-all solutions to the entire stock of rent-stabilized housing. City subsidies can arrest this decline, but at the cost of diverting financial resources that could be otherwise deployed for means-tested housing vouchers or expanding the supply of affordable housing. 

This diagnosis tells us that the part of the stabilized stock that works well financially is mixed-income buildings, because internal cross-subsidy is the cheapest affordable financing tool we have. These buildings also work socially. A [deep](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04996-4?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [body of research](https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/HopeVI%5FPaper.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) finds that economically integrated buildings and neighborhoods produce better outcomes for low-income kids than concentrated low-income housing, however well-maintained. Income-segregated buildings, whether in NYCHA or rent-stabilized housing, represent both a long-term fiscal drag as well as bad social architecture. 

The agenda to fix this situation should therefore be to deliberately convert more of this distressed monoculture into mixed-income units while protecting sitting tenants. What would that look like?

**Allow limited vacancy resets, but in a mix-and-match way**. The 2019 reforms ended the vacancy bonus, which was misused to harass tenants out and lift the building out of rent regulation entirely. But there is a better design. Give fully stabilized buildings a building-level affordability budget, expressed in Area Median Income (AMI) bands. This is the standard metric for housing affordability set by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. For 2025, the threshold is $145,800 for a three-person family in the NYC metro area, so a housing unit “at 30% of AMI” is reserved for a household earning $43,700.

The idea is to enforce affordability by first translating existing rents into the AMI bands they correspond to, and treat this as a fixed affordability budget the building must stay within. Within that envelope, an owner may reset a vacant unit to market, but only within limits so that another vacant unit must be repriced to deep affordability.

Imagine a 100-unit, pre-1974 building in the Bronx that is fully stabilized and losing money. Suppose its rents cluster in the low bands: say 20 units at or below 30% of AMI, another 50 between 30% and 40%, 25 between 40% and 60%, and a handful above that. Seventy of the hundred units are affordable at 40% of AMI or less, while the median collected rent sits around $1,300, and operating costs now surpass this number. A vacancy opens in a unit renting at roughly 35% of AMI ($1,250). Under today's rules, the owner must re-rent at the same regulated rent, and the building continues to face losses. 

Under this proposed framework, the owner may instead reset that unit closer to market — say 80% of AMI, or $2,900 — but only by pairing it with a deepening: A separate vacant unit currently renting at 55% of AMI ($2,000) is permanently repriced down to 28% of AMI ($1,000). The owner nets about $650 a month on the pair, addressing the building's gap, while the tenant population gets access to a new, deeply affordable housing unit. And most importantly, the gain makes it viable for the two units to reach tenants in the first place, while they may remain persistently vacant absent any policy change.

This process would basically replicate the basic economics at play in buildings with inclusionary zoning or “mix and match” programs administered by HPD. Owners gain because they are able to recoup more on a vacant unit, which will help pull some of the 57,000 units back to the market. However, any gains there will be offset by deep affordability gains on other units, which helps tenants.

Compliance could run on the same principle as the conditions-based guideline proposed below: Resets are audited annually against the covenant and frozen in buildings that fall into serious disrepair, so the new revenue is always contingent on the building holding up its end. An alternative, as former Rent Guidelines Board member Alex Armlovich [has suggested](https://x.com/aarmlovi/status/2002515029891940684?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), would be to set a weighted average AMI for the building’s entire rent roll, so that new vacancies would be able to convert to higher rents only if they do not cause the building to exceed a certain average rent level, relative to local incomes. While both approaches can work, NYC faces a critical shortage of deeply affordable housing units, and given high construction costs faces few routes to generating more. Therefore, pairing deep affordability with some higher-value units generates a real public benefit while ensuring the buildings stay solvent. However, the AMI-weighted average version is a reasonable option as well, and the two options could even be combined.

**Let stabilized buildings build up**. Currently, rent-stabilized units are [much less likely](https://vrollet.github.io/files/city%5Fstructure.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to be redeveloped. Some of the legacy stock sits on land zoned for more than what is currently built. We can pair upzonings along the lines of City of Yes targeted at the distressed stabilized stock, with an as-of-right pathway to add floors, infill development with potential teardowns, or rear additions to generate new market-rate units. These market-rate units would then become a cross-subsidy for rent-stabilized units. This would yield a rare housing win, which can add supply and preserve affordability at the same time. This would follow the playbook in NYCHA, where the Mamdani administration is aggressively pursuing developmental paths that add more market-rate housing on NYCHA campuses, with the funding used to address capital shortfalls on public housing in areas such as the RAD-PACT redevelopment at NYCHA’s Fulton Elliot Chelsea houses. The same basic formula can apply for rent-stabilized buildings, too.

The current pathway for demolition or substantial rehabilitation is severe, and is commonly viewed as a negative event to avoid, rather than a pathway to preservation. It typically requires a stringent set of requirements, pre-approved demolition plans, removing the entire building including the foundation and stipends to displaced tenants equaling six times the average rent of non-regulated vacant units. The process for getting a demolition approved through DHCR typically takes so long that some owners pay buyouts [far exceeding these amounts](https://www.brickunderground.com/rent/demolition-rent-stabilized-buyout-relocation-landlord-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

One change that could make this process easier is to let owners temporarily relocate tenants during construction, with a guaranteed right to return at the same stabilized rent once the work is done. This is the same approach NYCHA uses when a development undergoes substantial redevelopment. The 57,000 vacant rent-stabilized units could help serve as an important flex space to host rent-stabilized tenants while their buildings are under renovation. An additional change necessary for this policy to work is to allow newly created units in what are now fully rent-stabilized buildings to become market-rate themselves. This is essential to generate additional revenue and cross-subsidy, but existing law requires that new units be pulled into stabilization.

**Fix the property tax.** This is a big one, and it’s essential. Many renters in rent-stabilized units face poor and worsening housing conditions, and rightfully question where their rent checks are going. The answer, in many cases, is to the government: property taxes are by far the largest component of building expenses, accounting for around 31% of rental payments. The Furman Center has done a great job at [documenting](https://www.furmancenter.org/soc-report/state-of-the-city-2025/nycs-property-tax-system/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the inherent inequities in the tax system for multifamily buildings, with rentals paying a far higher tax rate than single-family homes, and rent-stabilized units having the worst tax treatment of all. That’s truly regressive, given that renters have incomes half that of owners, on [average](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/2023-nychvs-selected-initial-findings.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

A broader property tax system to fix these inequities would be wonderful — and would provide the genuine cost decrease to justify a rent freeze. But if a broader fix cannot be worked out, the Furman Center highlighted one issue in particular that needs to be addressed. The City’s Department of Finance applies standardized expense ratios. This means that rent-stabilized units nearing the doom loop actually have steadily rising property tax bills even as their true profits dwindle. This issue has crept up on the city as expense ratios have steadily risen. But the good news is that it can be fixed by the City on its own, without the broader discussions with Albany that have to take place for broader property tax reform. This could be done, as the Furman Center suggests, by the Department of Finance creating a distinct subcategory for 90% stabilized buildings and creating a specific expense cap for this segment, recognizing the higher genuine costs these owners face.

**Create an as-of-right conversion to “affordable” status**. Many of the issues at the heart of the distressed rent-stabilized stock stem from its peculiar status. Despite the fact that these units house low-income tenants at below-market rate, they receive none of the tax relief or rental support the City routinely extends to housing formally designated as “affordable.” A standing pathway to convert them could close this gap.

Article XI of the Private Housing Finance Law allows the City to trade a property tax exemption for a binding affordability commitment. This means that owners get a break in these expenses, but must pass this along to renters. Somewhat confusingly, “affordability” is distinct from stabilization. Rent stabilization only regulates the rate of increase in rents, but says nothing about the level that rents start at or about the characteristics of who lives in the unit. A stabilized rent can be $1,200 or $3,400, and be rented out to a household earning minimum wage or over six figures (30% of rent-stabilized residents [currently fall](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/2023-nychvs-selected-initial-findings.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the six-figure category). 

Affordability status instead regulates the level of rents as a fraction of the Area Median Income, is typically accompanied by income eligibility rules over who is allowed to move in, and is structured to allow access by housing voucher recipients, who bring excess income to owners on top of typical rents. In exchange, affordable buildings receive favorable property tax treatment. These buildings are therefore more financially viable for owners, while at the same time better targeted to needy renters. 

The problem is that this process for becoming an affordable building runs through a discretionary, case-by-case approach that few owners have been able to navigate. A standardized as-of-right swap would change that. It would allow for distressed assets to convert themselves into permanently affordable, voucher-accessible housing. This could happen without requiring a costly third-party transfer agreement that commonly costs the City a multiple of the building’s value.

**Rebuild J-51 as a preservation finance tool**. A major toolkit for helping to finance capital improvements on buildings was the ability to raise rents when making Major Capital Improvements (covering building-wide systems like roofs or boilers) or Individual Apartment Improvements (covering in-unit upgrades like kitchens or baths). Both let landlords recover those costs by charging rents above the Rent Guidelines Board’s annual limits. The 2019 rent law change limited these tools substantially, stretching MCI recoupment, imposing a 2% annual cap, and making the increases temporary. IAIs were capped at $15,000 over 15 years, an amortized limit of $89 a month, across no more than three improvements. Subsequent amendments have slightly limited these limits, but the basic limits remain. These tools had a downside for tenants: Capital costs were passed to tenants as permanent rent changes. But removing their viability has left buildings without viable financing vehicles to pay for upkeep. 

The right design here would offer generous tax abatement policies that lower existing property taxes in exchange for investments in building-system replacement, but without passing on increases as rents. This is how the J-51 program currently works, making it the right tool for the job. This provides targeted capital relief to landowners in exchange for a property tax abatement, which lowers costs for landowners, without rental increases.

**Rent freezes for tenants**. New York City already has two programs that freeze rents for tenants regardless of what happens to building-level rents: one, called SCRIE, freezes rents for low-income seniors, while DRIE freezes them for low-income tenants with disabilities — protecting the finances of vulnerable households while still allowing landlords to raise rents on households with the ability to pay. We should add a third component: a freeze for *all low-income households* in *all stabilized units*, regardless of age or disability status.

Exactly because rent stabilization has no inherent income targeting, a more targeted and means-tested rent freeze program would protect the most vulnerable tenants. This design would offer existing tenants the stability that rent freezes promise, without defunding buildings. By only freezing the incremental increase in rents, this program would also be much cheaper than open-ended housing vouchers. 

**Condition the guideline on building conditions**. Finally, the rental adjustment process itself needs a change to address building conditions. The underlying issue with the current system is that rental adjustments are unconditional: A slumlord who allows the building to fall apart collects the same rental increases as a property owner who successfully upkeeps the building. This is important because we see neglect concentrating in the highly-stabilized, pre-1974 segment of the stock. The pre-1974, highly rent-stabilized segment has more building violations, an indication of worse building conditions. These buildings have more violations when the fraction of stabilized apartments is higher. 

For many tenant advocates, the poor conditions in these buildings are a sign of owner greed. However, this building stock has lower violations the higher the fraction of market rate units. The reason is that the basic economics of maintenance rely on the difference between what a unit could fetch on the open market and what the owner is legally allowed to charge. Owners face large incentives in market-rate units for proper upkeep because failing to do so loses tenants and revenue. Quality and cash flows move together, so maintenance pays for itself. Rent stabilization breaks this link. Because the rent is fixed by the guidelines regardless of the unit’s condition, and because the below-market rents lock the tenants in place, stabilized tenants are captive. Even well-intentioned owners face a reality in this scenario that the cash flows to pay for upkeep are limited and tenants will not leave even if they fail to upkeep. 

Adding market-rate units in the building is a partial discipline on owners. In a mixed building, some share of tenants do pay for quality and will leave if the boiler fails or the lobby crumbles — so the owner has both the revenue and the reason to keep the building up, and that upkeep spills over onto the regulated units sharing the same roof and pipes. However, this incentive by itself is insufficient, especially in the fully stabilized buildings. 

For these units, it is critical to use regulatory tools to achieve the same incentives for building maintenance that prevail in the open market. The cleanest way to operationalize this is to tie eligibility for the rental guidelines increase to a reliable, already-existing distress signal: enrollment or eligibility for the city's Alternative Enforcement Program. AEP is HPD's enforcement tool for the worst-maintained buildings in the city. The city defines objective eligibility criteria based on the ratio of open hazardous (class "B") and immediately hazardous (class "C") code violations issued over the preceding five years, plus unpaid emergency-repair charges. A building that winds up in this poor condition would forfeit its guideline increase until it cures the conditions and is discharged. This shift would amount to a rent freeze for slumlords, and would build a maintenance incentive directly into rent stabilization: letting a building decay would now cost an owner real revenue, year after year, until the violations are fixed.

### What’s at stake

The city’s rent stabilization system represents a unique legacy of affordable housing in a dense urban environment. It would be a tremendous housing failure to let this stock fall into deep disrepair and neglect, the consequences of which will be felt first and foremost by tenants themselves. At the same time, we must recognize that the political demand for a freeze exists because tenants in the legacy stock pay more and more every year for buildings that are getting worse because the system offers owners no revenue beyond rent increases from tenants. A rent freeze addresses tenant affordability in the short-run, but aggravates the long-term channel of viability.

The agenda outlined here addresses the underlying problem in rent-stabilized housing by fixing the cause: giving every distressed unit a new revenue source in the form of new market units, tax breaks, or vouchers to generate economic and social diversity across this stock. Doing so will not require repealing the state’s 2019 rent reforms, litigating the freeze or displacing a single existing tenant. The only question is whether the City can act now, while the distress is evident and there is still time to shore up building health, or whether we will have to wait for a rerun of the Bronx in the 1970s to learn the lesson a second time.
### Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, Zohran Mamdani and New York
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/darializa-avila-chevalier-claire-valdez-brad-lander-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:04:59.000Z
What are we to make of the primary election wins of Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez and Brad Lander in New York? Six months after Zohran Mamdani became mayor, is it a new socialist dawn in America’s largest city? No — but I see at least five big lessons.

### Mamdani’s support matters. A lot. (In a primary. And in New York City.)

The system that [unfortunately](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/imagine-a-real-new-york-mayoral-election/) prevails in House races across America is that candidates compete in low-turnout, closed primaries in Democratic or Republican districts made overwhelmingly safe thanks to aggressive partisan gerrymandering. This rewards candidates who play to the far left or the far right. (In the 2026 midterms, [fewer than a fifth](https://gothamist.com/news/voter-data-shows-lower-turnout-but-pockets-of-engagement-boosted-insurgent-candidates?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of Democratic voters in these districts cast ballots.) Candidates further to the left have a natural advantage in heavily partisan New York City districts, with one big caveat: Incumbents typically start out with a certain reflexive support among their constituents.

This year, Mamdani — who has star power, charisma and intense popularity, especially among the city’s most progressive residents — made the bold (and according to many in the chattering class, foolish) decision to back two young Democratic Socialists against far more established politicians with strong progressive track records. There’s little question Chevalier and Valdez would have struggled mightily against Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the incumbent congressman, and Antonio Reynoso, the sitting borough president, if not for Mamdani’s relentless and effective boosterism on social media and on the streets, including creative and compelling ads during the Knicks’ finals run.

The caveat here is that these three districts are among the furthest left-leaning in America. If a Chevalier-style candidate had been running in NY-12, where Micah Lasher prevailed over Alex Bores and many others, it’s unlikely he or she would’ve broken through even with Mamdani’s support. That is doubly or even triply true of districts outside the deepest-blue big cities. 

That said, is it fair to write off the Democratic Socialist victories as only the result of support from young, well-educated, wealthier transplants? No. While Chevalier and Valdez, like Mamdani last year, were backed more by these groups than by others, [they had a reasonably broad base of support from all types of voters](https://x.com/galendruke/status/2069870895351615677?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Chevalier, for instance, seems to have [won more black voters than Espaillat](https://x.com/MichaelLangeNYC/status/2070149166739738995?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). While it’s important to keep the low turnout in mind and to understand that Democratic Socialism may be more popular among relatively well-to-do voters than among the working class and poor people it purports to champion, it’s [unhelpful and oversimplifying to suggest that these candidates only won thanks to one type of voter](https://votehub.com/2026/06/24/mamdanis-moment-new-york-primary-postmortem/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

### Never underestimate candidate quality.

Say what you will about Darializa Avila Chevalier — and I’ll say some unkind but true things about her in a minute — she’s a talent. She communicates clearly and in language that resonates with many voters. That doesn’t entirely come through in [the transcript of the New York Editorial Board interview](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/darializa-avila-chevalier-on-housing) that I helped conduct with her, but it was definitely felt in the room. Chevalier was up against a five-term incumbent who had all the endorsements you could ask for but no special political skills. (Indeed, Reynoso had every endorsement under the sun from unions, proof that license to print dozens of labor logos on your direct mail doesn’t count for much, nor does access to what was once considered a difference-making get-out-the-vote operation.)

While there was no similarly clear gulf in candidate quality between Valdez and Reynoso, Valdez had a special capacity to connect with young people in her district, many of whom came from other parts of the country looking to make it and are struggling to stay afloat here. Put a dud Socialist in her place and Reynoso may well have won.

Something similar could be said of Lander’s defeat of Goldman. The incumbent comes across as a smart, dedicated public servant — but not as someone especially agile or compelling. And his ties to the district are much weaker than Lander’s; people in Brownstone Brooklyn have been seeing Lander on ballots for City Council, comptroller and mayor for many years now. Lander’s voice may drip with sanctimony, but he ran with more passion. He was both for and against more than Goldman, who struggled to communicate what his campaign was really about.

### To the furthest left voters, Israel-Gaza is about much more than just the Mideast.

This brings us to Israel and Gaza. Growing numbers of Democrats are appalled by the reflexive U.S. establishment support of Israel amidst its continued brutal military campaign against Palestinians. As Dan Goldman found out, this anger extends even to Democrats who’ve spoken out against the Netanyahu government and attempted to impose consequences on Israel for overreaching. It glows so hot that, in the minds of some sizable number of New Yorkers, it justifies a local coffee shop [shaming Goldman and refusing to take his money](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/23/new-york-lawmaker-cafe-banned-pro-israel-view?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for allegedly being a genocide apologist. Among small but growing numbers of leftists, mostly but not only young people, support for Israel as a Jewish state — Zionism — is itself disqualifying, an original sin. Other than the support of Mamdani, that’s the clearest thread uniting the big wins of Valdez, Chevalier and Lander.

It’s unlikely that Israel and Gaza will prove as potent a political motivator as, say, [immigration policy](https://www.compactmag.com/article/mamdani-is-trumpifying-the-democrats/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which shapes every aspect of American life. But there’s no question that it is serving as a litmus test in safe Democratic districts in New York and elsewhere. That’s not only because voters increasingly side with Palestinians, but because support for Israel and Zionism is viewed as a broader proxy for establishmentarianism.

There’s some truth to this; the strength of the Israel-U.S. relationship isn’t unrelated to the fact that some Jewish New Yorkers and Americans are wealthy, prominent and powerful. The moment you write that, it [begins to sound anti-Semitic](https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/18/aipac-looms-large-ahead-of-new-york-primaries-00967068?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and to some on the left, a general suspicion of Jews’ influence certainly does enter the calculus. But step back and it makes perfect sense for idealistic voters who are throwing off establishment politics to connect a perceived failure of the governing class to serve the needs of working people to the continued sending of billions of dollars to a close ally they believe is perpetrating a genocide.

### It helps to stand for something.

Democratic Socialism has never been my cup of coffee — but in a low-turnout primary in which many of those motivated to turn out are eager to bring the fight to Donald Trump, it can connect, in part, because the candidates who support it can speak loudly and clearly about what they’re for. They want health care for all, decommodified housing, much higher taxes on the wealthy, much more government spending, strong limitations on corporate power and more. They want ICE to be abolished, full stop. They want much more school spending, [a funny thing to demand](https://joshgreenman.substack.com/p/zohran-mamdani-radical) in a city that already spends [$40,000 per pupil](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/new-york-city-schools-budget/686971/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), that’s struggling to abide by a costly, unfunded and arbitrary class-size reduction mandate and that [holds schools harmless when they lose enrollment](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2026/06/22/hold-harmless-costs-grow-enrollment-losses-continue/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). So the clarity of their message may not make much sense, but it can resonate when the alternative rhetoric sounds like a muddle.

What this means to someone like me, who generally sides with more pragmatic Democrats, is that the party's moderates need to articulate an affirmative agenda in compelling terms. Can mainstream Democrats unite around a persuasive, easy-to-understand agenda to grow and strengthen American families? To make housing more plentiful and easier to build? To answer worries about AI? ([Bernie Sanders’ call](https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-introduces-legislation-to-create-7-trillion-ai-sovereign-wealth-fund/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to give the public a 50% stake in the largest AI companies by creating a sovereign wealth fund, one especially interesting proposal, [has the approval of Micah Lasher, who won the NY-12 primary against Alex Bores, who foregrounded AI in his campaign](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/micah-lasher-on-housing-immigration?utm%5Fsource=post-email-title&publication%5Fid=3498939&post%5Fid=201160075&utm%5Fcampaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2ihec2&triedRedirect=true&utm%5Fmedium=email).) Something else? We haven’t seen such an agenda emerge yet.

### Chevalier will be a political liability to national Democrats.

We don’t know exactly what type of congresswoman Chevalier will be. She’s just 32\. But all signals are that the Ph.D. student in sociology will be every bit as potent an avatar for what conservatives and independents across the country see as loony leftism as someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene has been for the excesses of far-right ideology.

In [that New York Editorial Board interview](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/darializa-avila-chevalier-on-housing), we asked Chevalier under what conditions she thought it was OK to deport people. Her answer was absolute: Deportations are never okay, not even of violent criminals. We also asked her whether murderers should serve time in prison. She refused to say yes; in her world, we must build a utopian society in which nobody hurts anyone. (She’s also for abolishing police, a topic we didn’t get to in our hourlong sitdown.)

The point is that it’s well and good for the far left to exult when they manage to get their candidates into office. But it remains to be seen what actual difference the back-bench House presence of someone like Chevalier (or, to a lesser extent, Valdez) will make in the lives of their constituents. And politically speaking, if history is any judge, there’s likely to be an equal and opposite reaction to their ascent.
### The Myth of Millionaire Flight
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-myth-of-millionaire-flight/
Last updated: 2026-08-24T21:19:02.000Z
---

*New York might be next in a growing line of states adopting millionaire taxes — and the same old fear comes with it: tax the rich too hard and they'll leave, taking their businesses and their tax revenue with them. Cristobal Young, an economic sociologist at Cornell, has spent over twenty years testing that fear against actual IRS data, going back to New Jersey's first millionaire tax fight in 2004\. His finding, consistently: millionaires barely move at all, and when they do, it's rarely for tax reasons. Jamie talks with Young about why a wealth tax on people like Elon Musk might be worth the administrative headache and why — twenty years in — the deepest driver of where people live still isn't the tax code.*

*You can listen to the podcast on* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-myth-of-millionaire-flight/id1794619189?i=1000773984795&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *or* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/16oKy9GpqpHNFQYQMwLClB?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*
### What AI Can Do for Cities
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/josh-tyrangiel-interview-ai-city-government/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:05:00.000Z
*Most human intelligence about artificial intelligence falls into one of two camps. The accelerationists promise that AI will cure cancer, fix the climate and usher in a golden age. The doomers warn that it will eliminate our jobs, hollow out our institutions and possibly even end the species.*

*Josh Tyrangiel — a longtime journalist who is now a writer at The Atlantic — went looking for the people in between. His new book,* [*“AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter,”*](https://www.amazon.com/AI-Good-People-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/1668082500?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *reports from inside the Cleveland Clinic, the IRS, a school district in Indiana and a Pentagon war room. The people are doctors, teachers, engineers and civil servants trying to use AI to reduce the friction of real institutions — messy data, misaligned incentives and bureaucracies built decades before the technology existed.*

*We asked Tyrangiel to walk us through what he found, and what it means for New York. Among other things, the conversation touched on classroom rules and the temptation of cheating; lessons that the IRS, of all places, has to offer city government; and whether AI can finally unstick the permitting process.* 

*Tyrangiel is an optimist, but a chastened one. He has been through enough technology cycles to know that passivity in the face of a powerful new tool tends to produce the worst version of them. The work, he argues, is to be neither dazzled nor afraid — but to insist that human judgment stay in the loop.*

*The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.* 

---

**Vital City:** The conversation around AI is polarized, like so many other things. Your book is an attempt to weigh both sides of the debate, but you ultimately come out with a fairly positive read of what the technology can accomplish. Can you talk about why you came down there and whether you struggled with that conclusion?

**Josh Tyrangiel:** I approached the whole thing from a place of detachment, because that's what a good journalist is supposed to do. 

On the accelerationist utopian side, inevitably I heard that we were on the verge of an incredible breakthrough. Our lives were going to be so much richer and so much better, cancer was going to get cured, climate change was going to be mitigated. At a certain point, it was clear this had become a kind of dogma. So I would say, "Tell me more about how the cancer curing is going to happen." You'd find they actually hadn't thought about that. It was just their plucked example of how much better things would be.

Then I would talk to people who were like, "You have no idea. You better pick a side. You have to come with me if you want to live." — basically quoting The Terminator. I thought, oh, boy. Both sides might be right, but my hunch, having been through one or two of these moments before, is that the answer's somewhere in the middle, and that we may not be dealing with a deity, but we may be dealing with something a lot better than the other software we've seen.

So my goal was to get as far away as possible from the extremes and figure out how people are using the technology right now, to make the things that I care about better — the lives of my family and my children, the health of the republic, the quality of life of all the people around me. Naturally, that meant going into healthcare and hospitals, education, government agencies and human connection. 

**Vital City:** The two extremes seem to agree on one thing: This is really powerful technology, and it's going to mean massive change.

**Josh Tyrangiel:** I do think the technology itself is incredibly powerful. I also think it's important to parse what that power is. The name "artificial intelligence" is very deceptive. What this actually is, is human intelligence on steroids. It’s taking tons of data created by human beings and processing it at speeds and at a volume that human beings simply can't. It's going to take us some time to adjust to how that works.

There are downsides. People are very impressed with speed, but speed isn't always quality. Even now, you'll get hallucinations, and those can be meaningful if they turn up in the wrong documents — health studies, legal documents. You're also not getting real-time feedback from human beings into the state of our systems and the states of our needs and desires. It's almost like this abstracted power right now, and it's very seductive. But that doesn't mean it arrives without complications, and it doesn't mean there's no place for humans in managing it and bringing it into the systems and institutions we care about.

**Vital City:** It's not just speed — it's the authoritativeness of presentation. It can produce things that just look so good, so polished. 

**Josh Tyrangiel:** Yes, It produces results that convey an aura of certainty. Part of that is the programming, and part is just the speed. It produces so fast that you're like, "Wow." But we need this kind of secondary response, which is, okay, how good is this really? The trick is dazzling, but you have to sit there for a minute and process it with your own brain to understand where it's maybe a little less dazzling than it may have seemed. That's going to take years of adjustment. 

**Vital City:** You spend a lot of time in the book on the use and misuse of AI in education. Public education has so many tech failures littered through its recent history. Already we've seen a number of AI failures, but we've also seen some qualified successes. As the New York City Department of Education or any other department of education thinks about how to actually use the technology, what level of concern should they have? Should they look at this like a threat? A tool? Something else?

**Josh Tyrangiel:** They should look at it as both. It's a threat in that if you've structured your curriculum solely to assess credentials, you have to know that every student out there has the ability to fake their way to a credential. So there needs to be a wholesale examination inside of education: What are we doing here? You've already seen a rise in blue books and oral exams — those changes will probably continue.

I also think there needs to be some questioning about what the function of the classroom is. Is it merely to get a student to a credential, or do we want to focus on identity formation, on teaching kids who they are in relation to the world? Should we be changing the criteria for what the classroom is about — from "You've got to get to this number on a quiz," to a deeper form of moral and intellectual education?

**Vital City:** I saw something the other day on social media saying that the acquisition of knowledge in the age of AI is going to distinguish kids from one another — that AI is so authoritative-seeming that you need actual grounding to know when to take it seriously and when not, and the only thing that gives you that is knowledge. Do you buy that the rise of AI actually places a premium on knowledge acquisition in K–12 education, or is that just spin?

**Josh Tyrangiel:** I don't know, honestly. It's too early to tell. What we're going to see is the high flyers are going to be just fine. The self-motivated kids are going to use these tools to get themselves higher up and learn more.

The risk, as always, is in the middle and the bottom of the class. The temptation to use these tools to just get by is going to be off the charts, and all of us can relate to that. We all have something that feels like drudgery in our lives, and we'd love to find hacks to get away from it. The vulnerability of those kids to missing out on the experience of struggle and of practice is significant.

What I discovered in my reporting is that when you take an AI tool like Khanmigo — an AI tutor that’s a joint venture between Khan Academy and OpenAI and you just put it into schools in front of students, the reaction's sort of like, "Mm, I have lots of software." They've got laptops and open tabs, and this is just one more thing. The only difference is that it won't give you the answer. The tool was designed in the style of a tutor, and it's supposed to bring you along at your own skill level, in the proximal zone of development. So if a kid is a high flyer and wants practice, it's great. There aren't that many high flyers.

But what I did see is that teachers were able to use the tool in far more productive, and in some cases, really revolutionary ways. At its heart, it's an LLM designed to the curriculum of your district. I watched a couple of teachers who had come to the realization through COVID that standing in front of the classroom, broadcasting knowledge to their students and then assessing their receptivity to it, is really not working anymore. Kids are distracted. Kids learn in very different ways.

So they reinvented their teaching styles on the fly, and turned things into all sorts of collaborative labs, assessments through group conversation. That kind of transition ordinarily takes years of trial and error but some of these teachers are using Khanmigo to do it the day before class or between classes.

Not every teacher. But some have begun to figure out that the tool is far more powerful for them than it is for their students. The teachers' union today put out a statement basically saying they want no AI tools in schools, particularly in younger grades. I get it. We're going to see a series of pendulum-swinging responses over the next couple of years: let's ban it all, let's bring it back, let's find a middle ground. But what I saw left me pretty hopeful that AI can help teachers change things.

**Vital City:** If you had to write a rule for how students should or shouldn't be able to interact with AI in the classroom, would you write a rigid rule at this point, or would it be more flexible?

**Josh Tyrangiel:** You'd have to be flexible, because we just don't know enough. First of all, every superintendent will tell you they have no idea what can happen in an individual classroom. I think the variation from classroom to classroom and teacher to teacher is a feature, not a bug. If we look at it that way, maybe we can rapidly figure out what's working.

You don't want to treat your schools as laboratories haphazardly. So much of ed tech, to me — the flagrant disregard for what's actually supposed to happen in the classroom in service of somebody's brilliant tech idea — is just appalling. That's why it fails, time and again. You design a system and expect the students and teachers to adjust to it, as opposed to having a system that works at the rhythm of the classroom.

If I were in the very challenging job of designing AI policy for education, I'd say we need a systematic way of experimenting and rapidly apprehending what works in what classes, so we have examples. In this Indiana school district I visited — it's small, run by a ferocious superintendent — she was committed to two things. One, rapid experimentation: getting AI into the classroom so that students understood it was there, so that teachers understood it was there, so that they felt like they weren't King Canute holding back the waves. Two, a massive commitment to professional development, where teachers come in and say, "I learned this, and it does this really, really well. And oh, by the way, it does this kind of poorly, so I adjusted my class."

That is a lot to expect of teachers and of kids. When we talk about the current environment where people really resent AI, I think a large part of the reason, justifiably, is that this tech has arrived and we're all being told, "Change everything." It's hard to change everything. I like the way I do certain things in my life. At the same time, we kind of have to rise to the challenge, because if we don't, we now have 25 years of experience that teaches us that when you're passive in the wave of technology, you generally get the worst out of it. Social media — we were all so optimistic, we were all so dazzled and we ended up with crap that undermined the republic.

I know it stinks to have to adjust and change who you are, but there is upside here, and leadership has to be ready to motivate people, to incentivize people to actually use it for the good — because otherwise we know what the bad looks like.

**Vital City:** Let's transition to government service delivery more broadly. There are fears that AI's going to replace white-collar jobs, knowledge jobs, en masse. There are also hopes that AI can make taxpayer dollars go further. That's actually a version of the same idea — maybe we don't need 300,000, or however many, New York City public employees if 250,000 equipped with AI tools can do the job as well. What is the right way to strike a balance here? We don’t want to strike fear in the hearts of every public service employee that their job is on the chopping block, but we do want to find efficiencies and maybe even help government do better.

**Josh Tyrangiel:** It's hard to call out the IRS as a paragon of wise management when it comes to technology. But I did a ton of reporting around what the IRS was up to with its technology stack. There are certain rules the federal government has about tasks that are inherently governmental. They have so many regulations around what they can do, and they also have so much political pressure, because so many elected members and so many voters actually don't want the IRS to be successful.

But what they were able to carry out, very quietly, was to explain to the thousands of engineers inside the IRS that these tools were important. They were going to make their lives easier. They were going to make the IRS function better. They were going to open up possibilities for more pride in the organization — that by using tools that could do the work faster and cleaner, and they'd create a better customer experience.

They oriented people around two things. One, used properly, the tools were going to be successful. Two — and this is true for everything I explored — none of this stuff works without humans in the loop. One of the great myths of AI is that you just roll it out, it works itself into the enterprise or into the corporation, and all of a sudden everything's great. It turns out that's just not true. All of this stuff needs really wise Sherpas — first to get it accepted into the organization and into its systems, but then to calibrate how people use it.

**Vital City:** Stephen Goldsmith [wrote a piece for Vital City saying that "accountable discretion" is the model](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-government-ai-accountability-discretion/) — that AI actually makes it possible for a bureaucrat, who once upon a time simply had an enormous stack of rules to follow, to have a more flexible way of navigating them, with a lot of information that can lead to smarter human judgment.

**Josh Tyrangiel:** I think that's right. When you look at New York City, it's largely governed by massive stacks of paper, some of them dating back 100 years or more. For a lot of employees in city agencies, most of what they're doing is consulting a different kind of code. The law is a kind of code. Regulations are a kind of code. For people to dive into this antiquated code and then figure out how it applies to the real world is very complicated.

The reason AI is so powerful with things like the law and regs and tax is it's basically the same thing — a series of rules. So it can manage document comparison. It can take a permit application, look at the law as currently stated, and give you a recommendation rather quickly. What it can't do is know the details. It can't know little things about the geography. It can't walk the street. There are all these ways where the discretion of the employee becomes so much more valuable and the drudgery is outsourced.

It's not going to be true in every case, and I'm very sensitive to the fact that some people feed their families based on their tolerance for drudgery, and we want to be careful about that. But what I saw time and again is that the tech is more than ready to help us improve government. I don't sense yet that leadership understands that and is willing to have the pretty complicated conversations with employees about how we're going to navigate this together. But I'm very convinced the technology can do the job.

**Vital City:** If the government is making a decision on a potential sanction — or for permission to do something — that involves 20 or 25 steps, and at step 17 the AI makes an error, how would we know, if humans aren't checking every step of the way? And if they are checking, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of AI?

**Josh Tyrangiel:** You're baselining your expectation on a perfect human system. What we've seen in the federal government is that [a very high rate of food stamp applications were rejected incorrectly](https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/qc/caper?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as recently as a couple of years ago. So can we get better than that? I think we can. You're not going to have a perfect system. You are always going to have errors within AI. There's no question about it. But you can certainly reduce them, and I also think you can reduce the time to judgment.

In New York City, every single person complains about permitting, no matter what business they're in — from food carts to buildings. Everybody has the same experience: the paperwork is cumbersome, often they need expediters and a single mistake will slow the process or send it back to the beginning. There's really no reason we cannot take everything we know about permitting and create a portal for people to test out their initial pass, so they can find out what errors they made — or may possibly have made — before submission.

If we can get better, cleaner paperwork to the people making decisions about permits, think about the thousands of hours saved. Think about the productivity, the speed to building, the bias toward action, as opposed to this pervasive air of entropy. It’s true that we're going to have some errors with AI. But we have errors now.

**Vital City:** In New York City today, we have a transit system that, by law and contract, requires two people to run every single subway train. At the same time, we have Waymo trying to get in on the streets, which uses zero people in every car. A lot of people who worry about congestion have very well-intentioned objections to Waymo's entry. They argue Waymo could be dangerous — even though plenty of research says that driverless cars are safer than cars driven by people. Should New York lift its current ban on driverless cars? And if it does, what's the path?

**Josh Tyrangiel:** It's a big question, and the answer comes down to one word: politics. Politics doesn't have to be rational, and oftentimes the lack of rationality is helpful — because New York is a vibe. The mayor's top job is to understand the vibe. If what the politician understands is, "Oh, there is resentment, rational or irrational, to these cars with no drivers, but people are comfortable with two operators on every train, even though trains all around the world operate with zero conductors" — that's where the system collides with the human beings.

That's why so much of this really revolves around the people doing the work. The tech is complicated. But what human beings do is assess the other human beings on the other side of the equation. When we look at these labs, we ask, "Do I trust Sam Altman? Do I trust him more than Dario Amodei?" It's natural for us to focus on those human beings in making our judgment about the tech, in the same way that it will be natural for politicians to focus on the human beings if they implement the regulations.

Whether we want it or not, human-centered AI is still going to have to be the answer, because you can't just plug this stuff in and expect it to work. So the burden is going to be on people's assessment of the tolerance for change, of the appetite for change.

**Vital City:** What does the right balance look like on the roads? If you save some number of lives by replacing human-driven cars with driverless cars, that's a good thing. On the other hand, maybe you've lost a much larger number of driver jobs. How do you put those inputs in and figure out whether it's a good or a bad thing?

**Josh Tyrangiel:** Some of this is economics. When we get this kind of general purpose technology and this much change, ideally it comes in at a pace at which you can maximize the economic benefit while minimizing the harm. The benefit in this case being greater productivity; the harm being mass displacement of labor.

It's really hard to do, because we live in a capitalist system where there are a lot of incentives to get the drivers out, because drivers are a cost center. For the city, that's a disaster — tens of thousands of jobs. Across the country, multi-millions. So we want this to happen at a natural rate of adjustment, so that people's lives aren't so displaced.

But there are two forces at work: the people who are actually doing this work and who are going to have to change, and the people forcing the change upon the country. I hate to keep reverting to politics, but it's our best hope for managing this change. We know what happens if the tech guys are left to their own devices. They're going to force change, and we've had 25 years, particularly in this century, of watching the consequences. People are very, very angry about it.

What I would expect — and we've already seen some of this in the city, but I would expect it nationally — is that AI, as it pervades the economy, is going to be the number one issue, possibly as soon as 2026, certainly by 2028\. People are beginning to understand just how many ripple effects it has. When it comes to good policy, I think we have good answers to how we might want to implement it. But it is going to run into the brick wall of human beings, and for that it requires knowledgeable politicians.

---

*Disclosure: Josh Tyrangiel's wife and partner, Sarah Feinberg, is the former president of New York City Transit.*
### Taxing Land: An Old Idea is New Again
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/value-capture-land-tax-transit-funding-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-06-24T15:59:27.000Z
The state budget provisions for funding New York City’s ambitious transit projects contain references to financing models that may sound exotic, like “value capture” and a “land tax.” But the underlying concept is remarkably simple: When a city builds a new subway line, property values go up. So why not ask the adjacent private landowners to help pay for the projects that are creating so much wealth?

The idea of value capture — the recovery of a portion of increased private property values that are generated by public investments — has been around for centuries, and is widely in use in Europe, Asia and Latin America. It is getting fresh consideration after it was revealed earlier this month that New York State’s FY 2027 budget included proposals to use alternative funding mechanisms to build two new transit projects: the next stage of the Second Avenue subway along Manhattan’s Upper East Side (estimated cost: $7 billion), and the Interborough Express or IBX (estimated cost: $5.5 billion), running from Brooklyn to Queens, which would be the city’s first new end-to-end rapid transit line in almost a century.

With federal funding in doubt, government agencies have been empowered to “capture” the added value that the IBX and the Second Avenue subway extension will create. The mechanisms that would be used, according to an analysis by [The Niskanen Center](https://www.niskanencenter.org/new-york-state-authorizes-a-land-value-tax-that-could-provide-billions-for-transit-investment/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), include new taxes that the City can impose on property owners along the new transit lines, especially at the stations: special transit assessments — a kind of real estate surcharge in designated zones along a transit corridor — and a version of the [land value tax](https://www.lincolninst.edu/pt-br/publications/articles/land-value-taxation/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which takes into account the positive impact that public investments have on the value of privately owned urban land. Essentially, property on land near the new transit line will automatically be assessed at a higher rate. The stepped-up tax revenue would go directly to pay for the rail lines themselves, potentially representing billions in funding not otherwise available.

Acknowledging the true interplay between infrastructure and real estate is the fiscal equivalent of saying the quiet part out loud. For the most part, landowners over time have enjoyed a free ride as they benefit from the government’s provision of streets, water and sewer, railroads and highways. With land value capture (generally a one-time charge on new development to pay for a specific project) or the land tax (a more permanent system of assessing land, whether it’s developed or not), the private sector pays a modest portion of that public investment. It’s an honest and transparent recognition of what actually happens once the tunnels are bored and the turnstiles are spinning.

There are few certainties in life, but the essential premise of value capture — that transportation infrastructure will enhance property values for adjacent landowners — is about as close to a sure thing as it gets. Extensive empirical evidence underscores what is understood intuitively. The increase in value is known as the land value increment, and it can be measured.

In the 2020 study [“Take the Q Train,”](https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-papers/take-q-train/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) originally published as a working paper by our institute, economists Arpit Gupta, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh and Constantine Kontokosta found that property values jumped 8% in the initial phase of the Second Avenue subway extension — a higher increase than in other parts of the Upper East Side without direct access to transit. The grand total was $5.5 billion in “uplift,” an apt term for the prosperity that public investment brings. That would be enough to pay for the $4.5 billion two-mile extension from 63rd to 96th Street — with $1 billion left over.

The Q train project is just the latest demonstration of how increases in property value can be recovered. At the Lincoln Institute, we’ve been studying value capture and the land tax for decades. These financing tools have been successfully implemented all [around the world](https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/2022-07-new-compendium-60-countries-land-value-capture-fund-infrastructure/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to pay for major transportation projects:

- **United Kingdom**. The city of London established a series of property tax and development [surcharges](about:blank) to help pay for the $20 billion Crossrail (Elizabeth Line) — a cross-cutting and inter-connecting transit service similar to the proposed IBX in New York City — on the premise that increased mobility was an economic boost for not only adjacent commercial and residential development but virtually all businesses across the city.
- **Asia**. Widely used in Japan, Hong Kong and elsewhere and known as the [Rail plus Property model](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/the-rail-plus-property-model?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), land value capture has been providing billions for transportation projects throughout Asia and Australia. Hong Kong’s transit agency, the MTR Corporation (MTRC) acquires development rights for land above and around transit stations, builds mixed-use transit-oriented development projects itself, and thus captures the surge in land value prompted by new railway lines.
- **Latin America.** In Brazil, São Paulo auctions building rights to developers and the proceeds are used to fund transit and other amenities; in Bogotá, Colombia and the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba, special fees called betterment levies, applied to landowners and developers in upzoned areas around stations, have helped pay for Bus Rapid Transit systems.

In the U.S., the adoption of these financial instruments has been a little slower, but nonetheless some version of value capture (and to a lesser extent the land tax, most recently proposed in [Detroit](https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/other/split-rate-property-taxation-in-detroit/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) has been instituted with great success. The extension of the No. 7 subway line in Manhattan, including new stations, was partially funded through a kind of pre-payment of property taxes by the developers of Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s West Side waterfront. In Massachusetts, developers have made agreements to help build station facilities along the Green Line extension through Somerville and at a redeveloped industrial site called Assembly Square along the Orange Line; the New Balance shoe company financed a commuter rail station in Allston-Brighton.

In the early 20th century in the U.S., the connection between transportation and land use was so obvious, landowners and developers financed their own trolley lines to bring people and businesses to the new frontier of “streetcar suburbs.” Though the private companies rushed to hand the operation of the new routes back over to government to run, they well understood the essential value capture proposition: Building transit lines is what makes development so lucrative. Governments and public authorities do all the building these days, boring tunnels and laying down tracks, often in challenging conditions in the existing urban landscape. In value capture, the public sector simply asks the private sector to chip in.

Value capture has been used in other circumstances besides funding transit. Private landowners reap financial benefits when a new public park is built, for example. At a basic level, when local government approves a major zoning change, that itself instantly increases land and property values. A number of financing mechanisms are based on the premise that public investments and actions are inextricably linked with private profit, including direct charges for building rights, density bonuses, betterment contributions, exactions and impact fees and Business Improvement Districts.

Far from a newfangled public finance strategy, value capture has a long and interesting history through centuries of city-building, beginning with the construction of aqueducts in ancient Rome, and continuing with Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris, where a portion of real estate profits helped fund monuments and public squares. The concept is also inherent in the writing of political economist Henry George, who argued that the staggering wealth being accrued by landowners was “unearned” profits — not due to anything they did, but rather directly attributed to the government actions and public investments that created value for their property.

In today’s tumultuous public finance environment, the value capture-land value tax approach is worth a look by state and local governments searching for ways to fund transit, including in those places where other methods of raising revenue have not been popular — a rejected gas and payroll tax in [Oregon](https://www.opb.org/article/2026/06/02/transportation-funding-oregon-workgroup/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), for example, or the [“car tab”](https://www.theurbanist.org/wilson-proposes-doubling-seattle-transit-measure-to-expand-bus-frequencies/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) surcharge on private automobiles in Washington state. And while voters have been willing to agree to small increases in the sales tax to fund transit, most notably in [Denver](https://5280.com/how-denvers-public-transportation-projects-do-and-dont-get-funded/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) but also in [California](https://www.kqed.org/news/12085563/early-returns-show-strong-support-for-smart-tax-extension-in-sonoma-marin?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and many other jurisdictions, hikes in a tax that all consumers pay regardless of whether they use the transit systems cannot likely go on indefinitely.

In embracing this simple and elegant funding mechanism, New York will be in good company — joining cities around the world that recognize the virtuous cycle of bold public investments in transportation infrastructure and sustained economic success.
### Put a Price on Street Parking, Generate Billions
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/street-parking-charge-transit-funding-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-06-24T17:23:23.000Z
New York’s transportation politics have entered a new era. After years of debate, congestion pricing has demonstrated that there are [public benefits](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/less-traffic-better-transit-its-first-anniversary-governor-hochul-celebrates-transformational?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to charging for the use of scarce street space. Yet one of the city’s largest transportation subsidies remains almost untouched: curb parking. 

Across most of New York City, public land worth billions is still given away for free to store private cars. This implicit subsidy privileges drivers, contributes to congestion and curb overcrowding and leaves substantial public revenue untapped even as the Metropolitan Transit Authority faces persistent [funding gaps](https://joshgreenman1973.github.io/experiments/nyc-parking-revenue/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

New York City’s finances are under pressure; its curb parking is a major opportunity. While revenue should be seen as a byproduct of [better curb management](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308904293%5FThe%5FRight%5FPrice%5Ffor%5FCurb%5FParking?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), rather than the main goal, the fiscal upside is hard to ignore. According to transportation engineer Sam Schwartz (no relation), chair of the [Transportation Research Program at Roosevelt House](https://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/sam-schwartz-transportation-research-program-sstrp/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the city has over one million curb spaces that are free to use, for practically unlimited amounts of time. (Sam Schwartz’s estimate of one million spaces is based on his experience as New York City’s traffic commissioner and subtracts curb space in illegal zones, i.e. bus lanes, No Standing areas, curb cuts, space around hydrants and areas where there would be little or no demand for parking. Previous attempts to count the number of spaces, which have put the number at closer to 3 million, set a theoretical limit based on linear curb space.)

Charging an average of just $35 per space per week — the most you would pay in a week for unlimited transit — could generate nearly $2 billion annually. That’s more than [three times the revenue](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/less-traffic-better-transit-its-first-anniversary-governor-hochul-celebrates-transformational?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from the City’s new congestion pricing program. 

Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on a platform of economic justice. While it’s not the only reason to change parking policy, charging for curb space aligns with that goal. Fewer than half of New York City households own a car, and throughout the city, car-owning households have [nearly twice the median income](https://www.hunterurban.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Car-Light-NYC-Infographics-May-2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of non-car households. By keeping curb parking free, the City gives up revenue that could support public services for everyone and instead delivers a multi-million-dollar subsidy that lets wealthier residents store their cars.

A famous [study](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0739456X221141317?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#fn7-0739456X221141317) of Manhattan’s Upper West Side by Donald Shoup, the UCLA professor whose research inspired the creation of the [Center for Parking Policy](https://its.ucla.edu/programs/parking-center/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), estimated that free curb parking amounts to a subsidy of over $9,000 per parking space per year. But there is only one space for every 18 residents, so not everyone benefits, and those who do are disproportionately affluent. Only 27% of households own a car, and their average income is about $200,000, [compared with](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0739456X221141317?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#fn7-0739456X221141317) $105,000 for households without cars.

It may help to think about it this way. Imagine the City proposed using public money to reimburse people for renting a parking space in a private garage. Most people would see that as inappropriate. But keeping curb parking free has the same effect; it’s just less visible. Free parking mostly benefits people who are not poor, and most low-income residents get no benefit.

Free curb parking is more than a fiscal issue. As highlighted in a recent [New York Times article](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/09/nyregion/nyc-street-parking.html?smid=nytcore-android-share&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), it also shapes how streets function. When street parking is free or underpriced relative to nearby garages, drivers often circle the area waiting for a curb space to open up. This [cruising](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856421001105?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) wastes drivers’ time and adds to traffic congestion for everyone on the road. Full curbs also lead to double parking and illegal stopping in loading areas and red zones, which slows traffic and creates risks for pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers. 

Regardless of the many benefits for cities on the whole of charging for street parking — and even for drivers, many of whom appreciate more efficient allocation of parking spaces — many drivers balk at the possibility of paying to park. However, [support can grow](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210539517301244?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) when revenues are clearly reinvested in services people value. In Portland, for example, parking revenues fund [“transportation wallets”](https://www.portland.gov/transportation/wallet?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that residents and employees can use for transit, bike share, car share and other mobility options.

For low-income residents who rely on cars, the City might choose to offer targeted support. For example, Vancouver now charges [market-rate prices for parking permits](https://vancouver.ca/streets-transportation/west-end-parking-non-market-rates.aspx?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#fees) in its West End neighborhood but offers discounts for legacy permit holders and low-income residents. New York already adjusts [transit fares](https://www.nyc.gov/site/fairfares/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [congestion pricing](https://www.mta.info/fares-tolls/tolls/congestion-relief-zone/discounts-exemptions/low-income-discount-plan?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) based on income, and parking policy could follow a similar approach.

Every square foot of curb space reflects a policy choice. Right now, New York is choosing to subsidize private car storage even as it struggles to fund public transit. With its new [Office of Curb Management](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani-launches-office-of-curb-management-at-nyc-dot-to-m?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the City has an opening to rethink the curb and recognize the high costs of free parking. To illustrate the opportunity cost of the status quo and situate curb management within the broader transportation landscape, Vital City consulted with parking experts to develop a [revenue calculator](https://joshgreenman1973.github.io/experiments/nyc-parking-revenue/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that shows the revenue potential of different curb management strategies, highlights what the revenue could fund, and compares curb pricing approaches across peer cities.
### New York is the Town and the Team is the Knicks
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/knicks-champions-new-york-why-it-matters/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:05:01.000Z
Tragedy, it had come to seem, was the only thing that could bring us together: One recalls, say, New Yorkers lining up to donate blood and food and clothing after 9/11, or banging pots each evening to honor our front-line medical workers during the pandemic. New York, apparently, was simply too large, too various, too set against itself in a thousand different ways to allow for the possibility of collective euphoria.

That truism was decisively disproved late in the evening of June 13, 2026, when the New York Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs to win their first National Basketball Association championship since 1973, and New York City burst into paroxysms of unfettered joy not seen since perhaps [the celebrations of V-J Day](https://www.life.com/history/v-j-day-kiss-times-square/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The Knicks’ hold on New York is unique among the major sports, in that the city’s love for the team is both intense and nearly universal. For every Yankees fan who attends a victory parade, after all, a Mets fan stays home, muttering darkly about the Evil Empire; much the same is true in football, where the Jersey-based Giants and Jets grudgingly share a home in the manner of rivalrous siblings. In pro basketball, though, the Knicks’ only immediate competitors are the arriviste Nets, born not in the city but on Long Island, who decamped to New Jersey in 1977 only to return three decades later, like so many other regretful suburbanites, to a newly gentrified downtown Brooklyn, where they maintain an uneasy relationship with even their own modest fan base. 

While that other city game, stickball, has gone the way of [skelly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skully%5F%28game%29?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and chocolate malteds, basketball courts are still everywhere in New York, pick-up games played daily in gyms and playgrounds and schoolyards, on asphalt and concrete and polished parquet, with backboards made of glass or wood or sheet metal and the rims [often missing their nets](https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/06/04/basketball-nets-playground-parks-hoops-parks/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The open-air courts on West 4th Street (“The Cage”) have now become something of a tourist attraction, and the Harlem-based summer tournament founded in 1950 by a city parks employee named Holcombe Rucker is a national phenomenon, the games attended by celebrities and NBA players alike. No court, however, is as celebrated as that of Madison Square Garden, the arena that has been known as “the Mecca of basketball” ever since the 1930s, when college basketball teams from around the country aspired to receive an invitation to one of the Garden’s prestigious weekend triple-headers, much as actors working on a new play in a community theater somewhere might dream of taking it to Broadway. 

Ever since the glorious championship years of 1970 and 1973, a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden has had the captivating, slightly louche glamour of a Sinatra concert or heavyweight prize fight. George Lois, the legendary ad man on whom Don Draper is said to have been based, owned four season tickets on the baseline. Nearer to center court was Woody Allen — the pre-scandal Woody Allen, that is, in the years when a new film of his premiering at the Beekman or the Ziegfeld was a big deal. Elliott Gould was a Garden regular, as was Zero Mostel, and William Goldman, the writer of many great films including “Marathon Man”; often on game nights the star of that film, Dustin Hoffman, could also be found sitting behind the Knicks bench. 

These days, celebrity row has diversified and now features Spike Lee (of course), as well as actors such as John Leguizamo, Tracy Morgan and Chris Rock, alongside hip-hop stars including Busta Rhymes, Fat Joe and Jay-Z. So it’s not at all surprising that it is the Knicks, rather than one of the city’s other sports teams, who are name-checked again and again in rap lyrics. This was true from the very beginning of the genre, in 1979’s “Rapper’s Delight,” when Big Bank Hank of the Sugarhill Gang rapped, So after school I take a dip in the pool, which is really on the wall / I got a color TV so I can see the Knicks play basketball*.* Later came Knicks shout-outs from, among others, Kurtis Blow, Doug E. Fresh, Beastie Boys, Lauryn Hill, Notorious B.I.G. and A Tribe Called Quest, who summed things up in their song “One Two Sh\*t”: *Money on my mind so never mind a trick / New York is the town and the team is the Knicks*. 

Rory Sparrow, Marvin Webster, Eddy Curry, Cleanthony Early, Kevin Knox, Maciej Lampe, Antonio McDyess, Iman Shumpert, Elfrid Payton, Immanuel Quickley: On and on the names toll in the minds of Knicks fans, like the casualty rolls of ill-fated battles. In each of these players (and innumerable others), we once invested our hopes, however briefly or foolishly, telling ourselves that perhaps, somehow, this year would be different. Much of the time, though, the Knicks were simply not very good; in the 23 seasons preceding the 2026 championship, they failed to qualify for the playoffs 16 times. For a while in the 1990s, a title seemed within reach; yet each time, deep into a playoff run, they were thwarted by the likes of a Michael Jordan, a Reggie Miller, a Hakeem Olajuwon or a Tim Duncan, but more than anything by their own mistakes. In 1993, in the Eastern Conference championship against the Chicago Bulls, Charles Smith — all 6-foot-10 of him — failed to sink a game-winning put-in under the basket not once or even twice, but four times; the next year, in Game 7 of the NBA Finals against the Houston Rockets, the Knicks’ long-range bomber, John Starks, shot 2 for 18, missing all 11 of his three-point attempts; the year after that, in Game 7 against the Indiana Pacers, the outstanding center Patrick Ewing missed a last-second finger roll that normally he would make in his sleep. 

Those were excellent Knicks teams, admirable in many ways, but they were not precisely lovable. There was something a bit blundering about them; they were too reliant on sheer physicality, too focused on toughness at the expense of intelligence, too primed for a fight. Just the opposite was true of the 2025-2026 edition of the Knicks, who, if anything, were criticized for being too soft, too passive, lacking the killer instinct necessary to win at the highest levels. Yet after an up-and-down season in which they finished third in their conference, these Knicks seemed all at once to find themselves in the playoffs. Suddenly the ball movement was crisp, the spacing impeccable, the team defense smothering. It was basketball of a kind we had not seen before. (Watching the Knicks dismantle the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference finals, one television commentator said that he felt he was watching an instructional video.) Across the entire postseason — during which they lost only three games, by a combined margin of six points — the Knicks accumulated a total point differential of +283 — not just the highest in the history of the franchise, but the highest in all of NBA postseason history, shattering the previous record set in 2017 by the Golden State Warriors’ so-called “super-team,” by 53 points. During one especially remarkable stretch, the Knicks won 13 straight playoff games, against the toughest competition the NBA had to offer. 

Even years from now, in recalling this championship team, we will still thrill to the silky grace of Mikal Bridges’ jumper, with its unusual, slightly off-center release; the astonishingly deft three-point shooting of the seven-footer Karl-Anthony Towns; Josh Hart’s lunch-pail rebounding, and his careening coast-to-coast rambles, and his half-playful, half-aggrieved sneer when contesting a referee’s whistle (much like Kevin McHale before him, Hart seems to believe that he has never committed a foul in his NBA career); the playground bravado of Brooklyn-born Jose Alvarado, whose quick hands on defense earned him the moniker “Grand Theft” Alvarado, much as Walt Frazier was called “Clyde” after the celebrated bank robber Clyde Barrow; and the unassuming all-around brilliance of OG Anunoby, whose midseason arrival in December 2023 seemed to unlock the excellence of this team, as the midseason trade for Dave DeBusschere in December 1968 had for the earlier champions. 

New York City has fallen in love with each of these players, and several others to boot, but of course it has fallen most deeply, irreversibly in love with the captain, Jalen Brunson, who is a spellbinding point guard and clutch player of a sort we have not seen since the days of the great Frazier. We watch awestruck as Brunson sacrifices his body again and again, hurling himself toward the rim against much larger defenders; or as he delivers an advanced geometry lesson in the branch of sphere and backboard; or, perhaps most mesmerizingly, as he simply holds the ball at the top of the key, surveying the court with the silent cool of Alain Delon’s hitman in “Le Samouraï.” 

“This team that we’re looking at now, it didn’t remind me of the ‘90s Knicks,” said Chuck D of Public Enemy, who has been a fan since 1967\. “That was a different squad. This squad reminds me of the Knicks I grew up with. It was like we had stars and superstars, but they all played as one.” Unselfishness, intelligence, nerve, discipline, resilience: these are the qualities that we recognize in this team, and which enabled it to overcome double-digit deficits in all four of the victories against San Antonio, including the most remarkable one of all, Game 4, when OG Anunoby’s flying tip-in after a Brunson miss capped a comeback of 29 points — the largest comeback in NBA Finals history, and one that seemed to leave even the Knicks themselves stunned, grasping for words in post-game interviews. After Anunoby’s heroics that night a friend texted me, without hyperbole: “There will be a lot of babies born in New York named Ogugua.”

Before the San Antonio series began, a 23-year-old Bengali immigrant from Jamaica, Queens, named MD Ahnaf Hossain composed an ingenious quatrain that instantly went viral:

*My mayor is Muslim,*

*My bagels are Jewish,*

*My Christian Dior,*

*The Knicks in four!*

“I grew up with Jews, Muslims, Haitians, Pakistanis, Bengalis,” Hossain explained to the Washington Post. “I just had to bring everyone together.” 

All through the playoffs, New Yorkers did watch the games together, in bars and backyards and bowling alleys, in Radio City Music Hall and Wollman Rink and outside the Garden itself. And then at the end of the last game, nearing midnight, when the final buzzer sounded and the championship was ours, the celebrations went on in every neighborhood of the city, a mad exhilarating crush of strangers bouncing up and down in the streets, crowding onto fire escapes and clinging to light posts and scaffolds, jubilantly belting out “Go NY Go” and “Empire State of Mind” beneath impromptu fireworks displays. On social media, New Yorkers posted and re-posted the clip of the amazing final seconds, when television announcer Mike Breen exclaimed, “It’s over! It’s over! Knick fans, this is not a dream! Your long, long wait has ended! Go ahead and cry — after 53 years, the Knicks are NBA champions once again!”

Fifty-three years ago, of course, was a dismal moment in the city’s history; in 1973 the coming fiscal crisis could already be sensed on the horizon, foretold in thickly graffitied subway cars and triple-locked doors. Those championship Knicks teams seemed to offer an escape from daily realities, their brilliance and glamour hearkening back to a better time, when New Yorkers could proclaim their city, without fear of contradiction, the greatest in the world. Today’s city, for all its problems, feels entirely different. Our new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who is riding a wave of popularity, is not a Democratic hack but a democratic socialist; he is also, like so many others in the city, an immigrant, and a Knicks fan to boot. As deft a political communicator as there is anywhere today, Mamdani has attached himself to this team. He appeared at numerous events this spring wearing a Knicks jersey over his own politician’s suit, and cut a TV ad in which he draped his favored congressional candidates in Knicks blue and orange and declared, “This is our team. This is our year.” 

Unlike 1973, today the central issues facing New York involve not a lack of resources but an unfair allocation of them; ours is not a city abandoned by the well-to-do, but rather one that has been too freely given over to billionaires. Fortunately, in addressing these issues we will not have to depend on the clubhouse politicians and money managers and demagogues who dominated New York politics in the 70s. 

“So often,” Mayor Mamdani declared during the team’s City Hall victory celebration, “when this city comes together it is because we are forced to, by a moment of tragedy or adversity. What a gift it is to be brought together by pure, unfiltered joy. For as long as we live, we will remember this feeling of a city together, a city alive, a city overcome by happiness.”

*A city overcome by happiness*: Fifty-three years ago, the idea was virtually unthinkable. Today’s Knicks champions seem to represent not a turning away from present-day realities, as in 1973, but rather a turning *toward*: toward the possibility of a better future, of a freer, more just city — an improbable outcome, to be certain, but surely not as improbable as the 0.4% chance that oddsmakers gave the Knicks of winning Game 4 when they were down by 29 points. Yet the Knicks did win that game, of course, through the most improbable combination of skill, fortitude and teamwork, as well as a fair dose of luck, in so defying the oddsmakers and inscribing their names in the history books. Jalen Brunson, on whom our hopes have so often depended, misses the three-point jumper, but now comes OG Anunoby hurtling in unchecked from the sideline, rising free to the hoop, and this time, after so very long, the shot goes in. 

## Please support our work.

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### Darializa Avila Chevalier on Housing, Immigration, & Her Run for Congress in New York's 13th District
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/darializa-avila-chevalier-on-housing/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:17.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/darializa-avila-chevalier-on-housing) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on June 18, 2026 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

The New York Editorial Board spoke with Darializa Avila Chevalier about her campaign in the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th Congressional District (parts of Manhattan and the Bronx) on the morning of June 17, 2026\. Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist endorsed by NYC-DSA and Mayor Mamdani, is challenging Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the primary election taking place in June. *(photo by Christina Greer)*

*\[Note: The New York Editorial Board invited Espaillat and Avila Chevalier to interviews relatively late in the primary race. Espaillat’s team said it was too late to add to his schedule before primary day.\]*

*Participating journalists: Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Christina Greer, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Ben Smith.*

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Max**  
Thank you very much for being here.

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Thanks for having me.

**Christina Greer**  
I have some questions about Black Harlem before we sort of zoom out. There’s been this growing divide between Black Harlem and the diversifying and gentrifying district since Espaillat took office about a decade ago. You remember his longstanding rivalry with Charlie Rangel and then Keith Wright. So how would you begin to proceed — how would you begin to bridge the gap? Whether it’s real or perceived, it does feel that way for a lot of Black Harlemites and Black people in District 13.

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah, absolutely. I think so much of what we’ve seen is a divisive politics that has served no one, that has made it so that more and more Black Harlemites are leaving the city altogether, more and more Dominicans uptown are leaving the city, right? And I think what we’ve seen is a type of leadership that has engaged in divide-and-conquer politics that have made people feel cynical about government altogether, and that is why we’ve seen such low participation in our democracy as a result. And, you know, I think for so many folks in Harlem, we look around… I live in Harlem, right? And we look around and Harlem is changing year by year in a way that I don’t even recognize, right? And it’s something that is institutional, but it’s also a political choice that has been made by leadership, right? And Espaillat is somebody who has taken over $250,000 from the very corporate real estate developers who are changing the character of Harlem, that are pricing people out of Harlem. And in the last two days alone actually, he just took over $200,000 from both real estate and Wall Street.

**Josh Greenman**  
What policies would stop it from changing?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Well, part of it is that he has not actually engaged in any policies that would support Harlemites, that would support anybody in the district really, and stand up to the bad landlords that are pushing people out. It costs $4,000 right now for a two-bedroom in Harlem or Washington Heights in a district where the median income is $57,000, right? There hasn’t been any meaningful development or investment in NYCHA. There hasn’t been any meaningful investment in truly affordable housing, and when we think about the kinds of projects that he has claimed and claims to be proud of, it’s development projects that have actually priced people out, that a lot of the community has organized against. Be that the Inwood rezoning or other development projects. So I think part of the issue here is that the community is often left out of these conversations around housing, around what the actual make of the community should look like, right? And what are the things and the resources that we need to actually support New Yorkers, who want to stay in New York, right? Who have lived in New York for generations. And, you know, I think so much of not just the fact of the people who are forced to leave because of these policies, but also the culture that gets erased.

**Josh Greenman**  
Do you remember the \[One45\] fight? The [Bruce Teitelbaum development](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/nyregion/harlem-truck-depot-housing.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). There was a truck depot and there was going to be some housing that was insufficiently affordable for the council members. Do you remember that fight?...

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah.

**Josh Greenman**  
Would you have wanted to keep that a truck depot, build it as suggested, or…?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah, I mean, the thing about that is that a lot of the community felt that it was left out. I went to the community board meeting about that, right? And what kept coming up was that we were left out of that conversation until it was pretty much too late, right? And so I think my point here is that so often these conversations around development, around new builds, leaves out so much of the community. And in that development in particular, that was not truly affordable housing, right? And the impact that that would have on the residents in the surrounding community is that they would then get priced out of the community.

And so I think when we talk about how do we address this housing crisis, how do we fight to make sure that New Yorkers who have been here, who have been here, many of them for generations, how can they stay in their homes? We have to think about housing policy that actually supports them, right? And makes it so that people can actually have truly dignified and affordable housing. Part of that has to do with making sure we are fighting for a Green New Deal for NYCHA, making sure that we are pushing back on bad landlords, making sure that we are also creating pathways to homeownership, investing in community land trusts and HDFCs, and making it so that people can actually stay in the city that they helped build.

**Christina Greer**  
Have you reached out to Keith Wright?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
We’ve spoken.

**Akash Mehta**  
On development, do you see market-rate housing as part of the solution or the problem?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, I think we rush to market-rate housing, right? And I think there is a role there. But I think the vision that we’ve been talking about throughout this campaign is one that is far more expansive, one that makes sure that we are addressing multiple pillars of what affordable housing in the city looks like for so many people. In my district, for example, we have the most public housing units in the country, or the most concentrated number of public housing units in the country, and the conditions that people in NYCHA are forced to endure are so deeply shameful, and it’s the result of failed policy, right? We have not made meaningful investments in NYCHA, and now the solution that’s being proposed by so many is privatizing it, which, you know, not only makes it so that people don’t have a truly public option for dignified housing, it also means that over time, you’re going to see less quality investments in that because when you bring in private developers, bring in private contractors, they’re not holding the same standard to the types of repairs that need to happen. They’re not hiring, all the time, union workers, right? They’re cutting corners.

**Ben Max**  
Isn’t it the case that many of the NYCHA complexes that have entered into the RAD-PACT program are feeling better about it than when it was run by just NYCHA, that they brought in private management, and actually that has brought this infusion of cash that’s actually made improvements? I mean, I understand you want a Green New Deal for Public Housing, but in the absence of that massive federal program, hasn’t this alternative been successful to an extent— and it’s not privatizing housing, right? It’s privatizing the management.

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
So I think for so many NYCHA residents, they just want things to be repaired. They want an elevator that works. They want the roof over their head to stop leaking. They want the mold to stop growing. And, you know, I think when we have taken away the resources to actually do the investments that need to happen in a public way, to maintain NYCHA as what it was supposed to be, which is a pathway to the middle class, of dignified housing, folks will just say, “Just give us the repairs,” right? And I think for so many, they’re happy about it because they’re getting the repairs that they need, which is great. I’m happy they’re getting that. But the long-term impact of that means that we are turning Section 9 housing into Section 8\. We’re making it so that for so many for whom this is their entire community, all of a sudden we’re discussing it as a stepping stone into market-rate housing.

We need to make sure that communities can actually stay in their communities. And, you know, NYCHA was initially created to be a pathway to the middle class. It was created so that people could have a dignified place to live that was truly affordable, and build a community there, right? And the fact that for so many right now it is a last resort is a reflection of a failure of policy. It is a reflection of a failure of a policy that seeks to privatize every industry in our country, right? And we really need to make sure that we are keeping a public option for people in order to make sure that there is always affordable housing in the city, that there’s always affordable housing in this country. Because the more that we feed into the cycle of privatization, the more we allow these things to become not human rights, but commodities.

**Josh Greenman**  
But I mean, it’s a choice. You go to Congress, and if the Congress is not for a massive infusion of federal funding into public housing programs, then the choice is do you support or not support these other means of raising money to help with the repairs. So you’re saying if the money doesn’t come, if the Congress is not going to infuse public housing with millions and millions more dollars, which hasn’t been the case. You know, that’s not been the posture of Congress for many decades. Are you for or against? Would you try to stop RAD-PACT from being the law? Would you want to veto this program, end this program?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, one of the benefits of being an organizer is that we don’t take no for an answer, and we organize until we get the solutions that we’re fighting for. I am somebody who is very used to being outnumbered, very used to being out-resourced, and still having an outsized impact to deliver for my community, whether that is on immigration justice, whether that is on providing communities mutual aid when they were left out of the stimulus program. You know, that is something that I am used to doing, and thinking through strategy with my community about how to deliver.

And I think there are a number of ways that we can fight for funding to make sure that repairs are happening, but we really need a Green New Deal for Public Housing for many reasons. We need it on the basis that we have to repair these buildings. Some of them are in such a state of disrepair that they are structurally unsound. We need to decarbonize them because the impact of that is that the health of so many New Yorkers has been so greatly impacted that NYCHA residents are actually the most likely to have asthma, right? And fully decarbonizing NYCHA would have the impact of taking over 400,000 cars off the street. We also have to think about the economic impact of that, right? A Green New Deal for Public Housing would bring in over 300,000 union jobs to the city over the course of ten years, and it would have an economic impact of $96 billion over the course of ten years. And so not only is this just on the principle of needing to maintain public housing, it is also a public good. It is a net good for the entire city.

**Ben Max**  
Mayor Mamdani has sort-of embraced an all-of-the-above approach to housing. You said earlier there’s a role for market-rate development, but of course, in your view, it can’t be the main focus. Do you think he’s erred in how much he is going in the direction of wanting to cast a very— he’s obviously focused on tenant protections, but cast a wide net of development, including looking at more NYCHA infill development? Is that an incorrect approach? Is that something that just happens when people go into executive office, they change their lens a bit? How do you see his evolution on these issues?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
No, I think casting a wide net on all the possible solutions is a great approach because we have to look at everything. And I think he has limitations as someone who’s working on the city level, right? And so that’s why it’s so important to have federal partners who can also bring in other solutions that someone at the city level can’t bring in. And so when I think about, for example, the funding around NYCHA, oftentimes the city is being forced to make decisions with their hands tied because they don’t have the funds, right? Or they don’t have the infrastructure bills necessary that are passed on the federal level that would support this kind of policy. And so, you know, I think the mayor is doing an incredible job with the resources that he has at his disposal, and I think again, he’s also an organizer, right? He’s using all the levers at his disposal to actually deliver for New Yorkers, and that is the kind of work that an organizer does. We come to our community, we hear the urgency, and we fight to find solutions that are sustainable.

**Akash Mehta**  
You had a critical mention of the [Inwood rezoning](https://council.nyc.gov/land-use/plans/inwood-rezoning/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in your first answer. I think the city is projecting 3,600 new apartments from that rezoning, 2,600 of which are projected to be affordable. Could you talk more about your position on that rezoning?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the community has actually pushed back on that rezoning for a number of reasons. One, a lot of folks are being priced out of the area as a result. And the fact that the community was left out in the process of that rezoning and that development I think speaks volumes as to who is benefiting, right? When it’s contractors that are coming in and making these decisions about how affordable — quote-unquote affordable — housing is being built, but then you look at what the actual costs are, right? It’s not truly affordable for so many people. When I say the going rate for a two-bedroom in Harlem or Washington Heights is $4,000, that is what is considered affordable, and that is not affordable to the vast majority of people in this district, right? That is why so many people are getting pushed out of our city, because they just simply cannot afford it.

**Akash Mehta**  
When you say people are being priced out because of the rezoning, could you just talk a little bit more about what you see as the link between additions of new housing and people’s ability to stay in their neighborhoods?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Well, I mean, if you look, even just looking at some of these new developments, like the max number of bedrooms, for example, is a two-bedroom, right? Where are you supposed to put a family in a two-bedroom apartment? And oftentimes, these two bedrooms, again, are $4,000\. They can’t afford that, and that’s raising the market rate for the people around them, right?

And so when folks who can afford those buildings move in, right, that also has an impact on the market, has an impact on the, quote, unquote, affordability for folks who are coming in because the average income is now dramatically changing as well. And so the folks who don’t make quite as much, who are living in surrounding buildings, who are often fighting against bad landlords, who are not doing the repairs that are necessary, who are leaving so many homes vacant, and having an impact on the market in that way, they are the ones that are getting screwed over, right? They’re the ones who have to deal with the economic impact of these rising costs.

**Josh Greenman**  
So what do the feds do about this specifically?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah, well there’s a lot here in terms of the fact that so many on the federal level for example take money from these very developers—

**Josh Greenman**  
But I don’t want to—

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
No but I think part of that has to do with the fact that we are not investing in creative solutions to actually address this. So I say that as an issue of accountability, right? Because that is why we see a representative who we currently have who hasn’t signed on to things like the [HOMES Act](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4352?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), who hadn’t signed on to the federal [Tenants’ Rights to Organize Act](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3049?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) until I called him out on it, right? Who hadn’t really fought for meaningful investments in NYCHA, and who hasn’t as far as I know, advocated for a Green New Deal for Public Housing. And so I think that speaks volumes in a community that is in desperate need for affordable housing.

**Ben Max**  
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the HOMES Act creates a social housing development authority. How would that not go the way of NYCHA eventually in terms of divestment, in terms of a lot of finger-pointing, in terms of the feds potentially walking away from funding? I mean, how is more government- basically -built and -run housing the answer to the crisis that people are facing given what’s happened with NYCHA?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Well, that’s because government is supposed to be a solution to these problems, right? And we have for decades developed this notion that somehow government is supposed to be hands-off, that it’s the private market that should address our social issues, but government is supposed to address these social issues. We need to actually ensure that government is doing its job and serving the working people of our community, right? And this neoliberal notion that we just need to gut every institution from our government that actually helps people is one of the—

**Ben Max**  
I’m not talking about gutting it. I’m saying if we’re creating something new — how do you ensure its success?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
But the idea that it wouldn’t succeed because it’s coming from government is directly tied to this notion that we have to gut all these government services. The reason why NYCHA is a last resort for so many people is because we have not had government that is actually investing in it. It’s because we have government that has currently abandoned NYCHA residents. And if we had government that was actually accountable to them, we would have a system that would actually serve them.

**Christina Greer**  
What are some bills in the queue right now in Washington, DC that would address some of these issues, and who are some of the legislators that you’d be working with?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah, the HOMES Act, for example, was introduced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Tenants’ Right to Organize Act, by Delia Ramirez. You know, there are a number of bills around housing that are already being proposed that the incumbent has not signed on to. I mean, the Tenant Rights to Organize Act, for example, it wasn’t until I pushed him [on Brian Lehrer](https://wnyc.org/browse/shows/episode/simplecast/acbbc271-745a-40dc-bb6b-72b947ea58ad?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that he then that same day signed on. And so these are things that we could have been addressing a long time ago, where we could have made a lot of headway.

And I think also about the fact that we could be organizing our own community around pushing for these policies. But so often we have representation that just goes into these spaces and that feel like to so many a massive smokescreen where they don’t know what’s actually happening, don’t know what the policies are that are impacting their day-to-day lives. And, you know, these representatives ask us to trust them, but our day-to-day lives are getting harder. And so to involve people in that process of governance and involve all of them in the process of thinking about, how do we write legislation? The Green New Deal for Public Housing was actually drafted by public housing residents and organizers who are knowledgeable about NYCHA and public housing, right? And so to involve the community in that process of creating the legislation that’s going to directly impact them is also worth noting here. Because I think so often, we push them out of their own process of governing.

**Ben Smith**  
I have a community question about that. A lot of the housing crisis in New York is driven by communities, particularly single-family, probably middle-class communities who really don’t want more housing in their low-rise neighborhoods. Should they have the same right to be consulted that tenants in Inwood do? Because it does seem like that is the path to no more housing.

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, I think a lot of folks think of this as, like, folks who are more wealthy who are coming in and buying this type of housing, low-rise housing and having this Not In My Backyard kind of conversation. But in places like Harlem, you’re talking about Harlemites who have been there for generations, right? Who are impacted by this. And so you gotta think about, like, what is the human impact of having a grandmother who has been in her building for generations having to leave and then being told, “Well, will I still have an apartment here after this is rebuilt?”

**Ben Smith**  
But I guess I’m saying, do you feel like that same claim can be made by, you know, your colleagues in Congress who represent Bay Ridge and big chunks of Queens. They’re basically going to say the same thing. And that logic is sort of the reason nothing’s been built in New York for many years.

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah, but I think the fact that what’s happening in Harlem, for example, is that things are being built in a way that is actually hurting our community, right? I’m not going to speak for Bay Ridge, that is not my community, but I think for Harlemites, for folks uptown, we’re left out of the process so often. And the impact of that is that not only are people being pushed out for these buildings to happen with no guarantee that they can come back, but then they’re getting priced out of their neighborhoods, and then the character of the community is changing dramatically.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think the character– I mean, there’s a lot of people upset in big parts of white ethnic Brooklyn and Queens, over many, many years about the changes in the character of their community. Is that a legitimate concern, do you think?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
When I say in Harlem the character of the community is changing, for example, I live near where Lenox Lounge used to be. It is now an ugly Wells Fargo. And all that’s left of Lenox Lounge is a plaque, right? And this is a community that is the capital of Black America, the cultural capital, the political capital of Harlem, right? And to lose the character of Harlem is to lose so much of the history of Black America. That is what I’m talking about when I’m saying the character of the community is being lost because of these corporate interests, right?

**Akash Mehta**  
How would you have voted on [City of Yes](https://citylimits.org/how-each-nyc-councilmember-voted-on-city-of-yes-for-housing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the City Council? And how did you vote on the [housing ballot props](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/nyregion/nyc-ballot-measures-housing.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) last year?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah. I voted yes on the housing ballot props because I do believe that we need affordable housing, and I do believe that we need to engage in all types of solutions. But I also think that it requires community input when we do engage in new buildings, right? I’m not against—

**Josh Greenman**  
The ballot props quiet community consultation, don’t they? Don’t they work against community consultation in some instances, and you want more community consultation?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yes, and also, I was also thinking in the context of who are we asking to engage in these conversations. And I was voting for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, someone who has been very open about the way that he wants community to be part of this process of governing. And I think that was part of my logic, where we’re thinking about— yes, we need more housing, we need to think of all of the possible avenues to get affordable housing for people, and also, we need to do it in a way that actually consults the community and protects it, right? It was a hard choice for me because I was like, “Do I trust the leadership that’s going in to engage with this responsibly? Yes. Do I know who the leadership is going to be after that? No.” So that was where the question for me really lied. I decided to vote yes, because I do trust the leadership that’s going in there with these issues, and also, it was a hard decision for me to come to because I don’t know who’s going to be mayor in eight years.

**Christina Greer**  
Sorry, can I double back really quickly?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah.

**Christina Greer**  
When I asked you if you had been in touch with Keith Wright and you said you had spoken. Because of your concerns, and I think a lot of people’s concerns about the disappearance of Black Harlem, specifically, can you tell us a little bit of the nature of your conversation, and has he been helpful?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
I mean, I haven’t spoken to him about anything he’s comfortable with me sharing, and so I don’t want to speak out of turn for him. I just will say I think I’m somebody who cares deeply about Harlem. I’m somebody who cares deeply about making sure that our communities get to stay in our communities and that has been at the heart of my conversations with everybody on these issues.

**Christina Greer**  
Did you him ask for an endorsement?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
No, I did not. But I speak to all Harlemites. And he’s a Harlemite.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Can your district build enough affordable housing to satisfy global demand for affordable housing in the district? And if not, how do you decide who gets to live there and who doesn’t? Is it favor people already there over newcomers?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
I think that’s a hard question to answer because the people come in and out of this district all the time, right? And so to think about what is global demand is a hard question. But I think by and large, we all know that we just need more affordable housing, and we need to make the housing that is already there also affordable and dignified because for so many people— You know, I was just in [Tracey Towers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracey%5FTowers?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the other day, and I was told that they’re raising their rents by 28%. That’s an eviction notice to so many of its residents.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
But that’s because the costs are going up. How would you solve that problem, the energy cost, the labor cost for the people who work in the building? That’s not a market profit-driven cost increase \[it’s Mitchell-Lama**\]**.

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Right. But what I’m saying is that when we’re talking about affordable housing and creating more affordable housing for the folks who are there, one, the problem is that a lot of folks are getting pushed out, right? Their rents are rising. And so that creates even more concerns around well, where are they going to go? And if we’re not even doing the bare minimum of making sure that people can stay in their homes, then this question of, well, do we need more affordable housing, I think is one that de-centers the problem at its core. We’re raising the rents on the people who are already there. Where are we asking them to go?

**Ben Max**  
One more, quick on this. Just to touch on some of the politics involved here, I feel like there’s a little bit of a tension in that so many of the people you’re talking about who have moved into the district in recent years are likely to be your voters. Not your only voters, but how do you think about that tension and the fact that you have a lot of people who have moved into the district in recent years who are gentrifying, a lot of them are white, moving into Harlem, share a lot of your politics, how do you think about that confluence?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah, I think it’s a reflection of a larger social structure failure, right? A systems failure, where we are seeing across the city people being priced out of their communities and having to move to other communities where rent is more affordable. And I think a lot of those folks, to your point, share a politic that is about ensuring that housing is a human right. That is a politic about ensuring that we are supporting our families, that we are actually investing in them, right? And I like to remind folks that the crisis that we’re seeing, we’re seeing it under our current leadership. It is our current leadership that has failed to address this problem. It is our current leadership that has been engaging in political games that are pushing people out of their neighborhoods into other neighborhoods and out of the city altogether. And so I think when we’re talking about the human impact, it’s people who are having to leave the homes that they have known for a really long time, moving into new areas while the people who have lived there for a really long time are also forced to leave. So it is a larger systems failure.

**Josh Greenman**  
I wanted to ask about immigration. You’ve obviously studied immigration a lot as an academic. You’ve talked about it plenty as a candidate. And you’d have a big role in shaping federal immigration policy if you went to Congress. What should our federal immigration policy be? And start specifically with deportations. The DSA does not like deportations very much, believes in free flow of people across borders. Is that where you stand? If you are OK with some deportations, under what conditions ought people to be able to be deported?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
I am not OK with any deportation. I think all deportation is wrong because I think it is an incredibly cruel punishment that is really only relegated to people on the basis of where they were born. And, you know, I think that we just should not have a system that allows deportation to happen at all. And I have been very vocal about that. I studied deportation as a part of my doctoral research, and I have yet to come up with a reason for why deportation has been used in a way that isn’t rooted in deeply racist ideology.

**Ben Smith**  
Are there countries historically you can think of that don’t have borders, don’t deport people who aren’t there legally? Like, is there a model for that?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Well, first of all, we can think about nation state borders as a larger, longer, more philosophical concept—

**Ben Smith**  
I would like your philosophical view. I think that is not a usual view.

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
I mean, it’s a very modern— the view of bordering is a very modern construct, actually. It’s one that’s only happened over the last couple hundred years and borders are constantly shifting, even today, right? We are constantly debating. So much of the global conflict we’ve seen over the last few centuries has been over bordering. And so much human life has been lost over it, right?

And, you know, when we talk about the border, a lot of people think about it as like a hard line in the sand, but really it is a system. It is like a social system that we’re engaging in, and more and more, it’s a militarized project. It’s one that is deeply dehumanizing to so many people. And so when I think about, like, what is immigration, and what is the benefit of having an immigration system, there are benefits in the sense that we can use our government to actually integrate people into our community, support them, allow them to have the resources that they need to be members of our community who can actually contribute to our community. But when we force people to live in the shadows, when we force them to live in degrading conditions because they are afraid that they’re going to be detained and locked away in a concentration camp and then deported and ripped away from their families, we can’t allow them to actually be part of our community

**Ben Smith**  
You’d be a federal official — would you, if you could, remove the checkpoints at the northern and southern borders of the U.S.?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, again, I think when we’re talking about these philosophies—

**Ben Smith**  
No, because I mean, I’m not trying to ask you your opinion on the Trump administration policy right now. But more kind of thinking about it broadly, because a couple hundred years is a long time, actually.

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah, no, and I think about the fact that we’re not going to change— we’re not going to do the work that’s been done over a couple of centuries, overnight. And also, I think we need to start doing the work of actually creating immigration policy that allows people to have their dignity, that allows immigrant communities to feel like they are full members of our community. So when we think about people coming in and out, we can be using that to actually support people to access the resources that they need to be integrated into our community. But instead, we use them as a system of punishment, as a system of policing and degradation.

**Josh Greenman**  
So, if no deportations, what does a path to citizenship look like? It kicks in immediately when you come here. Is that right? Or how do you get to be a full-fledged American where you vote in elections?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, for so many people, the first thing that they want to do here when they come is they want to establish roots. They want a good, dignified job. They want a place to live and raise their kids. And for so many, they can’t even do that, right? They can’t work because they don’t have a pathway to a work permit. So, allowing people to do that, to have a work permit, to be able to put their kids in schools, to be able to lead a dignified life, and to have a pathway to citizenship, right? And part of that can be starting with folks who have arrived here as children. So many of them still don’t have a pathway to citizenship even though this country is all they know.

**Josh Greenman**  
Should only citizens be able to vote or should other people vote?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
I really believe that a democracy is something that impacts every single person in this country, whether or not you are a citizen, and I think New York has engaged in a project of trying to expand enfranchisement to folks who are non-citizens. And I think that that is an idea that I would love to explore, but also one that frankly right now I’m focused on trying to make sure that folks are getting out of concentration camps, right? And that’s where a lot of my research and my focus has been in those questions.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So under a no-deportation policy, an individual who arrived here under the Biden open-borders policy and went on to commit a violent crime or series of nonviolent crimes, should that person have a right to stay in the U.S. indefinitely?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, we have a criminal system, right? And everyone who has committed any type of criminal infraction is brought to that criminal system. That is true of someone whether they are a citizen or a non-citizen. And to subject non-citizens to both the criminal system and then the deportation system is inherently [double jeopardy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double%5Fjeopardy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the basis of where someone was born, right? And there are so many fewer protections under our immigration system for folks who are being detained by ICE, who are then also subject to this additional form of punishment of deportation, oftentimes to countries they don’t even know, that they’ve never even set foot in. And if they are from that place, often they haven’t been there in over half their lives or more. So they don’t have anybody there. And often they’re being deported with nothing but the clothes on their back.

That is so incredibly cruel, and again, it’s literally just on the basis of where someone was born because they’ve already been subjected to the criminal system, right? They’ve already done their time, paid their debt to society. And then often what we’re seeing as well is that people who are deported on these criminal infractions, it’s retroactive, right? It’s after they have been back in the community for years, have been rebuilding their lives, been productive members of our society, and then they’re picked up by ICE, detained into a facility, and then deported.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think that the sort-of story of the last 10, 15 years of global politics has been the left getting totally destroyed by populist right-wing parties who are running on these issues and on popular anger about immigration? It’s true here, it’s also true across Europe…I wonder if that’s changed how you think about the politics of this at all.

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
In what sense?

**Ben Smith**  
Because it just sounds like the politics that you’re voicing, which I think probably are popular in your district, are very unpopular in the United States and helped get Donald Trump elected. So I’m just curious what the left is learning from that, if anything.

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, something that I’ve noticed as this campaign has progressed is folks who have very reasonable questions about how I came to my positions and why I believe that they are the path forward, but who often are framing them from a what’s possible question, what’s realistic, right?

**Ben Smith**  
Right. That is the question.

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
And the thing about being an organizer is that half of my job as an organizer is to envision the world that I want to see, regardless of what’s possible right now, and the other half of my job is to close that gap between what is right now and what we want to see. And if we don’t start naming and describing the world that we want to live in, we’re never going to get to it.

And so thinking about, well, how do we close that gap between now and there. Thinking about, what are the policies that are creating the condition that we currently have? Does that mean that we have to repeal some of these policies? Yeah, absolutely. Actually, especially when it comes to immigration. So often we’re talking about, well, what additional new policies can we bring in? We also need to repeal a lot of these incredibly harmful policies that have hurt so many people. But we also need to start thinking about, what are the conditions that led to the point where we’re at, where we have a fascist in the White House? And how do we fight back on that?

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think that open borders are part of how you got there?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know— Again this is like a philosophy—

**Ben Smith**  
That’s sort-of the consensus, though.

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah, yeah. And it’s a philosophy again that where it’s like this is the ideal vision of what you, where we’re... Because right now what we currently have is a system where capital can move freely across the world, but people are trapped.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Speaking of idealism meets reality, Mayor Mamdani ran on moving a lot of policing responsibilities to civilian agencies, particularly in mental health issues. He said he would get rid of the Strategic Response Group, he said he would get rid of the gang database. And he said he would not increase the size of the police department. He hasn’t done any of those things, and he’s increasing the size of the police department. He’s now six months into his term. Is the DSA right to start criticizing him? Is he making a mistake here in not sticking to his campaign policies?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, I can’t speak to what the mayor’s calculations are here. What I can say is that I think the mayor is someone who is constantly having to make calculations and I trust his calculation will always be around, “how am I best serving my community,” right? And I think, you know, I don’t know what the conversations are in City Hall around those issues, and I just can’t comment on them. But I think there are a lot of different dynamics that one has to work around. And as someone who is an organizer who comes from community work, and now I’m finding myself being in contexts where I have to make decisions in a split moment, right? I trust my community to know that I’m making those decisions with them at the top of mind constantly.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
But isn’t one of the calculations— I mean, he clearly wants to keep crime down. He knows that that’s an important metric for him. And the whole DSA philosophy is, you can do this without relying on policing, and here he is relying on more policing. I mean, isn’t that kind of a big deal?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
I think that ignores that he’s also working on his Department of Community Safety. He’s also trying to fund the actual infrastructure that makes communities safer. And we know, you know, I know from my own research, that looks into criminology, right? That reduction in crime is actually correlated with funding with social safety nets that allow communities to lead dignified lives. It’s funding education. It’s funding our libraries. It’s funding the programs that allow our kids to have a place to spend their time after school. It’s making sure that people have a dignified home to come to. Dignified work. I think so often folks forget that a job isn’t just a means for how to pay your rent. It’s also the thing that gives so many of us purpose in our lives. And when people don’t have purpose, you start to see all these negative consequences in our society. And so making sure that we’re actually investing in good, dignified jobs, making sure that we’re investing in our children, making sure that we’re investing in housing, are all essential parts of actually increasing community safety.

**Christina Greer**  
So I’ve got a quick question, though. So much of what you’re saying is deeply rooted in ideology and a deep philosophy. So one, who are your political mentors as you’re running for office? And two, a lot of what it sounds like you’re trying to solve, when you think about [Tip O’Neill](https://www.amazon.com/All-Politics-Local-Other-Rules/dp/0812922972?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), it would be on a local level. So why Congress as opposed to, say, City Council, where you’d be directly impacting communities, or even Albany, where you’d be in charge of such a large budget for New Yorkers directly?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
I think part of that has to do with the fact that this is— Yes, it, we can see it all in the local, but this is national, right? The impact is absolutely national. And thinking about the way that so much of our country’s politics have, to your point, Ben \[Smith\], shifted to the right, has meant that it is hard for us on a local level to work with what we’ve got. To actually deliver for our community. And so we need to actually be taking this fight to scale.

The scale of the issue right now is national, and so we need to take this fight to the national stage. We need to make sure that we are bringing in the federal funding that we need to actually deliver on a lot of these projects. We need to make sure that we are pushing the narrative that it’s \[not\] only the right that is fighting for its ideological views, right? We, on the left, have a vision for what this world can be for working families, and we’re willing to fight for it, and we’re willing to fight for it on the national stage. And I think for so many, we haven’t had an opportunity to do that, because we’ve just had representation that has given up that fight, that has gotten complacent, has not worked with all levels of government, be that federal, city, or state, to actually deliver on a lot of these issues. And that has to do with the fact that on the federal level, we have representatives who are being bought and paid for by the same institutions, the same corporations, the same donors that are funding Republicans and Trump.

**Christina Greer**  
Who are you looking to as your political mentors as you move forward in Congress?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah, I am very grateful to have the mayor’s endorsement, and we’ve been talking more and more. Honestly, I look up to a lot to my own community; a lot of academics who have thought about these issues deeply over the course of their careers, including a lot of my professors and colleagues. I have been very grateful to be able to connect with folks like \[State Senator\] Robert Jackson, who’s also supported this campaign. He is an example of, I think, what leadership should be on every level of government, who really focuses on the community for every political decision that he makes

**Ben Max**  
Have you tried to get AOC’s endorsement? And why do you think she’s not backing your campaign?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
I’ve reached out, and we’ve talked, and we’ve had very positive conversations. But I’m not in her head. I don’t know what her—

**Ben Smith**  
What did you make of the “She’s the next AOC” [cover](https://www.cityandstateny.com/personality/2026/06/like-aoc-but-left/414164/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) \[of City & State magazine\]?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
I think the congresswoman is an incredible fighter for our community. She means so much to so many—

**Ben Smith**  
But personally, what was your reaction when you saw that?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, I think my reaction has been the same to all the comparisons I have gotten to anyone in political office right now. Early on it was like, “Oh, are you going to be the next Zohran Mamdani?” And I was like, “I’m going to be the Darializa Avila Chevalier.” That is who I have always been. And that’s who I will be.

**Ben Smith**  
We’re a little short on time. I can’t believe we haven’t asked about [your tweets](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/nyregion/avila-chevalier-social-media.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) yet, but a lot of the campaign is being fought about your tweets. I saw \[City Council Member\] Chi Osse [tweeted](https://www.cityandstateny.com/opinion/2026/06/editors-note-woke-1-was-crazyyyy/414206/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the other day, “Woke 1 was crazy,” with like nine exclamation points. Do you agree with that?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
“Woke 1” was indeed crazy, and I think to that point, we often forget that people who go into politics are people who have their own journeys, thinking about the world, these social structures, and how to also communicate them, how to communicate their values. And I regret my tweets because I think it’s taken so much away from the vision of what we’re trying to actually deliver to people.

**Josh Greenman**  
I heard you say that last night as well \[in the NY1 debate\], that you regretted and you were sorry to the Vice President \[Kamala Harris\], but would you actually say specifically that what you tweeted was incorrect, was wrong, or do you just regret the effect distracting from this campaign?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
To her? Is that—

**Josh Greenman**  
No, I’m saying of all the tweets that have been discussed, are there specific things that you tweeted that you would today say, “This was incorrect. This was wrong. I should not have said this thing,” or do you just regret the effect of the tweets?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Well, I mean, there are a couple thousand tweets there so I won’t speak to each and every one of them individually.

**Ben Smith**  
We have time.

\[laughter\]

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
But I think to [her](https://web.archive.org/web/20210608030753/https:/twitter.com/darializabonet/status/1402099964017250305) \[Kamala Harris\] specifically, like that was wrong. And I think as someone who really values human dignity, accountability, justice for our people. The critiques I had of her record as a prosecutor, I think I can still have those, right? And what I said was just wrong. That was not fair to her. That was not actually a critique of her as a prosecutor. And I think to Chi’s point of Woke 1.0, like, we grow and we recognize that a lot of—

**Ben Max**  
What was crazy about it, though? Was it the way people expressed themselves or the degree to which people were sort-of, for lack of a better term, super politically correct? Like, is it the expression or is it the substance, or both?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, at the core of what it means to organize is to bring people together behind a vision. And you can’t do that when you are spending time trying to show who’s more progressive or who’s more woke or who’s more— you know, that actually causes more division, and it makes folks feel that there is no space for them in our movements. And as I’ve grown, I’ve really thought about, “Well, how is it that we bring people into our movements,” right? And I always laugh when I think back to an era where so many people were like, “Well, it’s not my job to explain things to you.” I was like, “Yes, actually, as an organizer, that is your job.” It is your job to explain social systems to people, and to do it in a way that actually invites them to be part of changing them. And I think as someone who really values the work of community— Mariame Kaba has this saying, “Anything that’s worth doing in this life is worth doing together.” There is no togetherness when you’re engaging in divisive rhetoric.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So does this philosophy of regretting and growing, would this apply to a young white Republican man who made similarly sexist, racist, misogynistic, ageist posts? Maybe he said, older woman of a different race was ugly, or he slammed a door in her face. Should he also be able to grow and move on from that, or does that disqualify him from office?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, I think the thing about being human is that all of us are just as capable of doing incredibly shameful things as we are of doing incredibly beautiful and heartening and empowering things, right? There is always accountability at the heart of that. There is no way to grow as a person without taking accountability for when you do fall short. We all do, and there are various degrees of falling short, obviously.

But I think, you know, if we don’t allow folks a path to be accountable and to feel that they can be back with their community in a way that tends toward repair, then we’re just going to continue to see more of this growing division in our country, more of this rising fascism, where I think a lot of people feel pushed towards that because they feel shame around the cruelty that they have engaged in. And rather than being accountable and seeing, “Okay, that was cruel. Let me do better,” we engage in this, this politics that throws people away, and we should instead be welcoming people to be accountable for the harm that they’ve caused and do better. We can’t punish people for engaging in the behavior we want to see from them.

**Ben Max**  
Can I come back to the borders issue with a specific foreign policy issue that you would very likely have a voice in? You seemed [in the past](https://nypost.com/2026/06/05/us-news/mamdani-backed-ny-house-candidate-puppets-putins-talking-points-on-ukraine-war/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to maybe express some sympathy toward Russia in invading Ukraine, and maybe that’s tied in with some of your philosophy around borders. But could you just sort-of clarify how you see that war and whether in Congress you would support U.S. military aid to Ukraine or how you would envision impacting this conflict?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah, I will be clear. I don’t think I have ever felt— Like, I’ve never seen Russia’s invasion on Ukraine as one where Ukraine wasn’t the victim of an invasion. I have always seen that as Russia invading Ukraine, and violating its sovereignty. And if I remember correctly, my larger critique was one of global systems where you have imperialist powers engaging in constant violence in a war machine, right? And where we rush to engage in armed conflict over diplomacy.

I think with regards to Ukraine, so many lives have been lost, and from the very beginning, I’ve said I worry about the impact of this war on the larger global context, where now we’re seeing more and more wars since that one started across the globe. And, you know, I think we really need to make sure that we are putting diplomacy first to actually save human lives. And I think we have de-centered that in these conversations, the human impact of this war machine, this constant rush to engage in armed conflict.

**Josh Greenman**  
Now that we’re back to borders, I have one item…This is looping back to something that we were talking about before. But I’m curious, during what was called the migrant crisis, there were lots of people coming. We have a right to shelter in this city. There was a scramble to find places for them to sleep. If not for the flow of those people abating, if that had continued, where, in your view, would it or should it have ended? Where should policy have gone if we had continued to have to absorb more and more individuals being bussed from Texas all the time? What should have happened?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
I think what we forgot here is the question of why so many people are coming into our country to begin with. And a lot of that has to do with U.S. foreign policy, and the fact that our foreign policy has really engaged in a lot of destabilization across the globe. And if we’re not going to be honest and frank about our country’s role in why people have to migrate to begin with, then this question of, how do we deal with all the folks coming in is moot, right? If we are constantly pushing them to migrate to begin with, we can’t then turn around and complain that they’re coming here.

And to this question of, how do we deal and, and manage the resources to actually support communities when they come here, we are the richest country in the history of the world, and yet we barely provide for our own people who are already here. That is a problem that is not caused by the people who come here. That is a problem that is caused by the people in power who create these policies that allow so many people who live here, who are citizens, who have been here for generations to live so deeply undignified lives because of their political choices. Because they are OK with corporations profiting billions upon billions of dollars, with individuals like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos continuing to hoard wealth and not invest and pay their taxes. And so I think it really is a larger systems failure where we are continuing to prioritize profit over people and then complaining when human lives are impacted by that. And that people have to make these really tough choices about where they live and if they can live in the places they call home.

**Christina Greer**  
You’ve answered this in other forums, but I just want to ask you sort-of on our record, if you’re successful and you go to Congress, would you support Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, that’s a decision I’d have to come to with my community. I’m really focused on the primary, and two things would have to happen before we got to that question: I’d have to win my primary, and we’d have to win back the House. And I’m really committed to winning this primary because I think it matters that Democrats do take back the House, and it matters what kind of Democrats we put in.

**Christina Greer**  
Right. So let’s just say those two things happen. When you say consult with your community, what would that look like? Would you go to your community and say, “Should I support him?” In many ways he kind of represents this middle-of-the-road, milquetoast Democrat that you’re fighting against. Would you wait and kind-of see who ran against him? Or, like, asking your community, how does that work—

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah, there are many months between then and now, and again, there are a number of variables that can and will likely change along that timeline. And those are the things that I’d have to consider and have to weigh with the community. I am someone who really spends a lot of time thinking about this question of principle and strategy, right? And the thing about principle is that you stand by your principles no matter how hard they get, because that is the point of having them. But strategy is something that we’re constantly having to think about, constantly having to shift in order to be able to actually reach a point where we are achieving the world that we want to live in.

**Ben Max**  
One more on borders. This could be a whole conversation, but we don’t have time for that. I’ve heard your opponent say he favors a two-state solution for an Israeli state and a Palestinian state. I don’t think I’ve heard your view on that. Do you think there should be a two-state solution? Do you believe Israel should continue to exist as a country?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, I say this as someone who does not live in the region and believes that the people of the region should have a final say on what their government and their country looks like. I deeply believe that the only path forward is for a country that holds all people to equal standing, regardless of race, religion, ethnic background. And any system that prioritizes one group over the other is inherently an apartheid system. And what we’ve seen time and again is that Israel is engaging in more expansion. And so, this notion of two states, where? Because whenever there is an agreement around these borders, that is repeatedly violated. And I think the only path that will actually allow everyone to live in safety and dignity is one where everyone in the region is equal before the law.

**Josh Greenman**  
In the United States, is everyone equal before the law in the United States as you see it currently, including non-citizens? Or does the United States feel like an apartheid system by that definition?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, I think in a lot of ways, yeah. When you look at how communities of color are treated before the law. But the thing about the United States versus what you see in Israel is that in the law, we don’t have an apartheid system, right? In the state of Israel, there are many laws, over 50 laws, that are specifically targeted towards one particular community. That is inherently an apartheid system, when you have a difference in treatment under the law.

And, you know, I think a lot of times folks are like, “Well, what will happen?” It’s like, well, what happened in South Africa? We got rid of the apartheid system in South Africa. Are things completely equal in South Africa? No. But there’s a path where folks have been working for generations now, to make sure that people can live in equal dignity, as equal citizens before the law. And that is something that we should always be striving towards.

**Ben Smith**  
You have a lot of voters in this district who deeply disagree with you on this, and are really committed to Israel, and feel very threatened by the movement you represent, like physically threatened. How would you engage them? How would you think about that?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, I think about the fact that what I am advocating for is something that at its core is about human dignity and ending a cycle of violence. A cycle of violence that has continued in such a way where every few years, thousands upon thousands of people lose their lives, right?

**Ben Smith**  
But do you ever meet with, talk to the kind-of pro-Israel folks in your district?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yeah, I do. I do. The thing about the organizing I do around Palestine is that I’m constantly engaging with folks from all perspectives on this issue. You know, I’m someone, I’ve been organizing for a really long time, with organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP), organizations that are Palestinian-led, organizations that are-

**Ben Smith**  
Right but those are the folks who agree with you.

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Yes, and a lot of the work that JVP does is actually engaging with their community who holds a very different view.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think people who disagree with you on Israel should vote for you anyway, or is this such a core important issue that it should be kind-of a real dividing line for voters?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
No I think they should because I think one, a lot of the folks uptown, for whom they might disagree with me on Israel, they agree with me on almost everything else. And also, at the core of what I’m talking about here is about valuing human dignity at the heart of all of this, and humans, and the safety of the people who live in the region, the safety of New Yorkers, right? And so, you know, we can disagree, but there’s so much space to have conversations around this, right? And I think so often, the conversation around Israel-Palestine is had in a way that feels really toxic to a lot of people. And the fact that I have been engaging with this conversation for well over a decade and willing to have those conversations even when it is really hard-

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think the campus protests at Columbia and the style of those protests contributed to the toxicity?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
No, I think the campus protests were directly addressing the role of the university in its complicity with the corporations that profit from the genocide and profit from Israeli apartheid. And listen, it is a hard conversation because it would force folks to acknowledge that what is happening is a genocide. It would force folks to acknowledge that what is happening is an apartheid system.

**Ben Smith**  
So you don’t think that there were voices in those protests that talked about— Especially the way the word Zionist got used, that was part of what was so toxic. You don’t think that your side of this has any responsibility for that?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
I think Zionism is an ideology that is looking to create a political system where one group of people has more standing before the law than another group of people. And I understand that there are folks who don’t view it that way, but that is the origins of the ideology of Zionism.

**Ben Smith**  
But it is interesting, like you said, it was sort of a toxic conversation, which I think…everyone can probably agree on. Do you think that the anti-Israel side of that bears any responsibility for how toxic it is?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
I think that for so long when folks like myself talk about Palestinian human dignity and human rights, I immediately get labeled a terrorist sympathizer, which is so incredibly dehumanizing. What I’m saying is that, whenever we try to voice this position, you know, we are immediately shut down. And so it’s really hard for me to sit here and say, you know, who has more weight when I have been subjected to doxxing, to attacks on my life, to attacks on my dignity as a person, when I have been called some really incredibly heinous things for saying that Palestinians deserve human rights.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Just speaking of human rights and human dignity, you’ve been a prison abolitionist, a decarceralist. What should happen to somebody who has killed somebody else? I mean, I went to a sentencing last week, a man killed another man, didn’t know the person, just sitting on a stoop, got a 18-year prison sentence. Should that person not go to prison? And what should happen instead?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
So, you know, for prison abolitionists, I think a lot of folks misunderstand what that vision of the world actually is. And it is one that actually centers this question of harm. At the heart of what we’re asking is: What, why is it that there is so much harm in our society?

And how do we, A, prevent it, and B, deal with it when it happens. And as someone who has worked with folks who have been incarcerated, who have felt ostracized, for lack of a better term, by so many facets of our society for being poor, for being Black, for being Latino. I work at a public defender’s office where most of our clients are incredibly poor Black and brown New Yorkers. And for so many, the crimes that they’re being indicted for are crimes of poverty, or the effects of poverty.

And when I think about this question of harm, I think how do we create a society where people feel so safe that they don’t need to pick up the phone and call the police. And when harm does happen, how do we actually create repair? Because what we have right now is a system in whenever harm happens, there’s more harm being perpetrated, not only on the folks who engaged in the harm, but also on the victims of the harm. I’m someone who has actually been the victim of crimes, of violence, and gone to the police as a young person thinking, doing the thing that society told me to do, and all that did was traumatize me more.

**Josh Greenman**  
But what do you do to the murderer though? Or what do you do—

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
But and so I’m trying to answer the question, which is that— What we do is that we then put people behind bars in incredibly traumatizing conditions in a context where they cannot actually reflect on the harm that they caused or feel any remorse on that because they’re just trying to survive inside, and they’re being re-traumatized day after day after day while inside. And then when they’re released, they’re bringing that trauma back to our community, and that is having a reverberating effect on everyone in our society. And so as an abolitionist, you know, when you think about this question of harm, we have to think not only about interrupting that cycle of harm but also preventing it from the onset. And part of that has to do with thinking about, what are the systems that actually reduce that harm from happening in the first place?

And I have spoken to clients at public defender’s office where you hear the larger story of what happened, and it was folks who were under so much stress from the conditions that they were facing that they lashed out in a way that was out of character, in ways that they deeply regret. They don’t have a way to actually repair now because they don’t have a pathway towards that. You see folks who just need access to medical care. I had, at one of the jobs I had many years ago, a client who would actually intentionally get arrested because being on Rikers was the only way that he could get access to his bipolar medication. And this is a reflection of a larger failure of our system to actually protect our people from harm, to think about harm in a more expansive way, and actually address it meaningfully and effectively.

**Josh Greenman**  
But, did we answer what happens to the murderer? Do you not incarcerate the murderer?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
You know, again, I’m talking about this question between the distance between the world we want to see and the world that we’re at. And tomorrow, you know, when that instance happens, that \[incarceration\] is what’s going to happen, right? And I don’t think anyone in society questions that that’s what’s going to happen.

**Ben Smith**  
But can you get a little less abstract? Like she was watching a jury vote on the guy’s guilty, should he be sentenced or not?

**Darializa Avila Chevalier**  
Well, this is what I’m saying is that when that happens, and as someone who has sat in so many courtrooms, to me, all of that is tragic. The fact that the murder happened is tragic. The fact that there was a circumstance in which that could even come to pass is tragic, and all of that is a reflection of systems that allowed that circumstance to be possible. And so, you know, I have always focused my attention on how do we create systems where that’s not even the possibility.

**Everyone**  
Thank you.
### Why This Knicks Championship Means So Much
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-york-knicks-nba-championship/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:05:02.000Z
[Five hundred seventy-seven](https://www.nycgovparks.org/facilities/basketball?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

That’s the number of public outdoor basketball courts in New York City. If you factor in private gyms, high school gyms and community centers, the number of places to hoop in the city skyrockets to [well over 1,800](https://x.com/nycbbhistory/status/1924749853994975293?lang=en&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). With courts nearly everywhere and a rich history of playground legends, there’s no sport that is as synonymous with a city as basketball is with New York City.

Don’t get me wrong, other cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle have all impacted the game and produced legendary pros. But no city can say that its connection to basketball runs so deep that it helped to reimagine how one of the game’s positions is played. No city except New York.

“It had to be a point guard,” said Kazeem Famuyide, the co-host of [“7PM in Brooklyn”](https://www.youtube.com/@7PMinBrooklyn?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with famed New York Knicks legend Carmelo Anthony, and co-host of Hot 97’s “Mornings with Mero.” “We'd wished for so many players to be our savior. But for this city, it had to be a point guard. A point guard that is doubted. It had to be this way.”

Famuyide is absolutely right. This story of the Knicks rising back to championship prominence would’ve been sweet had Patrick Ewing, Allan Houston, Latrell Sprewell, Carmelo or any other star player since 1973 led the team to a title. But it makes this victory especially poetic that it was Jalen Brunson, an undersized, underrated and often overlooked point guard — whose father was on the last Knicks team to reach the NBA Finals in 1999 — who restored glory back to The Big Apple. Because if basketball is what we do, point guards are how we do it.

For those not fully in the know, there’s [a movie that explains the impact](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdKARK2z9-k&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) New York City players have had on the position. Elite point guard play has always been part of the equation for Knicks championship success. Before Hall of Famer Walt “Clyde” Frazier was a famed announcer, he was getting buckets in Orange and Blue, leading the Knicks to titles over the Los Angeles Lakers in 1970 and 1973\. But the search for a leader at that spot left the team without guidance, direction or focus. Until now.

Brunson now wields the power of the Point God in NYC. Along with Karl-Anthony Towns, a fellow New Jersey native, Josh Hart, Miles Bridges and the hero of game four, OG Anunoby, they’re a team full of counted-out overachievers that the city has embraced as its own.

They also happen to have one of our own on the roster.

“I don't know a lot of Puerto Ricans in the NBA like that,” said Randy J. Cruz, co-owner of the Hoops in the Sun basketball tournament, of Knicks guard Jose Alvarado. “There have definitely been some over the years, but especially him being here in New York is just phenomenal, man. I’m proud of that kid. Him being a New York City kid, born and raised, playing at Christ the King, and working and grinding his way to find a spot on the Knicks. Now he gets to call himself a champion. He earned that. He deserved that. And, you know, he just put on for the Boricuas.”

Having a Brooklyn-born talent on the roster is just one of the improbable storylines that makes this Knicks team so lovable. Not only do they play an exciting style of basketball, but they also have the deepest alumni section in the NBA. Legends like Ewing, Sprewell, John Starks and beloved players like J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert came out to support this year’s team. The feeling is that once you play in the jersey, you’re a Knick for life. It's the kind of loyalty and commitment that matters to true fans.

Scott Williams, co-owner of downtown bar Las’ Lap, says his journey as a Knicks fan began at age 6\. Williams, who attended Game 3 of the NBA Finals, was fully confident this team could do it. But what he couldn’t predict is what it would do to the city.

“They’ve definitely brought the community together,” Williams said. “It was really awesome to see. Whether you’re at a bar with a random group of people around you or you're just walking down the street, everyone's just like, ‘Yo, lets go Knicks.’”

That positivity has touched Knicks fans of all backgrounds and all ages.

“Me and my husband are huge Knicks fans, so if the game's on, everyone's watching at the same time,” said Mylean Rulloda, whose [3-year-old daughter Rya](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZOEuQekgsG/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) became the star of the “Always Knicks” campaign. “Rya just gravitated towards Brunson for some reason. She became obsessed with him even before I gave her the little doll, and then once I gave her a doll, that's it, it was over. She just loves him.” 

Brunson’s BFF being a doll-toting toddler who can’t wait to [show the Knicks captain](https://www.instagram.com/p/DSkb8SjEdOf/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) her team-inspired nails symbolizes the emergence of a new generation of Knicks fans that doesn’t remember the excitement of the Larry Johnson four-point play or Houston’s game-winner against the Miami Heat — or the pain of John Starks going 2-for-18 or the Bulls stopping Charles Smith over, and over, and over, and over again at the rim.

It isn’t necessary to go through decades of near misses to appreciate this Knicks team. 

Brielle Bennett, a freshman guard from Brooklyn’s Nazareth High School and the storied Exodus AAU program, says that the lesson she has taken from this Knicks team is to never give up. “Even after Josh Hart missed that layup, they kept playing. They didn't give up even though they were still down. That was a huge part in them winning. That just speaks for itself. And now that the Knicks won, it's just gonna add even more confidence to us and more pride to us. Being able to call our hometown team the champions in the NBA.”

That swagger and energy will likely trickle down to players at all levels of NYC’s hoops pyramid.

“I think \[the Knicks winning\] plays a part in the hypeness going into the summer,” said Brian Gardenhire, founder of LES Express basketball tournament. “New York City street basketball is its own entity, right? But with tourists and celebrities who enjoy streetball as well, and even with the NBA players, I think this championship only broadens its horizons and elevates it because there's just so much excitement.”

New Yorkers have proven for the last 53 years that they will support the Knicks through ups and downs. But *this* Knicks team, led by a humble, hardworking star and made up of players from different backgrounds who are bonded through hard work, will forever be beloved because it embodies so much of what makes New York great.

“The pandemic really took some level of community away from New York City,” said Famuyide. “This playoff run was the first time since before 2020 that I can remember enjoying one thing with an entire city. This level of community is something that we've really missed and we’ve got to thank these Knicks for it, man. It really goes to show you that this is a basketball city which loves the game and what this Knicks team represents.”
### Sustaining the Joyful City: A New York City Social Infrastructure Agenda
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/social-infrastructure-nyc-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-06-17T21:04:34.000Z
On Saturday, the New York Knicks won the NBA Championship, and the people of New York City experienced a weekend of collective effervescence and joy. Great athletes created the extraordinary moment. But so did the city’s open, accessible and welcoming public spaces — the sidewalks, streets, parks and plazas that gave everyone a place to gather and celebrate in a communal environment. Now, New York City faces an urgent and important question: How can we make the joyful, affordable and communal city real and sustainable? What can urban policy do to help? 

Nearly 20 years ago, New York City took a step in the right direction by reimagining sidewalks and streets. Janette Sadik-Khan and the city Department of Transportation she led released [World Class Streets](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2008/pr08%5F049.shtml?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the city's first comprehensive public realm strategy, arguing that streets were not simply conduits for vehicles but places for public life. (This was developed with Gehl Studio, where one of us works.) With startling speed and efficiency, New York City pedestrianized Times Square and parts of Broadway, created neighborhood plazas across the five boroughs and built its first lasting physically separated bike lane. The changes — while heavily contested, especially in the early days — validated the principle that streets belong to people, inspired a generation of planners to reimagine the city and sparked a wave of public space development that has transformed the urban environment.

In 2026, however, New York City faces challenges — from climate vulnerability to housing instability, from eroding civic trust to social inequality — that require more than street design. We propose something more ambitious: treating the entire public realm as essential “social infrastructure.” 

What is social infrastructure? We define it as the physical places that shape our capacity to interact. Think, for instance, of sidewalks, schoolyards, swimming pools, parks, playgrounds, libraries, plazas and recreation centers. These are not mere amenities. Public gathering places, large and small, are critical parts of the city that support human health, social cohesion, mutual aid networks and democratic life. While it might not have been at the center of his campaign, social infrastructure is the key to accomplishing many of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s goals, from increasing civic engagement to improving affordability and making everyday life more meaningful and fun. Investing in it — by building great new gathering places, as well as fixing up old ones — is one of the most important things the current administration can do. 

### “Desire lines” 

For the past two years, we led a team of social scientists from New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge and designers from Gehl in [a major study](https://www.gehlpeople.com/knowledge-hub/publications/social-infrastructure-is-essential-infrastructure/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of social infrastructure across three distinctive places: Flatbush, the Lower East Side and Poughkeepsie. While New York City benefits from a longstanding network of libraries, parks, recreation centers, streets and community organizations, uneven investment, fragmented management and decades of underfunding have limited its potential. Some neighborhoods, like the Lower East Side, enjoy a dense and connected network of spaces, while others, like Flatbush, face gaps in access, quality, comfort and connectivity. While there is a need to build more spaces, we found real opportunities to strengthen existing networks by building safe and convenient connections between sites, improving indoor facilities to make them more comfortable, expanding programming and adapting popular sites for an age of climate extremes. 

New Yorkers are already creating social infrastructure where they can. What is often missing is the supporting infrastructure that makes these spaces comfortable, safe and usable. Consider, for instance, how much the City could do to create cooler public gathering places for residents in ecologically exposed areas. In our research, we found that on a typical summer Saturday, along a 1.3-mile stretch of Flatbush Ave, more than 200 people per hour lingered throughout the day, despite no formal seating, limited shade and heavy traffic. One in five people had improvised their own seating, carrying plastic chairs to sidewalks and propping stools in tree beds. On this popular commercial corridor, there is ample room for misting systems, trees and artificial canopies, and places for people to gather and sit.

These quotidian actions are what urban designers refer to as “desire lines.” They tell us what people want — a rest during a long commute, or a breath of fresh air outside their apartment, or a social setting that is neither work nor home. These needs will continue to exist no matter how much people use social media and AI. Indeed, for many, isolating technological tools have only underscored the importance of being around other people in the flesh. 

Demand for social infrastructure is not limited to streets. [The Center for an Urban Future](https://nycfuture.org/research/putting-the-rec-back-in-nyc-parks-recreation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) documented what happens when recreation programming, staffing and facilities are allowed to erode: Neighborhoods lose some of their most accessible places for gathering, learning and play. Our research found that a lack of quality indoor spaces leads young people to stay at home or engage in unsafe activity.

### Why social infrastructure now

Our current research builds on Eric’s longstanding work on social infrastructure, explained in books like “Heat Wave,” “Palaces for the People” and “2020.” For two decades, Eric’s research has demonstrated that the physical places shaping our shared life — parks, libraries, community centers, streets — influence whether societies are resilient or fragile. When those systems are strong, people form bonds of trust and social support. When they deteriorate, communities become brittle and crises hit harder. The 1995 Chicago heat wave, [which killed hundreds of isolated people](https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/443213in.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), was not simply a weather event. It was a social infrastructure failure. 

New York is facing its own slow-moving version of that emergency. [Social disconnection and loneliness are now public health problems](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/press/pr2024/nyc-releases-first-ever-state-of-mental-health-report.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Nationwide, [trust in institutions is declining](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jun/11/trust-us-institutions?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). [Housing is unaffordable for a growing share of the population](https://www.nyc.gov/site/housing/about/problem.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). [Climate shocks are intensifying](https://www.nycgovparks.org/learn/sustainability/cooling-our-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — with extreme precipitation events causing catastrophic flooding and record-breaking heat forecast for this summer … and every summer for the rest of our lives. 

Addressing these problems requires allocating more financial resources and coordinated, cross-departmental planning to build new and maintain and upgrade the social infrastructure that exists, from social housing to soccer fields and branch libraries. Social infrastructure makes it easier to build stronger social bonds. When it’s accessible to everyone and programmed to make a variety of people feel that they belong, it can even bridge social divisions. 

Part of our research involved a 23-question survey administered to visitors of 21 social infrastructure sites to understand the types and depth of social connections formed at each site. Across the 1,100 people surveyed, more than 80% reported feeling a sense of belonging in these spaces, more than 70% said people there were willing to help one another and more than 60% said spending time there made them feel less isolated. More than 50% reported cross-racial or cross-ethnic interactions at social infrastructure sites and more than 35% reported cross-class interactions. 

The patterns vary across neighborhoods. Flatbush residents report exceptionally high levels of familiarity: 84% reported recognizing at least a few other people at social infrastructure sites, the highest rate of any study area. Yet fewer than half reported gathering with people they knew or participating in activities with others, suggesting a neighborhood rich in casual connection but lacking places that support deeper social life. In a segregated city, these patterns stand out, suggesting building blocks for the kind of everyday cultural life that helps democracy work.

### What implementation looks like

New York does not need to invent a social infrastructure agenda from scratch. Many of its agencies, from parks and cultural affairs to transportation and health, are already focused on creating places for people to gather and connect. A recent initiative by the [Urban Design Forum, the Public Space Partners Survey](https://urbandesignforum.org/initiative/public-space-partners-survey/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#overview), found that approximately 8,000 organizations exist across New York City to care for public spaces. The City has many of the ingredients. What it lacks is a strategy that treats social connection as a public outcome worthy of investment. Many of Mamdani’s [most active volunteers found that the connections that the campaign fostered were an antidote to the loneliness pandemic](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/nyregion/mamdani-young-voters.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Now that he’s in office, this could be a more permanent outlet to foster the opportunities to be social that younger generations are looking for. 

 A practical governing framework for social infrastructure would have six core priorities.

**First, supercharge the library.** Libraries may be the city's most powerful and underutilized social infrastructure asset. In our study, they stood out for the diversity of users by age, their ability to make people feel safe and their capacity to promote interactions among people with different backgrounds. Yet many branches continue to operate with limited staffing, aging facilities and insufficient programming. New York City’s branch libraries are amazing resources for everyone who spends time here. But they could be so much more!

A social infrastructure agenda would treat libraries less as service providers and more as civic hubs. That means expanded hours, upgraded facilities, outdoor gathering space, more programmed events, and strategic co-location with housing, recreation and community services. [Libraries are already](https://www.planning.org/blog/9305577/how-libraries-became-community-resilience-hubs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) trusted places where residents go for mutual aid during crises. Equipping them with backup power generators, wireless mesh networks and more reliable HVAC systems will give everyone, in every neighborhood, a better chance to get through hard times. New York has already begun moving in this direction through projects that pair new affordable housing development with opportunities to co-locate with and/or renovate existing libraries — [and the City Council has a new push to do this even more](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2026/06/11/3135/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The opportunity now is to make that model standard practice rather than the exception.

**Second, reinvest in recreation and play.** Findings from our research as well as [The Center for an Urban Future's “Putting the Rec Back in NYC Parks”](https://nycfuture.org/research/putting-the-rec-back-in-nyc-parks-recreation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) reveal a city searching for places to gather. Recreation centers, pools, playgrounds, athletic facilities and parks help meet that demand before it spills onto streets that were never designed to carry the entire burden of civic life. As an example, at Tompkins Square Skatepark, we found not only recreation but informal support networks, where participants shared job leads, helped one another through addiction and offered temporary support during periods of housing instability.

[Putting the Rec Back in NYC Parks](https://nycfuture.org/research/putting-the-rec-back-in-nyc-parks-recreation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) documented the consequences of decades of uneven investment in recreation infrastructure. A social infrastructure framework suggests that recreation should be viewed not as a discretionary amenity but as essential civic infrastructure. The success of a recreation center can be measured by participation rates as well as by its contribution to neighborhood connection, belonging and public life via self-reporting through surveys.

**Third, make public spaces comfortable in a changing climate.** Climate resilience and social resilience are increasingly the same project. Shade, tree canopy, seating, cooling, public bathrooms, water access and weather protection should be treated as core infrastructure rather than optional amenities. Public spaces cannot function as gathering places if they are uncomfortable or unsafe for large portions of the year.

While this is of concern to all of New York, this is particularly relevant for New York neighborhoods facing extreme heat and limited open space, such as those identified by the [NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s (DOHMH) Heat Vulnerability Index (HVI)](https://www.nyc.gov/content/climate/pages/extreme-heat?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The HVI shows neighborhoods whose residents are more at risk for dying during and immediately following extreme heat due to a range of social and environmental factors that contribute to neighborhood heat risk, such as surface temperature, green space, access to home air conditioning and the percentage of residents who are low-income or identify as Black. Investments in trees, shade structures, cooling corridors, green infrastructure and public amenities simultaneously advance climate adaptation and social connection and equity. The same bench, tree, or fountain can serve both goals at once.

**Fourth, transform streets into social connectors.** This is where the legacy of “World Class Streets” remains most relevant. Nearly 20 years ago, New York demonstrated that streets could be more than traffic corridors. Now, we can formally recognize that streets are also social infrastructure. Open Streets, plazas, sidewalks, protected bike lanes and neighborhood commercial corridors can improve mobility as well as opportunities for lingering, interaction and community life.

The Flatbush findings show that New Yorkers are already using streets this way. Policy needs to catch up with reality. That means permanent Open Streets, expanded seating, safer crossings, flexible curb space, public bathrooms and investments in corridors where residents have few alternatives for gathering.

**Fifth, invest in stewardship and community capacity.** A library, park or plaza is only as effective as the institutions that animate and maintain it**.** The [Design Trust's Untapped](https://www.designtrust.org/projects/untaped/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) finds that the challenge is not simply building more spaces. It is identifying where opportunities to allow people to steward them exist. 

This requires a different approach to public investment. In addition to capital construction, the City, with public-private partnerships, should contribute more to the operational needs of stewardship organizations (streamlined permitting, funding for salaries, insurance, overhead) who activate public space every day. Social infrastructure succeeds when communities have the resources to steward it. 

**Sixth, assess neighborhood needs and fill gaps.** New York brings systematic rigor to planning transportation, schools and utilities, yet applies no equivalent discipline to social connection. A social infrastructure agenda would change that — beginning by mapping neighborhoods through a different lens: Where are the physical places — the libraries, rec centers and gathering places — that bring people together? What are the social outcomes we want to measure — children playing, seniors being active and connecting, New Yorkers connecting across differences? Which neighborhoods have strong networks, and which are operating with critical gaps? 

That mapping would feed into a citywide strategy, a successor to “World Class Streets*,*”that places social infrastructure gaps alongside housing insecurity, heat vulnerability and access inequities. This could serve as a governing framework driving capital budgets and agency coordination. 

It could also link housing policy directly to social infrastructure investments. Mayor Mamdani's [Block by Block](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mayor-mamdani-releases--block-by-block--the-housing-plan-for-a-n?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) housing strategy rightly frames affordability as inseparable from neighborhood quality. Large rezonings should carry social infrastructure requirements alongside housing production goals. The success of a housing strategy should be measured not only by units produced, but by the social life those neighborhoods can sustain. This mapping approach could be folded into the “micro plans” outlined in [Block by Block](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mayor-mamdani-releases--block-by-block--the-housing-plan-for-a-n?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

### The governance challenge

The primary challenge is not recognizing the importance of social infrastructure. New York already contains thousands of organizations, public agencies, libraries, parks, cultural institutions, community groups and public space stewards working toward the same goals. The challenge is governance: organizing these actors around shared outcomes, stable funding and long-term stewardship. Public realm responsibilities remain fragmented across agencies with competing mandates and capital cycles. 

Our research suggests that New York's problem is less a shortage of committed actors than a shortage of coordination. Social infrastructure responsibilities are spread across parks, libraries, transportation, housing, schools, nonprofits, conservancies, community organizations and business improvement districts. The result is a system that relies on extraordinary effort from individual organizations but lacks a governing framework capable of sustaining the network as a whole.

Former Mayor Adams named the city’s first-ever public realm officer, recognizing the cross-sectoral leadership needed for this major task and city asset, but structurally [the position lacked authority and was eliminated in the current administration](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/02/17/jersey-city-shows-why-nyc-needs-a-real-chief-public-realm-officer?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Maintenance and programming funding has been reduced for years. For example, research by the [Center for an Urban Future](https://nycfuture.org/research/putting-the-rec-back-in-nyc-parks-recreation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that since 1964 there has been a 66% decline in the NYC Parks’ recreation division workforce. And communities — especially low-income communities that have watched public investment accelerate displacement — may see public realm improvements as harbingers of gentrification if it is not clear how existing community needs are being addressed. The question is not whether cities should invest in social infrastructure. The question is how they do so in ways that allow existing residents to remain and benefit from the value those investments create.

These concerns should be incorporated into a social infrastructure agenda to ensure sites are treated as community assets, or essential public goods. Just [as housing policy increasingly recognizes that production and preservation must go hand in hand](https://www.nlc.org/article/2026/04/16/expanding-housing-supply-while-avoiding-displacement/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), social infrastructure investments should be paired with preservation strategies that help existing residents remain in place and share in the benefits of neighborhood improvement. Community governance and genuine stewardship partnerships with local organizations are not add-ons. They are the difference between infrastructure that serves a neighborhood and infrastructure that might seem created for newer residents and not longstanding New Yorkers. 

Investments in parks, libraries, public spaces and cultural facilities should be accompanied by investments in housing preservation, tenant protections, community ownership and small-business stability, [increasingly cited as tools](https://www.nlc.org/article/2026/04/16/expanding-housing-supply-while-avoiding-displacement/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in national anti-displacement conversations. New York is already experimenting with this approach. Mayor Mamdani's housing agenda pairs new housing production with tenant protections, preservation of existing affordable housing, stronger enforcement against negligent landlords and mechanisms intended to help residents remain in place as neighborhoods change. 

Protecting neighborhood identity requires more than preventing residential displacement. As groups like [Municipal Art Society (MAS)](https://www.mas.org/initiatives/enduring-culture/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Public Works Partners ](https://publicworkspartners.com/resilient-roots-strategies-for-sustaining-neighborhood-identity-amid-gentrification/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)have documented, it also means sustaining the organizations, businesses, cultural institutions and social networks that give neighborhoods their character and provide the social infrastructure residents rely on.

The ideas advanced in the [Center for an Urban Future's “Real Estate for Parks”](https://nycfuture.org/research/real-estate-for-parks?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) report point toward a broader principle: Growth should help fund the public realm that makes growth successful. The same research also outlines best practice from outside of New York and recommendations for investment funds. Development contributions tied not only to open space but to broader neighborhood social infrastructure needs. The goal is to make social infrastructure a predictable part of city-building rather than an afterthought. New York should treat anti-displacement as a core component of social infrastructure governance. Every major social infrastructure investment should be accompanied by a neighborhood preservation strategy that identifies residents, businesses and community institutions at risk and aligns housing, economic development and community stewardship tools accordingly.

### The next step

The question is no longer whether [social infrastructure matters](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557044/palaces-for-the-people-by-eric-klinenberg/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The evidence — from New York to [London](https://www.bennettschool.cam.ac.uk/research/research-projects/measuring-social-and-cultural-infrastructure/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to [Cape Town to Brazil](https://www.gehlpeople.com/projects/social-infrastructure/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — is overwhelming. New Yorkers demonstrate its value every day in the ways they use public space, often despite its limitations. New York does not lack cultural organizations or civic ambition. What it lacks is a governing framework that treats these assets as a connected system and social connection as a public outcome. The challenge is not convincing the City to care. It is giving the City the institutional capacity to deliver, coordinate and sustain the social infrastructure it already knows it needs with the same seriousness it brings to housing, transportation and utilities. 

The goal is not simply to create more desirable neighborhoods. It is to ensure that the people who make neighborhoods desirable can continue to live, work, gather and belong there. Nearly 20 years after World Class Streets, and a few days after a celebration that inspired everyone, New York is ready for the next step: building a city where belonging is not improvised against the odds but designed in from the start. 

*This essay builds on a collaborative research report developed by a core team across IPK and Gehl: Eric, Julia and Eamon O’Connor, Candice Ji, Precious Ndukuba and Michael Koncewicz, Matthew Wolfe and Nan Feng. See the full report,* [*Social Infrastructure is Essential Infrastructure*](https://issuu.com/gehlarchitects/docs/ipkxgehl%5Fsocial%5Finfrastructure%5Fis%5Fessential%5Finfras?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*
### Use AI to Analyze Bodyworn Camera Footage
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/use-ai-to-analyze-bodyworn-camera-footage/
Last updated: 2026-06-17T14:53:08.000Z
When a federal court found that the NYPD engaged in unconstitutional stop-and-frisk practices in 2013, it appointed a monitor to oversee reforms to these practices within the department and to ensure compliance with reforms that the ruling set in motion. These reforms include, for instance, ensuring that officers only conduct stops when they have articulable reasonable suspicion, that race is not improperly used as a justification or a basis for disparate treatment and that such interactions are properly documented. In the 13 years since, although the department has made progress, fully achieving these goals has remained elusive and the monitor’s repeated findings have underscored the department’s failures to reach full compliance on these critical issues. This slow and uneven progress is similar to other large departments under monitorships requiring complex sets of reforms. 

It’s no surprise. Large departments are being asked to demonstrate — and those responsible for oversight are being asked to verify — substantive progress in the behavior of thousands of officers across millions of interactions with the public. The tools at their disposal include interviews, ride-alongs, documentation reviews and [statistical analyses of administrative records like stop reports](https://www.nypdmonitor.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024.04.11-927-1-Twentieth-Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), all of which provide a critical window into the problem. In the modern era where virtually all officers wear body-worn cameras (BWCs), random audits of BWC footage have now become a vital tool that offers the closest look at the reality on the ground — an actual glimpse into face-to-face interactions between officers and the public. Yet in the largest department in the country, where even a monitor making a herculean effort can manually review only a couple thousand videos out of the nearly five million recorded each year, a glimpse is all that anyone can hope for.

We don’t need to accept this as the best we can do. With the advent of new technologies, body-worn camera footage can be put to much better use for departments and the people they serve. We are computational social scientists who developed AI-based tools capable of reviewing body-worn camera footage with a high level of accuracy at an unprecedented scale. Since 2021, we have worked with NYPD’s independent monitor, now Mylan Denerstein, to apply these techniques to footage in order to evaluate street stops. [Our report](https://www.nypdmonitor.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/2026.04.29-983-Letter-and-Stanford-Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), recently submitted to the court, details the ongoing challenges the department faces when it comes to constitutional compliance. But more importantly for the future of the NYPD and policing in America writ large, it also demonstrates a promising path forward for using AI-powered tools to improve accountability, community trust and the effectiveness of reforms in police departments across the country.

Unlike many AI tools that have become controversial — from face recognition technology to drones to risk assessment tools — police body-worn cameras enjoy overwhelming public support. In fact, the cameras have a nearly 90% approval rating. Across the political spectrum, people see these cameras as essential tools for accountability and transparency. Here, we showcase how the footage from these cameras could be used to help address two particularly thorny problems in New York City: underdocumentation and the legality of consent searches.

### Underdocumentation and constitutionality

When NYPD officers detain someone in an investigative encounter, that interaction graduates from an encounter to a “stop” where the person is not free to leave. This is an important legal distinction when it comes to the detainee’s rights, and one that the officer is required to document. Officers can only detain someone when they have individualized reasonable suspicion that that person has committed or will commit a crime. Because the context of a police-civilian engagement is so important, underreporting and mislabeling of stops is one of the key areas where constitutional compliance — and community trust — can erode. Incidents that feel like stops in every practical sense to the civilian, but that are never documented as such, are a blind spot for the department and the monitor alike; constitutional rights may be violated, and in an endless sea of everyday encounters, no one would know where to check.

Audits by the NYPD’s Monitor Team have shed light on the potential scale of the problem, with manual reviews finding underreporting rates of [27% to 41% in recent years](https://www.nypdmonitor.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/2026.02.26-979-Monitors-Twenty-Ninth-Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — with specialized units that engage in proactive stops, frisks, and searches, such as the NYPD’s Neighborhood Safety Teams, underreporting rates are above 50%. But as with all manual reviews of body camera footage, these audits are necessarily random and sporadic. The monitor has no way of knowing which encounters to look at to find those most likely to have been mislabeled.

To address this issue, we analyzed a set of 2,858 encounters that the Monitor Team, along with retired court judges, had already audited. We used their expert judgments to train machine learning models to predict, for a given piece of footage, whether it is likely to be a stop in which someone is detained or merely an encounter in which they are legally free to leave. By parsing the language of officers and civilians in each video, these models were able to accurately distinguish between stops and mere encounters about 80% of the time. We were able to repeat this process using judges’ analyses of whether officers’ behavior during stops was constitutional — for instance, whether stops were conducted with reasonable suspicion, whether frisks and searches were conducted appropriately and so on — we trained our models, set them to work on a sample of known stops and came out with an accuracy rate of over 70%.

Of course, accuracy rates in the 70s and 80s will still produce plenty of false positives and negatives. But the purpose and potential of these models is not to replace human judgment on matters of constitutionality. What accuracy rates this high *can* do is dramatically narrow the pool of footage the department and Monitor needs to comb through by hand in order to find, assess and learn from likely episodes of underdocumentation.

That could be enormously helpful in two ways. First, it opens the potential for targeted audits. Rather than randomly grabbing a handful from the haystack and hoping to find a few needles, our models could quickly analyze millions of videos tagged as non-stop investigative encounters and point auditors directly to the specific encounters most likely to have been mislabeled. Our evidence suggests that review of even the top 1% of videos by model probability would likely uncover thousands of undocumented stops per month with very high auditing hit rates — a shortcut that could save departments and monitors significant time and resources.

Second, these models can provide a quantitative representation of encounters that has never existed before — in essence, a way of scoring language to measure elements like how “stop-like” an interaction seems and how constitutional an officer’s word choice feels. We found in the data that linguistic indicators for non-constitutionality include pointed questions like “why you running,” “what you got,” and “\[got nothing/anything\] on you,” as well as commands such as “stop” and “don’t reach.” These words themselves don’t constitute non-constitutional behavior, but measured in aggregate are predictive of non-constitutional behavior like stops conducted without reasonable suspicion. 

Metrics for scoring language in this way are enormously valuable for uncovering language patterns that departments can learn from and use as the basis for officer training. For example, our model quantified significant racial disparities bearing on Fourteenth Amendment concerns: The language officers use in non-stop interactions with Black and Hispanic civilians is about 5 to 11% closer to resembling language used in stops. Specifically, given only the language appearing in the footage, our trained models’ estimates of the probability that a given low-level interaction was a stop were on average 5-11% higher when the civilians in the interaction were Black or Hispanic. This suggests that, even in low-level police encounters, NYPD interactions with Black and Hispanic civilians take on a more “stop-like” tenor, raising questions about whether a reasonable person in such encounters would understand they were free to leave.

Our findings for the constitutionality of officers’ behavior during stops were perhaps more concerning. When we examined *correctly* documented stops — those most likely to be reviewed because they’ve been accurately labeled as more significant — we found little to no evidence of racial disparity in officers’ constitutional behavior. It was only when we examined stops that had been mislabeled as more casual encounters, the kind of videos that typically fall through the cracks of review, that we found large racial disparities: The model's estimated probability of non-compliance was 16% to 26% higher for stops of Black and Hispanic civilians. This finding further emphasizes the urgent need for departments seeking to root out racial disparities and 14th Amendment violations to improve documentation compliance. 

### Quantifying the explicitness of consent search requests

The second major category of constitutional compliance our models could be helpful in transforming involves civilians’ consent to being searched. The Fourth Amendment guarantees freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. Given this, where officers rely on consent to justify a search, that consent must be voluntary. Whether a person’s consent to a search is voluntary under the Fourth Amendment can depend in significant part on what officers say — including whether they clearly communicate the nature of the request and whether their words indicate that the civilian has a meaningful opportunity to refuse. We used computational tools to analyze the language NYPD officers used to obtain consent for searches in 2023, representing 1,770 encounters and 3,695 associated videos.

Our goal was to measure the prevalence of explicit consent language and the clarity of officers’ requests. We began by asking a simple question: When an officer documents a request for consent to search, do the words “consent” or “search” appear in the transcript at any point for any video associated with the encounter? We were surprised to find just how rare these critical words were: “Search” was mentioned in only 46% of these encounters, and “consent” in only 13%. When we manually reviewed a sample of these instances, we found that less than half represented genuine requests to search — in many cases, the words “search” and “consent” were being used to reference past searches or proactive refusals of consent by civilians rather than as a legitimate means of initiating a search.

The NYPD Patrol Guide offers suggested phrasing for officers to use when seeking a consent search: “I can only search you if you consent. Do you understand? May I search you?” But our analysis found that documented consent search requests contained the phrases “consent,” “search,” and “you understand” in only 3% of interactions — and the exact phrasing suggested by the Patrol Guide never occurs. Taken together, our fundamental finding is that consent searches in which officers clearly and explicitly request consent are exceedingly rare.

If officers are not using explicit terms to request consent, what *do* they say? We identified two prominent alternatives: requests using forms of “can I check” appear in 37% of consent search interactions, and those using forms of “do you mind” in 17%. While “search” carries specific legal and constitutional meanings, it’s also a word that civilians are likely to ascribe some weight to — a softer word like “check” is more nebulous, and could very well minimize and obscure the nature of what the officer is seeking to do. 

By the same token, “do you mind” questions create ambiguity almost by definition: To “mind” is to ask that something not take place, so a civilian might need to say “yes” to decline. On the other hand, we find that in real interactions, people often also reply to such questions with “no” to signal that they want to reject the underlying request to search. This ambiguity could be entirely avoided with greater clarity in the phrasing of requests.

Just as we found in cases of mislabeling stops, we discovered measurable racial differences in how officers seek consent for searches. “Do you mind”-style questions appear in about 20% of interactions with Black civilians as compared with only 15% of interactions with civilians of other races. Moreover, we found that Black and Hispanic civilians heard 20% more commands in general throughout these consent search interactions, which may contribute to an atmosphere in which a civilian feels they have less agency and are therefore less free to decline a search.

These estimates are all likely conservative due to the potential for underreporting of consent search interactions — another issue which could be addressed by using predictive models to trawl the data at scale and unearth the likeliest mislabeled consent searches. Overall, we believe that our findings could be instrumental in helping the NYPD to pinpoint opportunities for reform, pursue those reforms more effectively and expend far fewer resources while doing so.

### Merging technology and policy change

Predictive modeling of underdocumentation and compliance could have compounding benefits — a ripple effect for departments, monitors and the communities they serve. Targeted sampling could save valuable time for auditors (even as random audits remain a useful tool to establish baseline rates). Freeing up humans to evaluate the likeliest problem areas would allow them to learn more, faster. Language patterns revealed by the models could inform more targeted and effective officer training that is backed by real data. Those trainings could in turn be evaluated for their effectiveness by measuring whether troubling language patterns change. Even officers’ awareness that their mislabeling of stops or lax language initiating consent searches is more likely to be flagged for review could create a self-correcting effect that changes behaviors and contributes to better outcomes.

More broadly applied, AI-based tools offer the first opportunity to truly measure — quantifiably and at scale — which policy changes are actually being implemented on the ground, and ultimately which are most effective at improving constitutional policing, public trust and officer safety. The fact that these insights can be generated from already-existing body camera footage at a relatively low cost makes them a potentially game-changing asset for police departments — an unprecedented in-house capacity to track and tackle issues, measure geographic hotspots and trends over time and shed light on any key metric of interest.

The infrastructure and technology to support these kinds of analyses is already in place — the only barrier that remains is the will of local leaders. New York is in many ways uniquely positioned to lead the way for the nation on this front: Due to the How Many Stops Act, implemented starting in July 2024, the NYPD already collects more detailed information about encounters with the public than perhaps the majority of departments nationwide. As the largest department in the country, New York has a golden opportunity to set the standard for the use of AI for accountability and transparency.

At a time when police retirements are at record highs and recruitment is at record lows — when both officer wellness and public trust in law enforcement are issues of urgent concern — this new technology holds the potential to shift the dynamic. A clear, comprehensive, data-driven view into the realities of policing can be a launching pad for changes that make the profession safer, more responsive and more constitutionally sound, instilling greater trust in policing among the community in turn.
### Pelé and New York
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/pele-nyc-cosmos-soccer/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:37:13.000Z
On July 19, the FIFA World Cup Final will take place at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. A little over 50 years ago, on the same site, there was a different stadium and a different team playing there. But something just as momentous happened: the birth of a sporting phenomenon that helped America fall in love with soccer.

And it was all thanks to one man — Pelé.

A three-time World Cup winner with Brazil, the man born Edson Arantes do Nascimento, was known across the world as being the greatest player that had ever graced a soccer pitch and now he was here in America, a country whose indifference to the sport couldn’t have been more pronounced.

[When Pelé first stepped onto the field for the barely-known New York Cosmos in 1975, American soccer changed overnight](https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/pele-and-rise-american-league-soccer?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The Brazilian icon arrived in a country where his sport existed largely on the margins, competing for attention against more established, mainstream sports. 

Within months, crowds that had rarely paid attention to soccer were flocking to see the three-time World Cup winner in action and the Cosmos, a club going nowhere fast, soon became a cultural event. Celebrities filled the stands, television cameras followed their every move and soccer suddenly occupied a place in the national conversation in a manner not dissimilar to Lionel Messi’s arrival at Inter Miami in 2023.

Until Pelé arrived in 1975, the game the rest of the world called “football” had been dying a slow and largely unnoticed death in America. Indeed, in the five years that the North American Soccer League had existed, it had singularly failed to ignite any public interest in a sport that most every other country on the planet clutched to their hearts. 

Even before the NASL began, the odds were stacked against pro soccer succeeding, especially when faced with the hegemony of baseball and the other kind of football. Certainly, the massed ranks of the nation’s press seemed dead set against giving it any kind of opportunity to flourish. In 1968, for example, the San Francisco Examiner wrote despairingly of soccer’s influence around the world: “In Europe, as in South America, they go raving mad over the game. Pray that it doesn’t happen here.”

Even in New York City, perhaps the most ethnically diverse metropolis on earth, there appeared to be little appetite for the game, with the city’s soccer franchise, the New York Cosmos, “drawing less than the skin flicks on Eighth Avenue,” according to one of the Cosmos players, Shep Messing.

But the turning point came when global entertainment giant Warner Communications acquired the Cosmos and put its visionary chairman, Steve Ross, in charge. Ross didn’t know a goalkeeper from a zookeeper, but he was determined to break the Cosmos — and soccer itself — in the United States. Prior to the change, the team had been little more than a ragtag assembly of part-timers, students and foreigners who played their games at Downing Stadium, a crumbling wreck of a site under the Triborough Bridge at Randall’s Island.

Now, with the financial might of Warner Communications behind them, the Cosmos were transformed from a team on the brink of collapse to one with lofty ambitions, one of which, ridiculously, was signing 34-year-old Pelé, the greatest soccer player that the world had ever seen and who had recently retired from playing. 

In basketball terms, it was like a 40-year-old Michael Jordan coming out of retirement to play for a Turkish basketball team nobody had ever heard of.

The idea came from the Cosmos’ general manager, Englishman Clive Toye. “There was only one player in the world who could break through this crust of indifference — and that was Pelé,” he said.

The idea appealed to Steve Ross, a man drawn inexorably to star names and supersized personalities.

So began a four-year, 300,000-mile odyssey for Toye, where he pursued the Brazilian around the world as though he were a fugitive, eager to lure him out of retirement and back on the football pitch. 

There were meetings in London, Frankfurt and Toronto, in Santos and São Paulo, none of which yielded the result Toye wanted. It was only when Pelé’s financial woes caught up with him in late 1974 that Toye’s hand was suddenly strengthened. Waylaid by a succession of bad business deals and poor legal advice, the player was in dire need of money and the Cosmos, thanks to the deep pockets of Warner, had bags of it.

The deal Toye finally struck with Pelé guaranteed the player more money in three years than he had earned in his entire playing career with Santos – nearly $3 million (around $18 million today). Not only was it a world record package but it was over twice what the rest of the Cosmos squad earned combined. Add in two homes, one in Manhattan and one in Connecticut, a lavish office at Rockefeller Plaza and guaranteed spots for his children at the city’s top schools, and Pelé’s compensation package was staggering by the standards of any era.

The Cosmos management also went out of their way to ensure Pelé paid as little tax as possible, preparing a succession of contracts for him, with just one having any mention of soccer in it. Aside from the three-year playing deal, there was a 10-year deal for the global marketing rights to the Pelé name and likeness and a 14-year PR contract for Warner Communications. One agreement even had his position within the corporation as that of a “Recording Artist”.

But it wasn’t just money that tempted Pelé. 

When Clive Toye made his sales pitch to Pelé, he convinced him not to join one of the big European clubs, like Juventus in Italy or Spain’s Real Madrid, that had been keen to secure his services. “I said if you go there, all you can do is win another championship. If you come here, you can win a country.”

“He and he alone could do something no one had ever done and bring soccer to the mainstream.”

Those dreams would go through the nation’s largest city during one of its most difficult periods. [In the fall of 1975, New York was a city on the brink.](https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/a-crisis-without-keynes-the-1975-new-york-city-fiscal-crisis-revisited?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 

Mayor Abe Beame’s administration had overseen the city’s worst-ever fiscal crisis, with thousands of city workers and public-sector workers laid off, wages frozen and essential capital improvement projects shelved indefinitely. With the city on the verge of bankruptcy, Beame had been left with no option but to seek financial assistance from President Gerald Ford. 

[Just a couple of weeks after Pelé’s unveiling as a Cosmos player at the 21 Club on June 10, 1975](https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/11/archives/pele-signs-with-cosmos-soccer-has-arrived-here-pele-signs-cosmos.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Beame and New York got their response from the White House, a rejection that gave rise to the famous Daily News headline: “Ford To City: Drop Dead.” ([The actual history](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/drop-dead-city-review/) is [a bit more complicated](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-came-after-1975-new-york-fiscal-crisis/), but that’s a story for another essay.)

Even as the city spiraled, the Cosmos, now with the world’s greatest ever player on their roster, went stratospheric. They moved into the revamped Yankee Stadium and then, in 1977, moved into Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, where, against the Fort Lauderdale Strikers on August 14, 1977, [they pulled in a new NASL record attendance of 77,691](https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/15/archives/cosmos-triumph-at-giants-stadium-before-record-soccer-crowd-of.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Uniquely, the Cosmos blended sport and celebrity culture — Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Robert Redford and Muhammad Ali were all regular attendees. In disco-era New York, they had managed to take soccer beyond the confines of the stadium. For the players, that invariably meant jumping in limos and heading straight to legendary super club Studio 54 after the final whistle, where they could skip the queues and get the party started. 

There were drugs on the dance floor, sex in the toilets and the Cosmos in the VIP section. As team captain Werner Ritter said: “That club was one of the home bases for the players. It was pretty standard Cosmos treatment. The mob would part, the velvety ropes come open and you’d be taken into a VIP room there. We got superstar treatment.”

[Pelé’s part-missionary, part-mercenary Cosmos career finally came to an end on October 1, 1977.](https://www.espn.co.uk/football/story/%5F/id/37534292/farewell-king-remembering-pele-final-game-40-years-ago?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) In a farewell game at Giants Stadium against Santos, he played one half of the match for the Cosmos and the other for the only other club he had ever played for. As the game drew to an emotional end, the heavens opened over the stadium, drenching the 75,000 in attendance. The following day, a Brazilian newspaper ran the headline: ‘Even The Sky Was Crying’.

The Cosmos without Pelé were a different matter entirely. Devoid of his box-office appeal, the club floundered. [In 1985, with interest waning and crowds a tiny fraction of what they used to be, the Cosmos folded](https://www.ussoccerhistory.org/the-sad-end-of-the-original-nasl-cosmos/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

For the most part, the NASL had been like building a house and starting with the light fittings; the stars were there before the infrastructure, the marketing before the grassroots and the entertainment before the sustainability. 

For a time, it worked. But when the novelty wore off, the cracks that had always existed became impossible to ignore.

Fast forward half a century. The NASL is long gone, but it has been replaced by a new league, Major League Soccer (MLS), that has benefited enormously from learning the lessons of the Cosmos era. 

Rather than relying exclusively on imported stars, the league has invested heavily in soccer-specific stadiums, youth academies, training facilities and expansion markets with committed ownership groups. Growth has often been slower than supporters would like, but it has been built on firmer ground.

The Cosmos believed stars would create a soccer culture; MLS has spent the last three decades trying to build the culture first and let the stars enhance it rather than define it.

Since the demise of the Cosmos, MLS has driven a steady rise in soccer participation and fandom in New York City through the establishment of clubs like New York Red Bulls, New York City FC and the latest iteration of the New York Cosmos. Regular top-flight matches, youth academies, and community outreach programs have helped embed the sport more deeply in the city’s sporting culture and increased grassroots uptake across all age groups.

Over the past 20 years, for example, [K–12 soccer in New York has grown mainly through a mix of community programs, after-school initiatives and youth club development pathways](https://www.usyouthsoccer.org/programs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Key successes include the NYC Soccer Initiative, which has built mini-pitches and expanded access to the sport in underserved neighborhoods, and Soccer for Success, a large after-school program serving thousands of children with both soccer training and life-skills education. 

Alongside these, clubs such as Downtown United, Asphalt Green and FC Harlem have strengthened organized youth development, while MLS-linked pathways like the New York Red Bulls Academy have created clearer routes into elite and professional soccer.

And so, as the United States prepares to host the biggest World Cup in history, soccer is no longer a source of mockery and befuddlement among domestic sports fans. In 1975, American soccer relied on one iconic player to capture the nation's imagination. In 2026, it will showcase a more mature soccer ecosystem that includes professional clubs across the country, booming youth participation, dedicated stadiums and a generation of homegrown talent competing at the highest levels of the sport across the world.

Half a century after Pelé transformed a struggling team into a genuine cultural sensation, American soccer finds itself back in New Jersey again, preparing for another historic moment. The difference is that this time, the game is no longer trying to introduce itself. 

It has, finally, put down roots.
### The Knicks, the Hooligans and the Cops
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/knicks-hooligans-nypd/
Last updated: 2026-06-17T14:56:13.000Z
When I was a New York City cop, I would always wish the Yankees bad luck in the playoffs. It wasn’t just my family’s lineage as Mets fans and the vengeful suffering that wrought; in the small corner of my mind that concerned baseball, it would always be 1986 and the Mets would be world champions. I had been a rookie officer in Brooklyn when the Yankees won the World Series in 1998, and we were deployed to Bay Ridge to quell the “celebrations.” We chased violent drunks around all night as they tried to destroy whatever could be lifted, thrown or stomped on, fought with each other for no reason, and sped up and down the avenues hanging out of cars, screaming. As cops, we were either curmudgeons telling people to stop being so damn happy, or we were going toe-to-toe with the U.S. version of soccer hooligans. I will never forget the sight that night of a couch coming out of the window of a third-floor apartment, on fire. I took no special joy in chasing frenzied sports fans down the street with my baton cocked over my head. So, selfishly, I hoped the Yankees lost.

This kind of cop logic was on full display this week when the Knicks came back from a 29-point deficit that left them a game away from winning the NBA Finals for the first time in 53 years. A flurry of terrible calls by the refs early on left millions of fans furious and thousands on the verge of a riot. The improbable turnaround that followed catalyzed this energy into a drunken melee on a grand scale, the pointlessness of which was on display in the destruction of a yellow taxi. The car wasn’t symbolic of the referees who made the abominable calls, nor was it the team cab of the San Antonio Spurs. It was a car driven by someone whose livelihood has been mostly supplanted by Uber and Lyft drivers, who will soon enough be replaced by robots. It was pure felony criminal mischief. 

As the majority of fans celebrated lawfully, some [fought each other and destroyed street signs, magazine bins and store windows](https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/knicks-fans-assault-police-destroy-035507962.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). [Dozens were arrested](https://abc7ny.com/post/dozens-arrested-outside-madison-square-garden-perimeter-celebrations-turn-rowdy/19274965/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and [10 police officers were injured](https://wsvn.com/sports/56-taken-into-custody-10-officers-injured-after-knicks-game-4-chaos-near-msg/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In advance of the next game — Saturday night, in San Antonio — the NYPD has ordered thousands of extra officers to come in on their day off.

In the grand scheme of enforcing social cooperation in public spaces, the crowds that celebrate historic sports victories deserve a lot of leeway. When I was the commander of the West Village’s police precinct in 2011, New York state legalized gay marriage, and I let an ecstatic crowd block traffic and sidewalks, drink in the street and make a deafening amount of noise for hours, all in violation of the law. It was a momentous night in one of the world's epicenters of gay rights, a dream come true for so many people. Sports aren’t the same as human equality, but in the same way, the city needs to loosen the normal standards of disorderly conduct when New York’s beloved Knicks tee up to win the championship for the first time in most of our lives.

This doesn’t mean it should be a free-for-all, and it’s the job of policing to prevent that. New Year's Eve at Times Square, nearly all parades and countless political protests end without incident because they are well policed from the outset, [long before a tipping point takes hold](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-nypd-snowball-fight-police-arrest/), setting a standard that nearly everyone respects. Where the biggest crowds will form during a game isn’t a mystery, and the police have the prerogative of setting up pens, controlling access, regulating traffic, staying highly visible and dispersing crowds shortly after the game ends. Mobile field forces can respond to disorder throughout the city and swiftly make arrests before the violent energy of small groups becomes contagious. 

This point is critical, because what we saw after the last Knicks game had a classic hallmark of a riot: a group of people eager to use the cover of a big, emotional crowd to engage in violence and property crime. Then, other people, riled up but followers by nature, take the cue and join in only because they have an example to follow. When police come in fast and take the opportunists away in handcuffs, it chastens the crowd and shows followers what the boundaries are. In the way that going after the biggest bully in the playground keeps the wannabe bullies at bay, aggressively policing the first people who test the NYPD’s limits will keep the rest of the crowd on the right side of a raucous celebration.

Then there is the timeless New York City wisdom of knowing when to stay home. If a sea of drunken, screaming young men isn’t your thing, then many parts of the city will be off-limits on Saturday night. Basketball is one of our most accessible sports, cutting across race, class and geography in a profound way, so this type of forbearance is a small sacrifice for the greater civic moment. And if the track record of the city’s teams is any indication, it won’t become a habitual ask.

There is one critical thing to remember in all of this: Unlike the violence at a political protest, a night of sports mayhem doesn’t run the risk of going on day after day, or metastasizing over time. The violence of the sports fan isn’t the violence of the revolutionary. Nobody comes out the day after a team wins to riot again, and if they did, nobody else would get swept up and join them. This is a temporary disorder born of joy and catharsis, not a license to take it to the streets again tomorrow. So regardless of how the Knicks do, their worst-behaving fans are a time-limited problem.

Now free from the burden of policing New York City, I hope the Knicks win (but still not the Yankees). If they do, destructive opportunists will try to play their hand, and I hope they get summarily arrested. I hope the people caught up in the moment control themselves, sleep it off, wake up feeling vaguely embarrassed, and tell their grandchildren about it one day. I hope New York City police do what they often excel at: controlling a huge, historic event that consumes the city for a night.

I will be staying home.
### Borrow and Steal: The Art of Reinvention in Nantes
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nantes-tourism-culture-sophie-levy-interview/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:37:14.000Z
[Vital City](https://soundcloud.com/vital-city-604970448?ref=vitalcitynyc.org "Vital City") · [Borrow and Steal: The Art of Reinvention in Nantes](https://soundcloud.com/vital-city-604970448/borrow-and-steal-the-art-of?ref=vitalcitynyc.org "Borrow and Steal: The Art of Reinvention in Nantes")

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*This is the third installment of Borrow and Steal, our monthly interview series profiling evidence-backed urban policy ideas from around the world — and the practitioners who have translated them into reality.*

*Our interview today is with Sophie Lévy, the executive director of* [*Le Voyage à Nantes*](https://www.levoyageanantes.fr/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*, the City of Nantes’ official tourism body, which is responsible for promoting the city*’*s unique cultural scene.*

*In the 1980s, Nantes — with a metro area population of approximately 1 million — was a depressed post-industrial French city on the Loire River, facing nearly* [*a 20% unemployment rate*](https://www.theaou.org/resources/nantes-france?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*. Today, not only does it have one of the lowest regional unemployment rates in France, but some have called it* [*“Europe’s loopiest city,”*](https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/england/london-travel/nantes-the-loopiest-city-in-france-mqpr6k6zjh8?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *for the* [*surrealist open-air art*](https://www.wallpaper.com/art/nantes-cements-itself-as-the-epicentre-of-eccentricity-with-art-festival-le-voyage-a-nantes?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *that occupies its public spaces. Its annual summer arts festival,* [*Le Voyage à Nantes*](https://www.levoyageanantes.fr/le-voyage-en-ete/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*, draws* [*2 million visitors*](https://metropole.nantes.fr/actualites/2023/attractivite-tourisme/bilan-voyage-nantes-2023?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *from across Europe — which, relative to its population, is comparable in scale to the* [*Edinburgh Fringe*](https://www.edfringe.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*, widely considered one of the most extraordinary concentrations of cultural tourism in the world.*

*Nantes’ transformation is remarkable in part because it was achieved without an anchor cultural institution — defying the conventional wisdom of how most cities approach cultural spending. Specifically in the 2000s, dozens of cities tried to replicate what*’*s known as the* [*Bilbao Effect*](https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/creating-the-bilbao-effect?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*: drop a flagship museum (the* [*Guggenheim Bilbao*](https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*) by a starchitect (*[*Frank Gehry*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank%5FGehry?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*) into a struggling post-industrial neighborhood, and watch tourists flood in. The model has since* [*been criticized*](https://www.academia.edu/62938135/The%5FFading%5FAway%5Fof%5Fthe%5FBilbao%5FEffect%5FBilbao%5FDenver%5FHelsinki%5FAbu%5FDhabi?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *as a “Bilbao myth” in that it is expensive, top-down and hard to replicate.*

*In our interview, Sophie explains how Nantes-style planning — distributed, free, public-space programming — provides a more accessible and enduring alternative. She dives into the political history and the organizational machinery that sustains Nantes’ cultural scene, and its economic impacts. She also reflects on what American cities — where per-resident arts spending is a fraction of the French norm — might realistically borrow from the model.*

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![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/06/La_fac--ade_de_la_Cigale_-Le_Voyage_a--_Nantes_2014-_-14912325131-.jpg)

**Local businesses can opt to have their facade signage redesigned as part of the Le Voyage à Nantes programming.* Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra

**Cara Eckholm:** Sophie, thank you for joining. If you could start by taking us back to the 1980s — what was Nantes like then, and how did the city [decide to bet its future](https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/14/4/97?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on arts programming?

**Sophie Lévy:** I wasn’t in Nantes at the time, so I’m working from what I’ve heard. In the 1980s, the city faced a double economic crisis. The first was the collapse of shipbuilding — Nantes sits at the beginning of an estuary, and boat construction had been central to the city’s economy. The second was the decline of the textile industry in the south of the city. Both together drove unemployment sharply upward, and the city became known as *la belle endormie* — the beautiful sleeping city.

There are roughly three pillars that stabilize a city: political, economic and cultural. The economy was in bad shape. There was also a political shift. The previous right-wing mayor had a tendency to cut expenses and treated culture as a luxury. [Jean-Marc Ayrault](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marc%5FAyrault?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), who won the city in the late 1980s, came in with the conviction that culture could be a genuine tool to enliven — to create a form of renaissance for the city. That was a core part of his platform.

He’d met [Jean Blaise](https://luma.org/en/arles/artists-thinkers-a-z/jean-blaise?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a theater director, earlier on. Blaise had been invited to create a lively theatrical scene with a large portion of outdoor productions in one of Nantes's suburbs. That gave them the idea that bringing culture to people — through the streets and squares of the city — could signal that the city was awakening to something new. Ayrault won the town hall on that idea, and he began developing it through different forms across the 1990s, always adapting the form of the initiative to the period.

The first step was a Biennale built around performing arts — *art vivant* — bringing artists from partner cities like Buenos Aires into Nantes and staging performances over a month, often in abandoned factories or outdoor spaces, not traditional theaters. The second step was [Estuaire](https://www.levoyageanantes.fr/estuaire/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): commissioning monumental artworks along the Loire River between Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, physically embodying the historical, economic and geographic link between the two cities. They did that three times, every other year. The third step was [Le Lieu Unique](https://www.lelieuunique.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a multidisciplinary cultural center in the renovated LU biscuit factory: exhibitions, concerts, a bar, something like a smaller [Centre Pompidou](https://www.centrepompidou.fr/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or [Barbican](https://www.barbican.org.uk/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). And the fourth step, in 2012, was Le Voyage à Nantes itself.

**Cara Eckholm:** Just for context: Mayor Ayrault served from 1989 to 2012 before becoming President of France, right? A remarkably long run for seeing a vision through.

**Sophie Lévy:** Prime minister, not president.

**Cara Eckholm:** Right, prime minister. How did Nantes transform during that period beyond the cultural investments?

**Sophie Lévy:** The cultural story is the visible one, but there was a parallel economic strategy. Nantes already had strong universities and *grandes écoles* — graduate schools for engineers, doctors and other disciplines — so employers could find well-trained people there. The city also had improving transportation. The [TGV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) between Nantes and Paris opened in 1989, which helped, though many regions of France benefited from additional TGV connections, so that wasn’t unique to Nantes. What really distinguished it was the combination of geographic quality of life — great light, proximity to the sea and nature, easy access to the countryside — and the strength of the education system.

The city created an agency specifically to attract companies that didn't need to be in Paris — firms in health, pharmaceuticals, electronics and services that could function perfectly well elsewhere, as long as they could find educated graduates and lower rents for office space. Over time, a lot of headquarters for these service-sector companies relocated to Nantes.

Culture was part of what made that pitch work. The liveliness of the arts scene changed the city’s image, which helped attract the high-profile talent these companies needed to recruit. It became a virtuous cycle — economy, politics and culture reinforcing one another. Today, the average age of a Nantes resident is [around 35](https://ugeo.urbistat.com/AdminStat/en/fr/demografia/dati-sintesi/nantes/20069319/4?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which is young by French standards. You can have a full life — education, family, culture — without the hassle and cost of Paris.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/06/7712245598_fc4601f52a.jpg)

**A floating, faux, facade by Leandro Erlich erected in the Place du Bouffay.* Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra

**Cara Eckholm:** In the opening I mentioned the Bilbao Effect — the model of dropping an anchor cultural institution by a starchitect into a struggling post-industrial neighborhood. It worked for Bilbao, but there are [many other places where the effect did not pan out](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-12-21/frank-gehry-s-guggenheim-museum-bilbao-unleashed-a-wave-of-speculation?embedded-checkout=true&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Reflecting back on 30 years, how did Nantes think about the trade-off of investing into an anchor center relative to investing across the city?

**Sophie Lévy:** I wasn’t in those debates, but I can speak to what I’ve observed elsewhere. I lived in Lille and watched the [Louvre-Lens](https://www.louvrelens.fr/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) phenomenon develop. I also witnessed the [Centre Pompidou Metz](https://www.centrepompidou-metz.fr/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In both cases, you have a major cultural brand transplanted into a struggling post-industrial city. In Lens especially, it really does feel like a spaceship that has arrived from the sky onto a city with deep poverty and serious economic problems. It’s a beautiful initiative — a little bubble of what humanity can produce — but it will be a long time before it has a real impact on the rest of the city, because you have to build so much around it. You have schools to create, a population with low literacy — the Louvre can’t do it all.

Nantes took a different view. The assessment was: We have a castle and a Museum of Fine Arts. We have a base. Rather than import a big trademark, let’s invest in what’s already here — give the Museum of Fine Arts more budget to collect contemporary work, fully renovate the castle, build from the ground up. Jean-Marc Ayrault saw what the strengths already were, and decided to make those strengths visible to the rest of France and Europe rather than import something that might feel like a satellite landed from another world.

**Cara Eckholm:** When I was in Nantes, I confess I didn’t have time to visit the Museum of Fine Arts or do a formal tour of the castle. But what really struck me was how much art was woven into the experience of walking around the city. Can you talk through how the art is organized, and some of your favorite pieces?

**Sophie Lévy:** That's really the mission Le Voyage à Nantes was created to fulfill. The idea was that cultural institutions matter, but they should be complemented by art that’s visible in the city — reaching a broader audience more directly. Starting in 2012, every summer the festival installs 10 to 20 monumental works throughout the city, some temporary, some designed from the start to be permanent. Over the years, that has built up into what we call the [Green Line](https://www.levoyageanantes.fr/en/itineraries/walk-the-green-line/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a literal green line painted on the sidewalks that guides visitors from one work to the next. Some stops are heritage sites, like the castle or a historic church. Others are works commissioned by Le Voyage à Nantes. All of them are site-specific, made by living artists, created for Nantes rather than simply brought in.

The effect is almost surrealist — an element of surprise at every corner, art completely blended into the urban experience. What I often say is that Nantes didn’t have an Eiffel Tower, and that turned out to be its great advantage. Because there was no dominant symbol to work around, everything remained possible. Cities like Dijon have extraordinary medieval architecture, centuries of history — but that legacy leaves less room for invention and for new artists. When you have a great past, it's hard to get people interested in the present.

Nantes had a castle, but not the most impressive one along the Loire Valley. It had a Museum of Fine Arts, but an average one by French standards. It didn’t have a signature dish. Depending on who you asked, it was a sea city or a country city, a left city or a right city — sometimes considered religious, sometimes secular. Everything was true, and nothing was definitive. That floating identity, which once seemed like a weakness, turned out to be a canvas.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/06/Nantes_-_European_Thousand-Arms_Classical_Sculpture_-_20230716.jpg)

**European Thousand-Arms Classical Sculpture, a 46 foot by 16 foot installation, on one of Nantes’ main shopping streets.* Photo by Romain D C 

**Cara Eckholm:** What is the identity today, after 30 years of deliberately constructing one?

**Sophie Lévy:** The Ayrault era was really about repair. Nantes had accumulated a lot of trauma. In the 1920s, portions of the river running through the city were filled in — what had once been a city of waterways, almost like Venice, lost that character. Then in 1943, a large portion was destroyed by Allied bombing — perhaps half or two-thirds of the city. Then the economic crises. And there’s also the history of the slave trade: Nantes was one of the principal French ports for the [Atlantic slave trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History%5Fof%5FNantes?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#Slave%5Ftrade) in the 18th century, and the fortune of Nantes was partly built on that. Ayrault decided that the past had to be confronted directly — that you could use all of it, not to forget but to turn yourself toward the present. He wanted to repair the scars without erasing them.

The current mayor, [Johanna Rolland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanna%5FRolland?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — who was born in 1979, making her one of the youngest major-city mayors in France — has shifted the frame. Her era is about preparation rather than repair: preparing Nantes for the ecological transition, for the present century. Her phrase is *la ville du vivant et des imaginaires* — the city of the living and of the imaginations.

And when you look at Nantes's cultural history, that surrealist thread is real. [Jules Verne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules%5FVerne?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was from Nantes. [Jacques Demy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques%5FDemy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was from Nantes. The poet [Julien Gracq ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien%5FGracq?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)was associated with the city. The great photographer [Claude Cahun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude%5FCahun?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). There’s a long-running science fiction literature festival. There has always been this passion for imagination — for the power of the human mind to reinvent the world. In 2029, Nantes is opening a new museum called *La Cité des Imaginaires* — the City of the Imaginations — which will bring together the Jules Verne archives and explore the intersection of art and imaginative thinking.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/06/14713888587_f8d9496ded-1.jpg)

**Surrealist creatures by Claude Ponti laze around in the Jardin Des Plantes.* Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra

**Cara Eckholm:** It’s funny that a mayor born in ‘79 is considered young — we have a 34-year-old mayor in New York. But I definitely saw the Surrealism when I was walking through the city. Can you explain what Le Voyage à Nantes actually is as an organization?

**Sophie Lévy:** It's a large and complex public entity — I’m still mapping it since I arrived, because it's many different things that were brought together. The [Château des Ducs de Bretagne](https://www.chateaunantes.fr/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — the castle which is also a history museum — is managed by Le Voyage à Nantes. [Les Machines de l'Île](https://www.lesmachines-nantes.fr/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is managed by Le Voyage à Nantes. That’s the project you may have heard of: a theater company that decided to build enormous mechanical animals. The centerpiece is a giant elephant, made of steel, wood, and leather, that walks through the city and can carry riders inside it. Its trunk can spray water. There are also monkeys, an ant, and many others installations — all interactive, all extraordinary as both sculpture and engineering. They're based on the Île de Nantes, the island where shipbuilding once happened, which is itself one of the great urban renewal stories of the transformation.

Then there’s the city’s tourism office, which sits within Le Voyage à Nantes. And there’s the summer arts festival itself — the annual installation of new works across the city. We’ve also added a winter event, the *Voyage en Hiver*, in which artists are commissioned to animate the city during the Christmas season. That actually grew from a request by downtown shopkeepers, who had seen the summer programming drive foot traffic and asked us for something at Christmas to increase their seasonal draw. So it means they understand the impact, even if it’s hard to measure precisely.

**Cara Eckholm:** Let's talk about tourism. Nantes essentially had [no leisure tourism industry before 2000](https://www.theaou.org/resources/nantes-france?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). What do the numbers look like today?

**Sophie Lévy:** Overnight stays in the city grew by roughly 42% between 2012 and 2019\. Then COVID interrupted that, and we’ve since recovered to 2019 levels. Business travel — what the French call *tourisme d*’*affaires* — has always existed in Nantes, but leisure tourism is recent. All of the programming has had a significant impact, not just on visitor numbers but on the city’s overall image abroad. The City now has approximately [3.5M overnight stays. ](https://metropole.nantes.fr/ma-ville-ma-metropole/competences/competence-tourisme?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

This year we launched an observatory of tourism to start measuring this more rigorously. Three legs: We’ll track attendance and visitor origins using mobile data; we've implemented a booking plugin across many metropolitan hotels so we can see trends in real time; and we’re establishing a partnership with one of the major banks to analyze credit card spending, which will let us understand how much day-trippers and overnight visitors actually spend.

**Cara Eckholm:** What does the budget of Le Voyage à Nantes look like, and what does the city see in return?

**Sophie Lévy:** The annual budget across all the elements I’ve described is around €36 million. Two-thirds come from public funding. One-third comes from earned revenue — primarily ticket sales from the castle, Les Machines and some cruise experiences we manage. But the economic impact extends well beyond what comes back to us directly. Hotels, restaurants, retail — that flows through the broader economy, not back to the organization. The fact that downtown merchants came to Le Voyage à Nantes asking for a winter event tells you they understand that the programming is driving their revenues, even when it’s hard to quantify.

**Cara Eckholm:** I did some back of the envelope math: Nantes spends [roughly 6%](https://metropole.nantes.fr/ma-ville-ma-metropole/nantes-et-ses-11-quartiers/la-ville-de-nantes-comment-ca-marche/les-finances-de-la-ville-de-nantes/budget-2024-de-la-ville-de-nantes?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of its municipal budget on culture — about €116 per resident, which is an extremely normal number in France, but an eye-watering number for cities in the US. American cities typically spend a tiny fraction of that per resident, rarely breaking 0.5% of the budget. In New York we spend roughly $36 per resident, which is considered incredibly generous, or [0.3% of the city budget](https://www.ibo.nyc.gov/content/publications/2025-november-painting-the-towns-budget?ref=hyperallergic.com). (It’s admittedly a bit hard to compare apples-to-apples as a percentage basis, as French municipal budgets don’t include education spending.) 

I am wondering: what is the cultural money actually spent on, and how do you muster the political will to sustain a relatively high level of spending across different administrations?

**Sophie Lévy:** I don't have the detailed line-item breakdown, but the spending covers institutions — orchestras, an opera, three or four museums — as well as events like [La Folle Journée](https://www.follejournee.fr/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a week-long classical music festival, and the [Festival des Bords de l'Erdre](https://www.festival-bords-erdre.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), an outdoor jazz festival. Cumulatively, that all adds up.

As for the political will: The city has seen enough evidence of the multiple returns — economic, social, and in terms of pure quality of life — to sustain the commitment across changes in administration. In France, at least from my experience, culture is understood as a powerful source of social cohesion. People's sense of attachment to a city, their desire to live there together, is inseparable from what they can experience culturally. That calculus is different from the American model, where the funding of the arts works in a completely different way.
### Making the Shade
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/adam-lubinsky-interview/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:42.000Z
---

*Trees are infrastructure. They cool streets during heat waves, soak up stormwater, clean the air and, as most New Yorkers know, make neighborhoods better places to live. But that infrastructure is unevenly distributed: economically underprivileged areas have roughly 19% canopy coverage, while wealthier areas reach 26%. In this episode of "After Hours with Jamie Rubin," Jamie talks with Adam Lubinsky, a partner at WXY architecture + urban design and one of the architects of New York's first-ever Urban Forest Plan, about how the city intends to grow its canopy from about 23% to 30% by 2040 — by preserving the trees it has, planting many more in the right places and turning New Yorkers into stewards of the 7 million trees already here. As always, you can listen to this episode on* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trees-nyc-s-living-infrastructure/id1794619189?i=1000771969624&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *or* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Eu36lCwk3MjBHJMROGbjc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*

---

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

**Jamie:** When most New Yorkers think about the city's infrastructure, they think about subways, roads, bridges, maybe the sewer system. They almost surely don't think about the trees that surround them. But trees shape life in New York City in ways that are very easy to overlook. They're living, breathing infrastructure that cools the city during heat waves, improves air quality, absorbs stormwater, and of course makes streets more pleasant to walk down and neighborhoods nicer to live in — unless you happen to live near one of those horrible ginkgo trees.

**Jamie:** In April, New York City released its first-ever Urban Forest Plan, a roadmap to increase tree canopy across the five boroughs from around 23% of the city's acreage today to 30% by 2040\. While that may not sound like a big shift, if you take into account how geographically enormous the city is, it's a very ambitious goal. I sat down with Adam Lubinsky, a partner at WXY Studio, who worked, along with many others, to bring this plan to life. We talked about how the city can get to 30% tree coverage by preserving the current canopy, planting still more trees, and engaging New Yorkers as stewards of the existing urban forest.

**Jamie:** The conversation, like everything else in New York City, isn't just about the trees. It turned out to be a lot about climate adaptation, environmental justice, and public health — and above all, it's about who this city really exists for. It's about who gets shade, who doesn't, and what kind of city we're building for the people who are going to live here for the decades to come.

**Jamie:** Adam, thank you for being here.

**Adam:** Great to be here.

**Jamie:** Before we get into the project you worked on, tell me briefly what it is that you do.

**Adam:** I'm a principal at a firm called WXY, based here in New York City.

**Jamie:** If I were a young person looking for a job and my last name started with a Z, I would come straight to your place — I figure I'd have a clear shot to the top. They need a Z. So, WXY — what kind of firm is it?

**Adam:** We're an architecture, planning, and urban design firm focused on not just buildings or plans, but really the public life of New York City. We spend a lot of time working with city agencies and community-based organizations on what it takes to make New York a dynamic, equitable, and healthy city. The Urban Forest Plan is exactly the kind of project we love to dig into — thinking about city systems, what it takes to change things on the ground, and how to put that into action.

**Jamie:** What's your favorite project you've worked on?

**Adam:** We just helped the city launch its program to set up ADUs — accessory dwelling units — in people's backyards. It's been really fascinating to think through not just how to show people what they can do with their backyard space, but how to make sure they understand the zoning, how to budget for it, where it's permitted. We've also been working on affordable housing in the Bronx — a project called The Peninsula, which is being built on the site of the old Spofford Juvenile Detention Center. That's going to become 800 units of affordable housing, plus workspace and open space.

**Jamie:** Excellent. So let's turn to your most recent project: the Urban Forest Plan. How did it come to be?

**Adam:** Its origins go back to 2023, when the city released its PlaNYC update — the periodic citywide climate plan. In that plan, the city set out an ambition to reach 30% forest canopy across all five boroughs. That was backed up by Local Law 148, which the City Council passed, mandating that an urban forest plan be produced every 10 years laying out how to get there. So we produced the inaugural Urban Forest Plan for New York City.

**Jamie:** And when was the final report released?

**Adam:** It was released during Earth Week — late April of this year.

**Jamie:** And where would someone find it, if they wanted to read it — as I have?

**Adam:** It's on the city's website, under the Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice.

**Jamie:** We'll post a link in our show notes. Now, people my age remember Bette Midler and the Bloomberg administration's MillionTreesNYC campaign. This plan is something quite different — more organized, coordinated, strategic, goal-oriented. What were the goals beyond city beautification?

**Adam:** MillionTreesNYC was a huge and important effort. But one of the clear realizations coming out of it was that it wasn't just about putting new trees in the ground — it required a much more in-depth strategy. At the highest level, our goals were threefold: preserving the tree canopy we already have, planting significantly more trees and thinking carefully about where and how, and stewarding the urban forest by pulling in people at every level — education, community engagement, care over the full life of a tree.

**Jamie:** We're at about 23% covered now, is that right?

**Adam:** We're at 23.4%, as of 2021, based on LiDAR data — planes that flew over the city and produced laser mapping of the entire canopy. Our goal is to reach 30% by 2040.

**Jamie:** Do you know how many acres the city covers in total?

**Adam:** We have about 45,000 acres of urban forest right now. Multiply that by just over four and you get the total acreage of New York City.

**Jamie:** How much of that 45,000 acres is in actual parks versus the broader urban landscape?

**Adam:** Parks manages almost 50% of our urban canopy *\[editor's note: Lubinsky later corrected himself; the Parks Department actually manages 54% of the city's urban canopy\]* — just over half of that is within parks themselves, and just under half is on streets and other areas that Parks is responsible for. Parks is by far the biggest player in all of this.

**Jamie:** So if I walk across the Great Lawn in Central Park — does that count as canopy?

**Adam:** No. Canopy refers specifically to the area covered from above by trees. The Great Lawn is green space, but it's not canopy. That's not to devalue it — but trees bring a whole different set of benefits.

**Jamie:** And those benefits go well beyond what most people think about. Cooling is one that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention — until recently, when you start seeing those brutal heat waves. We have literal shade deserts in this city.

**Adam:** Absolutely. Carbon storage is a huge one. Stormwater filtration — trees absorb runoff and keep pollutants out of our waterways. Biodiversity, especially for pollinators. And then there are the less obvious ones: measurable reductions in stress, which in turn have real health benefits — reduced rates of cardiac disease, stroke, asthma, and improvements in physical fitness. The full picture of what we get from urban canopy is really remarkable.

**Jamie:** And where else would the raccoons live?

**Adam:** Exactly. I see them quite a bit, actually.

**Jamie:** The only thing scarier to me than the raccoons are the beavers — but that's a different podcast. One more thing on the numbers: you were saying two-thirds of the canopy is on public property and one-third on private?

**Adam:** That's right. And one of the things the plan tries to do is reach all the different stakeholders and property owners responsible for different parts of the urban forest — not just Parks, but NYCHA, state and federal landholders, private campuses, cemeteries, and the backyards and front yards of one- and two-family homes.

**Jamie:** How do you go about incentivizing the private sector? And what do you do about other government agencies that have no particular expertise in canopy management and no dedicated funding for it? My obligatory example is NYCHA — a ton of green space, amazing that it's stayed green at all.

**Adam:** NYCHA has about 1,000 acres of canopy and no full-time staff dedicated to their trees. There are a lot of volunteer friends groups doing stewarding work, which is valuable. But one of the plan's recommendations is to explore having Parks take on responsibility for the care of canopy on NYCHA campuses. We went through the data very carefully — I don't think anyone has mapped it this precisely before — and divided the canopy by ownership type, looking at what's on NYCHA, what's federal or state, what's on private campuses and cemeteries, what's in backyards. That granularity lets us target recommendations to the right stakeholders. For some parcels the answer is a transfer to Parks. For private owners, it starts with guidance — helping people understand that the tree they think they need to take down for safety reasons might actually be manageable with some expert advice.

**Jamie:** You can certainly incentivize ground-up developers to plant. But what about developers who encounter existing trees on a site they've already been permitted to build on?

**Adam:** That's the harder question. New York doesn't have what several other cities have — tree protection ordinances. Washington, D.C., for example, has long-standing statutes protecting trees. Figuring out how to put something like that in place here is complicated given the current pressure on housing supply. The plan does include a recommendation to work through what that could look like — whether it's a contribution to a dedicated tree fund, a replanting requirement, or something else. It's on the table.

**Jamie:** So as of now, a developer who has a building permit doesn't need any additional permission to remove trees on the site?

**Adam:** That's right. That's one of the complexities. We also look at how HPD can play a role, particularly around affordable housing development. There are a number of areas where the plan says: we need to take a deeper look.

**Jamie:** Let's talk about the demographics of the canopy. Where is it distributed — and where isn't it?

**Adam:** The citywide average is 23.4%. Environmental justice areas are at 19%. Non-EJ areas are at 26%. Roughly 40% of the city's land area falls into environmental justice categories, so you can see clearly that canopy is less abundant where it's most needed. The most direct path to improving that is through the public realm — streets, sidewalks, parks. At the borough level, Brooklyn used to have the least canopy in the city. Over the last 20 years it's essentially pulled even with Queens, both sitting just over 19%. And if you look by property type, the only category where canopy has actually been declining is one- and two-family homes.

**Jamie:** Any intuition about why?

**Adam:** We don't have complete data on that. But some of it is concern about trees falling on homes — climate change is affecting soil conditions and storm intensity in ways that make people feel more exposed. It's a range of factors. But increasing canopy on those properties is a significant opportunity.

**Jamie:** You'd think homeowners who are solely responsible for their own grounds would feel more stewardship instinct. But I guess if they decide the tree has to come down, there's nobody stopping them.

**Adam:** I think it largely comes down to a set of concerns about trees. And it's worth noting that in places like Staten Island, one- and two-family neighborhoods still have substantial coverage. It's really about where canopy is expanding versus contracting, and making sure we're addressing both.

**Jamie:** I can't let you go without asking about specific tree species. The trees in my neighborhood with the little pods that fall and smell absolutely terrible — those are ginkgos, right?

**Adam:** Yes, that would be the ginkgo.

**Jamie:** Why are they here, and how do we replace them?

**Adam:** I'm not the best person to make the case against the ginkgo — I actually have what I believe is one of the tallest ginkgo trees in New York City right behind my house. I'd estimate it at 70 to 80 feet. But I will say the city is actively looking at diversifying the tree palette, including toward species with broader canopy coverage. The most common tree in New York's parks and on its streets right now is the London plane tree. A couple of previously common species are no longer being planted at all — Norway maples and Callery pears are both out, partly due to climate concerns. There's a real repositioning underway in how we think about street trees and park trees, to make sure they're hardy enough for a changing climate, native where possible, and optimized for canopy and biodiversity.

**Jamie:** I'm not afraid to say I hate the ginkgo tree. The ginkgo fan club can send me all the hate mail they want. What city should we be aspiring to in terms of canopy percentage?

**Adam:** It's a great question. I lived in London for a while, and you'd think of it as a green city — but London is actually at 21% canopy, below us. So we're already ahead of London. I think one way to frame the aspiration is getting to one tree per person. We have about seven million trees right now. Getting our count up so every New Yorker can claim a tree — that would be something.

**Jamie:** We tend to think of this as a climate problem, an environmental problem, an aesthetic problem. But it's a government problem first and foremost. None of this happens if the city doesn't decide to play a role it largely hasn't played before, outside of Parks.

**Adam:** Making sure we have the right leadership structure in place is critical. The Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice will be the agency lead. And every other city agency will have a designated canopy steward — someone who may have another primary role, but who is clearly responsible for trees within their agency. That kind of coordination is essential to actually pulling this off. There are a lot of different nuts we're trying to crack. I'm trying to use as many tree metaphors as possible.

**Jamie:** Ginkgo nuts.

**Adam:** Getting into the weeds.

**Jamie:** It's a great report. The work is spectacular, and I know it took a year and a half. The nice thing is that it was started under Mayor Adams and announced under Mayor Mamdani — and the new administration is clearly taking it seriously. Adam, thank you for being here. We'll look forward to hearing how it goes.

**Adam:** Great to be here. Really enjoyed it. Thank you.

**Jamie:** Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with another episode of After Hours with Jamie Rubin.
### Economic Growth vs. Economic Justice: A False Choice
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-economic-development-mamdani-administration/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:34:52.000Z
Moments after capping off his victory, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani [promised](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/05/zohran-mamdani-victory-speech-transcript?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to enact “the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost-of-living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorello La Guardia.” His vision resonated deeply with millions of New Yorkers, who have high expectations for what he can achieve in office.

How he will realize these goals, however, remains an open question, particularly as it relates to an overarching economic development strategy. Many in the mayor’s base find growth itself — making the city more hospitable to businesses so they can settle and grow here — problematic or antithetical to delivering economic justice. That’s a false view, but it is also true that a commitment to growth does not guarantee widespread prosperity. Critical to understanding what can be accomplished in New York is acknowledging the limitations of city government, which has limited control over the macroeconomy, federal and state policy and private-sector decision-making. 

The two of us understand this well. We developed and implemented an economic strategy for another ambitious, progressive mayor: Bill de Blasio, whom Mamdani has [described](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/nyregion/zohran-mamdani-interview.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as the best mayor of his lifetime because he “showcased the ability of city government to meet the needs of New Yorkers.”

Those needs are extensive and expensive, including providing high-quality education and childcare; affordable mass transit; a healthy environment; and recreational, cultural and green spaces that make living here joyful and desirable. Woven through those objectives is Mamdani’s core promise: to deliver an economy that works for all New Yorkers and can fund robust social services.

That was also the de Blasio promise. Our strategy flowed from the belief that being pro-growth is a prerequisite to delivering on bold agendas and supporting equitable outcomes. It doesn’t just create jobs and expand the tax base, it avoids a self-reinforcing downward spiral in which residents leave New York, leading to declining tax revenue, eroding social services and confidence — causing still more population decline. New Yorkers from the 1970s remember this well.

Mamdani should develop an economic platform rooted in three pillars: investing in infrastructure, incentivizing private sector investment and fostering talent pipelines to fuel high-growth industries. He should thread equity throughout, carefully weighing impacts to ensure that opportunity, resources and wealth are shared across communities and racial and gender lines. By doing this, he can demonstrate that economic growth is not at odds with economic justice. Just as it’s true that a key component of how to bring down the cost of housing is to produce more of it, the way to make prosperity more widely accessible is to double down on New York’s dynamism.

That is the playbook for New York to remain a thriving economic capital — and to achieve an agenda [many](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/zohran-mamdanis-real-world-constraints/) consider unrealistic.

### 1) Investing in infrastructure

Investing in infrastructure is both a core government responsibility and a powerful economic accelerant. When the City builds and supports physical infrastructure, private capital follows with new jobs, new vertical development and an expanded tax base. Two examples from our experience show how this works in practice: NYC Ferry and Long Island City.

**NYC Ferry**

The idea behind the NYC Ferry was simple: serve as a connective tissue across our waterfronts, providing commuters in transit-starved neighborhoods with new public transportation and helping to unlock the promise of the City’s transforming waterfronts.

We built the Ferry system from the ground up using only City financial and agency resources (along with rider fares). Nearly a decade in, it is far exceeding expectations. The network now spans 70 nautical miles with 25 landings and served a record [7.4 million passengers](https://edc.nyc/press-release/nyc-ferry-celebrates-50-millionth-rider?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) last year — far [above](about:blank) pre-COVID levels. The system also has the [lowest](https://edc.nyc/press-release/nyc-ferry-celebrates-50-millionth-rider?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) subsidy-per-rider of any comparable municipal ferry operation.

That alone is worth cheering, but the lesson is broader than just transit: The City’s investment laid the foundation for more dynamic neighborhoods. As it moved toward launch, residential construction [increased by 6%](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160603/OPINION/160539978/new-york-city-s-ferry-expansion-heralds-waterfront-boom/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) within a quarter mile of ferry slips, and commercial construction increased by 3% — creating jobs and economic activity in waterfront neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods are still seeing benefits, exemplified by how [healthcare workers at hospitals on the Upper East Side](https://www.6sqft.com/new-commute-new-demand-nyc-ferry-fuels-housing-boom-on-the-waterfront/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) started moving to Astoria to find more space and affordability — and enjoy a five-minute commute to East 90th St.

**Long Island City**

Investment in horizontal “hard” infrastructure also enables vertical growth. Consider Long Island City, where aging infrastructure was devised to support an industrial district that had shrunk for decades. It was our job to revitalize that infrastructure to lay the foundation for a modern mixed-use community.

The headline infrastructure investment was the de Blasio administration’s [$99 million](https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/hunters-point-south-park/pressrelease/21586?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) commitment to the second phase of Hunter’s Point South’s waterfront park — concurrent with leveraging City-owned property for 5,000 units of new housing, 3,000 of which are permanently affordable. The 11-acre park is now [unrecognizable](https://edc.nyc/project/hunters-point-south?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from what it once was, with newly created wetlands, green space and public amenities like pedestrian and bike pathways, playgrounds, picnic areas and permanent art installations by local artists.

Less sexy, but arguably more important, was our $180 million Long Island City Investment Strategy, which funded new sewers and water mains, street reconstruction and other improvements to support the neighborhood’s revitalization. The private sector took notice, making major investments to [create millions of square feet](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tishman-speyer-moving-ahead-with-construction-of-11-million-square-foot-office-and-retail-project-in-long-island-city-300296431.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of new office and retail space, bringing thousands of permanent jobs to the area. 

Progress continues. A large swath of Long Island City was recently rezoned, further advancing its transformation into a thriving mixed-use hub and deepening the economic growth pattern. And, of course, Hunter’s Point South is getting a [new and improved ferry slip](https://edc.nyc/project/hunters-point-south-ferry-landing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

With the constraints on the capital budget and the focus the Mayor is rightly putting on supporting an ambitious Housing Plan, it is imperative that the Administration also make longer-term, strategic investments in hard infrastructure. Although focusing on “state of good repair” is necessary to assure the City literally functions, we need to think and act ambitiously in order to grow the economy.

### 2) Catalyzing private sector activity

New York’s dynamic economy relies in part on its concentration of Fortune 500 headquarters and a thriving start-up ecosystem. 

Startups and large corporations serve as a magnet for sustained population growth and help provide reliable customers for restaurants, theaters and small businesses. Being pro-business does not require handouts to large companies. But it does often require using the tools of government to facilitate economic activity.

Most businesses need a physical footprint. By keeping them in New York, we can help maintain a local spirit of innovation and create a durable economy over the long-term. Two examples from our experience — the East Midtown rezoning and the revitalization of the Brooklyn Navy Yard — demonstrate the benefits to the City from being proactively “pro-business.”

**270 Park Avenue**

Consider 270 Park Avenue, JP Morgan Chase’s soaring new tower above Grand Central Terminal. For some, it may seem a monument to wealth, or the sort of development activity City Hall should eschew. Untrue. 

This decades-long commitment from one of the nation’s top employers created a sustainable, healthy work environment for [14,000 New Yorkers](https://www.jpmorganchase.com/newsroom/press-releases/2022/jpmorgan-chase-unveils-plans-for-new-global-headquarters-building-in-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across the income spectrum and generated 8,000 jobs for members of 40 labor unions during construction. This single building is projected to generate [$74.6 million](https://commercialobserver.com/2026/01/new-assessment-roll-means-higher-taxes-are-on-the-way/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in FY26 taxes to the City of New York — the [equivalent](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2025/06/30/2915/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the City’s total support for cultural organizations this year, demonstrating that even one individual project can have a significant impact on the City’s bottom line. At scale, this sort of activity helps the City grow and expand its tax roll, providing funding necessary to deliver the services New Yorkers expect. 

It did not happen by accident or by offering Chase any financial incentives. 270 Park was the first major project approved under the [2017 East Midtown rezoning](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/nyregion/new-york-city-council-approves-rezoning-plan-for-midtown-manhattan.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), employing the City’s land-use powers to grow and modernize its largest business district. And because our agenda was focused on assuring that the growth generated by new development activity did not just inure to the private sector, the new zoning was structured to make sure there were demonstrable improvements made to the public realm, including support for struggling landmarks. In developing 270 Park Avenue, JP Morgan contributed [$42 million](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/real-estate/city-council-approves-jpmorgan-chase-midtown-east-tower/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to a public improvement fund, created an outdoor public plaza and bought air rights from St. Bartholomew’s, among others. 

270 Park is one example, but New York is [filled](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160505/REAL%5FESTATE/160509908/mayor-bill-de-blasio-de-blasio-welcomes-google-to-pier-57/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with [similar](https://www.kpf.com/story/one-vanderbilt?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) success stories. 

**Brooklyn Navy Yard**

The City itself owns real estate assets and has a significant role to play in providing physical space for businesses. The Brooklyn Navy Yard — a long-underutilized, environmentally compromised parcel of City-owned land — is a textbook example of how New York can use its assets and capital to drive growth, create jobs and foster an equitable educational environment.

Multiple administrations made capital investments in the redevelopment of the Navy Yard despite pressure to sell parts of the Yard, or re-zone for residential use. Maintaining that commitment to use the Yard to support businesses growing, the de Blasio administration invested [$140 million](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20141117/REAL%5FESTATE/141119861/city-to-invest-140m-in-brooklyn-navy-yard/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) into [Building 77](https://bklyner.com/opening-of-building-77-brings-new-manufacturing-space-to-brooklyn-navy-yard/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), creating a new “affordable” tech and manufacturing hub for New Yorkers.

Today, more than 13,000 employees across 550 businesses and 17 industries [work at the Navy Yard](https://www.brooklynnavyyard.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/BNY%5FFY-25-BNYDC-Impact-Report%5FDigital%5FV8.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), earning an average hourly wage of $39 — or $81,000 annualized. Nearly half (45%) of these ventures are Minority- and Women-Owned Business Enterprises. And, through the [Brooklyn STEAM Center](https://www.bkreader.com/policy-government/brooklyn-steam-center-expands-with-six-new-career-pathways-for-high-school-students-11407360?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), high school students have earned 2,200 industry certifications, completed 1,400 college credits and received more than $1.4 million in paid internships.

This collective investment [allowed companies](https://www.brooklynnavyyard.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/BNY%5FFY-25-BNYDC-Impact-Report%5FDigital%5FV8.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) like 10xBeta to evolve from a small, prototyping studio into a nationally recognized biomedical company that produced portable ventilators during COVID and is now delivering mobile, hospital-level care in rural areas.

### 3) Fostering a talent pipeline

The City also plays a critical role in fostering talent pipelines for emerging industries and high-growth fields. During de Blasio’s two terms, we prioritized the tech sector, as we concurrently heard from private-sector leaders that they needed more tech talent and from educational institutions that they lacked the resources to train it.

In practice, this took several forms. We helped lay the groundwork for more robust tech education opportunities at our public universities so that students of all backgrounds had the skills to break into the industry more broadly and made strategic targeted investments into the tech-heavy life sciences industry.

**Leveraging Higher Education to Promote Job Growth**

After convening CUNY presidents and provosts, we [launched a $20 million CUNY 2x Tech program](https://www.cs.csi.cuny.edu/cuny2x.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to help build the capacity of their Computer Science departments. As one campus-level program manager told the [Center for an Urban Future](https://nycfuture.org/research/doubling-down-on-cuny-2x-tech?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the program “really elevated the type of jobs graduates are getting…our graduates are getting positions in places like Amazon, Google and some of the big banks and insurance companies.” Another [called](https://nycfuture.org/research/doubling-down-on-cuny-2x-tech?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) it “the best thing to ever happen to that department, and I’ve been there for 30 years.”

We also fostered the [next generation](https://edc.nyc/program/cyber-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of cybersecurity professionals, recognizing that the nascent industry should not be dominated by other cities when its largest and most important customers are based here. Through [CyberNYC](https://edc.nyc/program/cyber-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), we paired New Yorkers with paid internships, created a bootcamp to upskill workers looking to break into cybersecurity and launched a Master’s program with the City College of New York that takes just three semesters and costs less than $20,000.

This has contributed to a vibrant and thriving sector overall, with [more than](https://edc.nyc/ai-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 25,000 tech-enabled startups in New York and [a 146% increase](https://nycfuture.org/research/doubling-down-on-cuny-2x-tech?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in tech jobs from 2010 to 2022.

**LifeSciNY**

Leveraging the City’s network of world-class academic and healthcare institutions, we made a [$1.1 billion public investment](https://lifesci.nyc/about-lifesci-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#why) into the life sciences industry designed to spur research, support a talent pipeline via CUNY and other local universities and create the specialized physical spaces the sector needed to grow.

This investment paid off. New York’s life sciences industry now encompasses approximately 20,000 jobs across 500 R&D stage companies and 3.5 million square feet of space. This includes advanced facilities like [CZ Biohub New York](https://biohub.org/news/investigators-immune-system-research-improve-human-health/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the [Joint Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine](https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2022/rensselaer-polytechnic-institute-and-the-icahn-school-of-medicine-at-mount-sinai-announce-a-joint-center-for-engineering-and-precision-medicine-in-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by Mount Sinai and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and [Lab of the Future](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/deerfield-management-announces-25m-grant-from-new-york-state-and-empire-state-development-to-build-a-lab-of-the-future-at-healthcare-innovation-campus-cure-301784600.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by Deerfield, where emerging technologies are applied to health outcomes.

Students are also benefiting. Over 220 companies have participated in the program’s internship program, benefiting 950 interns – with [nearly half](https://lifesci.nyc/internship?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) leveraging that opportunity into a longer internship or full-time role. Today, New York has one of the [largest life sciences economies](https://lifesci.nyc/about-lifesci-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#talent) in the United States.

---

This is not to say that we got everything right. Mayor Mamdani should evaluate and improve upon our record. That said, the core principles guiding our economic development strategy remain sound, and as the data shows, contributed to a growing economy with equitable results. While there are many factors, our policies and investments contributed to higher wages for workers through an increased minimum wage alongside record job growth, a City GDP that grew faster than national averages and a poverty rate that declined 12.7% from 2013-2019 and lifted 521,000 people out of poverty. These economic successes resulted in Moody’s upgrading our general obligation bonds to its highest-ever rating of Aa1 in 2019, specifically citing the strength and diversification of the economy as a key factor in the upgrade. 

In other words, growth and being “pro-business” can be leveraged in support of progressive values – and despite the rhetoric of how hostile Mamdani is to big corporations, there is evidence he understands this. He flew to D.C. to [pitch](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/nyregion/sunnyside-yard-mamdani-trump.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) President Trump on a bold, ambitious plan to create a new affordable mixed-use neighborhood over Sunnyside Yards, potentially activating a plan we oversaw. It is expensive and complex and will require partnering with large private-sector companies. But the concept is exactly right: make long-term, large-scale public investments in infrastructure to create and catalyze new mixed-income housing, while providing educational, employment, commercial, recreational and transportation opportunities for New Yorkers today and tomorrow. 

The good news for Mayor Mamdani? Developing Sunnyside Yards will only work if the City plays an active, leading role. And there is a long body of evidence to suggest that when New York City takes the reins, growth follows – with benefits not just for titans of industry, but for every resident who calls our great city home.
### Before You Surcharge the Penthouse, Fix the Foundation
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-pied-a-terre-surchage-property-tax/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:34:53.000Z
After Mayor Zohran Mamdani's first-choice new tax on the wealthy failed to gain traction in Albany, the Legislature and Governor Kathy Hochul agreed to a different approach — a new tax aimed at homes, co-ops and condos valued at or above $1 million when owners have a separate primary residence outside of New York City. Sold as a way to make absentee billionaires pay their share, the pied-à-terre surcharge passed as part of this year's budget and takes effect July 1\. The politics are easy: who could object to asking the owner of a $20 million apartment who doesn't actually live there to pay about $200,000 a year in surcharge? (As you'll see, the math is more complicated than that — but the politics is what got the law passed.) The policy is harder. Because the new tax sits on top of a property tax system that almost everyone, across decades and administrations, agrees is inaccurate and unfair, it will not land cleanly where it is aimed. To see why, you have to understand a little about how the city values property in the first place.

### A quick primer

Property taxes on homes, apartment buildings, commercial properties and more are the single biggest source of revenue for the City of New York, generating about $38 billion annually. Every year, the city’s Department of Finance estimates the market value of more than a million properties, and property tax bills flow from those estimates. 

Houses — the one-, two-, and three-family homes the city calls Class 1 — are valued by looking at what comparable homes sell for. That is roughly how most people imagine property valuation and taxation is supposed to work.

Co-ops and condos, which make up just over 30% of the city’s housing stock, are different. By state law, the city may not value them by their sale prices. Instead, it values them by the income a comparable rental building would generate — the “income approach.” This is not a loophole or a mistake; it is the method state law requires, and it is a legitimate way to measure a building’s economic value as housing rather than as a speculative asset. But it produces values far below what these apartments actually sell for. 

A condominium that would fetch $18 million on the market may carry a Finance value closer to $3 million. Multiply that across the luxury market and you get the central oddity the new tax had to work around: many of the very second homes the tax means to reach are, on the city’s books, worth a small fraction of their sale price.

Real Property Tax Law § 581, enacted in the early 1980s as part of a state effort to encourage homeownership in a city that mostly rented, requires the income approach precisely so that converting a rental building to a co-op or condo — a conversion that thousands of units underwent back then — does not trigger a steep assessment jump, thereby pricing out the residents. The law separately protects rental buildings from being assessed on what they would be worth if converted. 

Both decisions are defensible, even logical. The problem is how the city has executed the law — particularly its longstanding choice to use rents from regulated buildings rather than market-rate ones as comparables even for properties that would never have been rent-regulated. This produces values whose relationship to actual market value varies unevenly across buildings and neighborhoods. The City does this because it dampens the volatility of property tax bills for regulated tenants — but it widens the already yawning gap between what a co-op or condo is worth and the rate at which it is taxed.

The one-to-three-family houses where most homeowners live, which are taxed a different way, have their own version of the same problem. State law requires these “Class 1” properties to be assessed at a uniform percentage of their full value, and separately limits how quickly assessments can rise. They can go up no more than 6% in any one year or 20% over five years. Again, both rules are defensible on their own terms. Again, the problem is the city’s execution. 

For decades, Finance has set the uniform percentage in ways that produce assessments that vary widely across neighborhoods even for comparable houses. 

The property tax is perverse and illogical in many more ways than these, but these explain some of its biggest problems — and why the tax’s burden disproportionately falls on owners and tenants who can least afford it.

The 2024 Court of Appeals decision in *Tax Equity Now NY LLC v. City of New York* (I am policy director of Tax Equity Now) held that the two requirements can operate together, and that the city must assign the same assessment for properties with the same market value. That decision opened a path the city can take on its own authority, without waiting for state legislation.

If the city actually attempted to value properties in a more disciplined way, it wouldn’t fix all of these distortions entirely, but it would move things decidedly in the right direction.

That gap — between what an apartment would sell for and what the city says it is worth — is the key to everything that follows.

### What the tax does, and what it can reasonably be expected to do

The new surcharge is meant to apply only to homes that are *not* a primary residence and that are above a specified value threshold. For houses, that’s $5 million. For co-ops and condos, the tax arrives in two phases. This gets complicated, but stick with me.

In the first two years, the city uses its existing income-approach values, but applies high rates to compensate — 4%, 5.25%, or 6.5% — and sets the entry threshold at $1 million in Finance value, enough to capture apartments whose true sale value is much higher, like that condo that would fetch $20 million on the market. 

Beginning in 2028, the city is supposed to switch to valuing co-ops and condos by comparable sales, drop the threshold to a uniform $5 million of sale value, and apply the same lower rates that houses pay (0.8% to 1.3%). The shift brings the surcharge closer to actual sale prices and lets the city drop the awkward high-rate-low-base mechanic of Phase 1\. Whether the new approach is itself a sound way to value housing is a separate question — sale prices and market value are not identical, and a properly executed income approach (using market-rate rather than regulated rents) could produce values that consistently track actual worth without rewarding speculation. Whether the city can actually build the unit-level sales-based valuation system the second phase requires is yet another question — and one of several the law leaves open, like whether every co-op and condo unit will be revalued or only those flagged for surcharge in the first place.

What can the tax reasonably be expected to do? It will raise money — though probably less than the $500 million the state projects. As the city comptroller has pointed out, owners can respond by selling, renting their places out, or moving in, and that will likely result in lower collections. The tax will fall most heavily, in dollar terms, on the ultra-high-end absentee owners the politics describe. And in its second phase it will, for the first time, try to attach a sales-based number to luxury co-ops and condos — a small preview of the broader valuation reform advocates have sought for years.

But here is where to be careful.

### Beware the unintended consequences

**The first two years run on a number everyone agrees is wrong.** Phase one taxes apartments on the income-approach value — the very figure that critics, reformers and litigation (including a case the state’s highest court allowed to proceed in 2024) have long called inaccurate. The high 4-to-6.5% rates for co-ops and condos are an attempt to back into a fair result from an unfair number. Sometimes that will overshoot; sometimes it will miss. And because the income-approach value depends on *which* rental buildings the city chooses as comparables, the universe isn’t even stable: if Finance were to use higher market-rate rents as comparables — which it is permitted to do — more apartments would cross the $1 million line, pulling in owners who weren’t there the year before. There’s a lot of play in the joints.

**With co-ops — a common type of home in New York but one that people across the country are often unfamiliar with, whereby all the owners in a building have shares in a corporation — it’s especially complicated.** First, in Phase One, the law takes the whole building’s value and splits it by the apartment’s share of the co-op’s stock. But co-op shares were set by the building’s developer, usually by square footage and location — not by market value. So the split does not track what individual apartments are actually worth. The owner of a modest lower-floor unit can be assigned a share of building value out of all proportion to what their apartment would sell for — and a mixed-use building with valuable ground-floor retail can see that commercial value spread across the residential apartments above. 

Second, in Phase Two the question is whether the city will value each apartment directly from its own comparable sales, or value the whole building by sales and then divide it up the same imperfect way. The statute doesn’t say, and the answer determines whether Phase Two will fix the allocation problem or simply re-create it on a bigger number. 

Third — and most worrying — the law makes the co-op *corporation* the city’s collection agent, responsible for collecting the surcharge from individual shareholders. That’s risky because most proprietary leases let a co-op allocate charges only by shares, and an unpaid surcharge becomes a lien on the *entire building*, exposing every shareholder to one owner’s non-payment. That is a genuine legal tangle the statute leaves for others to untie.

**The method of valuation in the law’s second phase makes more sense, but it’s still flawed.** A sale price, which is what the law uses as the denominator to tax, and “market value” are not identical. When a single apartment sells for more than $200 million, that tells you what one extraordinarily motivated buyer would pay; with all due respect to the parties, it is not the price a rational buyer would pay, and it is not “market value” in the sense the law means — the price a typical willing buyer would pay a typical willing seller, neither under compulsion. 

Using a sale like that to value the apartments around it doesn’t measure their worth; it imports a premium that has nothing to do with them. Assigning values correctly would mean screening out the outliers and the non-arm’s-length deals — painstaking, unit-by-unit appraisal work the city does not currently do for co-ops and condos at all. Is the city prepared to take this on? It’s an open question.

**The administrative lift is enormous, and the clock is unforgiving.** Building a defensible, sales-based valuation system for tens of thousands of co-op and condo units — on top of producing the regular assessment roll — is a multi-year undertaking, not a two-year one. Meanwhile, the first year’s mechanics are brutally tight: the city must flag non-primary homes and notify owners by August 30, 2026, with the first bill due January 1, 2027 — and the law says that even if the notice never reaches you, you still owe the tax. Expect confusion, expect a wave of challenges, and expect a Tax Commission that is already busy to strain under them.

The Department of Finance issued draft rules at the end of May, with public comments due July 9\. The draft addresses some of the questions raised above — making clear, for example, that family LLC and family trust ownership structures qualify for the family-member exemption — but leaves others unresolved, including how Phase Two will identify which apartments to revalue, how the law applies to combined cooperative units, and whether and how it reaches institutional housing. The final rules will shape much of what this surcharge actually becomes.

**The surcharge’s reach into institutional property is another seam worth watching.** There’s yet another potential land mine in the new law. The surcharge may apply to properties that are currently exempt under a section of the law known as 420-a — university faculty housing, hospital residential property, religious institution clergy housing, foundation-owned residences — depending on how aggressively the city interprets the statute. Foreign government property is protected by federal treaty obligations, but the rest is genuinely uncertain. What this means is that a surcharge initially framed as reaching wealthy individuals with second homes could, under aggressive interpretation, extend to institutional housing the legislature likely did not mean to target. The new administration has signaled an interest in expanding the institutional tax base; whether and how that interest shapes this surcharge’s rulemaking is one of the questions that will define what it actually becomes.

### Fix the foundation

None of this is an argument against asking absent owners of luxury homes to contribute more. It is about sequencing and priorities. We keep trying to bolt targeted fixes onto a property tax system whose basic foundation we have refused to repair. This is a system that values identical neighbors differently, that taxes a Brooklyn rowhouse and a Park Avenue co-op on wholly different logics, and that has resisted serious reform for 40 years. The pied-à-terre tax inherits all of that. In its first phase it runs on values whose relationship to actual market prices varies in ways that no one defends; in its second, it depends on a valuation system the city has not built. 

The mayor says he is committed to property tax reform. We’ve heard mayors say as much many times, but they never get around to it because the politics are so thorny. But that remains the necessary work — and as the Court of Appeals has now made clear, much of it can be done under the city’s own authority. A surcharge layered on an uneven base will produce results that are arbitrary in ways that have little to do with who is, and isn’t, paying their fair share — and arbitrariness, in taxation, is its own kind of unfairness.

As this piece goes to press, the city has agreed in *TENNY v. City of New York* to enter a court-mediated settlement process aimed at the very implementation issues raised here — how the city values property, whether it can administer Class 1 assessments uniformly, how the income approach is executed for co-ops and condos. The agreement is a meaningful opening. Whether it produces real reform will depend on what the mediation actually delivers. Either way, the surcharge will continue to be administered on the existing foundation while that conversation unfolds — which makes how the foundation gets repaired even more important, not less.

I grew up in public housing in Brooklyn and later spent seven years running the department that values every property in this city. From both vantage points, the lesson is the same: a tax system earns trust by being fair. Get the foundation right, and a second-home surcharge could sit on it cleanly. Skip that step, and we will spend the next five years litigating the difference.

---

**Disclosure:* Martha Stark is policy director of Tax Equity Now New York (TENNY), the coalition whose litigation produced the 2024 Court of Appeals decision discussed above. She also advises clients and represents property owners in New York City property tax matters.*
### How New York City Can Come Out a Winner in the AI Age
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/ai-economic-opportunities-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T16:35:24.000Z
In May, New York City’s comptroller, Mark Levine, put hard numbers to a worry that has been hanging over the city’s economic landscape. [His report](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/ai-and-new-york-citys-fiscal-future?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) modeled five ways, ranging from optimistic to dire, that artificial intelligence could reshape the local economy. In the worst case, the private sector could lose over 100,000 jobs by 2027, which would cost the City billions in foregone revenue.

Levine is right to focus on New York City’s unique exposure to AI. The city is focused on knowledge-intensive white-collar work, and many workers do the exact same routine knowledge tasks AI is learning to master. But the report also points out something more hopeful: Levine notes the city is already home to hundreds of firms competing to make New York “the capital of applied AI.” This is the real opportunity. New York City will not win the battle for AI by simply bracing for impact or racing to the bottom to attract firms through tax breaks for data centers. The city is unlikely to overtake San Francisco in the race to develop frontier models or Northern Virginia in being home to GPU clusters.

New York City can capture the highest-value AI jobs by becoming the key hub for what the industry calls the “application layer” for AI. This is where AI’s capabilities meet the demands of real-world industries, most of all in regulated sectors. Think using AI to reshape law, finance, medicine, real estate, media, insurance and other sectors. These are all sectors where New York City already has an unmatched level of density and agglomeration of talent, where the economic value of AI will ultimately be realized. The opportunity for New York lies in becoming the primary destination for firms seeking to build the plumbing and deployment for AI across these different domains. This is where the high-paying jobs of the future are likely to be located, and hence New York City’s future tax base.

### Applications, not wrappers

The hard part about building the economy around AI applications is avoiding what technology experts refer to as the “wrapper” trap. A wrapper is a company that only provides a minimal interface bolted on top of a technology built by OpenAI or Google. These firms have multiplied since the arrival of ChatGPT: Think of the wave of “chat with your document” tools or one-click “AI assistant” applications.

These companies tend to have no real defense against future innovation. The moment a major lab improves its base model to tackle the same use case, or a hobbyist spins up a free open-source version over a weekend, the wrapper’s business model collapses.

New York’s strategy should explicitly not be about attracting or subsidizing these firms. There’s a more durable type of company that uses AI to build something genuinely valuable.

Which firms survive as the underlying AI models keep getting better and better? There are two defensible advantages: regulation and proprietary data.

Regulation sounds like a burden for firms, but here it can be a critical advantage. The best AI models can offer great legal and medical advice. But they cannot offer attorney-client privilege or prescribe a drug an insurer will reimburse. Industries built on licensing, liability and compliance have built-in natural barriers that a better AI model alone is not going to take down.

The second key advantage is having access to unique or niche data. A firm that sits on its own information AI labs cannot touch now possesses a critical advantage. These can consist of their own records, information about customers or their own history and decisions over time. These firms are in a position to build a huge advantage by putting AI to work on data competitors do not have access to.

These two advantages compound. A firm that successfully runs AI inside its own high-stakes operation throws out still more internal data in the process, which regulation then keeps out of the hands of a competitor. This lead will compound over time.

### What do these opportunities look like?

Here’s how this might play out in a field like finance. Private equity firms, hedge funds and investment banks are already deploying novel AI applications that interact with their trade executions, deal decisions, risk management and regulatory reporting. These are all areas where errors have enormous consequences and deep access to proprietary internal data — like the firm’s trading history, the record of how they have accepted or turned down deal opportunities, and private client data — is the baseline cost of entry. The firms that win the AI race will combine AI with human judgment to decide on execution and catch errors, taking advantage of data no one else has. The blend of data and talent to do this exists in New York and almost nowhere else.

New York has many other centers of excellence that can follow this same format. In medicine, the city is home to many forefront medical centers, among them NYU Langone, Mount Sinai, NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell and Memorial Sloan Kettering. These hospital systems are all experimenting with ways to incorporate AI intelligently in their clinical workflows. The role of regulation here — everything from the FDA’s regulatory requirements to malpractice insurance requirements to federal privacy laws — will help ensure that these jobs and tasks are going to remain durable and not be completely replaced. Even radiology, a job many AI experts predicted would become obsolete as technology got better and better at reading X-rays, has remained resilient as medical professionals remain a credentialed specialty. Instead, these systems are likely to expand to take on new roles and tasks that require both technical and medical expertise.

Legal and compliance firms, a stronghold in the city, are another example of the potential for AI enhancement. The white-collar firms that survive will be able to build upon their existing legal datasets to map and understand legal precedents and vulnerabilities as well as tackle novel issues around cybersecurity and alignment risks. The people who can build and validate these systems should also live overwhelmingly in New York.

A common thread through these examples is the deployment of AI in high-stakes, regulated settings to generate more data and more accurate models that drive future business value. Every time a clinical AI application processes a case and receives clinical feedback, it fuels a virtuous cycle. Better deployments lead to better algorithms, which generate more feedback. This loop compounds as firms deploy more AI inside of protected, proprietary environments, which ultimately generates a deeper competitive moat. It’s a promising path for AI as a competitive advantage for New York City.

### What the City should do

To some degree, AI in New York City will evolve along the lines I’ve described whether or not government does anything. So what should the City and State do?

The critical context here is that New York is looking at stagnation in well-paying white-collar jobs. As the state comptroller has shown in [a recent report](https://dingo.telicon.com/NY/library/2026/20260407ZZ.PDF?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), nearly all job growth in New York since the COVID-19 pandemic has been concentrated in a single sector: “health care and social assistance,” which generated 253,100 net new jobs. If you remove these positions, New York City’s private-sector job growth was negative. Two of the highest-paid sectors, “finance and insurance” and “information,” combined generated just 26,000 new jobs. This makes the city strategically vulnerable around a valuable set of white-collar jobs.

Together with Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, I have referred to the [urban doom loop](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/cause-to-worry-reason-to-act/) as the challenge of coping with dynamic responses from a smaller set of employed workers. While the full scope of AI-related impacts on white-collar employment is yet to be seen, the risk is that AI simply automates a large chunk of professional work just as we saw with the automation and outsourcing of blue-collar work, which led directly to the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.

Just as the city came out of that period with a renewed focus on new jobs and occupations (at that time, the focus was on the very white-collar professions that are now squarely in the targets of AI companies), today we should be proactive in advance of technological shifts to secure a future for novel economic tasks and occupations. Securing the AI application layer is a strategy that leverages New York’s existing advantages to ensure they remain relevant in a more AI-oriented world.

The City’s policy should be oriented around three approaches: strengthening access to domain-specific data, strengthening access to talent and space and helping institutional customers adopt new tools.

What will those strategies look like?

**Data-sharing frameworks.** New York City alone generates an enormous amount of structured data — building inspection reports, permit applications, transit operations, public health surveillance and so forth. While some of these data are made available through the City’s Open Data platform, much of it remains inaccessible or in formats that are challenging to use.

So the industrial policy for New York starts with the City itself. It should first make publicly accessible as much data as it can, in the form of a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that agents can access. In layman’s terms, MCP is a bridge between AI models and external data sources, making it easy for them to talk to one another. Additionally, the City should make available other controlled-access data, modeled, for instance, on the U.S. Census Bureau’s [Federal Statistical Research Data Centers](https://www.census.gov/about/adrm/fsrdc.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which let AI firms work with city data under privacy restrictions. This would provide the raw data for application-layer products in government technology, property technology and urban analytics.

The City should then lead the way in extending this approach to private-sector data. The City government can facilitate data-sharing agreements between academic medical centers (for clinical AI), between financial and fintech firms (for compliance AI) and between housing agencies and proptech firms. There is no need here for the City to build its own tools or models. Instead, the government can simply lower the transaction costs of data access that helps firms develop and scale their solutions. In medicine, this might mean that the City helps negotiate an agreement that lets startups train diagnostic tools on de-identified records pooled across multiple hospital systems. These are the kind of niche data that provide a critical edge, but that privacy rules alone might keep locked up in distinct silos upon which no one hospital is able to fully capitalize.

**Talent programs.** The growth of the application layer requires people who can combine technical fluency with domain knowledge. New York City’s universities are well placed to produce this talent, but the existing pipelines are too narrow. To prepare for future jobs, the City should pair with and nudge local universities to offer additional joint degrees, certification programs and lifelong-learning initiatives. There may also be a need for mid-career programs for displaced white-collar workers to retrain and retool themselves. Imagine a degree or certificate in AI and law or AI for clinical operations.

Application-layer firms will also need space in which to operate. Since Manhattan’s office vacancy remains elevated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of the work-from-home economy, the City should help convert Class B and Class C office space into subsidized lab and incubator space for firms located near industries they serve, modeled, for instance, on the [M-CORE program](https://edc.nyc/program/manhattan-commercial-revitalization-m-core?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which supports upgrading of commercial office space. The New York City Economic Development Corporation’s [NYC AI Nexus program](https://edc.nyc/program/nyc-ai-nexus?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which provides venture support and accelerator programs for early-stage AI firms, offers another model of how to foster collaboration and integration between AI firms, investors and others.

**City procurement.** Finally, there is room here to use City procurement much more intelligently. The government is one of the largest institutional buyers in the area. Committing to AI-enabled procurement in building inspection, permit review and benefits administration, among other functions, would ensure a guaranteed first customer for application-layer startups. To do this would require that the City also remove certain roadblocks and prohibitions to the deployment of AI in government and partner with employees and labor unions to do so. While challenging, being a leader itself in the deployment of AI can help push the City’s ecosystem in this direction.

Even as it helps some firms scale up, the City should work hard not to subsidize the wrong firms, the dreaded “picking of winners and losers.” A range of firms is likely to succeed in the application layer. This includes OpenAI, Anthropic and Google themselves, as they add functionality that directly connects their models to enterprise customers. It also includes the large companies that themselves find new ways to monetize existing proprietary datasets and workflows. And of course, many new startups will successfully build additional innovative AI-first strategies to grow and scale, as some will fail. The City should encourage all of these sets of firms to grow.

**Regulatory frameworks.** Finally, another dimension in which the City can help establish a framework for AI firms to flourish is through the development of regulatory guidelines. The City was an early mover here, releasing the [AI Action Plan](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/oti/downloads/pdf/reports/artificial-intelligence-action-plan.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in October 2023 through the New York City Office of Technology and Innovation. A clear set of regulatory requirements can actually help firms facilitate further growth and innovation, if the regulations provide clear safe harbor against litigation risk. For example, if the City set a clear bias and auditing standard for the use of AI in lending and gave firms that meet that standard some protection against discrimination suits, lenders would know the rules before they build, rather than having to guess where that legal line is.

### The bigger picture

The competition for AI jobs is sometimes viewed as a frantic fight to pay billion-dollar salaries for the very highest-paid talent in frontier labs, or an attempt to build wrapper models on top of foundational models. Neither approach is sustainable for a city of the scale and depth of New York. There will ultimately only be a few thousand AI researchers working to build the latest frontier models, but in doing so, they will continue to disrupt the wrapper firms.

The potential for New York is instead to focus on the firms with the best strategies to meaningfully deploy AI in the sectors of finance, health care, law, insurance, real estate and media. The regulatory restrictions and existing data moat will ensure that firms that succeed in these areas are going to require hybrid expertise of domain as well as institutional knowledge. This is the sweet spot in which New York City is well poised to excel.

In seizing this opportunity, New York has the potential to remain a global center for white-collar and professional work. The AI economy is unlikely to be geographically distributed the same way the pre-AI knowledge economy was. If foundational models continue to absorb routine cognitive tasks, the work that remains will concentrate in a handful of cities that already have the institutional density to support it. There may only be room for a few such hubs globally. New York is the natural candidate to be one of them, if we play our cards right.
### The Prosperity Equation
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-housing-affordability-economic-mobility/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T16:35:46.000Z
How do we make New York City housing more affordable? As [“Block by Block,”](https://www.nyc.gov/content/dam/nycgov/nyc-main/pdf/2026/block-by-block-report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the recently released Mamdani administration’s housing plan underscores, housing is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and one on which everyone has an opinion: Freeze rents, subsidize rents, protect tenants, support landlords, build more, create new housing models, speed processes and so on. But we too rarely talk about people and the resources they have to spend on housing, despite the fact that housing affordability and the crisis New York City faces are a function of both cost and income.

There is no economic justice without safe, quality, affordable housing — and there is no durable housing stability without economic justice and rising incomes. “Block by Block” notes that there is no “singular solution” and that an “all of the above” approach is warranted. That “all of the above” approach to true affordability must include driving incomes up, enacting better tenant protections and holding costs down. These are not separate policy lanes. The Mamdani administration has the mandate, and New York City already has the assets — and many of the tools — to treat them together and ensure New York remains a globally competitive city where housing is affordable and prosperity is increasingly shared.

### The plight of renters

New York is [a city of renters](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys-homeowner-housing-market/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), with almost 70% of households renting their homes, compared to 30% nationally. Rental housing is quite literally a contract between landlord and tenant. For the housing itself to be sustainable, tenants need to pay rent, but that can be impossible when incomes are stagnating while costs go up. In New York, rent collection in affordable housing [has dropped almost 5% since 2017](https://www.enterprisecommunity.org/sites/default/files/2025-10/Distress-in-NY-Affordable-Housing-Stock.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and the share of projects with rent collections under 80% has more than tripled. Rental arrears not only put specific households at risk of eviction but also impact housing conditions for everyone in the building, as landlords have fewer resources to maintain properties.

Many of these tenants are not paying their rent because they simply lack the resources to cover all living costs. For decades, across the United States, wages for low- and middle-income workers [have failed to keep pace](https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with the cost of living. Productivity has grown steadily since the 1970s, while real wages for the bottom half of earners have remained largely flat, meaning workers are producing more but taking home proportionally less. In high-cost cities like New York, this national trend is dramatically amplified: The gap between what working families earn and what it costs to live, eat, commute and raise children is not a marginal inconvenience; it is a structural crisis. According to the New York City True Cost of Living report, 62% of city residents, or more than 5 million people, [do not have the resources to cover basic costs](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/equity/downloads/pdf/2026%20NYC%20TCOL%20Measure%5F4%206%2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Affordable housing is supposed to solve at least a piece of this problem. At move-in, most tenants pay no more than 30% of their income in rent. But nationally, 40% of residents in Low-Income Housing Tax Credit properties [are rent-burdened](https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/Links%5FBetween%5FAffordable%5FHousing%5Fand%5FEconomic%5FMobility%5F.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), suggesting that, even in affordable housing, rents regularly rise faster than income.

This is a crosscutting challenge. Certainly, low-wage workers, who tend to be concentrated in health care, food service and personal care, are particularly vulnerable. Too many of these workers lack benefits, face irregular hours and cycle through job and housing instability. Nationally, more than 50% of affordable housing tenants lack health insurance, almost 50% have no paid time off, more than 40% have jobs that do not pay overtime, and about 25% do not have regular working hours. But the issue is not limited to the lowest-income households. [According to the New York City Comptroller’s Office](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/the-state-of-job-quality-in-new-york-city/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), 62% of New Yorkers are economically insecure; only 1 in 3 hold a “good job” with benefits and family-sustaining wages.

Housing costs, childcare, health care and transportation have all outpaced wage growth, leaving low- and middle-income families in a permanent state of economic precarity even when they are fully employed. This is a reality that [disproportionately affects people of color and women](https://robinhood.org/reports/poverty-tracker-annual-report-vol-8/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), who are more likely to live in poverty. Because rent payments can be deferred without immediate consequences to the household, this is becoming an increasingly frequent trade-off. We can expect rent collections to suffer as long as a significant number of tenants struggle without enough income to make ends meet.

### Changing course

This trade-off between rent and other living expenses — and the associated harm to both low-wage workers and the housing sector — is not inevitable. We can build off our local strengths to foster income growth.

First and foremost, we have [a diversified economy](https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/regional%5Feconomy/charts/Regional%5FNYC?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Page%201,diminished%20somewhat%20in%20relative%20importance) that is [projected to grow](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/nycs-economy-and-prospects/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — albeit slowly, given the overall weak U.S. economy. And while the proliferation of AI is likely to disrupt entry-level job markets, key priorities of the Mamdani administration — particularly increased development of affordable housing and universal childcare — are likely to create additional job opportunities in construction, property management/maintenance and education, all of which will require human workers. In particular, the groundbreaking commitment to new construction made in the administration’s “Block by Block” plan will create tens of thousands of jobs.

Second, New York City’s complex public-private workforce-development sector already serves many New Yorkers. Multiple agencies, including Small Business Services (SBS), Human Resources Administration (HRA), the Department of Youth and Community Development, the Department of Parks and Recreation and the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) operate targeted programs. New York City Public Schools, the City University of New York (CUNY) and the State University of New York (SUNY), serving over 1.5 million New Yorkers daily, have ramped up a focus on career readiness and student career success over the past five years. Hundreds of nonprofits add depth and expertise in specific areas, including industry, population and neighborhood. All of these agencies, institutions and organizations manage complex funding and regulations.

The New York City Office of Talent and Workforce Development was established to coordinate this vast ecosystem to fight fragmentation and meet diverse needs. It recently reconstituted the Workforce Development Board and Workforce Development Council, uniting leaders from industry, education, nonprofits, associations and philanthropy for essential public-private partnerships. The city’s size and complexity require coordination, capacity and expertise at the mayoral level to leverage and braid together the multiple public and private funding sources and stakeholders to ensure the needs of both New York City’s workers and employers are well served.

A stronger system would work with New Yorkers to deliver these resources using a shared lifelong career-development framework that looks at a person’s needs depending on their time in life, circumstances, interests and experience. The framework could build on [CareerReady NYC](https://www.nyc.gov/site/youthemployment/initiatives/careerready-nyc.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), developed under the de Blasio administration — taking into account the many lessons learned from talent-development providers who support targeted populations and industries — to better position New York City students to launch successfully into careers.

A lifelong career-development framework could serve as the shared operating system to deliver the right level of support through the best entity or entities at specific points in life: school-based career exposure, postsecondary pathways or workforce training matched to employer needs, plus childcare, language access, flexible schedules and credentials for better jobs. For example, New York City Public Schools initiatives like [FutureReadyNYC](https://futureready.nyc/web/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Career Readiness and Modern Youth Apprenticeship](https://www.schools.nyc.gov/learning/student-journey/career-connected-learning/career-readiness-and-modern-youth-apprenticeship?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are redesigning the high school experience to include career-readiness curriculum, school-supported work-based learning opportunities and apprenticeships. The Mamdani administration’s expansion of early childhood education supports working parents during their early and mid-careers or while they participate in paid [training opportunities](https://www.nyc.gov/employment/guide-pages/apprenticeships-training?service=apprenticeships-training&&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) funded through City programs.

Technology like the City’s [Workforce Data Portal](https://workforcedata.nyc.gov/en/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) can be expanded to track the many programs, monitor spending against outcomes, spot gaps/overlaps and guide smarter allocation for an integrated, accountable ecosystem focused on results. For people with low incomes or affordable housing tenants, this means meeting people where they are with the resources they need to advance at every stage. The pieces are ready; it just takes coordination and investment.

Third, New York City’s annual budget of over $100 billion can be leveraged in multiple ways to increase opportunities for low-income New Yorkers. Thanks to the passage of a State law in 2024, New York City has [strong community hiring mandates](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/communityhiring/downloads/pdf/Community-Hiring-Rules.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); most vendors with City contracts for construction, human services, professional services and standard services are required to hire individuals who are low-income or who live in low-income communities. The existing community hiring requirements went into effect in January 2025 and, once fully resourced and implemented, promise to be a powerful tool for economic advancement.

New York City also needs to consider local employment placement and mobility as central goals of its economic development incentives and capital investments. We need to ask not only “How many jobs were created?” but also “How are New Yorkers getting those jobs, keeping them, earning enough to live here and building toward something more?” This reframes the City’s entire economic development and capital investment apparatus around a single North Star: Are all New Yorkers, especially those in low-wage, benefit-poor jobs, measurably better off?

Urgency can be an asset here. At the federal level, House Resolution 1 imposed new work requirements on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid recipients. Without action, these requirements create real risks for low-income households and could easily leave many substantially worse off. But given that this is now law, we should use the opportunity to link recipients to career-path jobs. The moment is now to make relatively small investments to better coordinate the system and target resources rather than risk the significant downstream costs of inaction.

As technology and AI result in rapid changes to the labor market, jobs are moving to other markets, requiring more experience or being replaced altogether. Without a nimble, continuously improving talent-development ecosystem that can proactively anticipate changes, plan for the future and smartly invest resources, New Yorkers — especially low-income renters — risk unemployment, underemployment and working in jobs that don’t keep up with the cost of their rents. This puts more buildings at risk, increases demand for benefits and results in fewer resources to build new and preserve existing affordable housing.

### Ten next steps

It will take time to create a unified framework for career development that addresses the full scope of low-wage workers’ needs — and the challenge of accessing key resources in this climate. For the near term, we offer a 10-point plan on specific steps the City and its partners can take.

**1\. Streamline access to and implementation of the City's workforce development programs** to make it easier for job seekers to access training and placement support and reduce redundancy across programs. As noted, a half-dozen different City agencies and our publicly supported educational institutions are involved in workforce development. Individuals in need of support can struggle to connect with the right agency, and the fragmentation contributes to both gaps and overlaps in services.

As part of this process, formally elevate, fully staff and fund the Office of Talent and Workforce Development to coordinate the multiple systems and sectors. This is a mayoral office with explicit cross-agency authority and strong private and nonprofit relationships, and it can think holistically about how best to connect housing, education, workforce and economic development into a single, accountable strategy and career-development framework. With the mandate and partnership of the Workforce Development Board and Council, the City can align curriculum, credentials, hiring pipelines and initiatives across City agencies, CUNY, SUNY, Public Schools, labor, community-based organizations and industry to create a more effective, cost-efficient talent-development system with better outcomes.

**2\. Prioritize and expand talent-development programs**,such as apprenticeships, that provide pathways to quality jobs and living-wage careers, rather than rapid attachment to jobs that have limited opportunities for advancement and don’t result in industry-valued credentials and transferable skills. To realize this goal will require, wherever possible, providing people with stipends or wages as well as other support while they are in training so they don’t have to choose between acquiring the skills they need and paying rent.

**3\. Expand and enforce community hiring mandates** across all major City contracts — with benchmarks tied to resident outcomes such as wages, benefits, retention and advancement — leveraging the City’s purchasing power as a direct tool for closing the wage gap in the communities that need it most. Expand the mandate to include City loans as well as contracts to capture Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) and key New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) projects.

**4\. Create and expand public-private training programs**,including apprenticeships, to position low-income residents for jobs, beginning with mayoral priority fields, particularly housing development, operations and early childhood education. Employers should be involved in shaping these programs to ensure viability. [An analysis of SBS training programs](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/opportunity/pdf/evidence/nyc%5Froi%5Freport%5Fbrief%5Ffinal.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) released in 2020 showed the 10-year ROIs for participants, taxpayers and society were, respectively, $292.68, $2.02 and $18.80 for every dollar spent on workforce development — making investing in training a very cost-effective economic development strategy.

**5\. Invest in HRA and NYCHA career-services programs** and hold providers accountable for connecting public-benefit recipients to career-path jobs rather than simply the bare minimum engagement to maintain benefits. Work with the New York State Department of Health to set up a Medicaid work program that also prioritizes “good jobs” and encourages greater integration with SBS’s Workforce 1 system.

**6\. Leverage the City as an employer.** Public-sector jobs have historically been a pathway to economic growth. Although starting salaries may be low, City jobs typically have good benefits and opportunities for advancement. The City has an aging workforce; for example, at the New York City Department of Social Services, 40% of staff are 55 or older. Over the coming years, the City will need to hire to maintain services. There is an opportunity to work with City unions to educate and prepare diverse communities for civil service exams, building on existing initiatives such as CUNY Civil Service Pathways and the new civil service youth apprenticeship title.

**7\. Focus on ensuring students launch successfully into careers** and hold our educational institutions accountable to this goal. This includes providing academic credit for learning that happens in the workplace and leveraging summers for students as paid work-based learning opportunities. For example, summer work, including Summer Youth Employment Program placements, should explicitly link to career ladders, stackable credentials and promising pathways so that summer employment builds transferable skills and professional networks, rather than being a one-time transaction.

**8\. Center affordable housing residents in workforce strategy.** Partner with NYCHA, HPD, HRA, the New York City Housing Development Corporation and affordable housing providers to embed career-pathway services directly into buildings where the wage gap is most concentrated; this is where housing and income policy must meet in practice, not just in principle. The administration’s ambitious “Block by Block” plan recognizes the importance of tenants and tenant organizing, which can serve as a platform to support workforce engagement.

**9\. Establish talent outcomes as the central goal of economic development.** Reorient EDC investments, sector partnerships and City contract incentives around whether New Yorkers are obtaining quality jobs with living wages and benefits. The measure of success is not job creation in the abstract but whether the wage-cost gap is closing for working New Yorkers; this concept was developed in the “Green Economy Action Plan” released by the City in 2024.

**10\. Invest in and expand data tools and reporting** needed to track progress and make strategy changes as needed:

a. Create a transparent inventory of all publicly funded talent-development programs and initiatives that includes navigation support for New Yorkers seeking opportunity and industry seeking workers.

b. Develop a borough-level income-mobility index tracking wage growth, benefits access and advancement among low- and middle-income New Yorkers, making the wage-cost gap visible, measurable and politically accountable.

c. Establish a Shared Prosperity Dashboard that is publicly accessible and regularly updated, tracking rent burden in affordable housing, income growth, benefits access and workforce-credential attainment side-by-side, to understand and invest in what works, increase accountability and innovate to improve outcomes.

We cannot solve housing affordability or address the instability facing both tenants and landlords without tackling income. The traditional focus on rent levels as the sole driver of housing affordability has helped create the challenges facing the affordable housing stock today.

The false choice between “pro-business” and “pro-worker” is counterproductive and prevents the public-private partnerships that are critical for a robust, globally competitive economy, especially if we are seeking shared prosperity. In 2026, a diverse, skilled and stably housed talent pool is itself a competitive advantage, because global companies choose cities where they can find and keep talent that can afford to live and grow there. The New Yorkers living in affordable housing who are multilingual, resilient, community-rooted and motivated are not a social-services challenge; they are overlooked talent in which New York City needs to invest.

Investing in the career growth of low-income tenants helps these families thrive, improves the stability of affordable housing, creates a skilled talent pool for employers and reduces the demand for public benefits. The health of both our residents and our housing, not to mention our city, depends on thinking beyond rents and reducing costs when it comes to affordability.
### Economic Justice Starts With Young People
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/economic-justice-youth-workforce-development-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T16:36:06.000Z
The idea of “economic justice” in New York City, at its core, means ensuring every New Yorker is able to afford their life and make decisions about their future free from financial burden. Planning for a family, enrolling in school, buying a home, going on vacation and starting a business are attainable goals — provided people have a clear financial path enabled by the City’s investments in policies and programs that prioritize their financial security. Economic justice is not an antibusiness ideology without practical application. It is measurable economic infrastructure that establishes the foundation from which New Yorkers can live the lives they desire, and it begins with an investment in young people.

New York City is home to City University of New York (CUNY), which is often cited as an engine for economic mobility for young people. [Six senior colleges and six community colleges](https://www.cuny.edu/news/new-study-confirms-cunys-power-as-national-engine-of-economic-mobility/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) rank among the top in the nation for their ability to lift low-income New Yorkers into the middle class, so CUNY must be at the table in any discussion about economic justice. The university provides an affordable education to its students, with two-thirds attending for free and [80% graduating with no debt](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-second-consecutive-increase-student-enrollment-city-university-new?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). And programs like CUNY Beyond and CUNY 2X Tech are aligning career skills and internship opportunities with undergraduate programs to ensure students are prepared to enter the workforce after they graduate.

These successes notwithstanding, rising costs and a changing labor market threaten young New Yorkers’ ability to afford to live here. Since 2019, housing, grocery and childcare costs have gone up an [average of 23%](https://edc.nyc/sites/default/files/2026-02/NYCEDC-2025-State-of-NYC-Economy%5F2-12-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and entry-level job postings have [declined 37%](https://nycfuture.org/research/from-degree-to-career?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) since 2022\. The Mamdani administration has already laid out ambitious plans to expand childcare and affordable housing and establish City-owned grocery stores. The administration should have the same ambition in the realm of economic justice. By developing a strategy that prioritizes worker protection and creates pathways to a financially sustainable future for every young person in every borough, the City can help ensure New Yorkers are not left behind in this constantly changing labor market.

What signs have we seen so far? In a [conversation with Gothamist](https://gothamist.com/news/nycs-top-economic-agency-still-leaderless-under-mamdani-business-leaders-are-worried?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Julie Su, the City’s first-ever deputy mayor for economic justice, mentioned the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a successful model for economic development. Her enthusiasm is understandable. If you tour the Brooklyn Navy Yard this summer, you are likely to run into one of the many Brooklyn-based college interns working at a small or medium-sized business operating across the industrial park. You’ll be taken to Newlab, a venture platform supporting critical technology startups at the forefront of innovation. And high school students from the Brooklyn STEAM Center, on break from their summer projects, will be at lunch at Rustik or Russ & Daughters as you walk through the food hall on the main floor of the campus’s largest building.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard has built the model by reimagining a 300-acre former naval shipyard into an innovation campus that houses hundreds of businesses, connects community members with jobs and, through work-based learning and internships, gives the next generation a head start in launching their careers. On their own, each of these components is a successful program. Together, they actualize a vision for economic justice that can make New York City one of the most economically mobile cities in America.

The work starts in schools, but right now there are countless gaps that young people fall through. Every year, about 75,000 New York City Public Schools students enter ninth grade. Just 81% (much higher than it used to be, but down 2% from 2025) of those students graduate from high school, with a smaller cohort matriculating into and completing college. Even fewer will graduate college having completed a paid internship (the Center for an Urban Future estimates that only [12% of CUNY undergraduates do](https://nycfuture.org/research/investing-in-cuny-to-expand-pathways-to-careers?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)).

In a city with a $127 billion budget and access to some of the largest private-sector institutions in the world, there is no reason for thousands of students to graduate each year without having a paid professional experience. Moreover, there is no excuse for our high school graduation rate to drop, even by 2%, from one year to the next. The education pipeline is often seen as separate from fiscal discussions. But with the Navy Yard as the blueprint, we can ensure that similar economic development projects throughout the five boroughs pave the way for economic success for students as they go through the education system.

We wouldn’t be starting from scratch. The New York City Economic Development Corporation’s (EDC’s) portfolio has no shortage of projects on the right track if smartly woven together with the education system. In Manhattan, SPARC Kips Bay will bring life science, health care and public health education and jobs to the Hunter College Brookdale campus. The project will include a new public high school next to several CUNY campuses, an NYC Health + Hospitals outpatient care and training center, and other research and community investments. Brooklyn’s Sunset Park is primed for redevelopment; the Brooklyn Army Terminal, South Brooklyn Marine Terminal and MADE Bush Terminal are receiving millions of dollars to incubate startups and prepare for New York City’s first offshore wind project. Jamaica, Queens, can look forward to housing, education and job development through the Jamaica Neighborhood Plan, JFK Airport redevelopment that will bring 15,000 jobs to the area, and, building on the success of its Brooklyn forebear, a Queens STEAM Center. The Hunts Point Peninsula and Kingsbridge Armory plans promise improvements to historically underinvested regions of the Bronx, and Staten Island’s North Shore Action Plan will add residential, commercial and educational resources across 20 acres of waterfront.

Aligning with economic justice will require each of these projects to coordinate how young people will participate in the economic activity generated from the millions of dollars of investment. EDC’s Economic Mobility Networks are already doing some of this work in Sunset Park, Kips Bay and Hunts Point, but additional coordination with New York City Public Schools, CUNY and workforce-development organizations across city agencies will be needed to create a talent pipeline that will reap benefits from these projects for years to come.

It is not enough to focus on education and economic development. Young people and adults, regardless of their education level, may need to access one of many workforce-development providers for additional training, wraparound services or help finding a job.

Today, workforce development is divided across various City agencies, with few accountability structures. In a [Crain’s op-ed](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/op-ed/op-ed-you-cant-deliver-economic-justice-without-employers/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) earlier this year, Greg Morris and Kathy Wylde suggested building a sister entity to EDC, a Workforce Development Corporation. This organization would bring workforce-development functions across City agencies together, enabling the City to house workforce accountability under one roof, with identifiable owners who could report on outcomes that touch economic justice. If Workforce1 Career Centers are understaffed, Summer Youth Employment Program participation drops or we lose apprenticeships in priority neighborhoods, the Workforce Development Corporation would be responsible for working with the responsible agency owner to correct the issue.

This isn’t only about yielding better economic results for individuals and families. When a ninth grader’s journey from high school to financial security drives the long-term fiscal health of our city, we embrace a new way of understanding our economy.

Every day now, we hear from tech leaders who predict that the majority of white-collar jobs will be eliminated by AI. They would have us believe that, in a couple of years, humans won’t be needed to do most of the jobs we do today. Fortunately, we can determine the future we want. While CEOs and analysts predict a future led by AI, we can choose to prioritize our cities, our neighborhoods and all of the people in them.
### The Affordability Conundrum
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-affordability-conundrum-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-06-24T20:02:11.000Z
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election demonstrated that, for many voters, affordability is New York City’s biggest issue. Mamdani was elected on promises to lower the share of income families have to spend on [rent](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mayor-mamdani-releases--block-by-block--the-housing-plan-for-a-n?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [childcare](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/03/mayor-mamdani-advances-new-york-city-s-first-free-child-care-pro?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), provide cheaper [public transit](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/nyregion/nyc-free-bus-fair-fares.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and improve access to [low-cost groceries](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani-announces-la-marqueta-as-first-site-identified-for?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Affordability is clearly top of mind for many middle-income New Yorkers — but it’s a tough goal for a city government.

Tackling affordability for middle-income residents at the city level is challenging for two reasons. First, the City has only partial control of the underlying demand and supply factors that drive affordability. Second, the law of 100% makes addressing affordability across goods and services that vary not only in price but also in other dimensions well-nigh impossible.

Mayor Mamdani leads a city, not a country. That means that he doesn’t control the single biggest element of demand — the size of the city’s population. If the mayor succeeds in making New York a better place to live (let’s say that’s the effect of delivering free buses and cheaper groceries, less crime and more art), new people are likely to move in and current residents are less likely to move out. Between 2010 and 2020, for example, the city’s [population increased by nearly 630,000](https://www.osc.ny.gov/press/releases/2023/12/changing-face-post-pandemic-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). That’s the equivalent of adding two-thirds of the population of Austin, Texas — often hailed as a beacon of affordability — in just a decade.

Adding people to the city, whether through more stayers, more in-migrants or more births than deaths among residents, raises demands for housing as well as childcare and transportation services. Research shows that increased demands for housing, such as [those induced by migration](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347406420%5FEffects%5Fof%5FImmigration%5Fon%5FLocal%5FHousing%5FMarkets?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), raise home prices and rents (though, of course, migration also brings many benefits). In other words, making New York City a more desirable place to live will make it less affordable.

This problem is best understood by looking at its reverse — the effect of city shrinkage on housing affordability. The [most affordable cities](https://www.redfin.com/blog/most-affordable-cities-in-the-us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the U.S. are those in the Rust Belt, cities that have lost substantial population relatively recently. In general, population size and rents travel together. New York became less affordable precisely because it became more attractive.

The government of New York doesn’t fully control the supply of core goods and services — including housing — either. The City can certainly try to remove impediments to construction, although large-scale construction in dense places is inherently challenging, but it has no control over housing affordability in the City’s suburbs and commuter regions.

About [one million people commute](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/planning-level/housing-economy/nyc-ins-and-out-of-commuting.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to the City each day, from across a three-state commuting shed. The supply of housing and other services in that commuting shed acts — as a safety valve or a pressure cooker — on the New York City supply. Between 2010 and 2020, the shed acted as a safety valve. As housing in New York City became more expensive, people moved to the suburbs (from within the city and elsewhere). New York’s housing stock grew by 7.3%,but the increases in Jersey City (18%), Bayonne (14%), Newark (9%) and Stamford (10%) were even greater. These four cities alone added about 40,000 housing units between 2010 and 2020 and had population and housing growth 15% as large as New York City itself. New York’s affordability agenda depends on decisions made throughout the tristate area (and even beyond).

The other problem is that affordability, especially for the kinds of goods and services the mayor is targeting, is a slippery goal. By construction, household spending always adds up to 100% of expenditures (note that some income isn’t spent but goes to savings and taxes). Reducing unit prices for basic, core needs such as housing, food and transportation will allow people to spend a greater share of their income on less essential “wants.” But because there is so much potential for variation in the quality of those core needs (think square feet of living space, strawberries in January or power windows) much of that increased spending will typically be devoted to improvements in the quality of core goods themselves. In this way, a reduction in the price of housing could lead to an increase in the share of expenditures devoted to housing. The key point is that a larger share of spending on some good or service isn’t always bad; sometimes it’s a byproduct of improved standards of living and happier citizens.

To better understand this paradox, it’s useful to contrast gas or food and housing (or health care). Right now, many Americans are very unhappy about the affordability of gasoline. That’s easy to track: Gas, pretty much, is gas. Similarly, the U.S. government has a way of defining the affordability of food based on the [Thrifty Food Plan](https://www.fns.usda.gov/research/cnpp/usda-food-plans?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), originally developed back in 1975\. Nutritional needs haven’t changed much since then, though the plan was modified in 2021 to reflect changes in how families today prepare food.

The picture for housing (or health care or transportation), however, looks quite different. Households today are smaller than in the past, and [square footage per capita](https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/uploads/content/Manhattan%5FDensities%5FHigh%5FRes,%5F1%5FJanuary%5F2015.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has increased. People expect more comfort and privacy. New Yorkers no longer sleep on mattresses outdoors in the summer. All New York City apartments [will have air conditioning by 2030](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=6788510&GUID=156F95BB-CA74-44F3-A07B-A0E54EA0C10F&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and most do already. People will pay more for housing near parks, in low-crime areas, close to transit, with good restaurants nearby or even near their friends. If people move to be nearer to those good things, their rent will be higher. Efforts to reduce housing prices may lead people to live with fewer housemates, in larger units, with more amenities, and spend just as much, or even more, on rent. That doesn’t mean that housing has become less affordable.

The potential for substitution between money costs and other aspects of goods or services makes it particularly hard to change spending shares. When prices of some goods decline in relative terms, people reshuffle their spending and buy more of the others. That’s apparent in comparisons of how New Yorkers spent their money over time. The share of our spending on core goods and services in total has hardly changed, but the distribution across core goods and services has. Back in 2004, New Yorkers devoted a larger share of their budgets to food, transportation and apparel and a smaller share to housing and health care than New York City residents do today, reflecting the much greater improvements in the quality of housing and health care that they now consume.

It’s also clear when we look across the country that people in different cities prioritize their spending differently. Let’s compare spending shares on food, housing and transportation in New York City to spending shares in other large U.S. cities. In each of these very distinct cities, residents devote about 65% of their expenditures to food, housing and transportation, leaving 35% for all other spending. Food costs are quite comparable. But the division of expenditures between transportation and housing varies a lot. It’s not a coincidence that New York is both transportation-cheap and housing-expensive — or that the pattern in Houston is the reverse.

When costs of apparel, food or transportation fall (in relative terms), residents shift their spending. They might spend more on entertainment or pensions (the 35% of “other” spending), but the cross-time and cross-city comparisons suggest that it more often goes toward improving the quality of core goods. Reducing the cost of childcare allows people to spend more of their income on more comfortable, well-located housing. Lowering subway fares means people can spend more on groceries. That doesn’t mean they’ve become worse off. Nostalgia is a poor policy goal when standards are changing. Middle-class housing in New York was not more affordable when high crime kept prices low and most units did not have [air conditioners](https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs/data/interactive/ahstablecreator.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or [dishwashers](https://www2.census.gov/prod2/ahsscan/h170-9153.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), food was not more affordable when [fresh berries and ripe tomatoes](https://www.thepacker.com/news/industry/century-produce-first-aisle-department?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) were unavailable in the winter, and health care was not more affordable when the standard treatment for heart attacks was [bed rest](https://www.heart.org/en/news/2024/02/15/the-presidential-heart-attack-that-changed-america?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

In sum, New York City’s government should do everything it can to reduce the cost of living. Removing unnecessary barriers to construction, taking on overpriced monopolies and helping out low-income residents are all worthwhile goals. But short of making city life undesirable, it’s going to be hard to come through on the affordability promise itself.
### Build Wealth, Not Just Wages
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-workforce-development-wealth-gap/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T16:36:35.000Z
Nearly two-thirds of New Yorkers are unable to meet the city’s cost of living — coming up $40,000 shy annually on average. So, though they’re living in New York, they’re digging themselves into a financial hole as they do.

So says the [NYC True Cost of Living Measure](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/equity/downloads/pdf/2026%20NYC%20TCOL%20Measure%5F4%206%2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) report released in March by the New York City Mayor’s Office of Equity & Racial Justice. Most families strain to afford basic costs like housing, transportation, childcare, food and savings. Three-quarters of Latino New Yorkers struggle to afford these fundamental necessities, compared to one-third of white New Yorkers. These are not individual failures; these are systemic issues.

So what do we do about an economy where a breakfast staple like juice [costs $9 per carton](https://www.keyfood.com/search/products?q=orange%20juice&productId=016300168203&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and such basics are out of reach for more than half of the city’s population?

Workforce development is a partial answer. [New York City’s $640 million workforce development system](https://nycetc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Putting-Our-Dollars-to-Work%5FMarch-2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is designed to build shared prosperity for residents and employers alike. Broadly overseen by the Mayor’s Office of Talent and Workforce Development, it is a complex network of public, private and nonprofit actors that coordinate to recruit, train and place youth and adult job seekers in local jobs.

The system serves hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers each year, placing them in roles in health care, technology, sustainable infrastructure and more — a significant feat in a city where [nearly one-fifth of adults over 25 lack a high school diploma or equivalency](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewyork/PST120224?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Starting wages, however, can be low, and retention rates can be uneven.

The problem is that the traditional “pathways” model of workforce development on which the system is built — in which workers must climb a ladder to economic security — relies on precarious employment and volatile earnings, reinforcing asset poverty. Earnings do not translate to wealth, so workers see temporary gains rather than durable assets.

This volatility plays out along racial lines. In 2023, the [median incomes for white and Black New Yorkers](https://www.neilsberg.com/insights/new-york-ny-median-household-income-by-race/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) were approximately $108,000 and $60,000, respectively. At the wage level, [the Black-white gap was $16 per hour](https://www.nationalequityatlas.org/indicators/wages-median?geo=07000000003651000&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 2022\. Even among the City’s municipal workforce, where greater parity might be expected, disparities still exist, [with workers of color earning 84 cents per dollar compared to white workers](https://council.nyc.gov/data/wp-content/uploads/sites/73/2024/04/PayDisparitiesReport2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Consequently, racial wealth disparities are compounded and vast. Compared to white New Yorkers, [whose median wealth is $320,000](https://robinhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/PT%5FRacial%5FWealth-Gap%5F1.21%5Frev%5FFINAL.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Black residents hold a median $2,800 in wealth; for Latino New Yorkers, the median is $0\. A system that targets income alone is insufficient to bring asset equity to New Yorkers.

Yet the current workforce development system measures its success in wages, not wealth. It proposes that, through the traditional model, individuals will access jobs with family-sustaining wages, benefits and advancement opportunities.

But prosperity implies more than a paycheck. It points to a more durable construct — one that can fundamentally reshape an individual’s life from living on the margins to living abundantly. While a worker’s earnings can transform their life and should not be dismissed, income is highly volatile — especially in this increasingly unsettled economy — and therefore cannot provide lasting economic security. The traditional model of employer-centered workforce development does little to combat racialized asset poverty.

In today’s employer-demand-driven model, wages are consumed by basic needs, and workers become asset-poor and unable to withstand financial shocks or achieve intergenerational wealth. Too often, workers become chronically reliant on the workforce system for entry-level employment, reentering the cycle of precarity and asset poverty. This model cannot close racial wealth gaps.

Focusing on wealth pathways would mean taking a different approach — aligning workforce development to wealth as an outcome.

A home is the greatest asset most individuals will own in their lifetime, but only one-quarter of Black and less than one-fifth of Latino New Yorkers own their homes, [compared to nearly half of white New Yorkers](https://robinhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/PT%5FRacial%5FWealth-Gap%5F1.21%5Frev%5FFINAL.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Homeownership should not be a pipe dream for New Yorkers of color. A focus on wealth pathways would incentivize employers to adopt [evidence-based strategies to increase homeownership](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/black-homeownership-framework.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including automated savings, homeowner education and down-payment assistance programs.

This approach also expands access to employment benefits like [retirement accounts and life insurance policies](https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/how-states-and-cities-can-support-wealth-building-next-generation-black-families?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Workforce developers should prioritize filling demand for employers who provide the conditions for asset-building, while the City should encourage businesses to offer financial assets. Shared prosperity should be more than a policy slogan.

Simultaneously, government should focus on addressing inequitable asset markets that, both currently and historically, have acted as barriers to wealth-building for people of color. This includes [greater support for community development financial institutions (CDFIs) and Black-led banks and credit unions](https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/significantly-increase-access-capital-communities-color-we-need-support-black-banks-and-all-cdfis?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which are linked to increased Black wealth-building.

These tools would work in support of, not simply in addition to, workforce development outcomes.

As a homegrown strategy, New York City’s [Workforce Data Portal](https://workforcedata.nyc.gov/en?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is a ready-made foundation for tracking wealth outcomes. Developed by the [Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity](https://www.nyc.gov/site/opportunity/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the portal standardizes and makes public workforce development outcomes ranging from clients served to full-time placements, credential attainment and job continuity after two years. 

While it is a sophisticated workforce measurement system, the portal primarily tracks labor-market outcomes rather than wealth outcomes. Expanding the Workforce Data Portal to include measures of financial security and asset accumulation would allow the City to assess whether workforce investments are producing durable economic mobility rather than temporary earnings gains for New Yorkers of color.

Connecticut’s [Wealth Accelerator](https://www.wealthacceleratorct.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)mirrors what an asset-forward strategy could resemble, albeit on a smaller scale. The Wealth Accelerator mobilizes resources toward the common goal of closing racial wealth gaps for low- and moderate-income families by scaling wealth-building solutions. Through its Cash Catalyst, the program’s signature $500,000 Baby Bond initiative, the Wealth Accelerator is testing what it means to provide assets alongside social services — an approach that flips the pathways model on its head.

At present, several national workforce organizations, including [Jobs for the Future](https://www.jff.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Shift Work Forward](https://shiftworkforward.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), have been working with cities to define quality jobs and partner with employers that provide competitive pay, benefits and advancement opportunities. New York City could be at the forefront of defining quality jobs as those that not only provide short-term gains but build long-term asset pathways such as retirement contributions, emergency savings programs, homeownership assistance and employee ownership opportunities. Closing racial wealth gaps will require incentivizing employers to provide jobs that not only *lead* to wealth pathways, but *are* pathways to economic security.

The True Cost of Living in New York City makes it evident that income isn’t enough. To truly make it in this city requires maintaining a baseline savings rate that breaks the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle and allows New Yorkers to begin building a financial buffer.

[Even as some workforce leaders have begun to question the mayor’s economic strategy](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/nyregion/mamdani-edc-economy-nyc.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), New York City has an opportunity. Mamdani, still early in his first term, appointed a deputy mayor for economic justice — the first role of its kind in New York City. Appointee Julie Su’s remit is to measurably improve the lives of New Yorkers and oversee the Mayor’s Office of Talent and Workforce Development, among other responsibilities. Her resume includes serving as the acting secretary of labor in the Biden administration.

Among her priorities, Su has listed promoting worker and consumer protections, increasing access to childcare and transportation, and making sure working-class New Yorkers can enjoy the city’s cultural assets. While these priorities are important, they overlook a key institution: Reforming the City’s misaligned workforce development system must be a priority if the administration is to ensure that basic ease is not a luxury.

New Yorkers shouldn’t just tread water. Government needs to help them swim.
### The Job That's Taking Over New York City
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/home-care-job-growth-problems-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T16:32:04.000Z
When The New York Times interviewed random commuters at Columbus Circle in 2024 (for [a story](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/13/nyregion/migrant-children-selling-candy-subway-laws.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) about children selling candy in the subway) two out of the three people quoted happened to have the same occupation. It was a telling coincidence, because they were both home health aides — the low-paid, mostly taxpayer-financed jobs that are taking over New York City's economy.

Employment in the city's home care industry has [more than doubled](https://data.bls.gov/multi-screen?survey=sm&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) over the past decade to 546,000\. It now accounts for one in nine members of the workforce. Home health aides have become by far the most common occupation in New York, outnumbering retail clerks by roughly three-to-one.

Many of these aides unquestionably do vital work. Their help with the basic daily tasks of the elderly and infirm — helping them bathe, eat, go to the bathroom, take their medications, get out of bed — makes it possible for thousands of New Yorkers to survive outside of institutions.

Yet over the past decade, the ranks of home health aides in New York City have ballooned out of all proportion to the size of New York's elderly population, or any other available benchmark of need.

From 2014 to 2024, the number of city residents aged 65 or older grew by 35%, according to the Census Bureau. Over the same period, the city's home health workforce soared by 131%, or almost four times as fast, [according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics](https://data.bls.gov/multi-screen?survey=sm&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Is that because all those aging New Yorkers needed disproportionately that much more help at home? Seems unlikely.

Home care has been growing in the rest of the country, too, but at nowhere near the same rate. As of this year, New York City's home care industry employs 361 workers for every 1,000 residents over 65\. The national average is 88\. 

There's no obvious reason why the city's population would need such a disproportionate level of help. According to the Census Bureau, the share of the city's population who are over 65, and the share of under-65 people with disabilities, are both lower than the norm.

These statistics should set off two sets of alarm bells for New York's leaders.

First, they raise obvious concern that Medicaid, the state-run health plan that pays for most home care, is being overused, abused or defrauded — at considerable cost to taxpayers. Non-institutional long-term care, which is what home health aides represent, is the fastest-growing expense for Medicaid. It currently accounts for roughly one-third of New York's $111 billion Medicaid budget, which is by far the costliest in the U.S. on a per-capita basis.

Albany leaders sometimes defend this spending as a worthwhile investment to keep disabled people in the community — but it doesn't seem to be working. As of 2024, 2.6% of elderly New York City residents lived in nursing homes. The national rate is 2.0%.

The second cause for alarm is what the job numbers reveal about the city's economy. Home health has accounted for more than half of its employment growth since 2014 and *all* of its net growth since 2019\. The seemingly bottomless supply of these low-paying jobs has kept the unemployment rate down, but it also helps to explain why inflation-adjusted average wages have been dropping in the city since the pandemic, even as they have improved nationwide.

The broader field of healthcare has traditionally been a strong point for the city and its economy. A concentration of world-renowned hospitals and medical schools have pioneered life-saving breakthroughs while also supporting thousands of jobs for doctors, nurses and other professionals who typically command high salaries. They also have helped make New York City, for many, a nice place to retire. Although [hospital employment](https://data.bls.gov/multi-screen?survey=sm&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) dipped during the pandemic, it now stands 16% higher than in 2019, compared to a mere 4% increase for all categories of employment.

Yet the rebound for hospitals pales in comparison to the 54% growth in home care jobs since 2019\. For these workers, wages lie at the other end of the spectrum — [typically about $20 ](https://data.bls.gov/oes/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/area/3600000/2025)an hour, or $3 above the minimum.

The conditions in these jobs can be challenging. In some cases, aides work 24-hour shifts but get paid for only 13, on the assumption that they are sleeping or eating for the rest of the time. Aides and activists recently staged a [hunger strike in support of a City Council bill](https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/04/16/hunger-strike-home-care-24-hour-menin-council-labor-protections/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that would ban that unusual policy. Critics warned that such a ban would run afoul of state and federal payment policies, and that attempting to enforce it could strand clients without necessary care.

At the same time, most home care jobs require [minimal training](https://www.health.ny.gov/facilities/home%5Fcare/professional.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and no prior experience, making them an attractive option — or at least a viable option — for recent immigrants and others with limited education or English skills.

What is going on? Why is this sector within a sector surging, and what might be done to correct this problematic shift in the city's economy?

The answers trace largely to Medicaid policies set in Albany. 

In the middle of the past decade, during former Gov. Andrew Cuomo's first term, the state made two big choices that compounded the state's already heavy investment in home care.

First, it put Medicaid home care mostly under the control of companies known as [managed long-term care plans](https://www.health.ny.gov/health%5Fcare/managed%5Fcare/mltc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which were supposed to find efficiencies but also had a financial incentive to boost enrollment.

Second, the state loosened the eligibility rules for an option known as the [Consumer-Directed Personal Assistance Program](https://www.health.ny.gov/health%5Fcare/medicaid/program/longterm/cdpap/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), CDPAP, in which disabled people could directly hire their own caregivers, including friends and family members, instead of going through an agency. Officials believed this would save money compared to traditional home care, but it proved to be unexpectedly popular.

These changes to CDPAP triggered the formation of hundreds of businesses known as "fiscal intermediaries," which handled payroll processing for recipients. These companies recruited customers with advertising on subways and television and helped them sign up for Medicaid coverage. Enrollment and spending [boomed](https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/medicaid-benefit-doubles-in-4-years/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

State officials sought to corral the program, but their efforts were sporadic and halting. They tried to restrict the advertising, only to be [sued in federal court](https://www.nyhealthlawblog.com/2018/11/14/newly-enacted-consumer-directed-personal-assistance-program-advertisement-regulation-challenged-in-federal-court/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). They tightened eligibility rules, only to have the federal government [freeze those reforms ](https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/beyond-a-bailout-new-york-needs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)during the pandemic emergency. 

After Gov. Kathy Hochul took over, she vowed to tackle what she [described as a "racket."](https://homehealthcarenews.com/2024/07/new-york-governor-kathy-hochul-calls-states-self-directed-care-program-a-racket/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Her solution was to [consolidate CDPAP](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-next-steps-plans-strengthen-home-care-services-new-yorkers?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) under a single statewide fiscal intermediary. While this held the promise of administrative efficiency, it also put hundreds of thousands of caregivers under the auspices of a single employer. This paved the way for them[ to be organized](https://prod.crainsnewyork.com/health-pulse/1199seiu-begins-organizing-cdpap-workers?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by the powerful union 1199 SEIU, which will now have a vested interest in seeing the program grow further.

The outlier scale of New York's home care has caught the attention of the Trump administration, which sees it as an example of broader fraud, waste and abuse in Medicaid. A federal crackdown on the program may soon force a reckoning in Albany.

For now, though, many city and state policymakers remain complacent, if not outright oblivious, about this massive and costly conundrum.

The New York Caring Majority, which advocates on behalf of disabled people and their caregivers, [asserts](https://www.nycaringmajority.org/our-campaign?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that New York's home care industry has "the worst worker shortage in the U.S." – even as the city's per capita employment level is more than four times the national average.

Scholars from Manhattan's Weill Cornell Medical School recently [published a study](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2849348?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#xd%5Fco%5Ff=ZGMyODZhYTYtN2ZiMS00NjE4LTkyNGQtNjFlNjY2MDQ4YTkw~) analyzing the "challenges accessing home care" among Medicaid beneficiaries in New York. The study deplored the "complexities" of the process without so much as mentioning, let alone explaining, the city's off-the-charts enrollment and employment levels.

A first step toward a more sustainable home care program would be understanding how the city came to be such an outlier. New York needs a clear-eyed analysis of who is getting which services and why, and how its rules and policies diverge from national norms.

The city's unhealthy overdependence on home health jobs is putting immense strain on taxpayers and distorting the city's economy while seemingly failing at its primary goal, which is to keep disabled people out of institutions. A city that counts on home health jobs for the majority of its employment growth is a city doomed to decline.

Until city and state leaders grapple with those realities, they cannot hope to change them.
### Whither Wall Street?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/wall-street-future-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:34:54.000Z
Just before the turn of the millennium, the then-mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, [announced](https://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/23/nyregion/city-and-state-agree-to-900-million-deal-to-keep-new-york-stock-exchange.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a “Christmas gift to the city”: a $900 million incentive package to the New York Stock Exchange. The deal was classic corporate socialism: an array of tax breaks as well as the purchase and transfer of a city block — part-occupied by a newly converted apartment building — so that the NYSE could build a supertall tower to expand its operations and stop [threatening to leave](https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/08/nyregion/stock-exchange-on-wall-street-offered-a-home-in-new-jersey.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for New Jersey. 

Giuliani was only the latest elected official to fret that without the aid of state capitalism, “Wall Street” would leave Wall Street. More than three decades earlier, then-Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and his brother, Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David, had demolished swathes of Lower Manhattan to build the Chase Manhattan Plaza as well as the World Trade Center and keep financial businesses downtown.

The NYSE deal fell through, and the trajectory of Wall Street continued along an inexorable long-term trend: slowly but surely, as everyone had feared, losing its share of national finance jobs and losing jobs to technology, too. The stock exchange, longtime symbol of Wall Street’s humanity, hosts just [one-tenth](https://nypost.com/2020/02/15/how-the-macho-nyse-trader-became-an-endangered-species/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of its pre-millennial 5,000-strong trading and broking [force,](https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-MBB-26315?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and its expansion last year — an electronic-only stock-trading exchange — was [in Texas](https://www.nyse.com/markets/nyse-texas?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

The weird thing, though, is that even as the decline unfolded, New Yorkers stopped noticing. New York’s future turned out fine, economically and fiscally. New York State felt confident enough in its position as a home to high-end jobs that, in 2021, under then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, it [sharply raised income taxes](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/nyregion/taxes-rich-budget-new-york.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on wealthy earners.

But an analysis of that history shows why things may not *stay* fine, and the economic and fiscal uncertainty isn’t limited to the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs. Rather, the danger is an intensification of what’s already been happening for decades, with or without AI. We shouldn’t fear the unknowable future, but the acceleration of the present.

### How we got here

Anyone worried about an AI-spurred jobs catastrophe coming to Wall Street — the city’s securities underwriting, trading, sales and investment sector — need only turn to the classified ads of the 1980s and 1990s New York Times Sunday “help wanted” sections to realize that we’ve already long had a hint of the Wall Street jobs catastrophe. In 1985, halfway through the Reagan-era “greed is good” decade that helped turn New York's fortunes from the 1970s fiscal bust, Wall Street was a growing industry, concentrated in New York. Local jobs in the securities industry had nearly doubled since 1973, from 74,500 to 130,000, and [comprised](https://www.nysenate.gov/sites/default/files/articles/attachments/LanciaHandout.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) more than one-third of the nation’s share of such posts.

The industry always had its disproportionate share of Fifth and Park Avenue dwellers, but the classified ads demonstrate an egalitarianism, too. To staff an industry still dependent on in-person stock and bond trades as well as reams of paper to record those trades and transfers as well as the borrowing and lending that backed them, column after column of [ads](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1985/09/01/issue.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) called for margin clerks, vault clerks, head runners, assistant head runners, payroll clerks, teletype operators. Applicants who wanted to start at the bottom and work their way up could join stockbroker-trainee programs, spending their days dialing for clients.

No, the highest-paid jobs — scarce positions at Goldman, Sachs or J.P. Morgan & Co., or at a boutique firm — weren’t advertised in the newspaper; they recruited directly from elite colleges and family connections. But there was work [for everyone,](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/2000/09/03/issue.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from new-account specialists to wire clerks. The mean annual bonus [was](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/press/pdf/bonus%5Fchart%5F2007.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) $13,970 — about $44,100 in today’s dollars.

By the turn of the millennium, the Wall Street jobs roster continued to expand, to a peak 200,300 positions in 2000\. But the city was fast losing its share of industry jobs, down to below a quarter of the national tally. [Trading jobs](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/markstehli%5Fbank-of-america-inks-550k-sf-lease-at-bgo-activity-7155648175876313090-QHH9?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) expanded in New Jersey and Connecticut. [Discount-brokerage firms](https://nypost.com/2026/04/09/us-news/these-companies-have-shifted-their-headquarters-out-of-california/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), replacing full-service brokers, expanded in California and later, in Texas.

The jobs the city was losing were mostly in the middle or at the bottom of the industry. The average bonus, by then, was $100,530 — $198,300 in today’s dollars. Wall Street still employed tens of thousands of middle-class brokers, traders, and support workers. But in New York, it was mostly growing at the top: a relatively few people with ever more advanced educations, or proven skills at quantitative analysis, were making ever more money.

After the tech-bubble burst that year, and after terrorists attacked Lower Manhattan the following year, Wall Street’s local middle-class jobs base never really recovered. New York City shed industry jobs far faster than the country as a whole — losing 23% of its peak-year industry jobs by 2003, compared to 9.8% nationwide over the same period. Though some hedge funds were opening or expanding offices in Connecticut, the jobs that vanished from Manhattan were still mostly not the top jobs, but middle-class and working-class jobs: Gordon Gekko kept his post, but Bud Fox didn’t.

For a while, investment firms moved some of these middle-class posts to cheaper New Jersey and Connecticut, building new satellites in Jersey City, for example. Connecticut’s securities industry continued to grow through 2011, when it reached a peak of 26,500, and New Jersey’s grew through 2007, when it reached a peak of 59,600 — together, gains of more than 40,000 relative to the early 1990s. But that regional transfer of jobs largely stopped after the global financial crisis. Many middle-class financial jobs in the region simply disappeared, automated away: Few firms need floor runners anymore, and few people call a stockbroker to make a trade. 

Today, Wall Street is enjoying [record profits](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/press/pdf/securities-industry-employment-and-profits.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — $65.1 billion in 2025 (on an inflation-adjusted basis, profits were still higher just before the financial crisis). A volatile world has kept revenues from trading stocks, bonds and derivatives robust; borrowing, whether in the public or private sector, is at record highs; and nosebleed stock markets — albeit concentrated among a few tech companies — are hospitable to initial public offerings. And though traditional financiers [have viewed](https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/04/brian-armstrong-crypto-regulation-00949711?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) cryptocurrency with [concern](https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/29/dimon-jpmorgan-crypto-banks-coinbase-armstrong-00942998?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), so far, it hasn’t proven a formidable competitor to stocks and bonds.

But a nearly two-decade-long bull run — it's been a long time since 2008 — hasn't translated into impressive employment numbers for New York. It took until 2024 for New York’s securities industry to surpass its local jobs peak of nearly a quarter-century before. Today, employment stands at 207,400, about 3.1% above its millennial peak, and now just 18% of the national share of such jobs, barely half of its mid-1980s share.

The jobs that remain here are increasingly the well-compensated positions. The average Wall Street [bonus](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/press/pdf/new-york-city-securities-industry-bonus-pool.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) last year, out of a 2025 pool of $49.2 billion, another nominal record, was [$246,900](https://www.osc.ny.gov/press/releases/2026/03/dinapoli-246900-average-bonus-on-wall-street-up-6-percent-in-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In 2024, the average annual salary in the industry, just above half a million dollars, was nearly five times the average private-sector wage in the city, the state’s comptroller [reminds us,](https://www.osc.ny.gov/osdc/reports/nyc-sectors/securities-sector?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) having more than doubled (in nominal terms) since 2000; the average wage citywide has risen slightly less, thanks in part to mandated increases in the minimum wage. 

### How Wall Street’s makeup changed, and what it means

That Wall Street steadily became more exclusive, and better-paying, helps explain why New York City and State government barely noticed that the industry has hardly created any new local jobs in a quarter century. Though fewer people are needed to generate record profits, the tax revenues have kept pouring in.

The industry’s share of the economy and the state and city budget remains outsized. Last year, though comprising just 2.7% and 4.9% of private-sector jobs in the city and state respectively, the securities industry generated 15.2% and 22.5% of wages, says [Sifma](https://www.sifma.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/2026-The-Street-the-City-and-the-State.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the securities industry and financial markets trade group. 

According to my calculations based on state-comptroller data, Wall Street’s share of city tax revenues has held steady since the late 1990s, at an average of about 7.3% over the past three years, or about $5.6 billion annually. Wall Street’s share of state tax revenues, however, has risen, to about 21.7% of state tax revenues over the past three years — an average of $24.3 billion annually — up from about 17.5% around the turn of the millennium. (The city, with its property-tax base, is less directly vulnerable to a Wall Street downturn than is the state, which relies more on the income tax.)

Another reason why New York barely noticed this wan Wall Street jobs recovery, compared to the national picture, is that the ever-higher-paid Wall Street workers freely spend their money. Sifma estimates that every direct job on Wall Street [supports](https://www.sifma.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/2026-The-Street-the-City-and-the-State.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) two more jobs within the state, from restaurant workers to private-school administrators to real-estate agents.

Finally, New York barely noticed Wall Street’s stall-out because over the past quarter-century, New York succeeded in attracting well-paying jobs in other professions, mostly tech, both on purpose and by accident. The city more or less stumbled across a robust tech industry, as startups populated the lower half of Manhattan’s west side, attracted to sturdy old buildings as they took advantage of the city’s advertising industry and other legacy expertise. Tech employment [well more than doubled](https://www.technyc.org/nyc-tech-snapshot-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#jobs) over the past decade and a half, to more than 203,800 workers. In less well-paying jobs, New York has added tens of thousands of dollars in low-paying healthcare jobs, subsidized with the tax dollars generated by Wall Street. 

### Short the future?

Why worry now, then? Predictions of high finance shrinking as a share of the economy, whether from terror risk after September 2001 or growing street disorder after June 2020, soaring taxes and real-estate costs, have for decades come to nothing. Many of the jobs left, sure, but the money stayed. The new democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, doesn’t trouble himself as Giuliani once did that investment and trading firms might leave the city. When, in February, American Express, the global payments firm, [announced ](https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/newsroom/articles/colleagues-and-culture/amex-build-new-state-of-the-art-global-headquarters-new-york.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)a new headquarters building for 10,000 people at the World Trade Center site, the mayor concentrated his remarks on how the tower’s construction would generate “good union jobs,” rather than on how the company would employ finance workers in the tower itself. 

The city and state face two risks, though. The first is that during the next recession — and one is [overdue](https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/30/economy/recession-economy-timing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — Wall Street won’t confine its job-shedding to what’s left of middle-income and upper-middle-income jobs. Firms would target higher-end jobs, too, for transfer or elimination. 

This possibility isn’t so much a wild doom-and-gloom prediction as it is a slowly unfolding reality. In the past half-decade, firms from [JPMorgan Chase](https://nypost.com/2025/09/29/us-news/jpmorgan-chase-now-employs-more-workers-in-texas-than-ny-top-city-biz-advocate-calls-it-scary-development/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to [Goldman](https://www.goldmansachs.com/pressroom/press-releases/2025/gs-unveils-fresh-look-inside-northend-campus?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Sachs to [Apollo](https://nypost.com/2026/05/06/business/wall-street-giant-apollo-aims-to-open-second-headquarters-outside-nyc-in-latest-fallout-from-mamdanis-war-on-the-wealthy/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have expanded not in New York, but in [Florida](https://nypost.com/2019/09/12/carl-icahn-moving-hedge-fund-to-miami-whether-his-workers-like-it-or-not/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and Texas. One change from previous expansions outside of New York: this time around, Goldman is among the firms that [wants top-level directors](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-06/goldman-gives-managers-a-choice-dallas-salt-lake-city-or-leave?embedded-checkout=true&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — not all, of course, but some — to base themselves in Texas.

Indeed, Texas is becoming perilously close, from New York’s perspective, to reaching a self-perpetuating point where an agglomeration of finance jobs attracts even more and better finance jobs. Over the decade to 2025, Texas created 30,100 jobs in the securities industry — a 45.5% increase — outpacing New York’s 20,800 new jobs. As Sifma notes, the state, now with 8.3% of industry jobs, is “becoming a major financial hub,” already home to the second most Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. behind California. The new Texas Stock Exchange, with investment from major players such as JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock, [will soon start luring](https://pfnyc.org/research/texas-s-competitive-edge?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) IPOs — and potentially bank-led underwriting and sales jobs, as well.

Texas' lack of personal-income tax is “especially alluring to high earners,” the trade group observes, in contrast to New York, “one of the few states to raise taxes in 2021.” As E.J. McMahon [notes,](https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/the-limits-of-new-yorks-tax-the-rich-policy-2.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) top earners in the state now face the highest tax burden they have in four decades, when the financial sector began to take off. Most highly paid executives and traders may not have minded the Cuomo-era state income tax hikes on the rich a half-decade ago, and may not even mind that much now, when overall revenues are still growing. In an industrywide retrenchment, they may mind more.

The second risk is that as this higher-end jobs transfer happens, New York’s job growth in its other professional industries slumps. This possibility, too, isn’t a prediction but a reality: The city [lost](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/exec26/mm5-26.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 57,300 private-sector jobs in the year through March, including 5,800 professional and business jobs. As growth in the tech and other industries slows or reverses, whether because of AI or because a debt-driven, consumer-dependent economy [is mostly spent out](https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/americans-have-more-credit-card-debt-than-ever/f71236fd-849e-46eb-8817-6b426bc4cf21?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), what industry will replace it? No industry comes close to paying what Wall Street pays: the average tech job pays $135,000.

### What if the Masters of the Universe depart?

What would New York look like if its well-paid Wall Street jobs base permanently shrank? The city would be more equal, sure — but not in a good way, at least not for many people and interest groups who have grown accustomed to a permanent regime of state and city budget largesse funded by finance. In current dollars, New York City’s 1985 spending [was](https://www.ibo.nyc.gov/content/data-center?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) about $59.3 billion; the city, this year, [will spend ](https://www.city-journal.org/article/zohran-mamdani-budget-taxes-unions-welfare?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)$125.8 billion. High-paying job losses would also mean revenue losses for government. Absent drastic spending cuts both to union-worker compensation and to redistributive programs such as record homeless-services spending — cuts for which the state and city have never had a political appetite — the state and city would have to raise taxes on middle-class earners, including homeowners.

New York City and State did not create the four-decades-long-and-running financial-markets boom that began in the 1980s and contributed so much to its recovery from its 1970s near-bankruptcy. But the difference between then and now is that back then, finance had no choice but to be in New York, despite the city’s crime and quality-of-life woes. Similarly, New York has no control over the trajectory of financial markets, or of technology. If AI results in permanent job cuts [in finance](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/business/ai-job-cuts-wall-street.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and elsewhere — still an unknown — New York City cannot stop that process. The only thing the city can choose, or not, is its own complacency.
### New York City’s Job Growth Has a Quality Problem
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-job-quality-problem/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T16:32:29.000Z
The numbers are so large that one can lose perspective: There are nearly [4.9 million jobs based in New York City](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/newsletter/new-york-by-the-numbers-monthly-economic-and-fiscal-outlook-no-110-february-2026/?emci=b19dc444-2c08-f111-832e-0022482a9733&emdi=d9d5f2ba-5b08-f111-832e-0022482a9733&ceid=6228085&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), of which about 4.2 million are in the private sector. Yet in 2025, the city only added [33,400 new private-sector jobs](https://edc.nyc/sites/default/files/2026-01/NYCEDC-NYC-Economic-Snapshot-January-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a rate of growth that amounts to 0.8%. While this rate is better than the [national gain of 0.3% for the same period](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/what-is-going-on-with-nyc-jobs/?emci=693dd8e5-3a13-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&emdi=b67b1170-4713-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&ceid=6228085&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), it was driven entirely by a single sector: health care and social assistance. Further, through the first half of 2025, there were [4,600 fewer businesses](https://edc.nyc/sites/default/files/2026-01/NYCEDC-NYC-Economic-Snapshot-January-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) than the previous year, accompanied by the lowest business formation for a quarter in five years.

This is a story that’s barely told, but it could shape the future of New York as much as any other. It’s imperative that we understand why the city’s job creation engine is sputtering and take decisive action to rev it up.

Anemic jobs growth and business contraction affect the City’s budget, restricting public service programs and funding for agencies through reduced tax revenues. It also makes it harder for current residents to find new jobs that allow them to afford living here, and prevents potential residents from finding gainful employment sufficient to move here. The subsequent population stagnation further restricts business formation, tax revenues and the City budget.

Look past the headline jobs numbers, and the story becomes even more worrisome. While New York City has long been known as the finance capital of the world, it has also been the home of a diverse collection of people and jobs in a wide range of sectors. Yet in recent years, job growth in the metro area has been concentrated in just a handful of industries: health care, social services, and leisure and hospitality.

Remove the health care and social assistance sector, and employment in the city is [at its lowest level since mid-2022](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/what-is-going-on-with-nyc-jobs/?emci=693dd8e5-3a13-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&emdi=b67b1170-4713-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&ceid=6228085&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

In fact, remove just the health care and social assistance sector from the picture, and New York City’s job growth in 2025 was actually negative. Nearly all new jobs in the region have been home health care aides, a role that tends to pay less and provide few benefits. An overreliance on such a narrow slice of work makes the city particularly vulnerable to economic shocks or pullbacks in these industries.

How serious is the problem, really, and what should we do about it?

The centrality of health jobs to the economy isn’t a new phenomenon. Nearly all job growth in New York City since the COVID-19 pandemic has been in the health sector. If you remove the 253,000 net new jobs added to the city’s care workforce between early 2020 and August 2025, as a whole, the city’s private sector lost jobs.

[Analysis by the City’s Economic Development Corporation](https://edc.nyc/sites/default/files/2025-12/NYCEDC-2025-State-of-NYC-Economy%5F12-12-2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) fleshes out the picture, showing that postpandemic job growth has concentrated almost entirely in low-wage jobs. This is in stark contrast to previous job growth, which was more balanced with mid- and high-wage jobs.

While there is an argument that any employment is better than unemployment, many of the positions that make up care economy jobs are not what the Office of the Comptroller itself classifies as “good jobs.”

In May 2025, then-City Comptroller Brad Lander [released a report](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/the-state-of-job-quality-in-new-york-city/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) containing a rubric for judging the quality of a job based on four conditions: whether the job 1.) pays a living wage, 2.) offers full-time and year-round employment, 3.) provides employer-sponsored health insurance, and 4.) avoids physically demanding or hazardous conditions unless those conditions are offset by higher pay. The idea is that a job meeting these criteria is a “good job” in that it at least “meets a basic set of conditions for economic security and workplace standards.” Based on these criteria, only one-third of New York City residents have been working in good jobs over the past few years.

The comptroller’s report said this about the types of health care and social assistance jobs driving employment growth: “Despite employing hundreds of thousands of workers, these occupations offer minimal access to living wages, benefits, or year-round stability. Their persistently low performance underscores how many of the city’s essential workers remain trapped in low-quality employment.”

The sectors with the lowest share of good jobs, according to Lander? Personal care, food preparation and serving, and health care support. Two of those three are care-economy jobs, representing over 350,000 New York City workers today, with an average share of good jobs around 5%.

All this means that the majority of new jobs added since 2020, and a growing proportion of the city’s overall job base, are jobs of poor quality by the Comptroller’s Office standards.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that care work is not valuable work (in fact, it fulfills some of the most valuable needs for society), nor does it mean that the City should discourage job growth in these sectors. It simply means New York should think and act strategically to diversify job growth by nurturing and attracting employers that complement the growth in the care economy. At the same time, reforms should be pursued to make health care and social assistance jobs more desirable and financially rewarding.

### How does job growth concentrating in care work affect the City’s finances?

On the surface, it’s apparent why job growth concentrating in low-paying sectors would be bad for the City’s budget. Less income for residents means less revenue from income taxes collected and less disposable income to be spent on consumption, which means less sales-tax revenue. In fact, personal income-tax revenue is forecast to be among the [slowest-growing tax revenue sources](https://www.ibo.nyc.gov/content/publications/2025-december-analysis-of-the-november-2025-financial-plan?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for New York City over the next few years.

But the problem goes even deeper than that.

Not only are the industries where job growth has occurred in recent years the ones providing fewer benefits, but a large portion of these jobs also provide an income below the poverty line ([just above $47,000 in 2023](https://robinhood.org/news/robin-hood-annual-poverty-tracker-report-shows-25-overall-poverty-rate-in-new-york-city-climbing-beyond-record-highs-observed-in-2022/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), by Robin Hood’s measure). The combination of few benefits and low pay means that the government itself must often step in to both provide workers’ health insurance and help cover the cost of living. Programs like CityFHEPS (the City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement), which provide housing vouchers for eligible residents, cost the City [upward of $1 billion in 2025](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/nyregion/mamdani-budget-cuts.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and are only growing.

The municipal budget gets constrained on both ends, with lower income-tax receipts from workers who earn less and higher safety-net expenditures for workers who can’t afford to live in the city without assistance.

While many of these low-income workers may receive their health insurance from Medicaid or through the Affordable Care Act, where the federal government covers part or all of the cost, the State and City chip in too. With the federal government abdicating safety-net funding in recent years, the financial burden for the City is likely to increase.

### What can New York do to attract better and more diverse jobs?

Not all is doom and gloom for the city’s labor market. The metro area still holds several key advantages that can be utilized to attract more jobs. These include a world-leading financial system with plenty of capital ready to invest, world-class research universities, a top-tier creative and media industry ecosystem and an enormous, growing market for climate and transportation infrastructure. New York should establish new public initiatives to deploy these structural advantages in order to diversify and expand the jobs base.

These new initiatives could follow the example of the [Economic Mobility Networks](https://edc.nyc/press-release/nycedc-launches-first-ever-economic-mobility-networks-connect-sunset-park-hunts-point?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) program launched by the City’s Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) in 2025\. Worryingly, we are now four months into the Mamdani administration without a new head for NYCEDC being appointed by the mayor, [nor a detailed jobs plan](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/nyregion/mamdani-jobs-nyc.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); appointing an effective leader here would help direct the city’s economic growth. Additional programs launched by City government, in partnership with both private and public organizations, should focus on the following areas: 

**Leading in tech and applied AI**

The technology sector sits among the highest-income employment in New York City’s labor market, and the funding spigot has been on full blast. As [NYCEDC’s State of the Economy 2025 report](https://edc.nyc/sites/default/files/2025-12/NYCEDC-2025-State-of-NYC-Economy%5F12-12-2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) puts it, “New York City-based companies raised $67 billion in venture capital funding from 2022-2024 — 11.0% of nationwide funding. … The number of Tech establishments rose 15.8% from 2022 to 2024, during which time the number of establishments in the private sector grew by only 2.0%.”

A note of caution here: This tremendous capital growth in the city’s tech sector has not been matched by labor growth. Employment in tech has stagnated since the COVID-19 pandemic. The City needs to prioritize attracting and developing more of these high-paying, high-benefit, high-productivity jobs so that, as the sector’s capital funding grows, so does the opportunity for residents to work in tech.

One great example is [AI Nexus](https://edc.nyc/program/nyc-ai-nexus?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a partnership between NYCEDC and private companies to locate startup accelerators here and expand the region’s AI business ecosystem. New York should pull all its levers to attract employment in tech, from expanding university-industry partnerships like Cornell Tech to working with federal offices to build out targeted high-skill visa programs.

**Growing the life-sciences sector**

Just like the tech sector, life sciences has seen a huge boom in investment and new businesses but little accompanying job growth since 2022\. NYCEDC and local universities have been investing in the sector through programs like The Science Park and Research Campus (SPARC) at Kips Bay.

[SPARC](https://edc.nyc/project/sparc-kips-bay?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is a full city block being converted into a life-sciences jobs and education campus combining CUNY colleges with private biotech towers. Backed by $1.6 billion in City and State funds and $2 billion in private investment, the project is expected to generate $42 billion in economic impact over 30 years. If things go as hoped, the public investment for this project will be returned by just over one year of the expected impact.

New York City must continue supporting its university research centers and advocate for funds from the State while seeking new sources to replace federal funding cuts. Assisting the development of new labs and research centers and incentivizing researchers to relocate to the city can accelerate workforce development here.

**Building the green economy**

Another potential opportunity is in climate technologies, a fast-growing sector that will provide significant investment and employment opportunities for years to come. Just as with the above sectors, the trend in climate tech has been a growth of funding while job growth has stagnated. Recent federal funding cuts and regulatory changes by the Trump administration also present significant headwinds for green technologies.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard project is one example in this space of combining new technology with climate-focused initiatives, such as [Blue Highways](https://edc.nyc/press-release/nycedc-nyc-dot-launch-blue-highways-action-plan?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), to transform land use and create new jobs. [Blue Highways](https://edc.nyc/blue-highways?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) activates the waterfront for sustainable logistics and manufacturing, making New York City more resilient to supply-chain disruptions and tapping into the city’s origins as a port town. Rebuilding New York City’s shipping and manufacturing industries could create thousands of middle-income jobs in the trades while also providing clean energy and a resilient supply chain.

While tech, life sciences and climate technology represent a small share of New York’s GDP today, [they are leaders in driving the city’s growth](https://edc.nyc/sites/default/files/2025-12/NYCEDC-2025-State-of-NYC-Economy%5F12-12-2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Ultimately, the City will have to pursue all these initiatives on a much grander scale to build a labor force with higher-quality jobs. The good news is that money poured into such job creation programs frequently returns multiple times the investment.

While pursuing these new types of work, the City should not disregard or discourage care-economy or tourist-economy job growth, or growth in any other sector with lower-wage jobs. The economy needs to be well-rounded, with a wide range of opportunities for people with different skill sets and backgrounds. But today, the balance is out of whack. To continue funding safety-net programs for lower-income New Yorkers and guard against economic shocks, it’s necessary to nurture more businesses and industries with a higher concentration of higher-income opportunities.
### A Bolder Development Strategy for a Crowded New York
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-joint-developments-public-land-housing/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T16:36:53.000Z
During his campaign for mayor last year, [Zohran Mamdani focused on housing](https://www.zohranfornyc.com/policies/housing-by-and-for-new-york?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), emphasizing the importance of adding supply to address the city’s punishing rents. His emphasis responded to a real problem: More [than a quarter of city renter households](https://censusreporter.org/data/table/?table=B25140&geo%5Fids=16000US3651000&primary%5Fgeo%5Fid=16000US3651000&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#valueType%7Cestimate) — more than 600,000 of them — spend more than 50% of their incomes on housing costs. An additional 200,000 households that own their homes suffer similar burdens.

In response, Mamdani promised to add 200,000 publicly subsidized, rent-stabilized homes within 10 years, while also [increasing “zoned capacity”](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08854122231166961?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with the goal of encouraging market-rate development, following in the footsteps of [recent large-scale upzonings, like that of Gowanus](https://www.urban.org/research/publication/how-big-upzonings-affect-housing-supply?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Brooklyn. His theory? Adding [more housing would make homes more affordable](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10511482.2018.1476899?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a concept well supported by reams of research and the real-world experience of cities like Austin and Minneapolis.

One key mechanism Mayor Mamdani recommends using in his [recently released housing plan](https://www.nyc.gov/content/dam/nycgov/nyc-main/pdf/2026/block-by-block-report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is activating [City-owned land](https://www.furmancenter.org/city-owned-and-leased-land/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — such as parcels [that are vacant](https://www.furmancenter.org/publication/what-new-interactive-maps-reveal-about-the-development-potential-of-new-york-citys-city-owned-land/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Using publicly owned land [can reduce overall project development costs](https://www.localhousingsolutions.org/policy-insights/social-housing-and-public-developer-models-in-the-us-and-beyond/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and ease approvals. Upon taking office, Mamdani established the [“LIFT” Task Force](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/executive-order-04?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), intended to identify sites appropriate to support 25,000 new homes within 10 years; the task force is expected to release its conclusions by July.

In a city where development opportunities are too few and far between, it makes absolute sense to pick this low-hanging fruit. But vacant lots should be only the beginning. The mayor’s housing plan recommends colocating housing with schools, libraries and other public assets. These sorts of redevelopments, which I refer to as joint developments, enable the financing of new public facilities while making way for housing units on top — a combination that can help address the City’s underfunded [facilities needs](https://investinlibraries.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) while providing homes for thousands of New Yorkers.

I conducted a sketch-level analysis, finding that such joint developments of housing plus schools, libraries, police stations and fire stations offer the opportunity to create between 20,000 and 34,000 new housing units over the next several years, equivalent to the [total number of housing units](https://www.bkreader.com/policy-government/nyc-sees-highest-housing-completions-in-nearly-60-years-but-permitting-declines-10355498?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) added citywide in 2024\. Joint developments, which the City has already begun to undertake, could thus be a major tool to generate more homes in the public arsenal.

### Recent joint developments in New York City

Joint developments on publicly owned land often involve demolishing an aging facility and replacing it with a new tower that includes a new public service at the base and apartments on top. Across the United States, [dozens of libraries have been redeveloped in this way](https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/aging-libraries-could-offer-cities-unique-opportunity-build-new-housing-while-improving?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in recent years.

New York City agencies have implemented such joint developments slowly but steadily. Examples of such combinations include:

- [The Inwood Library project](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/022-24/the-city-cuts-ribbon-inwood-unveiling-174-deeply-affordable-homes-new-state-of-the-art?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/0), completed in 2024: This 174-unit affordable housing tower in Upper Manhattan, which replaced an existing library, includes a library and prekindergarten.
- [The Solaire](https://www.thesolaire.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), completed in 2002: This 293-unit apartment building in Battery Park City houses PS/IS 276, an elementary and middle school.

The City is currently in the early phases of additional projects, such as the Bloomingdale Library and Riverside Health Center on the Upper West Side. There, the City has [recently solicited proposals](https://edc.nyc/project/bloomingdale-library?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to redevelop the site with a new library, community center and [up to 850 affordable housing units](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm38mJUbP5I&ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Though New York City has not yet built new police or fire stations with apartments on top, other cities are pursuing this type of joint development. Washington, D.C., is planning to [redevelop a police and fire station on U Street](https://dmped.dc.gov/page/1617U?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). And Miami’s 791-unit Mercedes-Benz Places project, [now under construction](https://floridayimby.com/2025/03/first-phase-of-mercedes-benz-places-goes-vertical-in-brickell-miami.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), will incorporate a fire station.

### Opportunities for new joint developments

I sought to evaluate other opportunities available to undertake joint development projects on land now occupied by libraries, police stations, fire stations and schools in New York City. There are many thousands of possible sites.

I leveraged New York City’s [PLUTO map data](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/resources/datasets/mappluto-pluto-change?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which I combined with the City’s [database of owned and leased properties](https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/City-Owned-and-Leased-Property-COLP-/fn4k-qyk2/about%5Fdata?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). I made the following assumptions, which result in conservative estimates of redevelopment potential, but are focused on aging facilities: Joint developments can only occur on land owned by the relevant public agency; buildings that are landmarked, that were constructed since 2000, that have been renovated since 2010 or that have greater than three stories (or two stories for schools) are not candidates to be replaced; and schools’ sports fields would remain in place. Nonetheless, this is a preliminary analysis; I did not review sites individually to evaluate their potential.

I assumed that the maximum development size would be 300 units (small in some New York City contexts!) and that the first floor-and-a-half of any new development would be devoted to the public facility.

My analysis makes two estimates. First, I calculate the number of housing units that could theoretically be built on each City-owned parcel following current zoning allowances for residential construction. Second, I calculate how many housing units could be built if the parcel were rezoned to enable densities at the 90th percentile of current apartment buildings in the community district in which the parcel is located — in other words, if they were built at a scale similar to the neighborhood’s existing environment. This latter figure reflects the fact that current zoning policy may sometimes be overly restrictive.

This analysis found substantial opportunities for joint development throughout the five boroughs, including on sites now occupied by 125 libraries; 144 police department buildings; 188 fire department facilities; and 114 schools. In total, I estimate that about 19,500 housing units could be completed on these sites under current zoning, or about 33,900 units could be completed were sites upzoned to match the density levels of nearby apartment buildings.

Under current zoning, library sites could accommodate about 3,100 units (75% located within a half-mile of a subway station), police department sites 4,900 units (71% near a station), fire department sites 3,300 units (87% near a station) and schools 8,200 units (61% near a station). These figures could increase dramatically, particularly in Brooklyn and Queens, if sites were upzoned to enable higher-density development.

Some illustrative examples include:

- The [Queens Library branch at Forest Hills](https://www.queenslibrary.org/about-us/locations/Forest-Hills?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): This two-story facility, completed in 1957, is half a block from a subway station. Current zoning enables roughly 55 units on top of a library at the site.
- The [New York Police Department’s 28th Precinct](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/bureaus/patrol/precincts/28th-precinct.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): This two-story building, completed in 1975, is located just south of 125th Street in Central Harlem. Zoning enables 217 housing units on top of a police station.
- The [New York Fire Department’s Engine 54](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Engine%5F54,%5FLadder%5F4,%5FBattalion%5F9?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/media/File:Engine%5F54%5Fgoing%5Fback%5Findoors%5F16C245.jpg): This two-story building, completed in 1974 at the intersection of 8th Avenue and 48th Street in Midtown, could be redeveloped to accommodate 59 housing units.

[P.S. 308](https://www.schools.nyc.gov/schools/K308?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), an elementary and middle school in Brooklyn: This Bedford-Stuyvesant site, completed in 1972, could accommodate 150 housing units.

Regulatory changes recently adopted by the City, including the [Expedited Land Use Review Procedure](https://nyweekly.com/business/nyc-elurp-affordable-housing-mott-haven-mamdani-expedited-review/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the [Affordable Housing Fast Track](https://www.rosenbergestis.com/media/blog/industry-updates/nyc-voters-approve-significant-changes-to-accelerate-land-use-approvals?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), may speed the implementation of certain projects, especially if they incorporate affordable housing units.

I modeled only projects incorporating libraries, police stations, fire stations and schools. But the City and its sister agencies own a large number of additional aging properties available for joint development. For example, earlier this year, the City Council approved the replacement of a seven-story City-owned office building in downtown Brooklyn with an [80-story tower including 1,263 housing units](https://newyorkyimby.com/2025/05/renderings-reveal-840-foot-skyscraper-proposed-for-395-flatbush-avenue-extension-in-downtown-brooklyn.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), many reserved for households with low and moderate incomes.

### Trade-offs in achieving joint development projects

The use of publicly owned land can reduce projects’ total development costs. But joint developments cannot accomplish all public goals simultaneously, especially in neighborhoods with relatively weaker housing markets.

Joint developments save developers money compared to what they would pay for land on a privately owned site. These savings could be redistributed to fund the new public facility. But realistically, those savings are unlikely to be adequate to cover the costs of both the new facility and many affordable housing units. To accomplish multiple goals simultaneously, officials may need to combine joint development with other initiatives, such as affordable housing grants, derived from other revenue sources.

Moreover, in weaker housing markets, where developers are less likely to profit from projects, joint developments may produce inadequate revenue even to cover the cost of new public facilities. As such, the City should leverage this tool only if doing so is needed to replace a facility that is in poor physical condition or is in an area in great need of additional housing.

Finally, the redevelopment of existing public facilities, such as fire departments, may cause years of disruption. In many cases, the facility may need to move to a temporary location, which could be expensive. As such, City staff should carefully coordinate construction plans to ensure continued service provision.

Nevertheless, joint development is a major opportunity for cities like New York. The City should work with its sister agencies to quickly advance these projects, which could provide essential housing and new facilities for thousands of residents.
### Public Sector Unions vs. Mamdani’s Ambitions
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-nyc-unions-efficiency-reform/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T16:32:59.000Z
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s democratic socialism has a union problem. His agenda depends on delivering better City services at lower cost — but the public-sector unions that endorsed him, however reluctantly, have little interest in the efficiency reforms that would make that possible. Before Mamdani can build his urban welfare state, he has to reckon with allies standing in its way.

The [vision is ambitious](https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): free buses, universal childcare, City-run groceries — a supposed assault on the cost of living for working-class New Yorkers. But expanding government’s reach requires first proving that the existing government works — and recent events like the Long Island Rail Road strike don’t help the case. Mamdani cannot credibly promise expansive new programs if he cannot fix the ones already in existence.

Recognizing this, Mamdani argued in his [inauguration speech](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-zohran-mamdani-inaugural-address?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that “for too long, we have accepted mediocrity from those who serve the public.” An early [executive order ](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-signs-executive-order-to-require-chief-savings-off?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)calls on each City agency to appoint a “chief savings officer.” During his [budget presentation](https://www.rev.com/transcripts/nyc-preliminary-fiscal-year-2027-budget?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the mayor highlighted his plans to identify savings by “reducing bureaucratic waste and rendering agencies more efficient and cost-effective.”

Mamdani is right that New York City government can be slow, expensive and resistant to change. The civil service system can [take months to grade entry exams](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/what-it-will-take-to-deliver-for) — helping explain why the City has more than [14,000 jobs vacant](https://www.amny.com/politics/nyc-government-job-vacancies-budget-crisis/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The Department of Sanitation’s contract with the Teamsters Local 831 has created the norm of [two workers per truck](https://www.wastedive.com/news/new-york-containerization-teamsters-equipment-truck/691569/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which the [Citizens Budget Commission](https://cbcny.org/research/getting-fiscal-waste-out-solid-waste-collection-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) calls the single biggest source of avoidable cost in the department. The union president’s response: “I don’t think there’s ever gonna be a one-man truck in New York City.” Public schools tell a similar story: Per-pupil spending [is nearly $42,000](https://nypost.com/2025/08/30/us-news/nyc-doe-projected-to-spend-over-42k-per-student-this-school-year-the-most-in-the-country/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — the highest in the nation and nearly double the [California average](https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-public-schools/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — yet [standardized test results](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/01/29/naep-scores-show-recovery-in-nyc-fourth-grade-math-as-reading-holds-steady/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are below the national and State averages, and middling compared to other large cities. Enrollment has [fallen by more than 123,000 students](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/nyregion/nyc-school-enrollment-declines.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) since the pandemic and is projected to decline further. Even as students disappear, costs go up.

> Despite being nominal allies, Mamdani's and the unions’ goals conflict.

However, reducing what others see as bureaucratic waste threatens public-sector unions and the workers they represent. Efficiency efforts almost always mean doing more with less — automation, consolidation, streamlined processes and elimination of redundant positions. For unions, this is threatening on two levels simultaneously. Fewer positions means fewer dues-paying members and a smaller institutional base, which directly erodes union power. Beyond head count, many of the things that look like inefficiency from a management perspective — restrictive job classifications, limits on task assignments, overtime procedures, seniority-based placements — are hard-won contract provisions that unions and their members regard as fundamental worker protections. Agreeing to streamline them means giving back gains that took decades to secure and opening the door to further erosion in future negotiations.

In short, despite being nominal allies, Mamdani's and the unions’ goals conflict. While Mamdani has occasionally skirted the issue by [pointing a finger at failures of contracting services](https://jacobin.com/2026/02/zohran-mamdani-efficiency-nyc-budget?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to the private sector, the reality is that, with the exception of shelter, very little of core services — police, fire, education and sanitation — is outsourced. Workers in City hospitals, public parks, environmental protection, housing authorities and libraries are heavily unionized, civil-service-governed workforces, and the unions have successfully resisted privatization of core functions for decades.

Democratic socialism has a ready answer for every fiscal problem: Tax the rich. But even on its own terms, the math doesn’t work. Mamdani’s millionaire’s tax requires Albany’s approval — and Gov. Kathy Hochul has largely said no. And even if she hadn’t, the revenue wouldn’t even fully fund free universal childcare. It would [barely cover the budget gaps](https://www.city-journal.org/article/zohran-mamdani-budget-taxes-unions-welfare?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the City already has.

Therefore, the deal Mamdani is currently offering the City unions is respect, partnership and stability in exchange for patience, flexibility and political alignment — but not much cash. The looming question is whether Mamdani’s idea of [collaborative bargaining](https://thechiefleader.com/stories/mayor-mamdani-end-pattern-bargaining-start-collaborative-bargaining,55653?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and finding worker-driven efficiency is possible or if traditional patterns of adversarial bargaining take hold.

State and City budgets will determine how much money the mayor has to play with. While the City is supposed to pass a budget [by June 30](https://www.ibo.nyc.gov/content/budget-timeline?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the State passed its budget on May 27\. One of the most contentious issues was Tier 6 pension reform — public-sector unions’ top priority. The deal lowers the retirement age for teachers from 63 to 58 after 30 years of service and cuts contribution rates for all Tier 6 workers. Statewide cost is $557 million annually — below the unions’ $1.5 billion ask. New York City will absorb a disproportionate share of the costs given its large Tier 6 workforce — a recurring, permanent obligation starting at [$128 million in year one](https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/new-york-teachers-win-lower-retirement-age-as-lawmakers-pass-pension-reforms/2026/05?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — slightly reopening the City’s budget gap. In short, the unions’ victory on pensions may come at the expense of salaries and efficiency reforms.

Indeed, the depth of Mamdani’s fiscal bind is illustrated by his most recent budget maneuver: floating a plan to [delay payments into the City’s pension funds](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/nyregion/mamdani-pension-funds.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which could save at least $1 billion in the upcoming fiscal year but would push the deadline for meeting long-term pension obligations beyond 2032\. A mayor who campaigned on more generous pensions is now proposing to defer paying for that generosity to stay solvent, in effect borrowing from future generations to fund the present.

When the dust from the budget deals has fully settled, the mayor will turn to labor negotiations, with important questions about timing and “pattern bargaining.” Recall that under [New York State’s Triborough Amendment](https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Triborough-Final2.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to its collective bargaining law, any union contract that “expires” remains in effect until a new one is negotiated. That means public workers continue to receive pay increases as they move up the salary schedule without a new contract, which incentivizes unions to hold out for a deal that is better than the old contract. For instance, rather than negotiate with Mayor Bloomberg during his third term, the unions simply waited to sit down at the bargaining table with his successor. That’s part of the reason why the Police Benevolent Association’s contract, [which expired in July 2025](https://www.police1.com/nypd/articles/nyc-nypd-union-reach-new-contract-after-seven-years-of-disagreement-Ro4M1jD2e3jF3hHN/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), hasn’t been renegotiated.

The other reason is that New York City typically engages in pattern bargaining, whereby one contract with a big union — historically DC 37 or the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) — sets the broad terms of salary raises for other union contracts. However, Mamdani won’t face UFT [until late 2027](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2023/06/mayor-adams-uft-tentative-contract-agreement-providing-substantial-wage-increases-to?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which leaves DC 37, whose contract [expires in November](https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/02/17/dc37-union-agrees-to-contract-with-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as the primary candidate to set the pattern. A strategic question for Team Mamdani is whether they set the pattern with DC 37 or wait until the UFT contract expires. 

> A mayor who campaigned on more generous pensions is now proposing to defer paying for that generosity to stay solvent, in effect borrowing from future generations to fund the present.

Moving ahead with DC 37 has the advantage of acting while economic conditions are as favorable as they’re likely to get. Waiting until the UFT contract expires in late 2027 raises real risks: a recession, a federal funding cut or some other fiscal shock could arrive in the interim. That concern is sharpened by the fact that Mamdani entered office facing significant budget gaps despite nearly two decades of uninterrupted economic expansion. If the City can’t balance its books in good times, the answer in bad times won’t be pretty. Failing to set the pattern with DC 37 would mean waiting until late 2027 — nearly two years into a four-year term — with virtually every major union contract already lapsed. That’s not a recipe for efficiency reform. It’s a recipe for managed drift.

Mamdani needs a clear-eyed strategy for the unions, not just goodwill. He will face immediate pressure to demonstrate good faith, but with little fiscal headroom to do so. The core problem is that, however aligned the rhetoric may sound, the unions’ fundamental goal is straightforward: higher compensation for their members. For them, the most direct route to “affordability” in the city isn’t free buses or City-run groceries — it’s a bigger paycheck. And if Mamdani can’t deliver on wages, it is difficult to see how he can ask unions to give ground on the work rules and staffing flexibilities that any serious efficiency agenda requires.

It is helpful to recall that the Bloomberg administration had to raise teacher salaries 8% above the civilian union pay pattern to get the UFT to agree to [abandon the work rule](https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/nyregion/city-reaches-tentative-deal-with-teachers.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that required principals to hire the most senior teacher seeking a transfer within the school system irrespective of the principal’s assessment of that teacher’s quality. The reality is that changing work rules that some union members like costs a lot of money. 

If Mamdani’s salary offer is unsatisfactory, the Triborough Amendment lets unions simply wait. They can likely outlast Mamdani, who will face a mounting paradox: a democratic socialist at war with organized labor. Prolonged impasse will be his political problem, not theirs.

For all the fanfare about democratic socialism, Mamdani risks ending up where most of his predecessors did — making modest concessions, deferring hard choices and leaving New Yorkers with the same sluggish, expensive government they’ve always had. Bloomberg moved the needle on education; Giuliani on policing. Everyone else managed the equilibrium. If Mamdani can’t crack the union problem, his democratic socialism won’t fail loudly — it will just quietly echo the status quo.
### New York Families Are Doing Better Than You’ve Heard
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-families-positive-income-trends/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:34:55.000Z
Is the middle class in danger? On social media and in the news, Americans regularly hear that the middle class has shrunk, been hollowed out, or is disappearing. These claims can be tricky to evaluate because there is no agreed-upon way to define the middle class. Should it be defined in terms of a fixed standard of living, so that if everyone gets richer, the middle class gets smaller while better-off categories — the upper-middle class, for instance — grow larger? Or should we think of the middle class as “the middle” regardless of how poor or rich America is? Viewed this way, if everyone’s incomes double, the middle class remains the same size. 

Defining the middle class these two different ways — using absolute or relative thresholds — can lead to different assessments of how the middle class is doing. Claims that it is doing poorly invariably rely on relative thresholds. It’s how the Pew Research Center could [claim](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/1-the-hollowing-of-the-american-middle-class/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a decade ago that the middle class had “hollowed out,” with fewer families in the middle, more who were poorer than middle class, and more who were richer. It’s also how Pew [could say](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/05/11/appendix-b-detailed-tables-and-maps/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that metropolitan New York City’s middle class made up less than half the population and how a recent *Chicago* magazine article could [fret](https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/chicagos-middle-class-is-disappearing/) that that city’s middle class is “disappearing.”

Relative class standing matters in some contexts. If the cars that the richest Americans drive or the houses they buy are sufficiently luxurious that resentment builds among everyone else, a middle class that is better off in absolute terms might be considered worse off in relative terms. If the entry point to the middle class is pegged to what the typical family makes, the middle class might shrink if the median family’s income increases more than incomes of families lower down, raising the threshold for entry to the middle class faster than income grows among those trying to join or to stay in it. 

But these are stories about rising *inequality*, not falling living standards. The middle class shrinks in the [latest](https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024/05/RE%5F2024.05.31%5FAmerican-Middle-Class%5FFINAL.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Pew analyses, despite the fact that the middle class enjoyed a 60% increase in income. The lower-income categories in the Chicago [study](https://voorheescenter.uic.edu/chicago%5Fcommunities/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) also grew but saw large increases in purchasing power. It is usually worth analyzing living standards and inequality separately, so that negative characterizations do not give the impression that families are worse off in an absolute sense.

In a recent [paper](https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2027/12/The-Middle-Class-Is-Shrinking-Because-of-a-Booming-Upper-Middle-Class.pdf?x97961&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) I wrote with Steve Rose, we set class thresholds so that they remained constant over time in terms of living standards, rising only with inflation. That means “middle-class” incomes buy goods and services affording the same level of satisfaction in every year. If everyone’s inflation-adjusted income increases by 50%, relative thresholds will show a stable middle class, because it now requires 50% more income to enter it. Our absolute thresholds will show that more people make enough to reach the middle class but also that more make too much to stay in the middle class. 

We found that the “core” middle class shrunk between 1979 and 2024, but only because families became richer. The share of families poorer than the core middle class also shrunk. In contrast, the share who were in the upper-middle class rose from 10% to 31%.

Subsequently, I [reanalyzed](https://www.civitasinstitute.org/research/chicagos-disappearing-middle-class-can-be-found-in-its-proliferating-upper-middle-class-neighborhoods?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the Chicago data and found that using absolute class thresholds, the disappearance of the middle class since 1970 is a happy outcome of everyone getting richer. The share of Chicagoans living in communities poorer than “middle income” fell between 1970 and 2024, as did the share who were in “middle income” communities. The share who were in “high income” or “very high income” communities rose from 7% to 48%. 

Designations such as “middle class,” “poor” or “high income” based on thresholds are difficult to interpret without a reference point. Nevertheless, when everyone sees real (inflation-adjusted) income growth, that progress will be apparent wherever one draws class thresholds, so long as they are absolute ones.

That brings us to a recent [report](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2026-05/Bridging-the-True-Cost-of-Living-Gap-in-New-York-City-final%20%282%29.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on New York City living standards by the Urban Institute. That report determined that 62% of New Yorkers are “economically insecure,” based on their falling below “true cost of living” thresholds set by the [Urban Institute](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2026-05/Bridging-the-True-Cost-of-Living-Gap-in-New-York-City-final%20%282%29.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Those thresholds “\[capture\] costs associated with housing, food, health care, child care, transportation, technology, taxes, student debt, caring for people with disabilities, savings, and miscellaneous costs for items such as clothing, personal hygiene, and cleaning products.” But one could draw a different set of thresholds and find some other percentage of city residents are insecure. One recent analysis [absurdly ](https://scottwinship.substack.com/p/apocalypse-not)suggested that the poverty line in America should be set at $140,000, which, unsurprisingly, produces a much higher poverty rate than the official statistics do, since they set poverty thresholds much lower. How to assess any rate requires something to compare it against. 

To illustrate these points, I conducted analyses of New York City building off the Chicago ones I conducted earlier. (See that [report](https://www.civitasinstitute.org/research/chicagos-disappearing-middle-class-can-be-found-in-its-proliferating-upper-middle-class-neighborhoods?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for detailed methods.) First, consider how New Yorkers fare between 1970 and 2024 when we define classes in relative terms. Following the [approach](https://voorheescenter.uic.edu/chicago%5Fcommunities/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement, I define five classes of communities (census tracts) in New York depending on whether their per capita income is below 60% of the metropolitan per capita income (very low income), between 60% and 80% (low income), between 80% and 120% (middle income), between 120% and 140% (high income), or above 140% (very high income). These thresholds change over time as metropolitan per capita income changes, so even if its per capita income increases significantly, a community might still fall down a class if its trajectory is outpaced by the rest of the metropolitan area. 

In 1970, 43% of New Yorkers (residents of the five boroughs) lived in low-income or very low-income communities, 43% lived in middle-income communities, and 14% lived in high income or very high income communities. By 2024, those figures were 61%, 19%, and 20%. Thus, one finds the same hollowing out as in Chicago — the same disappearing middle class while more communities become poorer or richer than middle class. In fact, New Yorkers become more concentrated in very low-income and very high-income tracts. The maps display this as the falling number of beige tracts over time and the rising number of red-orange and dark blue tracts.

*Class definitions are based on percentages of the metropolitan area per capita income in either 1970 or 2024: very low income (under 60% of the metro average individual income), low income (60-80% of the metro average), middle income (80-120% of the metro average), high income (120-140% of the metro average), very high income (above 140% of the metro average). The metropolitan area per capita income was $34,311 in 1970 and $57,081 in 2024 (both in 2025 dollars). “1970” technically refers to 1969, while “2024” technically refers to 2020-24\. For full methodological details, see* [*this analysis*](https://www.civitasinstitute.org/research/chicagos-disappearing-middle-class-can-be-found-in-its-proliferating-upper-middle-class-neighborhoods?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.* 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/06/map_nyc_1970-4.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/06/map_nyc_2024_Method1-1.png)

*New York City census tracts by income class, 1970 and 2024, using relative class thresholds. Shading ranges from red/orange (very low income, or under 60% of the metro average individual income) to salmon (low income, or 60-80% of the metro average) to beige (middle income, or 80-120% of the metro average) to teal (high income, or 120-140% of the metro average) to dark blue (very high income, above 140% of the metro average). Unpopulated tracts are shown as grey. For full methodological details, see* [*this analysis*](https://www.civitasinstitute.org/research/chicagos-disappearing-middle-class-can-be-found-in-its-proliferating-upper-middle-class-neighborhoods?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.* 

How we view the state of New York City’s middle class changes markedly, however, if we hold class thresholds fixed over time. In the first set of analyses, a middle-income tract in 1970 had per capita income between $27,449 and $41,173 (2025 dollars), while the thresholds in 2024 were $45,665 and $68,498\. For the next analyses, I began with the 1970 thresholds but then kept them constant in terms of purchasing power over time. 

Looking through this lens, we can see clearly that the entire distribution of New Yorkers moved up. The share living in communities that were poorer than middle-income fell in half, from 43% to 21%. The share living in middle-income communities declined from 43% to 33%. But the share in high-income or very high-income communities rose from 14% to 46%. The maps show a decisive shift to dark blue.

*Class definitions are based on percentages of the metropolitan area per capita income in 1970: very low income (under 60% of the metro average individual income), low income (60-80% of the metro average), middle income (80-120% of the metro average), high income (120-140% of the metro average), very high income (above 140% of the metro average). The metropolitan area per capita income was $34,311 in 1970 (in 2025 dollars). “1970” technically refers to 1969, while “2024” technically refers to 2020-24\. For full methodological details, see* [*this analysis*](https://www.civitasinstitute.org/research/chicagos-disappearing-middle-class-can-be-found-in-its-proliferating-upper-middle-class-neighborhoods?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/06/map_nyc_1970-5.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/06/map_nyc_2024_Method2-1.png)

*New York City census tracts by income class, 1970 and 2024, using absolute class thresholds. Shading ranges from red/orange (very low income, or under 60% of the 1970 metro average individual income) to salmon (low income, or 60-80% of the metro average) to beige (middle income, or 80-120% of the metro average) to teal (high income, or 120-140% of the metro average) to dark blue (very high income, above 140% of the metro average). Unpopulated tracts are shown as grey. For full methodological details, see* [*this analysis*](https://www.civitasinstitute.org/research/chicagos-disappearing-middle-class-can-be-found-in-its-proliferating-upper-middle-class-neighborhoods?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.* 

So if we want to talk about a disappearing middle class, we should start by noting that the income distribution in New York City has shifted upward, leaving fewer people with living standards as low as was typical in 1970\. That’s the kind of disappearance we can all get behind.

How do these results square with the Urban Institute report claiming that 62% of New Yorkers are economically insecure? What the report actually finds is that 62% of families had resources (essentially, incomes) below the designated cost threshold for their family type. The share deemed insecure depends heavily on how the thresholds are set. 

The Urban Institute [uses](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/equity/downloads/pdf/2026%20NYC%20TCOL%20Measure%5F4%206%2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) different thresholds depending on whether children or elderly persons are present and depending on the borough. They range from $91,300 for a childless family in the Bronx with no elderly persons to $201,100 in Manhattan for a family with children but not elderly persons. Where do these values come from? They are based on the Urban Institute’s determination of what families “need” to spend on each of the categories it considered. However, those “needs,” more often than not, are based on median spending, or sometimes even average spending. The Urban Institute thresholds, therefore, approximate what the median family spends. On that basis alone, we might expect that about half of New Yorkers are “economically insecure,” since half of any distribution is, by definition, below the median. But that just redefines “economic insecurity” to mean “in the bottom half of spending.”

It’s difficult to know how concerned we should be about “economic insecurity” when all we know is that 62% of New Yorkers have been designated that by an arbitrary methodology. If we had trend data on needs and resources, that would help. To illustrate the importance of having a comparison point for assessing how New Yorkers are doing, I used Census Bureau data to determine the household income below which 62% of New Yorkers in 2024 fell. That ends up being $131,170\. (This income definition is narrower than the expanded one used by the Urban Institute, but the details don’t matter much here. Note, too, that this figure is for household income rather than family income and is not size-adjusted, due to data limitations.) I then asked, how many New Yorkers lived below $131,170 (in 2024 dollars) in 1970? It turns out that 94.5% did. We can also ask a related question: How many New Yorkers in 2024 lived below the 62nd percentile of 1970’s income distribution ($67,625 in 2024 dollars)? Just 42 percent did. Suddenly, “economic insecurity” levels in New York City today look pretty good! 

Urban Institute researchers would probably say, well, needs were more modest in 1970, so one really has to compare 1970 incomes to 1970 “true cost of living” thresholds, not to 2024 thresholds. Doing so, they’d find much less of a reduction in economic insecurity than I do. It turns out half the population was below the median in 1970 too! Indeed, the Urban Institute approach might even find an increase in economic insecurity to go along with the hollowing out of the middle class produced using relative class thresholds. If all families “need” to spend what the typical family spends, then raising everyone’s income by the same amount doesn’t reduce economic insecurity.

There is clearly something to be said for relative measures of wellbeing like those that commonly drive conversations about inequality and need in New York. Holding quality constant, the cost of goods and services depends in part on what others can afford. Again, though, this is where concerns about inequality trends might be relevant. Conventional inflation adjustment accounts for the general increase in prices. To affect the affordability of “needs,” inequality has to rise in such a way that something of constant quality that used to be affordable to middle-class families no longer is because its price has been bid up. These will tend to be goods whose supply is limited, like living in the “best” neighborhood, or getting the “best” child care. Alternatively, regulation can take lower-quality goods and services off the market, leaving some people unable to afford the remaining options. 

But these are edge cases. Housing has become generally more expensive because of artificial supply restrictions, but that is largely incorporated into inflation measures. Only so many people can ever afford to live in the “best” neighborhood. We generally don’t pity the lower reaches of the top one percent.

The dominant trend for economic well-being — in New York City and elsewhere — is the continued rise in living standards as measured by inflation-adjusted incomes. Economic growth constitutes a rising tide that has lifted all boats impressively, even if more so at the top than lower down. How we characterize middle-class trends should not obscure that basic fact.
### Anchors of Opportunity?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-public-housing-economics/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:34:55.000Z
Virtually all economists, and a growing segment of the public, agree that we are in the midst of a housing supply crisis in the United States. Prices and rents have risen rapidly as supply has consistently failed to respond to growing demand. But the discussion about the need to bolster supply has conspicuously overlooked a small but critical part of the supply-side solution: public housing, specifically the need to preserve the 900,000 public housing units across the country that have fallen into disrepair. 

[Public housing has never been popular](https://www.nber.org/papers/w21071?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). When it was initially debated in the 1930s, the real estate industry feared competition, and conservatives were skeptical of public ownership. The program was ultimately sold to Congress — over the objections of market advocates — as a strategy to increase employment and stimulate the economy. There were of course some early supporters, including mayors who welcomed the support to clear slums in their cities and progressive housing advocates. But by the late 1950s, even many of those who thought public housing was a good idea in theory had turned against how it had played out in practice. Fair housing advocates charged that the program concentrates poor families in high-poverty neighborhoods and exacerbates racial segregation. While public housing developments are not as isolated as they once were, public housing developments are still located in census tracts [with poverty rates of 29 percent and minority shares of 61 percent](https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/assthsg.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The indelible image of the [Pruitt Igoe towers ](https://www.archdaily.com/870685/ad-classics-pruitt-igoe-housing-project-minoru-yamasaki-st-louis-usa-modernism?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)in St. Louis being deliberately dynamited continues to haunt any meaningful discussion of the topic. 

Economists, for their part, have written very little about public housing, perhaps because most so clearly favor housing vouchers — or portable subsidies like those provided under federal Section 8, which cover part of the rent for homes leased on the private market — as the way to make sure low-income people can secure housing (even though vouchers will not solve the supply-side problem on their own). 

But the economics of our current public housing stock are worth a closer look, especially in New York City, where the New York City Housing Authority continues to provide homes for[ over 170,000 low-income households](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycha/about/developments.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including 150,000 living in conventional public housing developments. These households face few other affordable options in the city, and none that are guaranteed to be permanently affordable. As building new housing has become increasingly difficult, the last thing we need to do is to demolish a source of permanently affordable housing or to let it deteriorate to the point of obsolescence or uninhabitability. Effective supply strategies must not only bring in new units through the front door but also invest in existing homes to keep them from falling out the back door. Unfortunately, pro-housing advocates rarely focus on preservation.

The pro-housing movement can also lose sight of the fact that all the supply in the world will not solve the housing challenges of very low-income households. Their incomes are simply insufficient to cover the costs needed to operate and maintain rental housing. These households will likely always require some form of subsidy to cover rent. And this is another key reason to prioritize preserving public housing. Rigorous recent research shows that public housing improves [children’s test scores](about:blank), grade [advancement](about:blank), and [economic mobility over the long-run](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=2850255&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This research counters[ the common view](https://www.huduser.gov/Portal/publications/The-Final-Report-of-the-National-Commission-on-Severely-Distressed-Public-Housing.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that public housing is bad for children. 

Further, today’s public housing is often located in relatively high-income neighborhoods, helping to lock in economic and racial diversity in those communities. In New York City, gentrification has meant that [two-thirds of public housing units](about:blank) are now surrounded by census block groups with an average household income above the citywide median. So at least in New York, public housing developments are no longer isolated, high-poverty communities but rather part of mixed-income neighborhoods.[Recent research on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) HOPE VI program](about:blank) shows that children who grow up in renovated or new public housing developments that are part of mixed-income communities earn about 50% more as adults than those living in other public housing developments. The gains appear to be driven by the children living in revitalized public housing developments surrounded by more affluent communities.

The core challenge, of course, is that as public housing buildings have aged significantly, the repair and maintenance costs have risen dramatically. And absent intervention, the stock will only continue to deteriorate, exposing tenants to growing risk of mold, broken elevators and malfunctioning electrical and heating systems. [Current estimates](https://www.novoco.com/public-media/documents/10-year-roadmap-interim-report-10232025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) suggest that the cost of preserving public housing nationally has climbed to close to $170 billion. 

[The New York City Housing Authority estimates that it needs some $80 billion](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycha/about/press/pr-2026/pr-20260305.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to preserve just its stock of public housing. And yet while the federal government helps to support operating costs and to fund renovations and capital improvements through the public housing capital fund, both of these federal subsidy streams have long been inadequately funded, forcing housing agencies to defer needed capital repairs. Congress isn’t likely to come to the rescue with new capital funding for the public housing program any time soon. 

That said, Congress provided something of a lifeline in 2012 when it enacted the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program. The RAD program allows public housing agencies to convert developments from conventional public housing support (Section 9) to project-based Section 8 contracts, which commit HUD to provide long-term rental assistance funding to the building. In New York City, NYCHA PACT and the Public Housing Preservation Trust both rely on the RAD program to convert public housing to Project-based Section 8\. One benefit of these conversions is more steady operating support. While public housing has long been under-funded, Section 8 rental assistance has enjoyed steady, bipartisan support in Congress, in part because most of those dollars flow to private owners, and in part because cuts to Section 8 would force housing agencies to take away subsidies from current recipients. (Cuts to public housing force housing agencies to make far less visible cuts to maintenance and repairs.) [With Section 8 funding, developments can also leverage more sources of public and private funds for capital needs](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10511482.2016.1262445?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), rather than relying simply on the Congressional appropriations provided by Section 9\. [Nearly 200,000 public housing units](https://www.radresource.net/pha%5Fdata2020.cfm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) nationally have now converted to Section 8 contracts through the RAD program, and another 65,000 units are in the pipeline.

[Advocates have expressed concern that RAD makes tenants vulnerable to eviction](https://citylimits.org/nychas-rad-pact-and-preservation-trust-plans-explained/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Still%2C%20PACT%20has%20been%20met,data%20at%20some%20of%20the) given that most conversions bring in private owners and managers. Mayor Mamdani voted against establishing the NYCHA Public Housing Preservation Trust when he was a member of the New York State Assembly, presumably out of concern about any movement towards privatization. [But as mayor, to his credit, he has taken a more pragmatic and ultimately more effective path to preserving public housing, embracing PACT and the Trust as critical tools, in addition to committing $5.6 billion in city capital dollars over five years.](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/nyregion/mamdani-housing-plan-nycha.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Some advocacy groups have criticized the Mamdani plan for its reliance on RAD. But designed with an eye toward avoiding [the displacement the HOPE VI program caused](about:blank), RAD retains many of the same tenant protections provided by the Section 9 program. The RAD program [requires one-for-one replacement of demolished units and guarantees that the original tenants can continue to live in (or move back into) renovated developments without new eligibility screening](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10511482.2016.1262445?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Recent research shows on average, [RAD conversions have not been associated with increases in eviction filings ](https://www.furmancenter.org/news/did-public-housing-conversion-lead-to-more-evictions/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)or judgments in [New York State](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10511482.2026.2668088?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or nationally. Hopefully this research will help to reassure advocates about the RAD program since, at the moment, it’s the only game in town. The Mamdani administration will also need to work closely with residents to demystify the PACT and Trust options, convey the lack of alternative funding sources, and reassure them that despite some potential disruptions and temporary relocations, they will maintain their rights, and the housing will remain permanently affordable.

On a related note, public housing agencies should also consider using some of the open space on their campuses to create new developments that can help to raise capital for repairs and also create mixed-income communities. They can do this “in-fill” development while still protecting legacy residents as well as preserving the long-run affordability of the public housing units. The key is maintaining public ownership of land. 

Even without new building, in many cities, including New York, public housing now offers a chance to allow low-income families to remain in neighborhoods seeing growing investment, and potential improvements in services and conditions. That said, it may be necessary to take explicit steps to break down the walls that often isolate public housing campuses from their surrounding neighborhoods and ensure that all residents can take advantage of any burgeoning opportunities. Local community organizations may be the best positioned to do this work, through offering programs and services to the full set of neighborhood residents. Investing in inclusive public spaces and forms of social infrastructure can also help to build bridges. 

But what about vouchers? Yes, virtually all economists prefer housing vouchers over public housing, and for some good reasons. One, they have been shown to be cheaper, and two, because they empower low-income households to choose where they want to live, including in neighborhoods that provide a richer set of resources and opportunities for upward mobility. But vouchers rarely work as cleanly in practice as they do on the pages of economics textbooks. Most fundamentally, vouchers only work if there are homes that are vacant and available to renters using vouchers. [Our recent work on voucher success rates](https://www.furmancenter.org/wp-content/uploads/ee-legacy/Success%5FRates%5Fin%5Fthe%5FHousing%5FChoice%5FVoucher%5FProgram%5F508.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) shows that nationally, just 57% of households who received housing vouchers (after typically waiting for years to receive them) were able to use their vouchers to rent homes. While voucher success rates may have been particularly depressed as rents rose rapidly in the immediate wake of the pandemic, success rates floated at around 65% in the pre-COVID years. So even prior to the pandemic, about a third of voucher recipients nationally were unable to use their vouchers. These rates show that the vouchers can be challenging to use in tight markets, [especially for certain types of households](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137723000670?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Further, without meaningful changes that make housing easier to build on the supply side, expansions to the voucher program may simply lead to higher rents, as additional voucher recipients compete for a fixed supply of units. [Several studies](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20150176&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have found that [landlords already capture some amount of existing housing voucher subsidies through rent increases](https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/pubeco/v83y2002i1p109-152.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Economists might view the first-best solution to the housing needs of low-income households to be housing vouchers (or even cash transfers) combined with radical reforms to land use that make it easier to build. But in the here-and-now, the prospects for radical land-use reform are slim. Plus, other barriers beyond land use regulations make it difficult to build quickly, including geographic constraints, labor and materials shortages, and limited land. 

Public housing continues to be the neglected stepchild of affordable housing programs. The growing pro-housing movement overlooks it as a key source of supply. Economists — and many affordable housing advocates — prefer vouchers. Even progressives touting new models of social housing often overlook the nation’s existing stock of social housing. Whether it is sound public policy to actually build new public housing is an important question for another time, but at the very least, it is critical to invest in and preserve the existing homes that we have.
### The Millionaire Exodus That Never Came
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-tax-increase-millionaire-exodus-fears/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T16:33:22.000Z
Every time a state proposes a millionaire tax, someone predicts an exodus.

In 2004, New Jersey adopted a new tax bracket on million-dollar incomes. Critics immediately warned that wealthy residents would leave. Since then, similar predictions have accompanied nearly every proposal to raise taxes on top earners. When California debated a millionaire tax, opponents argued that "there's nothing more portable than a millionaire and his money." When Oregon considered a similar measure, Nike founder [Phil Knight](https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2010/01/nike%5Fchairman%5Fanti-business%5Fcl.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) warned of a "death spiral" in which "thousands of our most successful residents will leave the state." During New York City's 2025 mayoral campaign, hedge fund billionaire [Bill Ackman warned](https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1938094628034506984?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that wealthy residents would flee if Zohran Mamdani won and succeeded in raising New York City's income tax surcharge on incomes over $1 million by two percentage points. 

These warnings carry weight. In places that tax the rich, high-income taxpayers generate a large share of state and local revenue, making them valuable residents. But taxes on the rich also give them a reason to leave. If enough do, governments can face budget shortfalls and pressure to cut services.

Top tax rates in New York City and California are now 13 to 14 percentage points higher than they are in Florida and Texas. Wealthy households have a great deal of freedom to choose where they live. They can afford to move. They employ accountants and financial advisers who know exactly where taxes are lower. If anyone should respond to tax incentives, it ought to be them.

This intuition lies at the heart of the classic economic theory of tax competition. If wealthy households can relocate to lower-tax jurisdictions, states that raise taxes on top earners will lose residents and revenue. Millionaire taxes become self-defeating, shrinking the very tax base they were designed to tap. Governments will eventually learn the lesson: don't tax the rich. Over time, competition for affluent residents pushes tax rates steadily downward in a race to the bottom.

The problem is that the race to the bottom never arrived.

I have been studying millionaire tax flight for nearly 20 years. My colleagues and I have analyzed millionaire tax reforms in [New Jersey](https://cristobalyoung.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/NTJ-millionaire-migration-state-taxation.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [California](https://inequality.stanford.edu/publications/media/details/millionaire-migration-california-impact-top-tax-rates?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), decades of IRS records tracking [where Americans with million-dollar incomes actually live](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122416639625?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the [migration of Forbes billionaires](https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Millionaire-Tax-Flight-Inequality/dp/1503603806?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and most recently the effects of the [2017 Trump Tax bill and the COVID-19 pandemic](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/737165?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The popular image of the “mobile millionaire,” constantly searching for the lowest-tax location, unravels under close inspection. Top earners often travel, but they rarely change where they live. More often, they are deeply rooted – and powerful insiders – in the places where they built their careers and businesses and raised their families. It is not so easy to walk away from these kinds of relationships.

Migration in America is concentrated among the young and the struggling, not the rich. Roughly 4.5% of low-wage workers - those earning less than $10,000 - move each year, often chasing jobs or affordable housing. Millionaires move at about half that rate, just 2.4% annually. They are not searching for their economic place in the world; they've already found it.

More than anything, migration is a young person's game. Recent college graduates move across state lines at rates exceeding [12% annually, roughly five times the rate of millionaires](https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Millionaire-Tax-Flight-Inequality/dp/1503603806?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But their migration drops off fast: by the time they reach their peak earning years, college graduates display the same low migration rates as most other Americans. The implication is important: people typically settle on where to build their lives decades before they ever enter the top tax brackets.

This does not mean taxes are irrelevant. When millionaires move - which is rare - they are more likely to relocate to lower-tax states than to higher-tax states. In the tax return data I examine, covering roughly 1999 through 2023, about 47% of millionaire moves were to states with lower income taxes than the states they left. But one-third were to states with higher income taxes, while another 21% were between states with essentially the same tax rates. These moves clearly cannot be explained by tax avoidance. People relocate for jobs, family, retirement, climate and countless other reasons. LeBron James, for example, roughly doubled his state tax bill when he moved from Ohio and the Cavs to California and the Lakers.

New York illustrates the same point. Florida is the most common destination [for New York movers overall](https://www.timesunion.com/state/article/top-5-states-new-york-residents-moved-2023-19846015.php?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But among the richest 1% of New Yorkers, the most common destinations are [Connecticut, New Jersey and California](https://fiscalpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/FPI-Migration-Pt-2.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), all of which levy millionaire taxes. The richest New Yorkers are not simply decamping to the lowest-tax state available. Many are moving within the same high-cost, high-tax professional region. These moves are not really about taxes.

The strongest evidence that taxes influence migration comes from Florida. It attracts millionaires on net from nearly every state in the country - mostly from high-tax states such as New York and New Jersey, but also from low-tax states such as Texas and Tennessee. The only states that do not lose at least some millionaires to Florida are Arizona and South Carolina, two other major retirement destinations.

Florida also illustrates the limits of the tax-flight story. Nine U.S. states levy no income tax, but [Florida is the only one](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122416639625?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that consistently attracts affluent migrants from across the country. If taxes were the primary driver, we would expect Texas, New Hampshire, Tennessee and the other no-tax states to attract similar millionaire flows. They do not. In fact, each of those states experiences a net loss of millionaires to Florida. Florida's success reflects a broader package of amenities, including climate, retirement communities and lifestyle advantages. Even the nation's clearest case of tax-motivated migration owes much - though not all - of its appeal to factors other than taxes.

Taken together, the directional pattern is clear but limited. Millionaire movers are more likely to move to lower-tax states than to higher-tax states: 47% compared with 32%. That 15-point gap provides a rough measure of the net excess movement toward lower-tax places. More technical analysis points in the same direction, suggesting that about one in seven millionaire moves are tax-motivated migration.

But that is one in seven millionaire *movers*, not one in seven *millionaires*. Millionaires themselves rarely move. Once we combine the modest tax tilt among movers with the low overall rate of millionaire migration, tax-motivated migration becomes a small slice of a small slice: 0.3% of the millionaire population moves for tax-purposes each year. It’s not zero, but looks nothing like the exodus often described in political debates. 

### Why aren’t millionaires more mobile? 

The problem with the tax competition story is that it mistakes freedom of movement for a willingness to move. Most millionaires are the late-career working rich. By the time they reach the top tax brackets, they have careers, businesses, reputations, colleagues, collaborators and networks in place. Much of what makes their lives work would not travel with them. Their very success in one place makes other places less appealing. Elsewhere, they would be less known, less connected and less central.

Tax competition theory treats people and their paychecks as movable while ignoring how place helps produce success. Places like New York, Boston and Silicon Valley concentrate talent, capital, information, clients, investors, employees and opportunity in unusually productive ways. A wealthy New Yorker can move to Florida and lower a tax bill. But for someone who is already a powerful insider, taking their chips somewhere else often means giving up their seat at the table. 

### A missing race to the bottom

Critics of tax policies in New York and California often focus on competition from Texas and Florida. Yet the larger reality is that states compete most directly with their nearest neighbors. Most interstate moves, even among millionaires, are [relatively short-distance](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122416639625?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) moves to nearby states. 

A key prediction of the tax-flight story is not just that some wealthy households will leave. It is that other states will benefit from their departure. If New Jersey adopts a millionaire tax that drives away affluent residents, neighboring states gain those taxpayers for free. In this sense, tax competition is a zero-sum game: One state's loss becomes another state's gain.

New Jersey adopted the nation's first modern millionaire tax in 2004, adding 2.4 percentage points to the top rate - slightly more than Mamdani's proposal. Five years later, voters elected Chris Christie after a campaign in which the tax was fiercely debated. Yet the millionaire tax survived and was eventually expanded. Rather than serving as a cautionary tale, New Jersey became a model that neighboring states increasingly followed.

Washington, D.C. adopted a new high-income bracket in 2008\. New York and Connecticut raised taxes on top earners in 2009\. Massachusetts voters approved a millionaire surtax in 2022\. Maryland created new top brackets in 2025, and Maine soon followed with its own millionaire tax. 

The West Coast followed a similar path. California enacted a millionaire tax in 2004, expanded it through a statewide referendum in 2012 and made the increase permanent in 2016\. Oregon voters approved a millionaire tax in 2010\. Washington State, long known for having no income tax at all, adopted a tax on high-income capital gains in 2021 and enacted a millionaire tax in 2026.

This is not a race to the bottom. It is a story of policy diffusion. State after state had an opportunity to observe the consequences of millionaire taxes in neighboring jurisdictions. If large numbers of the rich had fled, nearby states would have gained from their neighbors' losses, drawing in exile taxpayers. Instead, they waited, watched and most concluded that millionaire taxes were something to emulate. Rather than soaking up the spoils of tax competition, other states realized they were missing out on millionaire tax revenues.

The political lesson is striking. The prediction was "tax the rich and they will leave." The reality was closer to "tax the rich and your neighbors will copy you."

### When tax flight happened

Two recent events showed why the rich generally stay where they built their careers – and what it takes to actually change their minds and make them search for greener pastures. 

The first was the 2017 Trump tax bill, which capped the federal deduction for state and local taxes. For top earners in places like New York and California, this amounted to a considerable tax increase, with the money used to fund tax cuts for millionaires elsewhere. Many commentators, including the governors of New York and California, predicted fiscal chaos from millionaire flight. A widely shared Wall Street Journal op-ed, titled [“So Long, California. Sayonara, New York,”](https://www.wsj.com/articles/so-long-california-sayonara-new-york-1524611900?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) predicted that 800,000 people a year would leave these states.

My colleague and I used deidentified IRS tax returns to track every millionaire taxpayer in the country for two years before and after the reform. The exodus [never materialized](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/737165?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Out-migration from high-tax states did not increase at all. We were preparing to write up the results as a null finding when something changed dramatically. The pandemic came, and millionaire tax flight arrived with it.

The pandemic brought a profound shock to social embeddedness. Workplaces emptied out, with office-building entry swipes in major cities falling by nearly 90 percent. Local amenities were shuttered, and time spent alone increased. Schools closed, disrupting children's relationships with teachers and classmates. For many families, school closures also eliminated one of the biggest barriers to moving: taking children out of school. For many households, the pandemic created a strange form of freedom: a chance to rethink where to live and work, especially for top earners who could work remotely from almost anywhere.

Disconnected from many of the ties that anchor people to place, [top earners left high-tax states](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/737165?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in historically large numbers and disproportionately chose lower-tax destinations. So millionaire flight did indeed happen at a larger scale for a relatively brief period — but it took a force larger than taxes alone to dislodge people from their longtime homes.

Tax differences across states create real financial incentives to move. But in normal times those incentives compete with careers, friendships, schools, business relationships and community ties that are rooted in particular places. For most affluent households, tax savings alone are not enough to overcome those attachments.

During the pandemic, many of those attachments weakened simultaneously. The financial incentives to relocate had always been there, but they suddenly mattered more because there was less tying people to place. Yet the effect proved temporary. As the pandemic receded and normal patterns of work and social life resumed, millionaire migration returned toward its pre-pandemic baseline. By 2023, migration rates had largely normalized.

### What the City should do instead

Every state and city wants more top taxpayers. Many assume the way to get them is to keep taxes on the rich low. But in normal times, wealthy households are far less mobile than policymakers imagine. Many states today forgo substantial revenue in hopes of migration flows that never materialize. 

Places should focus less on courting millionaires and more on cultivating and retaining highly educated young people. Recent college graduates are among the most mobile people in the country. They are the pipeline for the millionaires and top taxpayers of 2045\. These young workers are not choosing where to live based on the tax rates paid by those at the very top. They're looking for places where they can afford the rent, find good work, build a social life, meet a partner and eventually raise a family. If they achieve their highest economic aspirations, one day they will be paying the highest tax rates. For now, they need the basics of opportunity to be within reach. Soon they'll need affordable child care and good schools.

A city that delivers on those needs builds its own pipeline of future top earners. The way to keep the rich in New York isn't to coddle today's millionaires. It's to make sure today's strivers can afford to stay.
### Time to Build Big Again
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-large-scale-housing-development/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T16:02:27.000Z
Building big is an immutable identifier of development ambitions in New York City and has been ever since consolidation transformed New York into a city of five boroughs in 1898\. As New York transitioned into a modern city, real-estate forces inaugurated a new era of city-building. Real-estate activity loomed large in the life of the city. It became inseparable from the idea of New York itself, aligned to its culture of commerce economically, politically and socially — and so it remains today.

But today, with New York seemingly built out, our ambitions for city-building are much smaller than they used to be. This is a mistake. The city might seem full, but we still have the opportunity, indeed the obligation, to think big.

Once, driven by rapid business expansion and surging population growth, New York’s builders pursued a pattern of building at scale. Their works created New York’s iconic density evident in skyscrapers (which, relative to what’s come after them, don’t seem to scrape the sky any longer) jammed into the historic streets of Lower Manhattan, later generations of office towers in Midtown Manhattan and the newest residential towers in Brooklyn and Long Island City. Less photogenic, but equally essential to the story of New York’s prominence in city-building, are the many acclaimed landmark housing projects for wage-earners and middle-income families. Think Stuyvesant Town, Co-Op City, public housing projects and so many others.

Housing the most people in the most economic manner while managing the risks of large-scale building dominated the urban dialogue in New York City during the first decades of the 20th century. Innovative experimental projects of ambitious scale made New York a pioneer.

As a condition for the city’s continued economic prosperity and social health, the need for affordable housing at scale is ever more pressing today, and the city’s legacy of building big offers a prelude to thinking about the future.

### Experimental urbanism

The last great wave of urban construction came out of necessity. Housing conditions in New York City at the turn of the 20th century were in dire need of reform. Old, overcrowded, inferior tenement housing built on the cheap during the 19th century needed to be replaced, and its design seriously reconsidered, to provide tenants with adequate light and improved sanitation and safety. Additionally, thousands of new dwellings were needed to accommodate a population explosion driven by waves of immigrants and others drawn to employment opportunities. Lot-by-lot development of tenements, the building pattern of the previous century, even when improved in design, was not up to the task of meeting the residential demands of an enlarged and rapidly urbanizing city. Large-scale projects were necessary, and they, in turn, imposed new demands on residential form and site design to mitigate the impact of increased densities.

Acting on different motivations, a certain set of builders, architects, philanthropists, union leaders and insurance companies worked through new ideas of providing modest-cost housing and planning complete residential communities. In short, the drive for scale inspired innovative experimentation.

Some of the city’s housing experiments evolved from different motivations. Wealthy philanthropists who aimed to address low-income housing problems founded City and Suburban Homes Company to build projects that could offer low rents because of large-scale organization and an investment model of limited returns: “philanthropy plus 5%.” When completed, the firm’s earliest projects in Manhattan, Avenue A Estate (1901-1913, 1,257 apartments plus a hotel) and First Avenue Estate (1898-1915, 1,059 apartments), were the largest low-income housing communities in the world; both are New York City landmarks. The most prolific of limited-dividend companies, City and Suburban Homes, after 25 years of operation, housed more than 12,000 tenants. Its success encouraged others to enter the field.

As successful as it was, however, the model could not address the full scale of New York City’s housing problem.

In 1922, prompted by a housing crisis and lobbying by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the New York State Legislature passed a law, the so-called “Metropolitan Bill,” enabling all life insurance companies operating in the state to invest up to 10% of their stated assets in residential development, with profits capped at 6%. Metropolitan Life responded with plans designed by architect Andrew J. Thomas for a project of 2,125 apartments built in five-story buildings around small interior courtyards on parcels still used for truck farming in Long Island City, Queens. Such scale, the company believed, would create economies in construction, operation and financing that would offset regulated rents. When completed in 1924, the complex (38 buildings, 1,500 apartments, currently called Cosmopolitan Houses) became the largest low-rent housing project in the country, rented mostly to middle-income households.

In 1938, new legislation drew life insurance companies, with their deep pockets of capital, into city-building at even greater magnitudes of scale. Large-scale housing appeared to offer a secure and profitable investment, and the civic-oriented investment was as well good publicity for the industry. Led by Frederick H. Ecker, Metropolitan Life completed four enormous market-rate housing projects: in the Bronx, Parkchester (12,272 units, 1940-1941); in Manhattan, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village (8,755 and 2,495 units, respectively, 1947-1949) and Riverton Houses (1,232 units, 1947-1948). The favorable economics of housing investment at the time, sweetened with tax abatements, influenced others: New York Life Insurance Company (3,008 units in Fresh Meadows, Queens, 1949; 582 units in Manhattan House, Manhattan, 1951) and Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States (1,130 units at Fordham Hill, Bronx, 1946-1950; 1,221 units at Clinton Hill Apartments, Brooklyn, 1943-1955). By 1955, these big-three life companies had sponsored more than 33,000 housing units. As conservative fiduciaries, they were unlikely developers to take on the risk of constructing innovative, large-scale, planned communities affordable to middle-class renters in America’s most expensive city.

The developer Alexander Bing, retired from his successful family real-estate company Bing & Bing, founded City Housing Corporation specifically to build a “garden city” under a limited-dividend investment format. Sunnyside Gardens, Queens (1924-1928), one of the most significant planned residential communities in New York City, gained widespread recognition for the way its architects Clarence Stein and Henry Wright designed low-density housing, amenities and landscaped open courtyards to foster a neighborhood that would meet the social as well as physical needs of its residents. By combining large-scale residential design and site planning (more than 600 buildings developed on 16 blocks covering 77 acres) with low-cost capital, Bing and his associates found a physical solution to the housing problems of the time. Desirous of promoting ownership rather than tenancy, the firm leveraged scale to keep selling prices low, and Bing’s real-estate skills enabled it to innovate homeownership financing mechanisms unique for the time. Today, it is a New York City historic district.

During the building boom of the 1920s, two profit-seeking developers, Fred F. French and Henry Mandel, pioneered large-scale walk-to-work residential enclaves that aimed to keep the middle-class urban worker in the city by providing well-built housing at a modest cost. Each believed modest rentals could be achieved by building at scale in older neighborhoods where land could be purchased at a relatively low cost based on existing antiquated or deteriorating structures. With Tudor City (1927-1930, 2,800 apartments on 14.5 acres formerly known as Prospect Hill), French aimed for suburban ambience in the city and advertised his project as “a garden spot in the center of New York” with built-in amenities to make urban living convenient, an antidote to a city growing taller, more commercial, more congested and noisier.

In London Terrace (1929-1930), Mandel also built “a city within a city” but hewed to high-density urban modernity in a massively scaled block-long complex of 14 continuous buildings (23rd to 24th Street) containing 1,665 apartments rising straight up from the street. Known as “the world’s largest apartment house under one roof,” Mandel planned London Terrace as an oasis offering residents an elaborate array of services and every accommodation for modern urban life. Both pioneering large-scale developments were speculative ventures based on an ideal. Both drove a dramatic shift in the fortunes of surrounding areas. Both used eponymous financing plans to support their development activities. And both created lasting legacies of city-building.

The most notable of builders of housing for the working class, Abraham E. Kazan and his United Housing Foundation, joined forces with the power of the city’s labor unions to build an alternative vision for housing based on the idea of cooperative ownership. They planned housing not just as a collection of residential buildings but as complete cooperative villages, and they followed through on that ambition in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Over the course of 40 years, Kazan oversaw the development of 40,000 cooperative homes in New York City in large-scale projects built on a not-for-profit basis. The first project, Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx, is today the oldest surviving limited-equity housing co-op in the United States (11 buildings erected between 1927 and 1970, 1,468 units). Rochdale Village in Queens became the largest housing cooperative in the world when it opened in late 1963 (5,860 apartments housing some 25,000 residents in 20 buildings laid out in a massive 170-acre superblock with its own food stores, nursery schools and credit union), only to be surpassed in size by Co-Op City in the Bronx (1960-1964, 35 high-rise buildings with 15,372 residential units on 320 acres). Housing co-ops were not new to New York, but Kazan’s legacy of building limited-equity co-ops, firmly rooted in the city’s labor movement, uniquely contributed to the city’s history of housing.

New York City’s growth and prosperity during the 20th century hinged on its ability to house the policemen, firefighters, tradesmen, garment workers, teachers, nurses and doctors, clerical and professional office workers and wage-earners who fueled the urban economy. The housing experiments I noted above represent approximately 82,000 dwelling units. More than bulk, the significance of building at scale on the land opportunities of the time enabled the creation of communities with open spaces and social infrastructure for urban life. Often cited as touchstones in the physical history of New York, these legacy communities established a template of ambition that inspired others then as it should today.

### 21st-century opportunity

What to make of this legacy? How to learn from it today?

Land that made such building at scale possible — the truck farms and rural estates of the outer boroughs and deteriorated tenements of Manhattan past their useful lives — is today no longer available in our built-up city, and the land reclamation projects that enabled large-scale projects like Co-Op City, Starrett City and Battery Park City are today environmentally constrained. With fewer opportunities to build at scale, sites like the Sunnyside Yard and Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens and Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn present tantalizing possibilities.

Consider, for example, the 180 acres of the Sunnyside Yard site, the largest undeveloped public site in New York. It offers a rare opportunity to create housing at scale based on a long-range framework for sustainable growth, planned in innovative ways that improve connections to well-established surrounding neighborhoods. Development of the Yard offers what building housing lot-by-lot cannot: the opportunity to build communities that sustain quality urban life.

The scale of the site can provide some 12,000 to 15,000 mixed-income housing units; open space and supporting social infrastructure of schools, libraries and childcare and health care centers; and a start-from-scratch chance to rethink core physical infrastructure for support of urban living.

Building a deck over much of the rail yard would create new publicly controlled land to serve the City’s future priorities, renew New York’s historic ambition to expand beyond its physical topography and further its legacy of innovative city-building.

The [Sunnyside Yard Master Plan](https://edc.nyc/project/sunnyside-yard?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was completed in March 2020 after years of planning, wide-ranging community engagement and extensive technical engineering work. It was not a thought exercise but rather a major effort to understand the constraints and opportunities, in consultation with communities, of creating a realistic basis for development of City priorities at scale.

Since its completion, changed economic circumstances might necessitate amendments or adjustments to the plan and its mix of uses. As policy, however, the fundamental ideas undergirding it are consistent with public priorities for mixed-use, mixed-income, community-based development. We do not need to start the planning over.

Incremental lot-by-lot development alone cannot meet the scale of today’s housing needs. The bold development of the Sunnyside Yard would take several decades, but today is the time to start structuring that process. The site presents complications and challenges, but New York City has the technical expertise and skilled public- and private-sector players necessary to bring a project of this scale to fruition within the time frame of other ambitious projects.

Creating new communities at Sunnyside Yard — as was the case in the award-winning development of Battery Park City with its 8,275 residential units, 11 million square feet of office space, 36 acres of parks and four public schools — requires a large up-front public investment to build the platform for growth. It could be done incrementally, and a place to start would be a section of about 25 acres where a deck is easiest to build.

Beyond the essential financial heft to build the infrastructure that would take the opportunity from plan to reality, officials at each level of government need to commit political capital to this project. And that commitment needs a strong governance structure to propel the project forward.

To restate the obvious: The need for housing is great, and few opportunities exist in New York City to increase mixed-income housing at scale — which development of Sunnyside Yard could make possible. Mayor Mamdani needs to take the long view and embrace this priority.

---

*Disclosure: The author was an independent advisor of the Sunnyside Yard Master Plan Steering Committee.*
### The Real Cost of a $30 Wage: The View From the Restaurant Industry
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-minimum-wage-increase-restaurant-industry/
Last updated: 2026-06-24T20:00:25.000Z
As executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, which represents thousands of restaurants and bars across the five boroughs, I hear regularly from small-business owners who have financial concerns about [a City Council bill](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=7944787&GUID=8A9D75D7-55AE-4F9A-B411-69904826532F&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030 and eliminate the tip credit, which allows gratuities to count toward guaranteed minimum wage obligations. 

In addition to the financial concerns, there are significant legal issues with the wage proposal. In [Wholesale Laundry Board of Trade v. City of New York](https://law.justia.com/cases/new-york/court-of-appeals/1964/15-n-y-2d-604-0.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), New York’s highest court ruled that the City cannot set a minimum wage higher than the State’s. Additionally, the proposal would undermine a recent statewide agreement that raised and indexed annual minimum wage increases to inflation.

The economic threat of the proposal is [significant](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ngad2nR3j3W8T1g%5Flk-MVRb-hvvpXHL%5F/view?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Restaurant operators and tipped workers warn it will strain small businesses and jobs — and there’s a good reason why. Less severe policies in cities like Chicago and Washington coincided with [restaurant closures](https://chicago.suntimes.com./city-hall/2026/03/11/samantha-nugent-freeze-phaseout-chicago-subminimum-wage-tipped-workers?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [job losses](https://epionline.org/blog-post/epi-spotlights-best-data-on-dcs-tip-credit-elimination-impacts-during-hearing-on-repeal/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), lower worker compensation and operational challenges. As a result, Chicago [recently paused](https://blockclubchicago.org/2026/05/20/tipped-minimum-wage-hike-paused-2-years-in-blow-to-mayor-via-near-unanimous-city-council-vote/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) its tip credit phaseout following Washington’s decision to reinstate its tip credit.

The current minimum wage in New York City is $17 an hour, though most hourly restaurant workers [earn more](https://culinaryagents.com/search/jobs?search%5Bsort%5Fby%5D=date&search%5Bradius%5D=25&search%5Bname%5Fclass%5Fid%5D=&search%5Bname%5D=&search%5Blocation%5D=New+York%2C+NY&search%5Bcountry%5D=US&search%5Bname%5Fcopy%5D=&search%5Blocation%5Fcopy%5D=New+York%2C+NY&search%5Bview%5Ftype%5D=Grid&search%5Bcategory%5D%5B%5D=culinary&search%5Btype%5D%5B%5D=full%5Ftime&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Tipped workers earn a combination of base pay and gratuities, with servers and bartenders guaranteed at least the minimum wage and often earning well above it.

To better understand the effect raising the minimum wage to $30 an hour and eliminating the tip credit would have on a full-service restaurant’s bottom line, we modeled it using member survey data, public wage benchmarks, statutory labor costs and projected wage compression. 

Our model found that total labor costs increased by approximately 69%, causing labor expenses to rise from roughly 35% of revenue to approximately 59% of revenue. A small restaurant generating $2 million a year in revenue, [with a typical 5% profit margin](https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/on-the-line/average-restaurant-profit-margin?srsltid=AfmBOopRbxeaDS6Rv53VIx%5FJPpoASB%5F8QADglWNf1JWuziiRkOfpU4nk&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), would run an annual loss of $380,000 when minimum wage hit $30 an hour. This would come at a time when restaurants continue to face rising [food costs](https://www.bonappetit.com/story/restaurant-costs-are-still-sky-high?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [rents](https://www.rivieraproduce.com/how-restaurants-are-fighting-back-against-inflation-in-2025/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [insurance premiums](https://www.innovateli.com/as-costs-soar-lawmakers-must-tackle-insurance-fraud/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [delivery-related expenses](https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/technology/survey-shows-strong-restaurant-support-nyc-delivery-fee-cap?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and other forms of [inflation](https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/data/2025-voice-of-restaurant-industry-survey?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). New York State Department of Labor data show New York City restaurant jobs have declined in 2026, at times by roughly 9,600 jobs year over year, raising concerns about the industry’s stability.

To illustrate the impact of this policy on our modeled full-service restaurant, we present a graphic that includes three paths restaurants would consider if a $30 minimum wage were implemented and the tip credit were eliminated.

Path A shows the additional sales a restaurant would need to generate to offset the gap — which restaurateurs say is a false choice, because if they could increase sales by so much, they already would have. Path B offsets the gap through higher menu prices, making dining out more expensive and less appealing for New Yorkers while worsening the city’s affordability crisis; data also show the required price increases would reduce profitability. Path C reflects the difficult business decisions restaurants would be forced to make in response. Small business owners tell me these are not real solutions, but different versions of the same outcome: fewer neighborhood restaurants, higher costs for New Yorkers and a weaker small-business economy across the city.

While eliminating the tip credit and implementing a minimum wage increase of this magnitude is unprecedented, local experience suggests the model is unsustainable. Before the pandemic, some restaurants experimented with eliminating the tip credit, raising base wages, and increasing menu prices to cover the cost, but ultimately abandoned the approach. Customers pushed back on higher menu prices, perceiving them as more expensive, even when their total out-of-pocket costs were comparable because a gratuity was no longer expected. In other jurisdictions, restaurants that added service charges to replace tip income faced similar customer confusion and resistance.

The result was lower earnings for many workers, customer dissatisfaction, and restaurants reverting to the traditional tip-credit system.

The restaurant and bar owners I represent clearly have a stake in this debate. Our analysis suggests that labor cost increases of this scale would lead to higher menu prices, job cuts, business closures and greater affordability pressures on restaurants, workers and consumers alike.
### How Immigrants Make New York City Go
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-immigrants-economic-vitality/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T16:00:02.000Z
Immigration is essential to New York City’s vitality. The numbers alone are extraordinary. After nearly half a century of huge inflows from abroad, more than 1 out of 3 New Yorkers are now immigrants, or around 3.1 million people in a city of almost 8.5 million, according to 2024 census data. Together with their U.S.-born children, they are an estimated half of the city’s population, the overwhelming majority with origins in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. The city now has a foreign-born mayor — born in Uganda to parents of South Asian origin — who made history as the first Muslim to hold the position. It is not surprising, given Zohran Mamdani’s background and bases of electoral support, that he declared in his election-night speech that New York is built and powered by immigrants. At the same time, the very fact that immigration has been so critical in New York City raises questions about the degree to which the Trump administration’s plans for the massive deportation of undocumented immigrants and slashing of legal immigration will spell trouble for the city and its economy in the next few years.

A major reason immigration is so important to New York is that it is a significant motor of the city’s economy. As researchers David Kallick and Anthony Capote report based on an analysis of the American Community Survey’s 2022 five-year sample: Immigrants, both those with legal status and those without, are literally building the city. An astounding 63% of the workers in the city’s construction industry are foreign-born, an estimated 41% of them undocumented. At the low end of the job hierarchy, nearly three-quarters of all construction laborers are immigrants; higher up, thousands of foreign-born people are painters, plumbers and paperhangers, and, still higher in status, many immigrants hold professional positions connected to the city’s construction industry — making up 36% of architects, for example, and 62% of electrical engineers.

Immigrants are also central to the restaurant industry, another mainstay of New York’s economy: They are roughly two-thirds or more of the city’s food preparation workers, head cooks and chefs, and servers. In food as well as other sectors, immigrants have established a great many small businesses, so that by 2022 they accounted for 48% of all self-employed, incorporated business owners in the city. Immigrants have invented new types of businesses, too, including nail salons pioneered by Korean immigrants that are now ubiquitous in New York City and the wider metropolitan area.

The health care industry is heavily dependent on immigrants, from those changing beds in hospitals and nursing homes to the physicians who diagnose and treat patients. A whopping four-fifths of the city’s home health aides are foreign-born, 53% of all registered nurses and 45% of all physicians. Without immigrant health care workers, the city would be plunged into crisis. The need for immigrant workers in health care — as in other parts of the economy — will become even more pressing in the future amid demographic changes. As the baby boomers age and retire, more people will be required to fill jobs they are vacating at all levels of the occupational hierarchy and, in an aging city, to meet growing needs in health care and other services. That immigrants provide many other services, from in-home childcare and housecleaning to home repairs, has made such services more affordable and thus more widely available. In this way, immigrants’ lower-paid labor has subsidized the lifestyle of middle- and upper-middle-class New Yorkers.

What about fears that competition from immigrants will hurt native-born workers? These are greatly exaggerated. As I detail in my book, [“One Quarter of the Nation,”](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691206394/one-quarter-of-the-nation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the consensus among economists is that immigration’s adverse effects on U.S.-born workers’ wages and employment have, overall, been very small: Immigrants not only provide, but also increase demand for, goods and services; immigrant-owned small firms and startups often generate job opportunities for native-born workers; and highly educated immigrants boost productivity. Because immigrants and their families themselves use services, they have boosted the economy and job growth, including swelling demand for workers in an array of public service jobs, from teachers and bus drivers to workers in public administration. Public schools in the five boroughs are oftenovercrowded, but without large-scale immigration and a substantial second generation, many would have downsized or closed; the demand for teachers would have been reduced, along with the need for lower-level employees, from custodians to kitchen staff.

Immigration has been a boon to the city in another way: revitalizing a number of neighborhoods that had fallen on hard times in the post-World War II years, when their populations declined as large numbers moved to the suburbs and the Sun Belt. Without immigration, it is likely that many apartments and houses in the neighborhoods left behind would have been vulnerable to abandonment. Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach and Sunset Park are two examples where immigrants brought new vitality, lifting the population, spurring economic growth and helping reestablish a commercial base as the newcomers started small businesses such as grocery shops and convenience stores.

Immigration has also made New York City safer. A common belief is that rising immigration leads to rising crime rates, but this is a myth. Immigration was a factor behind the decline in violent crime in urban America from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. In 2014, New York City had fewer than 330 murders, at the time the lowest number since comparable records were kept — and despite a population larger than in 1990\. In 2025, the figure was down to 309 homicides, making New York one of the safest cities in America.

What explains why immigrants have helped reduce violent crime? One factor is that they are a favorably self-selected population: ambitious, motivated to work and concerned with avoiding deportation. Something else is going on at the neighborhood level, where research indicates that large numbers of immigrants seem to lower crime and violence. The concentration of immigration in particular neighborhoods — leading to population growth and a reduction in housing vacancies — means more “eyes on the street” for informal neighborhood monitoring.

Nor should we forget how immigration has enriched New York City’s culture: the foods New Yorkers eat, the music they listen and dance to, the novels they read, the films and television programs they watch. If Italians a century ago brought us pizza and Russian Jews introduced the bagel, post-1965 Chinese immigration has brought a wide range of new cuisines, including Sichuan, Hunan and Shanghai. You can now find a good Mexican taco in New York, as well as an Argentine empanada and Colombian arepa. Latin and Asian American parades have joined old staples like the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. The West Indian American Day Parade Carnival is now the city’s largest ethnic festival, attracting hundreds of thousands who come to Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway to celebrate it every Labor Day. Many plays on and off Broadway have immigrant themes and stars. While the cultural contributions of immigrants and the second generation typically draw on home-country customs, they also blend aspects of immigrant and American cultures, in this way becoming Americanized mixtures in the New York context.

Finally, immigration has created a new and growing born-in-New-York second generation who, as a large-scale study by sociologist Philip Kasinitz and his colleagues shows, generally are doing better economically than their foreign-born parents. They have the ability to combine American and immigrant cultural patterns in ways that support getting ahead, as well as the good fortune to have parents who have instilled in them a high level of motivation. There is every reason to expect that second-generation New Yorkers will continue to add vitality and dynamism as they, once again, help to make New York City great.

Less happily, there is the specter of falling immigration levels in the next several years owing to the Trump administration’s policies to deport undocumented immigrants on a massive scale and cut back on the number of new legal arrivals. These policies have the potential to dampen economic growth in the city and create shortages of workers in such key sectors of the economy as health care and construction, especially given the ongoing outflow of residents to the suburbs and elsewhere in the country. Still, to end on a more optimistic note, Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant policies are unlikely to last forever. Indeed, demographic pressures — falling fertility rates nationwide and a need to fill many jobs previously held by the large number of retiring baby boomers — may well lead future presidents to support relatively high levels of legal immigration from abroad.

To the extent thatthe United States continues to admit a sizable number of new immigrants, New York City is bound to receive a not-insignificant share, if only because of the networks that link newcomers to established settlers as well as the demand for workers to shore up the city’s labor force and provide services for a large aging population. In that context, new immigrant arrivals — along with established immigrant residents and their adult children — can be counted on to enrich the city’s economy, communities and culture as they have done for the last half-century. The days of New York as a vibrant immigrant center are far from over.
### Editor's Note
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/editors-note-issue-16/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T15:58:41.000Z
Economics, often thought of as the least slippery of the social sciences, is simultaneously the most impenetrable for outsiders. At its heart, it is the study of tradeoffs — how dialing up one thing, like prices, often winds up driving down another thing, like sales. 

Many of these tradeoffs are especially pointed as New York City considers the ambitious agenda of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. In this issue, we explore the questions that are raised when economics meet public policy.

This isn’t new terrain for Vital City. We’ve been trying to answer closely related questions for the past year. When Mamdani said he wanted to freeze rent-regulated rents for four years, we looked at [what it would do to the balance sheets of thousands of buildings, all other things being equal](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-rent-is-too-damn-high-but-also-too-low/), and asked [whether there](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/a-housing-roadmap-for-new-yorks-next-mayor/) was a [better way](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-york-needs-a-smarter-way-to-control-rents/). When Mamdani said that he wanted to dedicate $600 or $700 million to making buses free, writers in our pages wondered whether [that would really be the smartest use of limited resources](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/beyond-free-buses/). And as the Mamdani administration advanced plans to establish a small network of grocery stores with free rent, no property taxes and heavy subsidy, our commentary asked [what impact that would have on the already struggling small businesses](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-city-run-grocery-stores-small-businesses-nyc/) in their orbit and [why other market-distorting, price-inflating city regulations remain in place](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-grocery-cost-explained/). 

In this issue, we take a step back to pose a broader set of questions. 

In many respects, New York City is an economic miracle. It’s not only the American capital of finance but of culture and tourism. It’s a leader in technology, a behemoth in health care and law and media and so much more. Into this $2.6 trillion ecosystem, running a government that spends $125 billion a year, steps a democratic socialist who hasn’t been shy about his intent to remake the city.

Is Mamdani’s agenda — free childcare to all, free buses for all, frozen rents for all rent-stabilized tenants and a wide range of other pricey promises — achievable, or is it destined to run into the brick wall of reality? Does the mayor’s core promise to make the city more affordable have any honest chance when the forces that move prices and salaries are much more powerful than anything the city’s chief executive can control? Can his promise to inject economic justice into government decision-making coexist alongside the basic responsibility of ensuring the city’s economy keeps growing?

For all his ideological commitments, Mamdani is a politician, and a canny one at that. He’s already demonstrated the ability to adapt when circumstances demand it. If his robust [“Block by Block” housing agenda](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mayor-mamdani-releases--block-by-block--the-housing-plan-for-a-n?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — which seeks to smartly leverage market forces and bulldoze obstacles to private development — is a sign of things to come, he’ll be charting a much more pragmatic course than many seem to expect. 

Cities, and New York City especially, are living through a time of profound disruption on multiple fronts. The government in Washington is mercurial and hostile to cities. Amazon and other e-commerce companies keep putting pressure on brick-and-mortar businesses struggling to pay the rent. The Sun Belt continues to lure families and businesses looking for lower taxes and better weather. The work-from-home revolution has made office buildings and business districts more precarious than before (even if the Manhattan office market is booking at the moment). And — oh yeah — AI threatens perhaps the most significant rupture in the nature of work since the industrial revolution.

For this issue, we asked our contributors not just to wrestle with big questions but to try to point toward solutions. We are grateful that leading lights like Ed Glaeser, Sherry Glied, Nicole Gelinas, Martha Stark, Alicia Glen, Arpit Gupta and so many more have answered the call. As always, our contributors often disagree with each other, offering competing diagnoses and prescriptions for what ails New York. But the consistent thread that runs through their pieces is to beware of simple narratives. The “tale of two cities” rhetoric of progressives and the “all the rich people will leave” fears of conservatives don’t adequately represent the complicated economic realities that Mamdani and the rest of us are currently facing. 

What we didn’t get to in these pages could fill three more volumes. Exactly what are the ramifications of Trump policies on the city’s economic health? Why do so many storefronts stay vacant for so long, and what can be done about it? What are the contours of the city’s underground economy? How can the city’s economy be better organized for the freelance workers who settle here by the thousands? Watch this space in the months to come.
### The New York City Economy: A Data Story
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-economy-data-story/
Last updated: 2026-06-10T16:07:28.000Z
_No content available._
### New York Under Mamdani: At the Crossroads, Again
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-economy-zohran-mamdani-efficiency/
Last updated: 2026-06-24T20:02:43.000Z
The American Rust Belt is full of cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, that are shadows of their past selves. As these places declined, there were crucial moments when large employers and wealthier citizens decided that enough was enough. Between 1970 and 1980, Detroit’s population dropped by one-fifth. At the end of the decade, Dodge shuttered its factory in Hamtramck that had once [employed more than 30,000](https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/motor-city-story-detroit?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Will the exit of Ken Griffin and Citadel appear equally momentous to the history of Chicago in 50 years? Will San Francisco’s claw back to safety under moderate Mayor Dan Lurie come to resemble New York’s resurgence after 1990?

New York faces a similar set of questions. Mayor Zohran Mamdani ran as a full-throated redistributor eager to take from the rich and fund everything from groceries to housing. Yet his agenda faces constraints of law and constraints of location. Mayors don’t get to set income tax rates, but taxpayers do, because they can change where they live. Moreover, the [mayor’s announcement on May 28](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/mayor-mamdani-announces-commission-on-government-efficiency-to-m?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of a “Commission on Government Efficiency, or COGE, a Charter Revision Commission tasked with making City government work better for New Yorkers,” suggests he may understand that the most successful left-wing mayors, from Milwaukee’s sewer socialist Daniel Hoan to New York City’s own Fiorello LaGuardia, were also fantastic managers.

New York’s economy would face fewer risks if the mayor coupled his progressive agenda with a campaign for competence that improves the quality of City services for rich and poor alike. This campaign could target spending more efficiently, for instance, by providing transit passes for people who are currently looking for work, rather than giving everybody free buses, or by targeting childcare spending on the children of working low-income residents. Better measurement of outcomes, like police respect for citizens, would make it easier for Mamdani’s managers to achieve his goals. Instead of funding city groceries, the mayor could push for one-step permitting for the city’s less wealthy entrepreneurs, which would be a blow for both upward mobility and delicious food. Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan enjoys a strong reputation as an administrator. Perhaps he could lead a big push to cut costs.

### The redistributor’s dilemma

Mayor Mamdani faces the redistributor’s dilemma. How much can he burden New York City’s wealthier taxpayers before they depart for sunnier, lower-tax climes? All local leaders who are keen on redistributing from rich to poor face the challenge of figuring out just how much their tax base is willing to endure.

Harvard Ph.D. students Matthew Jacob and Rene Livas [examine the impact](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5grej4l9znl1s7mmyaefl/wagetax%5Fdraft.pdf?rlkey=b1fdjai2ooja5rj9fffd8my4s&e=1&dl=0&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of post-World War II changes in Philadelphia’s wage tax on the location of jobs. They compare the workplace choices of city residents, who face the city’s wage tax no matter where they work, and suburbanites, who pay the tax only if they work in the city. Jacob and Livas look at how changes in Philadelphia’s wage tax impact the difference in the probability of working in the city between people who live right inside and right outside the city border. They find that “a 1% increase in the tax rate reduces suburb-to-city commuting by 6.39%,” which should surprise no one who has watched the hedge fund industry blossom in the lower-tax suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut.

While the number of millionaires in New York City [has remained steady](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/upshot/mamdani-tax-the-rich.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) over the last five years and [increased from 2010 to 2022](https://cbcny.org/research/hidden-cost-new-yorks-shrinking-millionaire-share?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), theshare of America’s millionaires living in the city [fell by about one-third](https://cbcny.org/research/hidden-cost-new-yorks-shrinking-millionaire-share?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from 6.5% to 4.2% over those same 12 years. The Citizens Budget Commission estimates that if “New York State and City had the same share of millionaires in 2022 as they did in 2010, the State would have received $10.7 billion more in PIT (personal income tax) revenue, and the City $2.5 billion more.”

But the difficult part of the redistributor’s dilemma is that the tax base’s willingness to suffer depends on local economic conditions that are largely outside the mayor’s control. Like Mayor Mamdani, Mayor John Lindsay was full of charisma and progressive plans, and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller mostly shared this progressivism. In 1957, the year before Rockefeller was first elected, the top State income tax rate was 7%, and New York City had no income tax. By 1973, when both Rockefeller and Lindsay stepped down, the top State income tax was 15%, and the City had its own income tax, which topped out at 3.5%. Despite those high tax rates, the City lurched into a fiscal crisis that almost turned into a bankruptcy.

If New York City’s economy had been stronger, the scope of Lindsay’s ambitions would probably have been manageable. Unfortunately for Lindsay, his term coincided with massive deindustrialization and spiraling crime rates. Between 1950 and 1976, [overall manufacturing employment in New York City declined](https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/quarterly%5Freview/1977v2/v2n2article8.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from just over 1 million to 544,000, and employment in the once-mighty apparel industry fell from 340,000 to 155,000\. Social trauma accompanied economic dislocation, and the [number of murders in New York City rose](https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/NACJD/studies/3226/datadocumentation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from 634 in 1965 to 1,680 in 1973\. The city’s image morphed from the urban playground seen in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” or the Doris Day-Rock Hudson romantic comedies to the hellscapes of “Taxi Driver” and “Escape from New York.”

While the New York City of 1970 couldn’t handle the high taxes and overwhelmed policing of the Lindsay Era, the strong New York City economy at the turn of the millennium stoically endured the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

So is 2026 more like 1976, when the [state’s unemployment rate hit](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/NYURN?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 11.3%, or more like 2000, when the unemployment rate dropped to 4.1%? Despite being the port of entry to the U.S. for a once-in-a-generation plague and experiencing a subsequent epidemic of empty offices, the city is [holding up well](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/real-estate/commercial/cny-colliers-report-may-manhattan-office-market-20260601/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In March 2026, the [state’s unemployment rate](https://dol.ny.gov/state-labor-department-releases-preliminary-march-2026-area-unemployment-rates?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was 4.6%, and the New York City metropolitan area’s unemployment rate was 4.9%. [The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) tells us](https://edc.nyc/sites/default/files/2026-02/NYCEDC-2025-State-of-NYC-Economy%5F2-12-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that the metropolitan area experienced faster employment growth than the nation in 2022, 2023 and 2024, and that the area’s office vacancy rate is down to 15.5%, which is far below Dallas (26.1%), Atlanta (26.8%) and San Francisco (35.7%). Moreover, the city experienced only 309 murders in 2025, which was fewer than half of the number of murders at the *start* of the Lindsay Era.

### The sharks circling New York City’s economy

Yet risks remain, from a massive decline in human office work (if the artificial intelligence boosters or work-from-home boosters are right) to a massive stock market slump (if the artificial intelligence boosters are wrong). A redistributive agenda that takes the city’s highest earners for granted could go badly wrong if one of those risks becomes reality.

Stock prices are high relative to earnings, which, like pride, often comes before a fall. Among the companies in the S&P 500, the [ratio of stock prices to earnings](https://www.wsj.com/market-data/stocks/peyields?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was 27 in early May 2026, which is much higher than the [long-run average](https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional/insights/market-insights/guide-to-the-markets/guide-to-the-markets-slides-us/equities/gtm-forwardpe/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of about 17\. Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller prefers to cyclically adjust earnings by averaging them over the last decade, which produces a price-to-earnings ratio of 40\. By that measure, stocks are pricier than they have ever been, except for the dot-com bubble era between January 1999 and September 2000.

There are also economic reasons for anxiety, which echo those held by the naysayers of the dot-com bubble. [In 1999, Warren Buffett wrote](https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/1999ar/FortuneMagazine.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that “the products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors,” which implies that even a revolutionary technology will not yield outsize profits if there are few barriers to competition. If four or five major AI firms end up selling a similar service that costs far more to develop than it does to deploy, then they are likely to lose money. Standard economic logic suggests that market competition will push prices down to the costs of deployment (“marginal cost”), which will surely fall below the price needed to earn a profit (“average cost”). I have no confidence in my crystal ball, but the commodification of AI is only one scenario among many in which the majority of AI mega investors lose their shirts. If AI follows the kind of winner-takes-all pattern that enriched Google and Facebook, then only one of the firms will enrich its shareholders.

What would a stock market crash do to New York? [According to the NYCEDC](https://edc.nyc/sites/default/files/2026-02/NYCEDC-2025-State-of-NYC-Economy%5F2-12-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), “In the 2000s, Finance and Insurance accounted for 21.1% of the city’s GDP; that rose to 22.5% in the 2010s, and has averaged 24.2% so far in the 2020s.” Those figures understate the region’s dependence on finance, because GDP also includes nontraded services, such as “retail trade” and “health care and social assistance,” which bring less outside money into the system than traded services like finance. Nonetheless, the 2001 internet stock bust did relatively little to the city, partially because other assets, especially those associated with real estate, continued to boom until 2006\. The busts of 1929 and 2006 and the stock market malaise of the mid-1970s were much tougher on New York. Employment in this sector has already begun to shrink.

The city may be as vulnerable to AI success as to AI financial failure. The region has 370,000 workers in finance and insurance, but more than 1 million New Yorkers toil in the four sectors called “information,” “management of companies and enterprises,” “professional, scientific and technical services,” and “administrative and support services.” These office workers are responsible for New York’s relatively low vacancy rate, but their jobs are surely vulnerable to both AI and working from home.

[For 30 years](https://www.nber.org/papers/w5562?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [I have argued](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119096920318?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that technology is more likely to make face-to-face contact — and the cities that enable that contact — more important. AI could certainly make the knowledge learned at the water cooler and over drinks after work more, not less, valuable. Yet despite my optimism about the power of live human collaboration, it would be foolish to ignore the AI-related risks to New York City’s office-based economy. New York City seems especially vulnerable because of the enormously high costs of doing anything from buying a home to building a subway.

We should marvel at New York City’s resilience over the last five years, or indeed the last 45 years, but we shouldn’t forget that New York has grown far less than its lower-cost Sunbelt competitors. Between 2001 and 2024, the real value of output went up by 61% in Manhattan and 89% in Harris County, Texas, which contains Houston. Since 2000, the population of New York City has grown by about 6%, and the population of Houston has risen by 23%.

Houston is, in a sense, New York’s political opposite. It has no state or city income taxes, it has limited land-use regulations, and its public sector unions aren’t allowed to engage in collective bargaining. The power of private-sector housing supply is well illustrated by the fact that red-state Texas does a much better job at providing low-cost housing for ordinary Americans than blue-state New York. According to the National Association of Realtors, the median price of a home sold in the first quarter of 2026 was $331,000 in Houston and $750,000 in greater New York.

If New York’s information-intensive economy continues to work magic, then the city will still thrive. But if asset markets crash or AI radically reduces the need for urban office workers, then the low costs of places like Houston are only going to look more appealing to businesses and their employees. If a local downturn were coupled with a public push that radically raised costs for businesses and the rich, then this could turn into one of those moments of swift urban decline.

### The campaign for competence

The best way to avoid that risk is for Mayor Mamdani to model himself after the most capable progressive mayors, like Hoan and LaGuardia, and start a campaign for competence. Many of his more ambitious redistributions [have been stymied](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/nyregion/mamdani-campaign-promises.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by political realities. He cannot unilaterally raise taxes on the rich, and [Gov. Kathy Hochul understands](https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2026/03/11/hochul-says-new-taxes-could-drive-wealthy-out-of-n-y-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that New York is “in competition with other states who have less of a tax burden on their corporations and their individuals.” Their jointly proposed “pied-à-terre tax” is not a particularly sensible policy (since nonresident owners already pay full property taxes and impose little cost on City or State government), but at least it creates fewer economic risks than increasing income taxes. Moreover, a reasonable estimate is that the tax will raise between $340 million and $380 million, which is tiny relative to the City’s budget of $125 billion.

The enormous size of that budget and the political limits on tax increases mean that the mayor can do far more for low-income residents by improving the efficacy of the existing spending than by fighting for dribs and drabs of extra revenue, more by reducing the regulations that hold back economic vitality than by providing public grocery stores. Here are five ideas that could help turn the zero-sum redistribution agenda into an agenda to expand the well-being of all New Yorkers in ways that particularly help lower-income New Yorkers.

First, target spending. Instead of trying to make all buses free, the mayor could provide free transit passes for jobless people who are actively looking for work. Oluchi Mbonu (my former Ph.D. student) and Seth Chizeck [evaluate a program](https://ombonu.github.io/discounted%5Ffares%5Fstudy.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that randomly gives out free and reduced-fare transit passes in Allegheny County. They found little positive impact on the overall population, but for the initially unemployed, “free fares cause a 3.5 pp (percentage point) increase in the likelihood of being employed and a $2,845 increase in total earnings during the first six quarters.” If these results held up in New York City, the program could easily pay for itself with increased taxes and reduced reliance on City services. The mayor could also improve [the currently weak targeting](https://www.nber.org/papers/w31981?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of road repaving to make sure that the City repaves the roughest streets first.

Second, the mayor could improve the quality of policing through better measurement. Management guru Peter Drucker famously declared, “What gets measured gets managed.” We measure crime much better than we measure community satisfaction with treatment by police officers. The mayor would find it easy to cajole left-leaning donors to fund an independent, repeated survey that asks ordinary people in precincts throughout the city about their experiences with police. Commissioner Jessica Tisch could then use that data to demand that her captains do more to ensure police treat every New Yorker with dignity and respect.

Third, instead of funding public groceries, the mayor could do more to unleash the immigrant entrepreneur. Current City regulations impose much greater costs on lower-income entrepreneurs than on rich entrepreneurs. It is easy to start your internet or AI phenomenon, since most of the action occurs in cyberspace. It is far harder to start a grocery store in the Bronx. The Mayor should level that playing field. He has already [started along this path](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-signs-executive-order-to-inventory-and-cut-fines-a?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and that is good, but freeing the food vendor will require a long administrative battle.

Despite heroic efforts over many decades to streamline permitting, starting a business in New York City still requires far too many steps. The mayor should create a one-stop permitting office with sufficient linguistic capacity to handle New York’s rich cultural mosaic. This has often been promised but never delivered. He should keep that office accountable by measuring the time to permit and insist on continual improvements in speed.

Fourth, the mayor should pivot from promising to deliver free, universal childcare for every child over six weeks old to improving the quality of educational services (both pre-K and in upper grades) for the children of working low-income residents. The younger the child, the more expensive the care. [We have long known](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.1.3.111&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that pre-K programs, like Head Start, can achieve remarkable results for children of lower-income families, but providing universal care for all children will mean enormous spending on middle-class and upper-middle-class households. Targeted and regularly evaluated interventions deliver far more value than universal entitlements.

Finally, Dean Fuleihan has a strong reputation as a capable administrator. The mayor should charge him with producing a plan to get more out of every dollar spent by the City, rather than relying on a network of “chief savings officers.” This program [appears to have identified](https://pix11.com/news/local-news/chief-savings-officers-found-1-7-billion-in-savings-mayor-mamdani/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) $1.7 billion worth of savings, which is far short of the budget gap. I also worry that his COGE will lack the unified leadership that is almost universally required to make tough administrative decisions. Budget cuts by lower-level administrators didn’t solve New York’s mid-1970s fiscal woes. Felix Rohatyn and the State-created Municipal Assistance Corporation did. A strong enough budget cutter within the City government today should be able to follow the Rohatyn path to fiscal health.

New York City has shown remarkable resilience in the face of a terrible pandemic and the rise of working from home. Yet the pace of technological change means that there are plenty of things that could still go wrong. If New York’s taxpayers experience the combination of an economic meltdown and a government that is determined to use them as a piggy bank, then the City could re-experience the traumas of 1975\. The city and its economy will be much safer if the mayor’s redistribution is coupled with a big push to use City dollars more efficiently.
### Twilight of the Union City?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-labor-unions-history-future/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:34:56.000Z
At an April 15, 2026, rally of thousands of building service workers threatening to strike at apartment buildings across the city, Mayor Zohran Mamdani declared that “New York City is a union town.” “That means,” the mayor said, “that we stand with our neighbors when wages and benefits are on the line.” Just two days later, events seemed to confirm the mayor’s view when the doormen, janitors and other building service workers won a contract that continued their free family health insurance, raised pensions 15% and provided a modest wage increase.

The phrase “union town” suggests a high level of union membership and political and economic power. Compared to the rest of the country, the mayor is right: New York is a union town. Nationally, just 9.9% of workers belong to a union, while in New York, the figure is more than twice that, 20.5% (in 2024-2025). Few places in the country surpass that rate — only Honolulu and a handful of other midsize cities.

Compared to the past, however, union density and power in New York are diminished. In 2007, more than 1 in 4 workers carried a union card, rather than 1 in 5 today. As recently as 2017, 17% of private-sector workers in the city were unionized; in the most recent data, that figure is down to 13.7%. (Public-sector union membership has also declined, but it is at a much higher rate, 65.5%.) Mamdani’s victory in the June Democratic mayoral primary, over an opponent supported by many of the largest and most politically active private-sector unions, illuminated a political landscape in which organized labor simply does not matter as much as it once did. Both union boosters and critics too often overlook labor’s diminished power.

To be sure, unionization remains a major factor shaping the economic life of the city. Its most obvious impact is raising wages. At first glance, the effect does not seem great. In 2024-2025, across all jobs in the five boroughs, the median wage for unionized workers was [just 10 cents an hour higher](https://slu.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Union-Density-2025-CUNY-SLU.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) than for those without union membership. The previous year it was [a more substantial 81 cents an hour](https://slu.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/The-State-of-the-Unions-2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which translates to $1,684.80 a year for someone working a 40-hour week — not a trivial sum for families spending most of their money on necessities, but not a huge one.

But that significantly underestimates the pay premium unionized workers enjoy. For one thing, the baskets of union and nonunion jobs are different, distorting the comparison. If you compare wages within particular industries, [the pay premium can be much higher](https://www.hofstra.edu/sites/default/files/2022-09/cld-state-of-new-york-unions-2022.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): 40% in construction, 28% in wholesale and retail, and a whopping 58% in leisure and hospitality. (These data are for the metropolitan area as of 2019-2021, the most recent year available.) Under a just-signed agreement, housekeepers in unionized hotels will earn more than $100,000 a year starting in 2032\. For another thing, unionized workers are more likely than nonunion ones to receive health insurance, pensions and other benefits through their job, delivering a sense of stability in unsettled times and freeing up money for other kinds of spending.

For workers and their families, the union pay premium can make an existential difference — between struggling economically all the time and having a bit of security and discretionary spending power; between being a renter forever and buying a home (maybe not in the city but in a lower-cost outer suburb); between having a serious sickness bring economic disaster and having health insurance and disability pay easing the burden. For the next generation, parental union membership might mean being able to go to college or trade school as a path to upward mobility rather than having to take the first available job after leaving school.

Employers often have a different perspective, seeing the higher wages and better benefits that come with unionization as a burden and a disincentive to investment. Historically, in some industries like garment manufacturing, when unionization drove up wages, New York employers relocated to cheaper parts of the country and eventually overseas. Today, that is less likely to happen because so many unionized jobs are in industries that are place-specific and cannot be relocated: construction, transportation and utilities, health care, education and government. Employers in some industries, including construction, have described union work rules that limit flexibility as more challenging and costly than union wage rates. (Workers see those same rules as protecting their jobs and health.) Some businesses and nonprofits claim that certain activities, like building affordable housing, are impossible using unionized workers due to high costs. Mayor Mamdani’s campaign pledge to create 200,000 units of affordable housing with union labor will be a test of whether this circle can be squared.

But economic fearmongering aside, unionization also provides real benefits to employers, even if they may not acknowledge them. Decent wages and pensions reduce turnover, meaning experienced workforces and lower costs for recruitment and training. In some industries, with jobs of limited duration, employers can go to unions when they need workers with specific skills, say a construction electrician or a set-builder for a movie or a stage show. Unions in construction, building services, health care and other industries run training and apprenticeship programs that provide the next generation of skilled workers as well as advancement opportunities for current employees. In short, unions help sustain a workforce with a vast range of skills and deep experience — a strength of the New York economy.

The presence of unionized workers benefits the city as a whole. Every additional dollar that goes to a worker is more likely to recirculate locally than a dollar going to a bond trader or real estate mogul, since there is only so much even a luxury-loving tycoon can spend. Unionized workers anchor many outer-borough neighborhoods, owning homes; patronizing local businesses; being active in their churches, mosques and synagogues; coaching youth sports; and volunteering in all sorts of community organizations.

While unions continue to buoy a significant sector of the New York workforce, they have been less effective in helping many of the low-wage workers who are so vital in keeping the city going: delivery and restaurant workers, child carers, taxi and hired car drivers, cleaners and landscapers, and day laborers of all kinds. With some minor exceptions, this vast stratum of New Yorkers — which happens to be disproportionately immigrants and, in many cases, undocumented immigrants — lacks union protection. That has contributed to a level of economic inequality in the city that is very high by national standards. In 2023, the [average annual salary for employees in the securities industry](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-09/wall-street-salaries-decline-further-from-pandemic-heights?embedded-checkout=true&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was $471,370\. That same year, a quarter of New Yorkers, including 420,000 children, lived [below the poverty line](https://robinhood.org/reports/poverty-tracker-annual-report-vol-7/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of $47,190 a year for a family of four. Most of the recent gains for low-wage workers have come not through collective bargaining but government action: a higher minimum wage, scheduling rules, mandatory sick leave and the like. Union support for these measures helped push them through, but the workers themselves aren’t unionized. The “Fight for $15,” begun in 2012 by striking New York fast food workers, was meant to push up minimum wages and spur unionization of low-paid restaurant workers; it proved remarkably successful in the first regard but a flop in the second.

Going forward, it is unclear how much influence organized labor will have over economic development policy, which, in any case, does not seem to be a priority for the Mamdani administration. The mayor is not indebted to the private-sector unions for winning office (though many of them, once Mamdani won the Democratic primary, abandoned Andrew Cuomo in the general — a demonstration of just how transactional their politics have become). Nonetheless, the mayor’s democratic socialism has led to a commitment by his administration to support workers in contract struggles, as Mamdani did with striking nurses as well as the building service workers, and to trying to increase private-sector union density. Perhaps the mayoral appointment most at odds with business-as-usual was the selection of former acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Julie Su to the newly created post of deputy mayor for economic justice. Su, an inventive longtime supporter of labor, has pledged to aggressively enforce labor laws, take into consideration the interests of working people in economic development decisions and use whatever power the City has to support unionization efforts.

Labor can use whatever help it can get. Though the past decade has seen greater efforts to bring new members into organized labor, the advances have been very modest. One area of success has been among professionals in higher education, museums, digital journalism and gaming, where unionization is beginning to lead to significant changes. Among other things, unions can provide some protection from AI diminishing or eliminating jobs, as the NewsGuild, the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild have done in recent contracts. Still, between January 2023 and June 2024, the United Automobile Workers, which has been at the forefront of organizing professionals, added only 1,571 new members through recognition elections or voluntary employer recognition, while the Service Employees International Union, whose giant New York affiliates represent health, building service and security workers, gained just 1,134 new members. At this rate, there is no chance that organized labor will regain its former clout in the private sector.

Public-sector unions are much stronger and, in part for this reason, are more frequently the target for attacks blaming organized labor for driving up costs while resisting reform. Government workers, who are unionized at more than four times the rate of private-sector workers in the city, represent nearly half of all unionized workers in the metropolitan area. They are indeed a political force; many will point a finger at the United Federation of Teachers for spearheading a class-size law so expensive that the mayor had to ask for a delay in its implementation, or the Police Benevolent Association for resisting police accountability reforms, or the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association for preventing improvements at Rikers Island.

But the pay for City workers is often exaggerated in attacks on labor. A sanitation worker starts at a base salary of $44,821 per year for a difficult, dangerous, dirty job, and after five-and-a-half years reaches $92,093; a school lunch aide base salary tops out at $49,037, while a City architect makes between $76,262 and $137,501\. In recent contracts, City salaries have barely kept up with inflation, and sometimes not even that.

While on some particular, parochial issues, unions representing City workers have considerable sway, for the most part they seem on autopilot, with few new ideas or ambitions. Arrangements that date back decades, like pattern bargaining (in which the City and one union come to an agreement that serves as a template for everyone else), have been kept in place even though they do not serve unions very well. The new administration could be an occasion for rethinking municipal labor relations, to get workers involved in developing more effective and less expensive ways of providing services. Former Transport Workers Union official Marc Kagan, who was on Mamdani’s transition team, suggested convening small groups of workers and midlevel managers to discuss such issues as scheduling, client interactions and wasteful practices, bringing feedback from the front lines to administrators often at a remove. So far, neither side seems interested. The mayor reappointed as head of the Office of Labor Relations Renee Campion, a competent professional first put in the post by Bill de Blasio and kept on by Eric Adams, seemingly a sign that no big changes in the relationship between the City and its employee unions are envisioned. At an event marking his first 100 days in office, the mayor indicated some interest in trying to move toward a more collaborative style of labor relations, but he has so far seemed not very engaged with managing the municipal workforce.

Like it or not, the City will need to make municipal labor relations a priority, as current contracts begin to expire in an unfavorable budgetary climate. Unions will want wages to at least keep up with inflation. Benefits may present an even greater challenge. Right now, health benefits alone for active and retired City workers [make up nearly 13% of the City budget](https://www.centernyc.org/urban-matters-2/city-workers-have-a-new-health-plan-mayor-mamdani-good-luck-with-that?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). With the federal government cutting back on health care spending and the State not eager to pick up the load, the City and its unions are facing very difficult circumstances.

When the City government asks its unions to partner with it, that usually has been a code word for making their members sacrifice in the face of fiscal challenges. It is not fair to ask modestly paid workers who keep the city going to take a hit as the stock market, real estate prices and inequality all soar. But the public-sector unions should join with the administration in looking for ways to improve service delivery and lower costs. Also, they can use their political influence (as some already do) to pressure Albany and Washington to provide New York City with the kind of support it once received. Stepping further out of the box, public-sector unions might use their large memberships and considerable assets to help with private-sector union organizing, something they have generally treated as none of their business. A shriveling labor movement in the private sector will ultimately make a robust public-sector labor movement unsustainable.

In the decades after World War II, organized labor played an enormous role in shaping life in New York City, not only elevating living standards for millions of workers and their family members but also shaping housing, health care and other aspects of city life. Those days are largely over, but unions still matter, and matter a lot. How much that will continue to be the case will depend to a large measure on their ability to reverse their decline in membership and more aggressively use the power they have. The Mamdani administration presents a moment of opportunity for organized labor. It remains to be seen if labor will seize it.
### Voices of the City: The Economy
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/economy-opinion-survey-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:19.000Z
*Vital City, in partnership with CrowdVox — an independent project led by veteran public opinion researcher John Della Volpe — is developing a new way for New Yorkers to be heard regularly about life in the city, the issues that matter most to them, and the direction in which leaders are taking New York.*

*The project grew out of* [*previous research*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-yorks-five-political-types/) *showing that many New Yorkers want to be heard and understood by the institutions and leaders shaping city life more than they are today. To build on that insight, CrowdVox conducts nightly AI-assisted, open-ended interviews. More than 700 New Yorkers have participated so far across the five boroughs through phone and online audio conversations.*

*Participants are recruited across each borough, with the interview pool designed to reflect the city’s diversity, including by geography, gender, race, ethnicity, education, income and ideology. Some questions are asked nightly so responses can be tracked over time. Others are updated on a rolling basis to explore the elements of city life that are most closely connected to New Yorkers’ overall life satisfaction, including affordability, personal safety, career and job opportunities, stress and recovery, community connection, whether city leaders understand neighborhood needs, school quality, public transportation, health care, public spaces, mental health, and more.*

*Together, these interviews create a rolling qualitative portrait of how New Yorkers are experiencing the city in their own words. Here is what New Yorkers told us in May and June 2026 about the state of the city’s economy and the challenges they face.*

---

### The bright side

"The cost of living is going down…There's better public service, there's better — the mayor is doing great and you know the cost of living is going down….The pay is competitive, the cost of living is competitive and the quality of living is about the same as most urban cities."

— James, 26, white man, Brooklyn, Republican. Interviewed May 31, 2026.

"Prices are going down, housing as well…The new mayor that's in charge has been profoundly moving things around in New York to make there more support for parents as far as opening schools. Prices are going down, housing as well, and just the people around are very friendly…Having a good paying job, a secure job, free daycare for, or free schooling for 2-to 3-year-olds so that I am able to work. Good grocery stores like Aldi that have good prices. Yes."

— Jasmine, 24, white woman, married, Staten Island, Democrat. Interviewed May 27, 2026.

"Oh no, I don't think anything is moving in the wrong direction of this city. I think this city is going in ~~to, um, this city is going in~~... the right direction…Right now I'm building myself up to be an owner of my apartment. So I will definitely stay here."

— Randy, 27, white man, Harlem, independent. Interviewed April 28, 2026.

"Fortunate for me, I do actually have a really good, decent job where I can afford to still maintain and still, you know, be able to live a little comfortable with the stuff that's been provided for me from my job. But it hasn't really been a struggle to me, but it has been for a lot of people, especially with grocery prices up. And that seems like to be like a worldwide thing. But New York can be extremely pricey, especially it really, really don't matter what borough you live in."

— Day, 36, Black man, Queens, Democrat. Interviewed May 28, 2026.

"As long as our streets are safe and good education and childcare, I'm fine…Businesses here seem to be doing okay, and there are part-time and full-time manual jobs or jobs for unskilled labor so that someone at my son's age can get his start and get some work experience, which is great because if the economy is doing well, then we will be doing well here…I live quite simply. So as long as our streets are safe, public transportation is safe, and good education and childcare, I'm fine. I can be able to afford to live here."

— Allie, 57, white woman, retired, Staten Island, independent. Interviewed May 28, 2026.

"My quality of life is much better than I would have in another area…I would say not necessarily, but my quality of life is much better than I would have in another area due to my pay, as well as the accessibility of public transportation, the community network…The housing prices are through the roof. You can't afford a house, and even if you do afford something, there's no space at all…Long term, it's not sustainable, you know?"

— Liba, 22, Asian woman, Brooklyn, Democrat. Interviewed June 2, 2026.

"My outlook on it is still positive but you can't ignore the stuff that you see…People are buying less stuff. Some people can't afford their basic needs, the cost of gas is up, everything is up. There's a whole war going on. It's just a lot of negativity. So my outlook on it is still positive but like you can't ignore the stuff that you see…People still looking for jobs and people wandering around aimlessly. It's not boredom, but just like, you don't really see them. Like there's no goal to what people are doing."

— Guillermo, 42, second-generation Puerto Rican man, unemployed and studying digital cinematography, the Bronx, independent. Interviewed May 4, 2026.

"I'm always hopeful because hope is the only thing that is letting us move on…Rome is not built in a day. So it's collective effort. So I think... I decided that if I move, if everybody starts moving, we won't be called New Yorkers. So with that said, I am still hopeful that things are getting better. Moving is not an option for me."

— Abraham, 39, white man, Tribeca, Democrat. Interviewed May 1, 2026.

"It feels like we're looking out from the inside and just like we're stuck behind a wall of glass. It just makes you feel like you're numb or paralyzed or something and can't do anything in the city that you love." — Sarah, 43-year-old white woman, Queens, Republican, Interviewed May 6, 2026

### The dark side

"We haven't been able to take vacations. There's certain foods we have to switch to cheaper brands…With everything going up, we haven't been able to take vacations recently and everybody in this house is dying to take a vacation. It's been over a year. There's certain things that we have to cut out on, certain foods that we have to switch, like brands, we have to switch to cheaper brands or we have to go without certain things…There are times when things stay heavy on my mind like rent and grocery prices and what's going to happen tomorrow with the utilities and all that stuff."

— Sean, 46, Hispanic man, married with two sons, the Bronx, Republican. Interviewed May 31, 2026.

"My salary doesn't rise with inflation…One big issue for me at least is that my salary doesn't rise with inflation or with cost of living... I actually make less money now than I did about a decade ago…I feel like there's probably a ton of people in New York working three or four jobs, just two couples both working multiple jobs just to make ends meet. But at some point, you have to wonder, you know, is it worth it? Should we just go somewhere else where it's a little more reasonable?"

— Brian, 58, white man, married, Long Island City, Democrat. Interviewed June 1, 2026.

"I have family in New York City and what's pushing me to leave is the cost of food, cost of rent, cost of gas. Everything is too expensive."

— Heather, 38, Black and Hispanic woman, Far Rockaway, Democrat. Interviewed May 16, 2026.

"I feel more isolated because I stay in more. I cannot afford to take Ubers or taxis on a regular basis to meetings of groups that may occur in faraway parts of Manhattan. So I'm by myself a lot…The cost of housing is astronomical. It's only habitable for wealthy people at this point."

— Miriam, 72, white woman, retired, Upper East Side, Democrat. Interviewed May 21, 2026.

"It feels like we're drowning in a cup of water and there's no one to save us. We just need a little help from you to at least bring rent back down to a certain amount where we're able to keep up and not have to just live paycheck to paycheck." — Yressa, 39-year-old Black woman, Brooklyn, Republican, Interviewed May 2, 2026"A lot of people that I speak to, including myself, cut back. Don't go to restaurants anymore. Don't go to the movies anymore. Just basically we have enough money just for our groceries and to get by and live." — Ally, 57-year-old white woman, Staten Island, Independent, Interviewed May 5, 2026

"I have no life. I'm stressed out constantly and I just work my part-time job and try to chip away at the rent a little bit by a little bit." — Michael, 45-year-old white man, Brooklyn, Republican, Interviewed May 4, 2026
### Micah Lasher on Housing, Immigration, and His Campaign for Congress in New York's 12th District
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/micah-lasher-on-housing-immigration/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:17.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/micah-lasher-on-housing-immigration) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on June 9, 2026 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

The New York Editorial Board spoke with Assembly Member Micah Lasher, who represents parts of Manhattan’s West Side, about his campaign in the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District (parts of Manhattan’s East and West Sides and Roosevelt Island) on the morning of June 8, 2026\. Lasher is among the candidates running to succeed retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler. The primary election takes place in June. *(photo: Lasher campaign)*

*Participating journalists: Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Ben Smith, Liena Žagare.*

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Smith**  
Thank you for coming in. I always say this at the top, but politicians are less required to engage journalists than they used to be, so we appreciate you coming in. We appreciate one of your competitors, Alex \[Bores\] coming in. Note that Jack Schlossberg totally ignored us. But basically every other major candidate \[we’ve invited\] did come in. Josh?

**Josh Greenman**  
So you do have a few different opponents. I would say your chief opponent, Alex Bores, is running on taming, attacking, dealing with AI as a transformative threat to the American economy and so much else. What is your campaign about? What do you think are the central themes of your campaign? And related to that, what is your approach to dealing with AI, and how significantly does it differ from his?

**Micah Lasher**  
My campaign is about making the Democratic Party a more effective fighting force in this immediate moment of crisis, and returning its focus to core economic issues facing the American people. And both of those aspects of a vision are tied to the belief that making change in government is still hard and complicated work, and it matters to know what you’re doing.

With regard to AI, I think that the question on the table is less one of significant, substantive differences in this moment, but on an issue that’s going to play out over time, whether or not the district’s going to have a member of Congress who is truly independent-minded on these issues.

**Josh Greenman**  
So you’re saying he’s not truly independent-minded on AI?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think I will be truly independent-minded on AI.

**Josh Greenman**  
What’s your position on the [sovereign wealth fund idea](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/opinion/artificial-intelligence-bernie-sanders.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that \[Bernie\] Sanders has thrown out there?

**Micah Lasher**  
I am supportive of it. I think it’s a good idea. I think it addresses a bunch of different concerns, both with regard to how taxpayers are going to be beneficiaries of the enormous wealth that is going to come from artificial intelligence, potentially at the expense of the broader workforce, and also how we align the financial incentives of artificial intelligence companies with the public interest that is bound up in their actions.

**Josh Greenman**  
One last thing on this. Specifically for what Sanders proposes, a 50% stake in the companies that would then basically be held by a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund. Are those particulars things that you’re signing onto? Would you co-sponsor the legislation if that’s what it said today?

**Micah Lasher**  
I would. Obviously, with the recognition that these things always tend to get negotiated and evolve out. But yeah, I think the idea that these companies are going— are already so massive both in terms of economic value and societal impact, that there’s a really compelling argument for a direct public stake.

**Ben Smith**  
I meant to keep AI for a little later, but I actually have a question: Do you think people in the district actually care about this, or is this just something that we’re talking about, and Alex is talking about, and you’re talking about?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think it is an important issue, and I think there are a lot of people in the district that, to a greater or lesser extent, are concerned about it. I think there’s no question that the attacks by OpenAI on Alex, and his effective use of those attacks to obscure other parts of the story, have made it more of an issue in the race than it would have been otherwise.

**Ben Smith**  
What is he obscuring?

**Micah Lasher**  
Well, I think the fact that there has now been more money spent in support of his candidacy by AI and crypto executives than there has been in opposition to his candidacy has been completely lost in the conversation. I think the fact that the crypto money that’s being spent on his behalf probably has something to do with his public position that he supports every aspect of the crypto lobby’s agenda, has been completely lost in the conversation. The fact that Anthropic is very interested in sending him to Congress has been completely lost in the conversation.

**Josh Greenman**  
Is Google/Alphabet one of the companies that the U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund should have 50% stake in?

**Micah Lasher**  
I don’t know.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So you were a co-sponsor of the [one-year data center moratorium](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/06/nyregion/data-centers-ai-ny.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). What is your long-term strategy for local participation in if and where data centers are located in New York State?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think that right now, we have a significant horse-and-barn risk with data centers, and you have significant collateral impacts that we need to figure out how to manage, and until we do, I think there should be a moratorium.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
But what would the hint be of how do you address this five years from now?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think you have to— I think there has to be a serious conversation about how you’re managing the environmental consequences, how you’re managing the impact on costs to ratepayers. And that requires a serious conversation that I don’t think we’ve had, that we’ve scarcely begun.

**Akash Mehta**  
On outside spending, it is one of the most notable things about this race. I think it’s the most expensive House primary in this cycle and one of the most expensive in history. What do you think accounts for that? What is OpenAI’s interest? What is Chris Larsen’s interest? What is Anthropic’s interest? Why are they all spending so heavily? What is the Palantir co-founder who’s attacking Alex Bores for working for Palantir, what is his interest?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think there’s a crypto piece of this that is its own thing, which is while the crypto industry was the villain of the 2024 election cycle, and less the 2026 election cycle, this is still, in my view, a deeply problematic industry with a significant political agenda that is, remains very active in the political landscape and may be benefiting from having receded from public attention because of the AI battles. So the crypto interest to me is fairly clear. Alex proactively sought, effectively sought the support of the crypto lobby, filling out their questionnaire, acceding to every request getting [an A-plus rating](http://www.standwithcrypto.org/politicians/person/alexander---bores?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and I believe now reaps the benefits of that from Mr. Larsen.

The AI issue, I think, is a proxy fight between the two highest-profile players in the industry, each of which wants dominance in the halls of power. And I don’t take the view that either OpenAI or Anthropic should be writing our AI policy. And to me, it harkens back to a moment in time where the Democratic Party thought that Facebook was an enlightened company that could both be a great source of funds for the party and a good partner in figuring out where we— how we approach social media and emerging technology of that time. And I think that we would be making a terrific mistake if we think that the answer is to take the, to rely on any AI company to guide us and to fund our party. But I think that both of these companies are fighting for influence, and I think this race, for a bunch of reasons, has become a proxy fight in that battle.

**Akash Mehta**  
On crypto, at my newsroom, New York Focus, we were looking into Bores’ relationship with the crypto industry for a potential story. We couldn’t find enough there for a story. We did see that questionnaire. But for instance, I think he signed on to and was in the press release for Attorney General James’ [big proposed crypto regulations](https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2023/attorney-general-james-proposes-nation-leading-regulations-cryptocurrency?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a few years ago. Are there major federal regulations on crypto that you support and he doesn’t? Where do you see the divide?

**Micah Lasher**  
Well, I would not minimize the idea, I would not minimize the significance of first and foremost even engaging in a support-seeking way with the industry. You will not find my answers to the Stand With Crypto questionnaire on their website, let alone one that is completely to their liking. So I would begin there. I think there’s a fundamentally different starting place for the conversation, which is I see them as, at best, a self-interested lobby that should be treated with an enormous amount of skepticism, and at worst, a corrosive force in our economy and a major tool of the Trump administration’s kleptocracy, and would approach them with that skepticism in Congress, as I would the major industry players in AI.

**Ben Max**  
Were you more optimistic about crypto at one point?

**Micah Lasher**  
I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly optimistic about crypto.

**Josh Greenman**  
You did work in tech for a little while.

**Micah Lasher**  
I did.

**Josh Greenman**  
So did your perspective on the industry, and Google is now a major player in AI just as much as the other two probably. Did your perspective change over those few years?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think the reality is I’ve always had a pretty healthy skepticism about the political power of large technology companies in our society, and that goes back...Frankly, it goes all the way back to my time when I was working for Jerry \[Nadler\] and Airbnb was emerging, and we saw what was going on with the conversion of apartments into illegal hotel units, which actually predated Airbnb, but they kind of supercharged that practice. That fight then carried into my time in the Bloomberg administration.

When I was chief of staff in the state attorney general’s office, I was a driver of significant actions involving most of the household names in big tech from Uber to Lyft to Airbnb to Facebook. And, frankly, we spent a lot of time looking at the question of whether there was a way to pierce \[Section\] [230 immunity](https://www.theverge.com/21273768/section-230-explained-internet-speech-law-definition-guide-free-moderation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with regard to Google. So I did spend three years working at Sidewalk Labs, which was a company that was created by Alphabet. It was a very different kind of company. But I don’t think my views on this have really changed much over the years.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Would that skepticism continue to the driverless car issue, and how would you approach driverless car regulation at the federal level? Should it preempt state and local regulation?

**Micah Lasher**  
I am concerned about driverless cars. Let me say one— Here’s the positive: I think there is real opportunity for… I’m trying to think how to prioritize my takes on this because it is a complicated issue. I think we have to tread very carefully. You have a hundred thousand people plus who work in the for-hire vehicle industry in this city. Their lives were turned absolutely upside down when Uber came to town. The workforce and the economy in the for-hire vehicle industry, after years of turmoil, has stabilized. And I think we have to be very careful not to kick that cycle off again.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think that’s more important than passenger safety? Like, if you have to trade them off, is it more important that someone’s employed? Like, is it more important that you have employment or that passengers are safe?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think that you can’t look at one to the exclusion of the other.

**Ben Smith**  
Really? So you would be comfortable with some lost lives in car accidents in exchange?

**Micah Lasher**  
With enormous amounts of affection, Ben, I don’t think the trade-off is quite that stark. But I think that as we proceed— Nor by the way, would the gradual introduction of autonomous vehicles into the New York streetscape, with all of its messy glory, produce instant improvements in safety.

**Josh Greenman**  
Or major job losses if it’s a slow introduction.

**Micah Lasher**  
Well, and I think to that point, I think that there just needs to be thoughtful planning around these issues, that I do not think that the companies that want to get autonomous vehicles on the streets as quickly as they can are particularly interested in having.

**Ben Smith**  
Have you ever been in one?

**Micah Lasher**  
I have not.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Would it be a good idea to use regulation to nudge the rollout toward the most dangerous sector of drivers, who would not be the for-hire vehicle drivers?

**Micah Lasher**  
Sorry, Say that again?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Should we start with the bad drivers?

**Josh Greenman**  
And/or truckers….I think the feds would probably have the strongest role in figuring out federal highways, right?

**Micah Lasher**  
Yeah. Look, I think that there are real potential safety benefits from autonomous vehicles. I think there are real economic implications, as well as implications for the number of vehicles on the road, depending on how you structure the regulatory framework, and I just think it requires a thoughtful conversation. And I think that if history tells us anything, it is that the companies that stand to reap the benefits from the implementation of this technology are not particularly interested in a genuinely independent and thoughtful dialogue about a regulatory framework.

**Liena Zagare**  
Do you think the government can move fast enough to regulate these industries?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think that’s always a question. I think that would have been a very reasonable question to ask about social media, and I think we would be far better off if we had erred on the side of a greater tolerance for government’s clunkiness when it comes to regulating social media than what was ultimately a completely hands-off approach.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And how do you square this perennial problem that by the time people hear about it politically, it’s too late? I mean, that happened with social media, it happened with Uber and Lyft. How do you get them to care before it’s too late?

**Micah Lasher**  
That’s coming full circle on our conversation. That’s part of what our elected representatives are supposed to do, is to be seeing around corners and being willing to take on the self-interested entities and parties that are often the drivers of these conversations.

**Ben Smith**  
I want to move to some non-tech questions.

**Ben Max**  
As you may have read, when Alex Bores was here, we asked him what separates the two of you beyond the AI stuff. [He had a pretty detailed answer](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/alex-bores-on-housing-ai-regulation). He basically boiled it down to five things. We’ve already sort of covered — he said he’s the one that the AI overlords are really afraid of. So we don’t need to keep going there. He said he’s had a top secret security clearance. I don’t know if that’s worth that much conversation. But the other three things he said were that he’s passed a lot more legislation than you, more effective in office, that he has extensive private and public sector experience, more than you, and that he works better with your Democratic colleagues than you. So how would you respond to those critiques, and what would you say are the biggest differentiators other than the AI and tech conversation we’ve already had?

**Ben Smith**  
Yeah, particularly as legislators in the same house.

**Micah Lasher**  
Well, look, we talked about this, I guess before the tape recorder started rolling about the notion that we might all be better off if we didn’t view legislation as a volume business. He is absolutely correct that he has passed a higher number of bills. Some of the greatest hits are prohibiting the use of the phrase “Chinese throwing stars” from the New York State statute books and granting a liquor license to a single macaroon store. So I can’t claim such a voluminous legislative record as Mr. Bores. I will concede that point.

But I think that when it comes to making a meaningful difference, at all three levels of government over a period of nearly two decades, from indexing the minimum wage to inflation, to crafting the state’s billion-dollar plan to reinvest in mental health, to doubling access to childcare assistance, and all of that before I stepped foot in the Legislature. I’ll happily stack my record of accomplishment in government against Alex’s any day of the week. And to the extent he views his time in the private sector at the venerable institution of Palantir as an asset in this race, I’ll leave that to him.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think he’s a good legislator?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think he’s a fine legislator, yes.

**Ben Max**  
One of the things, though, he said is, look at all the people you’ve both worked with, and he has far more endorsements from your fellow Assembly members than you in this race. What’s that attributable to?

**Micah Lasher**  
It is attributable to the fact that I wouldn’t think to ask a colleague who does not represent this congressional district to choose between two colleagues who are running for it. And the result of that different choice that Alex and I made is that every single sitting elected official who represents any human beings who live in this congressional district has endorsed my candidacy. Alex has endorsements from colleagues that he decided to press for support who represent wonderful communities in Long Island and Brooklyn and elsewhere.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think that they’re doing that because there’s sort of a sluice of AI money that he represents as well?

**Micah Lasher**  
That’s a fascinating thought.

**Ben Max**  
You’ve been in government for all this time that you just mentioned. Do you regret any pieces of that work? Are there parts–

**Micah Lasher**  
Oh! You spend 18 years—

**Ben Max**  
So what would you name?

**Micah Lasher**  
You know, you guys can watch the debates too. Listen, I’m not running for office premised on the idea that I haven’t made mistakes, let alone premised on the idea that every position that everyone I’ve ever worked for was right at the time or has aged well. I would say a central argument for my candidacy is that I have been in this as seriously as I have been for as long as I have been, that there are plenty of mistakes that my opponents can use as grist for their mills. And it is easy to do that when you are more or less a blank slate.

**Josh Greenman**  
U.S. Congress is a very different place than the New York Legislature. This is pretty much a one-party state. The House is not a one-party body. How would you approach working with Republicans? Because most of the energy has been about how to counter Trump. Do you see any opportunity for partnership?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think we’d be really clear-eyed about the moment we’re in, which is not one that in the most immediate is going to be overcome with cooperation from Republicans. I wish it were otherwise.

**Josh Greenman**  
“The moment.” But there’s so many issues and so many opportunities to theoretically partner.

**Micah Lasher**  
Yes. And on any issue where there is an opportunity for common ground, whether it is housing or childcare investment, I would happily seek that out. But I also think that we should not understate the existential stakes of what the Trump administration is doing with the cooperation of their allies in Congress, and that a failure to beat that back will make cooperation on other issues look very much a tertiary matter.

**Ben Max**  
[You wrote](https://substack.micahlasher.com/p/throwing-sand-in-the-republicans?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), I believe, “Don’t give them a single vote.”

**Micah Lasher**  
Yeah.

**Ben Max**  
On anything. That’s good policy and politics?

**Micah Lasher**  
I believe one of the failures of the party right now has been a failure to create a stark contrast with the majority party. I think if we were in a parliamentary system, which obviously we are not, but to some extent we are in a parliamentary moment. The Republicans are fully in charge. They control the White House, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court. And if we were in a parliamentary system and we were the opposition party, we would have a party leader that represented the voice of the party. We would have an agenda that said to voters, “This is what you get if you throw these guys out and put us in.” And there would be a very clear distinction between the choices before voters. And I think that we are in a— we are effectively in that dynamic, and we have failed to respond appropriately.

**Ben Max**  
With no agenda.

**Ben Smith**  
So you’re really saying Hakeem Jeffries specifically has failed?

**Micah Lasher**  
I’m saying that I think that we as a party need to offer a very stark and clear contrast with the party that is in charge.

**Ben Smith**  
Would you vote for him as leader?

**Micah Lasher**  
I would.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So one of the reasons we’re in this moment is because of the Biden-era failure to control the border. In retrospect, do you think that Congressman Nadler could have worked better with leadership in New York City to bring home to the President at the time that he needed to do something about the border? Because this seemed to unfold at a time with no leadership from New York City’s Democratic delegation.

**Micah Lasher**  
Candidly, I’m not at all well-versed in what the interactions were between any of the members of the congressional delegation and the Biden administration on border policy. I do think there’s no question that the Biden administration made a hash of the border policy and that voters— That was part of what voters were responding to sending Trump to the White House a second time.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
You want to abolish ICE.

**Micah Lasher**  
Yes.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
How would the US government enforce immigration policy with no ICE?

**Micah Lasher**  
Through a federal agency that was not— whose central organizing principle was not thuggery and deportation.

**Liena Zagare**  
Do you think there is a immigration level that’s politically unsustainable in this country?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think people want to have confidence that the question of immigration is being managed competently and thoughtfully, and I think that that is not what is happening now, for sure. I think that if you look at New York City, we have not had a single year of population growth in my lifetime if you exclude international immigration. And if you were to carry the current Trump administration policies and their effect on the numbers forward, we will see steady population decline in New York City, and I think that would be tremendously unhealthy for New York.

**Josh Greenman**  
Who should get deported by the feds? And what should the city or the state’s role in cooperating with ICE or some future federal—

**Micah Lasher**  
I think in a world— I think these are conversations that are a lot easier to have when you’re not in a moment where the animating principle of our federal immigration policy is cruelty.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
But so for someone who came during the Biden-era open borders, and it turns out they don’t qualify for asylum, or they didn’t go through the process to apply for asylum, what should happen to those people?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think as a general matter, we should have an immigration policy that is focused on pathways to citizenship. If you are here and you’re living in— you are playing by the rules, it has long been the ethos of this country to make it possible for you to live a safe and productive life. It’s how my family came here. It’s how I assume most of the families of the people sitting at this table came here, and I think we need to get back to that.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And what if you’re not playing by the rules? What should the rules for engagement in criminal behavior be?

**Micah Lasher**  
We have laws on the books that deal with that.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And we would have a new ICE to enforce that?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think what we need is— we were not without federal entities enforcing our laws with regard to immigration long before we had ICE. We had an agency called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which for all of its flaws, its very name conveyed a very different orientation on this issue than the agency that was created as part of the post 9/11 reaction. And I think we can, I think we did alright for 200 years, and I think we can probably find our way back to something that better reflects the better angels of our nature.

**Akash Mehta**  
You’re co-sponsor of the New York For All Act, which would ban collaboration between local police departments in New York and state police and federal immigration agents. Hochul passed a compromise but did not pass that bill, and collaboration continues. You spent three years as her policy director. What do you make of her stance on it? And given your close relationship with her, have you spoken to her privately about it or urged her administration to pass it?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think I’m going to, as a general matter, take a pass on the genre of questions about conversations that I have with people I worked for. But I was a supporter of New York For All, and I’m glad we made as much progress as we did. I also was the sponsor of legislation to prohibit warrantless arrests by ICE agents at schools and houses of worship and healthcare facilities that was included in the package. I’m very proud of that. I also was a sponsor of legislation to create a right of action in state court for New Yorkers to hold individual ICE agents legally responsible for the deprivation of civil rights and civil liberties, which was also included in that final package. So we did a lot of good, and I’m very proud of that.

**Josh Greenman**  
On Housing. You helped craft the New York Compact.

**Micah Lasher**  
[The Housing Compact](https://www.governor.ny.gov/programs/new-york-housing-compact?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). And named it!

**Josh Greenman**  
And named it. It’s a great name.

**Micah Lasher**  
Thank you.

**Josh Greenman**  
I think you believe that there ought to be a lot more housing in a lot more places. If you were to go to Washington, the question is what actual federal authorities you would want to use to force there to be more housing built in local communities.

But before we get there, just a quick one on SALT \[state and local tax deduction from federal taxes\]. The people who benefit from a higher SALT cap or from there being no SALT cap are wealthier people who own their homes. It is not a particularly progressive piece of legislation, if you’re looking from a purely economic perspective. Are you for it because you’re a New York homer, or do you see that complexity?

**Micah Lasher**  
While I see the complexity, I see SALT as a deeply progressive tool. And the reason is because what the SALT deduction enables is for states and localities to have expansive safety nets. And when Donald Trump repealed the SALT deduction, what he was saying to a state like New York was, “I’m going to pit your liberal values, your progressive programs, the fact that you are a city and a state that relies on the socioeconomic diversity of your population and your state and local government’s capacity to provide aid to significant portions of that population — I’m going to pit all of that against your tax base. And put your state and other states that are similarly situated under enormous strain.”

**Josh Greenman**  
Did it hurt your ability to make those investments?

**Micah Lasher**  
Sure. And that attack on blue states with expansive safety nets has continued in the second Trump presidency as they have slashed away at federal assistance for safety net programs. And so my view is that the restoration of the SALT deduction is one of the most important things that the federal government can do to make it possible for blue states like New York to hold on to progressive governance.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you accept the view that these blue states with extensive social nets are just kind of badly governed? I mean, I think you see people have broadly viewed in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago, they have bigger safety nets and more generous, but just I think there’s wide view in among their voters and then nationally, there’s just something wrong with governance of these places, and populations are leaving for the South and the West.

**Micah Lasher**  
I think…There are a whole bunch of issues that are packed into the question you just asked. I think that, first of all, there has been a decades-long effort by the Republican Party to diminish people’s faith in government, to convert that diminished faith into diminished support for taxation and governmental investment. In doing so, to diminish the capacity of government and thereby to create a vicious cycle. And so I think that is a big part of what is going on, certainly nationally, number one.

Number two, New York has long been a high tax jurisdiction. It was a high tax jurisdiction when Mike Bloomberg was the mayor of this city, and I think there was not a view that it, that New York was badly governed at that time

**Josh Greenman**  
So, I’m sorry, I asked you a very compound question about housing. You can go back to what should the feds do to make it easier for housing to be built, including in your district?

**Micah Lasher**  
Sure. Well, there are obviously a few pieces at the federal level, NEPA \[National Environmental Protection Act\] chief among them, where reform at the federal level can make it easier to build things. I think the greatest power that the federal government has in this space is the massive amounts of money that we send to states and localities. And I think that that money should start coming with some very real strings attached, tied to the question of whether states and localities have policies and laws that make it possible or even easy to build a lot of housing.

**Josh Greenman**  
And is it currently possible or even easy in your district by that definition?

**Micah Lasher**  
No.

**Josh Greenman**  
OK. So what things would you want to target to make it—

**Micah Lasher**  
Look, I think as a general matter, what we had in the policies that were advanced in the Housing Compact were the right set of policies, and we saw some of them taken up in City of Yes, and we saw some of them taken up in the ballot referenda. And I have no small amount of pride that to have played a role in kicking off a conversation that led to some of those changes. But there’s a lot that remains undone, and so I think that policies like growth targets for communities and builders remedies—

**Josh Greenman**  
At the federal level. It’s complicated at the federal level is why I’m asking, because we have such a complex—

**Micah Lasher**  
I think the tool that the feds can use most effectively is leveraging the money that they’re sending to states and localities to drive policy change at the state level.

**Ben Max**  
So two more things on that. One is you just mentioned the ballot referenda which passed, and it looks like potentially this congressional district is going to have some of the community districts that will be subject to the new fast track policy because there’s been relatively little affordable housing growth. Do you like that? Are you excited about the idea that community districts within this congressional district are going to be subject to this new fast track, potentially going to be subject to it?

**Micah Lasher**  
I am excited about the possibility that we are going to start building housing again at anywhere approaching the pace that we need to if we’re going to dig our way out of this. And I have no doubt that the local battles that ensue will take several years off my life.

**Ben Max**  
On the Housing Compact, the second one is: what at its core went wrong there, and why was there no second attempt at it?

**Micah Lasher**  
At its core, what we hit up against was an intractable Legislature, particularly in the suburbs. It’s not a lot more complicated than that.

**Akash Mehta**  
Was it just their fault, or could the governor’s team have built more legislative allies?

**Micah Lasher**  
I know that is a common refrain on this and I say this not because I don’t think we could have done a better job on the politics, but I don’t believe that that would have been a meaningful difference maker.

**Ben Smith**  
Is there a federal role in— because that pattern is also what you see in San Francisco. It’s what you see in lots of places where the obvious housing growth would be in the suburbs, but they’re controlled by a different branch of government. Is there a role in federal policy for sweeping aside some of the power of the suburbs to control their own housing?

**Micah Lasher**  
Well, look, a lot of what we were doing in the Housing Compact was an attempt to bring decision-making up, at least in some circumstances, from the most hyperlocal level. That is also what you see in City of Yes. I have to give some thought to the question of whether there are ways to do that in a federal context.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
How many units do you think your district needs to build to satisfy global demand for affordable housing in your district?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think that we in general need to think about this both as a collective responsibility, that every neighborhood and every community has a role to play, and that no place can be a no-build zone, and also that this is a regional issue. And most of the no-build zones I would observe are in the suburbs. I believe this is the most densely-populated congressional district, or the smallest in terms of geographical area, of all 435 congressional districts. So I think it is fair to say we are not going to solve the housing crisis in the 12th congressional district.

**Ben Max**  
But that’s part of what I was trying to get at with the fast track. Do you have qualms about that given how dense the district is? Is there a lot of capacity in this district?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think there is probably more capacity in this district than we are using, and far less capacity than would be required to make a meaningful dent in the regional need. So the question is how do you make a real— You know, we probably need something like a million new units of housing in the New York metropolitan region over the next decade, and there are lots of places in commutable distance from the central business district with an enormous amount of housing opportunity. That idea was at the center of the Housing Compact.

**Ben Smith**  
What’s the population of New York City in that scenario? Like what’s the ideal population of New York City?

**Micah Lasher**  
I don’t know.

**Ben Max**  
The mayor said he’s done endorsing. Did you try to get his endorsement in this race? Did you want it?

**Micah Lasher**  
I would love to have the mayor’s endorsement in the race.

**Ben Max**  
Did you try to get it?

**Micah Lasher**  
I… \[pause\]

**Ben Max**  
That would have been an interesting coalition.

**Micah Lasher**  
It would have been an interesting coalition.

**Ben Max**  
Did you try to get it?

**Micah Lasher**  
It would have been an interesting coalition.

**Josh Greenman**  
An education question: Governor Hochul backed the federal tax credit for private parochial education. She was the second Democratic governor to do it after Jared Polis. Did you, do you support that move?

**Micah Lasher**  
Well, I think what she’s attached is something of a caveat to that, which is contingent on what the federal regulations say.

**Josh Greenman**  
OK. And so is that the same caveat you would have?

**Micah Lasher**  
Yes.

**Josh Greenman**  
But in theory, you’re OK with there being a tax credit to—

**Micah Lasher**  
No, I mean, I think I would strongly oppose a national school voucher scheme, which is certainly what this seems like.

**Josh Greenman**  
OK. But under certain circumstances, you think it might work in New York? I mean, because there are a lot of– your district has a lot of people who send their kids to private and charter schools.

**Micah Lasher**  
Yeah, I was opposed to the legislation, and would be opposed to the state signing on to anything that diverts resources from public schools.

**Josh Greenman**  
So when you say that, you were a sizable charter school advocate, I think fair to say, a few years ago. Are you still a big believer in the potential of charter schools? Do you think that they have a lot of room to grow in New York right now?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think that— Well, first of all, I should say I’m a parent of three New York City public school kids, and we have gotten a great education at those schools. I want that opportunity to be available for all of our kids, and I think that we are in a moment right now where some of the battles of a decade ago seem rather quaint because there is a very concerted effort, I think, to do damage to our public education system on a very ideological basis, and I think this district needs somebody who’s going to stand up to that.

**Josh Greenman**  
But we also have a state where we have passed a class size bill that is arguably funding the schools even as they lose enrollment, and there’s kind of a mismatch on the left as well, you could argue, with the current moment, no?

**Micah Lasher**  
I will tell you as just from my own personal experience, my son Ben’s middle school has implemented the class size reduction mandate, and it has been met with enormous positivity from everybody in the school community — the kids, the teachers, and the parents. So I certainly recognize some of the challenges with implementation. Those challenges have emerged in [some fights over space](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/03/nyregion/upper-west-side-nyc-schools.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in my district. But I will tell you that the goal is, I think, a very good one.

**Josh Greenman**  
But you think it was smart legislation?

**Micah Lasher**  
The Legislature— We just— I think there are real implementation issues, but I think the goal of it is a very good one.

**Liena Zagare**  
Do you think UFT \[United Federation of Teachers\] has too much power?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think as a general matter, in Albany and in Washington, you have an array of interest groups that drive a lot of policymaking. And I wish, in general, that legislators, and I have tried to do this, look at each piece of legislation on the merits and with a little more distance from the politics of the many groups that are coming before them.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Two federal questions. One big Trump interest right now is the rebuilding of Penn Station. Do you support the plan that the Trump administration came out with a couple weeks ago? And would you commit to not knocking down an existing dense block in your district to make way for some iterations of this project?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think the problem with where we’re at right now with Penn Station is that there is absolutely no reason for anybody to trust the process or decisions that are coming out of the administration.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And why is that? I mean, Amtrak did a traditional RFP process. They picked a bidder. They’ve been reasonably transparent.

**Micah Lasher**  
Because at the same time as you have Amtrak running the process, you have Donald Trump holding court for donors and cronies who are in that process, opining on the results of that process before decisions are made. And so one can’t help but ask the question of how it could possibly be the case that decision-makers at Amtrak are not susceptible, at the very least, to the public messaging of the White House, let alone what’s happening behind the scenes. I think with regard to Block 780, I don’t think it needs to be torn down, and I think there is a way to redesign doesn’t have that happen.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And what about federal budget deficits in general? Are you concerned about the level of the federal budget deficit, and what would you do about it? Do you think taxes need to go up?

**Micah Lasher**  
I am concerned about the level of federal budget deficit, and also am concerned about attempts to use the deficit as an excuse to cut programs that people depend on. And so I think that revenue needs to be a big piece of the conversation.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So tax increases?

**Micah Lasher**  
Yes. I think when you look at the tax code, you know, the way that wealth is generated in this country has transformed twice during my lifetime. Used to be that the preponderance of wealth was generated as ordinary income, taxed through income taxes. Then the preponderance of wealth becomes generated through capital gains, taxed at half the rate of ordinary income. And now wealth is generated, at the highest levels, by borrowing against assets, deducting the interest payments, and never actually reporting the gains because they’re stepped up upon demise. I think if we could bring the tax code into the modern era and a situation in which Jeff Bezos is paying an effective tax rate of 0.9%, there would be a great deal more resources to the federal government, both to meet the needs of Americans and do deficit reduction.

**Ben Smith**  
And would you end the practice of resetting the basis?

**Micah Lasher**  
Stepped-up basis. In short, yes. There are— Yes.

**Akash Mehta**  
What should New York do on taxes?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think that New York has to continue to be progressive and try and meet as many of the needs of our population as we can, recognizing that the federal government is putting us under enormous strain. And I think that we will not— And I think what we, what needs to be very clear and spoken very loudly is that we need a federal government that gets back in the business of providing a baseline of support to all of our states.

**Ben Max**  
Were the decisions in this \[state\] budget the right ones in terms of what happened with taxes?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think budgets are always messy compromises. But I think it did a reasonably good job of balancing all the competing concerns.

**Akash Mehta**  
450,000 New Yorkers are about to lose their health insurance. The budget didn’t do anything for them.

**Micah Lasher**  
Yeah. Well, I’m a co-sponsor of legislation that would’ve expanded state benefits to cover the Americans that are being kicked off of federal healthcare. Again, I’m running for Congress because I think we’re never going to find our way out of this if the federal government doesn’t get back in the business of making sure that people are taken care of. And I think it puts New York in a very difficult position in which there are no good answers.

**Josh Greenman**  
If Democrats take the House, should they move to impeach immediately?

**Micah Lasher**  
Yes.

**Josh Greenman**  
Whether or not they were in control of the Senate? Doesn’t matter?

**Micah Lasher**  
Yes.

**Ben Max**  
Over what in particular?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think probably, I mean…I think this president has probably committed more impeachable offenses than every one of his predecessors combined. I think that the self-enrichment schemes would be a good place to start.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
But why didn’t the first two impeachment work? I mean, the voters didn’t care the second time around.

**Micah Lasher**  
I think this is an issue of whether or not we’re going to declare— we’re going to join the Supreme Court in saying that presidents can flout the law. To me, this is a basic question of: we have a constitutional provision for the impeachment and removal of a president, and Donald Trump has clearly and repeatedly met the standard for impeachment and removal. And so to not pursue that would be declaring that part of our Constitution a dead letter, and I do not think we should do that.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So you think J.D. Vance should be president now?

\[Laughter\]

**Micah Lasher**  
We can have a long and enormously entertaining conversation about the hypothetical political consequences of the action. To me, it is a fundamental question of whether or not we are going to normalize the commission of high crimes and misdemeanors by the President of the United States.

**Josh Greenman**  
Can you rate briefly the effectiveness of New York State’s senators in Washington?

**Micah Lasher**  
No.

**Ben Max**  
Why not?

**Micah Lasher**  
\[pause\]

**Ben Smith**  
Huh. Doesn’t sound like a glowing endorsement of their performance.

**Micah Lasher**  
You know, I’m focused on my own performance.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think Schumer should run for re-election?

**Micah Lasher**  
I will leave that to Senator Schumer.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think more broadly that…there should be an age limit in American public life?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think we need a lot of fresh blood and new voices in the process. I think Congressman Nadler set an example in his decision not to run again.

**Josh Greenman**  
What do you think is the best thing he did in his career?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think he has a really strong record of legislative achievement on civil rights, on LGBTQ equality. I think he was a strong moral voice against the war in Iraq. He pushed the party to hold Donald Trump accountable not once but twice. And I think in totality, he’s been someone that voters in this district and Democrats nationally saw as a voice of moral clarity in the Congress at a time when that was not the norm.

**Ben Max**  
I have a two-parter on this race. I think there was a lot of thinking going in that you were, once you got Congressman Nadler’s endorsement, especially, the strong favorite here. Do you consider yourself a favorite in this race? As we discussed early on, it sort of got turned on its head by all this AI money and Assembly Member Bores seems to be doing pretty well in the [polling](https://emersoncollegepolling.com/new-york-city-2026-congressional-polling-ny-07-ny-10-ny-12/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Do you consider yourself the favorite in this race? Why or why not?

And separately, but as part of it, what do you make of the Schlossberg candidacy? Can he win? Is he going to be a spoiler in this race? How do you sort of see his role in this?

**Micah Lasher**  
You know, I will leave the punditry on the race to others.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So if you had ranked-choice voting in this race after voting for yourself, which of your opponents would you rank second?

**Micah Lasher**  
I don’t know. We still have a few debates left.

**Liena Zagare**  
Can you be an effective leader in this day without being a social media star?

**Micah Lasher**  
Yes.

**Ben Smith**  
I have a follow-up on that. My TikTok is, like, entirely New York local politics. That’s sort of how I consume it, and I see a lot of your TikToks. And I noticed, it’s changed, but a little earlier on, from the engagement numbers that I was, like, the only one seeing them. What have you learned; I mean, so much politics is conducted on social media now. What have you learned in the course of this race about that? It seems like you’ve changed what you’re doing.

**Micah Lasher**  
Mm. Good question. I think that there’s an assumption that the way to success on that medium is through reductive or even absurd commentary, performance, and so forth. And that there is a way, I think, to connect with people that is not reductive or absurd on social media. But it’s hard.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think Jack Schlossberg’s social media presence is reductive or absurd?

**Micah Lasher**  
I will again leave that to others.

**Ben Max**  
You are declining to answer quite a few questions here. This is probably the most questions we’ve asked of anybody that you’ve declined to answer.

**Micah Lasher**  
Yeah, well because I think that— Look, I think in general the questions that I’m declining to answer are the questions that are kind of the punditry, grading, private conversations. Yeah, I’m going to decline to answer those questions.

**Ben Smith**  
We haven’t had any questions about Israel, which is shocking.

**Micah Lasher**  
Well, it would be a profound disappointment.

**Ben Smith**  
And I think I’ll steal one of Josh’s here. What’s your specific red line on conditioning U.S. military aid to Israel?

**Micah Lasher**  
I think the question that I’m going to ask every time a question on policy in Israel comes before me is, is it actually going to improve the conditions of life for people on the ground? And is it going to push the parties toward a dialogue that advances the goal of peace? And so to me, it’s not about red lines. It’s about examining any given policy proposal through those lenses.

**Ben Smith**  
And then if nothing else, Alyssa had, I thought, a good final question. She couldn’t make it, but sent this on, which is “What did being a magician teach you about politics?”

**Micah Lasher**  
I have thought about that question a great deal over the years, and at some point I will write an essay about it. it is a question that obviously lends itself to all kinds of... The jokes write themselves…But I think that one thing that I would say: the process by which magicians come up with their methods is an interesting one.

It basically starts with the question of what is the effect that you want to accomplish? And effect with an “e” is the euphemistic word that magicians use for tricks. Often in magic books you will see the word effect used instead of the word trick. But it’s a useful— it’s an interesting word because the idea is what is the effect that you want to create for the person watching what you’re doing?

And so you start with the question of what is the effect, and sort of the baseline assumption is that there is some means to accomplish any given effect. Those means may be not practically possible, may be economically infeasible, but that there’s some way in some theoretical universe to accomplish the effect. And if you’re David Copperfield and you have unlimited resources, you can make the Statue of Liberty disappear.

And so I have over the years in government and in the policymaking roles that I’ve had, tried to start with the proposition that every problem is solvable. It may not be, as a practical matter, solvable. It may not be, in an economically feasible way, solvable. But there is some world in which the problem can be solved, and I think that that is a very useful and important way to think about government, that there are solutions, and it is simply a question of how do we get at those solutions? How do we get at as many of those solutions as we can given the resources at our disposal?

**Ben Smith**  
Thank you.

**Micah Lasher**  
Thank you.
### For Cities, Aggressive Partisan Gerrymandering Has a Silver Lining
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/partisan-gerrymandering-cities-unexpected-benefit/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:42:15.000Z
Let's stipulate at the outset: Partisan gerrymandering — whether in Virginia or Florida — is bad for democracy. In recent years, increasingly sophisticated computer models have enabled ever more aggressive line-drawing, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly allowed, steadily widening lawmakers’ power to choose their voters rather than the other way around. The result dilutes minority voting power, makes it harder for elected officials to serve constituents with coherent shared interests, can effectively silence entire state delegations when partisan control of the House shifts, weakens public trust in elections and leaves entire communities without a meaningful voice. That’s a tragedy.

But it’s a tragedy with one potential, albeit small, saving grace: In their efforts to crack and pack urban voters to dilute their influence in elections, Republican-friendly mapmakers sometimes end up spreading those voters — and their cities' challenges — across multiple congressional districts. Even when those districts are represented by people whose main center of gravity politically is in exurbs or rural areas, that can create broader political ownership over the kinds of issues that are often concentrated in urban centers, including public safety, housing instability and reentry after prison. The same effect occurs with Democrat gerrymanders, as the [Virginia redistricting scheme](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/virginia-supreme-court-blocks-democratic-drawn-congressional-map-voter-rcna342687?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) struck down by the state’s top court would have doubled the number of districts that include a piece of the Washington D.C. metro area.

Consider Memphis and New Orleans, two cities frequently cited when national conversations turn to violent crime. Both cities have populations below the target district population of [761,169](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/2020-census-apportionment-results.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) per the 2020 census. Under relatively compact, geographically sensible maps, each could have a single House member who would presumably advocate for federal investment in crime prevention, reentry programs or housing stability. But now both cities’ populations are being carved up and scattered among multiple congressional districts by their state legislators. And so, where once there was one lawmaker with a stake in what happens on Beale or Bourbon streets, now there are two or three. Even if that makes the city itself less powerful in Congress, it will give multiple legislators with a wider ideological range a shared, if less significant, stake in the city’s future. And as a result, that’s likely to get those legislators more involved in figuring out how to solve problems in those cities — as opposed to sitting on the sidelines and pointing fingers at members of the other party who are allegedly failing at the job.

That broader stake extends beyond housing. Crime, of course, is [hardly an exclusively urban phenomenon](https://time.com/6904210/america-suburban-crime-problem-essay/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Rural areas face [significant challenges](https://www.wosu.org/2025-10-28/politicians-are-focused-on-city-crime-what-about-rural-communities?fbclid=IwY2xjawRoS3RleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFKQTlEdmYzRkFFdGVjQXczc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHkhVjCDAEUMJl%5FsJQhSukiQzAZEKNizgb1TUbFoGNx9z-Mjgi8l9roBybY1I%5Faem%5FTJ7Q0-F7W%5FZ-KB5fuhT00Q&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) related to drug addiction, property crime and violence. Suburban communities grapple with fentanyl overdoses and gang activity that don't stop at the county line. But perception often lags behind reality in politics, and the perception — fueled by selective media coverage and decades of political rhetoric — is that serious crime is primarily an urban problem.

When suburban or exurban members of Congress suddenly find that portions of Memphis, New Orleans, Birmingham or Indianapolis fall within their district lines, they gain a new constituency — and with it, a new political incentive to care about what happens in those communities. Lawmakers who previously thought they had little reason to champion grants for violence interruption programs or DNA testing backlogs now have constituents who need those things. They may not be the constituents who are controlling primaries or general elections, but they are constituents nonetheless.

Moreover, [research](https://jowei.polisci.lsa.umich.edu/florida.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has shown that members from districts that have communities of varying population density may be less ideologically rigid and more inclined towards crafting bipartisan solutions. Indeed, members from districts with more than one type of population density are 76% more likely to participate in the [Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus](https://problemsolverscaucus.house.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (PSC), the leading bipartisan legislative caucus.\*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/06/image1.png)

The implications for federal criminal justice policy are already significant. The [Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs](https://ojp.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) administers hundreds of millions of dollars annually in grants for purposes ranging from solving cold cases to funding pretrial diversion programs and supporting crime victims. Support for some of these initiatives has been [eroded over the last year](https://counciloncj.org/doj-funding-cuts-more-than-550-organizations-impacted-new-analysis-finds/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Historically, competition for such funds has been skewed toward states and localities with more members on key appropriations subcommittees — members who, by virtue of their districts, have had a reason to prioritize them. Now that gerrymanders have resulted in more House members having a direct stake in the fortunes of major urban centers, the political math around those appropriations is beginning to shift.

The same logic applies to housing policy. Urban housing instability and crime are deeply interconnected, with [research](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8496894/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)[ consistently showing that stable housing reduces recidivism](https://www.urban.org/research/publication/housing-as-platform-improving-employment-and-justice-outcomes?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and that concentrated poverty drives cycles of violence that neither policing nor social services alone can break. When lawmakers representing prosperous outer-ring suburbs now also represent inner-city neighborhoods where constituents’ adult children struggle to find affordable housing after release from prison, the dynamics of the policy conversation has already started to change. Abstractions become constituents. It also turns out free-market policies championed by many conservative lawmakers are crucial to [removing the red tape of permitting and zoning](https://www.niskanencenter.org/a-pro-supply-to-do-list-for-congresss-housing-bill/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that inflates housing costs, a reality that the [abundance movement](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/why-abundance-matters/) on the center-left has recently embraced to a considerable degree.

None of this is to romanticize gerrymandering or suggest that a corrupt process can be relied upon to produce good outcomes. The distortions it creates in competitive elections, minority representation and democratic accountability are serious, and no accidental urban policy benefit comes close to justifying them. Independent redistricting commissions and statutory constraints on partisan line-drawing remain the right goals. All who care about the future of democracy should want the Supreme Court to reverse its corrosive recent precedents.

But while we’re waiting for what may be an unlikely outcome, policymakers and advocates working on criminal justice reform and urban revitalization would be wise to seize the opportunities created by a new congressional map that gives more members a direct stake in our nation’s urban areas. If members who previously never would’ve attended a briefing on hotspot policing or violence interruption programs now have constituents in Memphis waiting for an answer, that briefing should become worth their time. If the representative of a safely red exurban district now also represents part of New Orleans, the incentive may be greater to advocate for initiatives like grants funding [DNA testing](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R41800?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that can both solve more crimes and identify those wrongfully convicted.

Innovative state-level initiatives offer a compelling model for what federal investment could look like. In Utah, a [bipartisan bill](https://le.utah.gov/~2022/bills/static/HB0137.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) created the Violent Crime Clearance Rate Fund, a grant program with [matching funds](https://www.arnoldventures.org/newsroom/arnold-ventures-matches-utah-investment-in-law-enforcement?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) provided by Arnold Ventures that helps law enforcement agencies solve violent crimes by increasing officer ranks and investigative resources. Such interventions already have bipartisan support, but they could find new champions among members of Congress who, thanks to gerrymandered maps, suddenly represent parts of urban communities that may be more likely to live with the consequences of unsolved violence.

Nor should we overlook the electoral dimension at the heart of the new map. The presence of newly incorporated urban voters matters not only in general elections — where shifting demographics could make some suburban or even historically red districts competitive in a national wave environment — but also in primaries. The objection here is obvious: Aren’t some gerrymandered districts designed precisely to ensure those urban voters are too few to matter? In states with closed primaries, it’s true that the majority of urban residents who are Democrats can’t vote in Republican primaries. But, even if the urban area incorporates only 10 or 20 percent of the primary electorate, that could sway a tight race. 

Even if the chances of that are modest, lawmakers may feel obliged to attend to the concerns of their constituents. Consider Tennessee’s 8th Congressional District. That district — rated [R+21](https://ballotpedia.org/Tennessee%27s%5F8th%5FCongressional%5FDistrict?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and among the most reliably Republican in the South prior to the 2026 Tennessee gerrymander — included numerous suburbs in Shelby County, all of which are urban areas. Kustoff voted for the [First Step Act](https://www.bop.gov/inmates/fsa/overview.jsp?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 2018 and for the EQUAL Act in 2021 — the bill eliminating the federal sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine — both votes that divided Republicans. And in 2025, he spent a day alongside the Trump administration’s Memphis Safe Task Force and began pushing for a permanent federal law enforcement presence in the city, explicitly citing the need to address violent crime for his constituents. 

We’ve seen signs that such a dynamic can work even in a Congress that many consider hopelessly divided. A close look at the 2018 First Step Act, the landmark federal criminal justice reform bill that has [reduced recidivism](https://counciloncj.org/first-step-an-early-analysis-of-recidivism/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) among people released from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, bears out the logic. The act, which reduced some mandatory minimum sentences in the federal system and expanded rehabilitative programming, earned overwhelming bipartisan support.

But analysis of the House revealed a clear pattern: Republicans representing districts with any urban component were significantly more likely to vote for the First Step Act than those from entirely rural or exurban districts. Of the 36 Republican “no” votes, nearly all came from the most rural, heavily conservative districts. Conversely, Republicans whose districts included parts of cities — even if those districts were drawn to be safely red — voted “yes” at more than three times the rate (94% versus 29%) than their rural counterparts.

If the First Step Act, which focused on sentencing and prison reform, produced such a clear correlation, there is good reason to expect an even stronger effect for legislation aimed at grantprograms to prevent and solve violent crimes. Violent crime is a visceral, immediate concern for urban constituents. Lawmakers who know that a portion of their primary electorate lives in a high-crime neighborhood might think twice before opposing funding for DNA testing backlogs, violence interruption programs or state grant initiatives like Utah’s violent crime clearance fund. 

Recognition of this silver lining is not a call for complacency about gerrymandering's real harms. It is an argument for clear-eyed opportunism in policy advocacy. Sometimes democracy's distortions create unexpected openings. The challenge is whether our elected leaders choose to walk through them.

---

\* *Analysis performed using 2026 Congressional District Health Dashboard (CDHD) District Density Index that categorizes congressional districts into six types based on a gradient of household density: Pure Urban: Highest household density, Urban-Suburban Mix Dense, Suburban Sparse, Suburban Rural, Suburban Mix, Pure Rural: Lowest household density.*

*\*\* Analysis performed using 2018 CDHD data.*

*Marc A. Levin, Esq., and Khalil Cumberbatch co-lead the Centering Justice Initiative at the Council on Criminal Justice, where Levin is Chief Policy Counsel and Cumberbatch is Director of Engagement and Partnerships. They can be reached at mlevin@counciloncj.org and khalil@counciloncj.org.*
### What Rikers’ Receiver Should Do Now
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rikers-receiver-jails-reform-lessons/
Last updated: 2026-06-03T18:51:56.000Z
One year ago, federal judge Laura Swain determined that conditions in New York City jails had been so bad for so long that the city had to give up control of its own jail system. Nicholas Deml is the remediation manager Judge Swain appointed to help turn things around, working with jail leadership. He will be issuing a report in July that includes recommendations for improving the city’s jails, including the notorious Rikers Island, to the parties involved in longstanding litigation on the issue. A final report will be filed with the court in July and publicly available. 

To reduce violence and improve conditions, Deml should consider some of the successes around the country that my colleagues at the Brennan Center for Justice and I cover in our [new report](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/prison-reform-united-states?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). We wrote about states implementing innovative practices in some prisons that are making life safer and more humane for the people who live and work there. The experience of those states can provide a helpful blueprint here.

Our study focuses on prisons in places as varied as Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, North Dakota and South Carolina. It’s true that prisons and jails aren’t exactly the same thing, but they share many of the same problems: the harm that comes with social and physical isolation, along with the constant threat of violence. Jails are largely a local function. They house individuals who have been arrested, those awaiting trial and those serving sentences for low-level offenses, typically for less than one year. Jails often have little to no programming opportunities because the population is supposed to be there for a short period of time. Prisons tend to house those who have been sentenced to more than a year, and typically have more robust educational and programming opportunities like parenting classes, educational instruction and behavioral health support. 

The issues plaguing New York City jails for both officers and those who are incarcerated there are pervasive and well known. People who have lived on Rikers Island [have said](https://www.vera.org/its-a-torture-chamber?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that officers treat them as “less than human.” That cruelty comes in many forms — from the excessive and unnecessary use of force to squalid conditions that include inedible food, a [lack of running water](https://queenseagle.com/all/2024/11/13/doc-boss-denies-knowing-about-rikers-worst-kept-secret?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), toilets not flushing and more. And the staffing challenges within the New York City Department of Correction aren’t helping. People who have worked on Rikers Island [have said](https://cobanyc.org/corrections-officers-call-for-better-conditions-on-rikers/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that the staff shortages make their jobs more dangerous. While Rikers Island has historically had one of the highest ratios of staff to detainees, since the beginning of the pandemic [more than 4,000 corrections officers](https://queenseagle.com/all/2025/12/10/rikers-guards-sue-city-over-return-of-12-hour-shifts?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across the department have left their jobs. This is despite a [70% increase](https://nyc-jail-population-tracker.datacollaborativeforjustice.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the number of people incarcerated in the jail system over nearly the same timeframe. 

The current operational culture and widespread violence on Rikers Island and across New York City jails — with routine violence against detainees by staff, and a lack of discipline around use of force — is detrimental to everyone it affects. Deml and his team will work with a range of experts to reduce violence and improve conditions, including: the newly appointed Department of Corrections Commissioner Stanley Richards and his department, the Independent Rikers Commission, the Board of Correction, the New York State Commission of Correction, the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, nonprofits, advocates and other experts. The case studies in our report show that culture change requires improving how correctional staff engage with incarcerated people. A focus of Deml’s reforms should be on humanizing these interactions, and making sure that life in jail resembles life outside the jail setting as much as possible. The NYC DOC should help to transform the role of the correctional officer to that of a motivator and role model, not someone who focuses solely on security.

### Humanizing interactions with incarcerated residents

Correctional officers need to be trained — and encouraged by department leadership — to understand residents’ mental and emotional needs. This allows staff to better anticipate and prevent security risks, rather than responding after an incident has occurred. This approach is known as dynamic security, and several jurisdictions across the country are embracing this new approach. 

As we studied culture change in corrections, we spent time shadowing an organization called [Amend](https://amend.us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), based at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. It’s one of the many organizations working with corrections departments across the country to reduce violence in correctional facilities and instill dynamic security.

Amend knows that poor working conditions for staff, under-investment in training and education and policies and procedures that perpetuate staff stress and trauma can be barriers to improving outcomes for incarcerated people. New York City jails face these same problems. Amend brings correctional officials from Norway, who are trained in more humane practices, to work alongside U.S.-based staff to make improvements in U.S. corrections culture and conditions. When our team visited prisons in North Dakota, Washington state and Oregon, we saw firsthand the incredible impact: The U.S.-based staff are more engaged at work, with higher morale and a greater feeling of safety.

New York City is familiar with Amend. Back in 2019, a delegation of city officials visited Norway with Amend. For some time, there appeared to be some progress and exchanges of ideas. But correctional leadership turnover and the COVID-19 crisis overwhelmed city jails, and hindered this progress.

So how does it work? To help promote culture change within corrections, Amend brings correctional leaders and government officials to prisons in Norway. Line staff also benefit from visiting Norway, where they shadow Norwegian correctional officers, attend Amend-led training programs at Norway’s correctional officer training academy, and learn more about innovative correctional practices. The Norwegians provide real-time feedback on U.S. staff interactions with incarcerated people and guide staff on more effective ways to encourage change. Amend’s training helps correctional officers re-envision their role as public health workers. The program empowers officers to support incarcerated people and their rehabilitation, fostering a more humane and dignified environment by reducing trauma, violence and harm in facilities. 

Some states are also implementing dynamic security by establishing specialized prison units for young adults ages 18-25, through the Vera Institute of Justice’s [Restoring Promise](https://www.vera.org/ending-mass-incarceration/dignity-behind-bars/living-conditions-in-prison/restoring-promise-initiative?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) initiative. Officers in these units receive training in listening and coaching skills, empathy, de-escalation tactics, conflict resolution and motivational interviewing. 

In practice, that training can manifest in simple ways. When our team visited such specialized units in North Dakota, we saw Director of Corrections Colby Braun asking incarcerated people we passed in the hallway how their day was going, how a visit with their family was and sometimes shaking hands with the residents. Officers in these units may also, for example, ask questions to explore why a young person is upset, instead of immediately issuing a disciplinary infraction. All these gestures might seem small. But they build on each other to encourage a supportive relationship and communication that’s based on trust, not fear. And they largely don’t happen in New York City jails.

The Scandinavian Prison Project is another unit-based initiative that implements international approaches to incarceration. Researchers from Drexel University and the University of Oslo entered into an agreement with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to create an experimental housing unit at State Correctional Institution Chester, a medium-security, reentry-focused facility near Philadelphia. 

The “Little Scandinavia” unit opened in May 2022, and can house up to 64 men. The new staff curriculum includes courses in crisis management, negotiation and communication, suicide prevention and motivational interviewing. And correctional staff eat shared meals with the residents inside these units.

These programs work. The team working with Amend in a high-security behavioral health unit in Oregon [reported](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0288187&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a mean 73.9% decrease in the rate of total assaults by incarcerated people — either against staff or against other incarcerated people. And an [evaluation](https://www.vera.org/publications/restoring-promise-a-randomized-control-trial-examining-the-impact-of-an-innovative-young-adult-housing-on-reducing-violence?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of two Restoring Promise units in South Carolina found that young adults from these units were 73% less likely to be written up for violence, compared with a control group in the general population. There was also an 83% reduction in solitary confinement stays during the first year of participation in the Restoring Promise units. And Scandinavian Prison Project researchers conducted a prison climate survey which found that Little Scandinavia has fewer disputes than other units at SCI Chester, less misconduct and decreased use of restrictive housing as a form of discipline. 

### Reflecting outside life in the jail setting

Another key principle we observed across multiple states and write about in our report is the idea that prison life should be organized to resemble community life as much as possible. For example, people behind bars may commute to a job, or personalize their living space with posters and family pictures. This approach is called normalization, and it’s another way corrections staff can establish more humane conditions for residents in their care. 

In Pennsylvania’s Little Scandinavia unit, for example, the prison [made structural changes](https://www.brennancenter.org/media/15371/download/2026%5F01%5Fprison%5Freform%5Ffinal.pdf?inline=1&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to the unit layout and to individual cells to help provide a sense of normalcy. There’s a communal space with plants, couches, a fish tank, a game table, and exercise equipment. And residents can also access a washer and dryer, green spaces outside, and a kitchen that's fully equipped.

Aspects of normalization are also already being replicated in some jail settings. Restoring Promise worked with Middlesex County, Mass., to open a housing unit at their jail. The project included renovations to brighten the space and add communal areas for prayer/meditation, along with a library/study hall. Officers in the unit emphasize the importance of a daily routine with residents. Staff are also trained in the same de-escalation, conflict resolution and other skills mentioned above. 

Within the first 11 months of operation, the Middlesex County Sheriff’s Office [reported](https://vera-institute.files.svdcdn.com/production/downloads/publications/PACT-report-final-3.6.19.pdf?dm=1568655693&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that only 13% of the young adults in this new unit had been issued at least one disciplinary report, compared to 33% of young adults in the general population of the jail. These types of practices and policies that produce a more normalized environment can better prepare people to rejoin their communities safely and successfully. 

### Conclusion

To be sure, the problems plaguing Rikers Island and jails across New York City are complex. They will not be fixed overnight. Fully addressing these problems also requires [reducing the jail population](https://www.nydailynews.com/2026/04/29/nyc-should-use-our-plan-close-rikers/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) through ensuring that cases move at a reasonable speed through the system, pretrial release and other alternatives to jail programs with an eye to public safety. But changing prison and jail culture is a pivotal step, and it’s possible as demonstrated by the examples in the states that we studied.

By shifting to an approach that focuses on dynamic security and normalization principles, Deml and Richards can help improve conditions for those who live and work behind bars.

Meanwhile, the City is planning for Rikers Island to close, and for the staff and the incarcerated population to move to new borough-based jails across the city. Deml and Richards’ work now to build a safer culture at Rikers won’t be lost but will travel with the staff to their new facilities, reducing the chance that the atrocities at Rikers Island will be repeated.
### Speeding Up the Bus: Reality Behind the Rhetoric
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/bus-speed-traffic-management-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-06-04T15:54:54.000Z
Mayors across the country, from New York to Seattle to Los Angeles to Boston, have promised to make buses faster and more useful to passengers. What we have seen in practice, however, is the steady diminution of the bus as travel speeds and ridership have declined over the last 20 years. 

So how do we make good on these pledges to speed up the bus, made most prominently by New York City’s Zohran Mamdani? We argue that traffic management, specifically, how priority is applied to the bus, matters. By applying solutions that mitigate the sources of delay — namely road traffic and the amount of time buses spend idling at a bus stop, waiting for passengers to pay and board, sitting behind a double parked car or waiting for traffic to clear — we can start to chart a course to faster, more reliable buses, buses that passengers opt for because they get where they need to go faster than walking or in a car. 

In May, the Transit Costs Project released what we call the [Transit Priority Atlas](https://tpa.transitcosts.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It contains three primary elements. First, we collected quantitative data from 32 cities to compare and contrast their bus operations along a wide range of indicators. Second, we documented different priority strategies used to speed up the bus. Third, we reviewed historical case studies to show how change has been achieved. 

What we found is that improving surface transit operations is slow and politically perilous. There are no simple fixes. It requires an ongoing commitment to nuts-and-bolts traffic management to yield meaningful results that deliver faster travel times for people and greater service reliability. 

After collecting data from 32 cities from around the world, we discovered that while it’s true that surface street traffic waxes and wanes over the course of the day, bus and trolley operations don’t have to suffer equally. Cities like Zurich, Bologna and Munich have found ways to prioritize surface transit so that travel speeds remain consistent throughout the day even as automobile speeds vary.

We collected these ideas in a transit priority toolbox with real-world examples and stylized drawings to make these interventions more tangible and vivid to practitioners, elected officials, journalists and anyone interested in how to improve transit.

For example, painted bus lanes have become more commonplace in North America as mayors pay lip service to improving transit. These easy-to-deploy curb-adjacent and parking-adjacent bus lanes, however, haven’t been paired with other changes to convey substantive priority by addressing conflicts with other vehicles that delay buses, notably at intersections. The Atlas illustrates how an extensive set of tools can be combined into broader priority strategies that rearrange the hierarchy of streets and shape circulation patterns, for example, by diverting through traffic away from transit routes or by establishing priority corridors for transit. Dead-ending lateral streets or turning them into right-in/right-out are two examples of interventions that reorder the hierarchy of streets to favor transit. Instead of maintaining equal access to each street, these treatments prioritize the transit street over the non-transit street. Another successful strategy is to plan transit priority following a “complete network” rather than a “complete street” paradigm, especially in parts of cities built before the car, with dense road networks and relatively narrow streets. By diverting through traffic away from transit corridors using tools such as modal filters and transit-only streets, bus routes can be protected from congestion even when there isn’t sufficient space to give them their own lane. 

These localized interventions, when embedded in broader traffic management strategies that favor transit by systematically addressing the sources of delays, have delivered faster, more reliable, and cheaper-to-operate trams and buses in cities like Zürich, Munich, Prague, Lyon, Stockholm and many more examples detailed in the Atlas. 

Finally, through an in-depth case study, we documented how a forward-looking political vision for better transit and a less car-centric city shaped traffic management policies in Bologna over a four-decade period. In the 1970s as mass automobility overwhelmed Italian cities, Bologna decided to prevent automobile traffic from “suffocating” the city. It didn’t have the resources to introduce high-capacity transit, such as a subway, or build more road infrastructure to alleviate traffic. Instead, it turned to street network management. Through incremental changes at the city-wide scale, such as limited traffic areas, one-way streets and transit priority via bus-only streets and contra-flow lanes, Bologna reduced conflicts between automobiles and buses. By freeing the bus from congestion and limiting access to private vehicles into the city center, scheduled bus travel speeds increased from around 14.5 km/h to 16 km/h. Despite the small numbers, bus travel speeds improved by more than 10%. A faster, more reliable bus has coincided with Bologna’s resurgence: a thriving city center and one of the highest transit modal shares and per capita usage in the country at around 300 per year, even as Italian car ownership rates have gone from 300 per 1000 residents in the 1970s to 650 per 1000 residents in the 2000s.

Bologna offers a lesson to cities that want to improve the bus but don’t have the money to take on capital construction: Smart management, namely creating a legible hierarchy of streets, minimizing conflicts and continually iterating on what works can tame congestion and revitalize public transit — and do it without straining the public fisc.
### Charter Revision Politics: A Primer
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/charter-revision-politics-nyc-primer/
Last updated: 2026-06-03T13:33:06.000Z
Last week was a big one for the New York City Charter Revision Commissions — that’s “Commissions” plural. On Wednesday night, the Commission created by then-Mayor Eric Adams on his final day in office formally approved a charter amendment, to be placed on the November ballot, that would, if approved by the voters, authorize open primaries — that is, primaries in which all voters, regardless of party enrollment, may participate — in elections for City offices. However, moments before the Commission acted, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, exercising the power granted to him by the state legislature in the just-enacted state budget, rescinded that Commission and nullified its proposals. 

Then, on Thursday, Mamdani announced the creation of his own 15-member charter revision commission, dubbed the Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) in satiric homage to you-know-what (if you don’t know what, it’s DOGE, Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s infamous wrecking ball aimed at the federal bureaucracy). Mamdani’s COGE, which is scheduled to hold its first public meeting this week, is charged with reviewing the City Charter to “remov\[e\] bureaucratic barriers that slow infrastructure projects and delay services; \[equip\] City agencies the authority, enforcement tools, and flexibility they need to deliver programs effectively; and \[modernize\] government to improve efficiency and saving, reserve, and budget practices.” 

(As long as we are counting charter revision commissions, there is also a third dangling out there — the City Council-created “NYC Commission to Strengthen Local Democracy,” which last summer adopted a package of proposed charter changes but, because of the actions of yet another Adams charter revision commission, was unable to get them on the ballot for voter consideration. That Commission has been quiet since last summer and its proposals are likely to be bumped from the ballot again this year by Mandani’s COGE, since a mayoral commission always takes precedence over a charter-authorized one.)

So, what is a charter revision commission? Why are there so many of them? How was Mayor Adams able to create one as he was walking out the door? And what happens now with Mamdani’s commission?

The New York City Charter is the constitution of New York City. First adopted in 1897 and revised and amended many times since, it creates the major offices and institutions of City government — the mayor, comptroller, public advocate, the Council, the borough presidents, major city agencies — and lays out their powers. It establishes the rules for adopting the City’s capital and operating budgets, zoning and land use regulation, procurement and local legislative process. 

Compared to the United States or New York State Constitutions, the Charter is relatively easy to amend through the regular local legislative process — meaning, action of the City Council, with mayoral approval. However, state law provides that charter changes that affect the powers of elected officials require voter approval. Those more significant charter changes can be prepared through ordinary legislation, but they also often come from charter revision commissions.

### What Charter Revision Commissions used to be

Although the Charter can be amended without a commission, state law also authorizes the creation of charter revision commissions — typically the time for more ambitious reimaginings of how city government might work.

A commission can be created by the City Council, from a voter initiative, or by the mayor, with mayoral commissions by far the most common. State law provides that a mayoral charter revision shall consist of nine to 15 city residents, handpicked by the mayor, who also designates the chair. The commission is supposed to “review the entire charter of the city” and recommend such changes as it considers appropriate, which can take effect only if approved by the voters. Any proposal has to be ready for the voters 60 days before election day, and the commission has until the second general election after it has been created to complete its work. In other words, Mamdani’s COGE has until the end of August if it wants to put proposals on the ballot this year, but can also continue work through the summer of 2027 to put proposals before the voters in November 2027\. That’s a pretty long tenure as these things go.

Historically, charter revision commissions were used to prepare major changes to the structure of city government. The 1897 Charter creating Greater New York, the 1938 replacement of the Board of Aldermen with the Council, the strengthening of the mayor’s role in the budget and land use process in 1961 and the 1987-89 abolition of the Board of Estimate and the redistribution of its powers across City government were all the work of Charter Revision Commissions. As these dates indicate, for most of New York City’s history, charter revision was a once-in-a-generation process, responding to the felt need for wholesale reworkings in the structure of City government, or, as with the 1987-89 commission, the powerful outside pressure posed by the Supreme Court’s invalidation of the Board of Estimate.

### The new politics of Charter revision

That all began to change as the 20th century turned into the 21st. While there were no more than a half-dozen charter revision commissions (including one created by the state) between 1897 and 1997, since 1998 there have been 14 charter revision commissions, 12 created by the mayor — or, on average, one commission every other year. Some of these have proposed significant changes to city government — like the adoption of ranked-choice voting in 2019 (proposed by a Council commission) and last year’s reform of the Uniform Land Review Process (ULURP) to speed up housing production — although not of the same scale as the abolition of the Board of Estimate. Others, like the 2022 proposal to adopt a statement of values as a preamble in the Charter, or the 2024 measure to expand the Department of Sanitation’s powers to clean all City property, were trivial and could easily have been adopted through the ordinary legislative process without a charter revision commission or voter approval.

What accounts for this explosion of charter revision commissions? Growing conflict between the mayor and council, exacerbated by a not-so-secret weapon state law gives the mayor — the power to “bump” Council proposals or voter-initiated measures from the ballot. Under state law, if a mayoral charter revision commission submits a charter amendment for voter approval, no other question can be submitted to the voters at that election. Mayor Rudy Giuliani was the first to use this bumping power in 1998\. Giuliani wanted to use taxpayer funds to relocate the New York Yankees from the Bronx to a new stadium on Manhattan’s West Side. The Council tried to block this with a local law, passed over Giuliani’s veto, that would have asked the voters to adopt a ban on the use of public funds to build the stadium. To bump the stadium referendum, Giuliani created a charter revision commission, which wound up placing a number of campaign finance reforms on the November 1998 ballot.

Giuliani used his bumping power again in 1999 to block a voter-initiated campaign finance reform proposal, creating a new commission in June 1999 that proposed multiple changes that would generally have strengthened the mayor’s power over the budget. The 1999 Giuliani commission’s proposals were rejected by the voters, but accomplished his goal of blocking the grassroots campaign finance reform measure.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg also deployed the charter-revision-commission bumping power, against a grassroots initiative opposing the Iraq War in 2002 and another voter initiative to amend the charter to mandate strict caps on public school class sizes in 2003\. Mayor Adams’ 2024 commission — the one that expanded the Sanitation Department’s powers — was also rushed into existence to block a Council measure that would have expanded its power to approve or reject mayoral appointments of commissioners. The 2025 Commission also blocked a City Council commission’s recommendations from the ballot.

Beyond bumping specific Council or grassroots proposals, mayors have used charter commissions to push their political agendas and leapfrog a potentially hostile City Council by getting their policy and government reform proposals directly to the voters.

### Where do we go from here?

The Adams-Mamdani commission tango sets new standards for the political use of charter commissions. Although nothing in state law addresses the timing of the mayor’s creation of a charter revision commission, Adams is the only mayor to have created a charter revision commission consisting entirely of his appointees as he was leaving office. With no love apparently lost between the outgoing and incoming mayors, Adams’ commission could have handicapped his successor in two ways. First, any charter amendment it would have proposed would probably bump any Mamdani charter proposals from the ballot. Although state law does not address the prospect of dueling charter commissions by different mayors operating simultaneously, there is reason to believe that the Adams commission proposals, if prepared first, would benefit from the law’s preference for mayoral commissions. Second, the Adams commission’s directive to consider open primaries is a direct attack on Mamdani’s political strength — the growing power of the highly motivated ideological left that enabled him to dominate in the Democratic primary. Opening the primary to non-Democrats — including more centrist independents and Republicans — could make the mayor more vulnerable to a reelection challenger.

Not only was Adams’s lame duck action unprecedented, so, too, was Mamdani’s rescission of it. When he acted, Adams appeared to have given Mamdani a fait accompli. While the law did not contemplate the situation Adams created, neither did it give Mamdani the power to remove or replace charter commissioners (although he could fill vacancies) or to cancel the commission. He could starve it of city funds, but the commission signaled it would raise private funds. In the end, Albany came to the rescue, with a new law, part of the state budget, written for the occasion, providing that when a charter commission is created between election day and the end of the year, its “continued existence” is dependent on “confirmation by the mayor in office” during the first six months of the following year. Failure to obtain confirmation — which Mamdani delivered last week — causes the commission to expire and nullifies its proposals.

Members of the Adams commission have signaled they intend to fight their termination, but it is unclear what legal recourse they have. We are probably back to just two commissions — Mamdani’s COGE and the in-limbo Council commission.

It is not yet clear what parts of the Charter the COGE intends to tackle, although from the mayor’s announcement of the commission it seems likely it will look at budget and fiscal issues, the process for approving capital projects, how the city delivers services and city agency powers. It remains to be seen whether COGE will live up to its promise of serious Charter change. But it has already accomplished its political purpose of blocking any charter initiative by the Council or anyone else.
### Did NYPD's Zone Strategy Cause Crime to Drop?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nypd-zone-strategy-crime-drop-analysis/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T00:09:15.000Z
Every month, the NYPD releases the prior month’s [crime numbers](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR007/nypd-fewest-murders-recorded-history-the-first-four-months-the-year-in-april?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and lately those numbers have been moving in the right direction. The [sharpest drops](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr011/nypd-record-low-shooting-victims-first-half-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are happening in the department’s deployment “zones,” small swathes of the city flooded with officers on foot. In these zones, shootings, violent crime and overall crime are all reported down well past the citywide declines. The department [credits](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/transcript-%5Fmayor-mamdani-and-nypd-announces-fewest-murders--sho?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the deployment strategy.

The drops are real. Fewer people are being shot on those blocks than during comparable time periods in the prior year. But there’s a question lurking underneath the press releases that rarely gets asked out loud: Is the strategy doing the work, or is something else? A long-known statistical phenomenon called regression to the mean — a fancy way of saying that random variations, especially in small sample sizes, typically explain most increases or decreases — predicts that when you pick the blocks that spiked the highest last year and look at them this year, those blocks will likely have fallen on their own, whether or not anyone deploys more police officers to them.

Earlier this month, the NYPD doubled down on the zone strategy, launching what it called the [“largest summer deployment in the department’s recorded history,”](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR007/nypd-fewest-murders-recorded-history-the-first-four-months-the-year-in-april?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) sending up to 3,800 officers a night to 72 zones in 40 of the city’s 78 precincts. Each zone averages just over a tenth of a square mile, small enough to walk across in under 10 minutes. The department’s January-through-April [press release](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR007/nypd-fewest-murders-recorded-history-the-first-four-months-the-year-in-april?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) credited the deployment with major crime going down 22.7%, shooting incidents down 62.5% and shooting victims down 66% inside the zones. Last summer’s [19-week version](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/10/transcript--mayor-adams-and-nypd-commissioner-jessica-s--tisch-b?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), by [NYPD’s accounting](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr015/nypd-record-low-shooting-incidents-shooting-victims-first-nine-months-the-year?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), produced similar numbers, with shootings down 47% and overall crime down 18%. The story is the same season after season: Heavy deployment seems to yield dramatic drops, and the deployment gets credit.

Commissioner Jessica Tisch called the zones “the one strategy that is game changing” in her January 2025 [State of the NYPD](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndrbYlzu2yg&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) address, a “hyperlocal, data-driven policing model” in which an algorithm selects “clusters of violence and disorder.” She has framed the approach as “the 2025 modernization of the classic cops-on-the-dots strategy.” 

That is shorthand for the [Jack Maple](https://www.qgazette.com/articles/crime-buster-jack-maple-secured-a-place-in-history/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) formulation, developed under Bill Bratton in the early 1990s, which became the operational core of CompStat. The system paired precinct-level crime data with regular command reviews, making commanders personally answerable for patterns on their watch. It has underpinned every place-based strategy since, from Operation Impact in 2003 to the current Violence Reduction Zones.

The underlying approach has evidence behind it. Decades of research show that concentrating police resources on small, high-crime hotspots reduces violence. A 2024 [meta-analysis](https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/science/article/pii/S1359178924001010?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of 32 evaluations confirmed the finding and added an important distinction. Problem-solving approaches, in which officers and analysts identify and address the specific conditions sustaining crime on a block (an unsecured vacant lot, a failing streetlight, an open-air drug market), outperform programs that simply flood those blocks with additional officers. The question is not whether police presence in small high-crime areas can reduce crime. It can and does. The question is whether the headline drops the NYPD reports from its zones are evidence that this particular deployment is doing so.

To be clear, citywide violence has fallen. Shootings last year hit a recorded low, and murders are also on track to hit historic lows. But what does analysis show when the focus is not on the citywide drop but on the much sharper declines the NYPD reports inside its zones?

It’s not new for the NYPD to attribute significant crime declines in narrow parts of the city to its own efforts when another likely suspect is in the shadows.

In [January 2003](https://nypost.com/2003/04/02/crime-slash-program-reprieved/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the NYPD launched Operation Impact, designating Impact Zones (high-crime areas judged to be experiencing recent spikes) and assigning roughly two-thirds of police academy graduates to flood them on foot. Over the program’s 12 years, it averaged about 25 zones across roughly six square miles. Commissioner Bill Bratton ended it in 2015\. “A generation of cops had grown up in a culture of enforcement, not one of relationship building,” [he wrote](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). “When I arrived, cops were still graduating from the Academy and going straight into Impact Zones.”

The zone strategy launched in May 2023 has the same operational logic as Impact: identify blocks that are spiking and flood them with uniformed officers during peak hours. Both versions use algorithms, mathematical tools that look for where crime is concentrating, to pick the blocks. Both rely heavily on [rookies](https://nypost.com/2026/05/04/us-news/nyc-crime-plunges-to-historic-laws-as-nypd-boss-reveals-plan-to-keep-streets-safe-for-summer/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) straight out of the Academy. 

What has actually grown is the footprint. Last summer’s plan covered 12 square miles, twice Impact’s average of six.

Operation Impact was evaluated by independent researchers. In 2016, John MacDonald, Jeffrey Fagan and Amanda Geller [compared](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0157223&type=printable&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) zones to similar non-zone blocks in the same precincts. Their estimate, based on a more rigorous methodological analysis, came in at 10% to 14%, far smaller than the figures NYPD leads with. The department typically touted higher declines, ranging between [20%](https://www.nyc.gov/html/unccp/gprb/downloads/pdf/NYC%5FSafety%20and%20Security%5FOperation%20Impact.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [44%](https://nypost.com/2003/01/18/a-bite-out-of-crime/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), by comparing crime in a zone during the program to the same period the year before. That arithmetic takes the entire drop at face value, with no control for what would have happened without the deployment.

### The selection itself does the work

Regression to the mean works like this. Crime on any given block in any given year reflects two things. One is the block’s underlying rate — the level of crime its population tends to produce. That rate is real and changes slowly. The other is the year’s particular bad luck: a crew that moved through, a hot summer, one repeat offender out and active. By definition, bad luck has no reason to repeat the next year.

So when the department picks blocks at the very top of last year’s count, it has picked partly the blocks that need the most intensive intervention and partly just those that are experiencing bad luck or statistical noise. The first part stays. The second part doesn’t. 

Next year, crime levels on the same block are bound to decline, whether or not anyone did anything.

The effect is amplified under three conditions: when the unit being measured is small, so a single event swings the count; when the window used to select a block is short, so one unlucky stretch is the whole record; and when the thing being measured swings around a lot from year to year on its own.

The zone strategy checks all three boxes. Zones average about 0.17 square miles, or about 24 (Manhattan-sized) blocks. The NYPD told a joint Council hearing on [April 29](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1405167&GUID=97EB83F2-4F5A-408A-85FB-12042EC17D56&Options=info%7C&Search=&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that the School Safety Zones are designated on the prior year’s trends. And shootings, prominent among the reported outcomes, fluctuate block-to-block more than almost anything else public-safety agencies track.

So how much would crime drop if no one did anything?

The NYPD has not published the algorithm behind how it selects its Violence Reduction Zones, but the department has said they are picked based on [recent spikes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndrbYlzu2yg&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Take the blocks scoring highest on a recent crime measure, stack them until the total footprint hits about 12 square miles, and call the result the zones. Whatever the formula, the act of picking the worst blocks in a given moment is itself enough to produce a drop the following year.

For the purposes of this exercise, the exact method matters less than the act of selection itself. So we built a simple model that mimics the selection process, picking the highest-crime blocks each year and tracking what happens next, to show how much of the decline regression to the mean alone can explain. For every summer from 2010 through 2025, we ranked blocks by their crime incident count in a defined look-back window, i.e. the prior summer, the prior year or the prior three years of crime or shootings numbers. We then took the top blocks until the cumulative area reached 12 square miles, and recorded what happened in those blocks during that summer compared to the previous summer. We tested two outcomes (shootings and street violence like robberies and assaults) across three look-back windows (the prior three years, the prior year and the prior summer alone). Find our detailed methodology [here](https://github.com/jjhall77/rtm%5Fzones?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Two windows in this period are worth keeping straight. Operation Impact ran from 2003 through 2015\. The current Violence Reduction Zones launched in May 2023 and are still running. In the years between Impact and the current zones, the department stepped back from centralized, year-round hot-spot deployment. It adopted a[ Neighborhood Policing](https://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/home/POA/pdf/Plan-of-Action.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) plan instead, a precinct-driven model that left enforcement priorities to local commanders and [communities](http://communities.to/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). To deal with increasing summer violence, the department instituted Summer All-Out, which sent a few hundred administrative cops to precincts with a lot of violence. Their deployment was left up to police commanders and has been shown to have [no impact](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/ep4fs%5Fv1?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on summer crime.

In every summer from 2010 to 2025, whether or not a zone strategy was in place, the blocks that spiked the previous year fell, and they fell far more than the city as a whole.

From 2015 through 2023, when no zone strategy existed, crime in simulated zones fell faster than the citywide rate every summer, with no extra officers deployed. For shootings, picking blocks on the prior year’s count produced an average drop of 76%, even as citywide year-over-year shootings averaged a 6% rise across the window. That is a gap of over 80 percentage points. For outdoor street violence, the same selection produced an average drop of 32%, against an average citywide rise of 2%. 

The narrower the selection window, the bigger the apparent drop. Picking on the prior summer alone, the narrowest window we tested, averaged a drop of 88% for shootings and 55% for street violence. During this period, there were no zone deployments, yet areas that had been spiking previously still saw drastic declines.

The NYPD’s reported drops sit right inside the mechanical range, meaning they’re what one would expect to see even if police did nothing.

For the broader major-crime category, the September 2025 press update reported that total crime in its zones went down 18.3% over the first four-plus months of the summer plan, as compared to a year-end citywide major-crime drop of 3%. That 15-point gap also falls well within the simulated range, slightly above what our most conservative look-back produces.

Regarding School Safety Zones, which the NYPD has stated are chosen based on the prior year’s trends, the department [reported](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR007/nypd-fewest-murders-recorded-history-the-first-four-months-the-year-in-april?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) crime down 53% and shooting incidents and victims each down more than 75% in the program’s early months. Those numbers also sit squarely inside what our simulation produces with no deployment at all, under both prior-year and prior-summer look-backs.

The acid test was summer 2020\. If anything should overwhelm a selection effect like the one described here, it is a year when the entire city moves in the wrong direction. Summer 2020 was such a year. New York’s shootings increased 150% compared to the summer of 2019, the largest single-year increase in modern city history. By most measures, police activity collapsed over the same period.

Even in the summer of 2020, when New York’s shootings increased 150%, the blocks selected based on 2019 spikes still fell.

If prior-year trends were used to select them, they fell 47%; if the prior-summer trends were used, they fell 80%. The reason is that the 2020 surge was spatially diffuse. It spread to blocks that had not been on the 2019 hot list. The 2019 hot blocks reverted toward their long-run rate even as the city around them more than doubled.

If a program had targeted those 2019-hot blocks in 2020 and reported a 50% to 80% drop, it would have been hailed as a triumph. That drop, however, would have happened with or without any program. The city’s worst summer in two decades did not overpower this effect.

So what should we make of the zone numbers?

While all of this complicates the NYPD’s simple cause-and-effect assertions, none of this proves that it’s useless to deploy police to places in the throes of crime spikes. “Hot-spot policing” is proven to be [effective](https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/24928?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in many contexts.

In their 2016 independent [evaluation](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0157223&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), MacDonald, Fagan and Geller found Operation Impact reduced crime by about 10% to 14%, and the gains spilled over to neighboring blocks rather than pushing crime around the corner. The current program could plausibly produce something similar. But the headline numbers NYPD publishes don’t tell us whether it does.

To distinguish a real deployment effect from the drop that selection alone produces, researchers need a credible counterfactual. They need to isolate what the intervention did beyond what would have happened anyway. For example, one could consider comparable blocks where police were not deployed, and observe those also during the same period. This is the standard in the criminology literature, what grant-funders expect in their reviews and what MacDonald and his coauthors did with Operation Impact a decade ago.

The City is looking to spend real money on the zone program, expanding it to what the department [calls](https://nypost.com/2026/05/04/us-news/nyc-crime-plunges-to-historic-laws-as-nypd-boss-reveals-plan-to-keep-streets-safe-for-summer/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the largest scale in its recorded history. Whether it works, and how much, deserves a proper evaluation, using sophisticated analytical methods. The data to do such an evaluation largely exist on NYC Open Data or in NYPD’s own systems. Philadelphia commissioned an independent [foot-patrol evaluation](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/philadelphia-foot-patrol-experiment-randomized-controlled-trial?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a decade ago. Other [cities](https://hcap.utsa.edu/documents/criminal-justice/final-dpd-y4-report-7.24.25.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) do this routinely.

Public safety spending that can’t survive rigorous analysis shouldn’t survive the budget process.
### What New York Can Learn from the NIMBYs of the 19th Century
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/19th-century-nimby-housing-development-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T00:08:33.000Z
In 1869, The New York Tribune heralded a new development in Manhattan: “Few people who pass through Broadway are aware that … there is now in course of erection … one of the largest and most magnificent hotels on the Western Continent.”

The following year, the eight-story Grand Central Hotel opened with 630 rooms and three elevators reputedly capable of whisking guests to the top floor in just 30 seconds. Though called a hotel, it was also, like many grand establishments of the era, a long term residence — home to single men and even wealthy families, who lived there for months or years at a time, alongside short-stay travelers. It offered residents hot-water baths and in-house dining, without the need for servants of their own. 

In effect, this style of hotel living served as New York's earliest experiment in middle- and upper-class communal housing — a precursor to the purpose-built apartment buildings about to transform the city.

It also set off a moral panic. The outrage wasn't really about the building's size. It was about what this new way of living seemed to represent. And that, as it turns out, is a pattern that has defined New York's housing fights ever since: Resistance to density is rarely about density itself. At the time, critics feared this new form of communal living would erode societal norms. One [New York Tribune journalist](https://www.loc.gov/item/01014724/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) warned, in language that has not aged well, that “hotel life is agreeable and desirable for masculine celibates,” but that any man would be unwise to take his wife there, given the “demoralizing influences” and “potent temptation.” In 1879, [The New York Times](https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801486135/alone-together/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#bookTabs=1) lamented the rise of “lazy and fashionable women” no longer willing to endure “the drudgery of housekeeping.” 

These were the NIMBYs of the 19th century. 

New York’s housing debates have long been framed as fights over density, neighborhood character and the perceived threat of social change. What changes over time is not the structure of the argument, but the building type being argued about. This history matters because recent research confirms that opposition to development is often shaped less by density itself than by the way density is designed and perceived.

Today, New York City is experiencing the [most severe housing affordability crisis](https://cbcny.org/building-crisis?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in decades, laying the groundwork for the most ambitious housing reforms the city has attempted in decades. 

The recently approved City of Yes zoning reforms seek to accelerate housing production by legalizing more housing types, easing parking requirements, encouraging office conversions and modestly increasing density across large portions of the city. Those changes are now being reinforced by a series of City Charter reforms and state-level housing initiatives designed to further streamline development, expand infrastructure capacity and accelerate housing production. 

Together, they represent a significant political shift away from decades of scarcity-driven planning and toward a more explicitly pro-growth housing agenda. State and local leaders have increasingly embraced these policies to improve the city’s affordability, economic competitiveness and ability to retain middle-class families.

But even if these reforms succeed politically, they may still fail to meet ambitious housing goals if policymakers misunderstand what actually drives neighborhood-level resistance to development, often described as NIMBYism.

> Too often, housing debates reduce opponents to selfish obstructionists. In fact, what people often resist is not density alone, but forms of development they perceive as placeless.

Multifamily living dates back to ancient Rome’s *insulae* — apartment blocks that could occupy entire city blocks and rose several stories high. The Roman architect [Vitruvius](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-ten-books-on-architecture-vitruvius/1100863297?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) defended them on practical grounds: With the city’s growing population, “it is necessary to increase the number of dwelling-places indefinitely.” Two thousand years later, his logic still applies to a city with very little land left to build on.

What was new in 19th-century New York was not the building type but the question of who would live in one. Density was for tenements. Respectability meant a house.

Living in a tenement [would have embarrassed](https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801486135/alone-together/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#bookTabs=1) the “middling class” of “book-keepers, artists, editors, clerks, lawyers, copyists, mechanics, and members of other professions and trades who desire privacy” — but those families could not afford single-family homes in Manhattan either. The challenge for architects was to design buildings that stood apart from the negatively perceived tenement while still accommodating middle-class life. Calvert Vaux, the architect and landscape designer best known for co-designing Central Park, was among the first to argue that multi-family living needed a rebrand, urging New Yorkers to look to Paris.

Drawing on Paris, Vaux and his peers adapted the Haussmannian model into elegant, respectable apartment buildings. The first rose on East 18th Street in 1869: Richard Morris Hunt’s Stuyvesant Flats, set on a block of mostly single-family row houses and given a facade to read as one. As the [Tribune reassured anxious readers](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/realestate/apartment-buildings-the-latest-in-french-ideas.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): “It is an attempt to introduce in this city the style of house-building almost universal in Paris . . . This is wholly different from the plan of the tenement house.”

The same architectural type that was viewed as a moral hazard on the Lower East Side became — with larger suites, indoor plumbing, a mansard roof and a Parisian pedigree — a sign of cosmopolitan refinement. They called it the “French flat.” By the time the Dakota opened in 1884, the same building category that had threatened society a decade earlier was being marketed as luxury.

Two recent studies point in the same direction: Opposition to new housing is shaped [not only by density](https://apietrzak.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/pietrzak-mendelberg-2025-political-architecture-contextual-development-and-opposition-to-housing.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but also by whether development appears [architecturally attractive](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/kz4m8%5Fv2?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), context-sensitive, pedestrian-friendly and visually coherent with its surroundings. In other words, people are more willing to accept new housing development when it feels integrated into the neighborhood rather than imposed upon it. Respondents were consistently more supportive of development when it reflected local architectural patterns, incorporated pedestrian-friendly design and appeared integrated into the surrounding urban fabric. 

Too often, housing debates reduce opponents to selfish obstructionists. In fact, what people often resist is not density alone, but forms of development they perceive as placeless. Even people who don’t live anywhere near a new development tend to oppose it if it’s out of context. But in an area where density is already the norm, people are more likely to accept it. 

In that sense, architecture and urban design are not secondary to housing politics. They are central to it. The Department of City Planning learned this lesson the hard way when the 2003 rezoning of Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn failed to consider how buildings met the street. The result was bulky, generic architecture and an unappealing streetscape. Fourth Avenue came to be known as the “canyon of mediocrity.” 

Fast forward to the Gowanus redevelopment that is taking shape today, and the story is very different. While there is the inevitable grumbling about the loss of historic brick warehouses, for the most part this large-scale redevelopment demonstrates that an entirely new neighborhood of well-designed large-scale buildings along a continuous public promenade — which includes significant affordable housing — offers a far more compelling model for what large-scale density can look like. If City of Yes and related reforms are implemented primarily as mechanisms to maximize unit counts without equal attention to design quality, political backlash may intensify rather than recede. The challenge facing New York is not simply whether it can build more housing quickly, but whether it can build more housing that people can feel proud of. 

Today, it is hard to imagine apartment living itself as controversial. Most New Yorkers live in one. But the deeper lesson of New York’s housing history is not merely that cities must grow. It is that successful urban growth has almost always depended on making density feel desirable, legible and integrated into the social and architectural fabric of daily life. 

The first real test will be the [South of Prospect Neighborhood Plan](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/our-work/plans/brooklyn/south-of-prospect?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the first major rezoning recently announced by the Mamdani administration. This proposal has already opened up a debate about neighborhood character. In [interviews](https://brooklyn.news12.com/2026/05/22/city-plans-to-upzone-prospect-park-south-to-add-thousands-of-units/6jlRAuBEoGONnVIiTdhSXv?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), some residents of the Victorian-era Beverly Square just off Coney Island Avenue support a rezoning of the commercial corridor but do not want tall glass towers looming over their leafy green oasis. Threading this needle will be critical to showing New Yorkers that new housing can be built sensitively — sometimes referred to as [“gentle density.”](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/gently-increasing-new-york-housing-density/) 

If policymakers fail to take seriously the underlying causes of NIMBYism — particularly the human desire for beauty, harmony and belonging — then no amount of regulatory reform, zoning liberalization or shifting of political power will automatically produce places that endure because they are genuinely beloved.
### The LIRR and the Lost Art of the Labor Fight
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/fred-naiden-interview-lirr-strike-labor/
Last updated: 2026-05-27T16:49:28.000Z
---

*On this episode of After Hours, Jamie talks to Fred Naiden — Columbia grad, former TWU Local 100 motorman, Harvard PhD, and recently retired UNC classics professor — about his new book, "Railroaded: A Motorman's Story of the New York City Subway." Recorded the day after the Long Island Rail Road went on strike and settled, Jamie and Fred discuss the 1980 subway strike, what it was really like to walk off the job, why working conditions mattered more than wages, and how the city's transit world has changed since the days of 15,000 subway crimes a year. Fred also offers a pointed assessment of Mayor Zohran Mamdani — through the lens of someone who learned organizing from a communist rent-strike leader known only as "The General."*

*You can listen to this episode on* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lirr-and-the-lost-art-of-the-labor-fight/id1794619189?i=1000769758863&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *and* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/7aE9zcVaMPndvnHBGGIaH1?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*
### Julie Won on Immigration, AI Regulation, and Her Campaign for Congress in New York's 7th District
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/julie-won-on-immigration-ai-regulation/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:16.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/julie-won-on-immigration-ai-regulation) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on May 26, 2026 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

The New York Editorial Board spoke with City Council Member Julie Won of Queens about her campaign in the Democratic primary for New York’s 7th Congressional District (parts of Brooklyn and Queens) on the morning of May 21, 2026\. Won is among the candidates running to succeed retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez. The primary election is in June. *(photo by Juan Manuel Benítez)*

*Participating journalists: Juan Manuel Benítez, Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Ben Max, Akash Mehta.*

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Max**  
Thanks for being here. Do you want to just take a couple minutes and tell us a little bit about your view of the district and its biggest needs, and how you would address those in Congress?

**Julie Won**  
Sure. So thank you so much for meeting with me. My name is Julie Won. I’m currently a third-term City Council member. I represent Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside, Astoria, which wholly sits within this congressional district, New York 7.

And I come from a non-traditional background into politics. I don’t come from the DSA, I don’t come from the Working Families Party, I don’t come from the Democratic Party, but I am a Democrat, and I believe in social democracy and social programs. I come from 10 years of tech experience. I was recruited out of college to IBM, where half of that I worked in Washington, D.C. as a federal contractor overseeing civilian agencies to help them modernize, and the other half I did commercial.

Once Trump took the presidency, I left D.C. and came back to New York, where I grew up. And when I look back…you know, there are certain serendipitous moments that happen in your life that make you pivot, and I don’t think I would’ve ever pivoted out of tech if it weren’t for COVID-19\. Because as an immigrant, I landed in this country in 1998, and I grew up on public school free lunch, and if it weren’t for public education, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here with you today. I don’t know where I would be. And for me, I grew up understanding that if I did not have school, then food was not guaranteed because I was relying on public school free lunch. So when COVID hit, I used to be 90% travel \[for work\], and I was grounded in Queens, so I was sitting in my apartment where at the time, I was living with a friend who I knew from D.C., who became an advisor for Mayor de Blasio. So she and I were sitting at home ‘cause I didn’t have a lot of work to do. My clients didn’t know what we were going to do during the pandemic.

And I was watching press conferences with her when the TV came on and Bill de Blasio came on saying, “Hey, schools are indefinitely closed, but if you get public school free lunch, you can come and pick it up.” And it just triggered me to flashbacks of knowing when I was in elementary school and there was a federal holiday, I was not celebrating like other kids. I was pretty miserable ‘cause my brother and I were going to be hungry. So I knew that even though de Blasio said you could come and pick up free lunch, for kids like me, where your parents work frontline jobs at delis or nail salons or grocery stores, they are working, and you don’t have childcare, therefore you cannot leave the apartment. They just lock the door and just stay at home, watch TV, and eat whatever is in the fridge. And then you go hungry. So because I was on the community board, I was on the board of two local nonprofits, I was pretty involved in my mutual aids. We started doing meal deliveries in public housing, ‘cause I lived a block away from the largest public housing in the country: Queensbridge Houses.

And while I was doing meal deliveries, out of the shared experience of knowing what it’s like to be hungry, I met a lot of families that live there, especially kids. And this one girl in particular really changed my life, where she saw me week by week coming through with food, and she told me to come over and see her. And these kids would sit outside for about five hours, even in the winter, using LinkNYC to go to school ‘cause that was their only source of internet, ‘cause their parents couldn’t afford it at home. And she showed me her tablet, and she was like, “I never turn on my camera, and I never turn on my microphone ‘cause I don’t want other classmates to know that I’m poor, but I’m scared that I’m not going to do well ‘cause I’m not participating.” And that just enraged me, because she was just like me, she wanted to excel in school so that she could have an opportunity in her life to socioeconomically mobilize herself for her family, and she couldn’t because she couldn’t afford to. And that’s what really kickstarted my entry into politics, where I started to be part of the community board because of Amazon HQ2, ‘cause it was such a big public fight.

But it wasn’t until that moment where it became very personal to me, where I started to call my congressmember, and it was Carolyn Maloney at the time, and then my Senator, Chuck Schumer, because those were the only two that I really knew, honestly. I didn’t really follow local politics then. And they told me to call my Assembly member, Cathy Nolan.

And then Cathy Nolan was like, “Try Gianaris.” And we tried \[Senator Michael\] Gianaris, and Gianaris’ office was like, “You gotta go local. It’s Jimmy Van Bramer.” And then \[City Council Member\] Jimmy Van Bramer-- ‘cause it was also COVID, so it was hard to get ahold of these offices. Eventually, I got a staffer who told me that it’s a vacant seat, and if I’m so passionate, then I should just run or do something about it myself. I think it was kind of sarcastic.

But during a team meeting on Zoom with my IBM team, we had a team stand-up. It really became a therapy session because our clients didn’t know what they were doing, so we just talked about what was going on in our lives. And I described what was happening in my district to folks all over the country who I work with. And luckily, one of the finance executives that I work with at IBM was like, “Oh, I could become your treasurer. I could help register you with the state. We could do this.” And two of the designers volunteered on my campaign and created my website, my branding. Then, some of us who worked together for a long time, they were like, “OK, tell us more about this race. How does this work?” I was like, “OK, I would represent about 175,000 people, and out of that we estimate about twelve to sixteen thousand people to vote. We have about two quarters, and I would be running in a race of 21 people.” I think at the end it was maybe 16.

And we used to take startups and new apps from zero users to 2 million or 200 to 2 million. So we were like, “I think we could try.” And we tried, and against all odds, even though I ran against somebody who had the mayor’s endorsement, the Working Families Party endorsement, every single labor union endorsement, had three times the money, we still won with 15 points or so.

And within six months of being elected, I got free Wi-Fi, free cable TV for every single NYCHA resident in my district at Queensbridge Houses, Ravenswood Houses, and Woodside Houses. And within the last three years we’ve scaled that program citywide, so now BigApple Connect is available, hopefully in perpetuity to the rest of the city for all public housing residents.

And as a consultant, I’m used to doing my projects and within two quarters I’m leaving. So I’ve had multiple conversations with people that I trust about not staying in politics and going back to tech. But that’s also when the migrant crisis hit. So I remember it was shortly after I gave birth to my first child, ’cause I’m a mom of two. And I remember getting a call from the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, the commissioner, who invited me to come to Port Authority, ‘cause I’m one of the few immigrants elected in New York City, to come and welcome the migrants coming from the buses from Texas. And it’s already a jarring experience ‘cause when the buses arrive and they get off, and we’ve seen it in the news, I was expecting it to be a very jarring experience ‘cause they’re all tagged with codes and they scan them out, just like a CVS checkout. But what really got me, another pivotal experience in my life, was there was one woman, and you could see them through the window. As everyone was getting off one by one, one woman in particular kept on rocking back and forth, and from afar I thought maybe she was just mentally unwell. But as she continued to come off, I realized when she got off, she was rocking a baby. She was holding a baby probably less than 24 hours old. That’s what it looked like to me. I think it was maybe 72 hours, and she was still covered in blood waist down. And I asked her if she gave birth on the bus because that’s how fresh the baby looked, and she told me that she gave birth outside of the bus. They cut her umbilical cord with a non-sanitized scissor, and then they put her on the bus and said goodbye, and she was still healing so she couldn’t sit the whole bus ride, and that’s how she ended up here.

And again, another moment of rage as someone who had been postpartum less than three months ago. To see that and how we were treating immigrants just like myself is what made me stay. And while some of my colleagues were fighting over who takes these migrants into their district, I just raised my hand and said, “I’ll take as many as humanly possible.” I opened up 38 shelters, and when we ran out of hotels, we converted commercial buildings that were empty from COVID into shelters for single men and even our gyms into shelters.

**Josh Greenman**  
Sorry, when you say, “I opened up 38 shelters,” can you—

**Julie Won**  
So what happens is, the City of New York will try to open up shelters, and a lot of Council members fight it, behind closed doors or publicly, and those are photographed and reported on. And even when I went beyond my capacity, I worked with the City of New York to open more.

**Josh Greenman**  
OK, so you welcomed them to the district. You welcomed additional shelters to the district.

**Julie Won**  
Yes. So we had about 15,000 people at any given time in the micro-shelters. And then I had a conversation with the speaker’s office and the mayor’s office. Even though the mayor’s office didn’t help us, we made sure that we had additional resources for our nonprofits, especially for a domestic workers co-op, so that migrants can work, because one of the biggest issues is that they can’t legally work.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
You started by saying you’re a three-term Council member. But you’ve been in the Council for not even five years yet, right? And you also said that before the pandemic, you weren’t really paying attention to local politics. So what do you think makes you qualified to really run for Congress for a seat that has been occupied by someone there for 30 years with deep roots in the community, and with one of your rivals, Antonio Reynoso, who has been a City Council member, he’s also represented Brooklyn and Queens, he’s also been a Brooklyn borough president. Why do you think you’re qualified for this position?

**Julie Won**  
So do you think qualifications are only by time, the number of years served?

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
No. But you started your words by saying that you are a three-term Council member, so you put some weight on experience as well.

**Julie Won**  
Well, I said third term because that’s truly the third term that I’m in. So if you want me to break that down, three terms is two, two, and four \[years\] within my Council tenure. And I believe that within the last four years, I’ve built and approved 32,000 units of housing, which is more than the borough of Queens has done in the last decade. And also, we’ve also passed over 14 bills. We’ve also made sure that we brought in over $2 billion of investment from the city to my district. We’ve built and approved over 6,000 new school seats, over 200 new 3-K and pre-K seats even before Hochul and Zohran’s announcement.

We’ve done a lot as a community together, and you can do a lot in a fast amount of time, and I don’t believe that qualifications are just about the time that you spend in government. It’s also your professional experience prior to getting in government that can prepare you to be a good representative, especially in a time like now, where we are going to be having a national discussion on the AI revolution and what this means for our job loss, what this means for our future as a country, and how we prepare for it, and you are best equipped by those who have industry experience, like myself in tech, to help prepare and usher the future of our country.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
You mentioned the term social democracy. How do you see social democracy as different from the DSA?

**Julie Won**  
I would never identify as a socialist or a communist, where some of those members do, because I am a child of—

**Akash Mehta**  
Which members identify as communist?

**Julie Won**  
There are members in my community who do.

**Akash Mehta**  
Oh, members in your community.

**Julie Won**  
Yes.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Members of the DSA?

**Julie Won**  
Yes. In my district who will openly say that. But I personally don’t, because I come from a war-torn country where I’ve seen it personally, and I grew up with my grandmother showing us pictures of family members who are still in North Korea, not because they chose to be there, but because they were stuck there when the DMZ was drawn outside of Korean control, who ended up in a communist country, who are now starving to death.

I take it really seriously but I do believe in social programs like universal healthcare, universal childcare, which we have in South Korea and many democratic countries and I believe that those are important parts of our country, especially what our taxpayer dollars should be used for so that the government can function properly.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So what would be the practical difference? Like, a lot of that the mayor supports, but he obviously supports something like city-run grocery stores. Is that where you would draw the line and say, “That’s not the government’s role”?

**Julie Won**  
Well, I think it, there has to be a clear line with making sure that there’s a free market, because I believe in a free market, and I think that there has to be a clear distinction.

I think there’s a misunderstanding of city-run grocery stores where we get phone calls from my constituents asking us for a free city-run grocery store. The city-run grocery stores are not free, they’re subsidized by the government. But we also simultaneously get phone calls from grocery owners who are really distraught that there is a grocery store run by the city that’s going to have subsidized costs a block away from them, even though their store is unionized and they are afraid of what this is going to do for them. But at the end of the day, the root cause is the same where people are afraid that they cannot afford the food that they need to eat, like the food that we have on this table. Because it’s cheaper for me to now get takeout than buy my own groceries and spend the time to cook it.

**Ben Max**  
So are you supportive of the municipal-run grocery stores, or how are you thinking about that? Would you welcome the Queens one in your district?

**Julie Won**  
I don’t really know. I think we have to see how, ‘cause this is going to be the first in the city of the government openly subsidizing a grocery store. So I think we have to understand the costs and how we run it, and what the municipal involvement is, exactly to what level. So I just don’t know enough to say yes or no. But I think the idea is something that we’ve seen in cooperatives in Brooklyn that have worked very successfully without government involvement.

**Ben Max**  
Yeah, I mean, he’s also talking about just making sure there’s a small “basket of goods” that’s below the prices that are elsewhere in the market. It seems like one of these things that’s sort-of a very modified socialist idea.

**Josh Greenman**  
I wanted to talk a little bit about immigration because it’s such an important federal responsibility. And you talked about the migrant crisis at the beginning. You worked for IBM. I assume everyone at IBM had their work authorization through very specific channels if they were an immigrant — they were H-1B, or through some other special program. You said you think that migrants should all have work authorization. That would be, I assume, from the federal government, not from the state. How would that work? When would it kick in? And would it be broad universal work authorization? Immediate? Explain a little bit more about that.

**Julie Won**  
I think our immigration crisis starts way before even that. Right now, what we’ve seen is a huge pendulum swing of…”Let’s not let anybody in” under Trump to “Let’s let everybody in with an open door” to now having a national fight over who should come in and who should be naturalized and who should have even birthright citizenship in this country.

So when we think about the idea, especially from a technology standpoint, the CBP app made it extremely accessible for people to enter the country, and that is a good thing. But it wasn’t enough, because there weren’t enough people to actually process all of the applicants that were coming in through the CBP app. The idea that the Biden administration had to have a phone application where you can apply directly is a good thing, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t a thought-out process, and the processing itself is what we need to fix in comprehensive immigration reform on a national level because we have to think about the qualifications that you have to have to come into this country, and right now we’re fighting over even who should have refugee status, asylee status. And we have to make sure that on a national level, that the government is coming up with a thoughtful process.

**Josh Greenman**  
Let’s talk about the migrants that you were mentioning before. \[Let’s say\] I’m a migrant, I’m coming from South America, from Mexico. I’m claiming that I’m fleeing persecution. It’s undetermined whether I’m actually fleeing persecution or not. I arrive in the United States. When do I get authorized to work under your vision and where can I work? And does this apply to everybody seeking asylum immediately?

**Julie Won**  
So I think it’s going to have to be by status of what you’re entering from, but I do believe that we should have a processing before people enter. And for some, where there’s an emergency, like a climate emergency or there’s a war and people have to be entered immediately, then we should also have TPS \[Temporary Protected Status\], the way that we currently do, and we shouldn’t just arbitrarily take it away or be very, very cherry-picking who does and doesn’t get TPS.

But first and foremost, I think we have to have a processing before people even enter. And in addition to that, when there is a subset of people who have to enter immediately, making sure that they have authorization to work, because that’s what we were able to do in New York State. We were able to register them with individual tax ID numbers so that they have a history of paying taxes in New York State for the work that they’re doing. Because statistics have historically shown that immigrants are not criminals, the majority of them. Some are, and we have to make sure that that is taken care of. But for those who are simply here to work, allow them to work and pay taxes.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Your opponents are against ICE. They want to abolish ICE. What’s your position when it comes to ICE?

**Julie Won**  
So when it comes to ICE, there’s two different major responsibilities that they have to do. First and foremost, when they do have to work on the criminalities of an immigrant, then it goes through DOJ and they still have civil rights, but it goes through the court process. But for the civil arm that are currently raiding our communities and just breaking up families and mistreating them, that really should be unfunded, defunded. And also, we have to make sure that there’s a proper replacement for that. So that way, even if you’re here in this country undocumented and you believe that those individuals should go through processing to make sure that they do become documented or are deported if they did something extremely horribly wrong. But \[ICE\] should not have unaccounted ability to go through with masks and just kidnap children and adults without any criminal history.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So is there an upper limit to immigration that you think Americans will politically accept?

**Julie Won**  
Look, I think that there’s not going to be a uniform consensus on how many people can or cannot enter the country, but the reality is everybody, for the most part in this country, they are some sort of...ancestrally, they probably are of immigrants. And we have to understand, I don’t think we’re ever going to have some sort of overall consensus of what the magic number is, but I think we do have to come up with a process of how we process these people who are trying to enter the country and how we allow them to work.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And in terms of processing, if I come here, I apply for asylum and I’m rejected or I said I was going to apply for asylum, but I didn’t, what should happen to me? What does the process look like?

**Julie Won**  
Well, the hope is that you process people before they enter, unless they are here for an emergency purpose. So that the majority of them have come in with authorization. But right now, it’s almost impossible to have those processings, which is why people just choose to enter early instead of after. And the whole idea of the CBP app was that you would get the paperwork, you would get their passport, and you would get as much identification as possible for every single person that was entering. But the app fell short because there was no back-end processing after somebody applied on the application itself because of the volume in which it happened, and that volume was extraordinarily high because we had four years of people not being able to enter at all.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Anecdotal evidence shows that many people who came in during the Biden years were economic migrants. They would not qualify for asylum. So what should happen to those people? They would be rejected before they come in?

**Julie Won**  
No, I don’t think they should be rejected before they come in because we rely on them to even put our food on the table for farming, for whatever it is that they do, even construction work. We know that they’re a very integral part of our economy, so we have to figure out how to make sure that they can work here legally, and ideally it’s before they enter, especially when they’re economic migrants. But currently we’re not doing that, so you’re putting employers at risk as well, where they’re forced to hire these folks, putting their businesses on the line and themselves on the line to criminality when they just want to be able to work.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Can you talk a little bit about your own personal immigration experience?

**Julie Won**  
Sure, yeah. I came to this country in ‘98, and it took me over 10 years to get my citizenship. So for Korean Americans, there’s always a multiple path of coming to this country. But for me personally, it was after the Korean War, a lot of Korean nurses were able to get specialized visas to work in hospitals. First it was to Germany, and once that Germany contract ended, a lot of those same nurses were offered contracts in U.S. hospitals, and that’s how one of my— So it’s very complicated, but my father is one of nine siblings, one sister, eight brothers, and the eldest brother is my uncle. His wife is a nurse, and his wife’s sisters are all nurses, and one of the sisters was the one that got a US offer to come to this country through her nursing degree. And from the nurse, she ended up marrying an American citizen, and she got citizenship. And in the ‘90s, the U.S. was very, very lenient on allowing siblings to get citizenship and allowing your family members to be extended an ability to come to the U.S. to have green cards. So that’s how my uncle was able to come with his wife, especially because they had a child that had brain cancer. So the U.S. expedited them, and once he came, he extended the invitation to his brothers to come to this country, and that’s how I ended up here.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
And you weren’t a citizen for many—

**Julie Won**  
Over 10 years.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
10 years. So you were here with a green card?

**Julie Won**  
No, we did not get a green card right away. But I just remember the most exploited thing is the notarial fraud. So, legal services in every immigrant community that exploit people like myself, who know that my parents don’t speak proper English, but they’re desperate to become citizens fast. So it would used to be in the papers a lot. You see it on the streets a lot, where they have signs that say, “Oh, I’ll help you get your citizenship. I have connections with judges. I have connections with the government. Call this number. Pay us this much.” And I just remember, so many of my family members, as well as my neighbors, and people in the Korean community, and my church, all talking about this one person who took over $30,000 and then disappeared. And this would happen over and over again. So that’s one of the bills that I passed last year, to double the fines and penalties for notarial fraud, because I was seeing it all over again during the migrant crisis.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
It happened to your family?

**Julie Won**  
Yes. I think it’s very common.

**Ben Max**  
When you mentioned welcoming migrants in the shelters, you have a pretty diverse City Council district that you represent. Did you have to deal with— there’s a lot of inter-immigrant-wave questions, especially at this time where there was seemingly a rise in resentment among people who had come to the country previously and were not then put up in shelters and given “free” stuff. Did you have to manage that?

**Julie Won**  
So for the most part, I’m extremely, extremely grateful because my community was so welcoming. We had welcome dinners where we were able to have resource fairs, so that they could meet the nonprofits that do a variety of services in the community, and they were willing to partner with us, as well as free meals, ‘cause we had so many complaints about how horrible the migrant shelter meals were. So we would have catered meals from local restaurants that were hot and delicious, of their cultural competency so that they enjoyed eating it. And in addition to that, we would also do collections for donations for clothes, for shoes, for luggage bags, and everybody overwhelmingly was so supportive.

My district also had the highest amount of rapid response training for citizens who wanted to protect undocumented citizens. And as you saw with the latest case with Yuanxin, a six-year-old Chinese boy who was [detained and deported](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/nyregion/child-father-deported-china-nyc.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from my community in a local school, we had over a hundred people that came to rally for his freedom.

So luckily, my district is very, very supportive. I would say that there was a small subset of people who’ve come to my office really upset for those reasons that you described. Because like myself and many immigrants who came here in the ‘90s and 2000s or even before, there were no free hotel shelters. There were no free dinners. There was no free food. But I would also say that with many conversations, especially when they learn I am an immigrant also, and just because we have all this trauma of immigration, doesn’t mean we need to knock everybody that comes here and smack them in the face with more trauma. If we can create a better pathway for other people instead of closing the door behind us and ripping the carpet under their feet, we should do it. And most people were very susceptible to that, and they came into the fold with the community.

**Josh Greenman**  
But aren’t you at all concerned? The U.S. is already a magnet for people from all over the world, mostly for economic opportunity, but for other reasons too. If work authorization were to be pretty much immediate, are you concerned about how much more powerful that magnet becomes? You know, we had even Obama saying, “Don’t come,” to some people who were just trying to come seeking authorization. Does that message get very, very hard to send to people if you’re saying at the same time, automatic work authorization if you do get here? And then related to that, what’s the difference practically between being an illegal immigrant, an undocumented immigrant, and a legal immigrant if work authorization becomes immediate?

**Julie Won**  
I’m not saying that work authorization is automatic for anybody that wants to come. But I also don’t think that it should be a class warfare like Trump, where they say, “Oh, you can only come if you have these certain degrees of higher education to let you come to this country.” You know, I hear stories, like for example, at my hair salon, the woman that cuts my hair, she came from Vietnam after the Vietnam War, and she tells a story of how easy it was. You landed here, and then they just handed you a physical green card and it was like, “Here you go.” And then she was like, “And then I was here.”

And, you know, when you look at parts of history, there were times in U.S. history where anybody and everyone was welcome, and then there are parts of history like now where it’s much more difficult and there has to be a balanced approach to how we allow some people to come, but I don’t think that the qualifications should only be set to people who qualify for an H-1B visa so that they can work a white-collar job. Because we know from our economy that over a trillion dollars of taxes are from immigrants and migrant workers, and we need them to succeed as a country and for our economy.

So I don’t have an exact formula for you today to say this is how we should have a benchmark of who qualifies for work authorization, but this current system of like people just free willingly come and then they are stuck in this limbo of three to five years or more of not being able to work legally, and then you have all these exploitative issues where you’re working under the table like my parents did for a while, and you have no legal protections. You don’t even have a single day off. I think we have to come up with some sort of way to make sure that we have work authorizations for people before they enter, and having a filtering process where obviously it’s not going to be for anybody and everyone in the world to come, but we have to make sure that there’s some sort of process in place, because it can’t be one or the other like we have now.

**Akash Mehta**  
Can I ask one more immigration question? What level of criminality should lead someone to be subject to deportation, and also should lead New York state and local agencies like police and sheriff’s departments to collaborate with immigration enforcement?

**Julie Won**  
I think we did a really good thing last year with the City Council to decriminalize street vending, for example. You know, we knew that ICE was going after anybody who even had, like, the smallest misdemeanor if it was seen as a criminal offense, like selling churros on the street. That is not OK. I think the same way that we’ve had bail reform on a state level is the same way we should qualify what qualifies as an extreme criminal to be deported or to not be allowed citizenship, and I think that is correct. But I don’t think we should go after super punitive issues that have been societally created as a structure for immigrants because they are just trying to make ends meet by doing what they can as a street vendor.

**Akash Mehta**  
And how would you evaluate the governor’s approach and position on collaboration with immigration authorities?

**Julie Won**  
We have to protect sanctuary city laws, and there should be zero collaboration with ICE. And even in Wykoff Hospital, when a lot of our community members were fighting with ICE to protect their immigrant neighbors who were at the hospital, I think that is the way that we should be. We should not allow any collaboration with ICE as a city that is a sanctuary city.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So on street vending, how would you make sure that the vendors aren’t just competing with each other and pushing their pay down? I mean, that’s one of the many reasons we have rules for street vending. Should anybody be able to obtain a license?

**Julie Won**  
Street vending has existing laws for qualifications of how to become a street vendor and how to become licensed. The problem was, a lot like citizenship, that it was a processing issue, and also the number of licenses available. So we just passed a law last year increasing the number of licenses, and therefore there’s going to be less people who are doing it unregulated and now competing to make sure that they can hold onto those existing licenses so that they are doing it legally.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So should there be a limit on the number of licenses?

**Julie Won**  
There already is a limit existing even with the expansion.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And that’s good? We should keep the limit?

**Julie Won**  
The number of licenses [that we expanded to](https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-expands-street-vendor-licenses-after-council-overrides-ex-mayor-adams-vetoes?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was the number that had been thoughtfully analyzed by Street Vendor Project and all the coalition members like Workers Justice Project.

So I believe that that is the number that we have come to understand that that is the rightful number. I’m sure as time goes on, we may change it saying, “Well, actually we have an excess number of licenses that are being unused.” Or we may say, “Hey, that wasn’t enough. We still have a large subset of people who still need licensing,” and we may have to expand it, but time will tell.

**Josh Greenman**  
The Council and the Congress are very, very different jobs. What specifically about federal law and federal tools is interesting to you and motivated you to run?

**Julie Won**  
Yeah. There’s a lot, but I would say my primary focuses are two major issues. One is immigration, as you know, which we’ve spent the majority of our time on now because it’s a personal issue to me that I’ve lived through and that I want to make sure that I’m a part of as we come up with comprehensive immigration reform. But secondly, also AI. Right now, just like the Industrial Revolution when all of our jobs went offshore and left a lot of people jobless, we’re going to see the same thing where week by week I’m getting phone calls of mass layoffs. Like, even my neighbor this week, he works for Meta — there is an expectation of 700,000 people being [laid off this week](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/technology/meta-layoffs-ai.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

So these are masses of people who are going to be jobless, and what we do as a country is going to be extremely important in a time like now. So that’s why after being contracts chair for the last few years, I’ve now become workforce development chair — and we’ve never had workforce development as a committee before, which is crazy in City Council, because I see that we’re at the precipice of a really important time for our country.

One, I think about AI, how politically we’re having this conversation about “ban AI,” well, the issue is it’s open source and we can’t really ban it and it’s decentralized. But the root cause of why the public sentiment is so negative towards it is because, one, of job losses or the fear of becoming obsolete, and two, also because of the amount of hallucinations that we’re having with AI that is misleading people.

So those are two things that I want to work on right now. I just introduced the bill yesterday on consumer protections for AI because I think in addition to job loss, which I want to work on as workforce development chair, for hallucinations. For example: teenagers committing suicide ‘cause ChatGPT told them to; seniors who call my office who’ve been scammed and phished out of their EBT cards because somebody used a deepfake voice recording of their grandchild saying, “Grandma, send me this money. I need to graduate from college. I need to buy these textbooks” — and now she’s out of this money. And there’s nowhere to report that to and have an investigation unless you have the funds yourself to have a lawsuit.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Do you see the regulation of AI being best done at the federal level, the state level, or the local level?

**Julie Won**  
Ideally, it’s on a federal level. And if we’re, you know, nationally we’re constantly having this conversation about how we’re in an arms race for AI with China, well, China has been light years ahead of having a national regulation, multiple national regulations on AI, whereas our country has failed to do so. I believe today the White House is having a meeting and putting together some sort of advisory committee on regulating AI, but we are still far behind in regulations, which continues to reap on the fears and the alarming of what we’re facing. So it should be on the federal level, but because we aren’t, we have to do it on a city or state level until the federal laws are in place to really protect all of our citizens, then we have to overrule federal preemption and allow those laws to be in place.

**Josh Greenman**  
What do those regulations look like? What do the big principles of regulation look like?

**Julie Won**  
First and foremost, I think it’s AI security and safety on how it’s used when it comes to biosecurity to make sure that AI isn’t being used to create some sort of new COVID-19, for example, because it can be capable of doing so.

And instead we should really make sure that it’s being used to cure cancer or something, something good for our survival. And also for deepfakes images. I think these are very basic. Anything that is created by AI should have some sort of watermark to make it clear that it was AI-generated, not human-generated, so that you could tell the difference between AI and something that is real. Because that’s also another fear where people are like, “How am I going to know what’s real or fake anymore?”

**Josh Greenman**  
That gets you into the similar territory with gun regulation, which is that nobody who wants to nefariously create a deepfake is going to actually do the water stamp part of it.

**Julie Won**  
Well, that’s why with consumer products like Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and OpenAI, that you force them to do it. Even if the users themselves may try to get around it, at least the default is that the watermark is there.

**Akash Mehta**  
You said we can’t ban AI. We could dramatically slow it. Bernie Sanders has a bill to impose a moratorium on new data centers. There’s a bill in the New York State Legislature that would do the same. Do you think we should?

**Julie Won**  
We could.

**Akash Mehta**  
Do you think we should?

**Julie Won**  
Well, I think for our own safety, if we don’t have data centers, and now we know with companies that it doesn’t even have to be Earth. Because when we talk about data moratoriums, it’s because of its horrible impacts on the environment mostly. You know, on our water supply, our energy supply, as well as any other effects that we don’t even know because there’s no transparency or accountability in all of these AI companies in disclosing the data of how much water they’ve used, what it does when it’s regurgitated back out to the public, and what the water, what the electric grid is going to take. But we know that there are current companies now that are putting out models of having it on certain parts of space where it’s completely facing the sun at all times, so that means that it has no impact on our environment. But we never want to lose to another country like China in this AI development, because it’s already happening. Just like the Cold War against Russia, we can’t allow our country to fall behind in this development, but we shouldn’t do it at the sake of our environment at all.

**Akash Mehta**  
So, whether it’s data centers or taxes or other regulatory tools that have been proposed to slow down the development of AI, you don’t think we should do that because then China will lead the progress?

**Julie Won**  
I don’t think we should slow down the development of innovation, but we have to have strong regulations. So for example, what I propose is that if you are going to lay off a certain number of people, then the company should either pay a severance fee to that individual as well as the state and the city and the country, like a tax. Or in reverse, if you don’t want to pay that, then you have to prove to us that you spent a certain amount on upskilling and reskilling those individuals to make sure that they had other strategic capabilities that you could put them in within your own company or elsewhere so that they’re not left jobless.

**Josh Greenman**  
Is that only for AI job losses or other job losses as well?

**Julie Won**  
AI job losses are going to come outside of the AI companies—

**Josh Greenman**  
So the severance you’re proposing— if I get laid off for another reason—

**Julie Won**  
Right. If you’re a journalist—

**Josh Greenman**  
Would that have applied in that case?

**Julie Won**  
No because you can’t do it in retrospect before the bills are written and these regulations are in place.

**Josh Greenman**  
I’m saying after the bills are written, does it apply only to AI-fueled job losses or to any job losses? Do you have to document that the job loss was because of AI?

**Julie Won**  
You will have to prove that it’s because of AI, because you can’t pay for every job loss in the world. But what I’m focused on in terms of AI policy is no matter what industry you’re in, if you’re using automations or AI to lay people off and replace them, then you should be responsible for making sure that they were re-skilled and retrained to make sure that they had some sort of other capability. Or we should talk about UBI and thinking about four-day work weeks. If we need less employees to do the same amount of work, then what are we going to do to protect our workforce in this country?

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
So do you think we’re going to end up needing universal basic income \[UBI\]?

**Julie Won**  
I do foresee that in our future, yes.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
How soon?

**Julie Won**  
You know, I’m not an engineer or a scientist, so, I don’t know. But what I do know is that it used to take me 26 days to build a phone application, like, with my team — not myself, but with my development team. And now what I’m hearing from them directly is that it only takes 12 days, and that only took less than one year for that to happen. And if we continue at this speed, then I imagine half a year from now or a year from now, it might take two days.

**Ben Max**  
You sound like you buy into this idea of using satellites and space technology to power AI. You think that’s a very viable plan and path?

**Julie Won**  
Yes. They already have prototypes that have been used, and it seems like that’s the least negative impact on our Earth and our environment, and I think that’s the only path forward because we don’t want to decimate \[the environment\], and we just don’t have enough energy. And I think it’s counterproductive for us to go back to using fossil fuels in order to power AI. And what I also am interested in is, for example, DeepSeek. China has figured out a way, without all these expensive AI data warehouse centers, to have powerful AI tools that are being built open source, unlike the U.S., where it’s extremely expensive to have something of similar speed.

**Josh Greenman**  
You talked a lot about AI layoffs, which are concerning to everybody, but you also worked at IBM trying to improve government efficiency, right? Can’t AI be an ally of making government more efficient for the people who pay for it? And if so, how does one’s attitude toward preventing AI-fueled layoffs in the private sector then carry over to the public sector where there may be productive uses of AI to make a bureaucracy work more cost-effectively?

**Julie Won**  
A hundred percent. So right now, I’m hoping to get a Council initiative funded for an AI Corps. So just like AmeriCorps, we want to make sure, because there are so many new college grads, because we’re seeing the greatest amount of job loss to AI in associate-level jobs, especially for those who studied computer science or engineering, because there just aren’t any entry-level positions open anymore for the most part in the country. So we want to take those individuals and bring them into the government, just like AmeriCorps, and say, “Hey, we’re going to have you shadow this commissioner,” an executive-level position in a city agency, state agency, and a federal agency, and watch how they work, watch what’s important, and where you can suggest certain automations that we have to have to save them time. We know that for the state, they’ve already started sampling this, where instead of having to read a document that is proposed to you for a briefing, like you just saw me drop my briefing on my way here. Instead of reading a six-page document, now they have something that within a four or five-minute podcast, they just listen to the briefing.

**Josh Greenman**  
Well, could that extend to reducing the number of government employees? There are more than 300,000 people who work for the City of New York, for example, and many, many more than that who work for the federal government. Do you foresee AI as a tool to thin the ranks of publicly-funded employees?

**Julie Won**  
My goal is not to cut any employees anywhere, but it’s to make sure that we are using them to be more strategic with their talents and their skills to protect our workforce. Because we have to use AI as a coworker to do things that are administrative that you want to pull your hair out and, and like punch yourself for, instead of having to do it for hours on end because that is all that you have been told that you can do.

**Akash Mehta**  
You were a federal tech contractor. You were contracts chair in the Council. I saw that you have a bunch of bills on procurement. In recent years there’s been a lot of public attention paid to mismanagement of tech contracts, including in New York City with MyCity and BigApple Connect. What do you think effective oversight of contracts, especially in tech, looks like? And do you think we over-rely on outsourced functions in government?

**Julie Won**  
So right now, about 30 to 40% of our [city’s budget is spent on contractors](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/pdf/report-10-2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and that’s a large amount of money. And as you saw during my tenure as a contract chair, I had a lot of oversight hearings on misspending and corruption. I passed seven bills on contracting accountability and transparency because one of the issues or the loopholes that we saw with the Adams administration is emergency contracts, which allowed him to go through without abiding by a lot of procurement rules that allowed him to line the pockets of his friends. So that’s a huge problem.

But I think another issue is these quasi-city-state agencies like the Department of Health, H+H —Health and Human Services, as well as the Department of Education. Because they don’t report directly to the city, it was almost impossible for me to get my hands on contracts to review them. I think the public deserves full transparency. Everyone and anyone should be able to subpoena those contracts, and they shouldn’t even have to subpoena it, we should just be able to pull it from the database publicly, and that should be available on a website for every single journalist, for every single person on the street so that we have full accountability and transparency. Because what we also see is that there has been a lot of the same people making money, over $40 billion every single year, from these very same contracts for decades, and sometimes generations within their families because they must have known somebody in the government at one point in time. I think now we have things like blockchain, and we have other technologies that will provide transparency and clear accountability and tracking on every single person that touched that contract so that there’s no one who can hide how that contract was administered and by whom.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So one type of AI is the field of driverless cars. And there’s a big safety issue there. There’s also a big workforce employment issue. What do you see as the optimal regulation of driverless cars at the federal, state, or local level?

**Julie Won**  
For the State of New York, we’ve already pretty much banned self-driving cars. But you know, we also had that exposé which showed that they weren’t autonomous at all. There was somebody offshore who was behind a screen driving or at least assisting in the driving of Waymo. And I also believe New York City’s streets and roads are much more complicated and dangerous than other cities, because our roads are just more congested — there’s a lot more pedestrians, there’s a lot more risk. And I think that the technology is just still not there.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So what should we do? Should we keep it banned?

**Julie Won**  
I think it, unless the technology is foolproof and we know that it’s not going to endanger human beings, I’m not opposed to what currently is. But I do think that there are some jobs that are extremely dangerous for people. So I know that a lot of use cases that people have studied are truck driving across the country. Where people are taking drugs to stay awake to meet their timelines, and that causes a danger not just to the driver, but to anybody else on the road

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Can we talk about housing really quickly? You know that housing is so important in the district. You were in favor of the Long Island City rezoning, but [you’re not so sure](https://gothamist.com/news/mamdani-trump-talk-sunnyside-yard-building-local-residents-ask-huh?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) about Sunnyside Yards. Why?

**Julie Won**  
So Sunnyside Yards is a really hairy project, just like Amazon HQ2, right? Before Amazon HQ2, there were two other forms of that project, and it failed. And it was a fourth or fifth try with me to get [OneLIC](https://www.licplan.nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) passed. So my community, as you know, is a hyper-engaged community. We’re a hyper-educated community, and it does not want to be messed with. And [Sunnyside Yards was shut down](https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11576-what-happened-sunnyside-yard-master-plan-housing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by AOC, Gianaris, Van Bramer, and I’m pretty sure that Zohran at the time was against that project, too, because that’s what the housing organizers tell me.

And it’s not that the project is a bad project, but it’s a matter of one, how will you work with the community, and what are the legal approval processes that you will take to go through this project? Still no answer. And also in terms of funding, where will the money come from? And the City of New York has already told me officially, the Deputy Mayor of Housing has told me officially that they will not move forward with this project without federal funding.

So unless there’s a congressional appropriation of this project. Funding it just for the deck, which is $21 billion—

**Juan-Manuel Benítez**  
The president is in favor, right?

**Julie Won**  
The president does not control the purse. It has to come from Congress.

**Josh Greenman**  
So would you work for that congressional appropriation?

**Julie Won**  
I’m open to it. But we have to come to an alignment with the City of New York on what the approval process would be because whatever they choose, whether it’s GPP \[state General Project Plan\] or ULURP \[city land use process\], the public deserves to know what they’re getting into.

**Ben Max**  
Right. That would become clear at some point in development, right? So you sound open to it, but what would be your key principles to moving forward? Figure there’s federal funding there — big if, but what would be your requirements?

**Julie Won**  
In a hypothetical world, if there was federal funding, I think what’s important to note is that if someone had approached me, as somebody who has read the feasibility study, who has been part of the community board, who is now the Council member. If someone approached me and said, “Hey, Julie, do you want to work on this together?” What I would’ve proposed is that what we do first in terms of funding and building out is the north side of Sunnyside Yards, where it’s the most narrow, and opening it as an actual station. Just like Penn Station or Moynihan Station. When you allow the station to function, and then you grow the commerce around it like shops, restaurants, then it becomes a hub. Right now, it’s a no-man’s-land. It’s kinda just an open scar in the middle of my district that separates Sunnyside from Astoria and Long Island City. So I think that’s what the central focus should have been of making a more—

**Juan-Manuel Benítez**  
The mayor didn’t talk to you about this?

**Julie Won**  
No. Or AOC, or Gianaris, or anybody.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
How do you feel about that?

**Julie Won**  
I think that is poor politics, honestly, ‘cause you have to work with your colleagues, especially your congressional colleagues. Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, who actually represents the district, also was not aware. If you need the help of Congress—

**Ben Max**  
Don’t you think \[Mamdani\] was kind of going there to give Trump something big and exciting to sort-of think about that would need a huge amount of obvious outreach and follow-through, but he was kind of just trying to almost distract the president with something, you know, a big building project to get him excited about. And then it’s like, if there’s any chance of it moving forward, you come back and you start to do that outreach?

**Julie Won**  
I don’t believe that I need to humanize the president the day after the State of the Union address, where he was extremely dehumanizing to our trans neighbors and our immigrant neighbors. I think the timing was very strange. If anything, that was a distraction to the left on what he had just said in the State of the Union address less than 24 hours before.

**Josh Greenman**  
So do you think there ought to be new federal tools, changes in federal laws to make it easier to build in places like New York City?

**Julie Won**  
100%, especially construction costs.

**Josh Greenman**  
And what do those look like specifically?

**Julie Won**  
So I think one of the biggest problems with our housing policy in this country is, unlike many countries of our caliber and GDP across the world, we don’t have a comprehensive housing policy at all, the same way we don’t have a comprehensive city housing policy either. Which is why I’ve always pushed for neighborhood-led housing planning, because we have to think about it cohesively. It’s not just about the housing, but how are we also making sure that there’s enough school seats, that our sewage and plumbing infrastructure is up to date, that we have resiliency so that our housing that we built isn’t underwater in five years, and making sure that the community is moving together for those who currently live here and those who will move in.

**Akash Mehta**  
One of your opponents, the borough president \[Antonio Reynoso\] has talked about how he has transitioned on the issue of housing and become much more of a YIMBY. I’m curious if you think he’s gone too far in that direction.

**Julie Won**  
You know, very often in this race I feel like Goldilocks, where I’m like always in the middle of the three where it’s not too hot, not too cold, and I’m just kind-of just right. I think that the borough president’s view on making sure that we build housing, it’s important because we have a supply-and-demand issue where we have a shortage of housing. But I think it’s a matter of what kind of housing is really needed, which is affordable housing. But I know that it’s not an easy dichotomy because what we struggle with is currently an overreliance on the private market to figure out how to build enough affordable housing for us and make sure that it pencils out because there just isn’t enough subsidy for us to build 100% affordable housing. We also can’t build Section 8 housing anymore, so what does this really mean for us?

And currently, if you asked the real estate industry now, they would probably tell you that with 485-x, it doesn’t work for anybody, and that’s how we’re ending up with a very slow growth of housing development and also [only 99 units](https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/05/07/affordable-housing-development-labor-485x-tax-break/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for all these housing buildings.

**Josh Greenman**  
Would you be willing to share what your personal housing situation is? We’ve asked the other candidates.

**Julie Won**  
Yeah, sure. Right now I live in a one-bedroom with two kids, and I’ve had to move in less than a year every single year because of safety issues.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
What do you mean safety issues?

**Julie Won**  
So now a little bit over a year ago, myself, Assembly Member Stephen Raga, and Borough President Donovan Richards had death threats from the same individual, and that individual ended up shooting somebody else and now is at Rikers. But it was an extremely alarming situation. I had not taken death threats this seriously until that incident, and now we’ve had to move, and now I currently have a new stalker who is on record, so now I’m moving again.

**Josh Greenman**  
Can you talk about the process of finding an apartment and what the market looked like for you when you looked?

**Julie Won**  
So I used to live in Sunnyside, and I’ve lived in Astoria before as well, and it’s much more affordable there, but it’s getting pretty pricey there as well. But because of my safety issues, I’ve had to move to Long Island City, especially for my children because New York City Council security has told me that I should put my children in a school where there’s more Asian children so that they can blend in more. So that has forced me to move back to Long Island City, where it’s extremely expensive. So we went from a two-bedroom to a one-bedroom, and we still pay over $4,000 for rent. But that’s still on the cheaper side because along the waterfront, Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Long Island City rent for a two-bedroom is $8,000 to $18,000\. So we just stay in a one-bedroom.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Have you found the NYPD response to these threats to be satisfactory? I mean, that doesn’t sound very satisfactory to me that your kids should go to school with more Asian kids. Is this a good response to these threats?

**Julie Won**  
So for me, we work with City Hall. So City Hall has City Council-dedicated security. Not that we get security details like Congress members do, but that’s who we report it to. I don’t know about satisfactory. Do I feel more or less safe? I think as a person of color, I’ve never felt 100% safe in this country. I’ve been threatened on the subway even as a civilian for being Asian-American, for bringing the “Kung Flu virus” to this country. I’ve had people try to hit me with an umbrella when I was eight months pregnant because I was Asian. And they blamed me for whatever they believe China’s doing in this country. So I don’t know about satisfactory, but I will do what I can within the limitations that I have ‘cause I don’t get security. But especially as a mom now, this is the best I can do for them, and that’s what I’m trying to do.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Why do you want to do this? I mean, you’re facing death threats. Your kids are not having a normal childhood. And you could be working for the private sector making way more money. What is the— where does the ambition come from?

**Julie Won**  
So I don’t think it’s ambition, but I feel that…Within the last four years, everything we’ve been able to accomplish as a community together shows us and gives us hope that there can be more change. And I don’t take death threats lightly. But like I said, I didn’t feel safe before. It is no different now. And I believe in the humanity of this country. At the end of the day, I meet more good people than bad people, that some of these unwell people are not the norm. They’re outliers, and it’s kind of the everyday life of any elected official, no matter who you are, you know?

I think some people have security details, they have drivers and stuff, and they might feel more safe. But talking to Donovan Richards, the borough president, he felt the same way that I did, even with his security detail. So I think it’s kind of just become, unfortunately, in this country, with such polarization, even the president being shot, attempted shooting multiple times, it’s kind of become the norm and it’s unfortunate.

But I believe that the same way that this country has given me an opportunity to succeed in the ways that I have so far, where it was enough for me to take care of my parents, and I am their retirement fund. And to know that for my children growing up in this country, representation is important. And to know that there are laws, that there is a budget that we can spend to make sure that in a few years we’re going to be opening up a school and my kids are going to know like, “Oh, wow, my mom worked on that. This park that opened has my mom’s name on it. Wow.” Like, you really can be a part of civics and make the change that you want to see in this country when you all work together as a community.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So speaking of the housing issue, you mentioned plumbing and flooding and some of the infrastructure. One important piece of the infrastructure is transit. And you mentioned construction costs. We also have very high transit operation costs. Would you support in Congress taking the LIRR out of federal jurisdiction so that the state could prohibit them from striking? Like we saw the strike over the weekend, and that would give the MTA more power to change some of these work rules and make the railroad more efficient.

**Julie Won**  
I would be open to giving state jurisdiction, but not for prohibiting strikes.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Well, state employees can’t strike, but federal ones can. So they’re under the federal law that allows a strike.

**Josh Greenman**  
The Taylor Law and at the state level—

**Julie Won**  
Yes. I think workers should have the right to strike.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Including public sector workers?

**Julie Won**  
Yes, I do. I genuinely do. And I do believe that we need more funding for infrastructure overall. My focus when it comes to transportation is rewriting or redesigning our federal guidelines, because right now the City of New York is constantly clawing at the feds to make simple changes to the City of New York because the current federal guidelines weren’t written for cities like us, for urban cities. It was written for the suburbs, where it’s car-centric, and it’s not pedestrian-centric for our own safety. So for us, we’ve already had four deaths of children who were mauled to death by cars. And for us to change those intersections to have simple things like a streetlight, that takes a fight with the feds because it doesn’t fall under their federal design guidelines for certain reasons, and it’s not okay.

**Josh Greenman**  
You mentioned getting harassed sometimes on trains and stuff by people who are unwell. Do you think that we struck in New York City, New York State, and at the federal level, the right balance between providing care for people who are deeply disturbed and sometimes requiring them to get care and institutionalizing them? We had a massive deinstitutionalization movement obviously decades ago. Are we at the right place, or do we need to change the balance at the federal level and/or city and state?

**Julie Won**  
I’m a public servant, and I can barely afford to have more than one mental health therapy session every other week because the copay is still extremely high for me to get mental health services. So for a working person to have mental health services, it’s this expensive, and we also have a shortage of social workers and mental health providers. It is virtually impossible for a homeless person to get a decent mental health service provider. And we know right now that there’s an overlap of mental health issues with homelessness, and we have to make mental health services more affordable. We have to pay people fairly, we have to compensate them, and we also have to continue to figure out how to actually make it accessible because right now, it simply isn’t even for a normal person.

**Josh Greenman**  
Do you think we have the right threshold for affirmative institutionalization, for lack of a better word, of actually holding people 72 hours, evaluating them, Kendra’s Law, all of that. Do you feel like New York currently has the correct balance, or should we go more in the direction that Mayor Adams wanted to go? Or should we go less in that direction?

**Julie Won**  
I think what we have is where we’re at, but unfortunately, it’s more complicated than what you try to force people into. So for mental health services, I don’t know about you, but it took me over 26 years of my life — I was 26 years old when I finally admitted to myself, I need to see a therapist every single week to be mentally well. Because there’s a lot of cultural stigma in Asian-American communities to get mental health services. And even if I put you in a room with a mental health service provider, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be susceptible to therapy. You know, there has to be a willingness for that individual as well to be willing to work on themselves and their mental health, because simply diagnosing them with medication in a psychiatric ward is not going to really make them fully whole. So I think mental health issues are much more than just, “oh, what are the thresholds on which we call them, whatever these diagnoses are,” and we lock them in a room, because we’ve seen this in history on Roosevelt Island, not too far from home, and it doesn’t work that way.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Did you try to get the mayor’s endorsement? And what are your thoughts on Claire Valdez?

**Julie Won**  
I have not sought the mayor’s endorsement because I came into the race in February. I’ve worked closely with the mayor for many years. He was my Assembly member. My thoughts on Claire Valdez is that she’s my Assembly member, and she’s a very nice, kind, respectable person.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Do you think she’s doing a good job as an Assembly member?

**Julie Won**  
She is in her first term, and I believe she’s about a year in. So I think the jury is out. We’ll see. You know, it would be the same if anybody asked about me my first year, being like, “She’s been in office for a year. What do you think about her?” People are like, “We need to see.”

**Akash Mehta**  
And then, and then more broadly, you mentioned a few minutes ago that you see yourself on many issues as the Goldilocks candidate. I’m curious on what other issues do you see yourself as the Goldilocks candidate? And more broadly, at least according to conventional wisdom, you are the underdog in this race. Why should voters elect you as opposed to Claire Valdez or Antonio Reynoso?

**Julie Won**  
Yeah, I was going to say that if Claire is the favorite with Zohran Mamdani, and I believe Antonio Reynoso was here not too long ago [saying that he was the underdog](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/antonio-reynoso-on-mamdani-immigration). If he’s the underdog, then I must be the feral progressive raccoon that is uncontrollable.

You know, I’ve always come from my community, and I’ve always been a community organizer. I’ve always run with community endorsements, community support. We launched this campaign with 350 volunteers. We’re now at 400, and we’re knocking doors every single day. We are constantly community organizing. We’re getting ready for a block party. We had a big Mother’s Day celebration. So at the end of the day, I think what differentiates us is that I’m the only mom in the race, I’m the only immigrant in the race, and I’m the only tech worker in the race, with work experience in technology. And at the end of the day, I’m always going to run a positive campaign as I always have. And for voters, they deserve a choice. I don’t agree with anybody in power saying, “You should not run for office.” And to have seen that this past year for my colleagues who are City Council members, who are told, “You should not run,” and to stomp on them, I don’t think that’s OK.

**Akash Mehta**  
You mean Chi Osse, or?

**Ben Max**  
Alexa Aviles?

**Julie Won**  
Yeah, both of them.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
If there were ranked choice voting, would you rank one of your opponents next, and which one?

**Julie Won**  
If there was ranked choice voting in this race, I would rank…It’s a little hard because all of us have very similar policy perspectives, but I would say in terms of relationship, like from my personal interactions with them and the time that I’ve spent with them, I would pick Antonio Reynoso because I just know him personally, better on a personal level, where I’ve had more conversations with them and have had more interactions with them.

**Everyone**  
Thank you very much.

**Julie Won**  
Thank you.
### The Big Picture
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-summary/
Last updated: 2026-05-21T20:49:09.000Z
*This is the summary overview of the problem and solutions in* [*Rubber Meets Road: Lighting*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road/)*, a Vital City-Center for Justice Innovation series on what New York can do to make its streets safer by lighting them better. The series also includes a* [*summary of the Rubber Meets Road project*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-about/)*,* [*detailed policy primer*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-policy-details)*,* [*Aaron Chalfin on 50 years of research*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-policy-primer)*, a* [*design deep-dive on what well-lit streets should feel like*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-design-deep-dive)*, maps showing where* [*darkness*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-satellite-crime-map) *and* [*311 lighting complaints*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-311-crime-map) *overlap with crime, and a* [*proof-of-concept mobile app*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-app) *for reporting dark blocks.*

---

Print [ Download ](https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1--EvoWvVksjvFWFIjfhi780AqiNgEFIo&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [ Open in new tab ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1--EvoWvVksjvFWFIjfhi780AqiNgEFIo/view?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Fullscreen 

### Street lighting

Crime goes up when the sun goes down. This is true in cities across the globe. But street lighting can change that — and change it by a lot. In research using the highest standard of proof, a randomized controlled trial (RCT), serious crime in New York City housing developments dropped by 35% when the lights went on. Crime wasn’t displaced to someplace else — it just went away. 

Street lighting reduces serious crime in part because people think twice when they know they might be seen and caught. And they’re not wrong: Streetlights ensure that pedestrians and police on patrol are better able to notice and react to threats. But more fundamentally, better lighting means more life on the streets. Lighting creates a virtuous cycle, drawing residents outside to socialize and patronize local businesses, resulting in more “eyes on the street,” which in turn puts the brakes on many forms of bad behavior.

### The evidence

Two recent studies have rigorously analyzed how improved lighting can drive down crime. In New York City, researchers identified 80 public housing developments with high crime rates and installed temporary lights in half of them. The new lights [reduced outdoor nighttime index crimes by 35%](https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/joqcri/v38y2022i1d10.1007%5Fs10940-020-09490-6.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and the drop in crime occurred without any increase in arrests. Nor did crime simply move to nearby locations.

In Philadelphia, upgrading more than 34,000 streetlights in high-crime neighborhoods to provide brighter and more even light [reduced nighttime outdoor crimes by 15%](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.70006?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in comparison to neighborhoods where there were no changes in lighting, including a 20% drop in violent crimes and 21% reduction in gun crimes. 

These outcomes align with the lion’s share of studies over the past 25 years showing that crime declines when street lighting improves. Learn more by reading Aaron Chalfin's in-depth explanation of the evidence, [“50 Years of Evidence,”](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-policy-primer) at Vital City.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/05/CLIENT---VC---RMR-Lighting-chart---5.21.26-1.png)

### A cost-effective strategy 

Improved street lighting is easy to implement through existing municipal operations, and it yields immediate results. In New York City, for example, it costs $10,000 to install a single new streetlight (a capital expense if the project exceeds $50,000 within a half-mile radius). This is a fraction of the cost of crime and punishment, and far less expensive than employing additional police officers. 

### Keys to success

**1\. Pick the right locations.** Serious crime is highly concentrated, often in neighborhoods long passed over for all types of investment. 

To identify areas of need, this project is debuting [a new mapping tool](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-satellite-crime-map) merging crime data with nighttime satellite imagery to spot where darkness and high rates of nighttime violent crime overlap in New York City. [A second mapping tool](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-311-crime-map) shows the intersection of 311 complaints about broken streetlights and violent crime. But the human eye and experience are key. Cities should incorporate the knowledge of residents and others who are in the neighborhood every day (e.g., sanitation and parks workers and police) to pinpoint the places that feel unsafe and decide on where to install or improve streetlights.

Here’s what Rubber Meets Road’s two mapping tools look like in action.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-19-at-10.52.06---AM.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-19-at-10.52.36---AM.png)

**2\. Illuminate a few blocks, not just a corner.** While lighting just the dark alley or underpass might seem the most direct approach, the research shows that overly specific targeting has negative side effects. If the alley is lit, but adjacent areas remain especially dim, the people intent on committing crimes may simply slip into the nearby shadows. A better approach is to create an illuminated “buffer zone” around any particular hot spot.

**3\. Invest in quality lighting.** The human eye sees best when light is uniformly distributed. But many city streets have glaring bright lights with dark stretches in between. The effect: Dark areas appear darker and visibility becomes poor. The solution: Rather than installing one overly bright fixture, install several warm and lower-output fixtures, evenly spaced. This approach improves visibility and creates pedestrian-focused spaces that encourage active use. Adding additional lights to existing poles, along with wall-mounted lights on businesses and residences, is another effective strategy. For more on the importance of lighting quality, read Buro Happold, Studio Gang, and Urban Design Forum’s [“What Well-Lit Streets Should Feel Like,”](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-design-deep-dive) composed in consultation with the Pitkin Avenue BID, Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, and Chhaya CDC, under “Rubber Meets Road” on Vital City’s website.

**4\. Look beyond lighting.** Other changes to the built environment — for example, improving the design of scaffolding (or removing it promptly) and adding street furniture, like chairs or benches, to underused public spaces — may also help prevent crime. While these specific changes to a neighborhood have yet to be rigorously evaluated, research on [greening vacant lots](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36172506/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [fixing up blighted properties](https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303434?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) finds that, much like improved street lighting, these sorts of investments can help make neighborhoods safer by revitalizing neglected blocks and generating greater foot traffic.

For more in-depth strategies, read our detailed policy guidance, [“Street Lighting: How to Get it Done.”](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-policy-details)
### How to Get It Done
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-policy-details/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:58:02.000Z
*This is the implementation roadmap in* [*Rubber Meets Road: Lighting*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road/)*, a Vital City-Center for Justice Innovation series on lighting New York's streets to make them safer. Read alongside it: a* [*summary of the Rubber Meets Road project*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-about/)*, the* [*summary overview of the problem and solutions*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-summary)*,* [*Aaron Chalfin on 50 years of research*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-policy-primer)*, a* [*design deep-dive*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-design-deep-dive)*, maps overlaying crime with* [*satellite-measured darkness*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-satellite-crime-map) *and* [*311 outage complaints*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-311-crime-map)*, and a* [*proof-of-concept app*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-app) *for reporting dark blocks.*

---

Print [ Download ](https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1bVEFRKCxTAqZqxLxYUeqb7uaPtZz3wwT&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [ Open in new tab ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bVEFRKCxTAqZqxLxYUeqb7uaPtZz3wwT/view?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Fullscreen 

Better lighting on a city’s streets and sidewalks can be a highly effective way to reduce crime — and to bolster civic life at the same time. It’s not just common sense. It’s been tested at the highest level of scientific rigor. In New York City, a randomized controlled trial in public housing showed [a 35% reduction in major crime committed outdoors during nighttime hours](https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/joqcri/v38y2022i1d10.1007%5Fs10940-020-09490-6.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), with no increase in nearby areas. These reductions were sustained over years. And research in other cities — including Philadelphia and Washington — shows that citywide lighting upgrades have a similar impact.

Lighting is one of a handful of strategies that are twofers. It is a service that cities provide as part of their everyday responsibilities, and it has the added benefit of decreasing crime when smartly deployed. Improving lighting improves public safety without increasing arrests or incarceration.

The power of lighting is rooted in the idea that improving social connections helps make a city safe. Lighting encourages lively public spaces, or, as Jane Jacobs put it, “eyes on the street.” Because the responsibility to provide this service lives outside of a police department — in New York City, primarily in the Department of Transportation — its crime-reducing powers are often overlooked. But with not that much effort and often without that much money, it can be a powerful tool.

This guide for policymakers explains why improving lighting makes cities safer and summarizes the research supporting streetlights as an effective crime prevention strategy. It also outlines important considerations and practical steps for implementing a simple change that yields outsize benefits.

### The idea

Changes to the way a city street looks and feels can have a large impact on public safety. Most people stay away from dark alleys but gravitate to well-lit streets. Meanwhile, those looking to commit crimes will see an opportunity — to avoid being seen and caught — in a city’s unlit, neglected places. Overwhelming evidence in city after city over the decades also shows that crime, particularly violence, is highly concentrated in a small number of neighborhoods and even on certain streets within those neighborhoods. And just as reliably, [study](https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303434?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) after [study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36172506/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has shown that improving public spaces — whether by lighting or greening vacant lots or fixing up dilapidated buildings — can increase safety and reduce fear among residents.

It’s not just social scientists who understand why lighting is part of the solution. In well-lit environments, people who might otherwise be motivated to commit crimes think twice. Potential victims and police on patrol are better able to notice and react to threats. And perhaps most importantly, lights draw residents outside to socialize with one another and patronize local businesses, which further discourages crime.

### The evidence

A review of 21 studies spanning more than five decades of research finds that improved street lighting reduces crime [by an average of 14%](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359895696%5FThe%5Fimpact%5Fand%5Fpolicy%5Frelevance%5Fof%5Fstreet%5Flighting%5Ffor%5Fcrime%5Fprevention%5FA%5Fsystematic%5Freview%5Fbased%5Fon%5Fa%5Fhalf-century%5Fof%5Fevaluation%5Fresearch?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) compared to more poorly lit areas. The strongest evidence comes from New York City and Philadelphia, where recent, rigorous studies documented large reductions in nighttime outdoor violent crime, in New York City by 35% and in Philadelphia by 15%.

In New York City in 2016, researchers identified 80 public housing developments with high crime rates and randomly assigned half to receive temporary lighting towers to illuminate dim or dark internal sidewalks; the other half served as a control group where the lighting was unchanged. The result, as measured in the months that followed: [a 35% reduction in felony assaults, robberies and other index crimes](https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/joqcri/v38y2022i1d10.1007%5Fs10940-020-09490-6.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (murder, manslaughter, robbery, burglary, grand larceny and motor vehicle theft) outside at night. And crime didn’t simply move around the corner. The study looked for but found no evidence that crime was displaced to other areas.

Critically, the decrease in crime occurred without any increase in arrests — compelling evidence that lighting deters crime and doesn’t widen the net of the justice system. And these weren’t just flash-in-the-pan results. Following up three years later, researchers found that [the crime declines had been sustained and arrests had not risen](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9133.12599?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

More recently, researchers in Philadelphia studied the ongoing rollout of a citywide lighting upgrade. Since summer 2023, the Philadelphia Energy Authority has been working to replace all 134,552 streetlights with new LED fixtures that provide more even illumination (and reduce energy usage and costs). An analysis of the first 34,374 upgraded lights, covering roughly a third of the city and installed disproportionately on blocks with higher crime rates, [found a 15% reduction in nighttime street crime, including a 21% reduction in gun violence](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-9133.70006?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as compared to areas not yet upgraded. As in New York City, the new lights did not displace crime to surrounding blocks, and the drop in crime occurred without any increase in arrests. The researchers also documented reductions in crime during the day, albeit to a smaller degree.

As more cities embark on citywide lighting upgrades, the evidence has gotten stronger. In [Washington, D.C.](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PCohyCV44N5MbxCM%5Fd4YzQbN7MrQLbDL/view?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and [Mesa, Arizona](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n1jO6T-GUHIumfLcY8%5FmZOamLFA89Fbf/view?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), recent studies also found crime reductions following citywide lighting upgrades, with no evidence that crime simply moved elsewhere. In [Newark](https://catalog.results4america.org/case-studies/reducing-crime-through-street-lighting-improvements-newark-nj?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), violent crime fell by 35% within 200 feet of enhanced streetlights (although this effect dissipated after 6 months), with no displacement of crime to other areas, and no reductions observed in similar areas without improved lighting.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/05/CLIENT---VC---RMR-Lighting-chart---5.21.26.png)

For the skeptic, it’s worth pointing to a simple but compelling natural experiment on lighting’s impact on crime: daylight saving time. Twice a year, we move our clocks backward or forward, dramatically changing daylight during certain hours of the day. One day, 7 p.m. is dark — the next day it’s light. Research studies from the [United States](https://jenniferdoleac.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Doleac%5FSanders%5FDST.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Chile](https://publications.iadb.org/en/publications/english/viewer/Crime%5FTime%5FHow%5FAmbient%5FLight%5FAffects%5FCrime%5Fen%5Fen.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) demonstrate that when the clocks move forward or back and natural lighting changes, shifts in street crime follow. In a study in the United States, the extra hour of daylight reduces robberies by 7%.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that every single dimly lit area needs brighter lighting — or that every well-lit area is sure to be safe. But when an area is both unsafe and poorly lit, better lighting is a cost-effective approach that pays dividends in safer and livelier streets.

For more information about the body of evidence supporting street lighting as an effective crime prevention strategy, read [“50 Years of Evidence,”](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-policy-primer) written for Rubber Meets Road by Aaron Chalfin, associate professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania and the nation’s leading researcher on the effect of lighting.

### The costs

Streetlights are a standard city service. Each year, cities allocate funds to maintain and repair existing lights and add new ones. For example, the New York City Department of Transportation, the agency primarily responsible for the city’s streetlights, spends roughly $35 million on repairs and $10 million on new installations each year (along with a $60 million energy bill). Maintenance efforts are generally funded by annual expense budgets, while installations draw on longer-term capital budgets (if the project exceeds a minimum threshold of $50,000 within a half-mile radius).

These are large sums, but because these are existing budgetary commitments, using streetlights to reduce crime requires a small shift in mindset, not a big shift in dollars. To start, policymakers could simply add public safety to their list of criteria when deciding where lights should go.

New or improved streetlights can be quickly installed. They have immediate impact, are long-lasting and are inexpensive to maintain. In New York, it costs approximately $10,000 to install a new streetlight and $400 annually to maintain it, and it lasts for 10 to 20 years. And because lighting appears to reduce crime through deterrence (which is cheap) and not through arrest and possible incarceration (which are expensive), it reduces the costs of both crime and punishment, yielding a rare double dividend for strained city and state budgets for years to come. Lighting is especially cost-effective when one factors in [the costs of crime](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225637886%5FNew%5FEvidence%5Fon%5Fthe%5FMonetary%5FValue%5Fof%5FSaving%5Fa%5FHigh%5FRisk%5FYouth?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to victims, families and neighborhoods, and the costs of investigating crimes and prosecuting and incarcerating offenders.

And the benefits of improved lighting likely extend well beyond quantifiable criminal justice costs — from increased feelings of safety among residents to busier sidewalks and businesses.

### Putting the idea into practice

Distilling the research and the wisdom of New York City government officials, urban planners and lighting experts, here is some of the best advice for the real work of improving street lighting.

**1\. Pick the right locations.** Figuring out where dark places overlap with the highest rates of serious nighttime crime starts with looking at the data — what’s well-lit and what’s not, where and what kind of crime is happening, and in what concentrations. Assembling the crime data is relatively straightforward; the lighting data, less so. 

To take a first cut, Vital City and the Center for Justice Innovation worked with researchers at NYU to develop a [prototype mapping tool](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-satellite-crime-map) that overlays where crime is concentrated (by type) with where the lighting needs work. We then tested the tool with City officials.

The tool tries something new. Using NASA satellite images, it divides New York into 500-by-500-meter squares (roughly 12 city blocks). It then calculates the monthly average nighttime radiance (or surface brightness) and the counts of outdoor nighttime violent crimes for each square. Together, these data give City officials a starting point to zoom in on places where outdoor crime is high and lighting is relatively poor. The tool is also useful for identifying areas where lighting may be adequate but crime is still high, suggesting the need for other interventions.

**2\. Talk to neighborhood residents.** Though the tool provides a pointer, the devil’s in the details. Because the analysis of satellite imagery can only calculate average brightness over a wide area, the tool can’t zero in on problem blocks or show where specific lights should be located. That requires shoe leather.

Neighborhood residents, store owners and government workers who have daily experience in a neighborhood’s streets and parks often know where better lighting is needed. Some of these insights are captured in 311 calls — and we are also releasing [a map showing where complaints about street lighting and violent crime overlap](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-311-crime-map). These data have their own limitations, as they are skewed by deeply uneven complaint volumes by neighborhood.

Using these tools’ suggestions as a starting place, the City could conduct lighting audits with residents to identify places where people feel unsafe — such as on dark corners, under scaffolding where views are obstructed and even in places where overly bright lights blind pedestrians and create shadows. Because this work stretches the conventional mandate of the agencies tasked with installing and upgrading streetlights, the City could partner with local community-based organizations with on-the-ground relationships. This kind of work might be incorporated into the neighborhood work that a soon-to-be-created Department of Community Safety, among other City agencies, will be doing. And this work should be documented to ensure cities and researchers learn which approaches lead to successful interventions.

A recent [resident-driven planning process](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/connecting-communities-through-design/) in public housing developments in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, for example, resulted in the installation of supplementary fixtures on light posts that illuminate dark corners and overpasses and also activate underused seating areas.

To support these granular efforts and give both residents and the City an easier way to document lighting conditions, Vital City built a working proof of concept: [a browser-based tool](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-app) that turns a smartphone camera into a rough light meter, geotags readings and walks users through reporting outages to 311\. Although just a demonstration, this tool shows how an existing technology could be leveraged to better target maintenance and installation efforts at almost no cost.

**3\. Illuminate a few blocks, not just a corner.** While it is tempting to light just the dark alley or underpass, research suggests that such focused strategies can potentially backfire. Lighting just a corner but not the surrounding area can simply push crime to new locations. [A study in the United Kingdom](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-022-09539-8?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that when lighting was upgraded on a single street, crime fell there but increased on adjacent streets. Interestingly, the same study also found that when street lighting was intentionally dimmed to reduce costs and carbon emissions, crime moved from the newly dimmed areas to adjacent streets with better illumination. This suggests that some people are willing to commit crimes in illuminated areas where they have more access to potential victims, perhaps especially if they can quickly “disappear” into dark areas nearby. [A study of power outages in Chicago](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353036947%5FStreet%5FLight%5FOutages%5FPublic%5FSafety%5Fand%5FCrime%5FAttraction?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) reached a similar finding: When streetlights went out, crime migrated from totally dark streets to partially illuminated ones nearby.

These findings suggest that piecemeal improvements are unlikely to be successful.

To avoid simply moving crime from one street to another, policymakers should create illuminated “buffer zones” by improving lighting on the blocks around crime hot spots. The larger the area in which lighting is improved, the lower the chance that crime will be displaced. This approach aligns with the studies in [Philadelphia](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-9133.70006?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Washington](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PCohyCV44N5MbxCM%5Fd4YzQbN7MrQLbDL/view?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Mesa](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n1jO6T-GUHIumfLcY8%5FmZOamLFA89Fbf/view?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), in which large-scale lighting upgrades reduced crime with no evidence of displacement.

**4\. Use lights as a complement to, not a substitute for, law enforcement.** Given street lighting’s effect on increasing public safety and its low costs and ease of implementation, City officials might consider investing in lighting while reducing spending on law enforcement. Whether policing can be reduced as lighting improves is an unanswered question. It’s also not possible to say with precision how much increased activity on the streets would diminish the need for police presence. Neither question has been specifically addressed in the research, but experts note that police presence has a strong deterrence effect and likely complements lighting. Of all the studies to date on the effect of street lighting, none examined a coordinated effort to reduce policing as the new and improved lighting was added. In fact, each study examined instances in which lighting was upgraded and policing continued independently.

**5\. Think hard about lighting quality.** The human eye sees best when light is uniformly distributed with little to no excessive brightness (what we commonly call glare). But some city streets have overly bright lights with dark stretches in between. The effect: Dark areas appear darker, visibility is poor, and pedestrians are unlikely to feel or be safe.

In the 2016 randomized control trial in public housing developments, New York used very bright, temporary, diesel-powered mobile lighting towers to illuminate dark areas. These towers are quick to implement but are also powerful, loud and often smelly when powered by diesel, creating inhospitable spaces.

While researchers have yet to study the specific relationship between light quality and crime prevention, lighting science suggests that, to maximize visibility and encourage active use of the streets and sidewalks, cities should generally install several evenly spaced, lower-output LED fixtures rather than individual, bright fixtures. Urban planners and lighting designers recommend using lights with a correlated color temperature (CCT) of no more than 3,000 K and installing them at least 12 feet and no more than 18 feet from the ground. ([New York City](https://www.nycstreetdesign.info/sites/default/files/2020-03/Lighting%5FSDM%5Fv3%5F2020%5F0.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) uses 3,000 K bulbs, the standard light pole is 30 feet tall and pedestrian poles range from 12 to 18 feet.) The fixtures should also have shields that control the direction and spread of light to reduce glare. Such uniform, warm and pedestrian-friendly illumination creates welcoming spaces and encourages activity on streets and plazas.

As a bonus, such lighting can also promote better health. Overly bright streetlights that shine into residences can disrupt circadian rhythms and sleep, contributing to impaired daytime functioning, among other health impacts.

**6\. Try a variety of lighting solutions.** While high-quality street lighting is the foundation, additional lighting fixtures can improve visibility and activate public space. For example, a shielded, wall-mounted light can make it easier to see one’s surroundings when entering or leaving a building. A task light (a lower fixture that can be added to existing poles to illuminate benches, bus stops or other potential gathering places) encourages people to sit and read, play chess or stop to chat.

This multifaceted approach might also include temporary lighting towers, especially in response to pressing safety concerns, where there is an immediate need or in places that are hard to access. For example, mobile units could be added to high-crime areas in the summer months to further deter crime. These mobile units should, wherever possible, connect to the power grid to avoid the noise, pollution and maintenance costs of diesel generators. Most importantly, they should be converted into permanent lighting if they prove effective. For more information on outdoor lighting best practices and different lighting solutions, including designs for novel temporary-to-permanent fixtures, read the design deep dive, [“What Well-Lit Streets Should Feel Like,”](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-design-deep-dive) written for Rubber Meets Road by experts at Buro Happold, Studio Gang and the Urban Design Forum, in consultation with three community-based organizations: Pitkin Avenue BID (Brownsville), Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice (Longwood) and Chhaya CDC (Richmond Hill).

**7\. Complement better lighting with other improvements to the physical city.** Lighting can’t be treated in isolation. There is strong evidence that other physical changes to neighborhoods, such as [greening vacant lots](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36172506/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [remediating blighted housing](https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303434?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), can also reduce crime. Some of these efforts are already underway in the city, such as attempts to remove scaffolding more swiftly. But these efforts — along with cleaning up blight and installing street furniture in underused public spaces, among other improvements — could be tested and assessed as natural, inexpensive ways to revitalize neglected blocks and bring people into public spaces.

### Implementation in New York City

The process of making street lighting a part of a city’s public safety strategy will necessarily be different from city to city. Here are some ways that New York City might apply the above general guidance to the actual machinery of municipal government:

In New York, lighting maintenance and installation is decentralized and reactive. The Department of Transportation (DOT) manages streetlights, the Department of Parks and Recreation manages some lighting in parks, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) manages lighting in public housing developments, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) manages lighting on and around transit infrastructure and underground, and the Department of Small Business Services (SBS) funds temporary lighting interventions in commercial corridors.

Coordination could be significantly improved. There’s no map that identifies where each City-managed light is located. Nor is there a map that shows where outages are. Each agency separately evaluates requests for improvements from residents, elected officials or other agencies and funds installations and repairs through their own operational and budgeting processes. Agencies do not systematically share data. And none of the agencies formally consider public safety conditions in their repair or improvement operations.

Here are steps that two of the agencies responsible for lighting could begin to implement tomorrow to make the city safer and more vibrant, as well as recommendations for a citywide process to advance longer-term change.

**Department of Transportation**

The Department of Transportation maintains nearly 400,000 streetlights and has the largest remit for lighting maintenance and improvements. Through 311, elected officials and other City agencies, it receives more than 18,000 calls about outages or other issues and around 700 requests for new lights each year. And it spends over $100 million each year on repairs, new installations and energy costs. Given its scale, even small changes in its processes have the potential for significant impact. Here are four places to start:

- **Consider public safety in the decision-making process.** The most important change is simply to include the impact on public safety as one of the criteria when deciding where lights should be repaired or added. This could be accomplished by using a tool like the ones we’ve developed to identify areas where crime and darkness or crime and outages intersect or analyzing crime data when assessing the merits of individual projects.
- **Add a public safety analysis to scopes of work for contractors.** Scopes of work are a mundane — but essential — element of City service delivery. Currently, when contractors apply to work on lighting improvements, the standard DOT scope of work requires them to assess a project’s impact on street safety. This language should be updated to require a similar analysis of the impact on crime.
- **Create a map or dataset of all DOT lightpoles.** The current lack of data hinders progress. DOT should map the existing infrastructure, perhaps as part of a project to add maintenance sensors to each light (and publish it on the City’s Open Data portal). These data could be used along with nighttime satellite images, a phone-based light meter app or other tools to guide future decision-making.
- **Study the impact and learn from implementation.** While the evidence for improving lighting is strong, there are unanswered questions about the best approach. For example, how many lights are needed in a given area to reduce crime? Does warmer, gentler light produce more activity and safety than harsh lights? By tracking where lights are improved and what impact they have, the City can refine its own practices and improve future interventions.

While these changes would have the greatest scale and impact at DOT, all agencies with significant lighting infrastructure, such as NYCHA and MTA, could adopt a similar approach.

**Small Business Services**

Along with general improvements to street lighting, cities also need mechanisms to implement additional and creative lighting improvements in specific busy or high-crime areas, such as wall-mounted lights or lights in art installations. In New York City, many of these installations are funded by the City’s Department of Small Business Services, a small player in the world of street lighting. Each year, SBS awards a limited number of “public realm” grants of up to $100,000 to community-based organizations (CBOs) to improve commercial corridors, including through lighting. While limited, this initiative could facilitate just the sort of targeted improvements that complement DOT’s broader efforts.

The current grant program has some advantages. Channeling the money through CBOs taps into local knowledge, ensuring that the infrastructure improvements are responsive to neighborhoods’ needs and likely to activate the upgraded public spaces. But it also has two significant flaws: First, the process is overly complex and difficult to navigate. While SBS provides the funding, the process of securing permits and accessing a power source is managed by other agencies — typically DOT or the Parks Department — creating extra paperwork and limiting the design, scale and impact of initiatives. Second, the impact is temporary. All permits and grants are only for one year, meaning considerable time and effort go into interventions that are typically removed a year later.

These dollars could be put to far better use by changing how this grant program operates. Here are five changes to consider:

- **Consider public safety in the decision-making process**. Applicants should be required to weigh public safety considerations in their proposals. The focus of the grants could also be broadened beyond commercial corridors to include other public spaces where crime is a concern and public life can be activated.
- **Create a “one-stop shop” for funding, permits and power.** Rather than being run exclusively through SBS, the City could create a multiagency team to review proposals, make awards, issue permits and provide power access through a single, streamlined process.
- **Set metrics**. Each project should have clearly articulated and measurable goals, such as increasing use of the space or reducing crime.
- **Provide a path to ongoing funding**. If projects meet their metrics at the one-year mark (or other agreed-upon timing), they should unlock funding for additional years. Creating a pathway for multiyear funding, or even permanency, ensures that well-designed and implemented projects have lasting benefits. This might also include long-term funding for community organizations to function as stewards of the improved public spaces.
- **Study the impact and learn from implementation**. As with the general improvements to street lighting, the City should track where projects are implemented and what impact they have. Because the public realm grants are not limited to lighting, studying them has the added benefit of documenting the impact of lighting and other physical improvements to public space in tandem.

**Looking to the future**

These changes at DOT and SBS are meaningful first steps, and NYCHA and MTA should follow suit. However, even with agency-by-agency changes, the current fractured landscape of lighting responsibility limits the City’s ability to fully harness the power of lighting to reduce crime. A better approach would be to form and empower **an interagency team** that brings together representatives from all agencies responsible for lighting. This team would:

- Build on DOT’s efforts to map streetpoles and create **a centralized map or dataset of all agency-maintained lights** illuminating streets, walkways and green spaces on City-owned properties (and publish it on the City’s Open Data portal);
- **Build shared systems to track requests** for lighting maintenance and upgrades; and, most importantly,
- Shift from a reactive to a proactive posture by **developing a citywide Lighting Master Plan**. This plan would set clear standards for lighting quality, develop a process for identifying areas of need, set goals for lighting coverage and determine implementation timelines — all with the broader goal of aligning lighting improvements with efforts to reduce crime and nurture safe and vibrant communities. The plan could also incorporate the implementation of [recently passed City Council legislation](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=6509412&GUID=70F34B69-DF33-439E-AEC2-EC3E417B9EC2&Options=&Search=&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that requires DOT to improve pedestrian lighting in 300 commercial corridors annually.

### Conclusion

Dark or dim areas in cities too often invite crime and discourage public life. Enhanced street lighting is a cost-effective strategy with immediate and lasting benefits for public safety and neighborhood vibrancy.

To achieve the greatest reductions in crime and other benefits, government officials should rely on geolocated crime and lighting data and resident complaint data to identify broad areas of need, then leverage on-the-ground expertise to precisely target upgrades. They should invest in high-quality lighting, incorporate a variety of lighting interventions and track where interventions occur to facilitate further research on what interventions are most successful. And to achieve impact at scale, they should align agencies, systems and funding mechanisms in ways that use street lighting as a core public safety strategy.

Turning on the lights can be just the start, but it’s a start that can reduce violence and help city life flourish.
### Where Darkness and Crime Overlap: An Interactive Map
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-satellite-crime-map/
Last updated: 2026-05-20T15:03:06.000Z
_No content available._
### Where 311 Lighting Complaints and Crime Overlap: An Interactive Map
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-311-crime-map/
Last updated: 2026-05-20T15:03:18.000Z
_No content available._
### 50 Years of Evidence
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-policy-primer/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:34:59.000Z
*This piece explains the evidence on street lighting and crime as part of* [*Rubber Meets Road: Lighting*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road)*, a Vital City-Center for Justice Innovation series on lighting New York's streets to make them safer. The series also includes a* [*summary of the Rubber Meets Road project*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-about/)*, a* [*summary overview of the problem and solutions*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-summary)*, a* [*detailed policy primer*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-policy-details)*, a* [*design deep-dive on what well-lit streets should feel like*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-design-deep-dive)*, maps overlaying crime with* [*satellite-measured darkness*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-satellite-crime-map) *and* [*311 outage complaints*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-311-crime-map)*, and a* [*proof-of-concept app*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-app) *for reporting dark blocks.*

---

In her [seminal 1961 book](https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” Jane Jacobs argued that the vitality of urban life depends critically on the design of communal spaces. With respect to public safety, she argued that the police, while a critical input into crime control, cannot make a community safe all on their own, and that sustainable safety is ultimately created by “an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards … enforced by the people themselves.” In short, when public space is used and monitored by members of the public with the support of the police, these spaces are made safe for the public to enjoy. On the other hand, public spaces that are hidden from prying eyes — such as public housing stairwells or blocks where law-abiding people dare not venture — can become hot spots for crime and disorder.

Jane Jacobs’ central insight was that the most effective crime control strategies enlist members of the community to coproduce public safety alongside the police — a task aided by policymakers who can help to design public spaces that are defensible. In urban planning, the study of how public spaces can be engineered with safety in mind is known as CPTED (pronounced SEP-TED), an acronym for “crime prevention through environmental design.” Among social scientists, the term of art is “situational crime prevention,” acknowledging that crimes are implicitly a function of a motivated offender, an attractive victim and the right situation.

CPTED-inspired interventions are highly variable and include efforts to remediate blighted properties, find alternate uses for vacant lots, remove trash, better maintain public infrastructure, promote the use of surveillance cameras and design spaces that have better lines of sight, among many other varieties. Some of these interventions are a question of urban design and call upon the skill sets of architects and engineers. Others are related to the more mundane but critically important task of maintenance. As James Q. Wilson and George Kelling remind us in their seminal 1982 essay, “Broken Windows,” when public spaces aren’t maintained and property damage (e.g., a broken window) is allowed to proliferate without remediation, a signal is sent that no one cares, so broken windows cost nothing — a state of affairs that ultimately leads public spaces to be taken over by those with nefarious intentions.

While many situational crime prevention interventions are worth investing in and studying, this white paper focuses on improvements in street lighting — perhaps the oldest form of situational crime prevention.

### Street lighting and human civilization

Street lighting is undoubtedly one of the earliest forms of situational crime prevention — or any type of crime prevention for that matter. As far back as antiquity, people have understood darkness to mean danger, and streetlights have been around, in one form or another, for millennia. Recognizing the value of ambient lighting during nighttime hours, extensive systems of oil lamps were used to improve safety at night in the Greco-Roman world. After a late-night dinner party, Romans would travel back to their homes on illuminated streets, not much different from today. While lasting evidence is scant, it is probably reasonable to conclude that street lighting is an idea nearly as old as civilization itself, an essential public safety strategy that evolved alongside the world’s first cities and, notably, thousands of years before the world’s first professional police forces in the 18th century. The idea that lighting means safety is both intuitive and universal. Even before humans settled in fixed locations, it is easy to imagine hunter-gatherers feeding their campfires throughout the night, adding a source of light to ward off animals and better recognize any attendant threats from other human beings.

By some accounts, street lighting was introduced in the United States by Benjamin Franklin, who designed his own candle-based streetlight, first used in Philadelphia as early as 1757\. David Melville demonstrated gas street lighting in Newport, Rhode Island in 1805, and Baltimore became the first U.S. city with municipal gas streetlights in 1816\. And in 1880, after the invention of the electric light bulb, Wabash, Indiana, became the first U.S. city to use electric street lighting. Today, while there is substantial variation in their usage and intensity, streetlights can be found in varying degrees of abundance in every city in the United States and throughout the rest of the developed and developing world.

However, the number of streetlights, their brightness and the evenness of the light they provide continue to vary substantially across different areas within a city as well as between cities. Most U.S. cities still rely on legacy streetlights, which provide dim yellow light, focused intensively on the area just beneath the light fixture. Recently, a number of cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington and Dallas, are switching — or have switched — to LED lights, which provide an experience of brighter and more even lighting.

Despite investments in lighting, ultimately there are streets in every U.S. city that are simply not very well lit at night, which has led to a natural question: Would improvements in street lighting lead to improvements in public safety? On the one hand, given the potential benefits of lighting, it seems intuitive that the answer would be a resounding yes. On the other hand, if we think of people who commit crimes as highly motivated to do so, then perhaps a modest improvement in lighting would generate scant deterrence. The next two sections of this essay provide a high-level overview of how lighting might affect public safety as well as a summary of the evidence, including a discussion of what we do not yet know.

### Theories of change

The presence of ambient lighting can affect crime through numerous channels, each of which may operate by changing the behavior of potential offenders, potential victims, community members, police officers or any combination thereof.

Perhaps the most obvious way street lighting can influence crime is by increasing the perceived risk of being caught in the act by a patrol officer, bystander or surveillance camera, thus deterring people from engaging in criminal activity in the first place. Lighting can also affect the incidence of crime by changing the behavior of potential victims. Darkness is thought to generate a sense of insecurity because it decreases visibility and recognition at a distance, creating blind spots, shadows and potential places of entrapment. To the extent that better lighting enhances what people are able to see at night, it may empower them to mitigate a potential threat by taking an action as simple as crossing to the other side of the street or doing something else that makes them a more difficult “mark.”

There are other, more nuanced perspectives on the role lighting may play in the generation of public safety. These theories emphasize how investments in improving neighborhood conditions strengthen community confidence, cohesion and something known as “informal social control.” Specifically, when a place is perceived as cared for, it tends to be more welcoming to law-abiding people and less welcoming to would-be offenders. Blocks, intersections and green spaces frequently traversed by community members are generally less attractive places to deal or use drugs or for gang members to hang out, for example.

If better lighting reduces fear and brings more people outdoors at night, it may give rise to two potentially countervailing effects: On the one hand, more outdoor activity means more “eyes on the street,” potentially deterring crime by increasing the perceived risk of apprehension or through the types of informal social control that are a mainstay of the broken windows theory. On the other hand, more human activity means a greater supply of potential targets.

To the extent that enhanced lighting increases not only the perceived but the actual probability of apprehension, it might also generate incapacitation effects, where crime falls due to more imprisonment. This happens if better lighting makes it possible for the police to gather better evidence and make more arrests. While crime reduction by any means is a welcome outcome, it is important to remember that deterrence is cheap relative to incapacitation, which requires municipal and state governments to finance the considerable costs of arresting, adjudicating and confining offenders. As such, the efficiency and therefore the scalability of a given crime-control strategy like improved street lighting depends on the relative magnitude of its deterrence effects. Indeed, if the deterrence effects are sufficiently large, it is possible for a crime control strategy to reduce both crime and incarceration, producing a “double dividend” in which two costly outcomes — crime as well as resources allocated to crime control — are simultaneously minimized. That is always the outcome we want.

### Empirical evidence

In thinking about the importance of ambient lighting in maintaining public safety, a natural place to begin is to consider the effects of street lighting’s great rival: the sun. While the sun’s movement is governed by the laws of physics, its relationship to time is man-made and therefore subject to government policy. Twice per year, daylight saving time generates a revealing natural experiment in the public safety value of lighting. Consider that as soon as clocks are set forward, a 7 p.m. walk that used to take place during daylight hours becomes a nighttime endeavor. Likewise, when the clocks are set back, what was formerly a nighttime excursion suddenly happens in the light of day. Researchers in the[ United States](https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/97/5/1093/58281/Under-the-Cover-of-Darkness-How-Ambient-Light?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and[ Chile](https://academic.oup.com/joeg/article-abstract/23/2/299/6590082?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have studied what happens to crime, particularly street crime, during these controlled shifts, and their findings are what we would expect: A reduction in daylight leads to an increase in crime — powerful proof of concept that more ambient lighting leads to greater safety.

In contrast to these studies of daylight saving time, most academic literature studies discrete interventions that typically add new streetlights to an area or enhance the quality of the lighting already present. Areas receiving improved lighting are compared to plausibly similar control areas that experience no upgrades in lighting, and the relative change in crime is computed using a research design known as “differences in differences.” A comprehensive review by Welsh et al. (2022) of over five decades of research found that street lighting interventions reduced crime by an average of 14% across 21 research studies in which the comparisons being made were regarded as credible.

Notably, the entire body of literature includes just one randomized controlled trial — the gold standard in research that has become a mainstay of pharmaceutical studies and is equally powerful in assessing the impact of public safety interventions. That study, which evaluated the addition of portable temporary light towers in New York City public housing communities during the spring and summer of 2016, found that the added lights resulted in a 36% reduction in felony assaults and robberies during nighttime hours. Follow-up work from this trial found that enhanced outdoor lighting led to reductions in both crime and arrests in the intervention areas and that the beneficial effects of lighting in these communities endured for at least three years.

***Does lighting shift crime to other locations?***

A central question in studying any place-based intervention, be it street lighting, trash cleanup or additional police presence, is whether the intervention will genuinely reduce crime or simply displace crime to another location. From a scientific perspective, genuine crime reduction and displacement are equally interesting insofar as either effect provides evidence that crime is sensitive to lighting or whatever is being studied. But from a policymaker’s perspective, the difference between genuine crime reduction and displacement is critically important, as spending money merely to spread crime around a city is not a particularly attractive proposition.

As a general matter, criminological research [has demonstrated](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-014-9209-4?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that displacement is more of a theoretical concern than a reality. Because crime is so intimately[ tied to social context](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2004.tb00521.x?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and because the people who commit crimes tend to be so strongly tied to a small and familiar set of places, most place-based evaluations have not found evidence that crimes are pushed to alternative locations. Research that has studied the addition of lighting to *entire neighborhoods* reaches a similar conclusion — that better lighting tends to reduce crime in focal areas without causing crime to spill out to adjacent communities.

When it comes to street lighting, though, there is some additional nuance to consider. This has to do with the sometimes hyperlocal nature of lighting, which can vary tremendously from street to street. Two research papers speak to this nuance and find suggestive evidence that poorly designed lighting interventions could simply push crime around the corner rather than lead to genuine crime reductions. A study of streetlight outages in Chicago considered the effect of electrical outages and spent lightbulbs that caused short-term disruptions to municipal street lighting. Essentially, an electrical failure or a spent bulb causes a street to go dark for several days before the issue is fixed. This paper analyzed changes in reported crimes before, during and after 300,000 streetlight outages and found that outages caused nighttime crimes to spill over into nearby street segments, with the greatest impact on robberies and auto thefts. The likely intuition here is that few people wish to walk down completely dark streets, so human activity — and crime — were reallocated to better-lit streets. While, in this instance, the better-lit streets received more crime, the broader lesson is that crime can, in fact, be responsive to changes in lighting on a street-by-street basis.

A similar study of the Oxfordshire, Reading, West Berkshire and Wokingham municipalities in the United Kingdom examined what happened to crime after local authorities began to reduce the amount of street lighting at night to save energy costs and carbon emissions. Consistent with the Chicago research, the study found that crime increased significantly on street segments adjacent to those shut off at midnight to save energy costs. The study also found that areas adjacent to streetlights that replaced yellow lights (high-pressure sodium, or HPS, bulbs) with energy-efficient white lights saw nighttime crime decrease by 14% and increase by 13% on adjacent streets.

The central theme across these studies is that discrete shifts in street lighting — on a street-by-street basis — have led to behavioral adjustments, raising concerns that piecemeal lighting upgrades could simply displace crime rather than produce a genuine, scalable improvement in public safety. In order to maximize the public safety benefits, policymakers should do their best to upgrade lighting on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. 

***Will lighting scale?***

Taken as a whole, research that studies improved lighting in communities has found beneficial effects. However, an enduring question is whether improved lighting can have effects at scale — that is, whether a citywide improvement in street lighting will lead to a citywide reduction in crime victimization. At-scale impacts are elusive in policy research. Indeed, there are numerous programs that appear to lead to important improvements in a small population served by the program but which are difficult to deliver to a larger population due to some rate-limiting step, such as the scarcity of transformational leaders or the difficulty of hiring a large number of high-quality employees.

Lighting has several attractive properties when it comes to operating at a meaningful scale. The technical know-how involved in installing 1,000 streetlights is generally no different from what is required to install 10 streetlights. Similarly, delivering high-quality lighting is mostly an issue of a city’s capital budget and does not require the same degree of nuance and expertise as, for example, delivering culturally appropriate services to at-risk youth.

Does lighting scale? The daylight saving time papers — which study crime across entire cities when there is more lighting — hint that it can. But, for a long time, empirical tests remained elusive. In the last three years, empirical tests suggest that lighting can have at-scale impacts. There are now four evaluations of improved lighting across an entire city. All four evaluations study the change from legacy street lighting to LED lighting, which produces light perceived to be brighter and which, critically, provides considerably more even light across a street, with far fewer dark spaces between streetlights. Research in Mesa, Arizona; Philadelphia; and Washington, D.C., found that as lighting rolled out to different communities citywide, crimes fell — notably, in Philadelphia’s case, including shootings. In contrast, similar research in Dallas did not find an impact of lighting on firearm offenses, which was the only outcome studied. Of note, since firearm offenses in Dallas are statistically rare, this study was probably underpowered to detect effects of similar size to those seen in Philadelphia. It is also worth observing that while Philadelphia is a pedestrian-oriented city, Dallas is more car-oriented and, as such, might offer a more limited scope for lighting to make a difference.

### Remaining controversies and future directions

In 1997, a National Institute of Justice [report to Congress](https://www.ojp.gov/library/publications/preventing-crime-what-works-what-doesnt-whats-promising-report-united-states?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), authored by several of the country’s leading criminologists, concluded that, due to the inadequacy of the available research, “we can have very little confidence that improved lighting prevents crime.” At the time, this was certainly the correct conclusion. Most of the available evidence was very old — from the 1970s — and consisted of comparisons between a single treated community and some other community, whether it was comparable or not.

In the last 25 years, street lighting research, like other areas of social science, has been boosted by the[ “credibility revolution,”](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.24.2.3&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) which has inspired empirical crime researchers to invest in obtaining stronger evidence. The lion’s share, albeit not all, of the more recent research finds that crime, including violent crime, declines in response to improved lighting. The crime declines that are observed have been modest but are large enough to be meaningful. On average, the crime reduction that we see in response to enhanced lighting is of an order of magnitude similar to that which would be expected from[ 10% more police](http://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272718302305?%5F%5Fcf%5Fchl%5Ftk=DHrpbJBesnRPHmXgvx2iTxt2CcsXmScKSKjrWsdOtf0-1774465503-1.0.1.1-qqMS2b%5FQyzjtrsi8FXVRv1UNQpc1AK.Rt5x%5F2HMnqU0&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). However, much remains unknown, and some additional findings remain more speculative. First, we have little understanding of the types of places where lighting interventions will be most successful. This means we can offer little formal guidance to policymakers about how different types of communities or places should be prioritized for enhanced lighting. The best advice, in my view, is simply to prioritize areas that suffer from the highest rates of outdoor nighttime crime and that, at present, have the lowest-quality lighting. There is some empirical backing for this advice as [research on daylight saving time](https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/97/5/1093/58281/Under-the-Cover-of-Darkness-How-Ambient-Light?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has found that the impacts are felt disproportionately in communities with less municipal lighting and those with higher crime rates.

Second, the mechanisms through which better lighting reduces crime remain murky. Does better street lighting reduce crime by bringing more people outside, increasing the number of eyes on the street? Or does lighting work mostly by deterring would-be offenders? If it is the latter, what is it about lighting that deters? Is it simply a matter of the increase in ambient light that increases the perception that there will be a witness to a crime or that the police will observe a crime in progress? Or does better lighting send a more abstract signal — that a particular area is looked after and cared for? In sorting out the potential mechanisms, we can engage in some informed speculation — informed because there is empirical research that sheds some light on these questions but still speculative because the available literature remains thin.

With respect to whether lighting will change the way public spaces are used, [one recent study](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9125.70046?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of daylight saving time found that, when there was more ambient lighting, more people were out and about at the same hour of the day than when it was darker. This suggests — but does not prove — that better municipal lighting might change the way public spaces are used. We will soon have more data to answer this question. The availability of cellphone mobility data from firms like Safegraph and Advan makes it possible for crime scholars to observe whether better lighting brings more people outdoors, thus generating more eyes on the street. The Philadelphia research, referenced in the prior section of this brief, will report such estimates in the near future. These findings are relevant to our understanding of public safety and important for other reasons. Outside of observed crime rates, the extent to which people are willing to use public spaces in their community after dark is an important measure of fear and well-being.

With respect to whether it is ambient lighting itself or the signaling effect that improved lighting might have, there is some tantalizing evidence that the signaling effect of lighting may play an important role in shaping the efficacy of lighting interventions. First, it is potentially noteworthy that one of the largest effects in the literature comes from the randomized trial in New York public housing that studied lighting that was very bright and especially salient to community residents. Second, in that study and several others, better lighting also appears to have led to some decreases indaytime crime. This is especially remarkable as streetlights do not turn on during the day, so there is no other way for street lighting to have an effect on daytime crimes except by sending a signal about community caretaking.

Finally, we can say something about whether lighting is reducing crime by leading to more incapacitation — and thus widening the net of the justice system. This is a plausible hypothesis about how lighting could work. With better lighting, surveillance footage might have greater evidentiary value, eyewitness testimony might be more useful, or police might directly observe a crime in commission. But two available data points suggest that lighting reduces crime without more arrests. Most notably, the randomized trial from New York that found outdoor nighttime crimes fell by 36% in response to enhanced lighting also found that arrests fell. Daylight saving research finds that street crimes decline but there is no indication that arrests fall with darkness. Likewise, while more research is needed to determine whether these findings will hold across a broader range of interventions, this finding is potentially very powerful: Interventions that reduce both crime and arrests represent the holy grail of public safety — and offer a double dividend to society by reducing victimization as well as the cost of adjudicating and punishing criminals.

One final caution merits discussion. Investments in physical infrastructure are often compared to investments in policing, with discussion ensuing about which effect is larger and therefore which is the wisest investment. Such discussions miss the mark and are based on a misleading read of the available research. To my knowledge, there has yet to be a paper that tests the effects of an intervention that increases lighting while reducing police presence at the same time. As such, lighting studies are probably best thought of as revealing the impact of improved lighting, holding law enforcement inputs constant. From a conceptual standpoint, police and community investments are considerably more likely to be complements than substitutes. Lighting makes places more defensible, but the most sustainable forms of safety are likely to be created using a layered approach.
### The Research on Street Lighting and Crime
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-evidence-browser/
Last updated: 2026-08-18T17:58:39.000Z
_No content available._
### What Well-Lit Streets Should Feel Like
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-design-deep-dive/
Last updated: 2026-05-20T14:55:36.000Z
_No content available._
### About This Project
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-about/
Last updated: 2026-05-29T00:24:07.000Z
How do cities decide what to do? The tug on the sleeve, the crisis in the moment, the upcoming State of the State or State of the City address requiring a Big Idea or three. These days, it is fashionable to refer to “evidence-based policies” (a hilarious formulation if applied, say, to medicine). But how, really, can cities and their leaders figure out what works, use that as the ballast of governance — whatever else politics may require — and steel themselves to the prose of implementing the ideas?

We’re in luck. Because every day, great ideas are being tested. They come out of neighborhoods, the academy and cities more generally. But too rarely do they reach policymakers, who have little time — even with Claude — to figure out what really works for them, and what really are the operational obstacles to implementation.

Vital City’s new project, launched in partnership with the Center for Justice Innovation, is called Rubber Meets Road: Running Cities on Evidence. It aims to solve that problem and make better the lives of city dwellers and the public servants who work on their behalf, first by finding the best ideas across the nation and around the globe and then by offering nuts-and-bolts guidance on how to implement them. Where possible, we have created tools that can both illuminate the problems to be solved and ease the solutions.

We are starting with a set of ideas to reduce violent crime. Crime may be trending down nationwide these past two years, but it remains a leading concern of New Yorkers and people across America. And while we have some breathing room, why not use it to tap into solutions that may come from surprising places but offer a durable way to keep the peace. Each idea we showcase is powerful by itself, but no one is sufficient by itself. 

Each idea is explained to resonate with a broad range of people — people who live in cities, journalists, researchers and others. But our emphasis here is reaching the busy bureaucrat, who will need to make the budget and policy case. Where possible, we offer costs, and sometimes cost-benefit analyses. We are cautious here, trying to see the issue from the point of view of a budget director who may not be moved by promised savings in a generation or even five years or even when the savings accrue now but to the “wrong pocket.”

In this first iteration, the ideas, while generally applicable to cities, are offered in detail as applied to the budget and operations of the City of New York. New York is the nation’s biggest city and therefore the one where solutions can reach the most people. But we anticipate developing “city agnostic” tools in the coming months as well. 

Vital City is deeply grateful to our friends, critics and colleagues who offered trenchant comments and advice. All mistakes are our own, but we particularly want to thank: Aaron Chalfin, Eric Cumberbatch, Renita Francois, Sherry Glied, Gloria Gong, Chenghe Guan, Anna Harvey, Candice Jones, Dana Kaplan, Lee-Sien Kuo, Jeff Liebman, Jens Ludwig, Jessica Mofield, Daniel Neill, Sarah Picard, Abdul Rad, Amy Sanaman, Pat Sharkey, Marcos Soler, Shu Wang, the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance, the NYU Wagner School, the Urban Design Forum and the New York Police Department, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and Department of Transportation for their comments, work and pushback.

We are also extraordinarily lucky to have the support of Arnold Ventures, the Public Welfare Foundation, the Charles H. Revson Foundation and the Tow Foundation, whose resources and thought partnership have been key in shaping and realizing this public service.
### How Dark is Your Block? A Proof-of-Concept Mobile App
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-app/
Last updated: 2026-05-20T15:03:47.000Z
*This proof-of-concept tool is part of* [*Rubber Meets Road: Lighting*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road/)*, a Vital City–Center for Justice Innovation series on lighting New York's streets to make them safer. The series also includes a* [*summary of the Rubber Meets Road project*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-about/)*, a* [*summary overview of the problem and solutions*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-summary)*, a* [*detailed policy primer*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-policy-details)*,* [*Aaron Chalfin on 50 years of research*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-policy-primer)*, a* [*design deep-dive*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-design-deep-dive)*, and maps overlaying crime with* [*satellite-measured darkness*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-satellite-crime-map) *and* [*311 outage complaints*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rubber-meets-road-lighting-311-crime-map)*.*

---

What’s the lighting like on your block at night? Are the streetlights dim or out? Most New Yorkers have no easy way to tell — and the City has no easy way to know either, beyond complaints filed through 311\. To show what’s possible, Vital City built a working proof of concept: a browser-based tool that uses your phone’s camera as a light meter, geotags the reading, and walks you through reporting outages to 311\. The full tool, including the underlying code, is freely available so the City can adapt it — ideally as a feature inside the official NYC 311 app, or as a standalone municipal release. Below is how the demonstration works today.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/05/image1.png)

### Get set up (30 seconds)

1\. On your phone, open[ https://vitalcity-nyc.github.io/streetlightmeter/](https://vitalcity-nyc.github.io/streetlightmeter/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Safari (iPhone) or Chrome (Android).

2\. Add it to your home screen so it opens like a regular app: on iPhone, tap the Share icon and choose "Add to Home Screen"; on Android, tap the three-dot menu and choose "Add to Home screen."

3\. That's it — no app store, no account, no download.

### Take a reading

1\. Head outside at night to the spot you want to measure.

2\. Open StreetLightMeter and tap "Measure light here." Grant camera access when prompted.

3\. Hold your phone at chest height, rear camera pointing straight ahead (not up at the light).

4\. Tap the capture button and hold still for about two seconds.

5\. You'll get a reading in lux and a plain-language rating: dark, dim, or adequate.

*The camera image is analyzed on your phone and never uploaded.*

### Report it to 311

If the reading shows a problem, the app walks you through filing a report:

1\. Pick the issue type (for example, "Street light out" or "Insufficient lighting").

2\. Optional but helpful: enter the pole number (stamped near eye level on the pole) and attach a photo.

3\. Choose how to file: online via the NYC 311 street light form, by phone, or by text to 311-692.

4\. Save the service request number the city gives you so you can track the repair.

Your reading is also added to a shared map, so neighbors can see which blocks have been measured.

### Tips

● Take readings mid-block and directly under the pole for comparison.

● Measure on a clear night; rain and fog will skew results.

● If a whole stretch reads "dim," file one report per pole — the city dispatches crews by pole number.

### From proof of concept to city tool

This is a demonstration, not a finished product. Vital City built it to show that the technology already exists to give New Yorkers — and the agencies that serve them — better information about street lighting at almost no cost. The natural next step is for the City to take it the rest of the way. Two paths look promising:

● Build it into the NYC 311 app. The agency already collects streetlight complaints; a one-tap light meter would shorten the path from “something’s wrong” to a service request with a verified pole number, a lux reading and a precise location.

● Release it as a standalone “NYC StreetLight” tool. DOT or the Mayor’s Office of the CTO could publish a polished version, with the readings flowing into a citywide map that helps target maintenance and identify chronically dark blocks.

Either route would turn what is now a small civic experiment into a real piece of municipal infrastructure. The code, the methodology and the data are open; we’d be glad to work with the City to make it happen.
### Hochul's School-Choice Choice
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/hochul-trump-school-choice-ny/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:00.000Z
Speaking recently at an event hosted by Agudath Israel, an Orthodox Jewish organization, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul[ announced that she intended to opt into the Education Freedom Tax Credit](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2026/05/08/kathy-hochul-opts-into-federal-tax-scholarship-school-choice/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (EFTC) program, which was fiercely opposed by Congressional Democrats. Enacted as part of the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” EFTC authorizes a dollar-for-dollar tax credit to anyone who donates up to $1,700 towards the largest federal school choice program in history. The funds collected will be administered through private scholarship-granting organizations and made available to parents whose family income does not exceed 300% of their area median income. The money can be used for tuition at private and religious schools and a host of other education-related services.

Hochul’s surprising decision is not only politically important for Democrats; it could shape policy in profound ways in New York City and State for generations to come.

As a concession to Democrats who caucused against the bill, the EFTC program grants state leaders discretion to opt into the program or refuse to do so. At the time of Hochul’s announcement, only one of the 27 states that opted in had a Democratic governor: Colorado, led by Jared Polis. When Democratic Govs. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Laura Kelly of Kansas refused to participate, their decisions were overturned by Republican-controlled state legislatures.

It’s little wonder why most Democratic governors have turned a cold shoulder to the program. The program has been vehemently opposed by national teachers union president Randi Weingarten, a longtime opponent of private school choice and a prominent voice in the Democratic Party.[ She claims](https://gothamist.com/news/enrollment-is-declining-in-nyc-schools-expect-more-school-closure-fights?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that the EFTC will drain resources and students from public schools like those in New York City, where enrollment[ has declined by 160,000 since 2020](https://gothamist.com/news/enrollment-is-declining-in-nyc-schools-expect-more-school-closure-fights?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Sympathetic labor leaders have lined up behind Weingarten. Democratic State Sen. John Liu, who chairs his chamber’s education committee,[ has threatened](https://www.silive.com/politics/2026/05/ny-gov-hochul-pushes-back-amid-dem-clash-over-trump-private-school-tax-credit-program.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to challenge the governor’s decision in the state legislature.

Why isn’t Hochul toeing the line? Since launching her reelection campaign, the governor has brandished an uncharacteristic independent streak. Last year, she broke with U.S. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, as well as the state party chair Jay Jacobs, to endorse the left-leaning mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani against party stalwart Andrew Cuomo. While the two still bicker over heavier taxes on the rich, the governor and the mayor overall seem to have a productive relationship. After endorsing her reelection campaign, Mamdani was able to secure state funding to support his childcare program and other campaign promises.

But this feels like a bigger break. Why would a centrist politician like Hochul defy the powerful teachers union president and other labor leaders who have routinely aligned with her? Perhaps it was a purely political calculation. Where else do the EFTC’s opponents have to go if they have problems with her position? Her Republican challenger in this year’s gubernatorial race, Bruce Blakeman, declared support for the federal funding long before the governor did. While Hochul is polling favorably, it is still early in the election season. Blakeman’s campaign recently got a boost when[ a state judge ruled that he qualifies for $3.5 million in public funding](https://www.wxxinews.org/text/new-york-public-news-network/2026-05-12/bruce-blakemans-legal-win-could-unlock-3-5m-for-his-campaign?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) after a state board denied it. Hochul may be thinking that the issue could neuter a perceived Blakeman advantage.

It wasn’t just a coincidence that Hochul made her provocative announcement to a powerful conservative Jewish organization. Their members, many of whom could well be swing voters in the gubernatorial election, have a lot to gain from a federal program, which will provide tuition relief to parents whose children attend yeshivas. Then there is the larger Catholic school lobby with its own financially strapped school system. It has been a reliable supporter of school choice in the past, not to mention Republican officeholders.

But the support for school choice does not end there. It is also popular within Black and Latino communities because children from those communities are more likely to get trapped in chronically failing public schools with no reasonable options. Generations of Black and Brown parents have come up with their own tuition payments to find better opportunities in Catholic schools; but not all can afford it, so they remain consigned to underperforming institutions. Democrats generally have ignored their pleas for alternatives. It is not a winning election strategy[ at a time when their party has been hemorrhaging support in Black and Latino voting districts](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/us/politics/democratic-party-voter-registration-crisis.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

The dynamic is fascinating and worth following: Notwithstanding the thumbs-down from municipal labor leaders in sympathy with the teachers, many parents who stand to benefit from the federal aid are members of these very unions.

It remains to be seen whether Hochul’s decision will encourage other Democratic governors to welcome the infusion of federal funding. Private school choice has been the third rail of Democratic politics[ ever since the first voucher program appeared in Milwaukee back in 1990](https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Dreamers-Failure-American-Education/dp/0197827101?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Since then, the idea has gained enormous momentum across the country. It is likely to grow in popularity with national test scores[ sliding to record low levels](https://ed.stanford.edu/news/us-student-achievement-was-falling-long-pandemic-study-finds?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and more parents questioning the quality of public schools.

Today, some 75 school choice programs are active in 35 mostly red states, and they differ in purpose and scope from the earlier ones.

The original programs that came about in Milwaukee and Cleveland were the result of odd coalitions between Black activists and moderate Republicans. They targeted children from low-income families who sought alternatives to failing public schools. A progressive model of school choice evolved, setting standards for participating schools and protecting the rights of students and teachers. Despite their orientation, mainstream Democrats continued to oppose these programs. Even charter schools, public schools of choice with clear standards that tend to have positive records of academic performance serving underprivileged children, have been a point of contention for Democrats.

The more recent state programs [differ in purpose and scope](https://www.future-ed.org/early-returns-first-results-from-the-new-wave-of-public-funding-of-private-schooling/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). They include vouchers, tax credits and education savings accounts. More expansive than the early school choice programs, they fund private and religious school tuition, attendance at micro-schools, homeschooling, and a wide range of education-related expenses. Many are universal in scope, making them available to all students. Many lack accountability provisions to ensure sound education standards. 

It was in the spirit of these state laws that the federal tax credit program was enacted.

Until very recently, it was widely assumed that the regulations eventually produced by the Trump Treasury Department would mimic the more recent brand of choice programs — sweeping programs available to all with fewer government regulations. Then, on May 14, appearing before the House Education and Workforce Committee, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon stated that states would be authorized[ to set their own conditions for administering the program](https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/05/14/states-could-set-rules-for-federal-education-tax-credit-mcmahon-says/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). If true, 

this could be a game-changer that brings still more Democrats into the fold, assuming they can finally come to terms with the choice issue. Was this the thinking behind the secretary of education’s turnaround on the regulations? Did the surprise announcement by the governor from the deep blue state of New York alert Republicans to a fresh opportunity to expand the choice regime? Or was McMahon’s statement merely a ploy to isolate Democrats from some of their own constituents?

Hochul was wise enough to give herself some wiggle room when, after making her original surprise announcement, she said that she would look out for “poison pills” within the regulations before signing on.

To make her case among fellow Democrats, she will need to ask more pointed questions about the scope of the regulations. She has argued that no funding would be taken from public schools and that money appropriated to the state could be used by public school students for items like tutoring, transportation and after-school activities. If permitted, might it also possibly be used to underwrite Mamdani’s plans to offer universal childcare?

Under existing federal laws, the city Department of Education spends $1.5 billion annually in tuition payments to send students with disabilities to private institutions that public schools do not have the capacity to serve. Might there be some mechanism to apply EFTC funding toward these costs as well? Such opportunities could bring savings to overburdened state and city budgets and make funds available for other favored programs of the governor and mayor.

There will be other, more difficult questions that Democrats, including the governor, will need to wrestle with as the federal program proceeds. Assuming limited funds are available, would it be possible to prioritize federal vouchers for low-income families whose children attend low-performing schools? Will states be able to hold participating private schools to existing educational standards? Will these standards be sufficient to hold newly opened institutions to acceptable levels of performance?

And what would happen if a private or religious school participating in the program refused to hire a teacher who is gay or admit a student who identifies as transgender? Assuming that the U.S. Supreme Court is no longer so reliable a protector of individual rights, will plaintiffs in such cases have adequate safeguards through state laws and regulations?

The school choice train left the station decades ago. It has barreled across the country and is gaining increasing momentum. Rather than jump on board and steer it in a safe direction, Democrats have generally chosen to lie in its path, and it has passed over them. Gov. Hochul may have a chance to change its course by asking the right questions and marshaling its resources to address the learning gap defined by race and class that has been a national disgrace for generations. It is a bold wager in an election year.
### How Zohran Mamdani Can Help Shrink the Child Welfare System in New York City
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-child-welfare-community-safety-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:01.000Z
In 2021, New York City [asked thousands of NYCHA residents](https://map.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/2021%5FActionAgenda%5FFINAL%5FPAGE-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) how to improve public safety. Some of the needs they articulated: easier access to public benefits, sports and arts programs, [healing spaces](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/designcommission/downloads/pdf/PDC%5FStreetscapesForWellness.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) like community gardens and [restorative circles](https://www.hiddenwatercircle.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to address trauma, community centers, and peer support and “credible messengers” with the life experience to help others navigate through a challenge.

That same year, parents across the city [were asked](https://www.risemagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/AnUnavoidableSystem.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a different question: How can the city reduce over-reliance on the child welfare system?

Their answers were very similar: to invest in neighborhoods. They wanted investments in grassroots groups, community spaces and programming that offer holistic support. 

These responses, reported months apart by the city’s [NeighborhoodStat](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nstat-should-be-key-to-mamdani-public-safety-plan/) program and by Rise, a parent advocacy group, reflect what decades of [research](https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/HopeVI%5FPaper.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) also show: Place matters. Children and families do better — and crime is lower — in places with a strong social fabric, well-kept parks, welcoming libraries and vibrant community organizations. 

Mayor Zohran Mamdani understands this logic when it comes to safety. His campaign was built on the premise that over-reliance on law enforcement to manage social problems causes its own harms — and that a community-rooted approach could produce better outcomes. That’s the vision behind the new Office of Community Safety. Now, he has an opportunity and responsibility to apply that same logic to child welfare.

### The problem with policing families

For decades, New York City’s primary institutional response to family stress has been to send investigators from the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) to a home to determine whether there’s neglect or abuse. If a teacher notices something worrying or a doctor has a concern, their training told them, “when in doubt, call the hotline” — the state-run phone line that takes reports of suspected harm to children. The result is that nearly [1 in 20](https://familypolicynyc.org/data-brief/hotline-calls-2023/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) New York City families faces a child protective case every year, even though 93% of these cases are not serious enough to lead to further intervention. 

Even when children are quickly assessed to be safe, regulations in New York state require multiple visits to the home, interviews with people who know the family, record gathering and extensive documentation. The typical case lasts 40-60 days, while the threat that children may be removed hangs over families. 

That knock on the door leaves lasting damage even when it leads nowhere. [Research](https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/97/4/1785/5113162?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) shows that parents who have been investigated pull back from their communities. They confide less in doctors and teachers. They avoid the mental health providers and social services that might actually help them — because those institutions now feel like threats. “We are scared to talk to our doctors or our children’s teachers,” [one affected mother wrote](https://www.risemagazine.org/2019/12/mariya-kolesnichenko-target-the-situations/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), “because we fear they may misinterpret our words and use them against us.” As [one mother](https://www.risemagazine.org/2021/06/fear-of-cps-impacts-every-move-i-make/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) put it, “Being scared of the child welfare system has an impact on almost everything I do.”

Today, [experts](https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/exploring-the-intersection-of-child-neglect-and-poverty/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) [agree](https://preventchildabuse.org/resources/primary-prevention-toolkit/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [that](https://imprintnews.org/opinion/rolling-out-the-welcome-mat-for-prevention/270728?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), while it’s essential to act swiftly when children are in danger, the child protective system is a blunt instrument deployed too often in situations it was never designed to address. In the past two years, ACS has sought to reduce unnecessary investigations, training more than 25,000 frontline staff in schools, hospitals and shelters that they can “support, not report” a family when a child is not in danger, with promising [results](https://www.casey.org/media/25.07-QFF-TS-Transforming-mandated-reporting%5Ffinal.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

That’s a good first step, but it’s not enough. The problem is that no city agency holds a charter to ensure that families themselves find a welcoming front door when they need help. ACS — an agency with the power to separate families — can’t offer that friendly hand.

That is why I am part of [a coalition of advocates](https://narrowingthefrontdoor.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) proposing that New York City stand up a new Office of Family Well-Being to commit to building a community approach to family safety, just as it has committed to a community approach to public safety. Ideally, this new office would work in tandem with the Office of Community Safety, and potentially become part of the expanded Department of Community Safety that Mayor Mamdani aims to build. The building blocks of both should be to build up place-based planning and neighborhood supports that stabilize residents, both in everyday life and when setbacks threaten to become crises. 

### The front-door problem

For 25 years, child welfare advocates and ACS leadership have focused on reducing the most serious trauma of the system — family separation — with significant success. The number of children in foster care fell by [70% between 2001 and 2025](https://familypolicynyc.org/2026/01/15/edwards-jama-nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), while deaths of children from abuse and neglect also declined. But the rate of *investigations* — the front door of the system, where families first encounter its power — has barely moved. 

These investigations are not distributed equally. Nearly [45% of Black and Latino children](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2106272118?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the city can expect to experience an investigation by age 18\. And child welfare involvement is hyperconcentrated — and has been for decades — in a small number of neighborhoods. A quarter of all ACS investigations of Black families occur in just nine of the city’s hundreds of zip codes. To a striking degree, these are the [same disinvested neighborhoods](https://imprintnews.org/child-welfare-2/citywide-framework-to-hold-upstream-efforts-accountable/243348?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — Brownsville in Brooklyn and Mott Haven in the Bronx, to name two — where policing is concentrated. 

For families, conditions in these neighborhoods increase the potential for stress. In [Brownsville](https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.cccnewyork.org/2020/12/CCC-Brownsville.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), for instance, commute times are long, childcare is scarce and afterschool programs are lacking. Parents told [researchers at the Citizens Committee for Children](https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.cccnewyork.org/2020/12/CCC-Brownsville.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that they avoid local mental health providers because they fear ACS involvement and hesitate to let their kids play outside because of violence. This lack of basic amenities and social infrastructure reflects the legacy of redlining and the results of decades of city disinvestment. 

It’s well-established that [neighborhood neglect produces crime](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo5514383.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and a [growing body of research](https://familypolicynyc.org/explainer/neighborhood-conditions/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) also finds that neighborhood conditions influence child safety and child welfare involvement. For instance, cleaning and greening vacant lots [reduces gun violence](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22871378/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — and greener neighborhoods also see fewer child welfare reports, even when poverty levels are the same. 

Possibly the most important factor is what’s known as [collective efficacy —](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/robert-sampson-interview) the sense of place and belonging that encourages residents to look after one another and to act in solidarity when necessary. Research reliably finds that neighborhoods with stronger social fabrics have lower rates of crime, substantiated child maltreatment, [domestic violence](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2002.00833.x?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [substance abuse](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4006326/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com), even when controlling for income and other factors. A Columbia University [analysis](https://familypolicynyc.org/explainer/neighborhood-conditions/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of New York City found that high rates of collective efficacy are associated with lower rates of substantiated investigations and foster care entries at the zip code level. 

With neighborhood conditions tied so tightly to positive public safety and family safety outcomes, a Mayor’s Office of Community Safety that addresses crime while ignoring child welfare is doing half the job. It is critical to fold families into that vision.

### The missing office

Over the past year, a collaboration including the Narrowing the Front Door Workgroup, the Innovations Team in the Mayor’s Office of Policy and Planning and two dozen parents and community leaders have developed a [detailed proposal](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X9KRyc5txh%5F2l88REfzJ8zK2L-3pdIk9/view?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for a new Office of Family Well-Being, which could sit within the City’s proposed Department of Community Safety. 

The proposed office would perform three interlocking functions. In each neighborhood where child welfare involvement is concentrated, a designated community anchor — a trusted local organization, not a government agency — would lead a planning process to identify the resources families want and need and the local strengths to build on. 

The office would then direct grants to community organizations to address priorities surfaced in the planning process. These might include flexible, non-stigmatizing supports that could help families out of a bind, such as emergency cash, back-up childcare, peer support, grief counseling and help navigating public benefits, as well as joyful family gatherings and civic actions that bring neighbors together. 

At the citywide level, the office would be responsible for identifying citywide gaps and collaborating with local groups to address conditions — like a city warmline for family support — that community collaboratives can’t resolve alone. 

ACS itself has been supportive of this planning. “It’s a wonderful idea to have a city entity focused solely on family wellness,” said recent ACS Commissioner Jess Dannhauser at a City Council hearing in February, adding that he sees “no reason why we shouldn’t urgently kick off a planning process for what an Office of Family Well-Being would look like.”

### Direct cost savings for the city

New York City has already demonstrated that upstream child welfare investment pays for itself. [A new report](https://familypolicynyc.org/report/reinvesting-upstream/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) published by the NYC Family Policy Project that I co-authored with Tim Ross assembles what city and state taxpayers actually spend on child welfare investigations, and what upstream reforms could save. 

We found that, since the state created an uncapped fund for preventive services 25 years ago, sharp reductions in foster care entries have saved billions. If the same number of children were in foster care today as in 2001, New York City alone would be spending [$1 billion more annually](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2021/08/parents-advocates-rally-against-expansion-family-enrichment-centers/184609/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on foster care costs. That [stunning annual savings](https://familypolicynyc.org/report/reinvesting-upstream/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), with no reduction in safety, is the return on a visionary structural decision made a generation ago.

The next phase of reform could potentially produce a similar return. Each year, New York City spends [$142 million](https://familypolicynyc.org/report/reinvesting-upstream/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) responding to hotline calls, an average of about $2,800 per investigation. About [40%](https://familypolicynyc.org/report/reinvesting-upstream/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of that cost comes from city tax dollars. Eliminating tens of thousands of investigations each year can generate tens of millions of dollars. With the City perennially under pressure to find budget savings, this is the rare reform that will cost less the better it works.

### The decision in front of the mayor

The Mayor’s Office of Community Safety is being stood up at this moment, and the mayor continues to envision a full-fledged city department to achieve its mission. The question is whether this vision will expand to include a comprehensive, resourced, independent Office of Family Well-Being — with real authority to shape neighborhood conditions.

When [New York went upstream on crime](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/stemming-violence-investing-in-civic-goods/), it proved you can’t just arrest your way out of a safety problem. You also need to invest your way out of it. That’s true for child safety, too. With the synergy of investing in public safety and family well-being together, in the same places, through the same trusted institutions, New York City can have a bigger impact on both.
### Lessons from Tokyo
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/joe-mcreynolds-interview-tokyo-zoning/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:37:20.000Z
---

*Joe McReynolds has two jobs. By day, he's a national security analyst tracking Chinese information warfare. Nights and weekends, he's a Tokyo obsessive with a PhD in progress, a private digital library of hundreds of Japanese-language urban studies books, and a story about the time he frantically called his boss to manufacture an emergency just so he could fly to Tokyo and show Ezra Klein around. Jamie sits down with McReynolds to talk about what New York could actually learn from a city where you can open a bar in your living room for $2,000, health inspections happen every five to seven years, and grandmas sell homemade lunchboxes off folding tables without anyone hassling them. Also: public toilets, the 1961 down-zoning that broke everything, and why Joe is terrified about the short term but quietly hopeful about geoengineering.*

*You can listen to the podcast on* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6HGwLGrIQtL40TPQ2OmSR1?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *and* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lessons-from-tokyo/id1794619189?i=1000767759906&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*

---

**Jamie Rubin:** You’re listening to After Hours with Jamie Rubin, a Vital City podcast. Today’s episode is a totally fascinating conversation with Joe McReynolds, who came over to talk to me on a Sunday a few weeks ago. Joe currently serves as the chief for global information operations and cyber at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, the China Security Studies Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, and as a co-founder of the China Cyber and Intelligence Studies Institute. He’s the lead editor and co-author of the book “China’s Evolving Military Strategy,” as well as the upcoming “China’s Information Warfare.” In addition to his foreign policy work, he’s an urban studies scholar affiliated with Keio University’s Almazan Architecture and Urban Studies Laboratory in Japan, where he studies Tokyo’s approach to urban policy. He is also the research editor and co-author of the book “Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City.”

A theme to keep in mind is the picture Joe paints of Tokyo as a place where anything can develop in any neighborhood and support a vibrant, economically self-sufficient community. He talks about how many restaurants and bars Tokyo has, particularly in comparison to New York. I found myself wondering whether New York City really can be a place like Tokyo in that sense — if we fixed regulatory issues, could we support small businesses run by anybody who lives there?

Joe, thank you for being here on a Sunday afternoon. Tell me where you actually live.

**Joe McReynolds:** Depending on the year, different places, but at the moment I am splitting my time half and half between DC and Tokyo.

**Jamie:** Exactly what is it that you do for a living? You seem to have seventeen different flavors of employment.

**Joe:** My day job is as a national security analyst focused on China, Chinese military development, and especially Chinese information warfare. But then nights and weekends, I am an urban studies researcher focused on Tokyo and what American cities can learn from Tokyo.

**Jamie:** But your PhD work is in what?

**Joe:** PhD work is in urban studies — it is basically “Tokyo-ology,” building off of the book “Emergent Tokyo.” I became obsessed with cities and how they work differently. Tokyo was the most interesting because of the human experimentation and dynamism in people trying out different ways to live and form communities. I already spoke Japanese from public school in California. I was using Chinese in my day job, then realized I was obsessed with Tokyo and started collecting primary source materials in the 2010s. Finally, the Japanese Ministry of Defense brought me over for a year as an exchange; I’d do China information warfare stuff for them, but really I wanted to understand why Tokyo works the way it does. That was the genesis of the book.

**Jamie:** I was thinking about you this morning because of an article in the Times about the renovation — or destruction — of the East Wing ballroom. Architects explained why the designs made no sense, and it made me think of the notion that there should be less scrutiny and more of a “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach. How does that fit into your conception of a city?

**Joe:** I’ve been thinking about this recently because I’ve been involved a bit with the folks building California Forever, that new city project in California. They hired people out of SPUR, the Bay Area urbanism think tank, to talk about Tokyo-style neighborhood design.

**Jamie:** California Forever is this effort to quietly aggregate land, led by Jan Sramek and funded by wealthy Silicon Valley types. Are they actually building a city?

**Joe:** They didn’t really account for the political realities of zoning, but they hit on a solution: get a neighboring city to absorb you with a sweetheart deal that grandfathers every existing resident in as a king with financial incentives. By being absorbed into an existing city that can set its own zoning, that solves the farmland zoning problem. My answer to the city question is that you have to have a degree of trust in people, which goes beyond architecture to land use. One of my biggest takeaways from Tokyo for American cities is to let people do more things with their own residences.

In Tokyo, the “exclusively residential zone” includes the right to open a small restaurant, bar, workshop, or boutique on the ground floor. People are entrusted to do this, and nuisance issues are negotiated with neighbors. We are designing our cities in such a defensive crouch from any possible harm that we lose something in the process. I don’t think the answer is that we can’t trust people; setting rules with guardrails that allow for individual flexibility could be a happy medium.

**Jamie:** You have written a couple of articles for Vital City. One was about public toilets. Explain that situation in Tokyo.

**Joe:** The piece on public toilets is as much about transit systems as it is about toilets because they are intertwined. About eight or nine private train companies run about half or more of the stations in Tokyo. They operate the rail itself, commercial shopping hubs above stations, and build out bedroom communities around them. They even operate tourist attractions at the end of the line. They are fundamentally in competition to make their commuter lines the best places to live. Public toilets are part of what they offer — clean, well-appointed amenities, always inside the fare gates.

The infrastructure is spatially doable in New York; the plumbing hookups are there. It is a question of prioritization and the MTA’s relationship with the city.

**Jamie:** You mention cleanliness — is it downstream of Japanese culture?

**Joe:** No. Anyone who has been on a drinking street in Tokyo when the salarymen are going hard knows they have the same bad aim as drunk men everywhere else. It is about expectations. In New York, it is rare to have bars or restaurants above the second or third floor. In Tokyo, you’ll see eight-story buildings where every floor has something. Real estate developers in New York say they don’t do that because New Yorkers are not accustomed to looking up. That then rewires the economic logic for developers. We are used to not expecting much in the way of public toilets, so there isn’t pressure on City Hall or the MTA.

**Jamie:** With the MTA, it’s a budget issue. Relatively small things like a million dollars of revenue don’t seem worth it to an organization that big, even if it would change the experience. Mayor Mamdani has made a public commitment to more toilets. In the city, they found a Riverside Park toilet that has cost $3 million so far and still isn’t built. How much of that is an issue?

**Joe:** It’s a huge issue, but reform of the contracting process would unlock a lot of urban improvements. We have been in the urban political wilderness by accepting that better things are not possible. Mamdani’s campaign compared to Eric Adams’ City of Yes shows a political pendulum swing toward boldness that people are hungry for.

**Jamie:** People often talk about Tokyo’s housing development. How many units do they develop?

**Joe:** About 150,000 every year, though that includes units being torn down and built anew.

**Jamie:** The population of the greater Tokyo metro area is about 40 million, while New York is 8 or 9 million. The other interesting piece is the restaurant and bar scene.

**Joe:** Tokyo has about ten times or more bars and restaurants compared to New York. It is a question of zoning, liquor licenses, and health inspections — which only happen once every five to seven years in Tokyo. I know a Japanese American woman who opened an eight-seat bar in a nice area of Tokyo; her total startup cost was under $2,000.

New York restaurant owners’ jaws drop when they hear that. It is possible because of by-right zoning, $50 liquor licenses, and permissive regulations for mom-and-pops. In Japan, mom-and-pop businesses get to keep the sales tax they collect up to a certain point as an incentive. In any residential neighborhood, someone can operate a business out of the ground floor of their house. You get older couples who rent their ground floors to young people to bring energy to the community; they aren’t trying to maximize profit.

I studied this in New York and found survivability often depends on special landlords — like a co-op that likes having a bookstore downstairs or a family that bought the building forty years ago and likes the continuity.

**Jamie:** Is what you’re describing a luxury good, or does it matter beyond how it feels? If we tried it in New York, would it only end up in fun areas like Park Slope or Downtown Brooklyn?

**Joe:** When you give people flexibility, the optimal result for a given area can naturally emerge through micro-scale choices. In Tokyo, you have grandmas selling homemade lunchboxes out of their ground floors for $4\. When you allow people to cook for their neighbors and monetize it without hassle, it is a pocketbook positive for entrepreneurial cooks and provides affordable food. That would arise organically in economically depressed areas.

Regarding housing, I was shocked at the extent to which New York is nominally zoned for housing but 80% is considered at capacity. This is an artifact of floor area restrictions.

**Jamie:** Let’s close with a lightning round. Commercial-to-residential conversion?

**Joe:** I find it more interesting to turn offices into other forms of commercial space, like micro-commercial hubs, to break the norm of New Yorkers not looking up.

**Jamie:** Ezra Klein and “Abundance”?

**Joe:** I actually took Ezra around Tokyo when he was writing that. I fundamentally agree with the message. He’s arguing for a political prioritization. My prediction for Zohran is that he won’t dramatically transform the future of New York housing, but he’ll get more political credit than past politicians because he’s shown an appetite for boldness.

**Jamie:** You have two sides to your life: foreign policy and urban issues. Are you an optimist about where we are in history?

**Joe:** Short-term, I am very terrified. We are seeing a move toward dramatic development of military technologies and the shattering of old consensuses. Long-term, I am more optimistic that we’ll solve climate change because of advances in geoengineering technology. The youth scare me, but they also seem to be self-correcting and embracing in-person connection. I just turned 40, so the youth have informed me I am now an “unc.”

**Jamie:** As a 58-year-old, I can tell you it’s liberating. Joe, I appreciate you coming by. Thanks for listening to After Hours with Jamie Rubin.
### A Diamond, a Mayor and a Citywide Lesson Plan
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/museum-art-repatriation-mamdani-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:20.000Z
It is just after nine in the morning and I am facing a group of about 100 New York City fifth graders, preparing to speak to them about my latest novel for young people, an art repatriation museum heist set at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The auditorium’s stage is full of haphazardly stacked xylophones from a recent school concert, and it is over-warm and stuffy in the way that older city buildings can be in the late spring. Like pupils at any New York area school, these 10- and 11-year-olds on their wooden auditorium seats are of many colors and backgrounds, a wide range of heights and sizes. 

The kids are a little restless at first, but thankfully, I have been supplied a cordless microphone, so I’m able to walk among the students as I launch into my interactive presentation, asking them questions and allowing them to sometimes interrupt me in turn. I talk first about the infamous heist of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, and the thief Vincenzo Peruggia’s [belief that the Italian masterpiece had been stolen by Napoleon and therefore belonged not in France](https://www.npr.org/2011/07/30/138800110/the-theft-that-made-the-mona-lisa-a-masterpiece?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) but Leonardo’s home country of Italy. Soon, I’m connecting this to the issue of colonial looting of art and artifacts — encouraging students to ask the question where the art they see in museums came from, where it belongs and who has a right to own whose treasures. By the time I mention [Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s comment](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/nyregion/kohinoor-diamond-india-history-mamdani-king-charles.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) late last month that if he were granted time to speak privately with King Charles III during the monarch’s recent visit to the U.S., he would encourage him to return the Koh-I-Noor diamond, the students are entirely engaged, hooting and hollering in outrage at the gall of Britain and other colonial powers. 

The famed 105.6-carat Koh-I-Noor, which currently sits in the Tower of London as part of the British crown jewels, has long been a symbol of colonial plunder, as well as a touchstone for the issue of repatriation of looted artifacts to formerly colonized countries. The British Crown [claimed the massive diamond](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-koh-i-noor-diamondand-why-british-wont-give-it-back-180964660/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 1849 following the annexation of the Punjab. India, Pakistan and Afghanistan have all since demanded its return, citing that it was obtained through the aggressive and illegal coercion of a 10-year-old boy king after the imprisonment of his mother (Read the full sordid history at [Smithsonian Magazine](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-koh-i-noor-diamondand-why-british-wont-give-it-back-180964660/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).) The U.K. has resisted; in 2010, then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron [said](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-10802469?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), “If you say yes to one, you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty … it is going to have to stay put.” 

To whom do looted art and artifacts rightfully belong? When I was a museum-visiting child, I was never taught to ask such questions. Neither were my own now young adult children. Yet the tides of the broader cultural conversation seem to be shifting. The 2025 Louvre heist involving the French crown jewels, for instance, was [deemed a “colonial wake-up call,”](https://hyperallergic.com/the-louvre-heist-was-a-colonial-wake-up-call/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) because the gemstones were mined by the French using exploited labor when they laid claim to lands across Asia, Africa, and South America. (For more, [read the Associated Press’ description of the jewels’ origins](https://apnews.com/article/jewels-crown-louvre-1fc9ced982798bc5c292a2f58d075275?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which “moved through imperial networks that converted global labor, resources — and even slavery — into European prestige.”)

Conversations about colonial looting — and what to do about it — have been increasingly in the zeitgeist. Ryan Coogler’s 2018 “Black Panther”opens with [a museum heist scene](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/black-panther-museum-heist-restitution-1233278?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that gestures to the repatriation of African art and artifacts.There is an entire BBC docuseries entitled [“Stuff the British Stole.”](https://www.bbc.com/video/docs/series/10227966?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Popular internet [memes](https://hyperallergic.com/can-we-meme-the-british-museum-into-doing-the-right-thing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) joke that Western museums are crime scenes, and [a video game called “Relooted”](https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5707283/relooted-is-a-game-about-repatriating-art?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) centers on the stealing back of looted African art. 

New York City museums are not above this sort of critique. In 2021, The Metropolitan Museum of Art [returned a few Benin Bronzes — among many taken by the British in an 1897 raid on Benin City — to Nigeria](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/arts/design/met-museum-benin-bronzes-nigeria.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In 2023, [it returned Khmer-era looted artworks to Cambodia and Thailand](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/arts/met-return-ancient-treasures.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In 2024, the museum [brought on its first head of provenance research](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/arts/met-museum-first-provenance-research-head.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and has established [inventories of repatriated antiquities](https://www.metmuseum.org/collections/570?pkgids=570&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as well as one for Nazi-era provenance research. Despite these [active and ongoing efforts](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/arts/design/met-museum-provenance-research-lucian-simmons.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [it continues to possess other objects historians consider looted](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-met-museum-native-american-collections?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Colonial looting did not limit itself to inanimate objects. In 2023, [art historian and legal scholar Erin L. Thompson’s investigative report for Hyperallergic](https://hyperallergic.com/a-new-york-museums-house-of-bones/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) revealed that the American Museum of Natural History had a collection of 12,000 individuals’ bodies and body parts, most from Indigenous and formerly colonized communities. These human remains were often gathered in the name of racist eugenic practices, projects of comparative anatomy designed to prove white racial superiority. Due perhaps to the public outcry after Thompson’s revelations, the museum changed course, [declaring it would no longer display such human remains publicly](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/arts/american-museum-natural-history-human-remains.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and closing two major halls displaying Native American objects, due to Biden-era federal regulations requiring museums to obtain consent from indigenous communities prior to displaying cultural items. For many, however, these actions feel long overdue. 

As an author of a novel for young people about art repatriation, what I hope Mamdani’s comment does is to open the door to more informed engagement with these issues in our own city. A critical component of New York’s identity is its museums. From the Met Cloisters to the South Street Seaport Museum and everything in between, not only do visitors from everywhere in the world enjoy our museums, but so do the city’s residents. For students, museum visits are often a part of school curricula. Programs like [Culture Pass](https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/07/16/culturepass?s%5Fkwcid=AL!18508!3!339988332682!b!!g!!culture%20pass%20nyc&gad%5Fsource=1&gad%5Fcampaignid=1479435788&gbraid=0AAAAAD%5FjtH7AhnRoBvBz2InPLxEGGNyAX&gclid=CjwKCAjwzevPBhBaEiwAplAxvmpmKkhboNCgWVVSuB0a8cNr8L4lOQz9MUMbTiUVLvwlDWvJN9TRRxoCE5cQAvD%5FBwE&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Cool Culture](https://www.coolculture.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as well as free museum days and partnerships with educational institutions make New York’s museums accessible to a broad range of its families and children. Yet, as far as I’m aware, there is no consistent curricular component teaching New York’s students about colonial looting, or encouraging young people to ask where museum artifacts come from.

As I have been traveling around New York City schools doing author visits, I’m consistently impressed by how simple the issue of repatriation is to young people: Stuff that was stolen (or obtained under fundamentally immoral or dishonest terms) should be returned. Once presented with the facts, the issue is plain and simple to most of our city’s students, many of whom are themselves from immigrant communities impacted by colonial histories. Yet for adults, whether academic colleagues or family members accompanying young people to events about my book, the issue seems more vexed. As one educator put it to me recently, didn’t repatriation of objects deny children of various immigrant diasporas the right to learn about their own culture? Couldn’t, say, the bombing of Iran have been stopped through more education in the U.S. about the beauty of Persian art? 

To me, such comments are consistent with the narratives that justified colonialism itself, the idea that colonialists ‘rescued’ art from irresponsible communities uninterested in or incapable of caring for their own precious treasures. They remind me of Edward Said’s [theory of Orientalism](https://hyperallergic.com/how-the-contemporary-art-world-repackages-orientalism/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — an idea of a backward and barbaric “other” who must be tamed and civilized — which has been used to not only justify colonialism, but continues to inform the way that Western institutions frame and view art from the rest of the world. 

The repatriation of ill-gotten works is not simply about possession, but the construction of collective cultural memory and therefore history itself. Diasporic immigrant children cannot learn about their own cultural objects without learning about the violence that brought those objects, and perhaps their own families, to the U.S. Current-day wars cannot unfortunately be avoided by eliding mention about past wars, invasions and colonial violence. 

Indeed, conversations about repatriation, [in the words of Erin Thompson](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/opinion/museums-artifacts-stolen.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), can actually enrich and deepen museums, whether that means better and more complete museum education or richer relationships with the communities from which art and artifacts originate. “Repatriation can make an opening rather than leave a hole,” [writes Thompson](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/opinion/museums-artifacts-stolen.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), citing several possibilities, including museums displaying replicas of repatriated objects, alongside videos of the original object in use in its country of origin, or commissioning work from modern-day artists working in their cultural traditions. 

Museums are what Michel Foucault called [heterotopias](https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), “worlds within worlds,” spaces that represent and reveal truths about the society in which they exist, as well as trouble them. Not just the treasures within museums, but the ethical standards of museums shape the way we understand ourselves, each other, our histories and futures. Even as Mayor Mamdani draws worldwide attention to the Koh-I-Noor’s potential return, his words are an opening for New York City in general, and New York City schools in particular, to deepen museum education. It is an opportunity for the city to ask questions about the looted art and human remains still being held in our museums, while engaging in meaningful conversations about repatriation and reparations. At a time when immigrant communities all over the country are dehumanized and [demonized by the president’s rhetoric](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-degrading-language-immigrants-rcna171120?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [terrorized by ICE raids](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/were-being-terrorized-what-mainers-are-seeing-as-ice-launches-operation-in-the-state?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), New York City can change the narrative of what this country should treasure: ill-gotten goods from formerly colonized countries, or immigrant communities from those countries, the kids and families who truly make this city great.

Due to our mayor’s albeit brief comments, New York has a meaningful opportunity right now to become a world leader in the arena of museum ethics and education. Diamonds may be forever, but a citywide anti-colonial museum curriculum could be our metropolis’ best friend.
### Call It What It Is: A State Bailout of New York City
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-hochul-nyc-budget-bailout/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:37:21.000Z
On the morning of May 12, 2026, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani [announced](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/05/governor-hochul-and-mayor-mamdani-announce-additional-aid-and-st?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=With%20this%20latest%20agreement%2C%20the,more%20affordable%20for%20working%20people.) that New York State would provide New York City with an additional $4 billion “in gap-closing support” over the current and upcoming fiscal years to enable the City to balance its FY 27 Executive Budget without the need for increased property taxes or significant reductions in services. 

The joint announcement noted that between the current budget year and the upcoming FY 27 Budget, the State had provided the City with $8 billion in additional resources, comprised of about $3 billion of additional direct State assistance and approximately $5 billion being State authority for the City to engage in financial engineering in the form of deferring pension contributions, a new pied-à-terre tax and permission for the City to delay implementation of the State’s small class-size unfunded mandate. 

Later that afternoon, Mamdani introduced New York City’s $124.7 billion FY 27 Executive Budget. The mayor’s narrative is that he was able to overcome a $12 billion budget deficit created, and hidden, by his predecessor. He argues that he accomplished this through the skillful identification of “waste” in City government and savings opportunities, increased State assistance won through his collegial relationship with Hochul and legislative leaders, and by “taxing the rich.” 

What is left of the mainstream media in New York saw things differently. The New York Post ran an [op-ed](https://nypost.com/2026/05/12/opinion/zohran-mamdanis-unbelievably-dishonest-budget/?utm%5Fcampaign=iphone%5Fnyp&utm%5Fsource=mail%5Fapp) titled “Zohran Mamdani’s unbelievably dishonest NYC budget.” The New York Daily Newseditorial headline was, “Logic triumphs over mayor’s initial very bad plans.” The editorial criticized the “tax the rich” rhetoric the mayor used as the organizing principle of his budget strategy, adding: “He is mayor now (and has been since Jan. 1) and must end his political campaigning.”

All elected officials try to win the “history of the war” irrespective of whether they have actually won the war. Mamdani not only is no exception to that rule, he pays more attention than most to controlling the narrative. He built his political career on the combination of a bold agenda and an exceptionally effective communication strategy, using social media to communicate directly with his political and ideological base in New York City and beyond. 

Mamdani concluded his Executive Budget presentation by saying that he had “made the choice to tax the rich and reject the false inevitability of austerity.” In fact, very little of the City’s Budget gap was closed by taxing the rich — and although this is not an austerity budget in the sense that there are significant reductions in services or programs, this budget also does little to advance the ambitious affordability agenda on which Mamdani campaigned. 

It will take a few more days to parse all the nuances. But we know enough now to understand the extent to which Gov. Hochul bailed out the mayor from a fiscal dilemma that he largely ignored in his campaign. She arguably advanced both of their political needs in doing so. The mayor needed significant cooperation from the State to avoid deep cuts in services or unpopular property tax increases. The governor needs the political support of Mamdani’s political base in her upcoming re-election and to relieve pressure from progressives in the state Legislature. 

But despite Mamdani appearing to declare victory, New York City’s fiscal pressures are not going away. The City still faces a substantial structural budget deficit (i.e., recurring revenues minus recurring expenses). As New York City Comptroller Mark Levine said:

“\[T\]he Executive Budget relies on $2.8 billion in one-time measures and $2.3 billion in short-term pension savings, without solving for the fact that City government continues to spend more than we take in, even in a year of record revenues … Taken together, these actions delay addressing the deeper structural imbalances in the City’s budget, as is clear from out-year gaps of $7.1 billion in FY 2028 growing to $9.8 billion in FY 2030.” 

Understanding the evolution of the City’s deficit-closing dance with the State and the strategies ultimately adopted to achieve a balanced budget holds clues for the obstacles Mamdani will face in the future as he attempts to implement the ambitious vision on which he was elected.

### Mayor Mamdani’s budget odyssey

Mayor Mamdani’s budget odyssey began with his dramatic announcement on January 28, 2026, that he had discovered that New York City was facing a “budget crisis”: a $12 billion deficit that needed to be resolved in order for the City to enact a balanced budget by the constitutional deadline of June 30, 2026\. Mamdani insisted that he saw few opportunities to meaningfully close the budget gap through spending reductions. Instead, he called for New York State government to authorize the $9 billion of corporate and personal income tax increases he had campaigned on, as well as to increase State funding to address a “structural imbalance” between the City and the State.

After the mayor’s announcement of the $12 billion deficit, it [was reported](https://nypost.com/2026/01/30/us-news/hochul-peeved-by-mamdanis-tax-the-rich-demands-as-he-claims-nyc-faces-12b-budget-hole/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that Gov. Hochul thought the City was exaggerating its budget problem to create leverage for the mayor’s priority of raising taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and large corporations. Indeed, by the time the mayor presented New York City’s Preliminary Budget on February 17, City Hall had reduced the size of the City’s deficit to $5.4 billion, primarily as a result of upward revenue revisions but also aided by a last-minute addition of $1.5 billion in new State funding on top of the roughly $1 billion in budget relief funding for the City that had been included in the governor’s initial Executive Budget. 

Even with this smaller deficit, the mayor continued to insist that the problem could only be solved by the State. In a transparent effort to force the State’s hand, the Mayor threatened to increase New York City property taxes — the only tax the City can increase without State approval — by 9.5% unless the State authorized the alternative taxes he proposed and substantially increased State funding to the City. 

In the end, both the Governor and the Mayor got what they needed. The governor was able to find enough other resources for New York City through a combination of additional State aid and State authorization of City actions to bail out the City without increased personal income taxes or increased corporate taxes. The mayor got Albany’s support for $7.5 billion of additional resources between increased aid, relief of unfunded mandates and authorization of pension “smoothing,” plus a new pied-à-terre tax supposedly worth $500 million, which enabled the mayor’s frame of his budget solution in the context of “taxing the rich.”

Although not the largest contributor to deficit reduction, the signature initiative of New York City’s FY 27 Budget is certainly that new tax on luxury second homes. Such a tax was not a radical idea. It had been seriously considered in 2019, with even Gov. Cuomo reported as being open to the idea if it advanced through the legislature. 

Several obstacles have stood in the way since. First, it is difficult to operationalize given the complexity of New York City’s real estate tax law. Second, previous studies suggested it would not raise that much revenue. A [study](https://ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/new-options-december-2020.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by New York City’s Independent Budget Office in 2020 concluded a tax on second homes with a value above $5 million would only raise approximately $232 million a year. Third, and decisively, it was bitterly opposed by New York’s real estate industry, which argued it would sufficiently impair market value and wind up rendering many new luxury projects uneconomic.

Although the pied-à-terre tax could have been sold to the public as a relatively modest proposal that addresses the inequity of wealthy part-time residents avoiding the high State and City income taxes borne by full-time residents, Mamdani had the opposite goal in mind. He wanted to present the pied-à-terre tax as fulfilling his promise to “tax the rich.” He boasted about the tax in a social media video that was uncharacteristically off-key, “naming and shaming” the billionaire Ken Griffin as being a representative target of the tax. 

The video unleashed a ferocious backlash from New York City’s business and media elite, reinforcing many of the negative perceptions of the mayor that he had been working to reverse.

As for the pied-à-terre tax itself, as of this writing, the provisions of the law remain unclear, reflecting the difficulty of translating a simple concept into programmatic language. The New York City Comptroller, Mark Levine, said his office [estimated](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nyc-comptroller-mark-levine-releases-comprehensive-estimation-of-a-potential-pied-a-terre-tax-and-key-uncertainties/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that the tax would quite possibly raise only about $340 million to $380 million because of tax-avoidance efforts by owners of second homes. 

In short, the pied-à-terre tax is not a bad idea, but the amount of revenue it can produce is paltry within a $125 billion budget, and it comes with intangible baggage in the form of loss of business confidence.

> Budget watchdogs view stretching out pension obligations as the road to perdition, and this deferral may rattle the bond rating agencies that have already reduced the outlook on New York City’s debt from Stable to Negative. 

So where did the money come from? The largest single gap-closing measure in the New York City budget involves deferral of pension contributions. Instead of amortizing the unfunded liability in New York City pension plans by 2032 as required under current law, that obligation will be stretched out to 2037\. This will save New York City $652 million in FY26 and $1.64 billion in FY27\. 

Budget watchdogs view stretching out pension obligations as the road to perdition, and this deferral may rattle the bond rating agencies that have already reduced the outlook on New York City’s debt from Stable to Negative. Moreover, this deferral of contributions is subject to the approval of the City’s five pension plans, which at a minimum gives the public employee unions considerable leverage in upcoming contract negotiations. That said, with the governor ruling out significant new taxes and the mayor ruling out meaningful program cuts, this act of financial engineering, at least in hindsight, looks inevitable.

In addition to calling for significantly increased taxes on the rich, the mayor based his strategy for closing the City’s budget gap on the argument that decisions by Gov. Andrew Cuomo during his time in office from 2011-2021 had shifted funding away from New York City and created a “structural imbalance” between the City and the State. This argument always ignored the fact that the State had assumed far more spending than the City historically had been responsible for — about [$1.5 billion annually](https://nypost.com/2026/05/12/us-news/nyc-dumping-record-43b-into-public-schools-at-whopping-44k-per-pupil-despite-plummeting-enrollment-poor-test-results/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) just from freezing the City’s Medicaid contribution. It similarly ignored actions Mamdani had supported in the state Assembly, such as the unfunded mandate for smaller class sizes. 

In any event, the reversal of fortune between the City and the State in recent years was attributable to the fact that New York State significantly increased income taxes on high earners in 2021, while the City did not. This action, combined with the exceptionally strong stock market over the last three years, has left the State with an embarrassment of riches in fiscal terms, while the City now faces a deep structural deficit.

The State could have used a number of mechanisms to drive funding to New York City, at least some of which would have been justified in light of the change in the City’s financial position relative to that of the State. As it happens, the State chose to direct approximately $1 billion of funding in the Executive Budget that could be construed as budget relief, mostly in the form of increased child care spending, $1.5 billion over two years (of which $500 million was non-recurring) in additional assistance in the 30-day amendments to the Executive Budget and approximately $352 million of direct assistance in the package announced on May 12, 2026\. 

Other than the pension smoothing and the pied-à-terre tax, the City’s gap-closing actions fall primarily into two buckets. First, the City is saving approximately $1 billion by delaying the implementation of two major program expenses — the small class-size initiative and the expansion of the CityFHEPS rental subsidy program. In addition, the City assumes it will save approximately $149 million by stemming [the tide of the growth in special education due-process cases, which now cost the City approximately $1.4 billion annually](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/exec26/erc5-26.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This has long been a policy goal of City Hall, but has proven very difficult to implement in the real world.

What is second nature to fiscal experts but not always intuitive to the general public is that “savings” typically involve reductions in baseline growth rather than the actual elimination of spending. About $300 million of the bucket of savings in this case comes from budgeting increased staff vacancies, while much of the rest comes from the familiar goal of increasing “efficiency” in government operations and programs. No doubt that in a $125 billion budget, efficiencies can be achieved. With the potential of AI, in particular, the extent to which efficiencies can be realized is as much a matter of political choice as it is technical capability.

### Conclusion

The way in which Mayor Mamdani has managed his first budget is fairly conventional. Blaming one’s predecessors for fiscal problems is par for the course. Faced with the dilemma of choosing between unpopular spending cuts and unpopular broad-based taxes, financial engineering such as deferring pension contributions is a budget director’s best friend. The mayor was fortunate that New York State is in its strongest fiscal position in 50 years — and can afford to rebalance spending obligations with New York City. Finally, the mood of the times makes taxing the rich in the form of a pied-à-terre tax acceptable even to a moderate governor.

What is less typical is the chasm between the expectations Mamdani created for his administration and the amount that can actually be accomplished not just now, but for the foreseeable future. Something major will have to give — such as a willingness for the State to enact significant increases in personal income taxes on high earners and corporate taxes — or not even someone with Mamdani’s exceptional political skills can square this circle.
### Mamdani’s Supermarket Mistake
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-city-run-grocery-stores-small-businesses-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:07:36.000Z
My first job ever was working at my father’s Met Foods grocery store in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Like most of his employees, I did whatever was needed, from stocking shelves to checking out customers. I learned a lot about how small businesses survive by understanding their community's particular needs and dedicating themselves to meeting them. Perhaps more importantly, the exposure at such an impressionable young age to co-workers of vastly different economic, ethnic and social groups made me appreciate that no matter how hard people may work, the circumstances of where they come from have a huge impact on where they wind up. It also gives me a special perspective on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plans to create a small network of government-run supermarkets, which clash with so much else he purports to believe in.

_This post is for subscribers only._
### Alex Bores on Housing, AI Regulation, and His Campaign for Congress in New York's 12th District
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/alex-bores-on-housing-ai-regulation/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:15.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/alex-bores-on-housing-ai-regulation) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on May 13, 2026 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

The New York Editorial Board spoke with Assembly Member Alex Bores, who represents parts of Manhattan’s East Side, about his campaign in the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District (parts of Manhattan’s East and West Sides and Roosevelt Island) on the morning of May 7, 2026\. Bores is among the candidates running to succeed retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler. The primary election will take place in June. *(photo by Juan Manuel Benítez)*

*Participating journalists: Juan Manuel Benítez, Nicole Gelinas, Ben Max, Ben Smith, Liena Žagare.*

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Smith**  
I’ll just kick this off as I often do by saying thank you for coming. It’s a moment when I think an increasing number of politicians left and right feel like they don’t need to talk to journalists anymore. Actually, I should note that this is the only race this cycle in which one of the candidates…seems uninterested in coming. Jack Schlossberg didn’t respond to our inquiries. He’s running a different campaign, but still, it’s disappointing. I appreciate you, and Micah Lasher is going to be by soon, participating in this.

**Alex Bores**  
Appreciate all of you taking the time to dig into all these races, so thank you.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Good morning.

**Alex Bores**  
Morning.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Do you think that Congressman Nadler has done a good job? If so, what would be the problem for voters in electing the person who Congressman Nadler has endorsed \[Lasher\]?

**Alex Bores**  
I think Congressman Nadler has done a fantastic job and had a distinguished 34 years of service. This race is not about what has happened over the past 34 years, but what’s coming in the next set of years. When he was first elected, he was part of the “West Side kids” that were bringing new, fresh ideas into elected office. Now, 50 years later from his first election, 52, it’s another time when people are asking about what are the fresh new ideas that are facing the challenges of the day.

**Ben Max**  
Digging into the district a little, how would you describe the different politics on the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side, and say a little bit about the different political constituencies in this district and how you’re thinking about their needs in a new congressperson?

**Alex Bores**  
For decades, every elected official would go before the redistricting committee and say why the East Side and West Side were so different and could never be combined into one district, and then obviously they were in 2022\. Honestly, Congressman Nadler’s funniest moment I’ve seen was right after he won that primary in 2022.

He came to an East Side Democratic club and was waxing poetic about all kinds of policy things and giving really detailed answers. Someone asked a puff question, which was, “Oh, now you’re representing the East Side for the first time. Are the East Side and West Side different? How are they different,” and he just goes, “Not at all.”

Obviously, like any district has its own pieces, this district is the densest in the country. It’s the smallest geographic district in the country, and yet it feels so large because there’s so much pride of place in the individual neighborhoods. Even within the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side, you’ll have divisions that are there. I think this is less a race about geography and more a race about records, results, and about vision for the future.

**Ben Max**  
You are certainly counting on a path to victory that includes performing very strongly on the East Side.

**Alex Bores**  
I plan to perform very strongly everywhere.

**Ben Max**  
Do you have a different answer than Nadler mostly jokingly saying there’s no differences?

**Alex Bores**  
No, certainly there are differences.

**Ben Max**  
The voting patterns are different.

**Alex Bores**  
There are. Murray Hill is different than Turtle Bay is different than Yorkville is different than Carnegie Hill. Around Lincoln Center on the West Side’s different than higher up. There’s lots of micro-neighborhoods that are very different. I think the dividing line is less east and west and actually much more mixed in the district.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Now that since we’re talking about the district, it also happens to be the most Jewish district in the country. Nadler, he occupied it very much as that and had a particular standing in Washington as a result of that. I want to get a sense from you of how you approach that. You would be leading the most Jewish district in the country. How do you wear that? How do you own that in this particular moment?

**Alex Bores**  
I currently represent one of the most Jewish Assembly districts in the state. I’ve been very involved in the Jewish community, like I have every community in my district. I do think that nationwide, New York is, in a good way, an outlier in terms of its diversity of communities, including having the largest Jewish population. I would continue to engage with that community as I have in the Assembly. Just like we were talking about how there’s differences in geography, there’s differences within that community and their political views as well.

**Alyssa Katz**  
There certainly are. Let’s dig into them a little bit.

**Alex Bores**  
Sure.

**Alyssa Katz**  
I think among the most significant — clearly, Nadler was I think, especially over time, had staked out a position a little bit to the left of center on Israel. Now you have a situation where, as I’m sure you’re aware, a significant number of Democrats have been endorsing measures to defund U.S. aid to Israel. There’s the Block the Bombs Act and other measures that already have Democratic majority support. Where do you stand on those, on that particular measure and on generally— I’ll break it down into a couple of things: one is just U.S. aid to Israel: Ban it entirely? Is it Block the Bombs? Is it in support of funding for the Iron Dome? Let’s talk about that first.

**Alex Bores**  
Broadly or do you want—

**Alyssa Katz**  
I’m giving you a bunch of items that you can respond to or not.

**Alex Bores**  
I’ll respond broadly but poke and prod on any. Aid to Israel is and should be subject to the conditions that aid to any other country is subject to, which is Leahy Law vetting. There are flaws in that process that can and should be strengthened. On my website, I’ve talked about the Safeguard Act as one of them. I am usually very suspicious of bills that are specifically targeting one country.

I don’t think that has generally helped the process of peace or the process of human rights to legislatively or politically go country by country. We should be setting universal standards. I think in many ways that should be strengthened, and I’ve put proposals for that. If it’s within those laws of the U.S., then aid should continue.

**Ben Smith**  
Just to follow one thing you said.

**Alex Bores**  
Yes.

**Ben Smith**  
It sounds like New York and the U.S. have traditionally had a special relationship with Israel. You’d like, you’d like to see that end?

**Alex Bores**  
No, there’s a difference between a special relationship, a deep relationship that ties between countries and saying that laws are universal. We have allies and we have countries that are, enemies might be too strong, but not allies. We still have universal laws that apply.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Israel is an ally?

**Alex Bores**  
Yes, Israel is an ally.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
How do you feel about a real estate company coming to a nearby synagogue to sell property in the occupied West Bank?

**Alex Bores**  
I’m opposed to the settlements. The settlements are making it harder to have a two-state solution, which is ultimately the only way we’ll have an enduring peace in the region, as dim as it looks right now. Israel has massively ramped up the approval of settlements. I think they’ve done more approved settlements in the West Bank this year or last year, 2025, than in the 20 years prior to that, and that makes it incredibly difficult to think about what a future Palestinian state could look like. No, I don’t support the settlements at all. I think it’s harming everyone in the region.

**Ben Max**  
But you’re not out there, people aren’t out there right now who say you’ve got to subject aid to Leahy Law vetting and strengthen it, and watching what you’re saying you disapprove of Israel’s actions in the West Bank or elsewhere — but people aren’t out there saying, or correct me if I’m wrong, you’re not out there saying \[the U.S.\] should be using leverage now to change that behavior, or are you?

**Alex Bores**  
Well, I guess it depends what you mean by the term leverage there—

**Ben Max**  
On aid.

**Alex Bores**  
—but there’s many ways that we engage in foreign policy, in soft diplomacy and hard diplomacy, and I think we have an alliance with Israel that should continue, and even with allies, the same way within families, you can have tough conversations. Yes, the policy of the United States, forever, and insofar as we still have one, has been against the settlements in the West Bank. That should continue, that should be part of the conversation. If you want to talk about specific kinds of leverage, we can do that.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Actually, I do want to ask about that, just to bring it full circle, which is Leahy Law — Congress does not control it, it’s actually a very technical thing that the State Department can do and has never used against Israel, and probably never will, I suspect. You would be in Congress, what would you be doing in Congress, if you’re concerned about the settlements, that falls in your court?

**Alex Bores**  
It’s two separate pieces because Leahy Law is about abuses of human rights, and it’s different than the settlements. I think we should strengthen the Leahy Laws. That’s what I would do in Congress. I do think that the standards of who we’re supplying aid to should be done by career people and separated from politics. It should be technical experts that are really digging into it. We should improve those standards, improve the reporting, improve the transparency, all of those. On the settlements piece, again, I think a lot of that you’re talking about executive power and negotiations. Settler violence, I would support Jerry Nadler’s bill, that would codify Biden’s sanctions on the violent settlers in the West Bank. I think it was a mistake for Trump to rescind those, and I think it’s made it harder to reign them in.

**Liena Žagare**  
Speaking of allies, enemies, and wars, do you think that government should invest more heavily in the Department of War? If so, what level of investment would be appropriate and why?

**Alex Bores**  
Should the federal government invest more in the Department of War? Basically, Trump’s exceedingly high budget—

**Liena Žagare**  
The Department of Defense.

**Alex Bores**  
I shudder at the “Department of War” and try to use the old terminology. I think this is the first time a budget’s proposed over a trillion dollars in one year for the Department of Defense, a department that has never really passed a full audit. Individual branches, I think one has passed. The excessive spending on our military is not making us safer. General Mattis was the one who said, “If you don’t fund the State Department, you’re going to have to buy me more bullets.” The defunding of our soft power, of the experts in the State Department, makes us significantly less safe in a way that throwing more money at the military, I don’t think makes us safer.

We should be providing for our troops, we should be providing for our common defense, but I don’t see a need to have this massive increase that the Trump administration has put forward on the Department of Defense.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Tell us one thing that you would be fighting for in Washington that you align with Mayor Mamdani, something that you guys share, and something that you would tell him that he’s wrong about.

**Alex Bores**  
Specifically federally?

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Federally.

**Alex Bores**  
I will fight to get childcare and childcare funds from the federal government. I will fight to build in Sunnyside Yards. I think getting more money for housing in New York is very important. I’ll fight for the funding for the Gateway Tunnel, 2nd Avenue Subway...I have been pleased with his overall focus on city issues and on delivery of services, and so that’s why I asked that, federally, because I think there’s been a difference there. He’s mostly stayed out of federal issues. I’m trying to think of explicit federal issues that he has been pushing on.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
How about locally?

**Alex Bores**  
The thing that was coming to mind was he said that the city should review its relationship with Cornell Tech because it has a partnership with Technion. That’s like injecting a federal issue into a city, or an international issue and, I think that’s wrong. I think Cornell Tech is a wonderful institution, and I said as such publicly.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
I know that you’re talking about housing. What’s your policy in housing? When you go to Congress, also should we build more affordable housing on the Upper East Side, Upper West Side? What is your plan?

**Alex Bores**  
Yes. Yes.We should build a lot more housing. I say that as someone running to represent the densest district in the country, so we’re doing our part and still. You need all kinds of housing: market, affordable, and public housing. There’s a lot that can be done. That includes adjusting the AMI \[Area Median Income\] calculation so that it actually reflects the cost of living. Obviously, New York, it \[AMI\] includes the region of Westchester and beyond that, because our rents are so high, it actually opts into a different calculation from HUD that is based on rents itself and not income. That needs to be adjusted so it’s actually affordable levels. The federal government gives private activity bonds to every state to encourage investments in affordable housing or other means. They are exempt from federal taxation, so you have a lower cost of capital that allows us to build.

New York uses our allocation of bonds every year. California uses their allocation of bonds every year. Lots of states don’t. This is already allocated money from the federal government. We should be able to use their unused cap. This is more for market\[-rate\], but for everything, the same way that the state will often encourage municipalities to liberalize zoning by funding infrastructure, by having grant matching programs, the federal government should be doing that to the states.

When it comes to public housing, we should be repealing the Faircloth Amendment. We should be fighting for as many dollars as we can to make direct repairs to NYCHA, which has $78 billion capital deferred maintenance budget. We should also be allowing well-capitalized public housing authorities to issue federally backed bonds so they can do it at a much lower rate, so that they can actually do more of the repairs themselves. I’ve probably gone on too long for this answer, but a lot more.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
One of your opponents, Jack Schlossberg, is against the Chelsea Elliott \[NYCHA\] [tear-down and rebuild](https://www.fultonelliottchelsea.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). That part of the City Council district voted heavily in the election a couple weeks ago for the candidate who’s aligned with Schlossberg on that.

**Alex Bores**  
Yes.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
What’s your position on the \[[Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea](https://www.fultonelliottchelsea.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)\] project?

**Alex Bores**  
I think projects like that can be a great thing. They have to be approved by the residents, and I have concerns about the vote that was held among the residents. If the residents unambiguously support it, then absolutely, I think that’s a great thing to go forward.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
More broadly, you said a couple times that your district is the densest in the country.

**Alex Bores**  
I just want to make sure that we in the transcript note: population density.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
My part of your district has increased its housing by 54% since the year 2000\. Can a city densify itself into affordability? If so, what would be an example of a global city that has densified itself into affordability, in contrast to places that just build out sprawl, build cheap housing, and call it housing investment?

**Alex Bores**  
Dallas, for example, has built out a lot of housing even as its population has grown an incredible amount. When you put in sprawl, like obviously Dallas has spread out and has an example of land. But study after study shows that if you are building more housing, if you are building more supply, that lowers the pressure on housing costs and on rent. When you artificially constrain that supply, that accelerates the increases in rent. We shouldn’t overpromise and say you can build enough that rents will go down, although there are isolated incidents where that has occurred.

The issue is how much and how quickly are those rents going up, and are they vastly exceeding the way wages are going up, as they have for decades, or are they actually in a realm that is manageable for people, where you can put down roots and grow your family and not be worried about being priced out.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Do those rules apply in your district? You’re in a district where many people, certainly not most, have multiple homes, where New York is a place that is one of many that they have a foothold in, but they want to maintain a domicile in New York for all the reasons we all live here. Your district, is it exceptional, and how do you address the affordability issue given the kind of nature of global capital?

**Alex Bores**  
I support the pied-à-terre tax \[moving in Albany\]. I’ve also proposed my own version of it years ago, that is there, that would put a tax on vacant apartments and use all of the money that is raised by that tax to lower other people’s property taxes, which actually helps future projects net out and helps reduce the pressure on rents. We’re not going to solve the housing crisis just in New York 12, but New York 12 will continue to do our part, as this is a city, state, and countrywide conversation.

**Ben Smith**  
Did Mamdani make a mistake by attacking Ken Griffin personally in his presentation of the pied-à-terre tax?

**Alex Bores**  
I actually haven’t seen the specific quote on Ken Griffin.

**Ben Smith**  
He shot a social media video outside his home. Griffin is now saying he’ll basically slow down Citadel’s construction and building of jobs here. More broadly, there’s a tonal attack on like-named specific rich guys.

**Alex Bores**  
I think generally we should not engage in tonal attacks. Maybe I should spend more time on social media, but I haven’t seen the specific presentation there. I think it should be about the policy.

**Ben Max**  
Just on NYCHA, you said you have concerns about the \[Fulton and Chelsea-Elliott\] vote? Can you explain what your concerns about the vote are?

**Alex Bores**  
Yes. The vote was conducted a while ago now, after the developers had spent a lot of time organizing, finding their supporters, taking people out to presentations, et cetera. It had 57% in favor, 43% against, and I think 26% turnout. Now granted, that might be higher than this \[NY-12\] election itself, but it’s not something I would tout as when it comes to, like, people’s apartments. When I talk to people involved in the project, I say, “Are you confident you still have support? If there were a snap election today, would you support that and win it?” It’s like, “No, no, no, we could never do that.”

You see the results of the City Council \[District 3 special election\], where it seems like support inside is changing. If both sides have equal representation and both people get to make their pitch, and there are organizers on both sides, and that’s a fair vote, then great, it should go forward.

**Ben Max**  
I think there was a lot of attention on that and opposition leading up to the vote, too, no?

**Alex Bores**  
I don’t think there was the same on either side, and I think the reactions since that I’ve heard suggest that people don’t feel like there is support there.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
These are a really good example on housing development and fixing NYCHA. We can keep going on and on and on about technicalities and vote, but then nothing’s happening.

**Alex Bores**  
I don’t think votes are technicalities.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
No, but what is the alternative to the proposal right now in place? What do you offer?

**Alex Bores**  
The proposal itself seems to be a good one. When you are talking about tearing down people’s homes, they get a vote on that. This is not about the neighbors getting votes, this is the people whose homes are getting torn down get to vote, and I just want to ensure that they are in support. If they are, then it’s a great project to go forward.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
If they’re not?

**Alex Bores**  
If they aren’t, it’s their homes.

**Alyssa Katz**  
And I think the point is that their homes are falling apart. And to be clear, too. Absolutely. I think there’s one concern is that if you can’t do it there, where it’s high-value real estate, where they’re going to be providing each of those tenants and their homes back on that property once the project is built, and I believe they’re actually going to be able to move in, we’ll have to fact-check this, but right away. They will not have a disruption under the plan. If you cannot do it there, where you have that land value to unlock in Chelsea, where can you do that? You’ve talked about this as a model. It’s hard to see how that would be viable in a lot of places where land values are lower.

**Alex Bores**  
The plan itself, the policy of it seems solid to me. I think that the tenants get a vote in that. If they were to vote it down, you look at the alternatives. I don’t want to say there’s definitely a thing that is better. I’m not advocating for a different plan, I think the plan from my eyes looks good.

**Ben Smith**  
Isn’t this the point? I know you’re an Ezra Klein fan and listener. They were just talking about this, but it just seems like housing people who talk about wanting more housing than in every specific case, I think I find some complicated reason why, “Well, this one is different. This vote, they did have a vote, but maybe it wasn’t the right vote.” Sounds like that’s what you’re doing.

**Alex Bores**  
No, I think the big difference here is we’re talking about the people themselves directly impacted. Often, what it is, is neighbors that are next door that don’t want construction voting to limit what you can do on your own property.

**Ben Smith**  
Aren’t those also the people who live in rentals that would be replaced by larger rentals? Do you think broadly people who live in single-family, small rental units should be able to block larger buildings being built in those spaces?

**Alex Bores**  
I think what we’re talking about here is public housing, is a promise that the government has made to people who are economically in the toughest situations that have the least political power, generally, that have the least economic power, generally. You probably want to be careful, given our history of railroading the concerns of people from both of these communities, to ensure that their concerns are heard. I think that is when you’re talking about public housing and government actions, having the people directly impacted living in those homes have a fair say, feels to me like an OK principle.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Speaking of teardowns, another project in your district, you mentioned Gateway Tunnel. There is concern with the current configuration of the tunnel that it would require the mass scale teardown of a thriving mixed-use and very dense block of apartment buildings, small businesses, large buildings, retail called Block 780\. Would you support or oppose the teardown of Block 780 to do the Penn South project?

**Alex Bores**  
To do as part of the Gateway Tunnel?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
As you know, it’s complicated, but unless they reconfigure the tunnel, you’re going to be building a dead-end tunnel, unless— you’ve had elected officials say they’re against tearing down Block 780\. Unless they do something now, that is the result they’re going to get.

**Alex Bores**  
I haven’t dug into the specific block, so I’m happy to get back to you on that. I would say that generally, yes, when you are having infrastructure projects, when you’re having any new construction, that does involve changes. I think that is something that the city, the state and the federal government have to deal with and enable. I don’t know the specific project. I think there are times when there are calls for specific protection, like in public housing, but happy to get back to you on 780.

**Liena Žagare**  
Going back very quickly to objections and teardowns. There is eminent domain in order to facilitate…construction, can that apply to the situation in NYCHA? Because a handful of tenants could hold up a massive project that would be in the interest of the bigger city?

**Alex Bores**  
There’s two parts to that question.

**Liena Žagare**  
Ideologically I think similar.

**Alex Bores**  
Eminent domain is a power of the government that sometimes should be used. I don’t think it’s the first tool that the federal government should reach for, or a state should reach for. Again, this is what I’m calling for with NYCHA is a clean majority vote, not everyone expressing their consensus.

**Ben Max**  
But a different one than the one that already occurred.

**Alex Bores**  
I don’t think that was a clean vote.

**Ben Max**  
Maybe this is easy for you to say since a lot of money’s being spent against you in this race, but if the money’s not equally spent in this race and you don’t win, are you going to say it’s an illegitimate—?

**Alex Bores**  
It’s different.To say that I have concerns that I’m hearing from the tenants, that all of the data on current election results, all of the conversations I’ve had where people are afraid to even have a snap election, all of the conversations about how there was so much more organizing on one side than the other, and 26% turnout — I have questions. That is what I’m saying. I think generally these sorts of developments can go forward. I think they should be put to a vote, and it feels like in this one, what I have heard in talking to the tenants is a lot of concern that they don’t feel like that happened.

**Alyssa Katz**  
I saw in Politico this morning that you got the endorsement of Our Revolution, the Bernie Sanders-linked PAC. I’m wondering what voters should make of that. Does that mean you sign on to everything that Our Revolution stands for? What is that about, and then why are you—

**Alex Bores**  
I treat them like I treat every group that I pursue an endorsement, just like I treat every voter. I tell them what I agree with and what I disagree with, and they make their own decision. I’m very proud to have their support. I think you’ve seen Bernie really take the lead in communicating around AI risks and what that means for disempowering workers. I’ll leave to them to say exactly why they endorsed, but I think that \[AI regulation\] was a big piece of it. Happy to have them as part of the coalition. I have a broad coalition that doesn’t agree with themselves on everything, and I don’t agree with everyone who endorses on everything.

**Ben Smith**  
I think we’ve held off the AI conversation long enough.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
The mayor, when was the last time you spoke to the mayor, and have you spoken to him about getting an endorsement by him?

**Alex Bores**  
No, I haven’t talked to him about an endorsement. I spoke to him briefly at the NAN event. That might’ve been the last time. I’m forgetting if I bumped into him at another event. I spoke to him at the 32BJ rally at Park Avenue. That’s where I spoke to him last. I welcome his endorsement, just like I welcome the endorsement of any voter in the district.

**Ben Smith**  
That’s a little lukewarm.

**Alex Bores**  
Given the opportunity to ask and, yes, I would love to have his endorsement, but I don’t expect that he will get involved in this race. Regardless of whether he does or doesn’t, I look forward to working with him as a partner in Congress, and working together where we agree, and when we disagree, settling that as colleagues the same way we did in the Assembly.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So,AI, both politics and policy — every day I get multiple text messages, and most days a flyer in the mail telling me what a terrible person you are, I would say—

**Alex Bores**  
The fun thing is I’m a voter in the district. I get them too.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Oh, yes. If someone’s not paying attention to the race, this is the only thing they’ve heard so far in this race. Can you talk about the motives of this extremely negative anti-campaign? Do you think that any of your opponents support this negative campaigning against you?

**Alex Bores**  
\[laughs\] That’s a question for them. The motivations are three Trump mega-donors who— Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen, who in the last filing was the RNC’s largest mega-donor, and Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, who, in the last filing, was Donald Trump’s single largest mega-donor — who don’t want there to be any regulation of AI whatsoever. I know they say differently, but their actions belie what they say. They say they want a national framework; part of my platform is a national framework. If that’s what they truly believe, they’d be supporting me.

Instead, they just want there to be no regulation whatsoever, and they want to punish anyone who tries. They’ve given quotes about how they’re trying to make an example out of me, and the idea is not just to win this race, but to send a message to any member of Congress that if they dare actually try to get something done in AI that goes against these extreme interests, that that will be a career killer. Some of the spending is directly to defeat me, some of it is just to seemingly cause pain. They have made the stakes of this race, which were not the stakes when I declared, but they have made the stakes of this race, whether anyone can stand up and try to regulate AI at all.

**Ben Smith**  
You’ve also attracted, I think at this point, an enormous amount of spending on your behalf from profit, I think it’s the CEO of the crypto company Ripple. I think that now, at least, I read, it exceeds the spending against you. How should voters weigh that, and how should they feel about being involved in this proxy war and an issue that is not one of the top five, not right on top when you ask people, “What’s the top thing on your mind?” There’s two separate questions.

**Alex Bores**  
The Leading the Future \[PAC\] came out of the gate saying that they were pledging to spend at least $10 million against me, and they wanted to make clear that regulating AI at all was anathema and something that no one should do. I talk to members of the delegation all the time, and in quiet conversation, they say, “Hey, we’re watching this race.” We saw House leadership just a few weeks ago give a, reportedly, give advice to marginal members in red to blue to not talk about AI ‘cause you’re going to attract so much spending against you if you do that.

I think it’s important to remember that Leading the Future, though it has $140 million in its bankroll, is a small minority in terms of its political viewpoints of Americans writ large or even the tech community itself. Others have come in in response to try to support and equalize—

**Ben Smith**  
That’s obviously people associated with the other largest and most powerful AI company in the country, Anthropic, right?

**Alex Bores**  
Yes, I also have support from almost all of the companies in terms of the employees. There is an ideological set of AI billionaires that think there should be no regulation whatsoever. That is a view held by 10% of Americans. There’s been broad support for the view that we should have some say in the development of AI.

**Ben Smith**  
Just to move to the substance, there’s this semi-satirical measure called p-doom, the probability of the apocalypse. What is your p-doom?

**Alex Bores**  
It is high enough that it should be a real concern of the federal government. I think a lot of the debates on—

**Ben Smith**  
Like 5%, 10%?

**Alex Bores**  
I wouldn’t put a number on it, but I think a lot of the debates on it, is it 5%, is it 10%, is it 50%, is it 90%? If your chance of human extinction is measurable in percentage points, the federal government should be thinking about it and acting on it.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think it is in integers?

**Alex Bores**  
Yes. The median AI researcher, when polled, puts the risk of extinction at 10%.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think that’s reasonable?

**Alex Bores**  
I think so.

**Ben Smith**  
There’s that recent, Eliezer Yudkowsky book, *If Anybody Builds It, Everybody Dies*. Do you associate yourself with that? Is it basically your point of view on this?

**Alex Bores**  
No. I thought it was a very interesting book, and I read it with interest. I think I have some disagreements on the exact calculations there. I think what the vast majority of people agree on is that this technology is moving very quickly, comes with massive amounts of risk, and we need to have a government functioning and regulating it if we’re going to look for the benefit for everyone.

**Ben Smith**  
Can I ask one more on this, because I think the most pressing kind of municipal issue around AI, around autonomy, is Waymo and is driverless vehicles. I enjoyed you on the Ezra Klein podcast, but I was not totally satisfied with your answer on Waymo, which is you’d once been in one, it rained, and you didn’t like it because it stopped. I don’t know. If it was a sunny day, but it seems like politicians’ consumer preferences are a funny way to regulate.

**Alex Bores**  
I wasn’t expressing a consumer preference.

**Ben Smith**  
I am curious, it sounds like you would like to block it here. There are other cities full of insane people and hills, like San Francisco, where it seems to be quite a popular service that consumers like. I’m curious, I just did feel like I didn’t understand why you would say to consumers, “Here’s a thing you might like. I don’t personally like it.” And I feel like, what’s the logic for blocking it?

**Alex Bores**  
No. What I said is that my experience with it and what I have seen shows it’s not ready for the urban environment of New York right now, in that my one-time riding a Waymo was a little bit of rain in L.A. Every Waymo in the city shut down, pulled over to the side of the road. Thankfully, there was parking on the side of the road, which is another thing that isn’t here. We were all stuck for 10, 12 minutes while the remote drivers came in and got everyone out. If that happens in New York City, if you have mass deployment of Waymos and when it rains, they all shut down in the middle of the street, that’s going to have impacts on everyone else.

**Ben Smith**  
I’m sorry that happened to you, but this is a technology that is in wide use in several cities and has been for years.

**Alex Bores**  
Where there’s very little rain, and there’s a lot of parking. Listen, I think it should continue to test. I’m not against that. I think it is coming. I think it doesn’t seem ready yet, but it is coming, and we should continue to test it, and it will be here. I’m not saying there will never be autonomous vehicles. They will come, and I think it will come with many benefits when it does. We see it coming down the pike. Let’s start preparing now in terms of job displacement, in terms of traffic regulation, and all of that. You’re asking me right now if I have confidence that if they were mass-deployed, they’d be a good thing? Absolutely not.

**Ben Smith**  
What do you think about the job displacement, traffic regulation stuff? How would you structure that?

**Alex Bores**  
How would I structure…?

**Ben Smith**  
New York’s the most important market in the world for any car-sharing service. What regulations would you suggest?

**Alex Bores**  
I’m struggling with like—

**Ben Max**  
On driver displacements, what else…How would you want to regulate driverless cars?

**Alex Bores**  
I don’t think any place has nailed this yet. I think this is still policy that we’re developing. I saw Brad Lander’s proposal about a high license fee. Maybe there’s something there. There are proposals I’ve talked about elsewhere of where you still require a medallion for a generation in the transition, so it’s not an immediate wipeout for people that have invested life savings there. We’ve really struggled with what global trade did to some of our cities, de-industrialization, job replacement, job training didn’t solve that. We missed it there. I don’t think there’s a magic easy bullet here. I think this is a tough question where you’re going to need a lot of action at city and state levels, trying different things and seeing what works. Anyone that promises you that we have that figured out is lying to you. That’s why I’m saying it’s not ready yet. We know it’s coming. Now is the time to be having these conversations and preparing.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Very quickly, because we were talking about how AI is going so fast, the progress and all that. When it comes to regulations, you get into Congress May 2027, a year from now, if you’re not elected to Congress, what does it look like?

**Alex Bores**  
\[laughs\]

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
If somebody like you is not elected to Congress…

**Alex Bores**  
Yes.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
No, that’s it. You’re trying to instill this fear; we need to regulate and regulate.

**Alex Bores**  
To be clear, I’m not trying to instill fear. I use AI all the time. I see lots of benefits that can come from AI. My mom has multiple sclerosis. She’s doing great, but autoimmune diseases are some of the toughest for modern medicine to deal with. I’m really excited about what AI could unlock there. I am not trying to instill fear or roll it back. I think there’s three sides in this debate, and I’ll get specifically to what it looks like in a year.

I think there’s three sides in this debate, which is 10% of Americans that want to pretend AI doesn’t exist and put the genie back in the bottle. I empathize with the fear, but I don’t think that’s the way forward. 10% represented by Leading the Future that just want to let it rip and don’t care how many people it hurts, they just care how fast it moves. 80% of Americans, that I count myself in, that see some benefits, see some risks, see some harms, and just think we should have a say in that. The battle lines in this race right now are, do we get that say at all? There’s lots of tough coalitional questions to come on exactly which we prioritize and when. It’s why I was so focused on putting out my AI framework with 43 specific points, and then following that up with an AI dividend plan.

I want to dive into those details. Fundamentally, the question right now is, do we get a say or not? When you say, “What does it look like in May of 2027 \[if I’m not elected\]?” I actually think, again, there’s the impact that I will have myself in Congress as the second Democrat ever elected to Congress with a degree in computer science, as someone that has experience standing up to them and fighting and legislating, and being able to have those member-to-member conversations.

That will be one impact. Perhaps the larger impact \[if I lose\] will be every other member of Congress looking at this race and saying, “Oh, shoot, if I actually try to regulate AI, that will end my career, and so I’ll go on podcasts and say nice things, and I’ll put out press releases, but I won’t do the hard work of passing a bill because that’s what got Alex targeted, and that’s what, what ended things here.” I think May 2027 is \[potentially\] a world where AI is continuing to be controlled by five billionaires, insofar as they still have control, which is a whole other question. The American people don’t get to direct the evolution, the direction of this technology.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Do you have any paid membership for any of these models?

**Alex Bores**  
Yes.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
OpenAI?

**Alex Bores**  
I used to use OpenAI, but then, when Chris Lehane got hired and his master of the dark arts, I figured everything I was typing in was going straight into his inbox. I canceled ChatGPT, and I pay for Claude, and through our Google Drive stuff, we pay for Gemini as well.

**Ben Smith**  
Oh, the unedited version.

**Liena Žagare**  
What level of government should be regulating AI? State, federal?

**Alex Bores**  
Yes. To be clear, most of it should be done at the federal level. I think having one national framework on most of these questions is what makes sense. Obviously, there are some things that are restricted to the states. States have the right to regulate their own elections. I’ve passed two bills about the use of AI to create political ads. That will probably still be a lot of state action. Why municipalities use AI internally, how they use it internally, will be decided by municipalities, et cetera. Also, in any technology that’s as fast-moving as AI, states and cities tend to be able to move much quicker.

They are the laboratories of democracy, as is said. You have 50 of them. They pass far more bills than Congress. There’ll be a lot of experimentation at the city and state level, and the policies that don’t work should be rolled back, and the ones that do should become national. Ultimately, the best place overall is at the federal government, but there’ll be action at all of these levels.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Should states be able to pass regulation that is stronger than federal regulation?

**Alex Bores**  
In most cases. It depends on the specifics of it.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
What about the RAISE Act? What’s your one-sentence, like, success pitch on the RAISE Act? Is it good enough, and why is that?

**Alex Bores**  
It doesn’t go far enough.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
What good did it do, and what’s wrong?

**Alex Bores**  
It is the strongest AI safety law in the country, and I’m embarrassed by that fact on behalf of the country.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
In what way is it strong? If someone doesn’t know anything about AI and what’s the problem here and what’s the solution, like what did it do?

**Alex Bores**  
It took a number of steps beyond California’s SB53 to require more disclosure, more detailed disclosure, more detailed safety plans and steps and responsibilities on behalf of the frontier labs in how they test their own models, in what they have to disclose to government if and when things go wrong, and set up a whole new agency within New York to continue to gather data and study and suggest additional changes in the future to ensure that everyone is kept safe.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Do you think that’s a model for autonomous vehicles in the state and city as well, these reporting requirements, because right now all we have to go on is anecdotes in New York? There is no data reported.

**Alex Bores**  
I’m absolutely a data guy. That’s to my point, it should continue to be tested, and data gathered. In general, I always try to lead with how to measure a bill based on data and reporting that.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Do you think the governor was scared of the anti-AI regulation money and she watered down the RAISE Act?

**Alex Bores**  
That is a question for the governor. The red lines we got back from the executive did significantly water down the bill. We got to a place where the final version is the strongest in the country. It is weaker than the bill that we passed through the Legislature, and weaker still than versions that I proposed earlier. Still, it’s the strongest in the country.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Speaking of the governor…She’s announcing a budget deal right now—

**Alex Bores**  
As we speak.

**Alyssa Katz**  
—as we speak. One of the major concerns about AI is the energy usage of data centers, right?

**Alex Bores**  
Yes.

**Alyssa Katz**  
I believe also that this budget deal is expected to significantly roll back New York’s Climate Act, which set targets for greenhouse gas reduction. I know that you don’t, as an Assembly member, get to do a line-item vote on anything in the budget, you’re going to vote the whole budget up or down. I am wondering what you think of what has been reported about the changes to the climate law and what you might do about them in the Legislature.

**Alex Bores**  
I’m really upset about the changes that have been proposed. I think they’re moving us in the wrong direction. I think there was also very confusing pitching about it, where initially it was, “Oh, this will save New Yorkers $4,100,” and then later, “Oh no, actually it won’t.” I read this morning that we’re the first state, if this goes forward, to actually enact into law a rollback of a climate law, which is not a proud moment for the state. I think we need to be stepping into this fight, encouraging renewable energy, encouraging upgrades to the grid moving forward. To roll that back is the wrong direction.

**Alyssa Katz**  
To push back a little bit on that.

**Alex Bores**  
Please.

**Alyssa Katz**  
The point of the burden on individual households while the data centers are letting it rip, like, what do you do about the data centers so that the burden of addressing climate change doesn’t strictly fall on renters, owners—

**Alex Bores**  
This is one of the missed points of this whole conversation, which is — I’ll get specifically to data centers, but our grid is horribly outdated, and we have been trying to upgrade it for decades. We have lost tens of thousands of jobs in the state because we couldn’t provide enough power, mostly upstate with it, but I’ve talked to entrepreneurs in the city that have said that their biggest challenge is power. And the only solutions that have been put forward generally have been the state directly pays for it, which is taxpayer money, which is you and me, or the utilities put forward and then take a 10% CapEx on top of that, and utility payers pay, which again, you and me.

Here comes an industry with, for all intents and purposes, unlimited private capital that is really willing to pay for speed. I don’t think this can be done on just the state level, because you could play states off each other. I think at the federal level, we should be setting up a system where if these frontier labs agree to a very high percentage renewable energy, you probably can’t say 100%, but some very high percentage, they pay for all of their direct upgrades to the grid and the interconnect to the grid, and pay an additional premium on top of that. Anytime you’re hooking up new load to the system, you have to increase your base load and your margin and all of that. They’re paying additional money to upgrade the entire grid, then you get moved to the front of the permitting line, and you get moved to the front of the interconnection queue.

By doing that, we’re also pushing back your competitors’ data centers that are going there. You could set up these incentives where the only data centers that get built for the near-term, or if the incentives are raw enough, all of them are ones that are leaving the grid more powered, more reliable, and crucially, greener. It is a narrow path, but I do think to leave that opportunity on the table and not try to make that happen is a climate mistake.

**Liena Žagare**  
Is there a level of immigration that’s politically unsustainable in this country?

**Alex Bores**  
Is there a level of immigration that is politically unsustainable?

**Liena Žagare**  
Yes.

**Alex Bores**  
Call me naïve and an idealist, but I don’t think we should be primarily making our decisions on immigration based on what’s politically feasible. I realize that that comes in as part of any elected official’s calculation, but immigrants have made our city, state, and country great.

**Ben Smith**  
What’s the appropriate level of immigration then, like what percentage of America should be foreign-born in an ideal world?

**Alex Bores**  
Our country is made stronger by people wanting to come here. Our country is made stronger by having people reach for the American dream. Such a disproportionate share of our entrepreneurs are immigrants. Our population as a whole would be decreasing without immigration. I think in general, we make it far too hard to come to this country. I think we should be making it easier in lots of ways. I don’t know that I have a specific level in mind, but I think it’s far more than we have right now.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Do you think that Palantir is good for America or bad for America?

**Alex Bores**  
\[laughs\] Palantir leadership has thrown in their lots with what I call a fascist regime. I think the work that they are enabling now is bad for America.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
What was your goal in going to work there, and do you think you accomplished that goal?

**Alex Bores**  
I was 24\. I don’t know that I had a grand goal, but—

**Nicole Gelinas**  
I had goals when I took jobs at 24.

**Alex Bores**  
Fair. I don’t know that I had a grand, like, this is the goal, other than this was during the Obama administration. I’m a Democrat. I believe that government can and should be a force for good, but that also means we have the burden of proving it. Here was a company who was saying, and its leader was very forcibly saying that their goal was to help government actually work and accomplish goals on behalf of people.

I ended up working with the Department of Justice to go after the opioid epidemic and shut down pill-mills, to go after the big banks for their role in the Great Recession and recover $20 billion for taxpayers, to help the VA better staff their hospitals and provide veterans with care, to help the CDC better track epidemics. It was making government actually function and deliver on its promises.

**Ben Smith**  
As a member of a Democratic congressional majority, would you try to cut back on Palantir contracts with the federal government?

**Alex Bores**  
I think generally, who we contract with should be done universally. I wouldn’t go in targeting one company or another, but I do think that every person, company, entity that has been involved in the incredibly illegal things that we see ICE doing right now should be part—

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think Palantir specifically faces legal jeopardy?

**Alex Bores**  
I think there should be investigations into the illegality that is occurring, and that we should follow those investigations wherever they lead.

**Ben Max**  
Just to come back to some of your proposed regulations. I know we only have a few more minutes. You have a lot in your platform around data privacy, and I’m just curious if you could talk a little bit about that because I think a lot of Americans at this point are just like, “The ship has sailed. Everybody’s got my information on everything.” Not everybody thinks this way, but how do you think about that, and do you worry at all that a lot of regulation of data privacy could lead to higher user fees because companies are offering free tools and services because they get to use our data?

**Alex Bores**  
On the first part of the question, there’s a lot that is out there. There’s even more data that all these companies want on each of us. I’m glad we’re regulating data brokers in the state budget this year. I think that is a good thing going forward. I think that should be done federally. I think people’s data also changes over time. They know your address now, but you want protection on movement in the future. There are some things that don’t change that aren’t really out there, like your iris, and let’s protect that before that becomes out there and broad.

The need is still very much there and only increasing in the age of AI, because one of the things that AI is best at is de-anonymizing previously anonymized data. There’s a whole new challenge that is coming that we need to get ahead of as well. In general, there are 20 states that have privacy laws, I believe. None of them have had any of these services shut down and charge more. Obviously, Europe has a much stronger privacy law. There haven’t been huge shutdowns of services there. Could theoretically you design a privacy law that is so strong that there’s no way? Yes, but there is wide room to be protecting Americans’ privacy without leading to mass shutdowns of any of these platforms.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
What’s your housing situation? Do you rent, own?

**Alex Bores**  
I own my apartment. As we discussed on your podcast, I’m in a junior four. I plan to never leave it. It is just enough room for our one kid, and that is all we are having. We had a fun exchange on that.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
You’re young. You could be having a really high-paying job right now. With your degree and your experience and with all these AI that you’re very well versed on, why do you want to do this? Is this like an ego thing like it happens with a lot of politicians, that they just have this thing that they want to be an elected official? What is this about?

**Alex Bores**  
I love the work of government. I get paid to think about and act on how to make my city, state, and hopefully country better. What is better than that? I love the act of making a difference. I’ve passed 32 bills at the state level, which is about the same amount Congress as a whole passed in 2023, because I dive in and figure out how to get to a solution and actually get something across the finish line. There’s no better feeling than that. When Jerry announced his retirement, I did have every reason to just stay at the state level. I’m getting things done. I was ranked the most effective new legislator in New York City. We had just had our kid.

There were certain challenges that really can only be settled at the federal level. The threats to our democracy being a really big one, and the threats and opportunities from tech and AI. The criticism of the RAISE Act that I actually agree with is, “This shouldn’t be settled in Albany.” Here’s the opportunity at an incredibly fast-changing time to jump in and be able to really change an issue in a way that’s better for everyone, along with the threats to our democracy. I grew up proud of government work, proud of this country, and I look at my kid’s eyes, and it’s like, what are the stories I’m going to tell him about democracy? Given those threats, I knew I had to do this.

**Ben Max**  
Other than what you’ve said about your background in AI and regulation and all that — all that separate — is there something you would say is the biggest difference between putting yourself in Congress versus Micah Lasher? You’re both pretty into the weeds on a lot of policy, seemingly share a lot of the same politics. Any difference you’d point to other than your expertise in AI and related matters that you’ve talked about at length?

**Alex Bores**  
My effectiveness in office. Micah’s passed seven bills. I’ve passed 32\. I’ve passed 10 this year alone.

**Ben Max**  
Is more bills always good?

**Alex Bores**  
My bills are.

The fact that I have extensive private and public sector experience, whereas Micah’s largely been in the public sector, other than a lobbying stint. The fact that I think I’m the only one in the race broadly that’s had a top secret security clearance. I come in with a little more of the understanding of what happens there. And the fact that in a race where we’re all promising to fight Donald Trump, I am the only one that Donald Trump’s mega-donors are spending millions of dollars against. They are telling you who they’re afraid of. If you’re someone, like there are many in this district that think, “Oh, you guys are really close,” or broadly there’s a real binary choice in terms of what every other member of Congress will learn from this race in standing up to AI or not.

The last little bit I would say is when you’re one of 435 members, you need to know how to build coalitions both within your party and outside of it. Micah has a long institutional history in New York politics and has a lot of long endorsements to reflect that. The people that have seen both of us operate have overwhelmingly chosen me: 12 out of 14 Assembly members who have endorsed in this race have endorsed me.

Beyond that, I’ve proven very adept at working with the other party, which is not something you need to do at the state level, but is something you need to do in Congress, whether that’s my leadership of the bipartisan Future Caucus, whether that’s the fact that every single one of those 32 bills got at least one Republican vote, and that includes bills I didn’t expect to. I put forward gun bills that I didn’t expect to get those votes. I put forward a gender identity bill I didn’t expect to, but I always had the conversation with the other side. I always reached out to the ranking member, reached out to the minority floor leader, talked about what I was trying to do, what their feedback was. I’ve proven adept at working across the aisle, which again, you don’t need to do in Albany, you will need to do to be effective for this district.

**Ben Smith**  
Then, I guess, maybe a final question on a similar front, which is, do you think that Jack Schlossberg is qualified to be in Congress?

**Alex Bores**  
I’m here to talk about myself.

**Ben Smith**  
You’ve been so open on so many topics, including on Micah Lasher. I’m surprised that you would be so critical of Micah and—

**Alex Bores**  
I wasn’t critical. I was asked for differences. I think he’s a friend and an ally in many things.

**Ben Smith**  
Let’s changethe way that I framed that. How would you compare your qualifications to Jack Schlossberg’s?

**Alex Bores**  
I’ve had a job in the last two years.

**Ben Smith**  
OK. Well, thank you. This was great.

**Everyone**  
Thank you.

**Alex Bores**  
Thank you.
### New York’s Wooden Water Tanks: A Perfect Fusion of Form and Function
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-wooden-water-tanks-architecture-history/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:04.000Z
New York is a city of towers, and not just the skyscraper variety. Sitting atop many of the city’s buildings are towers of a different type — the modest but ingenious water tank. Capped with conical roofs, these instantly recognizable cylindrical features of the skyline have contributed to the city’s signature look for nearly a century and a half. It is estimated that more than 5,600 water tanks currently populate the cityscape. How didthese structures come into being, and why have they far surpassed their utilitarian value to become a symbol of the city? The answer tells us as much about the city’s character as it does about physics and economics. In a quintessentially New York mix, long-entrenched commerce, artistic imagination and stubborn practicality — an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude — have all contributed to this enduring urban phenomenon.

New York’s built environment has long been shaped by public health and safety concerns. It was, for example, not only the desire to humanely house the poor that led to the passage of the city’s first Tenement House Law (1867), which set minimum standards for residential buildings. One powerful perception repeatedly catalyzed reform — namely, the idea that slum dwellings lacking sanitary facilities, as well as adequate natural light and ventilation, served as incubators of infectious diseases. Similarly, the development of New York’s vast municipal water system, the envy of cities around the world, was rooted in public health issues. The lack of sanitary systems rendered privately operated wells, including those drawing water from a spring-fed pond in lower Manhattan known as the Collect Pond, extremely hazardous. 

In 1842, to address this issue, as well as the need to provide significant protection from fire, the damming of Westchester’s Croton River led to the creation of the Croton Aqueduct system. Like subsequently established municipal water systems in Boston and San Francisco, it relied on gravity. Though the Croton Reservoirs stood at an elevation of only about 60 feet, by the time water reached the city, the pressure created by the water’s weight was sufficient to push it up to the level of a building’s sixth story.

By the 1880s, however, the passenger elevator and steel-frame construction had allowed buildings to rise above 10 stories. At the same time, the demand for water skyrocketed as the result of both the city’s burgeoning population and the widespread adoption of indoor plumbing. Natural water pressure no longer sufficed. The rooftop water tank, along with the development of powerful electric pumps, offered a solution to the distribution problem posed by tall buildings. Water could be pumped up to a building’s roof and stored in a tank. When a building occupant turned on a faucet, gravity was on their side. Water depletion prompted a coordinating pump to trigger refilling, functioning much like a toilet.

As New York rapidly became a skyscraping city, its barrel-making industry was eager to fulfill the unprecedented demand for wooden tanks. (The city solidified this demand by legally mandating that all buildings over six stories be equipped with rooftop water tanks.) Barrel-maker William Dalton expanded his business, founded in 1866, to produce the new product, and in 1894, he sold his business to an employee, Harris Rosenwach, who established an eponymous water tank business. Four years earlier, in 1890, Isseks Brothers had become the first company expressly founded to manufacture water tanks, and by 1920, the two manufacturers had been joined by a third: American Pipe & Tank. The companies became the city’s principal producers of water tanks.

Tap and drag to explore. [Open full screen ↗](https://vitalcity-nyc.github.io/nyc-water-towers/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 

Today’s wooden water tanks are not merely vestiges of the Industrial Age. They continue to be built and installed. In the New York City area, the same three multi-generational, family-owned businesses dominate the industry, manufacturing 90% of the city’s water tanks. Wooden water tanks typically last 25 to 30 years, so while many new buildings incorporate sophisticated basement pumps that turn on and off based on demand and can distribute water directly to locations throughout a building, eliminating the need for rooftop tanks, replacement of existing tanks keeps manufacturers in business. And some new buildings opt for installing the older technology.

Amazingly, traditional cooperage materials and building methods are still used. Wood is favored over steel or concrete because it is less expensive and requires less maintenance. Additionally, it provides significant insulation, preventing the water within a tank from freezing in the winter or getting too warm in the summer. Redwood and cedar are the woods of choice due to their light weight and resistance to insect infestation and decay.

The average wooden tank, 10 to 12 feet high and capable of holding up to 10,000 gallons of water, is constructed of precut lumber and assembled on site, usually within 24 hours. Individual components too large to fit in a freight elevator are hoisted up the outside of a building. Three-inch-thick strips of wood (known as staves), narrower at the ends than in the middle, are grooved on the bottom to fit into floorboards. Staves are installed in a circular fashion around a base to form a cylinder. Cables are then placed around the wood. A conical cover, or “hat,” which adds a distinctive and almost humorous dimension to the design, serves to keep out debris. Once complete, the barrellike tank can be lifted onto steel stilts. When the tank is filled, water initially leaks out, but as the wood dampens and expands, the tank becomes watertight. Miraculously, neither nails nor synthetic sealants are used. 

Some buildings hide their water tanks behind brick or concrete enclosures, but so iconic have the wooden structures become that a 1994 set of voluntary design guidelines for residential buildings in Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City encouraged exposed rooftop water tanks “if they are of the traditional wood barrel type.” Five years later, in his design for the high-end apartment building at 400 Chambers Street, the architect Robert A.M. Stern followed the development’s guidelines. Sitting atop a massive rooftop platform, a classical New York water tank became a highly visible element of the building’s design.

How did such practical structures enter the realm of urban mythology? In the early decades of the 20th century, artists, including Ash Can School member John Sloan and Edward Hopper, acknowledged water tanks as a ubiquitous feature of the city. Later, in the 1970s, the German conceptual artists Bernd and Hilla Becher created meticulously assembled grids of black and white photographs that celebrated the New York water tanks they described as “anonymous sculpture.” 

In 1976, as New Yorkers responded to the impact of the fiscal crisis with a reinvigorated sense of pride (bordering on chauvinism), Saul Steinberg’s memorable *New Yorker* cover illustration, “View of the World from Ninth Avenue,” featured multiple water tanks as an indispensable part of the city’s visual vocabulary. Twenty-two years later, the Public Art Fund commissioned the British artist Rachel Whiteread to create a sculpture; she sought to depict an object she considered to encapsulate New York. While visiting Brooklyn and looking across the East River at the Manhattan skyline, she was struck by the ubiquity of water tanks. The resulting work, “Water Tower,” a life-size translucent resin cast, was initially displayed on a rooftop in SoHo and subsequently became part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. 

Today New York’s rooftop wooden water tanks stand proudly, miniature versions of the water towers that loom over smaller low-lying towns and communities nationwide. Byproducts of age-old craft and 19th-century technology, they continue not only to efficiently serve our daily needs, but to fascinate us. Perhaps this is because they seem to stand outside of time, antiquated, yet up to date. Or perhaps it is because unlike so many technologies in the Digital Age, which defy common understanding, we can readily comprehend how water is collected, stored and distributed. In the wooden water tank, we see not only practical accommodation but also the perfect fusion of form and function.
### Antonio Reynoso on Mamdani, Immigration, and His Campaign for Congress in New York's 7th District
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/antonio-reynoso-on-mamdani-immigration/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:14.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/antonio-reynoso-on-mamdani-immigration) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on May 8, 2026 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

The New York Editorial Board spoke with Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso about his campaign in the Democratic primary for New York’s 7th Congressional District (parts of Brooklyn and Queens) on the morning of May 1, 2026\. Reynoso is among the candidates running to succeed retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez, who has endorsed him as her preferred successor. The primary election will take place in June. *(photo by Juan Manuel Benítez)*

*Participating journalists: Juan Manuel Benítez, Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Christina Greer, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Myles Miller, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Žagare.*

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Smith**  
Thanks for coming in. I always say this at the top, but I feel like it’s worth saying, just we’re in this world where elected officials and politicians don’t actually need to talk to journalists anymore and some just don’t. It’s important that you do and we appreciate it.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Thank you.

**Ben Smith**  
Chrissy?

**Christina Greer**  
Yes, I’ll kick it off. I’ll echo what Ben said, thank you. Can you just tell us what you think are the biggest concerns in the district, and how you view them, as a \[potential\] congressman, and not a borough president?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
It’s affordability. I think the biggest issue in our district is the high cost of rent. We have an affordability crisis that’s really broad, but housing, or ability to have an apartment, I think, is the one thing that people are most struggling with in the district. It’s a district that has been significantly gentrified. Outside of being in a NYCHA development, a Mitchell-Lama, or rent-stabilized housing, you’re in a market-rate unit in arguably one of the most expensive parts of this city. Affordability on housing is the most daunting issue that we’re dealing with now.

How I want to solve for that is, there was a time during FDR’s time, after the Great Depression, after World War II, just like any opportunity, or any time we had a crisis of housing, the federal government was a big player in solving for those issues. We built NYCHA, we got funding for Mitchell-Lamas, for 202 housing for seniors, Section 8 vouchers, or Section 8 based housing. All those things existed and they don’t exist anymore. The Faircloth Amendment pretty much made it so that we can’t build what we call social housing, which I call NYCHA. We can’t do that anymore. Section 8 has been frozen for decades now, and people haven’t had access to it.

What I want to do is see if we can get to the federal government and start unlocking a lot of these levers that used to be able to help us solve for the housing crisis in the federal level. Right now it feels like we’re leaving it to the state and city, who have very limited resources and can’t do big things like build NYCHA developments all over again, but the federal government can. We have trillions of dollars that we could unlock to really support local government to solve for that problem. That’s my goal to get there.

**Josh Greenman**  
Can I just ask one thing about that? That’s been a goal of people to get a lot more money from the federal government for NYCHA and other things for decades under Republican and Democratic administrations. What’s different now, if anything, that leads you to believe that you can do that? Or are there new methods or new ways of getting funding that haven’t been contemplated that you’re talking about?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I think there are several things that are happening now. I do think we need to rename half of these programs because the politicization of the programs has polarized our ability to actually enact them, to fund them. I think that the Republican-Democrat fight makes it so that it’s very hard to find compromises. Maybe we need to rename them and remake them to some degree so that it’s palatable for both sides of the aisle.

I think what’s changed is that it’s a crisis now — it’s been a crisis for a while, but it’s getting worse. I think the affordability crisis is hitting everyone across this country, not just in New York City. I think about an affordable homeownership program for the middle class, for example. That’s something that I think you can sell to Republicans and say, “Hey, this is not just for New York, this is for all of us.” If your average median income in your state is $80,000 a year, can we take 30% of that income, stretch it out over a 30-year mortgage, and allow for the federal government to give out low-interest loans for homeowners and rebuild the American dream, and the middle class in America, by supporting that, and making it about the American dream?

That middle-class effort, for example, is something that I think can be attractive to somebody in the Republican Party. I want to be clear, it’s what’s hurting all of us. The Republicans will lose the House, we could get close to winning the Senate, and that seeds panic. When panic happens, I think people are more willing to negotiate for the greater good, and I’m hoping that when we get to Congress, we can do that and leverage the crisis to actually have a crisis-level solution for it.

**Myles Miller**  
You’ll come into Congress as a—

**Antonio Reynoso**  
A freshman.

**Myles Miller**  
A freshman**.** A backbencher as they could say—

**Antonio Reynoso**  
No, no, no.

**Myles Miller**  
—with an office that’s far from everything. How do you come in and build coalitions quickly to get this kind of thing done?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I want to talk about two things. First is my experience. I’ve been a freshman \[City\] Council member. I think I was the only class of freshman Council members that came in because the, and I’m sorry, I still haven’t had my coffee, so my thoughts will gather…but term limits when they got extended made it so that when I came in, there was a group of people that were going to do 12 years, and I was only going to do 8\. I was technically a freshman in that time. What you have to do is figure out ways to just be effective. I think something that I am very good at is finding ways to make things happen when they’re very difficult.

I’ll talk about the Right to Know Act a little later, but there are places where people didn’t want to put their necks on the line, and didn’t want to do the work, where I was able to insert myself and actually effect meaningful change. We talk about commercial waste zones, which is something that hadn’t been done since like the 1970s. There had been no reforms or no changes or regulations to the private sanitation industry, and I was able to get that done. We did a waste equity bill where we reduced the amount of capacity in three of the neighborhoods that are handling the city’s most trash. We did that and that was very controversial and very hard to do, but I always felt like I was really good at bringing people together, building basic commonalities or common denominators as to why we should be doing this and bringing people along. I want to be able to do that.

Another thing is, I don’t think that the Speaker of the House should solely rely on seniority in the future. I think the Republicans have already done this, from what I understand, but the Democratic Party should be highlighting some freshmen. I want to make the case that I should be one of those people. Some freshmen that are good communicators, that look like the people that are hurting, that are children, middle class, have kids — I’m a dad, immigrant parents, grew up poor. It’s just like, people just trying to make it that want the American dream to work for me.

You should be putting those people front and center in oversight in committees all over this country, and it doesn’t happen. Seniority is the sole bearer of that. I want to make the case to the Speaker that there should be a handful of us freshmen reps that should chair committees, and in doing so, allow us to build more power, more influence to actually get things done. I don’t want to be a freshman doing nothing. I want to start being effective immediately, and I’m already drawing up plans as to how I can insert myself in rooms and make sure that I’m influential.

I also think that I’m part of a progressive brand that I think is deeply important. I think that there are centrist and moderate Democrats across this country that don’t feel like New York City understands the hardships that they’re going through, and how purple states are one, and that we just want to push all these progressive policies. I also come from a place that has a socialist mayor in our city, and I feel like I’m someone that can help bring those things together, really have a conversation on how we could continue to build off of the progressive movement, which I think is the direction this country should be moving towards, but making it something that is practical, something that we can message, and that we can build a narrative around so that it is something that could be consumed by a larger mass.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Going back to the housing affordability thing, do you have any new creative ideas? This is not only a countrywide problem. This is happening in major cities across the world. People who grew up in those cities cannot afford living there anymore. Your main opponent in the race, Claire Valdez, last week, she spoke about a model program in Barcelona, which is a little strange because Barcelona might be the poster child of housing unaffordability at this moment. I have a friend who just moved there. She told me she just found 14 apartments in the whole city that she can afford, and of a decent size right now, out of the whole city. Is there any new creative idea for a city like New York that would not only spur development and create new housing but also affordable housing that average New Yorkers can afford? We’re not only talking about low-income, we’re talking about middle-class New Yorkers.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I think we’ve got to play to the market, right? We have to have an honest conversation about our ability to build a million new units over the next 10 years. Like if we’re really going to talk about the amount of housing that we need to build, there’s no way that the city and the state can build that — there’s no way they can build that without the federal government. Right now, the federal government is not a partner in being able to help us build that. I just want to say that we can’t solve for the housing crisis on just relying on subsidy and affordable housing development. We need a significant amount of market-rate development to meet the goal.

In the market-rate development, right now we have MIH \[Mandatory Inclusionary Housing\] that allows us to get some level of affordability in it. I’m talking about playing the market as building so much housing that landlords start fighting for tenants, not what we see now, where it’s tenants fighting for an apartment. I want to change that conversation. We don’t need a model in Barcelona. We have one in the United States of America: Minneapolis has seen rents decrease in their housing market; Austin saw it as well. A lot of people are concerned because it meant that they just threw so many apartments and so many units in those cities that landlords were negotiating with tenants that they didn’t want to go somewhere else because they had options. Instead they were negotiating, saying, “Hey, instead of $2,500, you can go in for $2,300\. I’ll give you free parking. I’ll make sure that you have a fully furnished apartment.” They started negotiating to keep tenants in their home because they had more apartments than they had tenants.

We have to do the best we can to have a significant amount of development happen over the next 10 years. Right now, I think we’re having too many conversations that are about incremental progress on an issue that is a crisis. We’re putting band-aids to try to solve for this housing crisis, and I think we’re way off to where we need to be.

**Harry Siegel**  
You brought up gentrification as a concern before in your district. Can you talk about how that squares with having lots more development?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
The problem with development during the— I want to have the de Blasio and Bloomberg era, they only built in poor Black and brown neighborhoods. That’s the only thing they did. The burden of the development and the housing growth in New York City fell on a few Black and brown poor communities, and that is it.

**Josh Greenman**  
Well, Bloomberg upzoned Williamsburg.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Williamsburg is a Latino district.

**Josh Greenman**  
Well, waterfront, OK.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Even in the waterfront, it was just manufacturing. When \[City Council Member\] Diana Reyna represented it when she first got in there, it was 68% Latino, right? That is a Latino district that saw a significant reduction in the amount of Latinos that were there after we developed the waterfront. The problem is, we didn’t develop Sheepshead Bay, Bay Ridge — we didn’t go anywhere. There was not even modest growth. We didn’t see one-family housing go into three-family housing, or three-family housing get to five units, or transportation-oriented development near train stations. We didn’t see any of that happen. We just left it right there.

Then we got new residents coming into these neighborhoods, they’re only going to go to the places where new housing is happening, and they just happen to be around where all the Black and brown people are because that’s where we rezoned. If anything, we made it even harder to build in white, more affluent areas with downzonings by Bloomberg, right? Those downzonings, for us to have to undo that, the amount of work and political capital that it is going to take is significant, but we need to talk about it. Then we have to talk about landmarking. We’ve landmarked a bunch of white affluent areas that will never see housing growth in the places that have the most opportunities, where if you put a poor family into Park Slope, they will thrive. They have the best jobs, they have the best roads, the best schools, the best parks. That’s where we want people to live.

**Josh Greenman**  
What will the feds do about that?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
The feds? Well, so I think the feds is about unlocking a ton of money so that we can build a ton of housing. We have a lot of work to do locally at the city level to be able to solve for that. I’m just trying to explain—

**Ben Max**  
The feds could attach conditions to that money.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
We saw it happen with \[Governor\] Kathy Hochul when she did the Housing Compact, it was an attempt to have like a stick and a carrot to try to get housing built. We’ve seen that type of work, but the thing here is that it’s an all-hands approach to solving for this issue — but what he asked was about gentrification, I was explaining gentrification on a local level because that’s how it was introduced.

**Ben Max**  
On that front, hopefully we don’t rehash half a dozen conversations we’ve had over the years, but you know that there’s a lot of people who appreciate that you’ve become one of the sort-of pro-housing voices in the city, but people who’ve been around a little while also still criticize you for not getting to ‘yes’ on a Bushwick rezoning.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
That’s just not true. Right now, go to the DCP \[Department of City Planning\], go on their website, and you will see the Bushwick rezoning. The mayor’s office has to trigger the rezoning. They have not done it. They didn’t do it. We didn’t say no. What we wanted to do—

**Ben Max**  
They walked away, right?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Exactly. I’m here with \[City Council Member\] Rafael Espinal in a five-year plan for the rezoning of Bushwick, which was not one of the 10 districts that de Blasio wanted to rezone. We voluntarily told the city we want to talk about rezoning. Look at that rezoning. The community’s model is exactly what we voted for in the City of Yes. It’s transit-oriented development, going up from a commercial site that can’t build any housing along Broadway to 12- and 14-story buildings in those areas.

There were some contextual zonings on mid-blocks that the city was pushing back against, but the overall development growth within the community was going to happen, but it was what I call moderate growth. Every single apartment unit wasn’t squeezed out by the City of New York. In that time, and this is part of why people don’t trust our ability to work on development, how are we going to get Sheepshead Bay, Bay Ridge, and all these places? It’s moderate growth. It isn’t extreme growth, and we were doing this 10 years ago. We were talking about this before this housing crisis was as apparent as it is.

What we did is the community was willing to vote and support the local elected officials in moderate growth. I just want to give an example on numbers. The equivalent of our rezoning by the community would have given us 10,000 units. The City of New York wanted 18,000 units. That was the fight we were having, so start the process--

**Ben Max**  
And those are just examples, by the way, because they were smaller numbers in that—

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Sure, it’s an example, but why didn’t they proceed? If they proceed, then I and Rafael Espinal, we have to negotiate to get to a number that we can all agree to. But the city didn’t even want to insert it and put it in, so we can do that right now. Even right now, Mayor Mamdani could start the process of unlocking the Bushwick rezoning if he wanted to, but the city stopped it, not us.

**Ben Smith**  
What do you think: Mamdani, I saw one of his supporters say it’s like there’s a sort-of socialist in the front and kind of abundance in the back quality to his housing policy. I think the jury is, it’s unclear still exactly how far he’s going to go. You still have this kind of like “Unleash the private market, let the chips fall where they may” mostly approach. He’s said a lot of different stuff. What do you think he’s going to do? Like what is your read on his actual approach here? And how close to— a million units would be a lot. That’s a big number. How close is he going to get.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yes, it is. No, a million units is not realistic. I’m just saying if we really want to lower the cost of housing, lower it, we need like a million units. If we don’t do a million units, we’re slowing down \[rent\] growth, right? It’s the slowing down and maybe stunting it for a couple of years where we don’t see significant \[rent\] increases — that’s what a million does.

**Ben Smith**  
Yes, what are you seeing from City Hall at the moment?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I think that the data and the information is…incontestable. It’s something you can’t challenge. The data shows that when you build a ton of units, you start lessening the pressure on the housing market and it lowers. I think he saw that. It took me 10 years to go from being open to negotiate with the city on some housing but not being like being all-in. Like being all-in, it took me 10 years to get there, right? I want to say that I’ve learned and I grew. I educated myself, I used data to be able to come to a position that I have now. He did that flip in less than six months because it doesn’t take a lot. Once the data’s in front of you, you see that it works and that it’s real, and that the work that we’ve been doing so far, what we do.

Another thing that I think a lot of people are tired of, we’re big on advocacy and we are huge on like, “Hey, we want everybody to get a housing unit.” Absolutely. We all agree in this city that everyone should have a unit that’s within 30% of their income so that everybody has housing. We all agree with that, but then we have to start talking about how to get there. There are too many people that just want to draw a line, and it’s like we either get it all or nothing. We won’t negotiate, we won’t make progress, and I don’t think that that’s the way to go when it comes to housing.

**Myles Miller**  
Wait, can I ask you just a quick follow-up on that, on what you were saying broadly, which is basically, that the mayor was able to switch on a dime, and knowing you over the last 15 years, you can be immovable on certain topics.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yes. Which I want to say is a quality that we should like.

**Myles Miller**  
…I just wonder how you feel like you’ll find consensus in Congress in a place where everybody seems immovable?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yes, it’s going to be tough. I want to be honest. I’m going to try my best. I really am, and I think I can do a lot of work, and just be one of the members that just shines light into Congress, and allows for people to see that there are some people working to try to get things done. I think our ability to communicate, because we’re younger, we know how to use social media a little better, is going to show the general public that we’re trying.

Look, I think until Trump is gone, and even shortly after that, there’s going to be a lot of reconciliation work that needs to happen. We are not in a good place. Right now, people are really seeing this as a Republican-Democrat challenge. I think it is a class challenge. I think it’s the rich versus the poor. I think these populist conversations are going to continue to grow and be more and more popular. I want to be honest. I’m going to try my best. I think I know how to work with people, but I don’t want the burden of trying to figure that out by myself. To be honest, I think I’ll be lying to you guys right now to say that I’m going to be able to bring bipartisan work to Congress just by myself. I am going to be a person that wants to see legislation pass. That is a goal that I want to achieve, and I’m going to be a player in trying to make those things happen.

**Christina Greer**  
Really quickly though, if you get to Congress, would you support Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yes, day one. I think it would be a waste of time \[otherwise\]. Hakeem Jeffries got voted unanimously during the fight with \[Speaker\] Mike Johnson. Mike Johnson, 100 times, he didn’t become Speaker. The entire Democratic caucus stood with him. It was one of the few moments of strength. We showed strength, we showed unity. That’s what people want to see from us. That’s what they want to see. For me to go to Congress and tell you that somebody that inevitably will be the next Speaker of the House, that we’re going to give him a hard time — we got too much work to do. Let’s get him in and then start pushing him to where he needs to go.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
When was the last time you spoke to him?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Maybe three weeks ago I spoke to him. The thing here is that \[City Council Speaker\] Melissa Mark-Viverito and \[Mayor\] Bill de Blasio are allies of mine. When we got to the City Council, I helped her get elected without county support. Well, we got Brooklyn County, but in an unusual way to become Speaker. The Right to Know Act was stalled. It wasn’t moving. I discharged the Right to Know Act against her, and against Bill de Blasio, and put pressure on them to eventually bring it to the floor, and they did do that. I was able to pull back my discharge and we finally got the hearing and the vote on the Right to Know Act. Those are my friends, and I was able to push them because I didn’t think they were moving the progressive agenda forward fast enough, and I did that—

**Josh Greenman**  
Can I ask one more on housing before you move on.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I guess I just wanted to end on this is what I’m going to do is I’m not going to fight Hakeem on being the Speaker, but when he’s there, I’m going to push him to the direction that I think this party should be going.

**Ben Smith**  
The last housing question.

**Josh Greenman**  
In [the Claire Valdez interview](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/claire-valdez-on-mamdani-aoc-and), we asked about her personal living situation and whether it was exemplary of the affordability challenges that she was talking about for others. Can you talk just for a second about yours, and if it is the exception to the rule that you’re describing, why it’s the exception, or if it’s not, why it’s not?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Why? What is the exception?

**Josh Greenman**  
Your personal living situation, your apartment, whether you feel the pressures, and if you don’t feel all the pressures as intensely as your neighbors, why you don’t?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I feel the pressures. I’m a dad, and raising a family in this environment is practically impossible. I don’t know how anyone does it. I am currently raising my kids technically, or arguably in the same conditions that I was raised in. I live in a two-bedroom apartment, I was raised in a two-bedroom apartment. My sisters and I shared one of those bedrooms, so it was three of us until I was 18 years old. College saved me. I had to get out. My kids are currently living in one of the bedrooms as my two boys are being raised. I think it’s like 750, 800 square feet. I don’t know numbers too well, but my mom, we were raised in a 750, 800 square foot.

**Josh Greenman**  
Market-rate?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I live in a market-rate apartment. My mom lived in Section 8 housing, but as a middle-class family, I’m not getting support from the government for a subsidy in any way. I’m paying market-rate housing. I don’t have a rent-regulated apartment. I don’t have any of that stuff.

**Josh Greenman**  
Would you share what your monthly rent is?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yes, I pay $2,250 a month.

Let me tell you how I got that. It was the hustle. I moved in there nine years ago and it was $2,500 a month, and I was dying. How my wife and I made it work for the first two years that I was there for $2,500 was huge. Then COVID happened, and the guy next to me was renting the same house, because it’s a two-family house. It’s exact same house for 2,100 bucks. I called our landlord and I was like, “I’m moving next door, so this is my last payment. You could keep the security deposit. We’re calling the moving guys right now.” He panicked, he called us right away. He was like, “Hey, 2,250, can we do that?” I was like, “I don’t know, let me talk to my wife,” but we were elated, joyful. We did that. Since then, I have not signed a new lease with him. I am month-to-month in my apartment because I know if I call him to sign a lease that he’s going to increase my rent. I’m risking it right now and it’s like my little New York hustle in hopes that it doesn’t happen.

**Ben Smith**  
He does not subscribe to our substack.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Has he asked for favors?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
No, exactly. My landlord loves us because we’ve been there, we pay our rent on time, but also, he makes me turn off the water in the winter. I have to upkeep the front yard. Indoors, I’ve had to do plumbing work. I had to do so much work in the house, but I do anything to keep him out.

**Ben Smith**  
I think Juan Manuel meant political favors.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Oh, no. He lives in Long Island. He doesn’t care about any of that, so no favors. Look, I did call him because my wife wanted to add a dishwasher. She was like, “We will need a dishwasher.” Let me tell you, if you got two kids and if you don’t got a dishwasher, God bless your soul. I was like, “Babe, I don’t want to call the landlord, because if we call him and tell him we’re going to install this dishwasher, he’s going to raise our rent.” She was like, “We’ve got to do it. We can’t add this type of appliance and not tell him.” I call him and I’m like, “Hey, we would like to do this.” He says, “Antonio, everybody’s struggling right now. Don’t worry about it, I’m not going to raise your rent. Add the thing.” Freaking nicest guy in the world, and I would love for you to meet this guy.

I haven’t seen him in two years, and that is a full effort that I am putting to never see him. I will take care of that house all the way so long as he’s not there. I just want to say I’ve had my rent at $2,250 for about five years now, and God willing, I could keep it for another 20 this way. I’m not going anywhere.

**Akash Mehta**  
Your race has become a proxy battle between the Working Families Party and the DSA \[New York City Democratic Socialists of America\], between more established progressive groups and affiliated electeds, and the newer socialist wing. What do you think of as the differences between those two wings of the party?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
The DSA and Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders versus the WFP, and like Tish James, Jumaane Williams, the group of progressives that have been doing a lot of work for a long time. The difference I think for me is that I’ve had time in helping lay the groundwork, or tilling the field for progressive politics to thrive in New York City, and that the DSA are the fruits that are bearing because of the investments that people like Jumaane, Tish, me, Nydia, all those people, the \[City Council\] Progressive Caucus movement. All that work. It was only six people when Jumaane Williams, Brad Lander, Jimmy Van Bramer, and all those folks, Danny Dromm, they were alone. That was not a happy time. They looked like they were crazy. Then all the young people got elected that next term when there were term limits, and we got in, and we helped bring that up to, I think it was 16 of us.

The progressive movement, people are shortsighted that they think that we’ve been progressive for a long time. We have not. I remember Carlos Menchaca and I being the only progressive members on the \[City Council\] transportation committee. When we said that we wanted to do safety over parking, people lost their minds. *The New York Post* called me a “red raider” or something like that because I wanted to do something for biking for cycling. People don’t remember that, but we did that work, and now progressive transportation policy is common talk. It is a centrist position now.

What I see is that the WFP is a party that’s been fighting a long time to get to where they are. To see somebody like Zohran Mamdani be able to thrive, they’ve been working on that since Jon Kest and Bertha Lewis were talking about the introduction of the WFP. Many of these folks that we’re talking about right now don’t even know who Jon Kest and Bertha Lewis are, so I’m just saying that we are here. We’re fighting the good fight, we’re having these conversations. We appreciate a lot of the work that the DSA is doing, and I think that they’re a meaningful piece of the movement, but the WFP helped prepare this city for what we’re seeing right now and for a win with Zohran Mamdani.

**Akash Mehta**  
I think maybe some of how Claire Valdez’s supporters might think of it is, yes, the WFP and related groups have been organizing for a long time, and they were losing, and they don’t have the energy, they don’t have the chutzpah, and the affiliated progressive non-profit foundation-funded groups just don’t have the dynamism and are captured by the status quo in ways that limit their effectiveness. That the energy of, for instance, someone like Zohran Mamdani, who was outspoken on something like what he would call the genocide in Gaza, and his supporters like Claire Valdez who were outspoken on that before, for instance, you were. That that energy and hold-no-bars approach is what is really going to move the needle more than the decades-long progressive non-profit strategy.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I think we’re only having that conversation because Zohran won, obviously. I just think that Zohran’s win was like a perfect storm. I talk about this all the time. A lot of these elected officials think that they got here because they’re talented and they work hard, and that was how we did it. It’s so much BS. Luck is so much a part of how we get to where we are. The timing has to be right. You have amazing, qualified people that run and lose because the timing isn’t right, and people that don’t belong in politics at all will win because everything gets straightened out. There are people that get elected to office because the person that they’re running against, that was the favorite got caught with like a sexual harassment scandal, and that the only people running against them was this scrappy person that we never heard of, but they’re the only ones on the ballot and now they’re elected.

It’s just, like, the circumstances are always a part of the conversation, and Zohran’s circumstance was real. I don’t want to, I don’t want to do this, but I want to be as honest and open as possible. Brad Lander is somebody that just couldn’t meet the moment in a citywide race in the way that maybe the progressive movement wanted, and which the WFP might have wanted. We think of him as somebody that is very smart, can push the progressive agenda forward, does bold things, and pushes it a little further than maybe you wanted to be pushed, and is somebody that could’ve led this city, let’s say. He couldn’t catch fire. He couldn’t resonate with a significant amount of people, so Brad doesn’t do well. On the other side, we have--

**Myles Miller**  
Do you think \[Lander\] does well in this congressional race \[in NY-10\]?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I do think he’s going to do well in this congressional race, yes. That is something I believe.

Then you have Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams on the other side. That’s not the progressive lane. This wasn’t a fight between the WFP and the DSA at the city level. The WFP worked together alongside all the progressives and did a slate, which was very smart. They didn’t go with one person. They went with three people and they were just like, “Pick any one of these three. We have ranked-choice voting. Let’s work together.”

For me, it’s just like, I think the moment really makes it so that they can make that argument, but AOC won, and when she won, it was all the rave in that time. Then right after, we saw a dip in this energy that was really targeted to a very talented and hard-working person that was a great communicator. I say this because when Eric Adams won, the freaking country thought he was a new face in the Democratic Party, right? It was just like, “Are we going to say that the reason he won is because the progressives don’t seem to ever win?” It’s not like that. We’re always in the middle, right? We’re the people that the people always want to throw shots at. The DSA wins, and now they want to throw shots at the progressives. Eric Adams wins, they want to throw shots at the progressives. It’s like, no, I think that the progressives are a practical, idea-building group that actually moves the agenda forward and have done it for the last 10 years. It’s us. We’ve done that work in a real way.

**Josh Greenman**  
Can we get to policy and federal policy, we’ll get back to that in a sec?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yes.

**Josh Greenman**  
Immigration, you talk a lot about it. You want to abolish ICE?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yes.

**Josh Greenman**  
What ought the standards of deportation be? Who should we be deporting?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
The people we were already deporting before 2002\. Before ICE even existed, which were just people that were going through our criminal justice system that have committed crimes and that a judge didn’t see fit to stay in this country, and deported them either after they served their time or immediately to their country.

**Josh Greenman**  
SoObama’s deportation strategy was a bad—

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yes. Look, I’m Dominican, and let me tell you, Obama was not good for a lot of our folks in our time. And I love Obama, he was the one that inspired me to run for office and really get into this, but I think he did a terrible job when it comes to immigration overall, for a different reason than what people would talk about now. But, in 2002, when they created ICE, it was mostly to do surveillance for Muslim immigrants here in New York City. That’s what it was born to do. What happens, we get somebody like Donald Trump that is more tyrannical in nature. He uses this little niche agency, and turns it into a militaristic force to do nothing. They don’t have anything to do, so what are they doing? They’re going after five-year-olds, they’re going after students, they’re going after people in churches and hospitals. Why? It’s because they don’t have anything to do, because the real deportation system and apparatus happens through the court system, and it’s already working. It’s just something that the Republicans have to do because they have terrible policies, and they can’t pitch a brand or a narrative that is sexy enough for them to win the midterm election so they’ve got to plan something.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
You’re saying that you’re Dominican American, but you know that a lot of Dominican Americans in the city voted for Donald Trump in 2024 because they liked his immigration platform.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yes. I want to say this, I love my people, but I think this happens a lot, and I think they’re learning. We come from a country where the social principles that we have are not relevant and prevalent in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is a monolith when it comes to the type of people that live there. They’re all Dominicans. The discrimination doesn’t necessarily happen.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Some Haitians.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yes. Well, I was going to get there. The Dominicans are all Dominicans, and there’s no discrimination when it comes to a Dominican, so you don’t have systemic racism and systemic systems in place, and make it harder for like dark-skinned Dominicans, the light-skinned Dominicans. It just doesn’t exist. Are those systems in place against the Haitians? Absolutely. That is a discrimination that happens and that’s what I fight against with the Dominican Republic all the time.

In this country, there is a history of slavery, there’s a history of laws and policies that have been in place to make it so that a Black person didn’t have the opportunities to advance as white people did in this country. The conversation that Dominicans bring when they come here and as immigrants is very different. They’re like, “You’re supposed to work hard, you’re supposed to study, you can’t do crime, you can’t do this. If you are in the circumstance that you are, that is a choice you made,” because in DR, everybody’s born the same, we all look the same, and the laws are all applied.

In New York, they just assume that, “Oh, if you are a poor Black person, it was a choice, you didn’t work hard enough. Then you, you’re the problem.” They have a mentality that’s a lot different than people that have been born here through generations, or they see something like, where like, “Hey, listen, the circumstances by which these folks are being supported in this country don’t exist, or if anything are being hurt,” and because of that, we’re trying to build equity in the system to allow them to have the opportunities that everybody else has. That education is very hard for us to do to with Dominican people. That’s why I think there’s a disconnect between how they feel about Trump, and why they voted for him, not being able to disconnect their relationship to the island and how people are being raised there.

**Liena Žagare**  
Do you think more broadly, is there a level of immigration that is politically unsustainable in this country?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I don’t know. Let me see. I could get a little more radical on this one. Listen, I think that the nationalism is hurting us deeply. When you have a global economy, global trade, diplomacy, and open conversations, there are great opportunities for us to invest in each other’s countries and invest in other countries to make sure their economic and social progress is happening. It makes it so that if we’re investing in Venezuela in a real way, we’re not putting sanctions on them, and building diplomatic relationships that those people don’t have an economic hardship that makes it so they want to leave and come to America.

If we stabilize these countries and help them through I think economic leverage, we could see advancements. As soon as we insert ourselves in international relations in ways that are like regime change, which we’ve seen in Latin America happen all throughout, I guess we could see advancements, right? My thing is, as soon as we continue to insert ourselves in international relations in ways that are like regime change, which we’ve seen in Latin America happen all throughout and it’s never been a positive outcome.

For me, the first thing is, I think that diplomacy, having economic interests and ties, being able to do trade can allow for these countries to stabilize themselves and not have a mass wave of immigrants coming to America, but we interfere, we insert ourselves.

The collapse of Venezuela came from the sanctions that were imparted by America because they had political disagreements with Venezuela, and put out economic sanctions that ends up hurting not the government — the government and the people on top of Venezuela are eating very well and driving nice cars — the people that suffered are all the people in Venezuela. Now that burden is falling upon us when we see this mass migration. I’m just saying if we do a better job at building international relations, we won’t have to deal with the mass migration moments that we’re seeing in our country.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
The rate we saw during the Biden administration, the influx of migrants in cities like New York City, do you think that rate is sustainable?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I do think it’s sustainable. It’s practically sustainable, right? It’s absolutely sustainable. We have the money, the infrastructure, the space to make it work, but because we have policies that are—

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
The space we were talking about, housing, and—

**Antonio Reynoso**  
No, but we have— there’s more than enough. Let’s say a Republican state is bearing the brunt of a lot of migrants, if the government was to come in and say, “Hey, we need to help Texas out, and build a plan, and a system by which we can make it so that when immigrants are coming in we’re sending them to different states or maybe they’re states that need more, larger workforce because we don’t have it” or if we have a communal conversation that is not based on politics, and is based on outcomes, we can absolutely solve for this problem.

**Josh Greenman**  
But if people who don’t come legally— I think what you were saying, correct me if I’m wrong, is, unless they don’t commit a crime, they shouldn’t be actively deported. If they commit a crime, and they’re convicted, they should be actively deported. Let’s assume they come illegally, don’t commit crime, then what happens? They just stay and they work in the grey economy, black economy for their whole lives and they don’t get sent back?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
No, we need comprehensive immigration reform, which we don’t do because it’s political. We can solve for this problem. There are solutions to the housing problem, there are solutions to our economic hardship problems.

**Josh Greenman**  
So I’m saying, anyone who comes illegally and they don’t commit a crime, they should all basically by law be regularized, every one of them?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Every one of them.

**Josh Greenman**  
Anyone who comes illegally should eventually be regularized?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yes, there should be a system by which, if you are here, and you got here not through the proper channels, but you’re here and you spend 10 years in this country already building a life, showing that you’re contributing to this country, why not start the process of naturalization? I think that is something that we should talk about. It would make a huge difference.

**Akash Mehta**  
Immigration potentially elected Trump for his second term and has just killed left and center-left parties all over the West. You were talking earlier about how to make progressive policy more palatable to centrists and conservatives, how do you talk about this to—

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I just disagree with the premise that immigration is what is hurting all this left policy. I think it’s a class warfare conversation that we have. This country has seen the greatest wealth transfer over the last five years that it’s ever seen in its history. We’re talking about days of deregulation and no regulation where people own steam trains and own oil and so forth. In that time, there wasn’t as great a wealth transfer than what we’ve seen over the last five years. There’s a group of people in this country that are doing very very well, and they’re thriving, and they need to keep the focus away from them.

While all 80% of us are struggling, they need to figure out a way to make sure that the people with little are fighting against people with less. What they do, they tell a bunch of poor white people that the reason they’re struggling isn’t because the rich haven’t built the system that is equitable, but instead it’s that these poor people that have no political capital, that can’t vote, have no say in it, don’t have any legislative positions that can build policy that means something, those are the people making your lives impossible. They won a narrative war not a practical war.

**Akash Mehta**  
Absolutely. How do you counter, it’s a very effective narrative won.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
No, it’s not. I don’t think it is. I think we win the presidency if we are right on Gaza, for example, as a Democratic Party, and then we’re not having the same conversation, but because the Democrats made other mistakes, now they’re using this one as one of the reasons why we lost, but they’re not letting us know exactly why they did their little report \[the 2024 DNC autopsy\] and said why we lost. They’re not letting us know because we know exactly what it is, and immigration is not going to be the number one issue. It’s going to be the war on Gaza, and the fact that a bunch of young people really felt that the Democratic Party abandoned their move.

It’s just like, we just got to be careful that, like, I don’t sit here, I would never justify that the Republican Party had a good narrative on immigration because that’s not the case. They’ve done everything they can right now. Immigration is pretty much— no one’s done more to stop the flow of illegal immigrants into this country than the Republican Party right now. They’ve done it. And are they going to lose the midterm elections? Absolutely. Are we not going to say that immigration— We’re not going to use immigration. We’re going to find some other reason as to why we do it. The core crux of it all is economic policy.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think the asylum system was working well?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
No. I don’t think— I think we need comprehensive immigration reform. I think we had a chance under Barack Obama to get it to happen when we \[Democrats\] were the Congress, the Senate, and presidency. We could’ve had a meaningful conversation, leveraged a ton to make it happen, and we didn’t. I think the asylum, TPS, the Temporary Protective Status, DACA, all these conversations, we need to talk about being able to naturalize a lot of these folks and we’re not having those conversations.

**Josh Greenman**  
That was the bargain, and he deported people in an attempt to lay the ground for the immigration reform. If you say we’re not going to deport anybody, don’t you undercut—

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I didn’t say we’re not going to deport anybody. I never said that. I said we’re going to deport the people that are criminals. Absolutely. If you’re here—

**Josh Greenman**  
If you significantly reduce deportations, don’t you make it harder to actually make a deal?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
How are you significantly reducing deportations. Barack Obama deported more people than anyone in the history.

**Josh Greenman**  
Right, which you disagree with.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Well, I disagree with it for different reasons. I don’t disagree with getting rid of the criminals in this country. If you committed a crime, then you shouldn’t be here. I think the problem I have is with, like, an expansion of ICE that’s going after people that their only crime is getting here without papers, and that I don’t think should be—

**Josh Greenman**  
I did think you said that Obama’s deportation levels were unacceptable, and you should go to much, much lower deportation.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yeah, I think that there were cases in Obama’s deportation effort that I disagree with. I think that he expanded the parameters by which people would be deported from this country that I think might have not been necessary. Just like misdemeanors and smaller crimes like jumping over turnstiles could get you deported and things like that, and I just thought that we should be going after violent criminals, and the people that are really causing harm in this country.

**Ben Max**  
That was actually going to be my question. You keep saying deport criminals, is it all crimes? Do you have a line of severity?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I do. If it’s something that should get a desk ticket, you jumped over a turnstile, and things like that, I don’t think that those are things that we should be deporting people for.

**Myles Miller**  
How do you get past the very nature of federal law that there’s the crime of reentry?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I just principally disagree with it. The whole premise of that law. I just think that it’s something that we shouldn’t be doing in this country, and I would work to legislate it, to solve for it, and have a conversation about it. I think when people are struggling and they’re hurting, this country should be a country that receives those types of people. It’s been a country that’s always done that, but now because people look like me, now it’s a conversation we want to have that’s a lot different than when the Italians and the Irish people were getting here. I just think that we have a whole different—

**Josh Greenman**  
Deportationfor only violent crimes, what about significant financial crimes?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Significant financial crimes as well, yes. White-collar crimes as well, yes.

**Ben Smith**  
Can I go back to Venezuela for a second, and then Harry had something about your opponent. A lot of Venezuelan exiles in Brooklyn, I think right now feel cautiously optimistic about what Trump did, even if they were initially pleased to have Maduro out, political prisoners released, and I’m sure you talked about things like that. What do you say to them?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I’ll give you another story, because there’s all going to be stories here. There’s 1,000 Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, came to the Dominican Republic. It was one of the few countries in the entire world that accepted Jews from the Holocaust to save them. They got there, and now you go to Sosúa, and you’ll see a thriving Jewish community, and we made it their home. The circumstances by which they got there were horrible because Trujillo in that time had a war— not a war, a massacre of 20,000 Haitians along the border. He was about to get international sanctions imparted on him by the international community for him.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
He also wanted white people to come into the country, right?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yes, but he didn’t negotiate bringing the Jews to evade the Holocaust. Then the international community was like, “None of us want to take the Jewish people. Give it to Trujillo and we don’t give him sanctions, but he’s going to have to take 100,000 Jewish people.” So he agreed to 100,000 Jewish people being able to come to the Dominican Republic. Only 1,000 of them made it, which is a sad, sad story, but those 1,000 people’s lives forever changed in a positive way.

Venezuela— And I say that because, one, the hardships and the economic problems in Venezuela, I think were orchestrated by the United States. They put in a fire, and then they’re trying to put it out. Maduro being gone is a great thing. I don’t think that that’s something that many people would argue against, but if you think for one second that Trump’s interest was the liberation of the Venezuelan people, then you’ve got to be out of your mind. I tell them, “Yes, you got Maduro out, but what was left over? The same regime, the vice president is still in charge, nothing has changed systematically in there, but it gives them an opportunity to enter, rebuild the oil infrastructure in Venezuela, and be able to extract like colonists do, extract like the United States and its imperialistic energy.” To Venezuelan people, congratulations on Maduro, but the circumstances haven’t changed one bit, and so I just think that they’re wrong.

I just say that story because good things could happen under the guy, or terrible things happen, and you can see a silver lining in it, and this is an example of that.

**Harry Siegel**  
So, you have two opponents in the race, neither of them are from New York City originally. One of them was raised in Texas, and is a member of the DSA, that your predecessor \[Eric Adams\], as borough president described as like a group of gentrifiers and transplants. [City and State wrote](https://www.cityandstateny.com/personality/2026/02/respectfully-antonio-reynoso-brooklyn/411258/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that your race is, “The latest referendum on who is a real New Yorker, and who has the right to represent the district in Congress?” How do you want the voters in your district thinking about all that?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Yeah,I don’t like the conversation of what makes you a real New Yorker. I’m an OG New Yorker. I’ve been here a long time, so I feel like I’ve been here a long time, and the time just makes it so that I’m a New Yorker from a long time ago, but if you’re new here, and you just put your roots down, and you’re about to start your life here, you’re a New Yorker too. I don’t want to make that about that.

The problem I have is that when I was organizing for ACORN, and helping childcare providers be a part of the UFT, that was 20 years ago. The people that are now in this city that are about to vote, 20 years ago were like four years old. They don’t know my history. They don’t know that work that I’ve done. Their political lifespan is like five years or four years. What I’m contending with is doing the best I can to inform, educate, get my message out there to let them know that I was doing a lot of work while you were in middle school, and high school, that is deeply meaningful to the movement that you care about and that’s something that I got to work toward. My thing is less about whether they’re transplants, or whatever it is, it’s just like: effective leadership, it exists here, I’ve done it, I’ve been a part of that, and I’m hoping that when June 23rd comes, I’m the choice that they make.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
For most of your life, you’ve been represented in Congress by the same person, Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez. More than 30 years in Congress. Do you think there’s something wrong with that?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
It’s a double-sided sword. Sometimes there is, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes having somebody that understands the community deeply, that understands its history, people that are effective, I think it adds a lot of value. You can tell Nydia about any block in the district, and she knows exactly what it is, who lives there, and all the troubles that that block has had, and there’s value in that. Then there’s other elected officials that just win because of name recognition, and incumbency, that don’t do work and that haven’t been effective, and I think that there should be a way to take them out. I would say this, I don’t necessarily think it’s a problem. What I do think is a problem is that we don’t have a public financing system in Congress to allow for younger people that don’t have money to be able to have a shot at being able to run against incumbents that we might not like.

**Josh Greenman**  
What’s her biggest accomplishment?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Nydia’s biggest accomplishment? I think Nydia’s biggest accomplishment really came from when she was the ranking member and the chair of the small business committee during COVID. Nydia did a lot of work in unlocking a ton of grant money and funding to businesses all over the country. She was central in that work. If you look at the bills or the policies passed by Nydia Velázquez during COVID, you will see that she earmarked for extremely small businesses, small businesses of people like Green Card holders, and just looking for ways to close the gap, and allow for non-corporate style businesses to get a shot at being able to survive COVID, and not just these large corporations and these big banks getting bailouts. I think that that’s one of her biggest accomplishments in the small business committee.

**Ben Max**  
Coming back to the prior part of the conversation, why weren’t you able to convince the mayor, given the track record you were talking about, to stay out of this race or support you or push the DSA to stand down? They’ve obviously recruited into the race someone who’s sort-of a movement figure who hasn’t been around very long—

**Antonio Reynoso**  
A movement figure?

**Ben Max**  
Yeah, a figure of their movement, of like a DSA organizer figure—

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I think this is also something that’s like a lot of insider baseball stuff here when it comes to this issue.

**Myles Miller**  
We want to hear it.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I would love to tell it but, let me see. I’m going to tell you as much as I can.

**Myles Miller**  
It’s the reason you’ve come here.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
How was that conversation when you sat down with the mayor and you were like—

**Antonio Reynoso**  
It wasn’t good.

No, no, I was going to come out before he did that, so it was like a Monday, I was going to say that I was running for Congress on a Tuesday. He called me Monday and he was like, “We need to meet quickly.” I was like, “Sure, no problem.” He was like, “Oh, I want to talk to you about other opportunities you may have that are not running for Congress.” I was like, “I don’t think that’s going to work. This is something that I really want to do. I’ve been talking to Nydia about it. I’ve been born and raised in this community. I think it’d really mean a lot for me to get your support in this race.”

He was like, “Well, I think I’m going to go somewhere else.” He mentioned Claire, and I really don’t know Claire. I was like, “Claire Valdez?” He says, “Yes.” I was like, “Well, I don’t think Nydia knows her. I don’t think a lot of people in the community know her. I don’t know her, so I just think that maybe we should think about whether or not she’s the best person for this seat,” but he was convinced.

I think what ended up happening is he went against Chi Ossé on Hakeem Jeffries, he went against Alexa Avilés in supporting Brad Lander. I think the Darializa-Espaillat conversation is going to be something very interesting. He’s running out of opportunities to push back against the DSA. He needed to throw them a bone. This is an open seat, it’s not an incumbent. He’s not going against me, he’s supporting the DSA. I think that’s how he saw an out.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
What other opportunities did he offer?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
No, he didn’t offer opportunities. Every time I do things like that— I want to be honest to you, I tried to play that type of game twice in my life in politics, and both times it went terribly wrong. I just don’t try to do that.

**Ben Smith**  
Can you tell those stories?

**Myles Miller**  
Give us one example, come on.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I almost compromised trying to build relationships on the issue of styrofoam in the City Council. Somebody in the City Council’s policy division told us that it’s recyclable. I was like, “There’s no way.” They went to Ohio and saw a styrofoam factory, brought back a brick, and were like, “Look, this is what you can do with it.” I was like, “Oh, man.” I was getting a lot of pressure from people to make styrofoam a recyclable entity in New York City. I’m an environmental justice person. I was like, “There’s no way.” There was a court case happening, and the court case was going to determine whether or not styrofoam was recyclable or not.

I had a hearing on it. It was a terrible hearing because it just reaffirmed that I shouldn’t be doing this. We were going to put it up for a vote, maybe three weeks later. The hearing came out two weeks before that vote, and the judge said it’s not recyclable, and it saved my life. It’s just an example of me trying to be nice to people I care about or that care about me. It’s just like, always just do what’s in your heart, what’s in your conscience. If I would’ve done that, it would’ve discredited my entire environmental justice, who I am at my core. I was almost willing to do that. I was just thinking back, “Be careful.”

And voting against the budget when there was too much money going into the police department was an example of me just voting my conscience and being who I am, regardless of the politics and the play.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
What did it mean that the mayor told you, like, “Oh, you shouldn’t run for Congress,” knowing that you wanted to run for Congress since you were a little kid?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
He doesn’t know that. Zohran just met me.

**Juan-Manuel Benitez**  
What did it mean to you?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
What do you mean?

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
When the mayor, who you supported really early in his campaign last year, said, “Oh, you shouldn’t run for Congress.” Knowing what running for Congress meant to you, personally.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I don’t think he knows me. I don’t think he knows what my history is. I think I was good enough to be in citywide Spanish media for him. I was good enough to do a commercial in all of Brooklyn for him, supporting his candidacy. I think that we were aligned because I’m a WFP pup, I’m a kid that’s always been with the WFP. He’s seen a lot of the progressive work that I’ve done, and he knows me as Antonio, maybe that way as a politician, but he doesn’t know my history. He doesn’t know where I come from. I think maybe to him, one, he thinks that I could be transactional in that way and offered me an opportunity to do something different, and found out that that’s not who I am. Or two, he maybe didn’t think I cared about this enough, and that it was something that we could figure out in another way.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think that’s a political flaw of his? Do you think he’s disloyal?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I think he is disloyal. And I want to say this, not to me so much. He’s DSA, he’s loyal to the DSA. I respect that. I’m not going to be mad at that.

I think it’s what he did to Nydia more so than me. I think he’s doing what he’s got to do for his people, and he doesn’t need to be with me, and it doesn’t bother me one bit. Even if I endorsed him, I get it. I think Nydia was asking him to sit down and come to an agreement and saying, “Hey, it doesn’t need to be Antonio.” I’ll be honest, I’ll tell you right now that I was hearing through the grapevine that she thought that \[City Council Member\] Tiffany Cabán was the compromise.

And that she \[Nyida Velazquez\] went and said that the amount of political capital that she will have to expend to get me out of the race and then communicate to the people of this district that I’m not the one, because she’s going to have to do damage control on that because a lot of people want me to run and care about me. She was like, “I’ll do all that work because I think we have a Puerto Rican woman and a DSA candidate, and a DSA member, and we could combine it. And my history with Antonio and how much he knows I care about Puerto Rican representation and leadership, and women representation, I think I can make that pitch to him. I’ll sacrifice all that to find a compromise here, to build as a partnership.” And he said no to her. She was the first Congresswoman to endorse him before any of the DSA Congresspeople.

**Ben Max**  
You would have stood down in that situation?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I don’t know, but I respect Nydia so much that I wanted to have that conversation. I want to be honest, I don’t know if I win that race necessarily. I’m not stupid. I know what this is. Now unions, the WFP, a lot of the electeds that supported me, now it’s all up for grabs. Tiffany Cabán has a lot of history here, has done a lot of good work. She is a legitimate person that when you hear her name, you know she’s done a lot of work. Claire Valdez was supposed to be the labor candidate, and I have all the labor, and she’s still pushing that she’s the labor candidate. I am the labor candidate.

My thing is, with him, he should have had a conversation with her. He wouldn’t have had a fight; he would have had a DSA victory, he would have still been friends with all of us, with Nydia, and all of them. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now.

**Ben Max**  
You come out of reform politics in Brooklyn, you’ve been at this so long, DSA is relatively new. Many people see you as the underdog in this race.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I am the underdog.

**Ben Max**  
You have all the labor, you have Nydia, you’ve been working in Brooklyn politics forever now. How is that possible? Isn’t that a failing of you and Nydia?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
No.

**Ben Max**  
How can you be the underdog then, if you have all the labor, you have the Congresswoman, you’ve been doing all this work?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I want to say this: the average age of the voting population in the district is 34 years old — 34 years old is the average age of this district. Over 51% or 52% of this district have less than 10 years living in the district. This is a significantly gentrified community that has really changed over the years. Of which, many of those people have supported me. Zohran Mamdani is a celebrity-status, inspiring figure at the levels of AOC and Bernie Sanders. He is a movement and is deeply important.

If it was just me and Claire and Zohran doesn’t endorse her, we’re not even having this conversation. It’s over, but Zohran means something. He is deeply popular. He has like an 80% favorability rating in this district. This district was the one he won with the biggest margin against Andrew Cuomo, 70% to 22%. Those are real statistics. That’s why it’s a toss-up. That’s why it’s going to be a tight race. It’s because we have those people that don’t know me from the Right to Know Act; don’t know me from Commercial Waste Zones; Black maternal health is not something that was central to the work that they were doing; fighting against county party in that time is not something they saw. Founding NKD \[New Kings Democrats\], working for ACORN, none of that stuff is—

They’re voting for the first time, many of them, 34 years old. This is their first big election for a lot of these people. It’s not so much my record or failure of media, and all that stuff. I won this district by like 82% when I ran for borough president. People very clearly liked me in this district. Now, I’m going against Zohran Mamdani’s popularity, and that is a real thing.

**Christina Greer**  
How has your strategy changed? Claire Valdez, she’s got the big celebrities who come into town, some may or may not \[live\] in the district. She’s got Bernie Sanders on the front of her website. How has your campaign strategy changed this time around?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
It hasn’t changed. The people that are going to elect me are very diverse and broad. While they’re having a glitzy fundraiser, I’m having 100 people meeting with Lindsay Park and talking to those residents in the Mitchell-Lama. I was at MUNA talking to Bangladeshi immigrants in Cypress Hills. Talking to the Hasidim about issues that are important to them and whether or not I would be the person that they would be interested in. Talking about long-term Dominicans that we need to get from 6% to 8% in voting population. I’m just death by 1,000 paper cuts.

I’m moving through this district, meeting a ton of people and building a coalition of the other, to challenge the population that’s going to be voting for her. I want to be clear. When you see the people that are supporting me, when you get into the victory party, or you see anything that I’m doing, all these people are Black, brown, poor folks. Every single NYCHA tenant association president has endorsed me. Even the ones in Queens that represent them. I got supported by Queensbridge houses. Ravenswood has a 501c3, so they can’t officially endorse, but go ask their leadership what they think about me.

These are people that I met through the campaign trail because I never represented them. What I’m doing, I’m going to all the places that people traditionally don’t go. I’m going to be in NYCHA, I’m going to be in the poor neighborhoods, I’m going to do it the hard way, and I’m excited about it. I think my team has been excited about it, and we’re going to show people when it’s over.

**Myles Miller**  
I was just wondering if you could quickly talk about the changing demographic of Hispanic representation in New York. You are going up against another Hispanic person, but I think when you look at the assembly and those races, it looked much different than what they were in the last 10, 15 years.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
I pride myself--

**Christina Greer**  
Is she Hispanic?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
She’s Mexican. Univision wants to have a debate, and we’re really looking forward to being able to have that debate with her on Univision. We’ll see…we’ve agreed to it. We’re seeing if she wants to do that. Also, NY1 wants to have a debate; we’re really excited, and we’re hoping that she wants to be there too. We want to be in as many debates as we possibly can be.

**Myles Miller**  
Do you think you’re banking on Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in Williamsburg and the surrounding areas?

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Everybody. All other. The Chinese population in Lindsay Park, the Black population in the southern portion of the district in Fort Greene, the middle-class white population in Concord Village — everywhere, everybody. We’re going after everybody. If we don’t do that, and we don’t get the numbers up in those areas, we’re not going to win this race. It’s what I have to do. Latino representation. I say this, that I pride myself on being somebody that has been elected to office, not through identity politics. The only way that Latinos are really— we talk about Latinos citywide. Freddie Ferrer is the last shot we got at a citywide elected official really doing some work.

It happened because Freddie was resonating outside of his identity. Latinos are not going to win. Of course, we’re going to win in Washington Heights and in the South Bronx because that’s where all of us live. Are we going to have representatives that are winning outside of those demographics because of their policy and their work, and then being able to build a coalition with them as well, an identity, long-term? What I tell a lot of these elected officials that are Latino is, “Hey, those are your people. If you’re in a majority Latino district, make sure that people see you in them, but you have to build a record outside of identity so that you can have an opportunity outside of that.”

\[City Council Member\] Chris Marte has done that and is an example of somebody that’s not representing a largely Latino community. We have these moments in this political world where we’re starting to move away from identity politics, and I think that’s deeply important for us to do.

**Ben Smith**  
Thank you so much for taking the time.

**Antonio Reynoso**  
Thank you. I’ll see you guys in the tweet comments on all this stuff.
### The Voting Rights Act in New York City
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/voting-rights-act-nyc-supreme-court/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:30:55.000Z
Coverage of the Supreme Court’s decision last week to undo Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — a ruling that will make it more difficult to create “majority-minority” voting districts — has focused on its effects on minority representation in the South. Specifically, commentators have shone a spotlight on how the Act has uprooted deeply racist voting practices in places like Louisiana, where the current challenge had been playing out.

Even New Yorkers deeply disturbed by the ruling likely comforted themselves in part with the thought that they at least live in a state where the just and heavy hand of the federal government was not needed to keep racist voting rules at bay. That self-assurance was no doubt reinforced if they were lucky enough to have seen Bryan Cranston’s Tony Award-winning portrayal of Lyndon Johnson’s megalomaniac machinations to pass the bill, which focused almost entirely on uprooting anti-Black voter suppression in the former Confederacy.

That view of this crucial federal legislation is far too narrow. Indeed, virtually every core element of New York City’s current governmental structure has been shaped by New York City itself being subject to that very same Voting Rights Act. Not in 1965 or in 1969, but in the late 1980s.

I should know. Because as a junior, just-out-of-college staffer to the 1988 and 1989 New York City Charter Revision Commissions led first by Richard Ravitch and then Frederick A. O. Schwarz, it was my responsibility to compile, photocopy and collate our submission to the Justice Department for pre-clearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. All 20,000 pages of it.

Because of its past history of discriminatory voting practices in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx (specifically, English literacy tests in the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections, combined with low turnout), New York City needed federal approval, or “preclearance,” before changing any voting laws in any of those “covered” counties. And thanks to a unanimous 9-0 [Supreme Court ruling](https://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/23/nyregion/justices-void-new-york-city-s-government-demand-voter-equality-in-all-boroughs.html?searchResultPosition=16&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on March 22, 1989, in [Board of Estimate v. Morris](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/489/688/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), New York City’s voting laws needed to change, big time. The problem was that the city’s distinctive and all-powerful quasi-legislative body, the Board of Estimate, which made virtually every major decision and approved every City contract and land use action, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, specifically the principle of one-person, one-vote.

Created when the five boroughs consolidated as a single city in 1898 and amended a few years later to add Borough Presidents, the Board of Estimate’s structure was designed in part to balance citywide and borough interests. Along with citywide elected officials who each had two votes, each borough president had one vote. But as the plaintiff’s lawyer Richard Emery noted, there was a problem, one that New York’s political establishment chose to ignore for almost a century: It wildly distorted an individual voter’s power. Staten Island’s borough president, who represented 350,000 people, had the same voting power as Brooklyn’s borough president, who represented 2.2 million people. Ditto for voter dilution in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx.

While the Voting Rights Act was not central to the Supreme Court decision, it became an [essential lens](https://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/25/nyregion/planners-must-satisfy-voting-law-in-the-shifting-of-municipal-power.html?searchResultPosition=2&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) through which any new form of government and decision-making would be viewed. It was not lost on people that Staten Island’s population was far less diverse than the more populous boroughs, adding another layer of inequity to be remedied beyond the mathematically simple issue of one-person, one-vote.

A central issue was what to do with the City Council, an entity so lacking in gravitas and power that onetime at-large Councilman Henry Stern said that it was “less than a rubber stamp because a rubber stamp at least leaves an impression.”

The first step in that Charter revision was to give it more power, including many of the legislative and land-use powers the Board of Estimate had held. And since some of the other Board powers, such as the approval of contracts, were more logically shifted to the executive branch, the traditional legislative oversight powers seen at the national and state level needed to be enhanced as well.

Hand in hand with the question of how to empower the Council in a manner consistent with federal antidiscrimination law was the question of how diverse it would be. The existing Council consisted of 35 equally populated districts; 10 additional at-large borough seats, two representing each of the five boroughs, had been eliminated in a 1983 charter revision. It became clear that the recent elimination of the at-large seats was not enough to create a more diverse and locally-responsible legislative body and that the overall number of equally-populated council districts needed to significantly increase. Staff conducted [detailed research](https://www.proquest.com/docview/208169508?parentSessionId=TzY1iQyyumXBD11YcZRkST%2FnpnxoGALDzD16QKmfY4A%3D&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (to which I was lucky enough to contribute) and after considerable deliberation, the Commission decided to increase the number of Council seats to 51, holding populations constant across the districts. While many voices feared strengthening a body with a lackluster record and reputation, others recognized that a reconstituted body had the power to significantly [alter the racial balance of power](https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/06/weekinreview/the-region-recasting-city-council-to-make-room-for-more-minority-voices.html?searchResultPosition=7&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the city. A significant coalition of groups representing minority interests, led by then-Bronx Borough President Freddy Ferrer, feared that the provisions would result in an “imperial mayor.” Ferrer called the proposed revisions a [“gross infringement of the Voting Rights Act”](https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/04/nyregion/ferrer-to-fight-charter-plan-at-the-justice-department.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and vowed to challenge them at the Justice Department. 

As a junior staffer I knew that my writing and thinking had a minimal impact on the Commission’s work. Arguably it was my physical work — my brawn rather than my brain — that mattered more and which also signalled how very seriously the Commission and its staff took the Voting Rights preclearance process. Across multiple volumes and more than 20,000 pages, I had to help catalogue, collate, index and copy every single transcript, piece of testimony, research memo, legal brief, sign-in sheet, legislative history and angry letter from disrespected machine pols to Staten Island secessionists. 

At the end of the day, the Justice Department reviewed what the New York Times called [“a small truckload of documents”](https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/03/realestate/assessing-new-york-s-charter-change.html?searchResultPosition=2&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and found that the proposed charter revisions passed legal muster, at least through the lens of the Voting Rights Act. Interestingly, because of the compressed time frame after the Supreme Court decision in the spring of an election year, that approval didn’t come until *after* the voters had had their say, approving the charter changes in November 1989 by approximately 55% to 45%. While those approvals resulted in the most significant changes in New York City’s governance in 90 years, what far more New Yorkers recall about that historic election was the mayor’s race: David Dinkins defeated Rudy Giuliani by a much slimmer margin to become the city’s first black mayor. In a single day, through the mayoral election and the Charter referendum, the racial balance of power in New York City changed dramatically. Four years later, David Dinkins lost to Rudy Giuliani, but the newly empowered and more racially diverse Council was here to stay, thanks to the Voting Rights Act.
### A Different Waymo Future Is Possible
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/waymo-nyc-robotaxi-future/
Last updated: 2026-05-07T14:06:32.000Z
In some sunbelt cities, robotaxis are becoming part of everyday life. In Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco, you can ride a Waymo to your destination with no human behind the wheel. But [not](https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2025-07-24/driverless-cars-run-into-resistance-at-boston-city-council?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [yet](https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-hits-a-rough-patch-in-washington-dc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the Northeast.

 In New York, robotaxis are stalled. In January, Gov. Kathy Hochul [proposed](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-unveils-proposals-fuel-innovation-and-create-good-paying-jobs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) legislation to authorize pilot programs for robotaxis. Her plan would have required companies to obtain the approval of local communities before deploying robotaxis, and it excluded New York City entirely. But even this incremental approach proved too controversial. In February, Hochul [withdrew](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/nyregion/new-york-robotaxi-upstate-hochul.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) her proposal. 

At the same time, there is a [bill](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7390/text?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) moving through Congress that would preempt much state regulation of robotaxis and other forms of automated driving. A House committee already [voted](https://www.youtube.com/live/FrwkCCiUDfU?t=3906s&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to advance the bill. If the bill becomes law, it could deprive states and cities of their say over many of the rules that govern these new technologies on their streets.

As one of us recently [testified](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bm7f95ZxZY&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to Congress, we believe both in the potential of automated driving and in the [imperative](https://newlypossible.org/files/2026SenateAnswers.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of community control. Robotaxis could transform cities for the better — but only if policymakers steer them in the right direction. In a new [paper](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=5595951&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), we argue that robotaxi policy should have three goals: (1) improving safety, (2) reducing externalities and (3) protecting the public.

First, robotaxis must realize their [potential](https://ssrn.com/abstract=2923240?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to make the roads safer. Robotaxis can avoid many of the errors that lead human drivers to crash. When designed and deployed carefully, they follow speed limits, obey stop signs and traffic lights, and yield the right of way more consistently than human drivers. But they can also make errors that most human drivers wouldn’t make. They have driven around stopped [school buses](https://www.reuters.com/world/us-safety-board-opens-probe-into-waymo-robotaxis-passing-stopped-school-buses-2026-01-23/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), steered into [flooded roads](https://carbonandcode.substack.com/p/i-almost-crashed-in-a-waymo) and crashed into a [telephone pole](https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2024/RCLRPT-24E049-1733.PDF?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

[Credible peer-reviewed work](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15389588.2025.2499887?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by [Waymo](https://waymo.com/safety/impact/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the leading US robotaxi company, suggests that its robotaxis are involved in far fewer injury crashes than humans driving in comparable conditions. Independent safety researchers should thoroughly engage with Waymo’s data, methodologies and conclusions. And it’s too early to say that robotaxis are saving lives: Even Waymo has not driven [enough miles](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research%5Freports/RR1400/RR1478/RAND%5FRR1478.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and one catastrophic crash could negate years of safety statistics. But these early results are encouraging, particularly given the tragic status quo on our streets.

State legislators can help regulators and the public learn more about robotaxi safety by requiring that companies report crashes. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) already [mandates](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=4190688&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) crash reporting at the federal level. But NHTSA lets companies redact important information. New York can fill this gap by requiring companies to report crashes and miles driven not just within its borders, but in any state or country where they operate. And for serious crashes, regulators should require companies to share video, with personally identifiable information obscured. As recent events have [illustrated](https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000010631041/minneapolis-ice-shooting-video.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), video has credibility that a narrative crafted by an interested party can’t provide. 

Then, state and local regulators should use crash reports to monitor safety. If a crash suggests deeper problems with a company’s technology, regulators should investigate. If they determine a company is creating an unreasonable risk, they should order it off the roads.

Safety is about more than just avoiding crashes. For example, in December, a blackout in San Francisco caused many of the city’s traffic lights to go dark. As a result, robotaxis got [stranded](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/us/waymo-suspended-service-in-san-francisco-after-problems-during-power-outage.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the streets. Waymo [explained](https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/autonomously-navigating-the-real-world?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that its software was designed to check in with a remote assistant before proceeding past a non-functional traffic light, and the blackout caused the remote assistants to be overwhelmed. This incident [shows](https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2025/12/on-waymos-traffic-jams/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that regulators need to stress-test companies’ emergency planning proactively. How will a company respond in the event of a hurricane, a riot or a cyberattack? Will their fleets be sufficient to help in an evacuation?

Robotaxis are not really “driverless”: Their drivers are the companies that develop and deploy them. State regulators accustomed to licensing human drivers should similarly have the power to license these corporate drivers, to enforce traffic laws against them — including fines — and to require a sufficient corporate presence in the state.

Second, regulation should ensure that robotaxis don’t impose unfair costs on third parties. Here, regulators face hard tradeoffs. All motor vehicles cause pollution and congestion. The deployment of robotaxis could be an opportunity to reduce those externalities because it’s politically [easier](https://ssrn.com/abstract=3463827?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to regulate a few companies deploying a novel technology than millions of drivers who are accustomed to roads being free. That’s why states have been able to require robotaxi companies to have more insurance than most human drivers would. But at the same time, imposing costs on robotaxis but not personal vehicle owners could distort consumer choices. Robotaxis should be able to fairly compete against other modes, including, eventually, individually owned automated vehicles.

On pollution, the good news is that today’s robotaxis are all battery electric vehicles. The bad news is that, even though electric vehicles have no tailpipes, they still generate pollution from upstream energy use and [tire emissions](https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemicals?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). We would mandate that all automated vehicles use batteries or an alternative fuel to prevent backsliding and then use broad-based environmental regulation to address these other emissions sources.

Congestion can’t be [“solved,”](https://ssrn.com/abstract=2303907?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) but robotaxis could help or hurt. Robotaxi fleets should be utilized more productively than ordinary cars — they shouldn’t spend most of the day depreciating in parking garages. But if robotaxis make car travel more convenient, there will be more car trips. Policymakers should therefore integrate robotaxis into congestion pricing systems, like New York’s [successful](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-22/nyc-congestion-pricing-is-the-controversial-program-working?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) program, treating them like regular taxis or Ubers. They should also charge all vehicles-for-hire a per-mile fee between rides, so the companies internalize the costs of circling the streets waiting for passengers. 

Robotaxis could also create a new kind of externality — [surveillance](https://ssrn.com/abstract=5034907?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The sensors they use to perceive objects in their environment passively record their surroundings. And that means every person within range is being recorded too. In some cases, that sensor data could help cities [detect](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/waymo-robotaxi-autonomous-driving-nyc/) potholes or investigate crimes. We have no objection to companies disclosing data when investigators obtain a valid warrant. But we are concerned that robotaxi companies are already [sharing](https://www.vice.com/en/article/san-francisco-police-are-using-driverless-cars-as-mobile-surveillance-cameras/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) video data voluntarily. Companies have strong incentives to do favors for law enforcement and little incentive to protect bystander privacy. Policymakers need to set rules about how robotaxi companies can use privacy-sensitive data, when they can share it, and when they must delete it.

Third, regulators need to protect the public, including those who want to ride and those who do not. The easiest way to keep prices low and service quality high is to encourage competition, both among robotaxi companies and across travel modes. If Waymo raises its fares today, riders can easily switch to a bus, a taxi, or an Uber. But what if fares fall and robotaxis start to outcompete other modes? The transportation market could become highly concentrated. Robotaxis benefit from network effects — the more riders on a network, the less time each vehicle spends deadheading between rides. So larger networks can be more profitable. That’s why the ride-hailing market became an Uber-Lyft [duopoly](https://toddwschneider.com/dashboards/nyc-taxi-ridehailing-uber-lyft-data/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). A similar dynamic could emerge for robotaxis. How can we protect riders if a few robotaxi companies come to dominate our transportation system?

Imagine you had a friend who was moving to New York from Texas. Suppose you were trying to convince her that she wouldn’t need a car to live here. You would explain that the subway runs 24/7, that it covers most of the city, and that the fare is always three dollars. You could say that because the subway is a public service, the MTA isn’t trying to squeeze every last penny out of its riders. But a private company might stand to gain from taking advantage of riders who come to rely on its service. Indeed, there is evidence that Uber’s increasing profitability has been fueled by [algorithms that tailor prices](https://len-sherman.medium.com/how-uber-became-a-cash-generating-machine-ef78e7a97230?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to individual riders.

Regulators should ban personalized pricing for fares in robotaxis as well as conventional ride-hails. Every rider who requests the same trip at the same time in the same mode should get the same fare. Robotaxi companies will almost certainly record every trip's origin, destination, time and fare; regulators should have access to the same data for the limited purpose of detecting personalized pricing. If a robotaxi company acquires monopoly power and starts to raise its fares across the board, regulators should impose utility regulation. We expect that the companies won’t love these proposals, yet we think they might encourage robotaxi adoption. People might be much more willing to give up their cars if they know companies can’t take advantage of them.

Robotaxis should be accessible. The industry has long argued that robotaxis will give new freedom to people with disabilities. Regulators should hold companies to their promises. They could require that robotaxi designs be [accessible](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/09/20/cruise-shows-origin-robotaxi-with-wheelchair-ramp-many-disabled-options-possible/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for people who use wheelchairs and other commonly used mobility devices. Or if that’s impractical, they could impose accessibility requirements on each company, create a market similar to emissions trading, and then monitor wait times and fares to ensure that people who need accessible vehicles experience service comparable to other riders.

Our proposals for regulation don’t address all the policy issues that robotaxis raise, including their effect on employment. It’s also understandable that residents of transit-rich cities like New York are more skeptical of robotaxis than residents of car-dependent cities like Phoenix. We, too, are fans of public transit — one of us commutes on the subway (and the other bikes to work). We doubt that robotaxis will make high-throughput transit obsolete. At least on our current streets, a fleet of robotaxis couldn’t move as many people from Harlem to Midtown on Lexington Avenue nearly as effectively as the subway underneath it.

But not every transit line is like the Lexington Avenue subway. Wide swaths of New York City, let alone other parts of the state, are served only by buses that run infrequently. In these areas, the deployment of robotaxis could expand mobility. And to the extent robotaxis do replace low-throughput transit, state and local governments should subsidize rides for people with low incomes.

In the long run, robotaxis could change the transportation system for the better. They could make the roads safer for cyclists and pedestrians. They could expand mobility for people who aren’t well served by transit. They could enable denser development outside of downtowns. And in the long run, they might obviate the need for parking, which will allow us to liberate urban land from cars.

This future won’t arrive if we give the industry a blank check *or* shut it out. We need to get to work on regulation.
### 8 Policy Tweaks City Hall Can Make to Speed Up the Permitting Process
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-housing-permits-fast-track-construction-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T14:58:08.000Z
*As Mayor Zohran Mamdani himself seems to understand, the job of mayor is about more than laying out grand visions. It’s about improving small- and medium-bore management to make New York’s government work better.* [***Just Fix It***](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/just-fix-it/) *is Vital City's running list of concrete, nonideological ways to unstick the gears of city government and make it work better for all New Yorkers.*

*The pace of building things is a top contender, especially given the administration’s understandable focus on producing more housing. It can take one to two years for as-of-right development to acquire the appropriate permits. For the biggest and most complex projects — those requiring rezonings or other discretionary city approvals —* [*three years can pass*](https://cbcny.org/research/improving-new-york-citys-land-use-decision-making-process?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *between the first application and final city sign-off. And that’s before construction even commences.* [*Recent research*](https://x.com/aarmlovi/status/2036899627748806898?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email) *found that each year saved would shave roughly 5% to 8% off the total price tag. And with the city facing a historic housing shortage and growing calls to build infrastructure of all kinds, every minute counts.* 

*The problem has been getting a good deal of attention and action in recent years. In November, voters gave the City’s protracted land-use process — which takes projects two-and-a-half years, on average, to get through — a speed boost for certain projects. A push underway in Albany to reform the state’s environmental review process (SEQR) could put a* [*particularly big dent*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-seqra-slows-housing-development-new-york/) *in reducing timelines. And early announcements from the Mamdani administration, like an interagency task force to* [*hasten*](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/executive-order-05?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=The%20SPEED%20Task%20Force%20shall,Department%20of%20Buildings%2C%20the%20Department) *affordable housing production, are encouraging. “This administration is willing to move at the speed of need to make this a city New Yorkers can continue to call home,” the mayor* [*said*](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/03/mamdani-administration-launches-new-program-to-deliver-affordabl?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *at a recent press conference.*

*But there are other moves that City Hall can make to speed things up. This column lays out eight.*

---

### 1) Streamline agency reviews

**The problem:** Permitting approval is subject to a series of wholly separate agency reviews, which stretches timelines.

**The Mamdani administration should:** Enforce maximum permitting periods so no one agency can hold up the process.

**The fine print:** From pre-filing to occupancy, a building’s permit needs sign-off from a total of 10-plus city agencies, including the Department of Buildings (DOB), the Department of City Planning (DCP), the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Fire Department (FDNY) and others. Projects cannot advance to the next phase until the green light is given from the specific entities involved in that part of the process. 

But each agency follows its own timeline, which is often left to its discretion. Thus, permitting can get stuck in a rotation of reviews with little to no motive to move it along.

---

---

City Hall should hold its own agencies accountable by ensuring that each review adheres to a strict schedule, with timelines set in reasonable accordance with responsibilities. Maximum wait times could be enforced to accelerate reviews — for example, DOT could be given a certain number of months to conduct its traffic analysis, and a sewer sign-off from DEP could take days, not weeks. Or else face consequences.

Other cities and states have shown what potential nudges exist. In Minnesota, zoning applications are [automatically approved](https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/4/22/a-permit-process-should-never-take-a-year-heres-a-different-way?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=A%20Permit%20Process%20Should%20Never,Year.%20Here's%20a%20Different%20Way.&text=First%2C%20the%2060%2Dday%20time%20limit,codes%20and%20processes%20that%20are) if an agency doesn’t respond within 60 days, and a request for extension must be justified in writing. Pennsylvania's [PAyback program](https://payback.pa.gov/Home/Who?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) refunds applicants’ permit fees when state agencies miss their statutory review deadlines. The City of New York should immediately explore the options available to get its agencies working together, and on deadline.

### 2) Get rid of redundancies

**The problem:** Siloed processes and overlapping jurisdictions lead to repetitive, time-consuming inspections.

**The Mamdani administration should:** Conduct an exhaustive review of the city’s permitting process for redundant approvals.

**The fine print:** Each city agency is empowered to review projects under a specific legal code, but agencies rely on systems that are unable to communicate with one another and share findings in real time. The result of those blurry lines and inadequate information-sharing is that officials sometimes carry out tasks that mirror work that came before or after.

Case in point: Currently, two city agencies review buildings for fire safety — the Fire Department and the Department of Buildings — and both under separate codes. A process meant to be concurrent is often fragmented; first it’s FDNY, then DOB and then FDNY again, but not until DOB has approved plans. Re-inspection can take months, and is rife with issues: In late 2024 and early 2025, two former fire chiefs [pled guilty](https://nypost.com/2025/01/29/us-news/second-ex-fdny-chief-pleads-guilty-in-200k-bribery-scheme/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to creating a “VIP lane” for building inspections in exchange for bribes, with developers hiring illicit ‘expediters’ to secure approval.

In recent years, the FDNY deployed new technology and revamped hiring practices for fire inspections. The results were promising — wait times eventually [fell](https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2024/01/nyc-touts-faster-fire-inspections-new-report/393718/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from 18 weeks to four weeks, according to City Hall— but were later reversed by budget cuts and political setbacks from City Hall. Efforts like that should be revived and furthered. 

Similar to the work of the newly designated “chief savings officers” tapped by City Hall, the administration should ask each agency involved in permitting to scan its respective processes for spots to streamline, and deliver responses in the next 90 days. And as we’ve [seen in Guadalajara](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/guadalajara-visor-urbano-permitting/), fully digitizing the process, with a one-stop shop for permits, is long overdue.

### 3) Right-size the traffic studies

**The problem:** No matter the building size, construction requires traffic analyses that haven’t kept up with recent policy changes and mobility advances.

**The Mamdani administration should:** Re-evaluate the criteria for traffic impact studies in terms of location and building size. 

**The fine print:** During the environmental review process, DOT conducts [a study](https://www.dot.ny.gov/CommercialHWP/traffic-impact?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to assess what a proposed development’s impact will be on local traffic flow. For most projects, the analysis can take up to two months.

But the way we get around has changed dramatically, calling into question whether such studies are still needed today. The passage of City of Yes [lifted](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-york-city-needs-a-two-track-mind/) mandatory parking minimums in most of Manhattan, western Queens and northern and western Brooklyn, meaning that future developments sited there will no longer have to provide on-site parking, a major source of vehicular traffic. (They were reduced or diluted elsewhere.) South of 60th Street in Manhattan, where the required analyses are already a lighter touch, congestion pricing prevails and has [substantially reduced](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/one-year-into-congestion-pricing-in-new-york-city/) traffic. Meanwhile, New Yorkers are biking and scooting more than ever before, so the assumption of [a sometimes 1-1 ratio](https://www.arch.columbia.edu/research/labs/15-housing-lab/parking?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of units to parking spaces and potential drivers may not hold the same weight as it once did. Besides, a growing body of evidence [casts doubt](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-06-03/in-killed-by-a-traffic-engineer-a-us-road-planner-pleads-for-reform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the engineering standards the analyses are based on in the first place.

At the same time, fully recognizing that a stadium isn’t the same as a single-family home, City Hall should direct its DOT to “right-size” its traffic code, with limits on buildings with 500 units or below. Reforming SEQR [will help](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/whats-the-deal-with-seqra/) — the city DOT is often following its state counterpart — but the City should explore what’s within its own power to clear the bottlenecks.

### 4) Flex the building code

**The problem:** Most of the city’s building code was written decades ago, with standards that still drive up costs and timelines for construction.

**The Mamdani administration should:** Launch a task force to quickly identify and advance amendments in accordance with international standards and new zoning laws.

**The fine print:** New York City’s Building Code was adopted in 1968\. Heralded then for its modern overhaul of the 1938 edition, it placed [heavier regulations](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-form-density-takes/) on mixed-use and taller buildings. It was then updated in 2008, 2014 and 2022, and a new Existing Building Code goes into effect [next year](https://www.nyc.gov/site/buildings/codes/existing-building-code.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Yet still, New York City’s rules and regulations for buildings are considered some of the most byzantine in the country, especially when compared to European and Asian counterparts with similar densities.

The City should immediately initiate an effort to further modernize its building code to match modern sensibilities and the new zoning rules put into effect by City of Yes.

Here are a few places to start. The live-in super rule, which requires an on-site or nearby hand for buildings with nine or more units, was codified when coal-fired boilers — most of which have since been phased out — had to be monitored 24/7\. The City [regulates](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-high-price-of-fine-print/) the use of certain building materials, like copper for wiring or concrete and steel for building, even though cheaper and more environmentally friendly alternatives — like hemp, recycled plastic and mass timber — exist. Elevators, which once unlocked the potential of skyscrapers, are now often a [deterrent](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/11/housing-regulation-disability-reform/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to building vertically, because the rules require them to be wide enough to accommodate a standard 24-by-84-inch ambulance stretcher in the horizontal position. And in the last two years, seven states across the political spectrum have [rewritten](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/business/single-staircase-apartment-buildings.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) rules that require one, rather than two, staircases in buildings of a certain size for fire safety purposes. While our unique building code exists as [yet another extension](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-high-price-of-fine-print/) of a New York-or-nowhere exceptionalism, lawmakers are actively studying what else can be done to smartly loosen the rules.

### 5) Empower the project managers

**The problem:** There is little accountability for project progress, with responsibilities shared — and often lost — between agencies.

**The Mamdani administration should:** Designate point people within City Hall to guide construction projects across the finish line. Create a publicly available tracker to bolster transparency and identify roadblocks.

**The fine print:** Once an application is filed for a building permit, its fate is largely left to the process. This puts the onus on the private citizen or company to navigate through an alphabet soup of agencies (hence why many hire an expeditor), favoring those with expertise and resources. A general lack of accountability allows projects to wallow, their completion being both everyone’s and no one’s problem.

City Hall should convene a team within the Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development’s office that can effectively project-manage the permitting for private projects above a certain size, offering both an attentive eye and the authority to find fixes to hurdles that may arise. These outcomes-focused roles are particularly needed when working with private stakeholders, like utility companies. 

To aid in those efforts, the City should launch an online project tracker — like what exists for [parks](https://www.nycgovparks.org/planning-and-building/capital-project-tracker?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [mass transit projects](https://capitaldashboard.mta.info/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — that can tell any New Yorker what is going on with that project on their corner, and who is responsible for its delay. Today, the best information most New Yorkers often have is months-old, uninformative notice posted at the construction site.

### 6) Get the new rules on the books

**The problem:** New York City voters just approved a number of far-reaching ballot proposals related to construction. But some are still not law.

**The Mamdani administration should:** Expedite the rulesmaking processes for the referenda passed last November.

**The fine print:** In November, a majority of New York City voters [approved](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/four-ballot-items-to-unlock-more-new-york-city-housing/) three measures meant to speed up construction. The first — Proposition 2 — fast-tracks affordable housing projects, with particular grease for “the bottom 12,” or the community districts that produced the least amount of affordable housing in recent years. Proposition 3 puts smaller projects through a less-intensive land-use process, while Proposition 4 creates an Affordable Housing Appeals Board, which may intervene if a development is blocked or diluted.

These measures will ease bureaucratic and political gridlock that can trip up permitting. So no more time should be wasted getting them going. The Affordable Housing Appeals Board is still just a concept, although even just the threat of it has already led one council member [to reverse their stance](https://nysfocus.com/2026/02/24/vickie-paladino-housing-appeals-board-ballot-proposition?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on a new development.

To its credit, the Mamdani administration has already [announced](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/03/mamdani-administration-launches-new-program-to-deliver-affordabl?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the first ELURP projects: an 84-unit affordable housing development in Mott Haven and a climate-resiliency acquisition on Staten Island. This speedier runway for City-owned land [consolidates](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/expedited-housing.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Community Board and Borough President reviews into a single 60-day window and removes City Council review for certain categories, cutting the roughly seven-month public-review timeline to 90 days. The City launched the Affordable Housing Fast Track rulemaking shortly after.

But rulesmaking can notoriously drag. To maximize potential, these processes should be expedited given the moment’s urgency, so city officials can start to tap into the benefits and opportunities the new powers pose. A particular focus should be placed on the bottom 12\. If the City now wields greater powers to catalyze construction there, it shouldn’t be afraid to use them.

### 7) Staff up

**The problem:** Many of the offices critical to approving construction projects are not operating at full capacity.

**The Mamdani administration should:** Focus on filling vacancies at DOB and expand headcount at the Board of Standards and Appeals and the City Planning Commission.

**The fine print:** The Program to Eliminate Gaps (PEG) cuts implemented by the Adams administration shaved a quarter of the DOB workforce between 2022 and 2024, [leading to](https://nypost.com/2024/05/15/us-news/nyc-buildings-dept-cuts-back-staffing-including-inspectors-despite-recent-collapses/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) an increase in wait times across inspections. While the City should simultaneously pursue efficiencies that don’t require bolstering staff, a hobbled workforce will ultimately hamper permitting reform. 

The City should consider options to restore headcount, which will include increasing salaries to compete with the private sector. Hiring for necessary roles is ultimately an investment — a faster rate of inspection helps bring down price tags, which allows projects that ultimately benefit the city coffers to advance.

Beyond DOB, the City should move to quickly staff up the offices with recently expanded authorities. The Board of Standards and Appeals, which will now oversee the affordable housing fast-track, has five commissioners and a support staff of several dozen people. Similarly, the City Planning Commission has a range of new and expanded responsibilities, yet still is composed of only 13 members with a similarly squeezed second bench. These entities will become much bigger players in how the City builds in the years ahead, and will need a workforce that reflects this brave new world.

### 8) Use AI more, and do it smartly

**The problem:** The City has thus far been averse to leverage AI as a potential tool for permitting efficiency.

**The Mamdani administration should:** Aggressively explore all the ways in which AI could be used to streamline processes.

**The fine print:** In 2023, the City of New York released its first-ever [AI Action Plan](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/oti/downloads/pdf/reports/artificial-intelligence-action-plan.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which laid out potential opportunities to incorporate generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to improve daily operations. Success thus far has been mixed. [Innovative pilots](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-to-deploy-ai-policing-nyc-nypd/) persist at the agency level: The Department of Education recently permitted AI in lesson planning, DOT is studying traffic patterns with AI and FDNY recently used AI to chart more efficient ambulance routes. But deployment is still fragile, with City Hall recently shutting down a chatbot launched by its former occupant after it notoriously offered incorrect advice. 

Permitting was not mentioned in the AI Action Plan, but there are two areas where it could yield real dividends. The first is interagency communication, where AI would make it easier for separate systems to share data with each other to reduce those redundancies mentioned earlier. (Another popular mayor, Boston’s Michelle Wu, signed [an executive order](https://www.boston.gov/departments/boston-digital-service/new-era-permitting-boston?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in August to do just that.) The second is what’s known as predictive analytics, where AI can pre-scan documents to alert applicants to potential problem areas later on, as well as forecast timelines so they can realistically plan ahead. This doesn’t remove humans from the critical job of reviewing work sites documents; it just helps them target limited resources where the data shows them to be most needed. In California, San Jose is [piloting](https://www.govtech.com/artificial-intelligence/san-jose-will-leverage-ai-to-address-the-housing-crisis?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the technology to hasten approvals of Accessory Dwelling Units (or ADUs), where 90 percent of applications are returned for missing information.

New York City should do the same. Privacy concerns and worries that AI will unintelligibly approach issues without context are no doubt valid. But the City should [actively explore areas](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/putting-tech-to-work-for-all-new-yorkers/) where the technology could be deployed for overly analog processes that currently take up an excessive amount of time and staffing. 

---

*This installment was prepared with the help of John Surico. Sarah Feinberg and many others provided essential guidance and will continue to inform our work on this project going forward. In the weeks and months ahead, we will continue to surface practical suggestions from people who know the system best — current and former agency staff, nonprofit partners and the everyday New Yorkers who routinely deal with, and often trip up trying to navigate, New York's bureaucracy.*

*Send your ideas to justfixit@vitalcitynyc.org; if you wish to remain anonymous, we will honor your request.*
### The Unions and the Cities
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/public-sector-unions-city-politics/
Last updated: 2026-05-04T09:00:41.000Z
On May Day, Mayor Zohran Mamdani [posted a slickly produced video](https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/2050207448846274956?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with the tagline that “there is no NYC without unions,” featuring images of proud public workers “showing the world what solidarity means.” It’s a fine sentiment, but it’s not quite right. There is no New York City without *government workers*. But the city thrived for generations without powerful *unions* to represent those workers.

In fact, public-sector unions are relative newcomers to the labor movement. Before the 1960s, the few that existed were small and weak. Walkouts were rare; when they occurred, the disruption of public services could provoke backlash, as occurred after the 1919 Boston police strike.

Powerful public-sector unions as we know them today emerged only in the late 1960s and 1970s. They did not arise organically. Instead, they were called into being by a rash of new state laws requiring municipalities to bargain collectively. This chart documenting the rise of teachers’ unions, which I lifted from Terry Moe’s [“Special Interest,”](https://www.brookings.edu/books/special-interest/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is quite something:

The modern public-sector union is entirely a creature of law. And it was something new under the sun. For decades, judges and public officials had insisted that collective bargaining would cede sovereign power to private organizations whose interests diverged from the community at large. In 1971, two Yale law professors, Harry Wellington and Ralph Winter, refined that argument in a [prescient book](https://www.google.com/books/edition/The%5Funions%5Fand%5Fthe%5Fcities%5Fby%5FH%5FH%5FWelling/OP2i0QEACAAJ?hl=en&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) called “The Unions and the Cities.”

Wellington and Winter cautioned against extending arguments in favor of private-sector unions to the public sector. In the private sector, they noted, unions are disciplined by the market: They share with their employers an interest in the success of the collective enterprise. Demands that make it impossible to compete would be bad for business and, ultimately, bad for workers.

Public-sector unions, in contrast, are constrained only by politics. Elected officials are supposed to represent the voters, but the public is disinterested in the minutiae of local elections. Unions, in contrast, care a lot about who’s sitting across the negotiating table and often have the clout to get them elected.

Institutionalizing the power of public-sector unions, Wellington and Winter feared, “would leave competing groups in the political process at a permanent and substantial disadvantage.” They were right to worry. As early as 1975, one union leader in New York City [was blunt](https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trouble-with-public-sector-unions?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): “We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss.”

So it remains today. In states with collective bargaining, public-sector unions are the most potent force in city elections. In the 2023-2024 cycle alone, the four biggest unions representing government workers spent [a whopping $915 million](https://commonwealthfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Union-Political-Spending-Report-Dec2023.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on politics. Union power is felt most acutely during primary elections, when the public is disengaged and candidates jockey for union endorsements and campaign dollars. And in most cities, the primary is the ballgame. 

Election timing can further amplify union influence. Sarah Anzia, a Berkeley political scientist, has [shown](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/s0022381611000028?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that teacher pay is higher in districts with school boards that are elected in off-year elections, when the public is paying even less attention than usual. What’s more, collective-bargaining agreements often extend past a mayor’s term. The next mayor may be elected on the promise to fix failing schools or a rotten police force — only to find his or her hands tied.

Union power has real advantages. Public employees deserve good wages, safe working conditions and protections from political reprisal. Especially as American cities become increasingly unaffordable, unions can discourage attempts to economize on the backs of the middle class. They can also force officials to confront real problems in the delivery of government services: employee burnout, abusive supervisors, untenable workloads and more.

Politicians elected with union backing, however, are under intense pressure to enter into labor contracts that are good for the unions and bad for the public. Yes, improvident labor deals may yield bloated budgets and crappy public services. But the diffuse frustration over a poorly managed city is nothing to the white-hot rage of the unions. The public does care about high taxes, which puts an upper limit on wage increases. But that just encourages officials to placate unions with lax work rules and generous pensions and health benefits, as Robert Gordon and I discussed in [a recent New York Times op-ed](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/opinion/democrats-public-sector-unions.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

What’s happening in New York exemplifies the problem. In Albany, public-sector unions are pushing for [legislation](https://nysaflcio.org/tier-6?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that would allow government workers to retire at age 55 with full pensions after 30 years of service. That would be an unthinkable deal for most Americans. It would also saddle a cash-strapped New York City with fiscal obligations that will frustrate Mamdani’s efforts to implement his most ambitious policy proposals, including universal child care.

At the same time, the Metropolitan Transit Authority is locked in [a bitter fight](https://nypost.com/2026/04/27/opinion/kathy-hochul-and-bruce-blakeman-must-both-stand-up-to-the-union-thugs-threatening-an-lirr-strike/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with the unions that represent Long Island Rail Road workers. Among the key hang-ups are arbitrary work rules that require double and sometimes even triple pay for a single day’s work.

The costs of collective bargaining may partly explain why blue cities in red states — David Brooks calls them [“red-blue mash-ups”](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/opinion/sun-belt-migration.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — are growing faster than blue cities in blue states. Most of that growth is a function of business climate and housing markets, of course; it’s still cheaper to live in Houston than Los Angeles. But red-blue cities also tend to have lower taxes than blue-blue cities, in part because they are less burdened by legacy pension obligations.

Though this is more speculative, blue cities in red states may deliver public services more efficiently. Per-pupil spending, for example, is a poor predictor of educational performance across states. But red states cluster on the low-spending left half of this graph, and blue states on the high-spending right.

In New York City, [spending is around $40,000 per pupil](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/new-york-city-schools-budget/686971/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). That’s likely to rise further under a rigid and expensive union-backed law [requiring smaller class sizes](https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/04/02/mamdani-class-size-law-compliance/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across all the city’s schools. Student performance is middling.

In short, laws that require collective bargaining created modern public-sector unions. Those unions then exploit their legal privilege to dominate urban politics, often at the public’s expense. 

That dynamic isn’t unique to unions. The corporate form, for example, is also a legal privilege with major electoral consequences. But only public-sector unions have a monopoly on negotiating labor contracts that immediately affect both the quality of public services and city finances.

It’s tempting to try to solve the problem by prohibiting unions from injecting money into politics. After *Citizens United*, however, efforts to cap unions’ independent spending will run into a brick wall.

But collective bargaining doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. Lawmakers can pick and choose what unions can negotiate over. Unions play a salutary role in pushing for competitive salaries, for example, which is essential to attracting a high-quality public workforce. It’s more troubling when they demand work rules that erode accountability and degrade public services. It’s also worrisome when unions press elected officials to shift compensation into pensions and health benefits that are obscure to voters and whose costs will only become apparent decades down the line.

Why not limit public-sector unions to negotiating over wages? It’s not a fanciful proposal; that’s what Wisconsin did in 2011\. Wisconsin’s law went too far in some respects and not far enough in others; its exception for police and firefighter unions was unprincipled, and it has now drawn a [serious equal-protection challenge](https://apnews.com/article/wisconsin-union-lawsuit-collective-bargainin-75faef922860f9a7d1dc06ae1dc783d1?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But the idea has much to be said for it.

Whatever the right approach may be, Democrats who worry about public safety, urban schools and the fiscal health of our cities ought to be open to rethinking the bargain we struck with public-sector unions five decades ago. Just 7.3 million people belong to public-sector unions, or about 2% of the population. They deserve a voice in our politics. But they shouldn’t have the power to shout the rest of us down. 

---

*This piece has been cross-posted at NYU Law’s Democracy Project.*
### Does When We’re Born Make Us Who We Are?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/robert-sampson-adam-gopnik-interview-transcript/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:06.000Z
*Sociologist Robert J. Sampson’s new book,* [*“Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans,”*](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674987548?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *draws on three decades of data from the landmark Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to argue that the era in which a person comes of age matters as much as, or even more than, their individual circumstances.* 

*On Monday, April 27, New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik spoke with Sampson at an event hosted by Vital City, NYU Wagner and the Russell Sage Foundation. The attached video is unedited; the transcript that follows is edited for clarity and length.*

---

---

**Adam Gopnik:** This is a work of social science, but for those of us who are essayists, it’s an astonishing thing — it’s not your opinions. It’s driven by data collected over a very long time. Tell us about the specifics of the project, and more broadly, what drew you to this kind of empirical sociology.

**Robert J. Sampson:** The ideas actually developed over time. Let me take you back to the beginning. The study started in the early 1990s, when I was on the faculty at the University of Chicago. It was a large-scale collaborative effort — what you might call big science — because at the time, academics were really trying to figure out how to understand urban violence. In the early 1990s, violence had been rising since the 1970s and ‘80s, but things were really coming to a head. New York had over 2,000 murders. Chicago wasn’t far behind.

We were designing the study in 1992, and there was a particular incident that I mention in the book. A young boy named [Dantrell Davis](https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/7-year-old-dantrell-davis-murder-led-to-gang-truce-in-1992-those-who-were-there-call-for-new-effort-with-multiple-children-shot-recently/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), just 7 years old, was walking with his mother on a sunny day when he was shot and killed by someone trying to take out a gang rival. It was emblematic of the crisis. So we designed what became the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to understand how children developed within their social contexts — not pitting individuals against neighborhoods, but trying to understand both.

The data collection was a monumental effort. We enrolled about 6,000 children across different ages and followed them over five to six years, conducting interviews with mothers, children and other caretakers. We collected original neighborhood data — we even drove down streets with video cameras to observe conditions. About 100 to 120 people were involved in data collection at peak. We were lucky to get funding, and I felt lucky to be part of it.

**Gopnik:** Just as you were starting the study, the era of the so-called “super predator” was beginning. That sets up a kind of dramatic tension at the heart of the book.

**Sampson:** Exactly. To illustrate the argument, I use two kids from the study. I call one Darnell, born in 1995, raised by a single parent in one of the highest-poverty neighborhoods in the city — every risk factor one might think would predict a life of crime. I pair him with Andre, born in 1980, who came of age in the 1980s, around age 13 during the peak of violence. Same neighborhood, same race, same poverty, same family structure. Environmentally similar in almost every way — but walking into very different futures. And indeed, they had very different lives.

That’s the core of the book. It’s not a narrative about two individuals. It’s a study of birth cohorts — using that comparison to make the argument that when we are born shapes outcomes in ways we haven’t fully reckoned with.

**Gopnik:** One of the philosophical foundations of the book seems to be that social experience is malleable and changeable — that it isn’t always fixed. That’s a particular tradition in American sociology, isn’t it?

**Sampson:** Absolutely. A lot of criminological research, at least historically, has been rooted in the assumption of stable propensity — the idea that criminal character is essentially built into the person. That’s embedded in the concept of the “super predator.” The book challenges that idea by looking at cohorts coming of age in very different historical contexts.

One of the problems with prior research is that most studies follow the same people through time — a single cohort. That’s a wonderful device, but as we age, time marches on. There’s a philosophical aphorism from the ancient Greeks: No man steps into the same river twice. The river changes; the man changes. So I wanted a design that could look at kids starting at very young ages across different birth years, all followed through the same historical window. That allowed us to compare children coming of age in genuinely different circumstances.

**Gopnik:** And that leads to what struck me as the central finding of the book. What you’re saying, in essence, is that it’s not where you’re raised, not even by whom you’re raised — it’s when you’re raised.

**Sampson:** That’s the strong version of the argument, yes. There’s a basic fact about crime called the age-crime curve: Across virtually all data sources, across different countries and historical periods, criminal activity rises sharply in adolescence, peaks in the late teens or early twenties, and then declines. Teenagers commit a disproportionate share of crime — all parents know this. But what the cohort comparison reveals is that when one is a teenager is centrally important.

Kids from the older cohorts — those born in the 1980s — had arrest trajectories that were substantially higher and persisted later into life. Younger cohorts, even controlling for race, family structure, neighborhood poverty and other individual characteristics, showed dramatically lower arrest rates. When you adjust for all of those factors and the cohort difference still holds, that tells you something fundamental: It’s the historical moment, not the individual profile.

**Gopnik:** And this is, in a sense, a reproach to both sides of the political debate about crime.

**Sampson:** I think that’s right. There are roughly three views. One holds that there are simply bad people — wicked individuals — and nothing to do except separate them from society. Then there’s a more incentive-oriented view: It’s about deterrence, incarceration, the rules. And then the sociological view, which I subscribe to, emphasizes social ties, social controls and informal community norms.

What the data show is that economic indicators — GNP, unemployment, poverty rates — don’t really explain why crime rose or fell in consistent ways. But something was changing. What was happening, particularly as the younger cohorts came of age, is that the world changed around them in ways that made arrest much less likely.

**Gopnik:** What changed?

**Sampson:** Several things. First, the collapse of the drug war — or at least of drug arrests. When we think about mass incarceration, we tend to think of arrests rising. But actually, arrests were declining starting in the late 1990s and into the 2000s. Drug arrests dropped around 75% in some areas. Disorder arrests — the kind associated with broken windows policing — dropped about 90%. That is a fundamentally different social world for a kid growing up.

At the same time, the drug market itself changed. There’s a sociologist, Randol Contreras, who studied the South Bronx and whose own life illustrated the point. He came of age slightly later than the kids who had become drug dealers, and by the time his cohort arrived, the profits had collapsed. The South Bronx was improving, gentrifying. The pull of the drug economy simply wasn’t what it had been.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/GopnikSampson-25-1.jpg)

Sampson and Gopnik in conversation. Credit: Anthony Esguerra

**Gopnik:** Broken windows theory is one of the hypotheses you examine. Is it a concept with some residual value, or is it empty?

**Sampson:** It is a concept — it’s not nothing. But I think it’s been misapplied. The original Wilson and Kelling article from 1982 was actually more nuanced than what came after it. They were talking about the breakdown of informal social controls and the importance of working with communities to clean things up. Over time, that morphed into much more aggressive policing — massive stop-and-frisk of young people without cause. That’s not what Wilson and Kelling had in mind, and it’s not responsible for the crime decline, in my view.

Perceptions of disorder vary a great deal depending on context — whether you’re in a wealthy neighborhood or a poor one, whether you’re higher or lower income. And a fair amount of research suggests that disorder itself is not what’s driving crime. Most crime control happens not because there’s a police officer on the corner. It’s the everyday regulations and norms — parents supervising their children, community organizations getting involved — that prevent crime.

**Gopnik:** Patrick Sharkey’s work puts a lot of weight on community organizations. You look at that too.

**Sampson:** Yes, absolutely. What happened in many cities over this period can be thought of as reclaiming urban space — the no-man’s-land areas that we all saw in the 1980s and ’90s, reclaimed in multiple ways. Community organizations, particularly those that received increased funding and focused on youth, showed real crime declines. You can attribute a meaningful portion of the crime drop to community organizing — not policing.

There’s also interesting experimental work on cleaning up vacant lots. Researchers took abandoned lots that were sites of crime and fear and transformed them into green spaces. What happened? People started using those spaces, interacting. There were more eyes on the street, in Jane Jacobs’ sense. People were more willing to intervene. Crime went down. It seems almost too simple, but it’s part of the broader argument that environments matter — that environmental policy is crime policy.

**Gopnik:** You even address the lead hypothesis, which I’ll confess I initially thought was a kind of red herring.

**Sampson:** I never expected to deal with it either. But over time, through colleagues and the accumulating research — including historical data on lead pipes and the leaded gasoline phaseout — I came to believe there was something there. Lead poisoning is a form of toxic environment, just like financial stress or neighborhood violence. For a while, it was everywhere. In some Chicago neighborhoods, 70% to 80% of children had elevated blood lead levels.

We were fortunate to get data from the Chicago Department of Public Health. For the infant cohort, higher lead levels were associated with more antisocial behavior later in life. And the decline in lead levels — which was sharpest in the poorest communities — tracks with the decline in problem behavior. It’s not the whole story, but it’s part of it. I found the research compelling enough to include it, and I think it’s a real vindication of empirical social science — because it sounds tabloid-ish at first, but you look into it carefully and find there’s something there.

**Gopnik:** Let’s talk about what the book means for policy. It seems to have some uncomfortable implications for a lot of tools that criminal justice systems currently rely on — risk assessment, prediction instruments, cost-benefit analysis.

**Sampson:** Prediction is a key area. A lot of risk assessment instruments are built on the assumption of stable propensity — that past behavior predicts future behavior in ways that don’t change over time. But our data show that the relationship between predictors and outcomes has been shifting. We took prediction technology, trained it on the older cohort, and applied it to the younger cohort. We overpredicted by 50% to 90%. That’s not a small error — it’s a difference of kind.

Criminal history records are used in so many decisions: bail, sentencing enhancements, tenant screening, employment. To the extent that the probability of being arrested in the past is baked into those records, you are, in effect, making predictions based on when someone was born — what I call cohort bias. The younger cohorts are simply less likely to have been arrested, and instruments trained on older cohorts systematically overestimate their risk.

What can be done? New York City has actually been at the forefront of updating its instruments. But beyond that, we need to recognize that the relationships between predictors and outcomes are constantly dynamic. These instruments are doing real damage, and there are ways to build them better.

**Gopnik:** And cost-benefit analyses have the same problem?

**Sampson:** Yes. A lot of social programs are touted using cost-benefit projections — “this intervention will save X dollars” — but those projections are often based on experiments conducted on the older, higher-crime cohorts. The estimated benefits simply won’t be as high when applied to younger cohorts who were already less likely to commit crime. That has real implications for government budgeting. If you’re in city government, you should be redoing those analyses using more recent cohorts, or at least weighting them accordingly.

**Gopnik:** What about incarceration itself as a crime-reduction strategy?

**Sampson:** A National Academy of Sciences panel concluded that incarceration explains a relatively modest portion of the great American crime decline — perhaps 10% to 15%, and only up to a point. Beyond that point, you’re incarcerating people who are less and less likely to commit crime anyway, and you’re creating collateral consequences — severed social ties, loss of housing, employment barriers — that can make things worse.

The book isn’t primarily about incarceration, but it’s relevant to the argument: The cohorts coming of age now are less likely to be arrested, and therefore less likely to be incarcerated later. The prison population is actually falling off a cliff, even as budgets for correctional facilities continue to be built around the older, higher-crime cohorts. That’s a mismatch with real fiscal consequences.

**Gopnik:** What intervention addresses the time variable? If when we are born is so central, what do we do about it?

**Sampson:** I don’t think there’s a magic bullet — and that’s part of the point. It’s a thousand smaller things that add up: community organizations, environmental cleanup, reducing police contacts for low-level behavior, updating our prediction instruments, investing in basic science so we understand what’s actually working.

There’s also a more conceptual point I want to make. We spend enormous energy searching for criminal character in individuals. But what the data suggest is that we should be thinking about the moral accountability of society — what I’d call social character. Are we providing the social structures and informal controls that actually prevent crime? Howard Becker had a wonderful book title: “What About Mozart? What About Murder?” — meaning, what do you say to the sociologist who claims it’s all about social variance? My answer is the same as Becker’s: Murder is wrong. But how we react to it, what counts as crime, who gets arrested for what — all of that varies enormously. The marijuana smoker who would have gone to prison in 1985 walks past five dispensaries today. That’s not a change in human nature. It’s a change in the social world.

The good news is that both the behaviors and the social reactions to them are trending in a positive direction. Young people today are less likely to commit crime, less likely to be arrested and less likely to be incarcerated than their counterparts a generation ago. Understanding why — and building on it — is what this book is really about.

---

*Robert J. Sampson is the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard University. His new book is “Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life of Young Americans.” Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker.*
### Claire Valdez on Mamdani, AOC, and Her Campaign for Congress in New York's 7th District
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/claire-valdez-on-mamdani-aoc-and/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:13.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/claire-valdez-on-mamdani-aoc-and) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on April 30, 2026 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

The New York Editorial Board spoke with Assembly Member Claire Valdez of Queens about her campaign in the Democratic primary for New York’s 7th Congressional District (parts of Brooklyn and Queens) on the morning of April 24, 2026\. Valdez, a democratic socialist endorsed by NYC-DSA and Mayor Mamdani, is among the candidates running to succeed retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez. The primary election will take place in June. *(photo by Liena Žagare)*

*Participating journalists: Nicole Gelinas, Christina Greer, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Myles Miller, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Žagare.*

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Smith**  
Thanks for coming in. I always say this but it’s also true: In the old days, I’d say the editorial board of the *Daily News* would have been able to, like, muscle you in through their sheer political power. But now politicians get to decide whether or not they speak to journalists, so we appreciate that you do. Chrissy?

**Christina Greer**  
Again, thank you. Can you just lay out the land of the district, tell us different demographics of the district, the different issues of the district, and how you plan to address the varying, quite diverse factors.

**Claire Valdez**  
As you all know, it’s [a big district](https://velazquez.house.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It spans Brooklyn and Queens: Long Island City, Astoria, Sunnyside, Woodside, Maspeth, Greenpoint, Bushwick, Williamsburg — I can run through the entire geography of the district. But it’s incredibly diverse. It’s full of immigrants, workers. Many artists live in the district, which is something that I’m very passionate about myself. There’s a large Hasidic population in Williamsburg. There’s a big Latin American diaspora throughout.

And it’s overwhelmingly tenants. It’s a 77 percent tenant district. And those tenants live in market-rate housing, NYCHA, and rent-stabilized housing. It really runs the gamut and the spectrum, and it’s an issue that really unites every single part of the district. Everywhere we go in this campaign, people are talking about rents going up and how unsustainable that is. We know that this district has seen a lot of displacement and development over the last couple of decades. I live in Ridgewood. My rent just went up or will be going up, on May 1st, unfortunately.

**Ben Smith**  
From what to what?

**Claire Valdez**  
It’s going up a hundred bucks. To $2,350\. It’s actually a good deal.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
It’s market rate?

**Claire Valdez**  
It’s market rate. My landlord has, I think, two buildings on the street. Pretty traditional New York small landlord. But housing is a real issue. People are worried about being displaced from their neighborhoods. People are unsure if they’ll be able to put down roots for the long haul and raise families in the neighborhoods that they know and love. And so that’s really an issue that unites, truly, the entire district, but everyone’s feeling the same kind of affordability crisis that so much of the last year and change has been about.

Childcare costs. We hopefully are, we’re mitigating now, but obviously a big expense. Utility expenses are really high and going up all the time. So people are feeling the pinch in a lot of different ways. I think a sense that people can’t live sustainable lives in New York, and people’s wages aren’t going up. I think this is one of the issues that really brought me into politics, is the fight for workers to be able to set the terms of their working conditions through unions.

But wages are stagnant, costs are going up, and this is very much what our, my, platform has been about. And the reason I wanted to run for Congress is to address all these kinds of various issues that are forcing people into real states of precariousness. And that’s a general sense, I think, throughout the entire district, that we’re finding as we knock doors and talk to people.

**Christina Greer**  
So how does the role of a Congressperson help mitigate some of these issues? Because some of this seems like a City Council member or even a state legislator could do that. So where do you see yourself working in Washington, DC, to change these things?

**Claire Valdez**  
Absolutely. I come out of the labor movement, I come out of organizing within my shop at UAW – at Columbia University and [in UAW](https://jacobin.com/2026/01/claire-valdez-union-organizing-congress?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). And what we know is that federal labor policy is stymied, organizing not just in New York State and New York City, but all over the country. And it’s my opinion that in order to build up our democracy, in order to raise wages and lift the floor for all workers, we need to get as many people as possible into unions. And that’s federal policy that has to be addressed at the federal level.

We deal with cases of ICE in our neighborhoods. When a teenager from Grover Cleveland High School [was kidnapped](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/07/15/student-from-queens-grover-cleveland-released-from-ice-detention/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from an immigration hearing last year, that’s a federal policy issue that we have to address.

And so we can do work at the state level to fight for a budget that is equitable and just, to advance immigration policy at the state level. But so many of these problems have to be addressed at the federal level, legislatively. And of course, fighting for more resources for our communities. The federal government has a lot of money. We want to bring that back to our district as well.

**Ben Max**  
You’re relatively new to [the Assembly](https://www.assembly.state.ny.us/mem/?ad=037&sh=bio&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). You’re from the DSA movement and organizing work. You’re endorsed by the mayor. Do you think if Zohran Mamdani had lost a relatively close race to Andrew Cuomo last year, you’d be running in this race? How has that victory for the movement sort-of propelled you to make this decision, and do you think you’d be running if he hadn’t won?

**Claire Valdez**  
I think the mayor’s race demonstrated that there is a broad constituency that is maybe open, more than we previously thought, to a democratic socialist vision for an affordable New York, for a just and equitable society, in which people’s real material needs are foregrounded against corporate interests. And that is very obviously inspiring to me. It’s the product of many, many years and many, many people organizing across a lot of different districts in a lot of different races, and really doing the work to talk to our neighbors. And we saw his, the mayor’s race, really electrify a constituency, that I think had felt pushed out of politics for a long time.

I certainly never saw myself in politics. Like I said, I come out of organizing in my shop and knocking doors for people like Bernie Sanders, but I never saw myself on the mailer. And I think I, I thought that for a long time, because politics felt like this very rarefied field, where you have to have the right degree, the right credentials to participate, and I think what DSA has done very well is to show people that actually, anyone can run these races. Working people can come together and strategize and gather resources and recruit candidates and run these races.

And the mayor’s election proved that people are really attracted to having a seat at the table and wanting to participate in those campaigns. You know, a hundred thousand people volunteered for that mayoral campaign. We’ve never seen anything like that in New York City. And so I think we’re coming off of the heels of this really momentous election, and just moment, in New York City history and time when everyday people felt compelled to organize together. And that’s energy that I am bringing into this campaign. We obviously are working with many of Zohran’s team, former team, and many people who were leaders in the field work, too, are organizing with us now. So I think it feels hard to imagine trying to launch a really ambitious campaign without the success of that one.

**Ben Smith**  
Can I just pause on one thing you said, about credentials, because it seems like actually the DSA is often representing people who do have a lot of credentials, but aren’t that happy with how their careers are working out. And a lot of its leaders, you know, Bernie went to University of Chicago, Zohran went to Bowdoin, and you’re a graduate student organizer. It’s not people with – it’s people with quite, you know, kind of, on paper, credentials that are actually probably fancier than those of the machine, machine Democrats that they’re looking to replace and displace, so I’m just curious what you meant about that?

**Claire Valdez**  
I’m sorry. Did you say I’m a graduate student organizer?

**Ben Smith**  
I’m sorry, you weren’t—

**Claire Valdez**  
No, you’re OK. There’s a lot of, there are many different unions on Columbia’s campus. So, I was a clerical worker organizer. So, I was an administrative assistant in the kind-of support staff union. And worked to organize with mostly administrative assistants, but also some cafeteria workers, call-center workers, print-shop workers, the support staff of Columbia.

**Ben Smith**  
I’m curious to the broader point. Do you feel like the kind of Joe Crowley, Antonio Reynoso Democrats, that the issue with them was that they have too many credentials? That was the part that I was confused about.

**Claire Valdez**  
No. So I meant more that I think before I got involved in DSA, my sense of campaigns was very much that consultants ran them — which may actually be true in a lot of campaigns. \[Laughs\] But that there was a kind of credentialism for the way that campaigns are spun up and run. And that’s not, that doesn’t have to be the case.

**Myles Miller**  
A follow-up about representing administrative assistants. My mom was an administrative assistant, so I know the life. I wonder how you square the message of your campaign for state office, and this [Ridgewood Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/ridgewood/comments/1djkkzc/info%5Fabout%5Fclaire%5Fvaldez/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) group was up in arms: She says she’s working class but she comes from a father who’s an electrical engineer--

**Claire Valdez**  
Civil engineer.

**Myles Miller**  
Civil engineer, right. How do you square the working-class message with your upbringing, and do you think that plays a role at all to what you’re fighting for?

**Claire Valdez**  
I’ve been working jobs since I was a teenager and I’ve bagged groceries; everyone likes to talk about how I worked at Taco Bell; I worked at Trader Joe’s for six years. I, like many, many people in New York City, did not set the terms of my employment. I didn’t set my hours, didn’t set my own wages. And that’s an experience that I think many people at this table and many people in New York have had. And I think that’s a really important one. That’s where my politics come from, is a sense of not having control over my life, not having control over my schedule or being able to plan ahead. There were times in my life working seven days a week where I was still overdrafting my bank account.

My union was the thing that introduced me to the idea that actually you can have power in the workplace. You can fight for the better working conditions and better wages, and you can win something really basic, like a nine-to-five and overtime, things that I think every worker should have. Maybe not a nine-to-five, but having set hours and having overtime and good benefits.

And I think we need more people who have a direct experience of that kind of transformation, of feeling formerly powerless, stepping into power, organizing for even more, with a real deep understanding of the fact that so many workers are locked out of feeling that kind of power. I think that’s a really important experience to foreground in this campaign.

**Harry Siegel**  
I’m a little confused by that. I worked all sorts of random jobs with bad hours and such things, and overdrew my bank account, but I had family resources to benefit from. And you’re saying that’s what we need from our representatives. But I wanted to ask, you brought up advisors and those people messaging campaigns. I saw Morris Katz, I think [in City and State](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/01/claire-valdez-launches-bid-congress-staffed-mamdanis-consigliere/410534/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) right when you were coming in, saying something like, this is the most important race and is gonna define things. I was hoping you could talk a little about that and what’s at stake here, because it’s clearly a race a Democrat is going to win \[in November\]. And I think for people who aren’t following it closely, maybe the differences between a DSA candidate and a progressive candidate aren’t so obvious.

**Claire Valdez**  
No, I think that’s a really good question. And I think the reason the stakes of this campaign are very high is because this is a very progressive district, as we all know. It’s very left-wing. And I think that from this seat, and we’ve seen this leadership of Congressman Velázquez, too. She’s been a very progressive and bold champion for workers, for immigrants, against colonialism for her entire life. And this seat represents the opportunity to continue that legacy and really advance a very progressive and even democratic socialist vision for what federal policy can look like. And so I think this is a really important race for that reason, that we can be the kind-of tip of the spear on a lot of different issues.

**Harry Siegel**  
Can I just ask then, because obviously she’s endorsed another candidate in the race. There was [reporting in the Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/nyregion/mamdani-politics-nyc.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) about her speaking privately with the mayor about trying to find someone \[together\]. Why is there a need for some sort-of ideological, in some ways generational, change in the district now?

**Claire Valdez**  
Why there’s a need for—?

**Harry Siegel**  
You’re saying these things about Velázquez and her legacy, and you’re also not the candidate she’s endorsed. There was all sorts of background conversations about this, reportedly. So, why someone, other than who she thinks should come in next, is the right person to fill the seat now?

**Claire Valdez**  
I think the— again, I really admire the Congresswoman. I’ve told her this directly, and will continue to say that I think she’s been an incredible champion for the district. It’s not, I think, a normal circumstance where you can say that actually my Congressperson is really great. \[Laughs\] And I have been fortunate, while living in the district, to be able to say exactly that.

I’m running because I think we need a unionist to go to Congress. There’s a reason that this campaign and this moment spoke to me, as reluctant as I was to take the swing. Because we need to advance a pro-worker labor agenda at the federal level to build union density across the entire country. And I think coming out of being an organizer in my own union, being on the bargaining committee, standing shoulder to shoulder with my coworkers in really difficult grievances and disciplinary meetings, and going toe to toe with a university as powerful as Columbia, those are experiences that I think are sorely needed.

I think there’s only a handful of Congressmembers who have any direct relationship to the labor movement, who have been union members themselves. So if you think union density in the country is low, in Congress it’s even worse. And we can change that in this election and that’s what I’m fighting for.

**Liena Zagare**  
Unionizing can be very contentious. So I wanted to understand how you think about compromise, because that and any other number of big burning issues would be front and center.

**Claire Valdez**  
Yeah, when I think about questions like this, I think back to my unit at Columbia, 500 people strong, and a very, I would say, politically and ideologically mixed unit. By no means a lefty group of people.

And what would unite us all would be contract negotiations — coming together to decide what we are willing to fight for, if a strike would be on the table, where we would want to move in negotiations with Columbia. And compromise comes in, I think, especially when we’re talking about bargaining committees and things like this, because you are evaluating how much power you have to actually push, if a strike is even possible, where that power is going to come from.

And so you can make those determinations at the table: What, if any, concessions you’re willing to give, and that’s a lot of what my union taught me, is how to talk to people about the things that really matter to us. Wages, childcare, benefits — gosh, what else were we bargaining for?

Those are the big things. And I think being able to kind of align on the things that are essential to the contract, when we’re going up against something, someone, an entity as powerful as Columbia University, is the first step.

Then we start thinking about, what can we give, what can we refuse to give, and do we have the actual power to withstand that? So, compromise, it happens. But I think there has to be real power analysis, to think about if we can actually, if sacrificing something is worth it in the pursuit of a better agreement overall.

And certainly in the New York State Assembly, we talk about compromise all the time. We are in the midst still, somehow, in negotiating a $263 billion budget. And there’ll be compromises on the table, absolutely. So we’re evaluating those as conversations go on, but on the whole it’s about finding, identifying the kind of, if there are red lines, how to navigate those, and evaluating how much power we have to push back.

**Akash Mehta**  
Two questions about power relations within the State Assembly. You talked in your first campaign about how being a union organizer made you realize that the bargaining table is the place where you become more powerful than your boss. In one sense, \[Assembly Speaker\] Carl Heastie is your boss. He makes the decisions for the chamber. How do you assess his leadership, and how have you organized to influence it?

**Claire Valdez**  
My constituents are my boss. I think Carl does a good job, I think, of balancing many different interests, and he’s negotiating between super-progressive districts like mine, and much more marginal districts, further away from, maybe outside of New York City or even within New York City. And I think he has done a good job of hearing people out and giving people the opportunity to speak and to air the things that are most pressing in our districts. The things that we are really concerned about.

And I’m grateful for that leadership. I think, ultimately, the New York state budget and so many decisions that are made in Albany, are made by three people in a room. And it can be really hard to influence that very closed node of power. What I, and many of my colleagues right now, are frustrated by, is that we have a budget that’s 24 days late.

And rather than talking about the things that really matter in our districts or the things that matter to, I think, the health of New York State, like raising revenue on the wealthiest New Yorkers, making sure that we’re filling holes left by the Trump administration’s cuts to to SNAP and Medicaid, that we’re still stuck on kind-of policy — the governor’s proposed policy changes that are in the budget. And it’s incredibly frustrating that’s where we are, instead of talking about things that actually make our constituents lives better and can improve New York State.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So I have two questions about the state budget.

One, since the \[Governor Andrew\] Cuomo years, it’s been a habit to put all these policies into the state budget as you just described. Is that bad? And if so, why haven’t the Democrats in the Legislature been able to stop it?

**Claire Valdez**  
I am of the opinion that it is bad. I would much rather us spend time negotiating policy changes on the floor of the Assembly and talking about those things as we would any other pieces of legislation. Because yes, as we’ve seen over the last couple of years, adding [these Article 7s](https://ballotpedia.org/Article%5FVII,%5FNew%5FYork%5FConstitution?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has made it much harder to just move through the budget process.

And we’re looking at these very late budgets that prevent us from talking about the budget items that are actually really important, or even funding to organizations in our districts that are relying on state funding. There’s a lot of things that are being held up right now.

But the downstream effect, then, is that we have even less time to do, to pass real legislation in the rest of the life of the legislative calendar. We’re wrapping up in early June this year. It’s now late April. We’re really looking at a short runway to pass our priority agenda, legislative priorities and things that, I think, would materially improve New Yorkers’ lives.

So I find it incredibly frustrating that Article 7s have been inserted into the budget, are gumming up this process. And I know that Speaker Heastie has spoken about this before, too, and expressed some frustration. And I hope that we can change it in the future and push back against this kind of impulse to add more legislation to the budget.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And Mamdani obviously ran and won on $9 billion worth of annual tax hikes from Albany. It doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen. Why is that? Why can’t the DSA contingent of the Democrats show enough power in Albany to get these tax increases passed?

**Claire Valdez**  
I am very happy to see the [pied-à-terre](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani--governor-hochul-announce-state-s-first-pied-a-ter?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) tax come forward. That’s, it’s not the biggest chunk of change, we know — looking at maybe $500 million. It is definitely a start. But it’s not the end of how much we need to raise, and how much we want to push back on, I think, a lot of corporate power within New York City and New York State.

So there’s much more organizing to do. We are, I’m sure you all saw, there’s an action [in Governor Hochul’s office](https://www.reutersconnect.com/item/protest-at-ny-governor-hochuls-manhattan-office/dGFnOnJldXRlcnMuY29tLDIwMjY6bmV3c21sX1JDMjhWS0FCNjdQTw?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) yesterday, where a number of people were arrested while they were demanding additional taxes on the rich. We’ll keep doing actions and trying to popularize this idea. I should say, it doesn’t need to be popularized anymore. It is consistently shown to be, to have majority support throughout the state. And that support crosses political lines too. I think most New Yorkers want to see taxes raised on the very wealthiest New Yorkers and most profitable corporations.

So I don’t know why the governor refuses to listen to her constituents, who have been calling for this for a long time. And whose healthcare systems and housing would be vastly improved, if we could make meaningful investments that come from those taxes.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And would that be a failure for the mayor? This is his most powerful year. He’s got his backing as enthusiastic as they’re ever going to be. If he can’t do it this year, is that a failing on his part?

**Claire Valdez**  
The governor wields immense power in the state. And especially, vis-a-vis, gumming up the state budget and taking her time in passing it, and just, we haven’t even been able to talk about fiscals yet because we’re stuck talking about her legislative priorities. I think it’s a real problem and we, there needs to be reform there.

Like I said, we’ve been organizing to tax the wealthiest New Yorkers for a long time, and that fight continues.

**Ben Max**  
Did he \[Mayor Mamdani\] make a mistake when he endorsed her \[Governor Hochul\]? Was that too early and he gave up leverage in a lot of this, and not going to tax the rich rallies in Albany or with Bernie Sanders? Was that a tactical, strategic error?

**Claire Valdez**  
What I’ll say is, I have not endorsed the governor. I have no intention to do so, I think, without some pressure of a election, I think, it’s hard to get her to move on some of our priorities. So I think, I haven’t endorsed her. I don’t have any plans to do so, and I’m hopeful that in an off, in a non-election year, maybe we’ll see some movement on these other priorities, but we’re still negotiating the budget.

We still have probably at least a few more weeks, a couple more weeks, left before this budget is done. And in that time, we’re gonna keep organizing both within the State Legislature and on the outside to get as many, to get as much revenue raised as possible.

I should say, too, this isn’t just a DSA priority. This would meaningfully impact working people’s lives in New York City and New York State. We’re looking at people who are about to be kicked off of their Medicaid, could lose their health insurance. We see people who are struggling every single day to pay their utilities. There are real material costs to the working class if we don’t do this.

And that’s why DSA is not the only organization calling for revenue-raisers. We’re part of a very broad coalition of people from all over New York State who are fighting for this.

**Christina Greer**  
I want to follow up with something you said, that we need more unionists. Who are some unionists? Already in Congress who you’d work with? And have you reached out to them?

**Claire Valdez**  
So now I’m forgetting who the, my list of folks who have been in unions. But I’ll say that I’ve been in conversation with Congressmember [Greg Casar](https://casar.house.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), who has been a real friend of the labor movement for a long time, and done good organizing in Texas to advance the labor movement. And I look to a lot of his leadership on these issues, too.

But I think, in terms of people who have had a direct relationship to the labor movement, who have really been, like I said, on bargaining committees, been their shop steward, there aren’t very many. But I do look to Congressmember Casar as someone who’s done that work.

**Christina Greer**  
But I don’t think that people necessarily have to have been in a union to be, say, unionist the way you laid it out. So are there any, say, New York members of Congress that you identified as wanting to work with closely? Let’s just say you get across the finish line, and you get to DC, who do you want your allies to be in this unionist mindset?

**Claire Valdez**  
Yeah, I’ll point to Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez as somebody who has been a real friend to labor for a long time, has stood with UAW in a lot of different fights, and as someone who I think is a real friend to workers and is gonna fight for federal legislation that will make it easier to unionize and will push back on the corporate greed that has made it, made this political landscape so difficult for workers to get into unions. So she’s certainly somebody whose leadership—

**Myles Miller**  
Would you say you’re looking to make yourself in that image?

**Claire Valdez**  
Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is a real leader in the United States right now, and certainly on the left is seen as, and I’ve seen her, as a real leader, and a real spokesperson for a movement to advance justice for workers and immigrants and pushing back on the Trump administration. And I have a lot of admiration for her. I got politically involved, so, I joined my union in 2018\. I got politically involved around that time in part because you have some more time off and you use it for something, but it was also on the heels of seeing her get elected and seeing the kind of grassroots momentum that allowed that to happen. And so she’s definitely, I would say, a political icon, and someone that I look to—

**Ben Smith**  
Would you urge her to run for president?

**Claire Valdez**  
I certainly think she should run for something, I think she should run for higher office. I would love to see her run for president.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think she will, this cycle?

**Claire Valdez**  
Well, we’ll see. I think…I think there are a number of places that she could use her political talent and organizing ability to succeed in—

**Ben Smith**  
The Senate being the other.

**Claire Valdez**  
I can see the Senate. I would be surprised if we don’t see a challenge to Senator Schumer in 2028 and I would love to see someone as fierce and as committed to building the movement as Congressman Ocasio-Cortez run for that seat or something else.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
What would you say is her main accomplishment?

**Claire Valdez**  
This might be a little intangible, but I think her real strength is in communicating to everyday people and demystifying or unobscuring the processes of federal government and opening that up to more people. I think this is why it’s really great to have incredible communicators like Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, like Mayor Mamdani, be in these positions, because so much of this has been obscured to working people for so long.

And working people are also busy, working two, three jobs, raising their kids. It can get, it can feel really easy to be shut out of the political process. And I think her ability to cut through the noise, to speak really directly, has been something that I found really admirable and found a lot of inspiration from.

**Liena Zagare**  
Since you touched on working people, how do you think about growing the economy?

**Claire Valdez**  
So part of my labor platform is a federal jobs guarantee. I really want to see the federal government investing in our economy, fighting to provide good jobs for people who want them, and making sure that people are employed in sectors like infrastructure or childcare, care for our elders — there’s so many places where I think we really need people to do good work. And I would like to see our federal government work to make that happen, and make direct investments in public works and good jobs for people.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think the private sector — I mean, we’re in a pretty low unemployment environment right now — do you think the private sector is too big? Would you like to see it shrink and the public sector grow? Just because, like, pretty low unemployment—

**Claire Valdez**  
Yeah.

**Ben Smith**  
So you would like to see workers shift from the private sector to the public sector?

**Claire Valde**  
I think we can look at things like Con Ed and National Grid, maybe as good examples here. New York State has the New York Power Authority, which is a huge public authority tasked with producing energy. I would, I think, we’ve seen that private investments in fossil-fuel infrastructure and kind of non-renewable infrastructure, is incredibly expensive and we’re investing in that for the next fifty, hundred years.

And we’re continuing to pour money into infrastructure that is both bad for the planet, and that does not make our utilities cheaper. And so in instances like that, I would like to see state ownership of utilities, because I think it’ll make our utilities much cheaper. It’ll help us advance toward a green future and more renewable energy. And I think that’s a good investment

**Akash Mehta**  
Hochul has directed the Power Authority to build five gigawatts of nuclear power. Is that a good idea?

**Claire Valdez**  
I think we should be building public renewable energy, especially solar and wind. I think we have a plan for, we would like to see 15 gigawatts of public renewable energy to meet the state’s demand for energy.

And I would much rather see those investments go toward geothermal and wind and solar, in part because those things are faster to bring online. And we need to make that transition just as quick as possible. And I think we can, with enough investment. And right now we’ve got, I think, $200 million in our state budget for NYPA. We’d like to see that increase.

**Akash Mehta**  
Could you talk more about just why nuclear is not on your list? It’s longer-term, is that the main reason?

**Claire Valdez**  
That’s part of the reason. I think we, there can be a real path for, what we know to be reliable, renewable energy sources, like I said, solar, wind, geothermal, and we should be pursuing those.

**Ben Max**  
Can I come back to the tax-the-rich effort. Do you agree or disagree with the notion that a lot of times the left leads with, *we need to tax the rich and generate more revenue*, and it’s not always clear what that revenue is for. I follow this stuff very closely and very often I’m hearing that message and not always — I think part of the reason the mayor was successful is he actually led with the deliverables, and taxing the rich was a way to get there. But it seems like a lot of the messaging, even some of what you started with, was we need to just be taxing the rich more. And the governor, her response in some of this — you’re not sure why she doesn’t come along — is, *I don’t believe in raising taxes just for the sake of raising taxes.*

Obviously there’s things that you want to pay for, but do you agree with that, that maybe that’s part of why there isn’t more, both — I know there’s popularity in the polling — but more support in politics and in the populace around the platform here? Do you think you’re clear enough about what the increased revenue would pay for, on the left?

**Claire Valdez**  
This is a really good question, and actually it’s a really live question, I think, within the movement, is *how are we messaging the necessity of taxing the rich*? Because truly, the list of things that we could pay for is endless. I talked a little bit about healthcare. We can talk about public-transit infrastructure, infrastructure upgrades, putting elevators in at every \[subway\] stop, building 15 gigawatts of public renewable energy.

And winnowing that list down to something that feels really salient and immediate in people’s lives is frankly a challenge, because there are so many needs, people are being squeezed from so many different sides. And so I think we can do a better job of foregrounding the exact proposals that we want to see funded.

And like I said, we’re heading into this potential Medicaid cliff, where many thousands of workers might be pushed off their healthcare. I think that is a really good example of why we need to be raising revenue, and why it needs to be happening now, why we can’t wait for another election cycle, or whatever. I know people who are going to be losing their healthcare. And that’s a really frightening proposition for someone who might not have savings in the bank to get through the next few months if they don’t have it.

**Christina Greer**  
Assuming Democrats take the House, would you support Hakeem Jeffries becoming speaker?

**Claire Valdez**  
Right now, I’m really focused on getting through 2026, and being in a position where we do take back the House. And so I am a little wary of committing to making, to committing to voting for the speaker at this time. What I’ll say is that I really hope that Democrats can take back the House in 2026, and that the progressive challengers around the country are successful. And that within these campaigns, and by winning, that we can demonstrate that there is a new vision for what leadership should be doing in the Congress.

**Ben Smith**  
Is there something that he could do to get you to say yes to that? Because it probably is, as you see in Albany, the most important vote you take, so it’s, I’m betting, voters might reasonably want to know your answer to it.

**Claire Valdez**  
Yeah, I’ll say that there’s a lot of dissatisfaction in my district about the way that, the way that \[Jeffries\] has dealt with confronting the war on Iran. I think refusing to say we won’t commit to funding more of this illegal war is a real problem and people are angry about it. Rightfully so. … So I think there are things like that I think are real points of contention. And I’d like to see some change there.

**Myles Miller**  
Can I just ask, you called the district a progressive district. And progressive and DSA are sometimes used interchangeably, coming from a progressive neighborhood. The DSA is such a different beast, whatever you want to call it.

**Claire Valdez**  
Call it beast.

**Myles Miller**  
Beast. But yeah, there’s some parts of the district that, you know, folks who’ve lived in Greenpoint for a long time, whether they’re Polish or not, or folks who’ve lived in South Williamsburg, who have lived there for quite some time. How do you differentiate yourself from a person who is so known in the district, and the issues that they have taken on for the last decade have been so germane to that district before, sort of, the DSA came in and said, we also care about these issues and we care about them a bit more and differently?

**Claire Valdez**  
I think in this campaign, we are trying to advance a real vision for federal policy that speaks to working people and directly addresses the problems that are happening in our lives. I just spoke about the Iran war. Those are — that’s billions and billions of dollars that are being spent, rather than being spent here in our communities shoring up our hospitals and our public transit system.

This campaign is really about advancing a vision for what’s possible and what we can be pushing back on. How we take on corporate greed and the billionaire class, how we take on the military-industrial complex.

And I’ll say, I live in Ridgewood. I represent Ridgewood. There are many people who’ve been there for a very long time. And I’m proud that I’ve made good connections and good relationships with the people who have been in these neighborhoods and called them home very proudly for decades, or even in some cases, generations. My role as a legislator has really been, and on my Assembly campaign, within this one, is about going out and talking to as many people as possible about the shared vision, and how I want to make sure that people can stay in neighborhoods for the long-term and can truly enjoy the good life.

**Ben Smith**  
We should ask a housing question.

**Ben Max**  
I have a housing question. I guess it builds on that question, which is, again, obviously your seemingly top competitor in the race is the [Brooklyn Borough President](https://www.brooklynbp.nyc.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) \[Antonio Reynoso\]. He’s taken a very all-of-the-above, very pro-housing-growth stance, including a real focus on upzoning and adding density to the lower-density parts of Brooklyn and the city more broadly. Do you agree with that? That general sense of, do it all on housing, including a lot more market-rate supply, but supply of all types and increasing density in some of the lower-density areas?

**Claire Valdez**  
So one of the pieces of federal legislation that I’m most excited about, and there’s a sister version on the state side, is the [Homes Act ](https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/press-releases/us-senator-tina-smith-and-congresswoman-ocasio-cortez-introduce-homes-act?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)carried by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that does a few different things. It puts more money into NYCHA; tt repeals the [Faircloth amendment](https://nationalhomeless.org/repeal-faircloth-amendment/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), so we can build more NYCHA developments; and it advances social housing as another option, for decommodified housing that’s permanently affordable and democratically managed by the people who live there. That’s also legislation carried by my colleague [Emily Gallagher](https://nyassembly.gov/mem/Emily-Gallagher?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the state, on the state side, that I’ve been very supportive of and very excited by.

I was in Barcelona in 2024, doing a tour of social-housing developments there. And they were beautiful. And it was a real demonstration of how the state can provide and build housing that’s, like I said, deeply and permanently affordable for people, that doesn’t cede power to real-estate developers who have a profit motive in mind — understandably so, they’re real-estate developers.

But I think the state can play a much more active role, in making sure that there’s housing that’s built that is outside of those market forces, so that people don’t have to worry about their rents getting raised all of the time.

I, like I said, I live in Ridgewood. We’re seeing rents go up like crazy right now. It’s not just mine. And this is a neighborhood that also saw, I think, the largest share of our rent-stabilized housing stock just disappear over the last few years. It’s a really, it’s a really frightening prospect, that we wouldn’t be able to stay in our neighborhood for the long haul.

**Ben Max**  
Now Reynoso would say: upzone Ridgewood, you’ll have less pressure on rents, you get more supply into the market. Agree or disagree?

**Claire Valdez**  
I think if we’re only talking about market-rate housing, I disagree. The market rate for one—

**Ben Max**  
Almost any upzoning like that would be mixed-income — it would have to include [Mandatory Inclusionary Housing](https://council.nyc.gov/land-use/plans/mih-zqa/mih/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), so it’d be mixed.

**Claire Valdez**  
I think, again, what I am really interested in advancing in this campaign, and at the state level, too, is a vision of social housing and public housing that can, and a role that the state could play, in much more aggressively in making sure that the housing that we’re building is actually deeply, deeply affordable and protected from the markets, that, right now, are really squeezing me.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you disagree with Mamdani on that, because I think he seems to think that you’re just not gonna hit the kind of numbers you want without the private market? Do you think he’s wrong about that?

**Claire Valdez**  
I don’t think he’s wrong. Like I said, what I’m really, the thing that I’m very excited about is this model of housing that is, that has iterations in New York already that we should be continuing to—

**Ben Smith**  
The federal government can afford 200,000, 300,000, 500,000 units of it? Or do you think, because Mamdani, I think, over the course of his campaign, kind of shifted on that…is he wrong?

**Claire Valdez**  
No, I think in reality we’re going to have to, like private development is going to happen, and the role of elected officials will be in pushing as hard as possible to make it as deeply affordable as possible, and have as big a share of those units be deeply affordable and actually affordable for the people who live in the neighborhood and hope to stay there.

So there will be a mix. But I really want to be advancing a vision of housing that doesn’t rely on market forces to to be sustainable, because we can’t, we just can’t afford it. And the housing crisis is really, it’s really dire. People are being forced out of their neighborhoods right now. And I don’t want to see a New York City that’s hollowed out of working people.

**Akash Mehta**  
This was right before you got to the State Legislature. But Governor Hochul, a couple years ago, had a housing compact that would’ve required every area of the state, including every community board district in New York City, to produce a certain amount of housing. And if they didn’t, the state would override their local zoning. And it also would’ve legalized [ADU](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/plus-one-adu.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)s across the state. Had you been in the Legislature at that time, would you have supported that, or not?

**Claire Valdez**  
Candidly, I’d have to look at it, to know whether or not, but what I will say is that there are certainly communities that have not built their fair share of housing, that overdevelopment has been happening in certain parts of the district. Certainly Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Long Island City, have seen a lot of development, and that hasn’t been matched in other parts of the city or state. And so I’d be curious to look at it specifically before I make a yes no, but, the need for more housing is real.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
The mayor seems like he’s supporting the redevelopment of the [Chelsea Elliott \[NYCHA\] project](https://www.fultonelliottchelsea.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which depends on market-rate density to fund the public-housing portion. Is that a mistake for him to go ahead with that and should he rethink it?

**Claire Valdez**  
It is a good question, and again, I think we are, we’re in a position because of really, decades and decades of disinvestment in our public-housing stock, where these are the decisions that would have to be made. What I’m really hoping in the coming years, and certainly as a Congressmember, is to fight for as much funding into our NYCHA as possible, so we don’t have to make these kinds of decisions.

That we can retrofit our buildings, that we can fix elevators, and that we can build more developments, too. The waiting list for these buildings is incredibly long. And bringing units up to code over time, doing asbestos abatement, all of that takes a long time. And requires a lot of resources. So what I’m hoping as a Congressmember is to fight for as much funding for NYCHA as possible. So these aren’t the tradeoffs that we have to be evaluating.

**Ben Max**  
Short of $80 billion, though, like that \[snaps fingers\], are these the types of compromises that seem necessary in the short-term? Some people say this should really be a model: tear down the buildings that are falling apart, build new public housing and add some housing supply on the NYCHA campus. Is there something wrong with that? Is that a bad model?

**Claire Valdez**  
Like I said, I think what I’m really hoping to advance, is a vision where we don’t have to make these kinds of compromises. I know there are many NYCHA tenants who are really frightened right now that this is going to be their reality. And the fact is, we live in an incredibly wealthy country. We live in one of the wealthiest countries this world has ever known. We should be able to make these repairs without making terrible sacrifices for the residents who call these homes.

**Harry Siegel**  
I think we’re getting toward the end here. I feel like a lot of this has been, you implicitly offering but dancing around a theory of the case for what government could do, and how your election would fit in with that. I’m hoping you can talk directly about that, and also, because it’s complicated, with lawmakers…who your models would be for successful legislators. And you brought up Ocasio-Cortez, but it was strictly in terms of messaging. Maybe that is the theory of the case, is, more messaging gets more results. Your win would send that message to the Democratic Party, but pop that out.

**Claire Valdez**  
So I think in this campaign, and really in my kind of political life, what I believe and hope to show people, is that the government can play, can be, a force for good in people’s lives. That it can, we can, be ambitious in our public works, that we can be ambitious in supporting workers who are trying to organize their unions. That we can be ambitious in the relief that we offer people, and that, in that process, people can become powerful actors in their own lives. I come out of organizing precisely because my union taught me that I don’t have to accept bad wages and bad working conditions. We can organize for something much better.

I think the Congresswoman — incredible communicator; I think so much of Congress is having a bully pulpit to communicate ideas, and advance a vision for what the economy should look like, and what our society should look like. But I’ll say it too, she has been a very effective Congresswoman. I think she’s brought a lot of resources back to her district. I think she has shown real leadership in moments where that is sorely lacking from some of our other Democratic leaders. And, in doing so, I think, helps make people more brave and more faithful in a democratic process.

And that’s really essential right now, when people either feel pushed out of politics entirely, don’t have faith in the federal government, don’t show up to vote in elections. I think that kind of demobilization and dissatisfaction is in part how we arrived at Trump’s presidency in 2024.

**Harry Siegel**  
Very quickly, what message would a win from you send to the Democratic Party, in a race that a Democrat is going to win in November?

**Claire Valdez**  
I hope that it shows that we can be, like I said, very ambitious. That what people are angry about is that their quality of life hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s gotten worse, that wages have been stagnant, that costs are going up, and it doesn’t feel like there’s anyone stepping in to help them.

I hope that this campaign can show that everyday working people organizing together can really change the political landscape in New York City. And that we need to be advancing a foreign policy of peace, of global cooperation, of solidarity in a moment when, certainly, this administration, but many others, have begun forever wars, and invested so much of our money in bombs and in and in war that no American wants to see.

**Ben Smith**  
We’re nearly done. It feels like it would’ve made sense to end it on that very kind of high brow sweeping note. But actually this being New York, there’s a real local news question. I didn’t want to leave without asking.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Speaking of quality of life and the democratic process, your district suffered a street takeover by reckless drivers over the weekend, where one of them, clearly out of control of the vehicle, he came very close to hitting multiple pedestrians. That one of those vehicles had many speeding camera tickets. You support the [super speeder bill ](http://google.com/search?q=super+speeder+bill&rlz=1C5OZZY%5FenUS1162US1163&oq=super+speeder+bill&gs%5Flcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIICAEQABgWGB4yCggCEAAYChgWGB4yCAgDEAAYFhgeMggIBBAAGBYYHjIKCAUQABgKGBYYHjINCAYQABiGAxiABBiKBTIGCAcQRRg90gEIMjA4OGowajeoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)to put automatic speed governors in these vehicles, but the \[Assembly\] speaker reportedly does not. What will you do in the next couple months to ensure that the super speeder bill passes?

**Claire Valdez**  
This is certainly an excellent case study for why the super speeder bill is necessary. We see reckless drivers all the time get by and in some cases kill people, we’ve seen people killed in traffic violence by people who have, what is it, 16 points on their licenses.

This is a demonstrated pattern of behavior that, we know what the next step will be, injury, potentially death. And I think, the case in my district, this reckless driving, I think is a really important case, to be sharing with the speaker and be advocating for this piece of legislation to be passed. The governor included it in her budget. We have a real necessity, in the Assembly, to fight for it, and make sure that it passes, too, because people’s lives are at stake.

**Ben Smith**  
To abstract that up, maybe a little, I think there’s a sense that you kind of see Mamdani wrestling with in real time: the left, people don’t trust the left, always, on issues of public order. I’ve seen, like Queens right now, there’s all sorts of stuff with — I was hoping, Nicole was more in the weeds than me — but obviously, neighbors are upset with kids drifting cars around, and stuff like that. And I’m curious, how big-picture you see that tension. Because it does seem like a lot of progressive governance in cities around the country has wound up falling apart over a sense that people don’t trust you to have these sort-of basic questions on order.

**Claire Valdez**  
I think that we are, and you’re right, I think we’re seeing Mamdani wrestle with this in real time. I think, we have a democratic socialist mayor, who, in my opinion, is doing a pretty good job, improving the kind of quality-of-life in neighborhoods. We saw him very successfully dig us out of a snowstorm, a couple snowstorms. I think demonstrating that leadership can be successful has incredible downstream effects for the rest of us. And we’ll see how that plays out in the coming years.

But it’s certainly— I think quality of life issues are really essential to be addressing. And it’s something that my office in the Assembly, at least, has taken really seriously. We have an open-door policy for people to come in and chew our ears off if they need to or want to, and want to make sure that people feel safe and comfortable in their neighborhoods. Because a sense of chaos is a sense that government isn’t working for them. And that’s the exact opposite experience that we want people to have.

**Ben Smith**  
Thanks for coming in.

**Claire Valdez**  
Thank you.
### How Guadalajara Killed the Paper Permit
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/guadalajara-visor-urbano-permitting/
Last updated: 2026-05-21T20:01:09.000Z
[Vital City](https://soundcloud.com/vital-city-604970448?ref=vitalcitynyc.org "Vital City") · [How Guadalajara Killed the Paper Permit](https://soundcloud.com/vital-city-604970448/how-guadalajara-killed-the?ref=vitalcitynyc.org "How Guadalajara Killed the Paper Permit")

---

*This is the second installment of* [*Borrow and Steal*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/londons-quest-for-low-traffic-neighborhoods)*, our monthly interview series profiling evidence-backed urban policy ideas from around the world — and the practitioners who have translated them into reality.*

*Our second interview is with* [*Yunive Moreno*](https://www.linkedin.com/in/yunivemoreno/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*, director of* [*Visor Urbano*](https://visorurbano.guadalajara.gob.mx/inicio?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*, an online, one-stop shop for issuing commercial permits. Visor Urbano was first developed by the Mexican city of Guadalajara in 2016 with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies. It is now hosted by the state of Jalisco (population roughly 9 million), with some 60 cities across Mexico running a version of the platform. Applicants can pull up zoning maps, see what’s allowed on a given parcel and apply for a permit to open a business or begin construction — entirely online. The average turnaround for a permit is three days.*

*What began as a bureaucratic cleanup project produced an unexpected dividend: a clean digital paper trail that cut out local middlemen who had long extracted fees, formal and otherwise, from business owners navigating the permit process. An* [*impact evaluation*](https://franciscolaragarcia.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/visor-urbano-impact-evaluation-delivery-associates-report-v4.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *from researchers at Oxford and Columbia found an 84% reduction in licensing time, a 74% drop in reports of bribe solicitation by municipal officials and an 85% drop in solicitation by third-party intermediaries. Some Jalisco municipalities have since seen permit revenue rise by 100% to 300% in a single year.*

*American cities should be paying attention. In many U.S. cities, obtaining a permit still requires in-person trips to a diffuse array of agencies, each with their own, fragmented software. Inspectors compare plans to byzantine codes that have, over decades, produced an entire profession —* [*“the expeditor”*](https://www.permitflow.com/blog/permit-expediter?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *— whose job is essentially to walk applications through City Hall.* 

*In New York, that system has* [*produced scandals on a regular schedule*](https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2017/09/18/is-time-up-for-nycs-construction-expeditors/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*: 50 inspectors, expeditors and owners arrested in a 2015 sting;* [*11 Department of Buildings employees charged*](https://abc7ny.com/post/bribery-scheme-probe-leads-to-arrests-of-building-inspectors-contractors/511324/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *with taking more than $400,000 in bribes;* [*a former DOB supervisor indicted just three weeks ago*](https://manhattanda.org/manhattan-d-a-dept-of-investigation-announce-bribery-indictment-of-dept-of-buildings-supervisor/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *for allegedly fast-tracking plan reviews in exchange for $75,000 in cash and travel. And that’s before we get to the* [*federal indictment of Mayor Eric Adams*](https://www.nytimes.com/article/eric-adams-indictment.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*, which alleged that he pressured FDNY officials to permit the high-rise Turkish consulate to open before the building was deemed safe to occupy.* 

*In our interview, Yunive explains how Visor Urbano was built, how it was scaled from a single city to a state of 9 million, and what cities considering the model should know about the politics of digitization. She also offers some blunt advice for anyone considering the same path.*

---

**Cara Eckholm:** Yunive, thanks for joining.

**Yunive Moreno:** Hi, Cara. Thanks for having me.

**Cara Eckholm:** Wonderful. So you were around in 2016 when Visor Urbano was just an idea. How did permitting work in Guadalajara before the platform, and what inspired the push to digitize the process?

**Yunive Moreno:** The process was, much like in the United States, quite complex. The principal challenge we faced at the time was the asymmetry of information around urban zoning — a lot of paperwork and a lack of transparency about what each permit actually required.

Also, in 2016, the city’s urban planning framework was updated for the first time in more than ten years. Those plans were published as documents full of highly technical language and data that were very difficult for ordinary people — anyone without a background in urban planning — to understand. That’s what motivated us to take those rules and translate them into an easy-to-use platform. With Visor Urbano, you select the property you’re interested in, and within seconds, you can see all the regulations that apply to that zone.

Once you’ve reviewed the applicable rules, you can start your application process entirely online — or, if you prefer, in person at the office. We maintained both channels. Staff at the Visor Urbano office help people digitize their paperwork and navigate the process. That’s how Visor Urbano got started, almost 10 years ago.

**Cara Eckholm:** It sounds like you’ve come a very long way. Just to make sure I’m understanding correctly — before Visor Urbano, if I were a business owner and wanted to check whether I could open a business at a particular site, I would have had to go in person?

**Yunive Moreno:** Yes, exactly. Before you could even begin the process of opening a business or starting construction, you had to visit a separate government office that held the urban planning information. That information existed as a kind of legal document — a PDF with hundreds of rules. Guadalajara is divided into, I believe, 10 or 12 zones, and the document ran more than 100 pages.

**Cara Eckholm:** Right, a zoning code.

**Yunive Moreno:** Exactly. It was really difficult to read and interpret. So you’d go to that office, and a public servant would analyze your situation manually — reviewing the law, sometimes visiting the site in person — and that process alone could take months, just to confirm whether your project was even permitted in that zone. 

There was a large asymmetry of information. Many consulting firms offered to do that analysis for you, but at a significant cost to citizens. What we did was take all of that zoning information and put it into a database. We mapped all the urban zoning rules by district and automated the lookup, which produced what we call “urban fact sheets” for each property, which citizens can download. Each fact sheet says what is allowed — and with that information you can then immediately begin your application online.

For larger projects, a public official still needs to review the application. But for something like a grocery store or other low-impact use, you can get your approval almost instantly.

**Cara Eckholm:** Where does the three-day average come in? What’s automatic and what requires a human reviewer?

**Yunive Moreno:** The fact sheets are instantaneous, but the permit application itself requires additional documentation — your ID, proof of property ownership, that kind of paperwork. The review of your uploads takes up to three days, during which a staff member verifies your identity and confirms that the property is legally yours. After that, you’re cleared to open your business.

**Cara Eckholm:** So just to recap: The zoning code is available online for anyone to consult. You look up a property, see whether your business is permitted there, and if you want to proceed, a human reviewer is looped in — but you’re still applying online and getting a response within about three days. And for more complex construction projects, I assume the review is more intensive. How do you differentiate between something like a grocery store — which gets fast approval — versus a multi-story commercial building?

**Yunive Moreno:** Yes, we have a hierarchy of project complexity. For all projects, there’s always a technical reviewer on the other side of the screen. For low-impact uses, that specialist works through a clear set of rules, so the process is relatively straightforward. For more complex projects, you should expect the review to take longer — but the key difference is that you can upload everything online: your project plans, architectural drawings, everything the reviewer needs. You no longer have to walk files into an office.

**Cara Eckholm:** Got it. And how did Visor Urbano go from idea to reality? I understand you initially received support from Bloomberg Philanthropies to build out the software, but that it remained a city-owned and city-operated project. Can you elaborate?

**Yunive Moreno:** Sure. In 2016, when Visor Urbano was just an idea, we applied for a [Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayor’s Challenge](https://www.bloomberg.org/government-innovation/spurring-innovation-in-cities/mayors-challenge/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Latin America, and we were one of five winning cities to receive a grant from the foundation. That grant allowed us to build a dedicated technical team within Guadalajara city government, focused exclusively on the project. We believe that this platform opened up information that had for many years been siloed and gatekept. The response from the public was very strong.

Following Guadalajara’s success, we transitioned to working with the state of Jalisco, with the goal of replicating Visor Urbano across all 125 municipalities in the state. That was a real challenge — scaling something built for one of Mexico’s major cities to work for municipalities with vastly different resources and realities. Some of our municipalities have fewer than 100 residents. The needs are completely different.

We developed a new platform, Visor Urbano Jalisco, specifically for the state context. We visited municipalities across the state, ran surveys and listened carefully to understand what each community needed. Many other municipalities didn’t even have computers in their offices. They didn’t have specialized staff to handle permit applications.

So we studied those realities, built Visor Urbano Jalisco accordingly and launched in 2020\. The pandemic actually helped us — because people couldn’t go to government offices, there was strong demand for online services. We ran a major communications campaign, and we’ve since launched in 35 municipalities. 

**Cara Eckholm:** I’m curious about how that replication effect actually works in practice. You mentioned that the mayor of Guadalajara later became governor of Jalisco — is that right? Was it his initiative to take the platform statewide?

**Yunive Moreno:** Yes, exactly. I think the political backing was the key driver of our success. The core values of Visor Urbano — transparency, efficiency and digitalization — were values that the team shared from the beginning. When Mayor Enrique Alfaro transitioned to the governorship of Jalisco, his innovation team moved with him, from the city to the state. The digital innovation agenda came with them, and the goal became bringing to all 125 municipalities the same tools that Guadalajara had. The idea was that it shouldn’t matter if your municipality doesn’t have the resources of a capital city — you should still be able to have your own modern, functional permitting platform.

So we built the software to be adaptable — each municipality can configure the platform to fit its own context. And the Visor Urbano Jalisco team does a lot of on-the-ground work: visiting municipalities, getting to know the staff, building capacity and supporting the transition to a new way of working. It’s a significant amount of people-oriented, soft-skills work alongside the technical implementation.

**Cara Eckholm:** That’s a great segue to my next question, which was about the political dynamics. Was there any pushback from permitting officers? Because as I understand it, in the old system, there were people making money at various stages of the process who were essentially cut out once everything went online. What was the reaction from those groups — the people working inside city governments, and the intermediaries who were helping shepherd applicants through the process, some legally and some not?

**Yunive Moreno:** We were actually surprised by how positive the reaction was. Part of that is because Visor Urbano’s initial focus was low-impact permits, which represent about 70% to 80% of all permit applications. But more importantly, we worked proactively with the business chambers — the chambers of commerce and construction industry associations — and tried to create a win-win situation. We showed them how the platform could actually help their work: It gave them better tools for managing higher-impact projects, and it helped their members get more transparent, rapid feedback from the government. 

I also think those groups benefited from the platform in a more indirect way: As the process became more efficient, more people chose to go through official channels rather than informal ones. We saw that when the platform works well, it builds trust — people become more willing to engage with government processes and do things by the book.

**Cara Eckholm:** I’m curious about the platform architecture. Why did you decide to make it open source? Was it always obvious there would be demand from other cities?

**Yunive Moreno:** From the very beginning — both with Guadalajara and later with Jalisco — we understood that this was a problem facing many cities. We received calls, attended conferences and heard from cities all over Mexico that wanted their own version of Visor Urbano. As a fun fact: In Mexico today, saying “I have my own Visor Urbano” has become shorthand for having an online zoning and permitting platform — even when those systems weren’t built with our code or our support. 

Making the code open source was also a commitment we made to Bloomberg Philanthropies from the start. It was part of the foundation’s vision — and one of the final deliverables of our collaboration — to open up Visor Urbano Jalisco in the most accessible and practical way possible. We published the code in late 2024.

Since then, a number of cities have been building on it. We’re always open to helping. And I know that Bloomberg Philanthropies is also running its [Cities Ideas Exchange](https://citiesideaexchange.bloomberg.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) program with Visor Urbano as one of its featured projects, with the goal of replicating it in cities around the world.

**Cara Eckholm:** How many cities are using Visor Urbano today?

**Yunive Moreno:** Approximately 60 cities in Mexico.

**Cara Eckholm:** And has it spread beyond Mexico yet?

**Yunive Moreno:** Not yet. Through the Bloomberg Cities Ideas Exchange, there are plans to launch in one city in Argentina and one city in Chile, but as of now, there are no implementations outside Mexico as far as I know.

**Cara Eckholm:** Still, 60 is impressive. And how does the platform work for municipalities that don’t have reliable internet access, or even computers? You mentioned some towns are starting without basic infrastructure.

**Yunive Moreno:** Yes. As part of the support we provided to municipalities — with philanthropic backing — we were able to supply desktop computers for Visor Urbano in some cases. We’re also continuing to work with the state of Jalisco to expand that support.

But the hardware is often the easier part. The harder, more ongoing work is capacity building — training public servants to use the platform consistently, making sure citizens know how to navigate it and sustaining both sides of that equation over time. We have two sets of users: citizens applying for permits, and the government staff processing them. Serving both well is a continuous effort. It’s a hard process, but a deeply fulfilling one when you see how many people it reaches.

**Cara Eckholm:** In terms of volume — how many users or downloads have you seen across Jalisco?

**Yunive Moreno:** Right now, Visor Urbano Jalisco has urban plans available for 10 municipalities. Not every municipality has an updated and digitized urban plan — that’s a separate process — but for the ones we do have, we’ve generated 440,000 urban fact sheet downloads since the platform launched in 2020\. That number reflects a lot of interest in doing business and building in the state.

In addition, 35,000 permits have been processed through the platform across the state. We’re really proud of those numbers — it’s the most-used online platform in the state government.

**Cara Eckholm:** I want to ask about the platform’s impact. I know [researchers from Oxford and Columbia](https://franciscolaragarcia.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/visor-urbano-impact-evaluation-delivery-associates-report-v4.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) came to study Visor Urbano in Guadalajara around 2020\. What did they find?

**Yunive Moreno:** Yes. They came toward the end of the Guadalajara phase and conducted surveys and calls with platform users. They found an 84% reduction in average time for the licensing process, a 74% reduction in reports of bribe solicitation by municipal officials and an 85% reduction in bribe solicitation by third-party intermediaries — what we call “coyotes,” the people who used to help applicants navigate the process.

That impact evaluation was enormously meaningful to us, because fighting corruption in urban development was always one of Visor Urbano’s goals. It’s a sensitive topic — not many cities are willing to openly acknowledge or study corruption in their permitting systems. So having rigorous external evidence was really powerful.

**Cara Eckholm:** Right, I know Jalisco has been in the news a lot recently related to gang activity. I will say though that corruption-in-permitting is a universal problem. It’s not specific to Jalisco or Mexico. In U.S. cities, we’ve essentially legalized the intermediary role by creating the “expeditor” profession, but every few years there’s a major scandal. In fact, one of the original corruption charges against the last mayor of New York involved pressuring someone to approve a building permit before an inspection had been completed. 

It sounds like you’ve made progress relative to where most places are. On that note — the last time we spoke, you mentioned that you also saw a corresponding increase in municipal permitting revenue. The idea being that money that once went to bribes is now being collected by the city. Is that right? And how significant have those revenue increases been?

**Yunive Moreno:** What we observed in Jalisco is a bit more nuanced than a direct bribe-to-revenue conversion.

In many smaller municipalities, the issue wasn’t exactly bribery in the traditional sense. It was more that there wasn’t really a formal permitting process to speak of. People knew each other, deals were made informally and businesses opened without permits — not necessarily because anyone demanded a bribe, but because that was simply how things worked. A lot of economic activity was happening outside the formal system.

So the revenue increase we’ve seen is largely, we believe, due to people entering the formal economy. When you make the formal process easy, accessible and trustworthy, people who previously operated informally start going through official channels. That’s one major factor. 

It’s worth understanding just how significant permits and licenses are as a revenue source for Mexican municipalities. Their principal income streams come from three things: land use and property tax; water usage charges and permit and license fees. That’s essentially the full menu of owned revenue for a local government. So when permit revenue increases substantially, it matters.

And the state benefits too — as municipalities collect more revenue, the state’s federal transfer allocations also increase. We’re currently working to formally institutionalize Visor Urbano Jalisco as a state public policy — moving it from an innovation project to a permanent part of the government structure. It’s a complex process, given the need to respect municipal autonomy, but the case is strong: we have municipalities that have seen revenue increases of 100% to 300% in a single year.

**Cara Eckholm:** It sounds like the program pays for itself? I hadn’t thought about the informal-to-formal economy angle, but it makes complete sense.

Just to close out — what are the key takeaways for other cities considering digitizing their permitting processes? Any advice?

**Yunive Moreno:** My advice is simply: start. You don’t need to wait for the perfect moment or have all the resources in place. What you need is the will and the right team. You will encounter resistance and hear a lot of “no’s” along the way — but once you push through that, the benefits become visible and the momentum builds.

I also believe citizens are demanding more information, clearer rules and more power in their own hands. And the lesson from our experience is that when the government delivers better services, people respond. 

**Cara Eckholm:** Of course. Well, thank you so much for your time, Yunive. It’s a great story, and I’m sure it’ll be a source of inspiration for a lot of people.
### Government AI, the Road to More Bureaucratic Discretion and Accountability
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-government-ai-accountability-discretion/
Last updated: 2026-04-29T15:45:01.000Z
When Mayor Zohran Mamdani created a new[ Office of Mass Engagement](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-establishes-office-of-mass-engagement-to-transform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), promising to listen more closely to the needs of everyday New Yorkers, it was a welcome first step toward earning the public’s trust. But as Mamdani seems to understand, listening better, and to a broader swath of the public, is only half of the recipe for a more responsive local government. City Hall also needs to solve the irritating quality-of-life problems more nimbly and proactively.

I saw how this played out when I served as Mike Bloomberg’s deputy mayor. Even though the City generally received high marks for performance, I wanted to understand how operations affected New Yorkers in their daily lives. So, I would meet five times a week with small groups of community representatives in each borough, starting each session with a simple question: How could city government do a better job for you and your neighborhood?

Almost every conversation included a common-sense request or complaint that ran into rigid interpretations of City rules. Can the timing of walk signs be adjusted to allow seniors to cross a wide street more safely? The traffic engineering manual said no. Why was the construction at a neighborhood park shoddy? Because procurement rules at the time required choosing the lowest bidder, not the best. A restaurant owner in Queens once hollered about getting fined by health inspectors for leaving his mozzarella out of the refrigerator while he was making pizzas.

To understand how it got this way, you have to go back over a century to the Progressive era. In response to Tammany Hall’s corruption and abuses of power, reformers went overboard with rules, compliance requirements and oversight that have stayed with us to this day. Union leaders in many jurisdictions are eager to protect their workers from supervisory abuses; understandably, they embedded restrictions and limitations in the work rules set out in bargaining contracts. Unfortunately, this leads to compounded restrictions, further limiting flexibility for supervisory staff.

> In this model, the traffic engineer looking at the wide street can pull up pedestrian counts, crash data and the age profile of the surrounding residents in seconds and adjust the walk signal without waiting six months for a manual revision. 

To be sure, city managers, elected officials and residents all want decisions that follow rules, reflect public values and treat people fairly. Too much control, however, creates nonsensical rigidity. It robs traffic engineers, procurement officials and restaurant inspectors of the discretion to develop pragmatic solutions to neighborhood problems.

Artificial intelligence, paired with updated civil service and management rules, offers a new way to strike a healthy balance. In a[ recent journal article in Urban Governance](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2664328626000069?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), my coauthor Juncheng “Tony” Yang and I call it “accountable discretion”: giving frontline workers room to use judgment on the problem at hand, while using technology to make every decision traceable, reviewable and fair.

 In this model, the traffic engineer looking at the wide street can pull up pedestrian counts, crash data and the age profile of the surrounding residents in seconds and adjust the walk signal without waiting six months for a manual revision. The health inspector, upon walking into the Queens pizzeria, can see that this is a first-time issue in an otherwise clean kitchen, issue a warning rather than a fine and offer guidance on how to meet the intent of the rule. The procurement officer can weigh a contractor's past performance against the low bid, with the comparison built into the system rather than buried in a file cabinet.

AI can do the work that used to make discretion difficult, if not impossible: It pulls the relevant data to the moment of decision, handles the routine paperwork that eats a field worker's day and leaves a clear record of who decided what and why. The frontline worker spends less time typing and more time judging — and every judgment is visible after the fact.

Supervision changes, too. Instead of writing rules that force every inspector to act the same way, a supervisor can watch how her inspectors actually use their judgment — and intervene only where the pattern looks off. If one inspector is issuing warnings at twice the rate of her peers in similar neighborhoods, that is a coaching conversation. If fines in one borough track the race of the business owner more than the severity of the violation, that is a problem the old system would have hidden for years. A supervisor responsible for dozens of field workers cannot read every case file; AI can and can flag the handful that deserve a second look.

> Accountable discretion only works with strong human oversight, clear limits on surveillance, serious investment in staff training and straightforward ways for residents to question a decision and push back.

None of this is automatic. AI tools are only as good as the data they draw on, and most City data still lives in siloed, aging systems — locked up by privacy rules written for a different era or trapped in software that does not talk to the software next door. Without fixing the plumbing, faster answers will just be faster wrong answers. There are also real risks on the other side: agencies that monitor their own staff too closely, or managers who rubber-stamp whatever the algorithm suggests. Accountable discretion only works with strong human oversight, clear limits on surveillance, serious investment in staff training and straightforward ways for residents to question a decision and push back.

AI can also change how a city listens to its communities, advancing, over time, an intervention in the life cycle of a developing problem. Residents routinely document deficient park construction on Instagram and other public platforms weeks before the issue reaches municipal channels. To close this latency gap, some cities are now deploying anonymized survey instruments and AI-based sentiment analysis to surface neighborhood-level quality-of-life concerns — including dissatisfaction with specific contractors or facilities — earlier in the complaint cycle. AI should monitor sensors to get ahead of problems: A spike in an air-quality sensor in the South Bronx, for example, could trigger a response before the first asthma complaint comes in.

Rather than removing human judgment, AI, when properly used, can free up more time and space for frontline common sense. An AI helper can sort records, summarize documents, flag patterns or handle routine steps. AI can increase responsiveness by dramatically expanding self-service. Why should a family opening a restaurant in the Bronx have to chase permits across a dozen agencies, when a single AI-powered front door could take their information once, in whatever language they speak, and route it to every office that needs it? Residents receive faster, clearer answers and services along with new levels of transparency. These shifts will free up more time for judgment and help public employees focus on areas that deserve more attention.

None of these changes will come easily. Civil service procedures are governed by state and local statutes, encrusted by decades of litigation. Union leaders, often skeptical of both managers and elected officials, will need to be persuaded. Public anxiety about AI misuse must be addressed directly. Yet this is precisely the moment for reform, when mayors can get out in front of changes that are coming regardless.

Cities need rules and protections regarding AI that, for example, require it to be deployed to expose bias, not entrench it. Mayors with strong labor relationships should engage now — demonstrating that humans remain in the loop at every decision point, and that accountable discretion is itself a recruiting advantage with a new generation of tech-fluent public workers. Thousands of New Yorkers will tell you, on any given day, that you cannot win against City Hall. But it is their City Hall, and what they want is common-sense responsiveness. Public employees take these jobs because they want to serve, not to hand out fines over mozzarella. With the right tools and the right rules, both sides win. Struggling New Yorkers have the most to gain, and efficiency can be turned into better and more affordable services.

---

*This piece draws on an academic paper by Stephen Goldsmith and Juncheng “Tony” Yang,*[ *“AI and the Transformation of Accountability and Discretion in Urban Governance,”*](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2664328626000069?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *in the journal Urban Governance.*
### Local Politics, After Murder
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-declining-murders-politics/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:21.000Z
For my entire lifetime, the central political issue in New York City has been crime, and even more specifically, the murder rate. In the New York City of my youth, the local evening news and the front pages of the Post and the Daily News were effectively a crime blotter, your daily dose of grisly crimes and ineffective politicians, vicious gangs and heroic cops. Worries about crime played a key role in everyday decisions, about whether to take the subway at night or whether it was okay to walk home from school alone. 

[Political scientists have shown clearly that the murder rate](https://people.duke.edu/~nwc8/arnold%5Fcarnes%5Fholding%5Fmayors%5Faccountable.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — not the local economy, not the quality of other local services — has been *the* measuring stick by which we judge the success and failure of politicians. The murder rate has historically played a role in New York City mayoral approval ratings, much like the unemployment rate or GDP growth have in determining presidential approval ratings.

Murders have also always led media coverage, particularly in New York City’s vibrant tabloids. If it bleeds, it leads. [Books about New York City’s political history](https://www.amazon.com/Gods-New-York-Idealists-Opportunists/dp/052551063X?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are often mostly discussions of murders, and the political ramifications of those murders. 

High murder rates have destroyed the careers of some of the city’s most promising politicians, like David Dinkins. Falling murder rates have elevated extremely unlikely ones, like Rudy Giuliani. Even as the murder rate fell to historic lows, mayors who sought to change the subject to other issues, like Bill de Blasio, [have seen their tenures partially defined by conflict with the police](https://abcnews.com/US/nypd-officers-turn-back-de-blasio-cops-funeral/story?id=27851746&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as the specter of “the bad old days” hovered over everyone’s shoulders. 

There’s a reason for this. The bad old days were *really bad*. New York City had more than 2,200 homicides in 1990\. The rate fell dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s, making New York City one of the safest cities in the country. As Vital City’s essential annual look into crime statistics noted, all types of crime spiked during COVID, but, [while other types of crime have been stubbornly persistent, murder rates have fallen dramatically](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/crime-in-new-york-city-trends-statistics) since. 

Last year, there were [309 murders in New York City, a decline of 20% from the prior year](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR001/nypd-safest-year-ever-gun-violence-fewest-shooting-incidents-shooting?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This was close to [2017’s 290, which was the fewest since the city started recording murder statistics](https://abc7ny.com/post/nypd-new-york-citys-2017-crime-rate-was-lowest-since-1951/2868270/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

In the first quarter of this year, [murders were down another 28% year-on-year](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/transcript-%5Fmayor-mamdani-and-nypd-announces-fewest-murders--sho?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). That data is noisy, and the low numbers this year almost certainly have something to do with snowstorms and extreme cold, so this year’s huge decline may not stick. But the decline is enormous. 

If the number of murders keeps declining at this year’s rates, New York City’s murder rate this year will be about 2.6 per 100,000 residents, a lot like we see in cities like [Toronto (1.6) and Berlin (3.2)](https://www.london.gov.uk/londons-homicide-rate-capita-lowest-records-began-having-recorded-its-lowest-homicide-figures-eleven?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Crime remains an issue in these cities, of course, but worries about murder do not dominate their politics. Further, a large majority of New York City residents, whether they are transplants or the young, simply have no memory of an era with high murder rates. (They likely do remember the spike during COVID, but, as serious as that was, it was small potatoes when compared to the 1980s and ‘90s.) While some other types of crime are stubbornly persistent, the Bad Old Days of high murder rates are increasingly a ghost story told at night to a population that doesn’t remember and may not care. 

The causes of the decline are only partially understood. Scholars have some [clear findings](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426877?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), like that increases in the number of police officers generally reduce crime. But while theories abound, they don’t have clear answers for why we saw such [a huge decline in the 1990s and 2000s](https://www.amazon.com/City-That-Became-Safe-Lessons/dp/0199324166?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (or why rates fell across the country, although at different rates). We similarly don’t have clear answers about why rates have come back down all over the country post-COVID. So there’s no guarantee this trend will continue. 

 Whatever the reason why murder has declined, it’s worth asking now what politics in New York City will look like if there are not many murders anymore. On some level, we don’t even have to ask. Mayor Mamdani’s election, [according to](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-chris-hayes.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) many, would have been unthinkable if the murder rate were not so low. Would the city have taken a chance on an inexperienced left-wing upstart if people were very afraid of crime? Notably, a number of Mamdani’s rivals in the last election put fighting crime at the center of their appeals to voters, either affirmatively or as defenses against criticism. But, while Mamdani talked about crime, it was not a major part of his appeal to voters — childcare, free buses, rent freezes and tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy were. Further, if homicide continues to fall, it is likely that Mamdani’s own political prospects will be strong, regardless of what else happens with the budget and taxes. 

 So what would we talk about in a city if we stopped talking about the murder rate? The answers can be broken into the more narrow question of what crime politics will look like, and the broader question of what effect the decline in homicide talk will have on the rest of politics. 

I think that, if homicide is truly defeated, city politics will be less consumed by fear and far more focused on the cost-effectiveness of government, an area in which New York City, despite its successes in reducing the murder rate, has long lagged. 

###  Crime politics after murder

 It would be wrong to think that homicide becoming less of an issue would be the end of public debate about crime. After all, murder isn’t the only crime, nor is prevention of murder the only thing the police do. 

 One area where we will see increased attention — indeed, one where we already have — is on the services police provide, without seeking to justify them in terms of their effect on the murder rate. 

For instance, since the 1990s, we have had a debate over whether police should focus on arresting people for committing quality-of-life crimes. But that debate has largely been about whether “broken windows policing” reduces murder. ([The empirical](https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-university-researchers-find-little-evidence-for-broken-windows-theory-say-neighborhood-disorder-doesnt-cause-crime/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) evidence has never been that strong, [but debate continues](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=peter+moskos+back+from+the+brink&adgrpid=186668573419&hvadid=779674748105&hvdev=c&hvexpln=0&hvlocphy=9004077&hvnetw=g&hvocijid=3345900255240836161--&hvqmt=e&hvrand=3345900255240836161&hvtargid=kwd-2411643678686&hydadcr=22593%5F13821245%5F8237&mcid=6fa93700adb239dd80eb8079bcbe872f&tag=googhydr-20&ref=pd%5Fsl%5F1r946myael%5Fe).) In a city with few murders, that framing will be less important. But it will not end the arguments over whether police, perhaps now freed up from other tasks, should address problems ranging from public urination and littering to threats of violence and harassment on the subway. (Or, indeed, actual assaults, which remain stubbornly high.)

That is, our crime politics will be about whether it is good to arrest people and devote public resources to fighting disorder because people *dislike* disorder, rather than linking that debate to questions about murder. Rather than focusing on the terror of murder, the question in policing will increasingly be about providing a positive vision of public services and unthreatening public spaces.

Similarly, there is a long debate about the effect that clearance rates, or solving cases, has on murder rates. There's [substantial evidence](https://www.amazon.com/When-Brute-Force-Fails-Punishment/dp/0691142084?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=When%20Brute%20Force%20Fails%20explains,put%20that%20knowledge%20to%20work.) that the certainty of punishment is more important to reducing crime than the severity of punishments. Although it makes logical sense, linking this to the clearance rate is [harder to do.](https://cls.gmu.edu/defenses/905?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 

As murder falls, I suspect clearance rates will be thought of in moral, rather than consequential, terms. That is, in a world where there are fewer murders, police will be held to account for solving murders, not because doing so will deter crime, but because people will want the government to provide victims with answers in cases of serious crimes. And, in a world with fewer homicides, police will be in a better place to solve crime, as their efforts will be spread across fewer cases. 

Notably, these arguments are about whether the social and economic benefits of order and justice are worth the tax price of police officers and prosecutors (and the social costs of arresting people). 

 One way to think about this is to ask whether voters will demand a “peace dividend,” cuts to police budgets and shifts of resources to other areas. The city surely has other needs, and, as the murder rate falls, some will put concerns about providing social services above demands for continued policing vigilance. Mayor Mamdani’s proposed Department of Community Safety is partially in this spirit. 

On the other hand, defunding the police has never been popular, even in 2020-21\. There are plenty of reasons why citizens will continue to want high levels of policing even as murder rates fall. Demand for public services like police and firefighting increase as property values increase, as they provide a kind of insurance for property. Providing public safety beyond murder prevention is important to economic development, as disorder and low-level crime reduces business investment. Rather than a “peace dividend,” citizens may demand the police and other city officials turn their attention to making public space more usable and making the city a more livable place. 

 Either way, in a city with a lower murder rate, crime politics will be fought out on very different grounds than it has been in living memory. 

###  Local politics more broadly

 The main effect of the decline of murder on city politics will probably be to make crime less important to local politics, and to elevate other issues. Indeed, as Mayor Mamdani’s election shows, issues of affordability and redistribution will have more space in a world where murder takes up less attention. More generally, the central question is likely to be about whether the extraordinarily high prices New York City residents pay in taxes and rent are worth it.

 Mayor Mamdani’s affordability politics are a perfect fit for a post-murder era. Telling voters you’ll spend scarce tax revenue on free buses or government-subsidized grocery stores is only plausible in a world where higher order concerns about safety have abated somewhat. [Whether or not you think these are good ideas](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/why-does-everything-cost-so-much), they are responses to the demands of voters less concerned about the murder rate. The fundamental pitch is not about avoiding the criminal downsides of urbanity, but about making it possible for more people to enjoy the upsides of living in the city. 

 The fights we are seeing over the City’s budget also have a post-murder feel to them. New York City has long had an extraordinarily high “tax price” for services. New York [pays more than any other large school district per student](https://cbcny.org/research/highest-costs-middling-marks?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but gets middling results. [The cost of running](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/nyregion/citys-annual-cost-per-inmate-is-nearly-168000-study-says.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [jails and prisons is much higher](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/comptroller-stringer-cost-of-incarceration-per-person-in-new-york-city-skyrockets-to-all-time-high/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and the quality again does not seem to be higher. Mayor Mamdani’s [focus on “public excellence,”](https://jacobin.com/2026/02/zohran-mamdani-efficiency-nyc-budget?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or improving the quality of services for a given tax price, is an effort to justify New York City’s high taxes (and the higher ones he’d like to see). Critics will argue for cuts to services, changes in union contracts or reforms to civil service rules to reduce costs. 

Either way, the focus will be on trying to convince New Yorkers they are getting a good deal.

 Mayor [Mamdani’s embrace](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/politics-policy/pro-development-yimby-advocates-lead-mamdanis-housing-effort?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [of YIMBYism](https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-city-election-charter-zoning-housing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is also a transition to a post-murder politics. At a rhetorical level, Mamdani has recognized that New York City can offer its residents (and potential newcomers) more value if it allows more housing construction to occur, [slowing increases in rent](https://x.com/PEWilliams%5F/status/2021280346189201797?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). And he can afford more of his promises if population increases and economic growth surges. Critics of this move are very much playing on an older playing field, where fear — of change, of new neighbors — dominated politics. 

There will be left-wing and more moderate and even conservative approaches to housing growth. But housing growth and prices almost certainly will increase in salience. If murder ceases to be a major concern, it will lead to increased demand for city living. This will increase demand for housing, creating growth but increasing prices. A falling murder rate will likely increase public support for YIMBY politics, as support for new building is associated with a positive affect towards cities as [David Broockman, Chris Elmendorf and Josh Kalla have shown](https://osf.io/preprints/osf/surv9%5Fv2?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It would be a healthy sign indeed if the housing growth rate replaced the murder rate as the key statistic in urban politics.

 If the murder rate continues to fall, New York City politics will orient itself towards making urban living more affordable and a focus on the quality of services (and the tax price of those services) offered to city residents by its government. Or at least one can hope.
### How the Public Can Help Mamdani Guide New York City Schools
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-parents-nyc-schools/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:07.000Z
With mayoral control of New York’s schools once again up for renewal by the State Legislature — the authority will expire June 30 unless extended before then — there’s pressure on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to show that he can bring parents to the table in a meaningful way. A careful bottom-to-top analysis of parent powers in the school system reveals that there are multiple levers he can pull to accomplish this task, largely under the current law.

Let’s start with the lowest-hanging fruit: Every year parents are surveyed on their children’s schools. Yet there is little visible sign that those survey results go anywhere. Mamdani should insist upon a comprehensive review of every principal in the system, using parent survey results as a tool.

This is an appropriate time for such assessment. Our new chancellor, Kamar Samuels, and his new deputy chancellors for elementary/middle and high schools, need to get a handle on the system they’ve inherited, in which [enrollment has been declining for years](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2026/02/13/nyc-school-funding-hold-harmless-mamdani-enrollment-decline/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Focusing on parent satisfaction is both good practice and good politics, especially in a competitive environment with charters and private schools. Assessing principals on their dedication to parent engagement should not be an inquisition, but rather an effort at bottom-up system improvement and a demonstration that grassroots attention will be the new chancellor’s governing paradigm.

The survey is just the beginning. Every public school is supposed to have an effective parent coordinator, a working [School Leadership Team](https://www.schools.nyc.gov/get-involved/families/school-leadership-team?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and other committees with parent representation. [Parent Associations](https://www.schools.nyc.gov/get-involved/families/parent-associations?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) elect parent members of the SLTs, are a conduit for information and opinions between parents and the administration, and often serve important fundraising roles.

One way to exhibit respect for the role of School Leadership Teams — which are charged with development of educational policies and oversight for their schools — is for Mamdani and Samuels to give the teams the prerogative to choose which approved reading and math curricula should be adopted by the school. Ex-Chancellor David Banks gave that choice to his hand-picked superintendents when it should have been a school-based decision all along, with waivers made more freely available if schools demonstrate viable alternatives. Where school-based decisionmaking is possible, that should be the administration’s default.

There’s more. The administration should empower parents’ role in hiring school and community district leadership. No, parents shouldn’t be given veto power — but they should be carefully heard during searches. Now, under Chancellor’s Regulation [C-30](https://www.schools.nyc.gov/docs/default-source/default-document-library/c-30-8-1-2019-final-combined-remediated-wcag2-0.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (principals and assistant principals) and [C-37](https://www.schools.nyc.gov/docs/default-source/default-document-library/c-37-8-1-2019-final-remediated-wcag2-0.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (community superintendents), parent consultation is too easily dismissed by superintendents or the chancellor, respectively, who have the final word. 

To put teeth into a better process, a new statutory position, Parent Advocate, housed in either the Department of Education or the office of the citywide elected Public Advocate, should be created to monitor and support parent engagement. To ensure the role’s independence, the Parent Advocate appointment should be approved by a collective vote of Community Education Council presidents, a decisionmaking body already empowered to appoint one of a number of parent members of the central Panel for Education Policy.

Community Education Councils in each of our 32 community school districts — largely now treated as vestigial versions of the old Community School Board — and the citywide Panel on Education Policy are another potential source of parent power and decisionmaking. But these councils currently have little power. The Legislature is being pressed to give them a greater role over district governance. That could make sense, but only if the councils are rethought. As long as these bodies are constituted through low-turnout school-district-run elections, their governing role will rightly be questioned. Arising from the late 20th-century era of community control, their predecessor community school boards were elected by all eligible voters in the district, plus otherwise ineligible parent voters. 

If the Legislature wishes to enhance the powers for the Community Education Councils, it would at a bare minimum make sense to restore the franchise to non-parents. Public schools are a public good. Besides the old saying against taxation without representation, it’s important as a matter of public support for education that the entire adult population (including eligible students) be given a voice in public school policies and operations. In any event, whether left to parent voters or the general public, administration of Community Education Council voting should be moved from the Department of Education to the Board of Elections, which is more expert at conducting elections.

Atop the parent power pyramid, our pre-mayoral control Board of Education had broad powers including appointment of the chancellor, with its seven members appointed by the borough presidents and mayor and no designated parent members. Today, its replacement, the 24-member [Panel for Educational Policy](https://www.schools.nyc.gov/get-involved/families/panel-for-education-policy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), majority-controlled by the mayor, has a [statutory](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/EDN/2590-B?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) minimum of 14 public school parents, including at least two who have children with disabilities and one with a child enrolled in a bilingual education program. While the Panel’s powers were originally limited to policy rather than operations, its [authority](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/EDN/2590-G?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) now extends to certain contract and school utilization decisions, including closures, grade configurations and co-location of schools within a building. 

An obscure power of the Panel for Educational Policy — [to redraw community district lines](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/EDN/2590-B?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — presents the possibility of solving daunting systemwide problems caused by uneven conditions of school under-enrollment, overcrowding and class-size limits, as well as racial and economic segregation. Current lines drawn 50 years ago now needlessly discourage mergers and restructured attendance zones that could better serve our students. A recent [study](https://availabletoall.org/report-and-stay-out/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) demonstrates how schools near to one another but across district lines could be improved by erasing these artificial barriers. 

The system of district-based superintendents and councils creates understandable proprietary interests in serving their own populations. But that means cross-district arrangements have rarely found footing. Current law gives the drawing of elementary and middle school attendance zones within the district to community education councils, a closely-held super power we saw malfunctioning in the recent [District 3 merger controversy](https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-nixes-plan-to-close-upper-west-side-school-amid-outrage-over-parents-racist-remarks?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Community school district lines are determined by the PEP. Unless the legislature wants to step into this debate, new lines approved by the PEP that promote greater fluidity in school enrollments are the best, if unlikely, solution. But through the weight of the mayor’s appointed majority, informed by strong parent representation, this needed reform could become a reality.

Some suggest changing the composition of the PEP to wrest majority control from the mayor, but that’s not wise. And, though its current size is unwieldy, major changes might run into legal or political trouble. For example, an elected board favoring Chicago’s parent voters faced judicial [rejection](https://law.justia.com/cases/illinois/supreme-court/1990/69558-7.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) over one-person-one-vote concerns, and even a mayor as progressive as Michelle Wu in Boston appoints that city’s seven member School Committee, circumscribed only by the flimsy [requirement](https://www.boston.gov/sites/default/files/file/2024/12/nominating-panel-legislation.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that “the mayor shall strive to appoint individuals who reflect the ethnic, racial and socioeconomic diversity of the city of Boston and its public school population.”

Increasing parent/school partnership in public education is crucial in an era of decreasing enrollments and increased competition. While mayoral control provides the needed budgetary, operational and contractual structure, our schools are hollow without parents actively engaged in their educational mission. The way forward is clear. System leaders and legislators need to rise to the occasion.
### Want More Parental Input While Keeping Mayoral Control? Look to Community Schools
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-mayoral-control-parents-community-schools/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:37:25.000Z
As a candidate, Zohran Mamdani opposed mayoral control of the schools — saying the public needed a much bigger voice in educational decision-making. Soon after becoming mayor, he changed his mind, urging the legislature in Albany to preserve the authority that’s been law since 2001\. But New York City does not have to choose between mayoral control and community voice in our schools. We can have both, and we already do. 

The city’s community schools, now 420 strong, show what it looks like to build structured, democratic input into school decision-making while keeping a clear line of accountability to City Hall. We should build on that foundation rather than swing between competing approaches in search of something entirely new. 

Mayor Mamdani has said that he wants New York to “belong to more of its people than it did the day before,” and he’s created an Office of Mass Engagement in City Hall to try to amplify the voices of ordinary residents. In education, the challenge is to translate that promise into practices that are transparent, consistent and inclusive, without weakening the mayor’s ability to mobilize resources and deliver results. It’s easy to say, tough to execute.

Giving control to ordinary New Yorkers sounds great, but in this city, almost everyone disagrees on almost everything, some voices are much louder than others and decisions still have to be made. For the mayor to deliver on goals as ambitious as universal childcare and stronger literacy outcomes, he needs to be able to coordinate across agencies, set priorities and act at scale with a clear line of accountability. That is why Albany should extend mayoral control for the next four years.

The debate, then, shouldn’t be whether a mayor should lead our public schools. The debate should be whether leadership can be structured so it is informed by the people most affected by school decisions — all of them, not only those with lots of time on their hands or those who are fluent in English, or those who already know how to navigate the system — and in ways that are transparent and consistent. The good news is that New York City already has a practical template for how to do that. It is community schools.

Today, New York City has a large network of community schools, district schools that combine academics with deeper family engagement, integrated family supports, expanded learning time and formal partnerships with lead nonprofit community-based organizations. The city’s initiative began in 2014 with 45 schools and grew significantly over the following decade. These are not charter schools or separate governance entities. They are “traditional” district schools, but they use a model that integrates academics with supports families often need, from mental health services and health care to food pantries and after-school programming, while giving families and community partners a more meaningful role in shaping school priorities and preserving clear accountability for final decisions. They run the gamut from P.S. 154 in Mott Haven to Port Richmond High School on Staten Island.

Research says these schools deliver results for kids. The RAND Corporation evaluated New York City’s community schools in two stages. A [2017 implementation](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research%5Freports/RR2100.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) study of 118 schools found that about 81% reported families were more present in the school as a result of becoming a community school. Then, in its [2020 impact study](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research%5Freports/RR3245.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), RAND found that community schools posted stronger outcomes than comparable schools, including higher graduation rates and lower rates of chronic absenteeism.

I have seen what this looks like when it is done right. During the de Blasio administration, I had the privilege of serving as the founding senior executive director of New York City’s Office of Community Schools. In that role, I worked with educators, community-based organizations and city agencies to build the approach and strengthen how schools engage families and respond to the needs of the whole child and family.

One example is M.S. 50 in Williamsburg. Each year, the school holds a forum where families review data, identify the school’s strengths and gaps and help shape the school’s priorities and comprehensive education plan. The forum is multilingual and designed to make families feel welcome, with celebrations of student work and food that reflects the school community, because honest input depends on genuine belonging. After reviewing the data, families share their perspectives on barriers to success and on the programs and supports students need, from academics to enrichment. Done well, this creates something rare in public systems: a structured way for families to influence priorities, grounded in evidence and connected to planning.

If Mamdani wants to honor his commitment to a more inclusive style of governing, he should treat community schools as a way of running schools, not a special initiative on the side. That means making two moves at once: expanding the number of community schools over time and bringing the practices that make them work to more schools, not just those formally designated as community schools. 

The fastest way to scale this work is to standardize transparent, inclusive school-level priority-setting and invest in helping parents and caregivers build the skills, knowledge and confidence to lead. Community input works only when families have the time, information and support to participate on more equal footing. That is how participation becomes broad and representative.

Here is what this could look like in a Mamdani administration.

First, set a citywide expectation that every school holds an annual community planning forum, based on the Community School Forum model, with accessible information, multilingual participation and a clear set of questions designed to surface priorities. Require all schools to publish what they heard and the priorities they will act on. This is not meant to replace existing channels for parent engagement, including PTAs and School Leadership Teams. Those structures still matter. But they are limited by design and often draw from a relatively small group of parents. A broader community planning process would widen participation and give formal governance bodies better, more representative input to work from.

Second, invest in building a stronger corps of parent leaders through Parent University, NYCPS’s existing learning platform, offering free workshops, resources, and events to help families support their children and navigate the school system. Without support, even highly engaged parents can struggle to interpret school data, understand where decisions are actually made or feel comfortable speaking up in meetings dominated by educators that freely use acronyms and jargon. Parent University could be used more intentionally to help parents build the skills to interpret school data, facilitate discussion and represent their communities in school-level and district-level bodies. Community-based organizations could help recruit, coach and support parent leaders on the ground, while the City provides the practical supports that make participation possible, including translation and child care.

Third, create a simple, systemwide accountability loop so community input is visible even as elected leaders make major decisions. Central offices should aggregate and incorporate what schools are hearing, identify patterns the city can address and report back publicly on what actions are being taken. The Panel for Educational Policy should receive regular public updates on what communities are raising and how the system is responding. That would make community input easier to trace, and harder to ignore. 

This approach would keep the line of accountability clear while bolstering community input in ways that matter. It would keep the mayor responsible for results while using an existing and effective strategy to bring families and communities into the work in a structured way. Community schools show New York City does not have to choose between strong leadership and a system where people have a voice. We can do both.
### The Cost of Freezing the Rent
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/alex-armlovich-interview-rent-freeze/
Last updated: 2026-04-22T16:37:55.000Z
---

*Freezing the rent sounds simple. Alex Armlovich, one of the sharpest housing policy minds in the country, explains why it isn't — and why that doesn't mean it's wrong. Jamie and Alex, a fellow at the Niskanen Center and program officer at Coefficient Giving, dig into what the Rent Guidelines Board actually does, what happens to buildings when operating costs outpace revenue, and what a "physical equity extractor" is — and why you don't want one buying your building.*

*You can listen to this episode on* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cost-of-freezing-the-rent/id1794619189?i=1000762999029&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *or* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6KcXnWyPItENAUFQUiaDP8?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*
### New York's Nameless Knights
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-yorkers-help-each-other-despite-stereotype/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:08.000Z
The man in the red shirt fell onto the subway tracks directly in front of me. I had noticed him seconds earlier, wobbly, with a cane. He looked elderly, then I realized he could have been younger than my 60 years, but with harder circumstances bearing down upon his countenance.

His cane caught, ironically, on the nubby rubber yellow “safety strip” at the platform edge. He faltered, then fell sideways onto the trackbed. He was moaning in pain, his clothing torn. Blood trickled down his pants. 

I screamed “POLICE” at the top of my lungs. Because it was midday people were spread sparsely across the platform at Herald Square. A woman ran towards the end of the tunnel where a train might momentarily arrive, her cellphone flashlight on and ready to wave at any oncoming F or M. She yelled out that subway operators know to look for waving flashlights as a sign to stop the train. Not knowing this, others and I followed suit. The rescue plan, at least the one in my head, was simple: help her stop an oncoming train and wait for professionals to arrive to rescue the man.

But before I knew it, two burly men — everyday straphangers with weathered work boots — swiftly jumped onto the tracks with an unassuming gallantry. “C’mon, get his shoulders,” one said to the other. They gently lifted the man and brought him to the platform edge, where another person and I helped pull him to safety. The two of us then moved quickly to bring up the good samaritans, a white man and a black man. The first ascended, one hand in mine, the other carrying the injured man’s cane. The second waited with a patient anxiety, his eyes fixed in the direction of oncoming trains. As we brought him up, he turned to me and said, “My heart is racing like a hummingbird,” to which I could only respond, “Of course it is, you just saved a man on live subway tracks.”

Paramedics arrived and tended to the injured man. Blood washed over his scarred and pockmarked legs, his veins an intricate spiderweb. He seemed to be yet another person New York had lost to the street, and almost lost for good that day. The paramedics cared for him gently and took him away. A downtown F train pulled into the station minutes later as we all, a bit stunned, went about our days while his blood disappeared beneath.

As the train doors shut, I felt guilty that it hadn’t occurred to me to jump onto the tracks. The police had arrived within minutes of my shout and could have brought the man out safely before any trains had arrived. For all I knew, they may have already radioed dispatch to stop all oncoming traffic. 

But the two samaritans were there first and acted instantaneously, with little thought for themselves. Their heroism will never be a glaring New York Post headline. There will be no ticker tape parade for these two brave men. They were just there and did what they felt was right. 

I have found time and again, contrary to our reputation in the wider world, New Yorkers look out for each other, like when my spouse lost her purse on the subway and it was returned, fully intact, at the next station, or when I had a bad Christmastime bike accident on Lexington Avenue in response to which tourists gawked while locals helped. I have heard versions of such stories of civic selflessness from many longtime New Yorkers, and yet this beautiful hallmark of who we are as a shared citizenry — in contrast to the stereotype of us as hardened urbanites who ignore each other’s plight — never seems to travel across our bridges and tunnels.

A particular purveyor of this urban callousness stereotype is Taylor Sheridan, the creator of “Yellowstone,” its spin offs and *“*Land Man.” To wit, the premiere of his latest hagiographic paean to Montana, “The Madison,” begins with the daughter of the protagonist being mugged and shoved to the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight while onlookers ignore the blood on her Bottegas and scurry away. (Confession: I will watch anything with Michelle Pfeiffer in it.) 

As someone who has driven across this beautiful nation multiple times and is overwhelmed by the glory of Montana, I don’t understand the need to trash the city in order to deify the country. It is a response, perhaps, to the sense that we city folk do the opposite when we look down on our rural brethren. We should all work harder to break through the stereotypes of our deeply divided era. What Sheridan should consider is the nexus between Madison, Montana, the breathtaking county after which the show is named, and Madison Avenue. He should understand that the people of both places are pioneers and rangers of sorts, insisting upon the hard but often fulfilling path of their intensely rural or urban lives. I have friends from both walks of life who equally state that they could exist no other way, maybe because both places have exhilarating characteristics that make people feel alive, a quality that perhaps mountains and skyscrapers both instill.

Rural America, however, isn’t perfect, and neither are we. There is much to concern us about the state of our city. We have been losing population. While crime is down, [the subways do not feel as safe as they should](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-to-do-about-subway-safety-nyc-policy-recommendations/), in part because of rare but horrific crimes, in part because of the kind of quotidian, lower-level disorder that rarely makes the news. The recent Saturday morning [machete incident at Grand Central](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/nyregion/machete-attack-grand-central.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is a stark reminder about our mental health crisis and its impacts on everyday New Yorkers. And of course, tragedies like this man tumbling to the tracks might have been avoided if we had the more modern two-door platform system used on London’s new Elizabeth Line, not to mention more affordable housing, more shelters and more mental health support.

Yet beyond these problems that we in the political cognoscenti ceaselessly debate, this story for me was a reminder of the pain and the promise of a Gotham forged by everyday people, people who instinctively jump on live tracks. It is a social compact few outside our borders will ever understand, yet we eight million know. New York’s nameless knights — the chivalrous men who saved this soul, the woman with the flashlight, the first responders, the conductors, or even the bicycle delivery men who peeled me off the pavement that frigid December day — are the individuals who in the end make this place work despite our inability to deliver a better city, a better society, on their behalf.
### The Unlikely Tool That Could Transform Second-Chance Hiring
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/second-chance-hiring-insurance-employer-risk/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:43.000Z
I was 7 when my father went to prison. I remember when he was allowed an outing in the park, a rare and special gift, knowing even at the time to hold on to every moment he could push me on the swing. I remember him finally coming home and seeing the classifieds in the paper open on the table. The unsaid imperative: find work. 

The classifieds didn’t work out, the sting of a record too great. In a stroke of good fortune, a friend of a friend took a chance and hired my dad despite his past. He became a travel agent, helping people plan their dream vacations to faraway places while the terms of his probation kept him landlocked. 

That one hire, that one “yes,” changed the trajectory of my life, too. It allowed us to get back to a version of normal where I could focus on my future.

April is Second Chance Month, a time to reflect on the barriers that people with criminal records — and their families — face long after they have served their time. Chief among those barriers is employment. [64% ](https://www.rand.org/news/press/2022/02/18.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)of all unemployed people have some form of criminal record. For years, policymakers have sought to either regulate this problem away through reforms like ban-the-box laws or subsidize it through tax credits, but research shows that most of these interventions have not meaningfully changed outcomes.

At Arnold Ventures, where I work on criminal justice policy, we go to the evidence first to see what works. What emerged in this area surprised us: Making second-chance hiring less risky to employers — through insurance — could make a big difference. 

Employers are often concerned that hiring someone with a record could make them more vulnerable to issues like theft on the job. We don’t actually know how true this is, given the dearth of data. But there is insurance that addresses this type of risk: Crime and safety coverage is a standard part of policies that employers purchase to cover the cost of thefts committed by their employees while working. Unfortunately, these policies typically exclude employees with a criminal record, meaning employers are on their own if they encounter any issues. This affects small- and medium-sized businesses the most. Large businesses either self-insure or buy custom insurance policies. But for the millions of small- and medium-sized businesses that lack the resources to negotiate custom policies, the coverage gap for workers with criminal records is a powerful, invisible deterrent to giving someone a second chance.

A [rigorous randomized controlled trial](https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=63031&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by economists Zoe Cullen, Will Dobbie and Mitchell Hoffman conducted a real-world experiment to see what interventions shifted employer behavior. When employers on a staffing platform were offered crime insurance covering potential damages from their hires, their willingness to hire workers with records jumped by 16 percentage points. Employers weren’t opposed to second chance hiring on principle. They were rationally responding to real financial exposure — and when that was addressed, they shifted their hiring decisions. 

How could we use this insight to help more people? Arnold Ventures is exploring ways to close this standard coverage gap. For instance, we’re working with state and city leaders to explore government-backed funds that would reimburse businesses for covered losses their insurers won’t pay. This could generate useful data on payouts to help commercial insurers offer such products in the future.

Some might argue that we shouldn’t invest public resources to help people with records. But preventing people with records from getting work actually may [cost us all more](https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mgms/wp-content/uploads/sites/283/2015/09/incar.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the long term — in subsidies for public benefits, damage from new crimes and ultimately system costs for reincarceration. As I can attest, helping someone reintegrate not only pays individual benefits, but helps their family and ultimately their community. Reentry is an area where we need innovation to make society healthier and safer.

I never expected to get excited about insurance. But insurance has extraordinary power to shape what people feel safe doing. It turns an uncertain risk into a manageable decision. For the employer weighing whether to hire a qualified candidate who happens to have a record, knowing they’re covered could make all the difference.

My father was lucky — he knew someone willing to take that chance. Most people coming home from prison don’t. April is Second Chance Month. Let’s commit to building a system where it doesn’t take luck to make a match between a qualified employee and a business eager to hire. Let’s realign incentives to make it easier for more employers to say yes.
### Learn from Japan to Get New York City Commuter Rail on Track
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/japan-rail-system-lessons-mta-nj-transit/
Last updated: 2026-04-22T14:22:15.000Z
The Japanese railway system is the most extensive and efficient system of public transportation in the world. [Over a quarter of all Japanese passenger-miles are traveled by train, compared to 8.1% in the UK and 0.3% in the United States](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/relative-share-of-passenger-kilometers-travelled-by-rail-and-road?country=JPN~GBR~DEU~FRA~USA~IND&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But while Japan is most famous for subways and Shinkansen bullet trains, the backbone of Japan’s rail system is the intricate urban commuter rail network, which carries passengers at a scale that American commuter rail systems could only dream of. On an average day in 2024, Shibuya Station on the Keio Inokashira Line — just one of many busy stations — carried [286,000 passengers](https://www.keio.co.jp/company/corporate/corporate%5Fmanual/number-of-passengers.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to and from Tokyo’s western suburbs. In the summer of 2025, the entire Long Island Rail Road averaged about [265,000 passengers per day](https://www.mta.info/press-release/lirr-ridership-surges-fall-season-begins-surpasses-300000-one-day-first-time-pandemic?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Last month, I spent 10 days in Japan, seeking to understand the country’s thriving commuter rail systems. There are three key things Japanese railways do better than their American counterparts. Japanese railways invest in labor-saving technology, they buy better trains and they make transit-oriented development an integral part of their financial stability. The MTA and New Jersey Transit should learn from these ideas. With both agencies facing fiscal shortfalls and lots of talk about how to generate more housing in and around New York, it has never been more urgent to learn how the most successful commuter railroads in the world do business.

### Better technology

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/20260331_104126.jpg)

**The JR Yamanote Line, the busiest commuter rail line in the world, is slated for full automation by 2035\. Credit: Jake Berman*

Japan faces dire labor shortages due to a shrinking population. [Its working-age population peaked in 1995 and its total population peaked in 2008](https://www.boj.or.jp/en/about/press/koen%5F2025/data/ko250824a1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Not coincidentally, the country’s commuter rail lines have gone all-in on automation. Some of these are large, flashy investments. The East Japan Railway Co. (JR East) operates the busiest commuter rail line in the world, Tokyo’s Yamanote Line, and [is currently working to automate it](https://asia.nikkei.com/business/transportation/tokyo-s-busy-yamanote-loop-line-to-go-driverless-by-2035?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). By 2035, the entire line will be driverless. For lines which still have street crossings, full automation is not possible with current technology, but even then, railways are installing equipment to reduce crew sizes. The [Keio Inokashira Line](https://www.keio.co.jp/news/update/news%5Frelease/news%5Frelease2024/pdf/nr20250306%5Fjidouunten.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), for example, is currently trialling automatic train control equipment to eliminate train conductors, enabling one-man operations.

Automation saves money and enables railroads to run more frequent trains. Even American examples bear this out. The BART regional rail system in San Francisco currently uses one-man operation, and it costs $374.50 to run a single train car for one hour in passenger service (in transit parlance, per “vehicle-revenue-hour”). This is less than half of what it costs the [Long Island Rail Road](https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/transit%5Fagency%5Fprofile%5Fdoc/2024/20100.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) ($850.81 per vehicle-revenue-hour), [New Jersey Transit](https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/transit%5Fagency%5Fprofile%5Fdoc/2024/20080.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) ($765.29 per vehicle-revenue-hour) and [Metro-North](https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/transit%5Fagency%5Fprofile%5Fdoc/2024/20078.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) ($836.37 per vehicle-revenue-hour).

Japan’s commuter railroads don’t just use automation to operate the trains. They also invest in off-board technology to enable more efficient running. Japanese operators universally use turnstiles to collect fares, [rather than the manual ticket takers used by the LIRR, Metro-North and NJ Transit](https://nypost.com/2023/01/16/mta-lirr-let-385m-fly-off-the-rails-beg-kathy-hochul-for-bailout/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (which also have machines supplementing their work). At major stations, Japanese operators have installed platform edge barriers which reduce delays in two ways: first, they prevent passengers from holding the doors; second, they keep passengers from falling onto the tracks.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/20260402_122144.jpg)

**Platform edge doors, Shibuya Station, Keio Inokashira Line, Tokyo. Credit: Jake Berman*

Japanese railroads have also invested in the simplest technology: platforms at the level of the train, so passengers don’t have to climb stairs to board, and the train crew don’t have to lower the stairs. 

New York and New Jersey are far behind. Rather than reducing staffing requirements on trains, the New York State Legislature [passed Bill S4091 last year banning one-man subway operation ](https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/traffic%5Fand%5Ftransit/2025/12/20/hochul-vetoes-bill-requiring-two-person-crews-on-subway-trains?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)at the behest of the Transport Workers Union, but Governor Hochul vetoed the bill. Fare collection remains a labor-intensive, manual business. The Long Island Rail Road, for example, [requires at least two workers per train to take tickets](https://nypost.com/2023/01/16/mta-lirr-let-385m-fly-off-the-rails-beg-kathy-hochul-for-bailout/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a process that has been subverted by corrupt [employees](https://www.wshu.org/long-island-news/2021-10-20/8-lirr-conductors-were-caught-pocketing-tickets-in-a-sting?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). To its credit, the MTA has installed level boarding platforms at Metro-North and LIRR stations, but New Jersey Transit still has dozens of stations which have not been upgraded. According to Nolan Hicks of NYU’s Transit Costs Project, [level boarding saves about 30 seconds of boarding time per station](https://transitcosts.com/momentum/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Over the course of a long run, such delays add up. For example, switching the dozen low-platform stations on NJ Transit’s Raritan Valley Line to level platforms would save an extra six minutes in each direction.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/20260331_104423-1.jpg)

**JR Yamanote Line turnstiles at Tokyo Station*. Credit: Jake Berman

### Better trains

In Japan, it’s not just the surrounding technology that’s advanced. The trains themselves are much more fit for their purpose than their American equivalents. Compared to the rolling stock used in the Tri-State Area, Japanese trains are lighter, faster and have more doors so passengers can board more quickly. On the weight front, the MTA’s newly purchased M9 railcars, used by the LIRR and Metro-North, weigh 65 tons each. A four-car, 340-foot train weighs 230 tons. [Comparable Japanese trains, like the E231 series used on Tokyo’s Chuo Line, weigh half as much](https://www.jreast.co.jp/e/environment/pdf%5F2004/report2004%5Fp06-07.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). A five-car, 327-foot train of E231s weighs 115 tons. Weight matters because lighter train cars are faster, require less electricity and put less wear and tear on tracks. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/car-comparisonArtboard-1@3x.png)

Credit: Jake Berman

The speed comparison becomes even more stark when comparing Japanese trains to the diesel locomotive-pulled trains still in common use in the Tri-State Area. According to Hicks, an eight-car train pulled by a diesel locomotive takes about 120 seconds to reach 80 mph from full stop. Japanese commuter trains can go 0-80 in 45 seconds, because each car has its own motors, electric motors give better torque and the trains themselves are lighter. The time savings are enormous. When the Caltrain system in San Francisco switched from diesel locomotives to lightweight electric trains, [it cut travel times for a 50-mile trip — the distance from Grand Central to Cold Spring — by 24 minutes](https://www.caltrain.com/electrictrainfaq?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/20260402_122652.jpg)

**Japanese commuter rail cars are optimized for fast loading and unloading. Keio Inokashira Line, Tokyo.* Credit: Jake Berman

Finally, Japanese commuter trains take less time to load and unload passengers because they have more doors. Japan’s E231 Series, for example, has 20 doors for a five-car, 327-foot train; the MTA’s new M9s have only eight doors for a roughly equivalent four-car, 340-foot train. American train designs make it harder to load and unload passengers quickly, leading to train congestion at major hubs like Penn Station. BART in San Francisco faced similar issues with its fleet of 1970s train cars. When BART replaced its fleet in the late 2010s, the agency bought cars with more doors.

How does it add up? At Penn Station, [the LIRR and NJ Transit respectively take 18 and 22 minutes](https://www.irum.org/20140807%5FAmtrak%5FNYP%5FThru%5FRunning%5FAssessment.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#page=11) to unload passengers, load new passengers and depart. In Tokyo, the Keio Inokashira Line takes three minutes, six seconds to do the same at its Shibuya terminal. Some of this inefficiency is because Penn Station has narrow platforms, and the LIRR and NJT do have outdated operating practices — but much of it is because it takes passengers longer to get on and off the train. 

The Tri-State Area’s railroads have stuck with these outdated train designs, even though the Federal Railroad Administration [legalized the use of lightweight Japanese-style rolling stock in 2018](https://railroads.dot.gov/regulations/federal-register-documents/2018-25020?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It’s not just the MTA ordering heavy, outdated equipment, either. [New Jersey Transit ](https://www.njtransit.com/press-releases/nj-transit-continues-commitment-modernize-rail-fleet?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)recently ordered more dual-level train cars that weigh an average of 75 tons per car. Per car, this is 10 tons heavier than the MTA’s M9, 30 tons heavier than the [dual-level cars ordered by Caltrain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadler%5FKISS?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and over 50 tons heavier than the E231 series used in Tokyo. 

### Transport and real estate development, hand in hand

The MTA only covers a [third of its operating expenses through fares](https://www.mta.info/document/201681?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and [NJ Transit recovers about half](https://content.njtransit.com/sites/default/files/FY24%20FACTS%20AT%20A%20GLANCE.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but Japanese commuter rail operators don’t require public subsidies to balance the books. How is that possible? The Japanese make train stations destinations in and of themselves, not just places that passengers pass through. ([Hong Kong’s publicly owned Mass Transit Railway does the same.](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/the-rail-plus-property-model?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) A showcase example is at Tokyo Station, Japan’s long-distance train hub. The grand old Tokyo Station Hotel, owned by JR East, occupies the station’s upper floors. But grand hotels aren’t the only part of Japanese railways’ real estate portfolios. They also build apartment buildings and commercial complexes. Each station is a small hub for people to work, live and play, even in the suburbs. The MTA and NJ Transit could do the same in New York City’s suburbs — if only it were legal to do so. In New York, Section 1266(8) of the Public Authorities Law makes the MTA subject to local zoning rules, and city councils can veto any development of [“facilities that are devoted to purposes other than](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PBA/1266?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [transportation or transit purposes.”](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PBA/1266?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) NJ Transit is similarly dependent on local cooperation [and lacks sufficient legal authority to carry out large-scale transit-supportive development on its property](https://content.njtransit.com/sites/default/files/marketing/website/pdf/REAL%5FESTATE%5FOPPORTUNITY%5FREPORT.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). [A bill to give NJ Transit that authority](https://pub.njleg.state.nj.us/Bills/2008/S3000/2972%5FI1.PDF?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was proposed in 2009, but failed. As of fiscal year 2024, [less than 1% of NJ Transit’s operating revenue](https://vtc.rutgers.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/NJT-Funding-Report%5FVTC-2025-FINAL.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) came from real estate. For comparison, the Keio Corporation (which runs Tokyo’s Inokashira Line) earned [18.3% of its revenue](https://www.keio.co.jp/assets/pdf/company/sustainability/management/integrated-report/integrated-report2025-english.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from real estate leasing and sales.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/20260331_104824.jpg)

**The Tokyo Station Hotel owned by JR East is one of many railway-owned hotels in Japan. Credit: Jake Berman*

In addition to their larger-scale projects, Japanese railways undertake myriad small-scale building projects, including commercial developments beneath their elevated lines. Under-track development is both profitable and mitigates the urban blight caused by elevated railways, as retailers of all kinds line the under-track areas. Metro-North’s Park Avenue Viaduct in Harlem, the LIRR’s Atlantic Avenue Viaduct in Brooklyn and the disused [Rockaway Beach Branch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockaway%5FBeach%5FBranch?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Queens are all viable candidates for this type of transformation.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/20260331_095925.jpg)

**Under-track retail spaces, Yurakucho, Tokyo. Credit: Jake Berman*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/20260403_122426.jpg)

**Under-track retail spaces, Ueno, Tokyo. The JR East Yamanote Line elevated tracks are on the upper right. Credit: Jake Berman*

Legally restricted from developing their real estate portfolio, the MTA and NJ Transit have had to fall back on fare hikes, service cuts and state subsidies. Giving the MTA and NJ Transit general authority to develop real estate is an opportunity to steady both agencies’ finances, and it would be in line with a growing national trend. The [Northern Illinois Transit Authority](https://gov-pritzker-newsroom.prezly.com/fact-sheet-northern-illinois-transit-authority-act-sb-2111?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) gained development authority last year, as part of a package of state reforms to stabilize greater Chicago’s public transport network. [San Francisco’s BART received authority to develop on its properties in 2018](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/BART%5FAB2923%5FFinalTechGuide%5FFull.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). To date, BART has built over 4,000 homes, 672,000 square feet of offices and 202,000 square feet of retail. BART’s suburban El Cerrito Plaza development is illustrative of the possibilities. On what was once surface parking, [743 units of housing, a public library and 2,100 square feet of commercial space](https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod/el-cerrito-plaza?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are planned or under construction. Closer to home, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has long been supported by its real estate portfolio. For the MTA and NJ Transit to do the same would take legislation in Albany and Trenton and an internal build-out, but it’s far from a pipe dream.

This combination of real estate and transportation used to be the norm in the United States, and it was how the commuter rail system was originally built. Grand Central Terminal was originally half real estate development, half transport expansion. [As the New York Central Railroad wrote in 1912](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015038162999&seq=4&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), “\[Grand Central\] is perhaps the largest, and promises to be the most successful, combination of the esthetic \[sic\] and the practical in city building yet planned in America ... Now, behind this artistic ideal of city building is a sane and hard-sense commercial proposition, for without some definite business side it would not be feasible.”

### An opportunity in a crisis

The MTA and New Jersey Transit are facing slow-motion fiscal crises. The MTA’s long-term structural deficit [is projected to reach $1.1 billion by 2029](https://cbcny.org/research/mta-operating-budget-outlook-short-term-stability-long-term-risks?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), according to the Citizens Budget Commission, while New Jersey Transit’s [structural deficit is currently around $200 million](https://gothamist.com/food/world-cup-fans-face-150-train-tickets-to-nj-games-regular-riders-get-service-cuts?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Rather than making brute-force cuts and raising fares, the commuter rail agencies should first think creatively about ways to improve the efficiency of their systems. There are plenty of ideas that can be borrowed from the Japanese commuter rail playbook. These can be simple cost-savers like new turnstiles and high platforms, or they could be longer-term plays like automation and real estate development. But the MTA and NJT needn’t come up with these ideas from first principles. Japan has already solved the problem of commuter rail sustainability, and it behooves the Tri-State Area’s transit agencies to learn from their ways.
### How the MTA Built Its New App In-House
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mta-new-app-subway-omny/
Last updated: 2026-04-22T13:49:03.000Z
*Last month, the state-controlled Metropolitan Transportation Authority* [*released*](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-launch-new-best-class-mta-app-new-york-city-subway-and-bus-customers?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *its new map and schedule app for subways and buses. In contrast to many public-sector attempts to build tech tools, the elegantly named* [*MTA App*](https://www.mta.info/document/202106?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *is fast and simple, enabling a user to learn when a subway or bus near her is coming on the first screen she sees, rather than forcing her to tap multiple times. The MTA App is easily on par now with — or even superior to — the tech-industry competition.*

*What went right? It’s a question we should ask more often, because we never forget to ask what went wrong when mistakes are made. Vital City sat down with three of the people behind the app: Chief Customer Officer* [*Shanifah Rieara*](https://www.mta.info/transparency/leadership/executive-leadership/shanifah-rieara?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*, Deputy Chief Customer Officer* [*Kevin Call*](https://x.com/kevinjcall?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *and Head of Product* [*Jen Chen*](https://www.amny.com/news/mta-launches-new-app-subway-bus-omny?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *— to understand what the MTA App does for riders, how the agency built it with an in-house team rather than depending on outside contractors, and what the experience might signal about the future of government technology.*

---

**Nicole Gelinas:** It's been almost 14 years since the MTA announced its first Subway Time app, which covered just six numbered lines. Now the MTA is offering zero-tap information on real-time subway and bus arrivals across the whole system. What's the first thing people will notice about this app — and why should they download it rather than just use Google or Apple Maps?

**Shanifah Rieara:** This is built for New York City Transit by transit riders, and that's what we want to convey. The zero-tap feature gives you a countdown clock in your pocket. It works in low-connectivity environments, which matters as we're still wiring up the system. You get real-time bus tracking, transfer options, key service alerts, a 24/7 customer service chat — and more is coming.

**Gelinas:** What's the one thing people really wanted that you were able to deliver?

**Kevin Call:** Speed. It was the biggest drawback of the predecessor — the information was there, but you'd have to sit and wait for it to load. This is New York. Seconds matter, especially if you're on a local trying to decide whether to get off and wait for an express. This app is optimized to work in low-data environments, so it loads fast. The other major apps are primarily driving apps with some transit added on. We can offer something incredibly customized to the experience of riding the subway and bus.

**Gelinas:** How are you getting the word out?

**Rieara:** We're taking a two-pronged approach. Everyone who had the previous app got a push update — they didn't have to go to the app store. To complement that, we've embarked on a marketing campaign using our 10,000 digital screens across the system, along with social media and rolling outreach. The rollout a couple of weeks ago generated a lot of positive reaction and [news coverage](https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/the-mta-just-launched-a-new-revamped-app-with-real-time-tracking-032626?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). We want to build on that.

**Gelinas:** Let's talk about the decision to build in-house. Back in 2012, the MTA signed an $800,000 contract with an outside vendor to handle web development. What was the reasoning for bringing it back?

**Rieara:** In the past, we relied on consultants who lived in every corner of the country or the world to develop a product for us. They'd create it, and then we were left finding capacity and funding to maintain it. As part of the new MTA, we've done a robust job of recruiting amazing talent — Jen came to us from Google. Having that capacity in-house means we can build it, maintain it and update it. As we get feedback from customers, it gets integrated by our team. We're not shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is a homegrown product.

**Call:** This generation of MTA leadership is confident that we can attract the best talent and deliver a digital experience New Yorkers deserve. Previously, the agency just wasn't confident, so they went the consulting route. There's nothing in place of having folks in the building who take the system, who know the quirks inside and out. As problems arise, we get into a room and hammer out a solution in real time, versus getting on the phone with a team in a different country that may never have been to New York.

**Gelinas:** Jen, why did you leave Google for the MTA?

**Jen Chen:** I wanted a job where I could have a positive impact on the community around me. I spent eight years on Google Maps — I know all about scale and launching across hundreds of countries. But the MTA gave me an opportunity to work on something for the city where I live and dive into details you don't get at that scale. With this app, I can model West 4th Street with its upper and lower levels. I can tell you that yes, Times Square gives you a free in-system transfer to the A-C-E, but it's a bit of a walk. These details really make or break a customer's experience.

**Gelinas:** Tell us about the team. How big is it, and how did it come together?

**Chen:** We try to operate as a startup within the MTA and really bring what it means to build software to the transit agency. We began with a few engineers who wanted to build a better ticketing experience for the Long Island Rail Road. That project became [TrainTime](https://www.mta.info/traintime?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which — at least for a while — was my favorite government-issued transit app. From that success, we realized we could build something in-house that's really good and set a new standard for what it means to be a government app. Then we took on the challenge of subway and buses, which is a different level of complexity compared to the commuter railroads. We also built the digital signage you see rolling out across stations. We probably reached 20 people last year.

**Call:** That's across products — the mobile apps, website and digital screens.

**Chen:** I think we've reached a good size for the products we support. And of course, as a product manager, I'm never going to say no to more people.

**Gelinas:** What would be the ballpark cost versus what it would have cost to contract this out?

**Call:** That one I might have to get back to you on. There were several vendors involved with the last app that we've over time sunset — some of these services have shut down or are in the process of shutting down, so it's not easy to make an apples-to-apples comparison.

**Gelinas:** Does bringing it in-house bring challenges? Do you have to convince people to be paid less than they'd make at Google?

**Rieara:** None of us who work for a government agency will ever be rich. But we're drawn to this because we believe in good government. We're here to apply our skill sets and make effective change. And there's no shortage of areas at the MTA where we can be innovative. Kevin has been instrumental in setting up text and email alerts so riders can get real-time service information — and that's now folded into the app. This will also complement the [Weekender](https://cloud.info.mta.org/weekender?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). There are other things these talented individuals can focus on, because we have a lot of systems that are antiquated and long overdue for overhaul.

There's also a flexibility advantage. When we procure with vendors, it's done through the lens of a particular job scope. When we onboard talent in-house, we get people who are jacks of all trades. Kevin doesn't come in and do one job and wrap his day up. We don't have the luxury of operating that way — and that ends up being a strength.

**Chen:** I find a lot of people are excited about working for the MTA, but they don't know how to get in. This isn't a career track the MTA has traditionally recruited for. The people we get tend to be a bit later in their career and want to bring private-sector experience to the MTA, or a bit earlier and want to have a really big impact. There's a real desire in tech right now to work on things that are mission-driven. It's just not something government has been traditionally well-suited to do, and that's what we're trying to change.

**Gelinas:** Did you use AI in building the app?

**Chen:** We use AI development tools as standard now. But every code change has been reviewed by a human. Some of our best work is what we now call "hand-coded," because there are things only a human eye can do. But AI makes a lot of work go faster — it can create a debug interface in minutes that would normally take a day.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/Untitled-design--1--1.png)

Pages of the MTA App

**Gelinas:** Where does the walking-directions data come from? Do you have to buy that?

**Chen:** In the app, we link to Apple Maps or Google Maps for walking directions. It's just a link to their service.

**Gelinas:** And they don't charge for that?

**Chen:** No, because we're sending traffic to them.

**Gelinas:** A kind of non-monetary trade — you own the subway and bus feeds, which are very valuable. When you do contracting, you have [goals](https://www.mta.info/press-release/mta-announces-commitment-award-historic-amount-of-work-75-billion-historically?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for MWBE — minority- and women-owned business enterprises. According to research from [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/institute-for-economic-mobility/our-insights/how-to-close-the-black-tech-talent-gap?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and others, Black people are underrepresented in top tech jobs. Will there be workforce development goals for the in-house staff?

**Rieara:** We have a diverse team from all walks of life and different backgrounds. I'm very proud to work at an agency that every year reaches the platinum level for MWBE, with a billion dollars in spend annually. [Chairman Lieber](https://www.mta.info/transparency/leadership/executive-leadership/janno-lieber?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) pushes every department to procure from and do business with MWBE vendors. When we recruit and onboard, all of that is factored in.

**Gelinas:** There are features in the app for customer safety. Would you ever consider something where a rider could drop their location and send a message — someone smoking in a subway car, for example?

**Call:** We already have a couple of features for that. There's a link to the feedback form, and we also offer 24/7 live-agent customer care, where you can connect with someone and submit a report — something broken, feeling unsafe, needing assistance.

**Rieara:** To complement that, in every subway car, and now on buses, we have announcements — digital on screen-equipped cars, posters on others — letting customers know they can text us 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at 212-MTA-Info.

**Call:** And the chat team is in the real control center, sitting next to the comms desk, next to NYPD. When you contact them, you're going direct to the source.

**Gelinas:** What about the physical infrastructure that underpins this? You couldn't have the tech without the countdown clocks, which were a [big achievement](https://www.nydailynews.com/2018/01/01/mta-adds-countdown-clocks-to-all-subway-stations-11-years-after-project-started/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for a previous generation.

**Call:** This ties to why the [CBTC](https://www.mta.info/project/cbtc-signal-upgrades?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) signaling project is so important. The [B Division](https://nypost.com/2025/10/30/us-news/mta-drops-1-5b-on-new-fleet-of-subway-cars-in-move-to-avoid-breakdowns/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) currently uses a beacon system, which tracks a train as it moves through a station. When CBTC is more widely online, we'll know train locations within a centimeter, which will make predictions even better.

**Chen:** We know customers really like seeing live vehicle locations on a map — it builds trust. So we increased the GPS polling rate for buses from every 30 seconds to every five seconds. You can watch the bus live as it comes down the street.

**Gelinas:** You've said you'll integrate OMNY trip history into the app. Do you envision in-app payments eventually?

**Call:** Coming later this year, we'll have trip and charge history in the app. To follow, the ability to add, edit and remove payments, and digital closed-loop OMNY cards — meaning if you have a transit benefits card that doesn't have the RFID chip, you'll be able to link it to a digital OMNY card and use your phone.

**Gelinas:** Would you ever have one app for all MTA agencies?

**Rieara:** That's something we're constantly talking about. Right now, we want to get the MTA App where it needs to be — all the functions and features our customers want, attracting riders who haven't downloaded it yet. Then we'll reevaluate.

**Gelinas:** How often do you expect to update it?

**Chen:** Right now, weekly, because we're getting so much feedback and trying to iterate quickly. I don't expect it to always be weekly — maybe every two weeks.

**Gelinas:** What kind of feedback have you responded to?

**Chen:** As we've scaled out our Android deployment, Android has such a diverse variety of hardware and operating systems — much more so than iOS. Scaling out has helped us see our performance on different devices and find places where we could optimize.

**Gelinas:** Can you support it on any phone, even one that's very old?

**Chen:** That can be tricky, depending on the manufacturer's support for operating systems. At some point, Apple and Google stop releasing security updates. It depends on our software development kits as well. But we're aiming to support as much as we reasonably can.

**Gelinas:** There's always discussion about whether the MTA should do more of its big projects in-house — mega-projects like the [Second Avenue Subway](https://www.mta.info/project/second-avenue-subway-phase-2?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) extension. Have you learned any lessons from building this app that might apply?

**Rieara:** What we've shown is that we have credibility now in these spaces — in delivering something in-house. Look at the [platform barriers](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-metropolitan-transportation-authority-has-installed-protective?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): when there was a need and concerns around customer safety, those were done in-house by an amazing group of transit workers. There are countless examples where we have the talent to do it ourselves. Under the direction of the chairman, we've been doing fiscal re-baselining exercises, and we've set goals in annual cost savings, initially $500 million. We're continuously looking at how to be innovative but more efficient. And when repairs or updates are needed, we don't have to wait for an external vendor — we deploy the army of the willing that's here.

**Gelinas:** The public's experience with government tech — whether it's federal, state or local — is often not great compared to private-sector products. Why is that, and does this app provide lessons for other government entities?

**Call:** In the public sector, you might have people who focus on the back end and neglect the front-end experience. In the private sector, you don't just have a developer — you have UX resources and a designer working together. We've tried to replicate that here.

**Chen:** Part of the challenge for government agencies is attracting talent, because big tech companies and startups have a natural funnel. When we do bring people in-house, you get really passionate people who bring a level of quality you can't get from a vendor. Government hasn't traditionally been well-suited to do this. That's something we're trying to change.

**Rieara:** We are proud of the product we've launched. We've done this in-house, with an amazing group of talented individuals invested in New York City. Download the app if you don't have it already, use it and give us feedback. It's a product for New Yorkers, by New Yorkers.
### To Prioritize Pedestrians, We Need to Walk the Walk
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/pedestrian-foot-tracking-nyc-map-model-mit/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:38:24.000Z
There is an old saying in urban planning: What gets counted, counts. By that logic, what remains uncounted risks being overlooked.

Stand at a busy street corner in New York — say, somewhere between Midtown’s 5 p.m. hustle-bustle and a quieter outer-borough avenue — and watch closely. Some move quickly, some slowly; some with purpose, while others meander or sit down. What first appears as a whirlwind of pedestrian flux, soon appears to have structure. People are not moving randomly. They are tracing paths: from subway exits to office towers, from homes to schools, from shops to parks. Together, they form a system. In fact, one of the most fundamental systems in the city — what Jane Jacobs liked to call the “sidewalk ballet,” Jan Gehl the “life between buildings” and Alison and Peter Smithson “the charged void.”

For more than a century, urban planning has devoted extraordinary attention to the movement of vehicles. We know how many cars pass through every intersection, how car traffic ebbs and flows over the course of a day, how congestion propagates across networks. These measurements are not merely descriptive; they are constitutive. They determine funding formulas, infrastructure priorities, street-design specs and ultimately the physical shape of cities.

Pedestrian movement, by contrast, has remained largely in the shadows. Walking is not only the most universal form of mobility — accessible to children, to older adults, to those who cannot afford to drive — but, in cities like New York, it is also the most common. More trips are made on foot than by car. And yet pedestrian activity is the least systematically measured and understood mode of travel. While the New York City Department of Transportation is one of the very few city agencies in the world that actually has a number of staff dedicated just to pedestrian mobility, cities generally do not know how many people walk on each given street, nor maintain reliable maps of the sidewalks where they can walk.

In [recent work with colleagues at MIT](https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-025-00383-y?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), we sought to make pedestrian movement visible at the scale of the entire city. This required beginning with a problem that is at once mundane and revealing: assembling a coherent map of New York’s pedestrian network. Sidewalks, crosswalks and footpaths, all connected into a routable network — the basic infrastructure of urban life on foot. 

---

Using this network, we developed a model to estimate how pedestrians travel in the city during peak travel hours — in the morning, during the midday and after work — between homes, jobs, transit stations, schools, parks and amenities. Unlike traditional transportation models, which operate at the level of large zones, this approach works at the scale of individual buildings and street segments. It allows us to ask, with some precision, not just how many people are walking in a neighborhood, but where, exactly, they are walking. How much foot-traffic does 32nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan have on weekdays between 5-6 p.m.? Around 3,700 people per hour. What about Bushwick Ave between Linden St and Gates Ave? Around 190 people per hour. We calibrated the model with roughly a thousand observed pedestrian counts that the DOT had commissioned at different streets and intersections throughout the city.

When one begins to measure pedestrian movement systematically, the city’s dynamism takes on a different clarity, revealing an underlying structure. Morning peaks are shaped by the gravitational pull of jobs and transit stations; midday flows reflect the rhythms of errands and social life; evenings blend the residuals of work with the anticipations of leisure and social gatherings. These patterns are not incidental. They are the temporal signature of interactions between individuals’ activity and travel choices and the built environment that frames and constrains these choices.

Modeling and visualizing foot traffic in a city has a number of practical implications that are increasingly difficult to ignore. Cities today face a set of intertwined challenges: reducing carbon emissions, accommodating growth and ensuring safety and equity in development. In each of these domains, pedestrian movement plays a central role.

Consider the question of decarbonization. Ambitious climate targets hinge, in no small part, on shifting trips away from automobiles toward more sustainable modes (the transport sector is the largest contributor to CO2 emissions in the U.S., roughly 30%, largely due to personal cars). A shift to more walking and public transit use is essential to reducing this share. But such shifts do not occur by convincing people to change their behavior, against their self-interests or needs. People choose to walk or to use public transit when such modes offer the most convenient, affordable or time-efficient ways of getting to places. To ensure that a larger share of the urban population naturally chooses sustainable travel options in the future, we need to ensure that the built environment develops in a direction that makes sustainable travel accessible and logical for more people. This takes time, but the good news is that there are a number of things that planners and city governments can actually do to nudge this shift — configure land use patterns that contain various daily necessities in close proximity, incentivize denser urban developments, prioritize pedestrian and cycling attributes in streets renovations and improve transit service quality.

A model of pedestrian movement allows us to examine how the built environment influences sustainable travel behavior. It offers a way to anticipate how changes in land use or infrastructure might alter walking patterns, and by extension, mode choice. Without such tools, planning for mode shift risks relying more on aspiration than on evidence.

At a finer scale, the implications are equally significant. Because the model operates at the level of individual buildings and street segments, it can connect everyday planning decisions to broader system-wide outcomes. A new residential development, a rezoning action, a shift in retail geography — each of these interventions generates and redistributes pedestrian trips. Taken together, they shape the mode-share profile of the city.

This connection between the granular and the global is often missing in urban policy. Climate goals are articulated at the scale of cities or regions, while the decisions that influence them are made incrementally, parcel by parcel. Bridging that divide requires tools that can trace the cumulative effects of local actions. Pedestrian models offer one such bridge.

They also introduce a more nuanced understanding of pedestrian well-being and safety. Much of the current discourse around pedestrian safety relies on counts of crashes or injuries. While important, these measures can be misleading if considered in isolation. A location with a high number of crashes, like Times Square, may simply reflect a high volume of pedestrians. Another location, with fewer incidents but far fewer pedestrians, may present a greater risk per pedestrian. A granular understanding of foot traffic provides a measure of exposure — a denominator against which risk can be assessed. When viewed through this lens, the geography of risk shifts. Some of the most dangerous intersections, in relative terms, are not the most crowded ones in Manhattan, but locations in other boroughs where pedestrian volumes are lower and risks per person are higher.

This has implications not only for safety, but for equity too. It suggests that the distribution of risk — and by extension, the allocation of resources to address it — may be misaligned if we focus solely on aggregate crash counts. Improving walking infrastructure in outer boroughs that have historically received far less investment and where kids have to walk to school over dangerous intersections is no less important than maintaining the sidewalks of Times Square. 

Underlying all of this is a more fundamental point: measurement is not neutral. It directs attention, frames problems and shapes solutions. For decades, the tools of urban analysis have been finely tuned to capture vehicular movement. They have enabled remarkable advances in transportation planning, but they have also reinforced a particular way of seeing the city — one in which the movement of cars is central, and the movement of people on foot is peripheral. Rebalancing that perspective requires not only new models, but a broader shift in what we consider worthy of measurement.

Walking, after all, is not a niche activity. It is the connective tissue of urban life. It links transit to destinations, homes to neighborhoods, individuals to one another. It is also the most equitable mode of transportation we have.

To take it seriously — to measure it with the same rigor we have long applied to driving — is to begin to see cities more clearly. And perhaps, in doing so, to design them more wisely.
### Why It Takes Four New Housing Units to Get One Person Off the Street
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/why-it-takes-four-new-housing-units-to-get-one-person-off-the-street/
Last updated: 2026-04-20T17:30:29.000Z
City governments are increasingly focused on reducing the number of people with serious mental illness who live on city streets — and with good reason. Living on the street is clearly [dangerous](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10546518/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=These%20health%20disadvantages%20manifest%20in%20significantly%20higher,and%20substance%20use%2C%20which%20are%20often%20co%2Doccurring.). The presence of people with mental illness living on the street also disturbs other city residents, for reasons ranging from fear of violent behavior (whether well-founded or not) to compassionate and empathetic concern. 

Censuses suggest that about [one-quarter](https://www.kff.org/medicaid/five-key-facts-about-people-experiencing-homelessness/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20U.S.%20Department,than%20those%20who%20are%20sheltered.) of unsheltered homeless adults have a serious and persistent mental illness, though the share varies by city depending on the availability of shelter. In New York, the city comptroller estimates that roughly [2,000](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/safer-for-all/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Data%20shows%20that%20there%20are,effectively%20to%20solve%20the%20problem.) people with serious mental illness are living on the streets. 

Research suggests that for many people with mental illness or serious addiction, supportive housing, which provides both subsidized shelter and the services they need to stabilize, is the best living option. The policy puzzle is that the counts of unsheltered people with serious mental illness and other maladies are quite small relative to the number of supportive housing units already in use — roughly [40,000](https://shnny.org/uploads/State%5Fof%5FSupportive%5FHousing%5F5.19.25%5FFINAL%5F.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in New York City. Given existing inventories, it might seem relatively inexpensive and straightforward to expand supply by just 5% and house another 2,000 people in New York, thereby addressing the problem. Experience shows that it is not so simple.

One well-recognized [challenge](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/comptroller-lander-announces-blueprint-to-end-street-homelessness-for-people-with-serious-mental-illness-in-new-york-city/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is that [some people](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2818505/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Prior%20research%20indicates%20that%20placement,of%20more%20powerful%20social%20theory.) with serious mental illness choose not to remain in housing, even with supports, and instead return to the street. But these transitions are only one of the many dynamics that muddle the arithmetic of reducing street homelessness. Street homelessness is not a static condition — it is dynamic.

Part of that dynamic consists of inflows from and outflows to those living in the community in ordinary (often subsidized) housing. Most people with serious and persistent mental illness at risk of losing housing (a group that we have estimated constitutes at least [0.85%](https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ps.20240450?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the total adult population) are not homeless at a given point in time — they live in the community. However, about [one-tenth](https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article-abstract/40/1/65/3074503?redirectedFrom=fulltext&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of people with a serious mental illness currently living in the community had been homeless in the prior year and one-fifth had experienced one or more episodes of homelessness over their lifetimes. These statistics imply that for every person with serious mental illness living on the street at a point in time, there are roughly four others — currently housed — who have experienced homelessness in the past. They also imply that many people currently living on the streets will eventually return to housing in the community. 

Flows into and out of jails, hospitals and other institutions add another dimension to this dynamic system. Nearly [half](https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/40/1/65/3074503?guestAccessKey=&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of individuals with a lifetime history of homelessness (whether or not they had serious mental illness) have been incarcerated at some point. Studies of supportive housing interventions find that large [shares](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10511482.2002.9521437?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of homeless people with serious mental illness have had prior stays in inpatient or state psychiatric facilities. [Most](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10511482.2002.9521437?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) people living on the street have also spent time in homeless shelters. At a point in time, about [97%](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hra/downloads/pdf/news/press%5Freleases/2025/pr-hope-7-2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of homeless adults in New York are in shelters. 

The overall population at risk of homelessness also evolves over time. Young adults experiencing the onset of serious mental illness [enter](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10783903251314873?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the population, while those already affected — whether living on the streets, in shelters or in the [community](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370%2823%2900471-6/fulltext?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — face elevated [mortality](https://www.nber.org/digest/202402/estimating-mortality-rates-us-homeless-population?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com&page=1&perPage=50) risks.

> Perhaps surprisingly, we find that adding supports to help people remain in supportive housing, so that they are less likely to return to the streets, has little effect on the overall street population.

Adding supportive housing units to this complex system sets off a [cascade of effects](https://thinkbiggerdogood.org/using-markov-modeling-to-understand-the-dynamics-of-unhoused-populations-experiencing-serious-mental-illness/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Supportive housing directly reduces the number of people sleeping on the streets, but it also (intentionally) reduces entry into jails, hospitals and institutions, and, proponents hope, improves life expectancy. It may also (unintentionally) reduce the likelihood that individuals return to other forms of housing in the community. These changes — many of them highly desirable — reduce outflows from the formerly street-homeless population. Combined with steady inflows into homelessness, this means that additional housing units may have more limited effects on the unsheltered population census than expected.

In recent research, we use an approach called Markov modeling to [estimate](https://thinkbiggerdogood.org/using-markov-modeling-to-understand-the-dynamics-of-unhoused-populations-experiencing-serious-mental-illness/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) how additional supportive housing targeted to people with serious mental illness would affect the street population in New York City. Under very restrictive targeting assumptions — where units are reserved exclusively for individuals who have lived on the street for at least two years — we find that more than two new units are required to reduce the street population census by one person. Under assumptions that more closely reflect existing supportive housing programs, we estimate that about four new units are needed to reduce the street population by one person. Other research, not limited to people with serious mental illness, suggests that as many as [10 new units](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1051137715300474?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) may be required to achieve this outcome.

Perhaps surprisingly, we find that adding supports to help people remain in supportive housing, so that they are less likely to return to the streets, has little effect on the overall street population. These supports help individuals remain in their units and may keep them out of jail and hospitals, but that stability means that units turn over less frequently and become less available to new entrants. Our analysis suggests that strategies targeting the much larger population at risk — those currently housed in the community — might make a given supply of supportive housing go farther. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to design and target such strategies so that they don’t become prohibitively expensive.

The dynamics of homelessness, particularly among people with serious mental illness, make this a challenging policy problem. Significant investments in housing can yield smaller-than-expected reductions in the street population. But this does not reflect waste or inefficiency. Rather, the visible street population represents only the tip of a much larger underlying problem: a sizable population with serious mental illness who struggle to consistently secure stable housing. These conditions make it very unlikely that people can earn enough (or collect enough through disability benefits, which currently average about $1,000 a month) to consistently and continuously afford adequate and stable housing. Most people in this group manage to remain housed most of the time, but a substantial share is at ongoing risk of homelessness. 

Supportive housing units targeted to those who are chronically homeless do have appreciable effects on the street census (even if not as large as anticipated). Perhaps more importantly, they provide people in this very vulnerable group with the stable shelter and services they need. While there is no way to entirely escape the effects of housing dynamics, policymakers may be able to achieve more from available units by strategically targeting them to those who are least likely to return to the community and by supplementing supportive housing units with more intensive services for those at high risk for homelessness who live in the community.
### Homeless Encampments, Expenditures and the Evidence We Keep Ignoring
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-homeless-encampments-spending-81k/
Last updated: 2026-04-16T13:08:43.000Z
I first learned how to do outreach to homeless individuals on the streets of the Bronx in 2005, where, at BronxWorks, I was part of a shift in how such work is done — from passively handing out sandwiches to people who were willing to engage, to actively seeking out those who were not. 

We climbed under fences, ventured deep into remote areas of parks and public spaces, and resolved long-standing encampments through a strong, coordinated response across city agencies. By some measures, this approach [reduced street homelessness citywide by nearly 40%](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dhs/downloads/pdf/hope-2018-results.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) between 2005 and 2009.

Since then, we’ve forgotten some of what drove that success. As the homelessness problem grew — from about 37,000 people in shelter each night in 2009 to over 85,000 today — so did emergency spending and response. In the process, we lost the intensity of focus and leadership that encampment resolutions require.

Outreach is among the most challenging roles in homeless services. Anyone who takes it on quickly learns that success is measured not in any single interaction, but in what comes before and after: the months of trust-building, the institutional readiness to receive someone when they finally say yes and the careful coordination of care to ensure that same individual does not land right back on the street after a housing placement. Unsheltered homeless individuals do not land on the street overnight; they have usually been failed by multiple social safety nets, and they are choosing personal autonomy in ways that may seem strange — even frustrating — to those of us who have stable housing situations. And yes, a portion of this population may be unable to make rational decisions concerning their own well-being due to substance use or serious mental illness. 

Two recent flashpoints have renewed conversations over how to approach this problem effectively and efficiently: a [New York Times piece](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/nyregion/nyc-street-homeless-outreach.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the intractability of shelter avoidance, and viral reports [in the press](https://nypost.com/2026/03/16/us-news/nyc-spent-roughly-81k-per-person-on-homeless-services-last-year-comptroller/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and on [social media](https://x.com/charliesmirkley/status/2033383075422540105?s=46&t=7In4G5WJw2unjfs1fo5wiQ&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which reference a [New York State Comptroller’s report](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-21-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) concluding that New York City allegedly spent $81,000 per street homeless person last year. Both deserve a careful and considered response.

### No easy answers

When people talk about encampments, they are most often referring to one or more individuals who have established improvised structures (using tents, tarps or other materials) as a temporary shelter in a public space or vacant private property. And let’s be clear: Homeless encampments are dangerous for everyone in them. As a form of shelter, they are inadequate and unsanitary. They also compound the kinds of trauma — including past experiences with violence — that often drives people to the street in the first place. Encampments can also impede foot traffic, disrupting surrounding neighborhoods and the New Yorkers who share those public spaces.

A persistent encampment sends a signal — to the people living in it and to the surrounding community — that this is an acceptable outcome. It isn’t. But it’s equally true that if you rush to dismantle encampments without a strategic, coordinated plan, you won’t solve the problem. You will just move it around.

A [New York City Comptroller’s audit](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-of-the-department-of-homeless-services-role-in-the-cleanups-of-homeless-encampments/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#%5Fftn4) found that a paltry 5% of people accepted temporary shelter from encampments cleared between March 1, 2022 and November 30, 2022\. Of the 2,036 people in those encampments, only 119 accepted shelter. Sixty-six of those remained in shelter for more than 50 days and only three made it into permanent housing. That is an enormous expenditure of resources by police, sanitation and nonprofits whose job it is to help unhoused individuals find shelter for an outcome that amounts to rearranging where people sleep on the streets.

Few would disagree that the goal should be connecting people in need to appropriate settings and ensuring that the encampment does not return once it’s addressed. The question is how to get there.

When Breaking Ground, the nonprofit where I serve as chief operating officer, began its outreach work over two decades ago, the approach to encampments was genuinely collaborative. Today, Breaking Ground, under contract with the Department of Homeless Services (DHS), is responsible for the bulk of outreach to street homeless individuals for the entire boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, along with a swath of Midtown Manhattan from 23rd to 59th Street, river-to-river. 

At the outset, we and our peer outreach providers — the people with daily, face-to-face relationships with individuals living outside — fed information to DHS to help shape decisions about when and how to approach a cleanup. That intelligence was the difference between knowing that a particular encampment includes three people who were days away from agreeing to come inside and treating it as an obstacle to be cleared on a schedule set by a 311 complaint.

The advent of HOME-STAT in 2016, through which the de Blasio administration sought to replicate the success of the Police Department’s data-driven COMPStat, brought innovation and additional resources to street outreach. But it also introduced layers of bureaucracy that, in some key ways, have thwarted creativity. Over the past decade, the City’s encampment strategy transformed into a sterile set of protocols, with nonprofit outreach providers — who, thanks to contracts with the City, provide the bulk of outreach efforts to homeless individuals — cut completely out of the picture. 

If the sole goal was to close out 311 complaints in a timely manner, that approach could claim a certain kind of success. If the goal was getting people to enter shelter willingly and begin the process of stabilization, it was a failure as documented by the City’s own data.

Effective encampment response requires cutting through the fragmentation of various City departments with two things: urgency and accountability. Nonprofit outreach providers should be back at the table as genuine strategic partners with DHS, not just implementers of decisions made above them. Everyone involved — DHS, the Police Department, Department of Sanitation, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Department of Parks & Recreation, nonprofit providers — must agree on a timeline for resolution and operate under clear, shared rules, such as those [outlined in this special Vital City report](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-to-do-about-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways/). We must also build in aftercare through sustained follow-up to ensure that people placed from an encampment remain housed, and that new encampments do not reemerge in the same spaces. The goal should not be simply to clean the area, but to house the people.

Finally, one of the most promising areas for innovation is accelerating placements to permanent housing. Every month that a street homeless individual is not cycling through various systems — emergency rooms and hospitalization, shelters, safe havens, drop-in centers, jail — can lead to better health outcomes and save thousands of public dollars. 

### The spending argument gets it wrong

The recent viral claim that New York City spends over $81,000 per unsheltered homeless person demands scrutiny not because the spending figures are incorrect, but the denominator is wrong.

The $81,000 figure, which understandably causes jaws to drop, is derived by dividing total city spending on unsheltered homelessness by the number of unsheltered people counted in the annual HOPE survey, a point-in-time count conducted on a single night each year that is specifically designed as a benchmarking tool, not a census. 

Point-in-time counts provide only a one-night snapshot and miss the many people who cycle in and out of unsheltered homelessness over the year. Outreach data suggest the true annual figure is much higher than the official count. The Comptroller’s report, for instance, also noted that the City made 10,841 placements from an unsheltered location to “stable settings” in fiscal year 2025 — 400% more than in 2017\. That suggests the number of people experiencing street homelessness was likely more than triple the HOPE count measure. (Breaking Ground’s outreach teams alone engaged with over 5,300 unique individuals in 2025.) Dividing real spending by an artificially small number produces an artificially large per-person cost. 

The spending critique also misses something entirely. Safe haven beds — specialized transitional units designed for short-term use by chronically homeless individuals who have consistently refused traditional shelter due to restrictive rules or safety fears — numbered approximately 1,100 in April of 2020\. Today, the City has expanded this resource to more than 2,100 beds at a cost of nearly $120 million, absorbing more than 1,000 additional people into these more intensive, humane settings while safe haven staff and outreach teams continue to work with each individual to find permanent housing.

Safe havens offer more privacy than traditional shelter and do not require the homeless individual to go to a central intake center — outreach teams transport the individual directly to their placement and accompany them through intake. In addition, by offering clinical support, no curfews and the kind of structured environment where someone who has spent years on the street can begin to stabilize, safe havens are a meaningful alternative to shelter for those who have been unsheltered for long periods of time. This is hardly evidence of waste. To the contrary, it is a deliberate, and appropriate, upgrade in the quality of care over these five years.

During that same period, the HOPE count rose from 3,857 to 4,305\. So is that evidence that despite the money we’re “throwing at” homelessness, the problem is growing? No. When the number of people on the street grows, it’s not a direct function of outreach’s effectiveness or lack thereof; it’s the result of an unsheltered homeless population that is likely growing faster than even the tools we use to measure and address it can capture. 

The real villain in the spending data is not homeless service providers, it is the housing market. According to the most [recent data](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/2023-nychvs-selected-initial-findings.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the vacancy rate for units that rent for under $1,100 per month is just 0.39%. That is most certainly a crisis for people in the lowest quintile of income. And a statistical analysis by the [U.S. Government Accountability Office](https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-20-433.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that a $100 increase in median rent is associated with a 9% increase in homelessness. Is it any wonder that homelessness is growing?

Additionally, more than 77% of unsheltered New Yorkers surveyed by the [Coalition for the Homeless](https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/View-from-the-Street-April-21.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 2018 had already tried the shelter system. Meanwhile, the number of single adults in shelters has climbed from roughly 14,000 in 2016 to over 25,000 today. 

Street homelessness is not, primarily, a story of people refusing help. It is largely a story of people who tried the system, had a negative experience and ended up outside. The city’s shelter system is the main feeder for street homelessness, and the housing market is the exit ramp that unhoused individuals can never quite reach.

The City and State are spending heavily on crisis response because they have not invested adequately in prevention. More safe havens are needed, yes — and more permanent supportive housing, and more deeply affordable units, and faster pathways out of shelter and off the streets. The question should not be whether $81,000 per person is too much, but whether we’re spending it in the right places, and whether we’re building enough housing so that the next person who arrives at central intake doesn’t eventually end up on the street.

Those of us who do this work every day already know the answer. We’re ready to help the City find it.
### Why It (Almost) Always Makes Sense to Send the Cops
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/policing-alternative-response-cahoots/
Last updated: 2026-04-22T14:23:55.000Z
The death of George Floyd was taken by many as indicative of a plague of murders by police, and hastened demands to reduce the rate of police contact with the public. It spurred [demands](https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2022.307107?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for “alternative response models” — responses to people in crisis by professionals other than police — as a matter of “health equity” aligned with “public health values.” Across more than 80 million police-community contacts a year, fatal force occurs in just [0.00041%](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10986111251383548?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of 911 calls in the U.S.; however, according to the American Public Health Association, law enforcement violence is now a [critical public health issue](https://www.apha.org/policy-and-advocacy/public-health-policy-briefs/policy-database/2019/01/29/law-enforcement-violence?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Any such incident is consequential, but the statistical rarity of the police use of fatal force complicates claims that lethal outcomes are representative of routine policing. Nevertheless, many reformers have taken up the call and are advancing their agenda. 

In the eyes of these advocates and policymakers, the use of alternative responses is the cornerstone of efforts to [reduce police involvement](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0731129X.2022.2062546?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in private and public space. Medics and counselors will attend mental health crisis calls, outreach workers will attend victims of addiction and homelessness and credible messengers and violence interrupters will settle neighborhood beefs and reduce shootings. The goal is to make these programs [“integral components of the public safety and wellness infrastructure.”](https://www.policingproject.org/events/2026/6/4/2026-advancing-the-field-of-alternative-response-convening-establishing-permanence?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new Office of Community Safety aims to [expand these programs](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/04/04/new-york-police-mental-health-mamdani?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), even though the impact of a pilot program, B-HEARD, has not been assessed because the organizations responsible for implementation “[do not, overall, collect sufficient evidence](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-of-the-behavioral-health-emergency-assistance-response-divisions-effectiveness-in-responding-to-individuals-with-mental-health-crises-and-meeting-its-goals/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to assess the program’s effectiveness against its stated goals.” 

Before New York and other cities double down on alternative response, they need to think hard about how it works — and doesn’t work — in practice.

### The limits of diversion and the realities of implementation

Advocates of a public health approach to violence deploy carefully selected data to [point out](https://www.versobooks.com/products/178-the-end-of-policing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that crime control is a small part of policing. Clearly someone forgot to tell folk in Philadelphia. More than two-thirds of Philadelphia police patrol time spent on calls for service received from the public in a year is related to [crime or quality of life](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40163-021-00141-0?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or has the potential to be so related (68.4%). Using similar categories, Cynthia Lum and colleagues’ data [showed](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10986111211035002?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the average across nine US cities was 60%. 

Could the remaining non-crime calls be diverted to an alternative agency? As Loren Atherley, senior research scientist for the Seattle Police Department, has [pointed out](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10986111251383548?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the potential for large-scale diversion may be more limited than is often implied. The practical question is not whether some calls can be handled by non-police professionals, but how many can be diverted without introducing unacceptable risk. Atherley’s analysis of three years of data from Seattle suggests that about a quarter of police service hours could be diverted to non-police personnel without significant risk. He does, however, recognize what he calls the “Ratcliffe paradox” (kindly referencing a recent article of mine) in that [determining whether a situation is appropriate for non-police response often requires an initial police presence](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40163-021-00141-0?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Risk assessment in dynamic environments is inherently uncertain, and public agencies understandably tend to err on the side of caution.

Existing alternative response programs are frequently placed on a pedestal with uncritical admiration. Eugene, Oregon’s CAHOOTS program is a prominent example, with [claims](https://kval.com/news/local/when-reform-backfires-how-the-cahoots-act-helped-dismantle-eugenes-mobile-crisis-program?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that up to 23% of the calls in the emergency response system were dealt with by CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets). Brian Stettin, who served as senior advisor on severe mental illness under former New York Mayor Eric Adams, [reports](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-mamdani-gets-wrong-about-severe-mental-illness-and-crisis-response/) this is misleading and estimates that the rate is more likely in the range of 3-8%. Whatever the real rate, it wasn’t enough to prevent the program from being shut down in 2025.

Context matters as well. I suspect many commentators (like me, writing from Center City, Philadelphia) reside in relatively safe, functional communities where many of the informal mechanisms of public life perform reliably — the [“elephant of social control.”](https://doi.org/10.2307/3054129?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) But to extrapolate a program like CAHOOTS from the affluent college town of Eugene, Ore., to somewhere like the Southwestern district of Baltimore is an altogether different proposition, where the elephant is barely on life support. 

> The practical question is not whether some calls can be diverted, but how many can be diverted without introducing unacceptable risk.

These constraints are compounded by decades of underinvestment in social services that have not kept pace with demand for services related to homelessness, mental health and addiction. This constrains the effectiveness of any response model, whether police-led or civilian. Institutional failures do not disappear; they are displaced. As David Thacher, professor of public policy and urban planning at the University of Michigan, [observes](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0731129X.2022.2062546?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), police are routinely called upon precisely because other systems have failed or are inaccessible, making them, in effect, managers of institutional breakdown.

This was evident in the [extensive fieldwork](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10439463.2024.2311899?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) colleagues and I undertook evaluating [Philadelphia’s transit police opioid response](https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/abs/pii/S1363951X22000136?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and co-responder programs. A year-long randomized trial, largely in the subterranean network of tunnels that extend for blocks beneath the center of the city, examined a dedicated police SAVE team (Serving a Vulnerable Entity) aiding the vulnerable community. Shifts were randomized between the usual arrangement of officers working alone or in pairs, with shifts when they were accompanied by trained social work specialists. In terms of getting vulnerable people to accept transport to a shelter, triage facility or hospital, the combined social work-police teams [outperformed police-only teams 41% to 32%](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-024-09634-9?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); however, every team experienced how challenging it was to work with the city’s shelters and treatment facilities. Facility capacities are limited, users feel their rules are often restrictive and shelters are frequently perceived to be dangerous. People with extensive unmet needs often return to the street within days or hours. In some cases, police officers brought more practical experience to these encounters than their civilian counterparts, demonstrating a better understanding of the support ecosystem and tailoring more effective responses.

What if social workers replaced officers in a wide swath of interactions? We did not test that scenario, but the [“doorman fallacy”](https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Curious-Science-Creating-Business/dp/006238841X?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is useful here. A hotel doorman who opens a lobby door can be easily replaced by a machine, but in the words of Rory Sutherland, “opening the door is only the notional role of a doorman; his other, less definable sources of value lie in a multiplicity of other functions, in addition to door-opening: taxi-hailing, security, vagrant discouragement, customer recognition, as well as in signalling the status of the hotel.” When not engaged in activities related to the vulnerable community, the social work specialists largely waited to be called, but the transit police officers performed a wide range of ancillary public safety functions such as helping with medical emergencies, tackling crime and disorder, guiding tourists and reassuring passengers. In an ironic twist, the SAVE initiative was cancelled by the police chief due to a lack of resources and a perceived need to increase the number of generalist officers available to handle whatever came up. The police chief needed more hotel doormen. 

> Would improving training within existing systems yield greater returns than building parallel ones? 

### Costs and constraints

Much of the discussion centers on an underlying assumption that police social service delivery to vulnerable communities is notably poorer than that of other providers. And debates about alternative responses often place significant weight on “lived experience” as a qualification for service providers. There is limited evidence here, and what evidence does exist is mixed. Research on interventions such as cognitive-behavioral therapy [suggests](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-005-3541-7?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that effectiveness is more closely associated with implementation quality and provider training than with experiential similarity between provider and client. In other words, people in recovery do not need a hand from someone with the same experiences, but instead access to well-trained, high-quality support structures. 

In “The End of Policing,” sociologist Alex Vitale [argues](https://www.versobooks.com/products/178-the-end-of-policing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that improving police training is beside the point, because “The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality.” He adds, “American police receive a great deal of training.” If by that he means the amount of training time, his comment will surprise anyone who knows the topic. For example, at the time of writing, police training in South Carolina comprises four weeks at a local police station watching videos, eight weeks at a police academy, and a mandatory four weeks of post-academy field training (approximately 1,080 hours). The [South Carolina Board of Cosmetology](https://llr.sc.gov/cosmo/examins.aspx?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) demands more training for someone who cuts and colors your hair (1,500 hours). 

And yet still, most police encounters are resolved without incident, raising a different question: Would improving training within existing systems yield greater returns than building parallel ones? As New Yorkers will soon find out as the Department of Community Safety gets up and running, alternative response teams are not cost-neutral, and reallocating a portion of police funding can’t in and of itself support the infrastructure of an entirely new administrative entity, nor negate the need to sustain those functions in the police service. A new organization requires HR, systems and policies, accountability structures and sustained funding for vehicles, offices, training facilities and pension systems — all of which already exist in policing. 

The value of alternative responders must also be evaluated not only in absolute terms, but relative to other possible costs. Specialization is expensive, and alternative responders have a narrow role. For all their imperfections, police, like hotel doormen, have a broad social function. In the process of their activities, built environment problems can be identified, crime opportunities reduced, crime victims reassured, confidential sources recruited and harmful social conditions ameliorated. 

Given [Americans’ propensity to want services and their hostility towards paying for them](https://www.accountingtoday.com/opinion/lindsey-graham-praises-tax-avoidance?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), increasing police training and recruitment might do more to improve a swath of social service response functions than the costly support necessary for a new, largely untested organization. Having police secure a situation and then wait for a team with scant additional capabilities to turn up seems less efficient than simply having the officers deal with the situation on arrival. Co-responder teams may seem an effective compromise, but at what point do the police officers gain sufficient experience and expertise to render the civilian co-responder redundant?

The current case for alternative response as a scalable, cost-effective replacement for the police in a social service role is grounded in weak analysis and skirts over potential adverse outcomes. Worse, these efforts may deflect attention from the potential benefits of improving law enforcement capability. Current efforts to institutionalize alternative response models as core components of public safety infrastructure may therefore be premature — not because the underlying goals are misguided, but because the operational, fiscal and institutional constraints are more substantial than is often understood and acknowledged.
### When Push Comes to Budget
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/louisa-chafee-nyc-budget-interview/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T15:18:12.000Z
---

*New York City's budget is arguably more honest than it's been in years — with an asterisk. Louisa Chafee runs the Independent Budget Office, the charter-created agency that tells New Yorkers where their money goes. In this episode of "After Hours," Chafee and Jamie discuss why Mayor Zohran Mamdani deserves credit for accurately budgeting expenditures after years of the Adams administration hiding billions in shortfalls, why the revenue side of the ledger is built on optimism and a property tax increase the City Council doesn't support, and how underfunded state mandates on class size and special education are eating up revenue. She also breaks down why government rarely pauses to ask whether it's working efficiently — and what the new administration's Chief Savings Officers might actually find. Plus: a lightning round on nonprofit payment delays, public bathrooms, Sunnyside Yards and why the Mayor's Management Report has ballooned from 200 pages to over 500 without getting more useful.*

  
*You can listen to this podcast on* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-honest-city-budget/id1794619189?i=1000760172954&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *or* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/34Uf03gKq8ZC2S5TjW3CG8?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*
### Mamdani’s First 100 Days: A Scorecard
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-first-100-days-scorecard-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:09.000Z
*Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor on a platform of big, transformative ideas,* [*many of them dependent on other layers and levels of government*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/zohran-mamdanis-real-world-constraints)*. But as every New Yorker knows, day-to-day life is shaped less by grand visions than by the basic machinery of city government — and too often, that machinery is stuck. While Mamdani’s mayoralty will be a test of his ambitious proposals, it will also be a test of small- and medium-bore management. *Just Fix It* is Vital City’s contribution to helping him pass that test: a running list of concrete, doable ways to unstick the gears of government and make it work better for all New Yorkers.*

*Another New Yorker — Franklin Delano Roosevelt — established the significance of an administration’s “first 100 days.” In his case they were to be devoted to “starting of the wheels” of his vision for governance, which he had called the New Deal. For Mayor Mamdani, a similar lexicon — his pitch of a “New Era” in city governance — permeated campaign promises.* 

*So: How’s he doing? Many scorecards have tried to answer the question in broad terms. Here, we focus instead on the tasks we laid out for him as inauguration neared in December — our* [*inaugural Just Fix It installment,*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/government-improvements-mamdani-can-tackle-in-the-first-100-days/) *which put forward 11 specific improvements Mamdani could enact without City Council or Albany permission to make government work better and improve life for New Yorkers. Here’s where they stand, and what else needs to happen to get them done.*

### 1.

### The problem: scaffolding

Sidewalk sheds are unsightly and a nuisance in neighborhoods.

**Our recommendation:**

Ratchet up enforcement and offer new incentives for building owners to complete repairs faster to remove sidewalk sheds.

**What the Mamdani administration did:**

Reducing the amount of scaffolding on buildings throughout the city was a priority for the mayor’s predecessor. Its [Get Sheds Down initiative](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/04/mayor-adams-signs-historic-legislation-get-sheds-down-remove-unsightly-scaffolding-across?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) allowed the Department of Buildings (DOB) to update its regulations, permitted new designs and created new penalties for sidewalk sheds that stayed up too long. We said the Mamdani administration should go further.

The mayor has indicated that he’s interested. In a press conference last month, he [announced](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/03/mayor-mamdani-launches-new-efforts-to-take-sidewalk-sheds-down--?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that his DOB is moving forward with its revisions to Local Laws that regulate scaffolding, shortening size and timeframes and proposing new enforcement abilities that, pending public comment, should go into effect this summer. A specific emphasis has been placed on NYCHA campuses, where some 40 developments plan to take down their sidewalk sheds in the coming months.

***Verdict: It’s a start!***

**What the Mamdani administration should do next:**

Target inspections to the worst sidewalk shed scofflaws. Draw up plans for the 1,120 sheds that have been up for three years or more, and help the rest navigate permitting. Offer rewards if need be. And don’t be afraid of using drones to expedite inspections.

---

### 2.

### The problem: placards

Parking placards are routinely abused, creating dangerous situations and effectively announcing that government employees think the rules don't apply to them.

**Our recommendation:**

Rationalize the process for granting placards, and deem all unofficial parking placards moot. Declare a no-tolerance policy for placard and parking abuses.

**What the Mamdani administration did:**

[Nothing of note](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/01/30/ten-years-of-placard-abuse-the-criminal-practice-that-mamdani-must-end?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Late last year, the NYPD — perhaps the most notorious offender — [rejected](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/11/25/exclusive-nypd-rejects-ending-self-enforcement-scandal-at-precinct-houses?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a reform that tried to clean up the out-of-control parking in front of police precincts, which often blocks sidewalks and crosswalks. The Department of Inspection has consistently [said](https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/01/16/tischs-nypd-cleanup-continues-doing-right-from-curbing-car-chases-to-cracking-down-on-rental-vehicle-misuse/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the commissioner has to get a handle on it, an assignment that has so far proven elusive. But when recently asked by a reporter at Streetsblog, the city media’s chronicler of parking snafus, Mamdani merely said [he’d look into it](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/04/07/mamdani-reckless-driving-cops-placard-abuse?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

***Verdict: Insufficient progress***

**What the Mamdani administration should do next:** 

[Look into it](https://x.com/placardabuse?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — and start clawing back and rationalizing placards right away.

---

### 3.

### The problem: lighting

New York City’s public spaces are defined by their vibrancy, but after dark, many neighborhoods are marred by “dark zones” where inadequate infrastructure actively discourages civic life and invites criminal activity.

**Our recommendation:**

Scan the city’s dark places with high crime rates and, working with residents who understand the local landscape, install permanent, high-quality street lighting to foster public activity and deter serious offenses.

**What the Mamdani administration did:**

Mamdani appears aware of the power of light. At the end of Ramadan, which saw the city’s first Muslim mayor criss-crossing the five boroughs to break fast alongside New Yorkers, he [stood](https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWFnUapDrXA/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in front of revelers on 125th Street in Harlem and pressed on “Eid Mubarak” decorations that brightened the often dim commercial corridor. A lot more lights — about 100 in total — are [coming](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/03/ahead-of-opening-day--mamdani-administration-breaks-ground-on-pr.?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to a major crosstown route in the Bronx as part of a major overhaul.

***Verdict: It’s a start!***

**What the Mamdani administration should do next:** Come up with a citywide plan to improve lighting, especially where crime and darkness overlap.

---

### 4.

### The problem: homeless people struggling with serious mental illness

Responsibility for the estimated 4,000 New Yorkers living on the streets and subways — many of whom suffer from serious mental illness or addiction — is currently scattered across a dozen siloed agencies. But because no one “owns” responsibility for this specific population, vulnerable people cycle through a never-ending churn of ERs, jails and shelters, compromising those people and the public space more broadly.

**Our recommendation:**

Designate a single, high-level authority within City Hall to engage this population, coordinating budgets, data and operations across agencies to ensure every person in crisis is tracked to a stable outcome.

**What the Mamdani administration did:**

On the campaign trail, candidate Mamdani promised to create a Department of Community Safety, which would consolidate the city’s various outreach efforts to the most vulnerable New Yorkers — which had mostly been relegated by police officers — under a new roof. But with the push still unfunded and unsettled in the City Council, which must draft legislation to create new departments, the mayor has instead [started smaller](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/nyregion/mamdani-department-community-safety-nyc.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), creating an Office of Community Safety within the confines of City Hall.

Community safety expert and [Vital City contributor](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/author/francois-renita/) Renita Francois now serves as the first official deputy mayor for community safety, which may be the closest thing yet to a centralized conduit to care for the 4,000 New Yorkers living on the streets. And early moves, like the [opening](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/02/mayor-mamdani-announces-opening-of-new-safe-haven-shelter-in-low?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of a 106-bed shelter in Lower Manhattan and [a new wing](https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/04/06/rikers-island-bellevue-infirmary-nic-240-million/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at Bellevue to replace the Rikers Island infirmary, show promise.

***Verdict: It’s a start!***

**What the Mamdani administration should do next:** Task the Office of Community Safety with mapping this massive population in most need, down to the individual level.

---

### 5.

### The problem: curb chaos

Cars and trucks blocking the bus lane and the curb lane with double parking and deliveries cause congestion throughout the city and create dangerous situations for drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians.

**Our recommendation:**

Expand on the MTA’s Automated Camera Enforcement program, which uses cameras and on-the-ground enforcement to stop double parking and free up the curb lane for traffic.

**What the Mamdani administration did:**

The “free” part of the Mamdani administration’s “fast and free buses” promise is still [stuck in traffic](https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/08/mamdani-free-buses-00863065?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but the “fast” part is off to the races. The mayor’s Department of Transportation (DOT) has [revived](https://www.amny.com/news/mamdanis-first-100-days-transportation/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) plans for bus lanes in the Bronx and Manhattan that stalled under his predecessor, and work on Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue, which will offer near-Bus Rapid Transit levels of service to New York City’s streets, is underway. City Hall is eyeing another 45 corridors for acceleration — and cameras will likely be part of the equation. With data showing [much clearer lanes](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/01/13/go-ace-bus-stops-are-clearer-than-ever-thanks-to-mtas-bus-mounted-camera-enforcement?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the MTA is [rolling out](https://nypost.com/2026/02/05/us-news/mta-adds-more-bus-cams-to-catch-driver-scofflaws/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) its ACE program to more corridors.

But within its jurisdiction, City Hall has expressed a sincere interest in unclogging the curb. A new Office of Curb Management is [taking shape](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/04/07/exclusive-mamdani-creates-curb-management-office-at-dot-seeking-long-sought-order-from-chaos?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at DOT, with a mission scope of enacting more efficient uses of the city’s most prized real estate to encourage turnover. Options include more meters, which would free space for deliveries and deter double-parking.

***Verdict: It’s a start!***

**What the Mamdani administration should do next:**

Work with the MTA to roll out more bus routes and lanes that utilize the ACE program. Opt for 24/7 enforcement [like speed cameras](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-speed-cameras-road-safety-mamdani-policy/). Parking reform will be a bigger fight, but it’s one worth having.

---

### 6.

### The problem: rigid civil service rules

The outdated New York City civil service program that governs much of City hiring is broken: As of November 2025, there were more than 14,000 vacancies, and it can take months to grade civil service entry exams.

**Our recommendation:**

Dramatically overhaul and streamline the City hiring and civil service system to make it more efficient, which will allow the administration to be better able to attract high-quality talent.

**The Mamdani administration did:**

Not much. As New York Focus [reported](https://nysfocus.com/2026/02/11/mamdani-civil-service-exams-hiring?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the Adams administration had a window last year to accelerate hiring by exempting 51 different job titles from the civil service exam. But the initiative ultimately caved under pressure from organized labor. 

The Mamdani administration has so far stayed mum on any further attempts at overhaul. The vacancy rate for City jobs [sits](https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2025/09/behind-all-time-high-job-growth-nyc-17k-government-positions-sit-vacant/407933/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at around 6%, and City Hall has said it wants to fill the 17,000 open roles, if the budget allows it. But some 75,000 people submitted CVs during the transition, and [only a fraction](https://www.thecity.nyc/newsletter/31-hires-80000-applicants/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have been hired thus far. 

***Verdict: Insufficient progress***

**What the Mamdani administration should do next:** Draw up a list of short-, medium- and long-term fixes to the civil service system, first [exploring](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/zohran-mamdani-technology-innovation-new-york/) technology that could help and then initiating talks with labor unions for a smarter, deeper overhaul.

---

### 7.

### The problem: inefficient service delivery

AI is underused by the city government. Bureaucratic rules remain a maze, and government service delivery is far too inefficient. Emerging tools can answer questions — and help government find solutions.

**Our recommendation:**

Invite the private sector to compete to build an AI tool that delivers clear, government-verified answers to a wide range of questions, while aggressively exploring ways to use AI (with human oversight) to do the work of government more efficiently.

**The Mamdani administration did:**

When it comes to AI, the last occupants of City Hall might be most remembered for creating a chatbot that doled out [inaccurate advice](https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/01/30/mamdani-unusable-ai-chatbot-budget/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to people. The Mamdani administration has cancelled the contract, and the mayor explicitly called it out as wasteful spending. (It cost the city about half a million dollars.) It has yet to be replaced.

But AI’s place in city government remains unclear at the moment. Mamdani himself [said](https://www.cityandstateny.com/personality/2026/04/mamdani-trump-ai-menin-and-what-can-be-accomplished-100-days/412727/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) he doesn’t use ChatGPT or Claude, but City Hall brought on [an expert on AI and privacy](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/03/city-hall-hires-expert-ai-and-privacy/412260/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as a senior advisor. Last month, the Department of Education [released](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/nyregion/ai-nyc-classes-grades.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) guidance on AI usage for teachers, permitting it for lesson planning but not grading. Smaller pilots persist at the NYPD, FDNY, DOT and elsewhere. And tech-wise, the administration is letting its agencies join the mayor on [TikTok](https://www.wired.com/story/in-a-big-reversal-zohran-mamdani-tells-nyc-agencies-to-use-tiktok/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

***Verdict: It’s a start!***

**What the Mamdani administration should do next:** Revisit the [AI Action Plan](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/oti/downloads/pdf/reports/artificial-intelligence-action-plan.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and see where progress can be made across a range of government functions. Start with permitting and social program assistance.

---

### 8.

### The problem: a hidebound budget office

The Office of Management and Budget plays an outsized role in city government, but it's usually as the penny counter and the Bureau of No. It needs to be a more proactive partner in efficient service delivery.

**Our recommendation:**

Put the M back in OMB, directing the office to modernize and advance its analytical capabilities to improve efficiency of government service delivery.

**The Mamdani administration did:**

Nothing yet. Sherif Soliman, the new head who previously brought order to CUNY’s finances, was [consumed](https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/03/25/city-budget-deficit-mamdani-julie-menin-sherif-soliman/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by questions over the city’s uncertain fiscal future at the City Council’s budget hearing, rather than any talks of reform. Meanwhile, the City Hall-designated ‘chief savings officer’ at OMB moved forward with cuts to [costly office leases](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/politics-policy/cny-mamdani-savings-officers-cuts-budget-20260325/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but nothing beyond that.

***Verdict: Insufficient progress***

**What the Mamdani administration should do next:** Start the process of modernizing OMB. 

---

### 9.

### The problem: vestigial offices and panels

Year after year, executives and legislators create their own smattering of new offices, boards, working groups and reports. Administrations rarely do the hard work of decluttering the bureaucracy — leading to inevitable redundancies, inefficiency and waste.

**Our recommendation:**

Rationalize the many interagencies and offices and streamline their functions. Then continue the work to eliminate unnecessary reports, boards and redundant staffing.

**The Mamdani administration did:**

City Hall has been on a roll with roles. [The Office of Mass Engagement](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-establishes-office-of-mass-engagement-to-transform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). [The Office of Community Safety.](https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2026/03/19/sources--mamdani-set-to-name-first-deputy-mayor-for-community-safety?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [The Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs](https://gothamist.com/news/mayor-mamdani-creates-lgbtqia-office-with-nycs-first-out-trans-agency-head-in-charge?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). A [“mom and pop czar.”](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/politics-policy/cny-mamdani-mom-and-pop-czar-20260407/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) A [“childcare czar.”](https://www.the74million.org/zero2eight/mamdanis-child-care-czar-on-nycs-first-of-its-kind-universal-2-k-rollout/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) A [“World Cup czar.”](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-announces-additional-appointments-across-key-city-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) And within the agencies themselves, a new Office of Curb Management (NYCDOT) and a new [Office of Street Vendor Services](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/03/mayor-mamdani--sbs-commissioner-kenny-minaya-name-carina-kaufman?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Small Business Services, or SBS). We’ve also gotten a few [new](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani-takes-bold--unapologetic-actions-to-protect-new-yo?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [taskforces](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/03/mamdani-administration-launches-new-program-to-deliver-affordabl?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

To some degree, this is a matter of reshuffling. City Hall has [revived](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-signs-eo-to-revitalize-mayor-s-office-to-protect-t?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, for example, while sunsetting the Office of Public Realm, instead directing those resources elsewhere. The “chief savings officers” may have replaced the futile “chief efficiency officer.” And the long-awaited release of a Racial Equity Plan, which sputtered out for so long in a new office created by the last mayor that its leaders [sued](https://gothamist.com/news/lawsuit-asks-court-to-prod-mayor-adams-on-long-overdue-racial-equity-plan-for-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), may imply a newfound sense of ownership of a sprawling organizational chart.

***Verdict: It’s a start!***

**What the Mamdani administration should do next:** Rearrange hierarchies to meet changing needs and priorities. Continue to pinpoint redundancies wherever possible.

---

### 10.

### The problem: inadequate transparency

The public has the right to know how the mayor and his team are conducting the city's business — and transparency is a tonic for creeping cynicism in government.

**Our recommendation:**

Set a new bar by becoming the most transparent mayoral administration in history. Release a comprehensive daily schedule; push out information quickly; turn around FOIL requests in days, not weeks and make leaders available for regular engagement and questions — on any and all topics.

**The Mamdani administration did:**

It’s a mixed bag. Mayor Mamdani pretty quickly [archived](https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2026/01/mamdani-plans-delete-all-adams-tweets/410435/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) his predecessor’s tweets and deleted them from public viewing. He has [invited](https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/2009006097974087859?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) more forms of ‘new’ media into City Hall, but the [exclusion](https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-mayor-zohran-mamdani-news-outlets-excluded-press-conference/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has frustrated Room 9 reporters. He came [under fire](https://www.politico.com/newsletters/new-york-playbook/2026/03/02/mamdanis-signal-habit-tests-transparency-pledge-00806566?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for talking about government business on Signal. He [quietly](https://www.nbcnewyork.com/new-york-city/mamdani-trump-meeting-columbia-student-arrested/6470240/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) skirted off to Washington for a surprise meeting with President Trump. And his administration [still owes](https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/mamdani-pledged-a-culture-of-transparency-but-hes-not-ready-to-hand-over-these-govt-records/6474264/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) some FOILs. 

But the Mayor and his team are also out there more than most. Hizzoner is [walking](https://www.instagram.com/reels/DW4LzRREQDg/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (or [biking](https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWzsK-%5FiaBE/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) home from City Hall and greeting New Yorkers along the way. The new deputy mayors and commissioners have led public availability, including a recent ‘Ask Me Anything’ on Reddit [around housing.](https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1sdz9p1/were%5Fmayor%5Fzohran%5Fmamdani%5Fdeputy%5Fmayor%5Ffor/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) And the ‘Rental Rip-Off’ hearings had policymakers [face the public](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rental-ripoff-hearings-landlords-tenants-economics/).

***Verdict: It’s a start!***

**What the Mamdani administration should do next:** Release the FOILs faster, and let the press know of any advance trips — especially if it involves the largest housing project in a borough’s recent history.

---

### 11.

### The problem: an overly complex housing voucher process

The process to help move New Yorkers into permanent housing is time-consuming, confusing and redundant, keeping people in shelter longer than necessary and costing the city money.

**Our recommendation:**

Streamline the process to obtain CityFHEPS vouchers without loosening eligibility.

**The Mamdani administration did:** 

As a candidate, Mamdani promised to loosen eligibility rules for the fast-growing program that offers vouchers for permanent housing, after the Adams administration sued to stop a Council-backed expansion of eligibility. In office, as he faces down deficits, Mayor Mamdani has understandably [continued the effort](https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/03/24/cityfheps-mamdani-vouchers-court-appeal/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to block it. The mayor’s budget proposal [instead](https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2026/04/nyc-councils-preliminary-budget-response-doesnt-include-cityfheps-expansion-its-priorities/412573/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) kept the same funding for the $1.2 billion program intact, [sparking outrage](https://citylimits.org/honor-his-promise-advocates-criticize-mamdanis-cityfheps-reversal-and-what-else-happened-this-week-in-housing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from advocates and policymakers.

While a CityFHEPS expansion is not in the cards for budgetary reasons, City Hall must focus much more on the dozens of steps and many months it takes for those who are eligible to access the program. 

***Verdict: Insufficient progress***

**What the Mamdani administration should do next:** Systematically review the overly bureaucratic CityFHEPS process and streamline it — without widening access in a way that grows the program’s costs.

---

*This installment was prepared with the help of John Surico. Sarah Feinberg and many others provided essential guidance and will continue to inform our work on this project going forward. In the weeks and months ahead, we will continue to surface practical suggestions from people who know the system best — current and former agency staff, nonprofit partners and the everyday New Yorkers who routinely deal with, and often trip up trying to navigate, New York's bureaucracy.*

*Send your ideas to justfixit@vitalcitynyc.org; if you wish to remain anonymous, we will honor your request.*
### Good Government, Beyond the Couch Cushions
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-nyc-vendors-contractors-staff/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:21.000Z
Not since Vice President Al Gore[ smashed an ashtray](https://www.google.com/search?q=gore+ashtray+letterman&oq=gore+ashtray+letterman&gs%5Flcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIICAEQABgWGB4yBwgCEAAY7wUyBwgDEAAY7wUyCggEEAAYgAQYogQyCggFEAAYogQYiQXSAQg5OTE0ajBqN6gCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:7a374aef,vid:6VM8TvVV6aY,st:0) on David Letterman has a politician made cutting waste as entertaining as Zohran Mamdani’s recent [viral video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6s4N2h6Eec&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Strolling through what looked like Gracie Mansion, pulling cash from couch cushions while naming savings, Mamdani expressed a simple idea: “The City was paying for a lot of work from outside contractors that was costing us far too much, so we’re bringing a lot of that work in house, and saving our budget millions.”

Cutting vendors rightly energizes the populist[ ](https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-big-con/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)[left](https://x.com/ddayen/status/2036853938792915059?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the technocratic[ center](https://www.amazon.com/Outsourcing-Sovereignty-Privatization-Government-Functions/dp/0521867045/ref=sr%5F1%5F3?crid=369BIEIIW9UQ8&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.UJJifA0o1QnpDxaVE9feBUtImWLYY-oBQQQ7FjU9-yMGJdR8JkreC-EiITktJRIY20Rs9vjGJPnusUxrTO0C7sSJGmhWqDzf7d7AelbcQOBqZ78pP6LrgpkDxVmEO0617bEXdVH5zbHD82MRWXmzKnLIwH9iPRvDM-E0c01CMFz9R26ru9lpZybIWHs0namu6IzZB3oUw74Yt%5FdldKetQxvZ4IJRjVICKqaR67kBngM.su4WHvqqkV%5Ftm2ldPY3bvdzUejbf8e4Fyb82ijIKaz8&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=government+outsourcing&qid=1775387255&s=books&sprefix=government+outsourcing%2Cstripbooks%2C129&sr=1-3&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and[ ](https://www.amazon.com/Bring-Back-Bureaucrats-Federal-Government/dp/1599474670?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)[parts](https://federalnewsnetwork.com/hiring-retention/2026/03/opms-kupor-would-be-perfectly-happy-hiring-more-feds-if-contractors-are-cut/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the right. But, at least thus far, Mamdani has announced contract savings that only amount to pocket change,[ maybe](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/03/mayor-mamdani-releases-update-on-savings-plan?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 1% of the City’s giant budget gap.

To get better results, the City will need a larger and stronger cadre of government managers and experts to lead major construction and technology projects. But building that top-tier talent will require the mayor to change his budgeting approach and push the civil service system to its limit. He will also need to push Albany to change that system in law. 

These tasks would be hard for any leader, and they will be especially hard for an egalitarian mayor with sympathies for organized labor. But Mamdani has already proven [practical](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/nyregion/mamdani-nyc-public-schools-mayoral-control.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in policy and[ “ruthless”](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/nyregion/mamdani-politics-nyc.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in politics. He will need to bring both qualities to bear if he is to achieve excellence in governance.

### Capacity gaps 

Outsourcing sometimes[ makes sense](https://academic.oup.com/cesifo/article/65/4/349/5518997?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as when the government is buying standard goods that are easy to judge on price and quality, like cars or computers. The City also[ saves](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53ee4f0be4b015b9c3690d84/t/67928e2ea2dbb23e331ac21d/1737657937883/Moving+Beyond+COLAs+to+Salary+Parity+++For+New+York+City%E2%80%99s+Nonprofit+Human+Services+Workers+FINAL.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by contracting with nonprofits to deliver human services. 

But outsourcing can be disastrous for big custom projects that require careful assessment, like planning and building a park or a benefits system.[ ](https://www.amazon.com/Bring-Back-Bureaucrats-Federal-Government/dp/1599474670?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)Decades of outsourcing expertise have decimated governments’ capacity to manage that kind of work. Agencies that lack strong staff don’t evaluate what they’re buying and become locked into ever-deepening dependence on vendors whose fiduciary responsibility is to their owners, not the public.

The pattern plays out across New York’s biggest investments. The best transportation example [is](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the “most expensive mile of subway track on earth”: the Second Avenue Subway extension. According to [exhaustive work](https://transitcosts.com/wp-content/uploads/TCP%5FFinal%5FReport.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by the Transportation Costs Project, the relevant management shrank from an in-house shop of 1,600 to a skeletal staff of 124, responsible for overseeing $20 billion worth of projects. That staff relied on consultants who earned perhaps three times more money, were not tightly managed and built knowledge that public employees needed and never gained.

While the MTA is a State authority, the City’s own capital program shows similar deficits. Nearly 80% of Department of Design & Construction projects are [behind schedule](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-report-of-the-department-of-design-and-constructions-mitigation-of-delays-and-cost-overruns-on-capital-construction-projects/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and by an average of three-and-a-half years. One big reason is the City’s own weakness. One audit [found](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/flying-blind-on-billions-how-weak-capital-data-undermines-new-york-citys-infrastructure-investments/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that project data is fragmented, inconsistent and so incomplete that nearly half of the $157 billion capital plan isn’t even in the city’s tracking dashboard. 

The story is similar for MyCity, the one-stop online portal for city services that Mayor Adams began rolling out in 2023\. According to a withering comptroller [audit](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-report-on-the-new-york-city-office-of-technology-and-innovations-mycity-system/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), MyCity was “initially intended to be developed in-house,” but was shifted to vendors “due to a lack of staff resources.” The City then engaged 50 vendors (many with [checkered histories](https://nysfocus.com/2025/03/19/mycity-eric-adams-child-care?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) through more than 120 contracts and delivery orders, spent over $100 million, could not verify whether key contractors had actually delivered their work, created custom technology when off-the-shelf options were available and built a childcare portal that scored 7 out of 100 on a standard mobile performance test. Mayor Adams [budgeted](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2025/03/Office-of-Technology-Innovation-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) about three out of every four dollars for the City’s technology office outside payroll, mostly to vendors, a ratio that has barely [changed](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/feb26/de2-26.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) under Mamdani. This is a contract management operation without the capacity to manage contracts.

### Success stories

Governments can build the muscle to do the work better, with or without contractors. Since the 1950s, Milan has had a municipally owned transit engineering [firm](https://www.mmspa.eu/en/about-us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that has successfully [bid](https://transitcosts.com/wp-content/uploads/TCP%5FFinal%5FReport.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for work in Copenhagen and Tehran. The United Kingdom’s buildout of the Government Digital Service saved [more than](https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/gds-claims-4-billion-savings-for-government-it/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) $4 billion and [cut](https://public.digital/pd-insights/client-stories/gds?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) central website operating expenses by 70%. Here at home, Maryland Governor Wes Moore has [saved](https://governor.maryland.gov/news/press/pages/Governor-Moore-Announces-New-Maryland-gov,-Improving-Access-to-State-Benefits,-Services,-and-Resources.aspx?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [millions](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/opinion/trump-budget-state-city-local.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by getting top staff and cutting contractors.

New York itself has a recent success story. The MTA’s new app for tracking trains [works far better](https://www.curbed.com/article/mta-app-maps-commute-train-car-accessible-stations.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) than MyCity ever has. And as the state has [touted](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-launch-new-best-class-mta-app-new-york-city-subway-and-bus-customers?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the app was “developed by an in-house team of tech experts” who can now continue to improve the product on their own, without vendors. 

Note well two things: The MTA is a State authority in which the relevant staff operate under the more flexible state civil service law. They were mostly hired based on resumes, not exams, which the State partly [suspended](https://www.cs.ny.gov/help/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 2022\. Second, creating a new app for a discrete task is far easier than fixing legacy systems that vendors have built over decades.

To begin to replicate successes elsewhere, a new budget could layer cost-saving hires on top of existing structures and slots. Mamdani has [taken](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/02/transcript--mayor-mamdani-releases-balanced-fiscal-year-2027-pre?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that approach where new hires drive savings quickly — adding 50 auditors to collect taxes and 100 lawyers to defend against tort claims. The City could also hire new FTEs as one-for-one swaps to replace “staff augmentation” contractors who cost twice as much. But Mamdani’s [budget](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/feb26/tech2-26.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) does not appear to pursue this path of increasing FTEs to save on contractors. Rather, his OMB is tightly [controlling](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2026/04/Fiscal-Year-2027-Preliminary-Budget-Response-2.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) staff additions across the board, filling half of vacancies and eliminating the other half entirely.

This is classic penny-wise-pound-foolish behavior. It is also understandable. Adding highly paid construction and tech engineers is a tough sell even without a deficit. And given that the City has a workforce [with](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/services/for-the-public/nyc-agency-staffing-dashboard/dashboard/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 307,247 authorized positions and 15,495 vacancies (last I checked), OMB probably believes that agencies can already bring on board the talent that the City needs. 

This is wrong. Many of the mayor’s commissioners have hired only a handful of key staff. And that’s normal: Public sector leaders may manage thousands of employees, but they rarely feel able to hire the people they need. Here’s one story from my own public sector experience: While crafting an [overhaul](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/nyregion/09schools.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the City’s approach to $5 billion in school funding two decades ago, I relied on two consulting firms — financed by philanthropy — because City staff did not have the right analytic skills and I was only allowed to hire one person. 

Here is how it goes down. Let’s say an agency head wants to add a cadre of engineers. She has a thin layer of truly at-will, “exempt” appointments, often filled through a political pipeline. After that, she must work through the civil service system if she wants to add staff. OMB probably won’t approve new positions, and there probably aren’t vacancies in the relevant title. Indeed, titles like “software engineer” don’t even [exist](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-yorks-mamdani-ny-civil-service-system/) among traditional civil service titles. If a position requires an exam, then the agency must consider candidates in a rigid order based on test scores. As candidates often turn down jobs, the process regularly takes over a year. Agencies try to negotiate around these constraints in different ways, such as using classifications that don’t require exams. But setting up those classifications [requires](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dcas/downloads/pdf/reports/100%5F2R.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a [hearing](https://citymeetings.nyc/meetings/new-york-city-council/2024-02-27-0100-pm-committee-on-civil-service-and-labor/chapter/how-are-open-competitive-and-promotional-exams-conducted-in-the-education-and-experience-format/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and state approval, and OMB tightly limits the number of people in those roles.

The system conspires against getting the right people into the right roles to manage and replace contractors. But that does not make change impossible.

### What is to be done

Right now, the mayor should direct his administration to do everything in its power to expand the ranks of hires who do not need to take civil service exams. And to find room to hire themselves, agency heads should take a hard look at their top staff and seek to replace those who cannot meet the moment. If they are protected by the civil service system, that will require a protracted process. But city law allows executives to encourage exit by [reassigning](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dcas/downloads/pdf/reports/320%5F2.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) managers to different duty stations and [cutting](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dcas/downloads/pdf/reports/320%5F2.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) their pay up to 20%. The City also can make more hires under provisional and temporary authorities that are both more flexible and less protected than traditional civil service roles. 

Language of this kind may call to mind DOGE, but there is a vast gulf between Elon Musk’s chainsaw and ordinary incrementalism. In that gulf belong leaders who believe in government passionately and will do what it takes to make government work. This moment requires public-spirited relentlessness. 

Better management alone cannot fix a broken system. Lasting reform will require Albany changing the civil service law, making it easier to hire and fire and enabling restructurings that take into account performance as well as seniority. The City should continue to demand civil service hiring based on skill, not politics, nepotism or corruption, but it should enforce those prohibitions mainly through audits and oversight, dropping rigid personnel rules that favor those who can work a byzantine system. 

In such an effort, the City would also want to raise take-home pay for the most skilled talent. Top technologists [can](https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/new-york-city-ny-software-engineer-salary-SRCH%5FIL.0,16%5FIM615%5FKO17,34.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [earn](https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/new-york-city-ny-software-engineer-salary-SRCH%5FIL.0,16%5FIM615%5FKO17,34.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) two to three times their City salary in the private sector, and there is a smaller but still [meaningful](https://www.indeed.com/career/civil-engineer/salaries/New-York--NY?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=The%20average%20salary%20for%20a,updated%20February%2022%2C%202026) [gap](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-pay-increases-engineer-and-related-licensed-positions-across-new?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for civil engineers. 

Inadequate public-sector pay for top talent does not save money. It costs money. Zachary Liscow and two colleagues [studied](https://tobin.yale.edu/research/experienced-state-employees-can-deliver-big-savings-infrastructure?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the costs of transportation contracting in California and made two striking findings. First, bigger departments built roads more efficiently, likely because they managed costs down better. Second, higher-quality engineers reduced project costs by 14% — savings worth more than three times an engineer’s salary. These are hard jobs, and knowing how to drive faster, lower bids matters a lot. The state lost top engineers regularly, the authors found — not because average salaries were higher in the private sector, but because the private sector rewards its best performers far more generously.

Raising the top of the pay scale in city government is not a popular agenda for anyone, and certainly not for a socialist. Indeed, Mamdani has reportedly capped pay in his own office at $230,000\. Caps on pay make a trivial contribution to reducing income inequality, but are a significant drag on government performance. When acting as an employer, the public sector best advances equality by delivering effective services to all.

Another challenge is political. DC37, the city's largest municipal union, [blocked](https://nysfocus.com/2026/02/11/mamdani-civil-service-exams-hiring?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the City's effort to join the State in waiving civil service exams for key positions. But Mamdani has already proven willing to break with labor, changing his position on eliminating mayoral control of the schools. He could make a similar choice here.

Mastering the bureaucracy is harder than making videos, but a leader who wants to go down in history must do thehard things. The question is not whether New York can afford to build the government it needs. Creating space for top public-sector talent pays for itself many times over. The question is whether the mayor, admirably pursuing government excellence, will challenge his own administration and coalition to get there.
### Brad Lander on Immigration Reform, Foreign Policy, and His Bid for Congress
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/brad-lander-on-immigration-reform/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:12.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/brad-lander-on-immigration-reform) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on April 10, 2026 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

The New York Editorial Board spoke with former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, a Democrat running a primary campaign against Rep. Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th Congressional District (Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn), on the morning of April 9, 2026\. The primary election will take place in June. *(photo by Liena Žagare)*

*Participating journalists: Nicole Gelinas, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Myles Miller, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Žagare.*

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Smith**  
We’re grateful for you coming the first time and setting the expectation that everyone running for office in New York has to come answer some questions. Thanks for coming in.

**Brad Lander**  
Thank you. I’m honored to be here. I’m grateful you guys have created this.

**Ben Smith**  
I don’t know if you want to kick off by explaining yourself at all, or…just taking our questions.

**Brad Lander**  
Up to you!

**Ben Smith**  
OK, Nicole’s question here: What is Congressman Goldman doing so wrong in office to justify losing his seat?

**Brad Lander**  
Well, this is a five-alarm fire for our democracy, for working families and for human beings on planet Earth. And in my opinion, status quo politicians, including establishment Democrats like Dan Goldman are not able to fight it. They aren’t getting the job done.

I will say it’s also a democracy. It’s not “his seat.” That seat belongs to the voters of the 10th Congressional District, and he’s out of step with those voters at this moment.

This is a moment at some points where Democrats need to unify and stand up to fight Donald Trump to protect our immigrant neighbors and people that are being kicked off of food stamps and having their health care premiums done.

But Democrats also have to reckon more seriously with our failures that opened the door to Trump, and I think those are in two categories, and Dand Goldman has failed in both of them.

The first is in standing up to special interests and delivering for American working families who are facing an affordability crisis and don’t see people fighting for them or holding anyone accountable. And a quarter-billionaire largely backed by Wall Street and crypto and AIPAC can’t rise to the moment. This is someone who’s voted for Wall Street deregulation, for crypto expansion, for warrantless wiretaps — not somebody who has a track record of fighting for working families on the core issues that people are so fed up with: for tenants and for affordable housing, for jobs that pay enough for investments in public schools. It’s not just box-checking on, “Did you sign on to some legislation in Washington?” Or, “Can you make up a bill to sponsor to put in people’s mailboxes?” It’s: Do you have a track record of fighting for working families who feel screwed. And I have a 30-year track record of fighting for tenants, of getting legislation passed that makes Uber, Lyft drivers and fast food and retail workers and freelancers better off in New York City because of what government has done for them.

And I think Americans Democrats, 10th Congressional District residents want someone who fights for them. And then — we don’t need to keep going on foreign policy — but I just want to say, at this moment, with the Middle East on fire, having someone who has failed the core foreign policy test of a foreign policy grounded in human rights and international law—

**Myles Miller**  
How do you square what you’re saying about the 10th congressional district, fighting for families, all of that, with the fact that he’s literally set up a clinic for immigrant families in Sunset Park, with the fact that he’s doing a lot of the things that you tried to do when it comes to these immigration issues? Immigration is a big issue in the 10th district.

**Brad Lander**  
I try to say three things. To start, it is an important moment for Democrats to unite and fight Donald Trump on behalf of our immigrant neighbors and our democracy. I’m proud of the ways that I have done that — probably the best moments of the last year have been when people come up to me and say, “I’ve been court watching all year long, and I was inspired to do it when I saw ICE agents arrest you.” And yes, on immigration, he has done good work.

But the other two areas where I think he has failed, and where establishment Democrats have failed, are part of what has opened the door to the crises of the moment: a failure to take on the ways the system is rigged and deliver more broadly to working families on the affordability crisis, the way their jobs suck and don’t pay enough for them to afford their housing or their health care or their child care. Those are issues I’ve been working on for 30 years. I don’t think he has any track record of working on them, and in many cases, has voted with Republicans on the wrong side of them.

And you know, it’s not always the case that Americans are paying attention to foreign policy, but at the moment, they’re paying attention to foreign policy and a foreign policy that talked about human rights and international law, that decided when some lives were worth more than others is a meaningful part of why we are living in a much more dangerous and precarious world. And I think he has failed on number two and number three.

**Alyssa Katz**  
So I want to ask you, and maybe the way you just unpacked it answers the question. But you mentioned AIPAC as among the funders that Goldman is beholden to — in the context of, it sounded like, you talking about the affordability crisis and how working families can’t get ahead. And I just wanted to ask you about that. Do you see a connection there? Certainly some Democrats have.

**Brad Lander**  
I mean, my primary criticisms of him on issues of Israel and Palestine and AIPAC are of utterly failing to meet the moment to see Palestinian lives as just as valuable as Israeli and Jewish lives, which was and remains catastrophic for Palestinian families, but in my opinion is also catastrophically bad for Israel, and catastrophically bad for American foreign policy, and now catastrophically bad for human beings on planet Earth.

The role of money in politics is problematic, and that is often about a particular moneyed interest spending on its own behalf, the way Amazon is spending today to try to defeat the [Delivery Worker Protection Act](https://nycclc.org/news/amazon-teamsters-and-supporters-urge-passage-delivery?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that Councilmember \[Tiffany\] Cabán is passing. But what AIPAC has done by creating these dark money vehicles that spend against people not even talking about the issue they’re working on, is corrosive for democracy, even though it’s in support of a foreign policy interest and not an economic interest.

**Alyssa Katz**  
But to answer the specific question I was getting to, I think some in the Democratic Party — I’m pretty sure AOC, I think Bernie Sanders has talked about this too — have explicitly drawn a connection between ‘We are spending on the war, we are beholden to AIPAC, and that’s why you can’t get health care,’ and so on. Do you draw that connection?

**Brad Lander**  
I think American working families struggle to understand how there are billions of dollars for bombing Iran and lighting the Middle East on fire and paying for the 2000-pound bombs that destroyed Gaza, and there’s not enough money to pay for their health care or affordable housing or child care. I don’t think that means AIPAC is working against child care or health care or affordable housing.

Money in politics, more broadly, is a problem and I tried to address that in this race by doing what Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown did in 2012 across the aisle, saying, let’s keep Super PACs out of this race. And I offered that I would, if he would, do this thing called the [People’s Pledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s%5FPledge%5F%28United%5FStates%29?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), where you say, if outside interest — an independent expenditure or a Super PAC, whatever it would be — spends on my behalf or against my opponent, I’ll take half the amount they spend from my own campaign account and contribute it to an agreed-upon charitable organization. They did that in 2012, it brought down super PAC spending in that race, it set a better tone. If you’re serious about getting money out of politics, don’t just say, “Someday we’ll repeal [Citizens United](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained?ref=vitalcitynyc.org),” show how you’ll do it in this campaign. I offered that, he rejected it.

**Alyssa Katz**  
One more question. You have said that you want to, in Congress, co-sponsor the ban the bombing act. And you’ve also called yourself a Zionist, or a liberal Zionist. I just want to get a sense of how you square those two things, basically denying aid to Israel and then also supporting Israel. Where does that path lead you as a member of Congress?

**Brad Lander**  
Yeah, I mean, first, you know, Dan Goldman has made very clear that unconditional support, unconditional military aid to Israel, regardless of what it does, is his approach to policy. He’s made clear there are no conditions that he’s ever going to put on Israel, regardless of its actions, and that is a catastrophically bad foreign policy that everyone can see the harms of. So yes, I mean I made clear on day one, I will sign on as a co-sponsor of the [Block the Bombs Act](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3565?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). I will sign on to \[Rep.\] Sean Casten’s Inspire Compliance Act, which much more moderate Democrats than me, you know, are signing on to. Dan Goldman isn’t even on that one. He is making very clear he will never put conditions on Israel: maybe an occasional letter to Trump to tell Netanyahu something, or a tweet. That’s just not gonna work.

I mean, American foreign policy to Israel has to change, and it has to condition support based on human rights and international law, like the [Leahy Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy%5FLaw?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) says we are supposed to do with all countries, and should do with all countries, not only with Israel. But we are never going to be able to move in the direction of the rebuilding of Gaza, an end to settler violence, an independent Palestinian state, and peace between Israelis and Palestinians, so that they can live in peace and security. And that is what I want. I would like to see an Israel which is able to be a safe place, not at war all the time, not fearing bombs and missiles all the time. Where Israeli Jews and other Israeli citizens can live with rights and dignity and safety, and where there’s an independent Palestine, where Palestinians can live with dignity and a rebuilt country that they have sovereignty and freedom in.

And I don’t think Israelis will be safe until Palestinians are free. And I don’t think Palestinians will be safe until they have sovereignty. And U.S. foreign policy currently is pulling us in the opposite direction of that: unconditional U.S. aid for Netanyahu, for Israel, whatever it does. And look, I do consider Israel’s destruction of Gaza a genocide. It was my daughter who brought me the works of [Raphael Lemkin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael%5FLemkin?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor who developed the term. I didn’t come to that easily, or quickly, but Dan Goldman continues to support a policy which is unconditional support, regardless of what it does. And that is working out catastrophically for Palestinians, for Israelis, for Iranians, for Lebanese folks, for the United States, and for the world.

**Ben Smith**  
Perhaps predictably, the Israel section of this has jumped ahead a bit.

**Harry Siegel**  
So we spoke, you and I, briefly at the [Hope Count](https://hoperegistration.cityofnewyork.us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), about foregrounding AIPAC in your campaign — criticisms of it and all these valid concerns — and how some of this overlaps with more traditional antisemitic concerns about Jews, and how to separate those two currents out. And I was hoping you could talk a little about that, and then maybe in the course of that also respond a bit to this circulated Daily News op-ed from a quote, uh, ‘Concerned Rabbi.’ It sort of touches on the same stuff, you know, urging you to start campaigning, quote, “with integrity and without resorting to rhetoric that echoes antisemitic tropes which fuels resentment towards Jews in the Jewish states. New Yorkers deserve better.”

**Brad Lander**  
OK, so first I want to say I did start with the ways that I think Dan Goldman has failed on economic inequality and delivering for working families and on rigging the system. And that is what I am doing consistently in my campaign. So, you know, as I did today, in general, this is my second area. You know, I think the things Democrats did that opened the door for Trump, were failing to make government deliver for working families, and working families feel it — and I think he \[Goldman\] is part of the problem there, and that is the number one reason that I’m running — *and* also I think there are significant Democratic failures of foreign policy that Dan Goldman has also shared some responsibility for. So just in terms of foregrounding that. On antisemitism more broadly, and how to navigate it at this very fraught moment. I’ll start with this—

**Harry Siegel**  
Actually at the very start of your announcement video, and you brought them up a couple of times here. So it \[affordability\] is not the first thing you’re mentioning.

**Brad Lander**  
Not at the start of my announcement video—

**Harry Siegel**  
The first 30 seconds—  
  
**Brad Lander**  
Not in the first 30 seconds. I think, like, 1:30 of a 2:30 [video](https://www.google.com/search?q=brad+lander+announcment+video&oq=brad+lander+announcment+video&gs%5Flcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRiPAtIBCDQ5NDNqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:0a48a304,vid:qmoyCPtPSTw,st:0). We can fact check on that. But I think the ordering matters. Like, I’m foregrounding progressive Democratic critique that is grounded in delivering on the affordability crisis, the cost of living, which matters for working families, as part of standing up to Donald Trump. And I think these issues are important. I’m talking about them. I think they matter, they’re a place that I have a meaningful difference from him, but I do think, when you say foregrounding, I just want to talk about what I’m really foregrounding here.

On antisemitism more broadly. One of the rabbis at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, was my cabin co-counselor at a Jewish summer camp outside of Indianapolis in the summer of 1987\. So when an attacker drove a truck full of explosives and tried to bomb and kill the preschool children, I am thinking about Josh Bennett and my Jewish summer campers, you know, in Indiana. Like, I feel this stuff really deeply. A local rabbi said to me at one point recently, the Jewish amygdala is badly dysregulated, and with good reason, and I feel that way. I mean, antisemitism is on the rise, and I take it seriously. How to confront it, talk about it, deal with it, is important and complicated.

That attacker, you know, the FBI found was inspired by Hezbollah, and attacking Jewish preschool kids in a synagogue in Michigan is an antisemitic attack, full stop. Also: his niece and nephew had been killed by an Israeli missile in Lebanon because his brother was alleged to be a Hamas militant, and they launched a missile that killed them. His niece and nephew did not deserve to be killed any more than those preschool kids in Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. And you’ve got to be able to talk about it like that. And so I don’t like what Netanyahu is doing, what Israel is doing, and I’m going to criticize it. I support Israel’s existence as a, uh, I believe in the vision of a Jewish and democratic Israel, I think what it is doing is catastrophically bad, and I’m going to talk about those things.

And I want Jewish New Yorkers and American Jews to be safe in this country at a time of rising antisemitism. And I think AIPAC is making us less safe, rather than more safe. I try hard to talk about these issues in a way that, you know, reflect my analysis, politically, of the situation, reflect my values, which happen to be Jewish and American and democratic values — and I’m going to keep doing that.

And, again, just to bring it back to Dan Goldman, I think he has shown, one, that there are no conditions that he will put on American military aid to Israel, no matter how many people’s human rights it violates, And, he is eager to continue taking contributions from AIPAC donors, and would not take a simple step, the People’s Pledge, to keep Super PACs in general, including AIPAC Super PACs, out of this race.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you agree with AOC that the U.S. should stop sending financial and military aid to Israel altogether, including Iron Dome funding?

**Brad Lander**  
So I mean, first, just to restate, you know, the current congressman has made clear that he’ll never, there’s no conditions he’s ever going to put on any aid. And I think that is catastrophically bad for policy. I do support both the Block the Bombs Act and the Ceasefire Compliance Act. More broadly than that, I think we need to follow the Leahy Law and condition all of our foreign policy aid on human rights and international law compliance. At the moment, Israel is very far from complying with human rights and international law. So I would not vote for any more aid at this moment, but I hope it gets there. I want it to be in compliance with human rights and international law. I want the U.S. to be a force for the rebuilding of Gaza under Palestinian leadership, for an end to settler violence, for an independent Palestinian state at peace with Israel, and with security and democracy for Israelis and Palestinians.

**Akash Mehta**  
And just to confirm, under Israel’s current actions you wouldn’t support funding for the Iron Dome?

**Brad Lander**  
At this time, Israel is not, in my estimation, compliant with the Leahy Law of abiding by human rights and international law perspectives. I hope it gets back to doing so.

**Ben Smith**  
One more Israel question for me, having stolen Ben \[Max\]’s. So, just step back: national American politics right now, both parties are having bitter internal fights about Jews and Israel, and Jews and Israel have somehow become the core fracture in the Republican Party, in the Democratic Party. What is going on, in your estimation? Why is everybody so obsessed with the Jews right now?

**Brad Lander**  
I want to start again by saying in the Democratic Party, I think that the fight that progressives need to primarily be prosecuting, in our internal fights as we get ready to unify and stand up against Trump and Republicans, are about delivering for working-class Americans on the affordability crisis. So there are some differences there, and I want that to be centered in the presidential primaries so we can resolve some of them, get behind some ideas together and go fight and win on them. Those are important differences. And you know, I want us to focus there.

I have two different answers to your question. On the one hand, this week our president sociopathically threatened a genocide against the people of Iran in a Middle East conflict that the U.S. and Israel, that Trump and Netanyahu, have launched. So at the moment, I think there are some straightforward reasons to be looking at this set of conflicts.

More deeply, I mean, antisemitism is a long and deep and nefarious force in human history, and it has many complex roots and causes. You know, I’m standing with people who are sharply criticizing Israel at the moment. And one thing I’m often asking them is, ‘how are we making sure that we are not like arm-in-arm with Tucker Carlson, right? And with fascists who have decided to make this a cause they have of the moment. And how are we building from what should be the foundational idea that, to me, is a very Jewish one: that everybody’s created *B’tzelem Elohim,* in God’s image. And that means we want human rights and international law.’ And that’s a very Jewish opinion, and Jews are very well protected by it. And I try to fight for it pretty Jewishly. I guess maybe that’s my core answer here. Like I show up to these fights as a Jew. It’s the only way I know how to, and I plan to keep doing it.

**Myles Miller**  
And we have quite the minyan at this table, black, women, everything —

**Ben Smith**  
We can draw a line under this section. We can argue later about who brought it up first…Liena?

**Liena Zagare**  
I wanted to ask about economic policy. You launched your campaign promising to be \[Mayor Zohran\] Mamdani’s ally in Washington. Mamdani has now met with Trump twice, called him a nice guy, and is asking him for billions for Sunnyside Yards. Being an ally means helping make that deal happen, but you also built your campaign around fighting Trump at every turn. Are there any areas where a compromise would not be possible?

**Brad Lander**  
Well, yes, of course. I mean, I hope the federal government provides billions of dollars to help us build affordable housing at Sunnyside Yards, and I will work hard to be an ally in helping make that happen. I still think the golf courses would be the best place to go first but that’s a place to be an ally. And there’s others. I put out a transit plan. I want to see us get more resources for transit.

I hope that Andy Byford’s leading the redevelopment of Penn Station means federal money will flow into there. It won’t have the architecture or design that I might choose. I’m willing to compromise on the architecture there, if that means we get federal dollars to put money in our transportation infrastructure that we need, and I will look to be a bridge.

But of course, there are places that I would not compromise. Immigration and protection of our immigrant neighbors is the most straightforward of them. I’m taking my case to trial on the DHS arrest at 26 Federal Plaza, and I will put my body on the line again. I would like to see us doing more as a city and a state to defend our immigrant neighbors against Trump and ICE’s abduction and detention, which they just revealed — I mean, \[US Attorney for the Southern District of New York\] Jay Clayton just put this letter out last week showing that ICE has known for the whole year that they are not authorized to make arrests in immigration court, and they kept doing so, and they say they’re going to keep doing so, and I’m never going to compromise.

**Liena Zagare**  
So you’re fully aligned with Mamdani.

**Brad Lander**  
There are places I disagree with him. I guess I don’t know what you mean. I mean, we want to be strategic. The places to push for resources in Washington are you want to be as aligned as you can. I don’t know the mayor’s position on Penn Station and Andy Byford, but that seems to me a strategic place for New York City to get resources that aren’t primarily about the mayor’s agenda. I’m aligned with him that housing, dollars for affordable housing are a plausible place during the Trump administration to try to get resources for New York City. God willing, after 2028 there’ll be a Democratic president, and there will be a lot more opportunities to think about how to build a bridge in the way that there was a bridge between Roosevelt and LaGuardia in a way that there’s a potential bridge for federal resources.

**Ben Max**  
You said, “There’s things I disagree with him on.” What pops to mind on that? What has \[Mamdani\] either done or said that you haven’t been aligned on?

**Brad Lander**  
Oh, I mean, I guess I was thinking, you know, I was half-joking — but I do think we disagree about the golf courses, like, I think it might make more sense to pitch for federal resources to build new homes on four the city’s 12 municipal golf courses, which I think we could get done much more quickly than building a deck over Sunnyside Yards. That’s not like a values difference. It’s a pragmatic one. But if the city is deciding to focus on Sunnyside Yards, that’s a place where I can go and fight for the dollars for Sunnyside Yards.

**Akash Mehta**  
I did want to ask where you situate yourself within the left, and with respect to the form of the socialist left that has emerged in the last 10 years. Also, I should disclose that I interned for you when I was 14 — so my real question is about your policy of paying interns.

**Brad Lander**  
\[Laughing\] I think then we didn’t, but subsequently we did.

**Akash Mehta**  
So for instance, in 2016, in the primary between Clinton and Sanders, you published an essay, “Why I’m a Brooklyn Socialist for Hillary” —

**Brad Lander**  
“Brooklyn Jewish Democratic Socialist for Hillary.”

**Akash Mehta**  
If Bernie were running against Hillary today, who would you support?

**Brad Lander**  
If Bernie were running against Hillary today, I would support Bernie. And in 2020 I supported Elizabeth Warren. When she dropped out, I endorsed Bernie. When Biden won, I robustly and energetically supported him in the general.

**Akash Mehta**  
And so what has changed in your politics or in national politics, from 2016 to now?

**Brad Lander**  
The clarity that Democratic failures to act boldly enough on core affordability, cost of living, economic justice issues, and that the system is rigged against working people and that the wealthy are getting wealthier is just much clearer.

We did a study in the comptroller’s office on ‘what are good jobs?’ We just wanted to know how many jobs in New York are good jobs. And we set a very low bar. It was just like, it’s full-time, it’s year-round, it has health care and it pays the New York minimum wage. Two-thirds of jobs in New York don’t meet those criteria — like two-thirds. That’s a rigged economy, and it isn’t working for people, and I think that’s a big part of why Zohran won the mayor’s race, was speaking to that concern. It’s not working broadly in America, and that precarity is a big part in my estimation of what opened the door to Trump. Because if you don’t fix those problems, and people are pissed off, and they see other people doing well in that system, and they are feeling precarious, you better either show government can deliver, or somebody is going to tell them who to blame — and you are letting fascists in the door.

And it’s clear to me that that is where we are, and that something bolder is required. Now I think you probably would have called me then a “left liberal.” I think you could still today call me a “left liberal.” My politics are aligned with the Working Families Party. That’s how I really ran my Council race, my comptroller race, my mayor’s race, that’s how I’m running this race. So that’s been pretty a consistent throughline.

**Akash Mehta**  
In this political situation where Mamdani is mayor, the DSA is ascendant in New York politics, and you were sort-of the Elizabeth Warren of the mayoral primary against, in some ways, the Bernie of the mayoral primary —

**Brad Lander**  
With a big difference at the end.

**Akash Mehta**  
That Warren didn’t endorse Bernie?

**Brad Lander**  
I mean, ranked-choice voting, which I helped bring to New York, made it possible for us to take a team approach to this mayor’s election, to say neither Andrew Cuomo nor Eric Adams should be the next mayor of New York City. There’s a broad set of progressive goals that’s pretty broadly shared, even if there are some differences within that movement about how to approach it and then ranked-choice voting in general, and the cross-endorsement, helped defeat Andrew Cuomo at a critical moment, offered people a vision of a politics that’s less sour and selfish and ego-driven and more a team effort in pursuit of shared values that requires some compromise, or knowing when it’s time to support someone else, because that’s what’s required.

**Akash Mehta**  
To Ben’s question, do you see pertinent differences between a left liberal who is rooted in, for instance, the Working Families Party, and the socialists who have taken power in recent years, who are more aligned with the DSA? Would you see that as a relevant difference in Congress?

**Brad Lander**  
Well I’m very grateful that those forces are aligned in my race. There was a question earlier in the race about what candidates there would be, and I feel grateful to have the backing of the broad progressive coalition, running against a moderate establishment Democrat. That’s a good way to build a coalition. I think in the mayor’s race, there were those differences. We played them out in the primary in advance. The voters made their choice, and I made a decision to cross-endorse at a moment when I thought it was strategic and important to bring people together so we didn’t risk losing to Andrew Cuomo. And I feel proud of that, but I also feel proud about the race I had run up until then, offering people the vision that I was offering, and I guess that is the kind of strategic coalition politics that I will look to bring to Washington. There are critical moments for all Democrats to unite. I mean, it is a party of moderates and left liberals and socialists.

**Ben Smith**  
What’s the difference, though, between left liberals and socialists? I mean, you don’t think workers should own the means of production?

**Brad Lander**  
I’m not sure those differences are that relevant to this congressional race, because progressives are united behind my candidacy against Dan Goldman.

I have somewhat more of a mixed-market approach. I would like to see more public options, like I proposed in the mayor’s campaign for rooftop solar, and I do support more social housing, but I think there’s a strong role for market actors in broadly the production of enough housing for everyone to live in. I want to see strong and thoughtful regulation.

Let’s take AI for a minute, like just to move us forward in the sort-of directions where there really are going to be important federal policy decisions to make, and where, on the one hand, I think not just Democrats — this is a place I think Democrats and Republicans can come together. Everyone can see that the infrastructure that is set up right now where a tiny handful of companies owned by a tiny set of billionaire tech bros are extracting our data, our privacy, our attention, our money. I think that’s true in sports betting. I think it’s true in the social media algorithms. I think it is true in crypto. I think it is setting up to be more and more true in AI, and there’s a clear need for government to act.

It’s a good issue to build politics around, because I actually think there’s a pretty broad majority of Americans who feel that way, not just socialists or left liberals or Democrats. But like when there was finally a move to get cell phones out of classrooms, people had accepted them, because it just happened along in that direction, in a way that was driven largely by profit, but then also by habits. And when finally people said — I give Governor Hochul her credit here — “Let’s get them out,” Everybody was like, “Yes, that’s the right thing to do.”

And I think there’s an important movement here for bringing people together around, What is the right regulatory approach? You know? What I think we should do is both a whole significant set of regulations that are going to have to have to be developed; but also build some government capacity. We have, like the Fermi Lab on energy, and there’s labs on nuclear and energy kind of science things. We have nothing like that on AI right now. So if the government wants to understand anything about it, we have to buy the understanding from the people who are building the thing for profit.

I’d like to see us have a national lab on AI and build some capacity for understanding it, for regulating it, for deploying it in support of all kinds of things that could be useful on. That to me, on AI, is a left liberal approach.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So automated vehicles are a subset of AI. The mayor has suspended the Waymo testing. Where are you on that concrete issue of, should we allow AVs to replace our for-hire vehicle drivers in the city?

**Brad Lander**  
Yeah, here’s what I think I would do if I were mayor. This is a little different from what should federal policy be. I think I would offer, let’s call it 1,000 licenses — say 1,000 licenses for Waymos. They will be quite expensive licenses, because we are going to charge, I don’t know, 50%, 75% of the displaced labor cost. You’re putting a Waymo on the street. It’s not going to have a driver. You’re not gonna pay that driver. That driver would have been a New Yorker earning some money. So that license is gonna cost you a pretty penny. You know, let’s say 75% of the displaced labor cost you would have spent over some period of time. And then I think I would say, let’s take that money and offer 1,000 current for-hire drivers, some package that they might be interested in. And I don’t know today whether that’s like a substantial investment in their education and retraining, or a basic income for some substantial period of time — and it would be voluntary, right? Because we’re not actually specifically displacing 1,000 people. We’re authorizing these things. We run some experiments on what will make it possible for people to thrive in new jobs and expenses of their lives on the other side of some tech transitions that have to take place. So that’s just like a pilot program, but maybe it’s an example of how I’m thinking about the kinds of investments that we should make.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think the Democratic Party broadly is too — I mean, sounds like you are, you think that AVs are coming and are real, and there’s a subsidiary party that I think thinks we should fight these things forever. There should be no data centers. There should be no AVs—

**Brad Lander**  
This actually maybe speaks really well to coalition. I mean, I think it’s smart what Bernie and AOC are doing, saying “No data centers until regulation.” How else are we going to get leverage? I mean, they are moving very quickly. AI is way outpacing anybody’s capacity to regulate. So the risk now is not that we’re going to shut it down, the risk is that it is going to take over everything before we’ve had time to figure things out. So I think that’s a smart move. I’d sign on and say, you know — but then I want to spend lots of time figuring out what the regulatory framework should be. That’s why I think we need more government capacity to understand it. That’s why I would support cities and states doing more regulation until we build enough consensus.

I don’t fully know exactly where it’s going. I don’t know if anyone does. I think it is going to be a very serious set of questions for the forward-going Congress, and I’d like to be one of the leaders that’s serious about taking it on.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
I was just going to follow up on Liena’s question. You brought up Penn Station. Are there conditions that you would require to support the federal Penn Station project? Two would be a no mass-scale clearance of buildings that are already there to give to developers to pay for some of it. And two, do you want to see through-running, where we make this into one regional commuter transportation system?

**Brad Lander**  
To the second, absolutely.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So you wouldn’t support it if it doesn’t have through-running?

**Brad Lander**  
I mean, the purpose is not to build a glorious new monument. The purpose is an infrastructure and transportation investment that strengthens our capacity to be the center of a metropolitan region. Through-running is a core purpose of the project.

On the questions of what gets demolished and rebuilt, and who benefits from it, I guess I want to get into the weeds a little more. The goal is the transportation and infrastructure project. And unfortunately, often these kinds of projects in the name of transportation and infrastructure become, you know, speculative grabs by real estate interests, and that is not their purpose.

But if something is getting built and look — I guess, one thing I’ll say here is, I have a lot of confidence in Andy Byford. Now, does he survive as the leader of this project? You know, how long can he stay in that job? Those are important questions, but I have a lot of confidence in him. I believe he would quit before he would bring something forward that didn’t meaningfully strengthen the city and the region and the nation’s transportation infrastructure and capacity?

**Brad Lander**  
He doesn’t want to quit. He just quits rather than let bullies and authoritarians make bad decisions that make him do them.

**Harry Siegel**  
You co-sponsored a bill a decade ago urging the federal government not to renew the licenses for the Indian Point nuclear nuclear plant. That didn’t pass. But you know, the plant shut down in 2021.

**Brad Lander**  
That was a mistake. I co-sponsored that resolution?

**Harry Siegel**  
Yeah. So that’s what I was going to ask. Have your views on nuclear changed at all? And more broadly, how would you approach energy policy, which is obviously front and center, given America’s war in Iran, and Israel’s, as congressman?

**Brad Lander**  
Well, I mean, first and foremost, I still think we need the core tenets and outlines of the Green New Deal. We need to invest in renewable and clean energy and have a transition away from fossil fuels to renewables, as far as we can. I still want to do the Public Solar NYC, this public option for rooftop solar. I was in Copenhagen and I saw their offshore wind. I mean, that is what we need to be doing. And our politics at the moment are very far from it. But I do think there is a role for nuclear energy within our transition away from fossil fuels.

And I had not remembered that I had signed on to that resolution, but I’ll view that as a mistake I made, and something I’ve changed my opinion on, I think like a lot of progressives on energy policy, who came out of a time when there were, for understandable reasons, a lot of anxieties about nuclear power plants. But I think we have realized that if we are going to transition away from fossil fuels fast enough to prevent catastrophic climate damage, that safe nuclear energy has a role to play.

**Akash Mehta**  
What do you make of the governor’s push to roll back New York’s climate law and more broadly, how do you square climate policy with the discourse around affordability?

**Brad Lander**  
I think that the governor’s move to roll back the CLCPA \[Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act\] is terrible, and I strenuously oppose it. We are still facing a climate emergency. I mean, there are a lot of other emergencies in our democracy at the moment, but we are still facing a climate emergency, and we are moving nowhere near fast enough to transition to clean energy, and the CLCPA was an important step in that direction. I was proud to support it, and I still support it, and I don’t like its rollback.

It is important to do that work in a way that delivers more affordable energy for Americans, and shows Americans that it’s delivering more affordable energy for them. And I think we can do that. That’s why Public Solar NYC was one of the things I tried to talk about during the mayor’s race. Like we could be using city and state and federal capital to build rooftop solar on the buildings of New York City in a way that would quickly reduce people’s energy costs and show them more money in their pocket, while we are building out a publicly-owned clean energy utility. And to me, that’s the way to bring together the shift to renewable energy while delivering for New Yorkers on affordability.

**Myles Miller**  
I want to ask you a budget question. The mayor has presented a bleak picture for the budget, really factoring in some of the projections and unpaid-fors by the Adams Administration. You were a critic of Adams, but you know, you have some responsibility and fiscal due diligence in the city.

**Brad Lander**  
And I was very clear about those things at multiple points. I called it out every single budget cycle. I pushed for an automatic deposit into the Rainy Day Fund. I called it out in my testimony to the City Council in April of last year. I called that out at the Financial Control Board in August of last year. I published the numbers people have relied on this year in December of last year.

**Myles Miller**  
So you were this fiscal steward, you were sounding the alarm about the budget. How do you square that with some of the investments in Palantir? How do you square that with divestment from Israel sovereign bonds, and then, you know, continued investment in defense stocks. If you you were this fiscal watchdog who was sounding the alarm about the budget and some of the issues in the Adams administration — why couldn’t you get over the line of divestment from Palantir, divestment from Israel defense with the five pension funds?

**Brad Lander**  
I don’t think there’s any connection between the two parts of your question, so I’m going to answer them as two separate questions.

**Myles Miller**  
Fantastic.

**Brad Lander**  
On the fiscal and budget issues, I did the job as a watchdog over the Adams administration. It is sometimes hard to get attention as New York City Comptroller, and I think in some ways, my critiques of Eric Adams got expected and baked in, and it was hard for me to get people to hear them. But if you ask the Citizens Budget Commission, you know, who was focused on deposits to the rainy day fund, on a thoughtful approach to the city budget, on demanding more transparency on what we’re really spending, and on identifying places for savings without reducing services, I did that job. I’m proud of it. The record reflects it.

On the pension funds. First, the pension funds did extremely well under my watch. We significantly outpaced the benchmarks that are set by the state. That’s like a 7% return. We had over 10% returns in the latter two years and across my tenure saved New Yorkers over $5 billion as a result of a thoughtful, diversified investment approach.

At the same time, we had the boldest, responsible investing program of any U.S. pension in the country, bar none. There’s not even a close second. So we did the largest divestment of fossil fuels, $4 billion out of fossil fuel reserve owners, the biggest investments in affordable housing, significant new responsible property management standards on investor-owned housing around the country, supported workers’ rights at many of the companies that we invested in. And yeah, I feel really proud of the responsible investing.

**Myles Miller**  
So Israel defense stocks —

**Brad Lander**  
So I stopped investing in — I chose not to renew the funds’ investments in Israel Bonds, because what I discovered was the way that prior comptrollers had invested in Israel Bonds was inconsistent with the policies of the pension funds and was favorable treatment of Israel.

We had no investments in any other foreign sovereign debt, and the place that investment was being made from was not actually the fixed income portfolio, it was the cash desk. Prior comptrollers, up to and including Scott Stringer, took cash desk money — that’s money that’s supposed to be an instrument with maturities less than a year, so that you can, like, pay your obligations — and did a thing they did not do anywhere else, put it in investments with two- to 10-year maturities in Israel Bonds that they did not do for any other countries. And when the team came to me and said, “Should we continue to do that?” I said, “No, we should not give Israel favorable treatment, and we should not take cash desk money and use it for…and use long-term maturities.” And I absolutely stand by that position. I think it would be a mistake for Mark Levine to reverse it.

On the other hand, you don’t pick and choose stocks as the comptroller. That is just not the comptroller’s job, to say which companies you like politically or think are good bets economically or fiscally. That would be a terrible idea. And instead, you hire a professional investment staff. They hire asset managers who invest your money broadly across the economy. And when you think there are broad strategic decisions to make, like, let’s divest from fossil fuel reserve owners, you do that with a lot of study, and you do that systemically. And you know, it’s an easy, cheap hit, because there are many companies in the world that investment funds invest in that you can make hay about. But the idea that you’d want a comptroller that picked and chose stocks—

**Myles Miller**  
I mean — Palantir, and you’re anti some of these immigration policies — does not fit with the narrative.

**Brad Lander**  
Do you think it would be a good idea? It does fit — do you think as comptroller, what I should have done was picked and chose stocks, what to buy and what to sell, based on my politics? Is that what you’re proposing? I think that would be a terrible idea, and I didn’t do it.

**Ben Smith**  
It turns out divesting fossil fuels was a bad bet…The stocks have performed great.

**Brad Lander**  
I mean, obviously, that depends on what time-horizon you pick. There were years when it was done well, you know, in the year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, those were up.

**Ben Smith**  
But — fossil fuels are on the way out, renewables are rising, just like as an objective fact—

**Brad Lander**  
No, I don’t think so. Actually, at the city level, you can compare, because three of the five funds divested fossil fuels, and two of them didn’t. I mean NYCERS, teachers, and **birds** divested fossil fuels, police and fire didn’t. Over the time-horizon since the divestment, the three funds that divested have done slightly better than the ones that didn’t.

**Ben Max**  
Can I just come back to this race for a second and what’s ahead, a little bit?

One of Congressman Goldman’s biggest talking points in his bid for reelection is that if Democrats take the House, there will be a lot of accountability work to do related to the Trump Administration, and that he would be particularly strong in that area, given his background as a prosecutor, his work in the first impeachment, and so forth.

Do you agree with that? You gave him credit on the immigration work — you know, that’s one of his core pitches for reelection, do you agree that he would be particularly strong there? And what’s your view on if there is a Democratic House, what needs to be top of the list in some of that oversight, accountability work?

**Brad Lander**  
This is a good and important question. I definitely agree that oversight and accountability of the Trump Administration will be an important role for House Democrats when we win the majority. How to do that is important, and a piece of that is prosecutorial in nature, is tough questions of Republicans for the crimes they’ve committed and the harms they’ve caused.

Let’s be clear, where there are crimes to be prosecuted, prosecutors should prosecute them. And asking questions about them in the well of Congress has a role. What’s more important is at the state and district attorney level, at the U.S. Attorney level, potentially at the independent counsel, prosecutor level, when we take back the White House, for crimes to be prosecuted.

But there’s an important — that’s one element. But you also have to do that work in a way that builds power for the goals we have, that helps build strength amongst Americans to take back our humanity and move away from these dangerous policies, and then sets up the 2028 election in a way that helps us move forward.

So on immigration, I think the first hearing should be in Minneapolis rather than in the Rotunda, because I think the people of Minneapolis, the good neighbors of Minneapolis, to me, have done the best job of anyone of showing how to fight Trumpism. They did it fiercely, but with love of neighbors, and it played, therefore, so well around the country. It helped win people over who had voted for Trump maybe because of, or at least not in spite of, his points of view on immigration. And some chunk of them, it looks like to me, based on polling responses, thought, “I don’t like what’s happening in Minneapolis. I like the way those neighbors are showing up for their other neighbors. That looks like a good way to be American to me.”

So it’ll be great to do our first hearing there, of course, to try to shine a light on who killed Alex Pretti and Renée Good, and to hope that there will then be prosecution and accountability. But also to paint a way forward away from ICE abductions and crimes and toward an immigration policy that we could get together around. And I hope that at the same time we’re having that hearing, Democratic primary candidates running for president, we’ll do a forum that’s televised nationally, but with the good neighbors of Minneapolis.

That, to me, would be a good use of congressional oversight and accountability power, but in a forward-looking direction that helps us get back to a country that can act, humanly, thoughtfully, and deliver for people.

And I think the agenda needs to look like that in other ways as well — on health care. You know, we want to hammer on the ways in which he has doubled the premiums for people on the exchanges and stripped people of Medicaid, and offer a platform to start thinking about how Democrats will deliver now, some of that we could do short-term. I think we could use our budget power to force the subsidies to come back. Right if we have one house, you have some budget negotiation power. That’s the best the Democrats have done collectively this term was when they made that government shutdown fight about the subsidies. I think Americans understood, “OK, I get what the Democrats are fighting for. I get the consequences.” Let’s pick that one back up and win the subsidy restoration and show people we brought your health-care costs down, but also provide a platform for Democratic presidential candidates to say, “Here’s what I’m offering,” you know, whether it’s Medicare For All, or others will have other ideas. So when we win, we could move forward.

So to me, that’s what we should be doing next term. I think I will be better at it than Dan Goldman, because I think he will be stuck in the Rotunda asking the prosecutorial questions, but not thinking about how you strategically build a broader coalition on the issues that really matter to working families.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
We asked Congressman Goldman what should happen to people who have applied for asylum, or who have not applied for asylum, and are found not to have a right to be in the country. So what do you think should happen to people who have failed, or not gone through the proper asylum or immigration process?

**Brad Lander**  
Under the global Convention Against Torture, that’s the controlling international law — it was the global Convention Against Torture that gives us an international obligation to evaluate whether people have a credible fear of persecution if they are deported back to their country.

And like a lot of people at the table, I really don’t want to take us back to the Jewish questions, but I take that very seriously. I’m from St. Louis and that ship called the St. Louis that got turned around and back to Europe, I’m never going to be responsible for that.

I want people’s credible fear of persecution if deported to be evaluated. It doesn’t take 10 years to evaluate. We have a broken immigration system that currently takes — who knows what it’s doing today — but that was taking 10 years to get. Right now, we’re mostly just pre-termitting people’s cases and not letting them even present their credible fear, and saying, “You can go to Uganda if you would like to claim that you have a credible fear of persecution if you’re deported back to Haiti or wherever.”

But it shouldn’t take 10 years. That was a mistake, letting the system become like that, and then failing to get any controls around it contributed to an extremely large number of people coming thinking they would take — some of whom have a credible fear of persecution, and some of whom are seeking economic opportunity because they’re from places of grinding poverty, but don’t, under the global Convention Against Torture, have a credible fear of persecution. I want a system that, in a much shorter period of time, can evaluate that question, and if they have a credible fear of persecution, we should offer them refuge in this country, and if they don’t have a credible fear of persecution, I have compassion for fleeing grinding poverty and wanting opportunity in this country, but that can’t be our immigration policy, and those people have to go back and enter through— try to enter through a different pathway. I would support increased legal immigration pathways that people could apply for. I want a a system that adjudicates more promptly, that does provide refuge for people who have credible fear—

**Ben Max**  
So people here 5, 8, 10, years have to go? They have to go back?

**Brad Lander**  
I mean, that’s a slightly different question. I mean, what the comprehensive immigration reform approach should be: path to citizenship for people who are already here is a different question from the policy for people who enter so…that’s got to be resolved in comprehensive immigration reform.

**Ben Smith**  
I mean, comprehensive immigration reform has been debated at least since like the Bush years. Do you think that there’s anything about the politics of this moment that made you think that Congress could actually get a deal — that President \[J.D.\] Vance and Speaker \[Hakeem\] Jeffries are going to be able to hammer this out? How does that happen?

**Brad Lander**  
Well, there are things it will be possible to agree on. How comprehensive they are is a different question.

**Ben Smith**  
The outlines of the thing called “comprehensive immigration reform” have basically been set for 20 years.

**Brad Lander**  
Well, they are different now than they were, because what it was was — stronger border for path to citizenship for everyone who’s here, who’s undocumented. And you know, I still would support some version of that deal for everyone who’s here who’s undocumented.

How to make the system work — the brokenness that revealed itself in Biden, and that Trump exploited, was a little different. It was a system that took so long to adjudicate asylum cases that it created an incentive for people to come and seek asylum, and then the numbers got so big, and that had that impact on our politics — and that could be fixed. It’s in no one’s interest to have a 10-year wait.

**Ben Smith**  
Is there some congressional politics that let that point to 60 votes in the Senate and a majority in the House on some legislation around this.

**Brad Lander**  
I think it’s a good question. There are other areas where I can more easily imagine congressional majorities reaching across the divide. I think there’s some significant economic and workers’ rights issues where that’s possible. I think for Congress to take back some of the Article I power it has ceded, it is given over to an increasingly imperial presidency.

I think \[Reps.\] Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, in really interesting ways, are teasing out certain kinds of things that might be, you could imagine building majorities around, even though it’s taken the kind of willingness to say, “Screw it,” on their part that, you know, got the Epstein files released and got the war powers resolution on the floor.

We should try hard to get there on immigration. But it has become one of the issues in our politics around when we’re most polarized. And look, that’s a challenge for Democrats, because, on the one hand, I’m just not going to compromise on, like, our obligations under the global Convention Against Torture. And I think immigration has been fantastic for New York City and for the country, and I recognize that it’s one of the issues around which the country is the most polarized.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Let me just ask you about Mamdani’s fiscal policies, both the changes in the policies and the funding of them. So you ran a much more moderate \[mayoral\] race. You weren’t pushing for immediate, universal child care. You were pushing for a more gradual rollout. You didn’t have a free bus platform. You didn’t have a city-run groceries platform. And it’s striking that Mamdani has walked away from all those three things. He said yesterday, he’s not going to get free buses this year, hard to see how he gets them next year. Does that vindicate your more moderate approach?

**Brad Lander**  
No! He won the election.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Do you think he won based on things he can’t deliver?

**Brad Lander**  
Well, I don’t know. I think he’s set up to deliver in meaningful, concrete ways on the affordability agenda, like universal child care. A path to universal child care is the biggest of those promises, both in the difference it can make in people’s lives and what it can be for New York City, if young families can count on it, and it’s cost. And I, you know, that was one of the top issues on his list. Usually he would say “freeze the rent” first, but that doesn’t have a fiscal cost in the same way. So, and I think he’s on a good path to deliver it. And I think winning Governor Hochul over to make a big step this year is valuable, and so I don’t know—

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And also taxes. Is the local government the right entity of government to sharply raise income and business taxes? Or should this be something you are doing in Congress so where people cannot flee the tax jurisdiction?

**Brad Lander**  
Well, it would be much better to do it at the federal level, but if the federal government can’t or won’t act to deliver, it’s better to do it in New York than not do it at all.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Why wouldn’t they be able to deliver?

**Brad Lander**  
Well, I’m going to try like hell. But, I mean, today, there is not a federal government that is going to tax the rich in order to fund universal child care for New Yorkers or other Americans. I wish there was. That’s one of the reasons I’m running. I’ll support it in Congress. But in the absence of that happening, I think it’s smart policy for Zohran to have campaigned on it, to be pushing to tax the rich, but also to be working with the governor to make a deal to deliver on it in the short term.

**Ben Max**  
You moved away from calling for those tax increases during your \[mayoral\] campaign. Now you’re back to supporting them?

**Brad Lander**  
I didn’t move away from them during the campaign, I called for them in the wake of the pandemic. The report I put out the first year as comptroller said we’re about to see a big drop in spending on our public schools because we’re going to see a big pandemic drop off. And I thought in that year it was appropriate to add a surcharge on millionaires or corporate taxes to prevent us from having to make cuts to our public school schools. And the next year, we did not face the same situation. And I didn’t call for the same increases because I didn’t think our schools were going to be cut. And at this moment, I think we can get a big increase to child care this year, even if there’s not some increase in millionaire’s tax or corporate tax in Albany. But to get to universal child care and keep paying for what’s being committed this year and grow to get to full universal two-care, as well as continue pre-K and 3-K, more resources are going to be required.

I hope we could deliver them from Washington. I’m going to go there and fight to tax the rich in Washington. Then, if federal resources will come to pay for that, fantastic. That would be preferable. I hope it happens. If it doesn’t happen, I support increasing those taxes in Albany to pay for it.

**Akash Mehta**  
On the spending side of things, I’m curious if you think that Mamdani is doing enough to find savings. He has proposed finding $1.7 billion in savings. The \[City Council\] speaker and the governor both think he can find more. On your, I think, second-to-last day as Comptroller, you put out [a report on MyCity](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/MyCity-System-Development-Public-Final-report-12-30-25-final-copy.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which was a social services website that [we reported on](https://nysfocus.com/2025/03/19/mycity-eric-adams-child-care?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and that cost over $100 million. The audit was the closest I’ve seen in comptroller-speak to “this is lighting money on fire.” But Mamdani is not proposing to scale it back. From your four years as comptroller, do you think there are wasteful contracts that Mamdani should more aggressively cut?

**Brad Lander**  
Oh yes, yes, yes. I mean, there are many more savings and efficiencies to achieve in New York City government. We laid out a roadmap to many of them as Comptroller. We did send over to the \[Mamdani\] transition a whole bunch of other ideas, looking at MyCity, looking at some other contracts, looking at claims against the city, which are $2 billion a year — and no one is responsible for trying to reduce the number of traffic crashes caused by city vehicles or many other things. So yes, I am eager to see it.

I do think he is focusing on those things more than some people thought he would. I think his focus on the day-to-day work of government, the pothole filling and putting chief saving officers in place and drawing attention to it is good. There’s a lot farther to go. I think he’ll probably do much more of that, even by the time the budget is adopted at the end of June. And there’s a lot more work to keep doing there, and you’ve got to do that work to keep your agencies working well, to not be wasting money, to show people you care about it. But at the same time, if you want to expand what social democracy looks like, and give people child care for their two-year olds and, at the federal level, be able to have a system that pays for everybody’s health care, it will also be necessary to tax the rich, and Dan Goldman has shown over and over again, he’s not really willing to do that, and folks in the 10th congressional district want someone who will.

**Harry Siegel**  
A little full circle here. When you met with this board for the first time, you made some news talking about how progressives, including yourself, were slow to respond to the growing sense of disorder coming out of the pandemic. A lot of headlines about that, and this is just after Mamdani got into the race at 0%, before Cuomo was in. Strategist hat on — do you want to look back: What was wrong with your theory of the case, or how things have shifted and where we’re at now?

**Brad Lander**  
I don’t think anything was wrong with my theory of the case. Zohran ran a brilliant campaign that spoke to the cost-of-living needs of New Yorkers and inspired people, and that helped him.

**Harry Siegel**  
His theory of the case was not public safety. Yours was progressives need to get more into that than that, I think—

**Brad Lander**  
I guess what I’m saying is: I don’t think I lost because of that. Zohran won because of the brilliant and effective campaign that he ran.

The number one campaign plan that I had in this space was to end street homelessness for people with serious mental illness in a way that would connect them to supportive housing. So it was not an expansion of policing, but it was a thought about how we could have a city that felt safer and less disordered and out-of-control through a thoughtful intervention that would help mentally ill folks who are sleeping in streets get into housing with the supports they need as well.

I have proposed a federal approach to achieving that for New York City and every other city that I really think we should fight for next term. The federal government, about 15 years ago, did what are called VASH vouchers that offer street homeless veterans a pathway to supportive housing. We used those vouchers in New York City to mostly end veteran street homelessness, and that is great. We could do the same at a quite modest cost for the federal government, for people with serious mental illness, if we had the same voucher, basically. I call them Street-to-Home vouchers. So if the city knew any time that a city worker encountered someone with serious mental illness who is unsheltered, rather than saying, “Can I get you to go into shelter, which often doesn’t work,” you could say, “I can get you an apartment tonight,” a lot more people will say yes. It’s been proven effective 70-90% of time. It’d be expensive for New York City. It’d be a modest amount for the federal government to offer that. And I think it will be great because it’s humane for people not to sleep on the streets who are seriously mentally ill. I think it would be great, because having cities and places that feel safe and don’t feel disordered is much better for living in those cities. And I think it’d be really good for Democratic politics to invest in for all of those reasons. And I thought that in the mayor’s race, and I think it today.

**Everyone**  
Thank you.

**Brad Lander**  
Thank you.
### NYC’s Fiscal Tightrope Act
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-mark-levine-potential-fitch-moody-bond-downgrade/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:21.000Z
In recent weeks, New York City’s credit rating agencies have sent us a clear warning about the fiscal trajectory our city is on. This may eventually have implications for our ability to borrow for critical capital investments. But it already raises a serious question: Can our budget withstand an economic downturn or unexpected shock? New Yorkers should be paying attention.

By many indicators, New York City’s economic health remains strong. Wages grew 3% last year in real terms, while income tax, sales tax and property tax receipts are all up. Wall Street just had the best bonus season ever. Office leasing is at a pace we haven’t seen in two decades. Demand for housing, including luxury properties, remains robust. (One notable exception: Job growth has stalled.)

If New York City’s economy is strong, and our tax revenue is increasing, what’s the problem? 

Our rating agencies have told us: The City’s budget has a structural imbalance, with recurring expenses outpacing recurring revenues. And the current fiscal plan does too little to correct it, instead drawing down the City’s fiscal cushion, including its reserves, end-of-year surplus and overall flexibility.

Three agencies — Moody's, Fitch Ratings and Kroll Bond Rating Agency — have [made that concern](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/services/financial-matters/nyc-bonds/new-york-city-debt/ratings-reports/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) clear by revising their outlook for New York City from “stable” to “negative.” S&P Global Ratings has not changed its outlook but has issued similarly stark warnings.

None of the agencies has yet lowered NYC’s bond rating, which remains strong. And there is still robust demand for our bonds among buyers. But the agencies are making it clear that a downgrade could well be on the horizon if we fail to fix the structural problems in our city’s budget.

> The City’s budget has a structural imbalance, with recurring expenses outpacing recurring revenues.

The bond rating agencies are not making a political judgment. They are evaluating whether the City is managing our finances in a way that protects our ability to meet our obligations in good times and bad. To do that, they look not just at whether the budget balances in a given year, but *how* it balances — and what condition it leaves the City in for the future. They track key quantitative indicators such as reserve levels as a share of spending, the size of projected budget gaps and whether fund balances are rising or falling.

The agencies have been crystal clear about their concerns. Moody's [cited](https://ratings.moodys.com/ratings-news/461132?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) “large and persistent imbalances” in NYC’s budget even during favorable economic conditions, and warned that a downgrade could follow if budget gaps grow, reserves are depleted, or the City continues relying on one-time measures like drawing on retiree health funds. S&P Global Ratings, while maintaining a stable outlook, has [issued a similar warning](https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/view/type/HTML/id/3534086?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): Continued reliance on temporary fixes and a weakening cushion could put the City’s rating at risk.

Fitch Ratings [flagged](https://www.fitchratings.com/research/us-public-finance/fitch-revises-new-york-city-outlook-to-negative-rates-fiscal-2026-ser-f-g-1-go-bonds-aa-20-03-2026?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a “sustained erosion” of reserves as a key concern and emphasized the need to close budget gaps in a lasting way. Kroll Bond Rating Agency [has raised](https://www.kbra.com/publications/XDSKKRHy/kbra-releases-report-assigning-aa-rating-negative-outlook-to-the-city-of-new-york-general-obligation-bonds-fiscal-2026-series-f-and-g-and-general-obligation-bonds-fiscal-2026-series-1?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) similar issues, pointing to growing imbalances, large out-year gaps and declining reserves and surplus. Different frameworks, but the same message: The City’s financial cushion is shrinking, and its room for error is narrowing.

What would the impact be if New York City’s bond rating were to be downgraded? It would likely add to our borrowing costs, but in the near term the direct financial cost may be manageable given the City’s strong investor base. 

But even small increases in borrowing rates, applied across tens of billions of dollars in debt, add up. Over time, those higher costs compound — meaning more taxpayer dollars going to interest and fewer available for schools, parks, housing and infrastructure. Just as important, a downgrade sends a broader signal about fiscal management, which can further raise borrowing costs and reduce flexibility. The real risk is not a sudden shock, but a gradual erosion of the City’s financial position.

> There will be only tough choices between now and June. The politically easy solutions have mostly already been exhausted.

For me, the greatest concern with a potential downgrade is what it says about our city’s ability to weather a difficult turn in the economy or other unexpected shock. Though our economy is strong today, we face myriad risks ahead, driven by continued damage from the president’s tariff policies, the impact of the war in Iran and mounting inflation. And then there is the rapid pace of AI advancement, which adds a whole new level of uncertainty for employment, the stock market, cybersecurity and more. This is a terrible time to be weakening NYC’s fiscal shock absorbers.

Fortunately, a bond rating downgrade is not inevitable. If the economy holds, we could see stronger-than-expected tax revenues. In Albany, State leaders are currently negotiating the budget, which I hope will include much-needed (recurring) support for New York City, especially given that we send billions more to Albany each year than we receive in return.

Most important are the choices we make ourselves. We have significant work to do between now and the June deadline to adopt the City budget. We need a plan that relies less on one-time fixes, reins in fast-growing expenses, avoids unspecified cuts and preserves — not depletes — our reserves, including both the Rainy Day Fund and the Retiree Health Benefit Fund. There will be only tough choices between now and June. The politically easy solutions have mostly already been exhausted. But the alternative to decisive action now is to push risk into next year at a moment of real uncertainty.

New York City has one of the most dynamic economies in the world, a deep and diverse tax base and a track record of adapting in the face of challenge. The warning from the rating agencies should not be read as a verdict on our future, but as a call to action. If we make the right choices now — restoring our fiscal cushion and addressing our structural imbalances — we can ensure that New York remains not just resilient in the face of the next downturn, but positioned to thrive for years to come.
### Does When We're Born Make Us Who We Are? A New Way of Thinking About Crime and Success in America
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/robert-sampson-adam-gopnik-interview/
Last updated: 2026-05-07T18:31:31.000Z
Many people believe that individual character determines outcomes. But new research challenges this idea. In a three-decade study of over 1,000 Chicago children, sociologist and Vital City contributor Robert J. Sampson finds that the era into which you're born matters as much as who your parents are. Children born a decade apart — from identical backgrounds and neighborhoods — experience dramatically different life trajectories. 

Join Vital City, NYU Wagner and the Russell Sage Foundation for a conversation between New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik and Robert Sampson about his new book, [“Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans.*”*](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674987548?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Featuring remarks from 

Polly Trottenberg, Dean, NYU Wagner

Elizabeth Glazer, Founder and Co-Editor, Vital City

Bruce Western, President, Russell Sage Foundation

**Monday, April 27 | 5:00 PM doors, 5:45 PM program** 

NYU Wagner Main Event Space, 105 E 17th St, New York, NY

**Sign up to attend in person using this form.**
### A Road Safety Blueprint for the Mamdani Administration
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-speed-cameras-road-safety-mamdani-policy/
Last updated: 2026-04-30T13:35:35.000Z
In one of his first acts after being inaugurated as mayor, Zohran Mamdani stood at the side of the Williamsburg Bridge and announced his first major improvement to transit infrastructure in New York: eliminating the notorious “bump” that has long rankled cyclists. Mamdani has moved quickly across the board on transportation, pushing speed limits down to 15 mph in school zones, accelerating [red-light camera](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2026/activate-additional-red-light-cameras.shtml?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) deployment and showing a willingness to use every tool available to make streets safer. What else should rank highly on the mayor’s list of transportation safety priorities?

Automated traffic enforcement would be a good place to lean in. The need for cities like New York to take bold action has become increasingly urgent since February, after the Trump Administration [cut](https://www.roadsbridges.com/road-traffic-safety/news/55355034/usdot-moves-to-restrict-federal-funding-for-automated-traffic-enforcement-cameras?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) federal transportation grants for automated enforcement. We recently published an evaluation of New York City’s speeding camera program in the [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences](https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2520328122?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), finding that speed cameras produced large reductions in collisions and injuries. 

When cameras are installed, they issue many violations in the first month, followed by a steep decline in the next few months as drivers learn about their location. This suggests that the cameras effectively deter speeding by changing driver behavior, a best-of-both-worlds scenario where financial penalties decline as safety benefits accrue. This is particularly striking given that New York City's speed cameras are so lenient: Violations carry a flat $50 fine with no points, compared to hundreds of dollars and upwards of three points for police-issued tickets. While critics worry that speed cameras will become revenue generators, indiscriminately taxing drivers rather than changing driving behavior and improving road safety, our research suggests the opposite. 

Critics have raised valid concerns about the surveillance implications of expanding automated enforcement. Indeed, in many jurisdictions, law enforcement’s use of automated license plate readers has intensified domestic [violence](https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/fac%5Fpubs/1515/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [cyberstalking](https://local12.com/news/nation-world/police-chief-gets-caught-using-license-plate-cameras-to-track-his-ex-girlfriend-228-times-arrests-charges-probation-flock-safety-follow-stalk-new-boyfriend-broke-up-out-of-town-misuse?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by police. Additionally, the ever-expanding surveillance capabilities of federal immigration enforcement raise civil liberties concerns, particularly as other New York law enforcement databases [feed into ICE systems](https://nysfocus.com/2025/04/23/trump-ice-new-york-gang-database-deportation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

> Cameras effectively deter speeding by changing driver behavior — a best-of-both-worlds scenario where financial penalties decline as safety benefits accrue.

These concerns can be remedied by requiring frequent deletion of traffic safety data, banning the application of [facial recognition](https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/06/23/boston-facial-recognition-ban?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) technology and implementing firm firewalls between civil traffic enforcement and local or federal law enforcement databases. Such efforts could be given real teeth through civilian oversight [mechanisms](https://www.oaklandca.gov/Government/Boards-Commissions/Privacy-Advisory-Commission?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

The efficacy of speed cameras can also be improved through further policy reforms. State law limits implementation to school zones, and the relatively lenient penalties mean that [“super-speeders”](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-09/nyc-s-speed-cameras-reveal-super-speeders-on-the-rise?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) can rack up literally hundreds of tickets with few consequences. Additionally, scofflaws obscure their license plates to dodge camera tickets, a problem that has [worsened](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-report-on-the-new-york-city-department-of-transportations-speed-camera-program/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) over time. 

But the City has policy tools at its disposal that could strengthen enforcement, like mandating the installation of [speed-limiting devices](https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/intelligent-speed-assistant-new-york-legislation/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in vehicles that are frequently caught speeding, or cracking down on the distribution of fake license plates. Action is needed from Albany to both classify toll evasion as [theft of services](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2024/02/29/on-eve-of-congestion-pricing-plate-scams-at-bridge-tolls-are-way-up?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and close a DMV [loophole](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2021/09/27/mtas-100k-toll-scofflaw-is-merely-the-tip-of-the-license-plate-obstructing-iceberg?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that ties unpaid toll fees to surrendered plates instead of registered vehicle owners, allowing drivers to swap plates and avoid revocation. In the meantime, the City and State can scale up enforcement through their multi-agency ghost plate task force. 

The New York State legislature is also [considering](https://transalt.org/reports-list/yn29thckywv9n0qpsv4jb1ab07nryp?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the Stop Super Speeders Bill this session, which would require drivers with many camera violations to install speed limiters curbing their speeds on roads to within 5 miles of the legal limit. The City Council passed a law in 2020 that would have required drivers with 15 or more violations in a year to take a safe driving course or risk vehicle impoundment. But the [de Blasio administration](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/danger-unabated/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) slow-walked its rollout, and Adams only enrolled 1,605 drivers (against a target of 5,000), while failing to punish drivers who ignored enrollment notices (only [impounding](https://www.amny.com/nyc-transit/nyc-program-reckless-drivers-expires/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 1.7% of noncompliant drivers). The program expired in 2021\. The Council should [reinstate it](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/re-up-program-to-curb-reckless-driving-comptroller-lander-recommends-in-new-policy-study/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and ensure proper implementation.

> Last year saw the lowest number of crash-related deaths since New York City started tracking traffic fatalities. 

The City should also scale fine amounts according to the driver’s [ability to pay](https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-103-issue-1/graduating-economic-sanctions-according-to-ability-to-pay?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This concept is called a “day fine,” where penalties are scaled to daily income — and it’s not completely new to New York City, as Staten Island implemented a [pilot program](https://www.vera.org/publications/the-staten-island-day-fines-experiment?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the 1980s. For wealthy motorists, a flat $50 ticket is less than a slap on the wrist. In Scandinavia, some traffic tickets hit [six figures](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-businessman-hit-with-121000-speeding-fine?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). On the other hand, fines should also be scaled downward for less affluent motorists. 

New York City’s automated traffic enforcement program builds on past successes. Mamdani has inherited a city that has made real progress on traffic safety. Since 2014, when Bill de Blasio ran for mayor on a [“Vision Zero”](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research%5Freports/RR2333.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) plan for no traffic fatalities, New York has seen [consistently fewer](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2025/pedestrian-deaths-vision-zero-roads/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) pedestrian deaths. Those gains continued under Mayor Adams. Last year saw the [lowest](https://aeelaw.com/insights/congestion-pricing-safety-impact/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) number of crash-related deaths since the City started tracking traffic fatalities. That can’t be said for most cities, [even those](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/12/05/fridays-headlines-visionary-nyc-edition?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) pursuing Vision Zero’s goals. 

What accounts for this improving, if imperfect, landscape? As our study shows, speed cameras are part of it, but increased enforcement is not the only approach. In 2024, the City removed parking spaces close to nearly 300 intersections, a practice that improves visibility for drivers and walkers, [reducing collisions](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/daylighting-and-street-safety.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). New York has also installed 23 miles of protected bike lanes, well short of the distance [required by law](https://projects.transalt.org/bikelanes?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [promised by Adams](https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/transit/2022/04/24/mayor-adams-pledges--904-million-in-traffic-safety-investments?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but a considerable step toward safe cycling. The City also began [lowering speed limits](https://gothamist.com/news/lawmakers-to-allow-nyc-to-lower-speed-limit-to-20-mph?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to 20 mph across the five boroughs in 2024 after the State passed Sammy’s Law, completing [implementation](https://pix11.com/news/local-news/nycs-speed-limit-will-drop-to-20-mph-in-250-areas-by-end-of-2025/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at the end of last year. Mayor Mamdani has already begun to use Sammy’s Law [more aggressively](https://abc7ny.com/post/nyc-traffic-new-york-city-impose-15-mph-school-zones-mayor-zohran-mamdani-announces/18721909/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) than the previous [administration](https://transalt.org/press-releases/after-247-speed-cameras-safety-projects-and-over-a-decade-of-vision-zero-historically-safe-2025-on-new-york-citys-streets-demonstrates-the-need-to-double-down-on-what-works?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), reducing speed limits to 15 mph in 700 school speed zones.

Perhaps the biggest recent change to city traffic patterns has been the introduction of congestion pricing, the program that tolls drivers coming into lower Manhattan. Reducing traffic has [cut crashes](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/six-months-governor-hochul-highlights-success-congestion-pricing-traffic-down-business-and?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the [tolled zone](https://www.cody-cook.com/papers/nyc%5Fcongestion%5Fpricing.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by 14% and [likely contributed](https://transalt.org/press-releases/new-data-from-transportation-alternatives-and-families-for-safe-streets-shows-vision-zero-works-should-be-expanded-congestion-pricing-has-made-streets-safer?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Traffic%20violence%20is%20killing%20fewer,from%20this%20time%20last%20year.) to 2025’s record low traffic fatality count. Air pollution in the congestion relief zone also [dropped](https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/12/congestion-pricing-improved-air-quality-nyc-and-suburbs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by 22%, with additional benefits extending citywide.

But what else can be done? Speed cameras are one element of a web of transportation and road safety good governance reforms that ideally work in tandem. One promising reform would be for New York State to follow jurisdictions like [Connecticut](https://www.ctinsider.com/waterbury/article/waterbury-speed-cameras-red-light-cameras-20242122.php?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which have earmarked funds generated from automated enforcement to go towards fixing structural design flaws on streets in neighborhoods disproportionately affected by traffic crashes. 

Following the lead of cities from San Francisco to Oslo, New York could also [adopt](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/opinion/mamdani-free-buses-parking.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a demand-based parking pricing system, which First Deputy Mayor Fuleihan [said](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/03/05/mamdani-deputy-mayor-on-charging-for-street-parking-its-not-a-no?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the City would consider. Currently, 97% of New York’s street parking is free; implementing meters and residential permits could generate over $1 billion in revenue annually, funding the mayor’s free bus program. It would also reduce double parking and free up curb space, both of which would improve visibility and safety. Such reforms discourage automobile dependence and encourage public transit use while generating funds that can be used to redesign streets and expand the frequency and quality of transit service. This is the most promising direction for a Mamdani administration. 

Until city government can redesign New York at scale, however, speed cameras remain a simple and effective way to make walking, biking and driving in the city safer.
### Karen B. Shaer 1959-2026
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/karen-shaer-in-memoriam/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:22.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/131018151130-women-in-management-karen-shaer-3498915393-1776259645396.jpg)

Portrait of Karen B. Shaer. Credit: David Hills Photography

If you actually know how things work, you know that making the world a better place is less about the campaigns and politics of presidents, governors and mayors than about the daily, under-the-sink-with-a-wrench work of public servants. They are ones who figure out how to make governance flow like poetry, how to get from a to b to c, and most especially how to know that z is your goal.

Earlier this week, one of the greatest examples of this kind of public servant, Karen Shaer, died. She had been a federal prosecutor, a defense lawyer, a publishing sweepstakes business tycoon, and an advisor to a mayor and a governor. She was also the person with the widest and deepest and most devoted circle of friends and family of anyone I have known.

Karen was brilliant — not in a Hegel sort of way, but in a way that went right to the heart of the matter with clarity, precision and insight. She was kind and generous, in the confident and bracing manner of firstborns who sit comfortably with themselves and their unconscious magnetism. She had insanely good judgment, born from quiet listening, and the restraint, unusual in most, to put aside any psychodrama. She was hilarious. She lived her life with irrepressible joy and she had a keen sense of the absurd that the world can serve up.

Strange though it might be to phrase it this way, it seems uncharacteristic for her to have died, as death and Karen were not on the same wavelength. She was shockingly young, at the full height of her formidable powers.

I have known Karen since law school when I watched agog at the moot court finals in which the best of the third year students argued a case before a Supreme Court justice and two other distinguished judges. She cantered lengths ahead of her opponents. Her brilliance was not wrapped in the obscurantism that can sometimes mar legal argument. She was crisp and plain. She had that quickness of mind that good litigators (and great public servants) have, undergirded by a sixth sense in anticipating where the alternative storylines might go and an uncanny ability to put herself in someone else’s shoes. She was able to synthesize complicated topics and then push the analysis to an understandable and persuasive place.

Some years later, I was lucky enough to persuade her to work with me in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, where our goal was to get to the lowest crime rate with the lowest incarceration rate, using all (legal) means possible. But how? The criminal justice system is sprawling. It has no boss, with city and state agencies, independent judges, defenders, district attorneys and an enormous array of non-profits each having different obligations and interests. Our office had merely the power of cajoling and convening.

Karen was maybe 5’1”, but she was a giant when it came to organization, mobilization and persuasion. First came the data: She wanted to know about every person in jail, every story behind who was held and why — no mean task. Then came the negotiation, figuring out who could do what to get people released. Finally came the crucial work of making a regular and reliable system that could safely ensure a smaller jail population. Over the course of several years, the jail population reached historic lows (from over 11,000 to under 4,000), at a time when the city also experienced the lowest levels of crime that it had in decades.

This success was built in no small part on Karen’s capacity to do the dreary trench warfare that all byzantine bureaucracies require. But Karen was not just a strategist — she was an inspiration. She brought the best out of people because, well, she expected it, and if she expected it, you fell in line because you wanted to honor that trust. While we shouldn’t have to wait for funerals to take the measure of a life, the hundreds of people who crowded the hall at Riverside Memorial Chapel earlier this week, ranging from scores of 20-somethings to people well into their eighties, bore some testament to how her friendship had shaped so many lives.

In the early days of Vital City, before we had written a single story or published any data or issued any policy recommendations, I asked Karen if she would help us to figure out what Vital City could be. She was an absolutely crucial piece in the puzzle. As was characteristic, she sought no public credit for her work.

No person’s life is summed up in a recitation of their work. Karen maybe more than most lived in a way that demonstrated how it is the thickness of life and thought and family, all tightly interwoven, that gives richness to all our lives. And one does not stand without the other.

It is the nature of things that fame accrues to those who seek it. Campaigning and politics may win the day, but it is policy and governance that steady a city and permit it to be great. For sure, people campaign in poetry but govern in prose. But governance, when it is well-practiced, has a certain poetry too. It is the poetry of people, of human connection, bent to the common task — with all its nuts and bolts — of making cities work. There was no one better at this complicated work than Karen Shaer.

Karen leaves behind her extraordinary family. Her mother, Janice, an example of the joy and life force that marked Karen’s life; her beloved sisters, Ellen and Jen, who were her earliest co-conspirators and remain so along with their families; her adored husband Ben, and her children, Joey and Jess, and their spouses, Lisa and Matt. And, of course, their dog, Fenway.

May her memory be a blessing.
### Why Your Pre-War Radiator Runs Hot, Clangs at 3 a.m. and is Painted Silver
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/radiator-steam-heat-history-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:22.000Z
“Is that normal?” you ask your roommate when the radiator starts its evening percussion solo.

“Yes,” they say, not looking up. “Just the pipes complaining about condensate.”

You stare. “About what?”

There it is again. That metallic bang that sounds like someone’s taken a sledgehammer to the pipes in your walls. It’s rhythmic. Insistent, even. Your radiator has opinions and it’s sharing them at full volume.

Welcome to steam heat. One New York City writer has called it a [“nightly Philip Glass symphony on PCP.”](https://gothamist.com/news/how-to-survive-winter-with-your-accursed-clanging-feverish-radiator?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Everyone else calls it an average weekday. 

In winter, it is almost charming. Spring is another matter. You want a little heat, but a radiator doesn’t do “a little.” You’re either sweating or freezing, though the noise is constant. 

### What’s actually happening inside your walls? 

Steam radiators work by sending steam from a boiler through pipes to radiators throughout the building. The steam heats the radiator, then cools and condenses back into water. That condensed water, known as condensate, needs to drain back down to the boiler through the same pipe that it was sent up.

This is where things get contentious.

Steam rises. Water falls. They’re traveling in opposite directions through the same pipe. For this to work, the pipe needs to slope precisely toward the boiler, [about an inch per 20 feet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpA1epqFMCw&t=4s&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), so condensate can drain back by gravity while steam pushes up past it. When that pitch is even slightly off, condensate pools. Steam hits that pool of water at high speed and pressure. The result is a collision technically referred to as a water hammer; this is what produces that distinctive metallic clang that sounds like someone’s attacking your heating system. 

The pipes are protesting because the steam is annoyed, and your radiator is the complaint department.

Noise isn’t the only complaint. Heat distribution is another problem. A poorly maintained system leaves rooms near the boiler warm while those farther away stay cold, a problem of calibration and maintenance rather than the system itself.

### Why steam heat exists (and why your radiator is calibrated for a different time) 

Mass steam heating was an American specialty that was genuinely revolutionary. Before it existed, warming a building meant a fireplace in every room, coal hauled upstairs, soot on the plaster and hearths eating the floor space that architects increasingly wanted for other uses. 1920s [boiler advertisements](https://www.ebay.com/itm/257293330307?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) called steam heat “a servant that works unseen and never tires.” 

Architects loved it. Rooms could be lined with tall windows and clean walls. Interiors shed their hearths and opened up. The radiator, tucked under a windowsill, became almost invisible. By the mid-1800s, manufacturers were stamping out sectional cast-iron radiators by the thousands, turning what had been a bespoke luxury installed in country houses and churches by specialist firms into a standard piece of urban infrastructure. Dense American cities, with their multi-story tenements and apartment blocks, were ideal territory. One boiler in the basement, pipes running up through the walls, cast-iron radiators in every room. The American Radiator Company was confident enough in its dominance to commission [a skyscraper](https://www.villagepreservation.org/2021/08/26/beyond-the-village-and-back-the-american-radiator-building/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that looked like a piece of burning coal. 

Some people were not charmed, of course. Gilded Age critics complained of the [hiss and clatter of the steam mains](https://www.nytimes.com/1883/01/24/archives/the-steamheating-nuisance-complaints-made-to-the-board-of-healthan.html%29?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the unbearable stench they left behind. It is safe to say that they lost the argument. 

### A feature, not a bug

The radiator’s position under the window was not incidental. It was intentional and it points toward everything that followed.

In the decades after the Civil War, a panic took hold about indoor air. Lewis Leeds, a health inspector for Army field hospitals, became convinced that the air exhaled by people in enclosed rooms was slowly killing them. He called it [“the national poison”](https://heatinghelp.com/systems-help-center/why-congress-has-no-windows/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and took his argument on the road in magic lantern shows. Writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe (of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” fame) helped popularize the same obsession. One slide showed a family at ease in their drawing room. The next showed red vapor rising from the father’s mouth and drifting toward the child on the floor. The child fell over. Audiences were terrified. The solution, Leeds and Stowe argued, was constant ventilation.

They were wrong about exhaled air being poisonous but right about the relationship between fresh air and disease. When the [1918 flu](https://www.npr.org/2020/12/10/945136599/how-spanish-flu-pandemic-changed-home-heat-radiators?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=As%20it%20turns%20out%2C%20radiators,be%20plenty%20of%20ventilation%20indoors.) arrived, their ideology had already been baked into American building codes for 50 years. New York’s Board of Health responded to the epidemic by requiring 68°F minimums in all centrally heated apartments and mandated open windows. Engineering textbooks stated the consequence plainly: Radiators and boilers must be sized to heat a building on the coldest day of the year with the windows open. 

The radiators moved to sit directly beneath the windows to warm incoming winter air. Architects replaced double windows or storm sashes with single-pane sash windows because [they leaked better](https://heatinghelp.com/news-and-media/dead-men-tales/old-buildings-new-steam/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

So your pre-war apartment radiator isn’t malfunctioning when it turns your apartment into a sauna. It’s doing precisely what it was designed to do.

### The paint is not decorative

When the Depression arrived and coal became expensive, people shut their windows. The oversized radiators, now operating in sealed apartments, made conditions unbearable. A 1935 National Bureau of Standards report, [“Does the Color of a Radiator Matter?”](https://heatinghelp.com/systems-help-center/does-the-color-of-a-radiator-matter/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that aluminum-bronze paint reduced a radiator’s heat output by about 20%, a cheap way to tame a system nobody could afford to replace. 

If your radiator is that distinctive dull silver, that’s why. Not an aesthetic choice but a 1930s government-endorsed workaround. Three historical crises — a post-Civil War ventilation panic, a flu pandemic and the Great Depression — had all resulted in the widespread use of a single paint color.

Similarly, the radiator covers of the same era weren’t about keeping children from burning themselves. A cover with a solid top and a perforated front reduces [heat output by up to 40%](https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/4222/1/An%20Investigation%20into%20the%20Effect%20of%20Decorative%20Covers%20on%20the%20Heat%20Output%20from%20LPHW%20Radiators.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Combined with the silver paint, the covers effectively halved what the radiators put out. “The Dead Men,” as historians call the engineers who designed these systems, had built something too powerful for the world. The world then spent the next two decades quietly tamping it down.

### Why steam is still here

Over time, central heating technology has improved. Hot water and forced-air systems have become more common. But in older buildings — including the pre-war apartments, Victorian houses and early-20th-century homes that make up much of the housing stock in older urban neighborhoods across North America and the UK — steam heat endures. 

According to a [2019 report](https://www.urbangreencouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2019.02.12%5Fdemystifying%5Fsteam%5Freport.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), about 75% of New York’s multifamily buildings use steam heat — and the percentage is likely higher among buildings overall. Replacing steam heat would mean tearing into walls, disrupting lives and spending thousands. And so the systems remain.

Steam has its advantages. It can heat a fifty-story building without pumps or pressure problems. It won’t freeze if the boiler fails. And it is, in the words of [a New York City housing official](https://heatinghelp.com/news-and-media/dead-men-tales/old-buildings-new-steam/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) explaining why the city installed brand-new one-pipe steam systems in renovated tenements as recently as the 1980s, essentially vandal-proof. Hot water systems use copper pipes. “A contractor can look at a truckload of copper tubing and see a truckload of copper tubing,” the official explained. “But to a drug addict, that truck looks like a jewelry store.”

Steam heat is largely a North American and British phenomenon. Most of the world uses hot water radiators or radiant floor heating. These systems are quieter, more efficient and don’t involve condensate complaining at antisocial hours.

So if you’re reading this thinking, “what are these people going on about?” ... Consider yourself fortunate. Your heating system has better manners.

We treat our apartments like modern enclosures, but steam heat is a reminder that many of us are living inside a 19th-century machine. The pipes in your walls likely predate your landlord’s birth; the system they carry was designed when “fresh air” was the only antibiotic and coal was the king of the basement. You are now being woken up by a system that is completely indifferent to the fact that the pandemic it was built for ended a century ago. But there’s something almost admirable about it, if you’re in the right mood. Your heating system may be loud, but at least you’re warm.

Passed in 2019, [Local Law 97](https://www.nyc.gov/site/buildings/codes/ll97-greenhouse-gas-emissions-reductions.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is now pushing New York City buildings toward electrification, with heat pumps as the leading solution. But heat pumps have limits. They struggle in extreme cold when demand is highest and typically last 15 to 20 years, sometimes less in harsh climates.

Meanwhile, much of what we’re replacing was built to endure. Cast iron radiators can last a century, are fully recyclable, and deliver steady, radiant warmth that’s easier on respiratory health. Steam systems can also be decarbonized through cleaner fuels like biomethane or green hydrogen, while relatively simple upgrades such as thermostatic radiator valves allow for temperature control, and quieter vents and improved insulation improve overall efficiency.

Before we replace infrastructure that already works, we should fully understand what we’re giving up.
### Rent Stabilization: What’s Constitutional, Anyway?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-york-rent-stabilization-law-supreme-court-clash/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:22.000Z
When New Yorkers argue about rent regulation and the city’s nearly 1 million rent-stabilized units, they argue about many different things. They argue about whether the Rent Guidelines Board should increase rents on rent-stabilized units, some arguing that substantial rent increases are too much for tenants and others that low or no increases are unfair to landlords and will reduce the quality of the housing supply. They argue about whether there should be “vacancy decontrol,” or the moving of units out of rent regulation at the end of leases for at least some units, something that was banned by the state legislature in 2019\. And they argue about the prevalence of high-income tenants in rent-stabilized units, and whether there should be “luxury decontrol,” something that was also banned in 2019\. And much else, too, including how landlords can be compensated for improving apartments, particularly after the legislature limited the ability of landlords to increase rents due to improvements in 2019, but then relaxed this (a bit) in 2024\. 

The last mayoral election was largely about these fights, with Zohran Mamdani campaigning on a promised four-year rent freeze for stabilized tenants. I’m not going to adjudicate these arguments for you — you’ve heard them all before, I’m sure. 

But one issue that comes up in debates about rent stabilization is whether some change or another will set in motion a series of events that render the broader system of rent stabilization unconstitutional. These arguments can be difficult to assess because the U.S. Supreme Court, in recent years, has changed several aspects of its takings clause analysis — the primary basis for challenging the law’s constitutionality — even as New York has been reforming its rent stabilization program.

For the uninitiated, the 5th and 14th Amendments require the government to pay “just compensation” if it engages in a “taking” of property — something that is easy enough to determine in the case of government taking ownership of a piece of property, but that can be conceptually and doctrinally complicated when owners of property argue that regulations have become so severe that they amount to a taking. (I’m leaving aside arguments that limits on rent increases violate state law, [something recently addressed well in Vital City](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-rent-freeze-nyc-rent-guidelines-board-explained/).)

First, depending on your perspective, the good or bad news: It is *very* unlikely that the Supreme Court will find the whole system unconstitutional. Courts have repeatedly upheld rent-regulation regimes, and in 2024 the Supreme Court declined to hear sweeping challenges to New York’s current system. But the content of some of the more aggressive parts of the state legislature’s 2019 changes to rent stabilization and some of the Court’s new decisions have raised real questions about the constitutionality of particular aspects of rent stabilization. Indeed, [a recently filed case](https://ij.org/ll/freeing-the-new-york-city-housing-market/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — one brought by owners of [“zombie apartments,”](https://nypost.com/2025/11/29/opinion/pray-this-new-lawsuit-frees-up-zombie-apartments-to-help-tenants-and-landlords/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) who claim that their vacant apartments can’t be rented out profitably due to the legal limits on the ability of owners to recoup investments in needed renovations — may be the first in a series of these targeted challenges. 

Here’s a guide to the types of challenges that can be, and have been, brought against rent stabilization. Broad-based challenges to the existence of rent stabilization are unlikely to succeed, but there are a number of narrower challenges — from owners of “zombie apartments,” from owners seeking to move back into their own units, or from developers required to build rent-regulated units as a condition for building new apartments — that might. Any one of these cases could upend local politics and housing markets to different degrees. 

### Broadsides

Repeatedly over the last 100 years, the Supreme Court has found that rent regulation is a constitutional exercise of what’s known as the police power and is not an unconstitutional “taking” of property under the 5th and 14th Amendments. The test the Court now uses to analyze claims that regulations amount to takings is called the *Penn Central* test, named after a case that challenged the application of New York City’s landmark laws to Grand Central Station. It’s very deferential to public regulations. 

 After the massive 2019 changes to rent stabilization, several landlords brought lawsuits that offered the Supreme Court a chance to reverse itself, but it declined to hear the case. Even Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote a [statement respecting the denial of certiorari in one of the cases that suggested an openness to challenges to the rent stabilization laws](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-1130%5Fc0nd.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), asked for more narrow claims about specific applications of rent stabilization, rather than broad challenges to the overall system. 

That said, the Court has reversed a number of long-standing precedents recently, so I suppose you never know. 

### “Zombie apartments”

The more serious current line of attack is narrower. It focuses on vacant apartments that owners say cannot realistically be returned to the market because the legal rent is too low to justify the cost of renovation. That argument became more salient after the 2019 reforms to rent stabilization laws sharply restricted rent increases for vacant apartments and for “Individual Apartment Improvements,” or in response to renovations. (A 2024 reform raised the cap on IAIs, but did not undo the broader changes.) The 2019 law also ended vacancy decontrol, which allowed vacant apartments with higher rents to leave the rent stabilization system. 

In [Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council](https://www.oyez.org/cases/1991/91-453?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the Court held that a regulation becomes a “per se” taking by the government — that is, it doesn’t have to go through the *Penn Central* balancing test and is simply determined to be a taking and thus require compensation — if it deprives property of all economically beneficial or productive use. Landlords recently brought a case that argued that specific apartments they owned needed too many renovations and were limited to charging rents too low to have any economic utility. A key question in the case is [whether “hardship” provisions](https://rules.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/fact-sheet-39-06-2019.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) inside the rent stabilization laws, which allow landlords to argue for emergency rent increases under certain limited circumstances, are sufficient to protect these landlords (and thus make their constitutional claims unsuccessful). 

Although the outcome of the case is not certain, this amounts to a serious challenge to rent stabilization. If Mayor Mamdani is successful, as expected, and the Rent Guidelines Board approves a rent freeze, while costs like insurance continue to rise, the number of vacant units that a landlord cannot profitably rent out will likely increase. (How many units this is true of is the subject of substantial debate.) That said, while the landlord plaintiffs in the new challenge have asked for broad remedies, like an end to vacancy control, the city may be able to get out from under such a decision by allowing rent increases in these “zombie” units — effectively a stronger, judicially imposed “hardship” exception — rather than ordering fundamental change to the rent stabilization system. 

### Owner re-entry

The 2019 state reforms also tightened owner-occupancy rules. Under current law, an owner generally may only take one rent-regulated unit out of the rental market for the owner’s or an immediate family member’s primary residence, and only on a showing of immediate and compelling necessity. The elderly, disabled and long-term tenants receive additional protections.

Could this rule be challenged? Possibly. In [Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2020/20-107?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the Supreme Court held that a California state law that required farmers to provide union organizers with temporary access to their farms constituted a permanent physical occupation, as it removed farm owners’ right to exclude. (Interestingly, this case is a direct descendant of another New York City case, one in which the Court held that requirements that apartment buildings allow for cable television boxes and wires constituted a physical taking.) *Cedar Point’*s focus on the right to exclude suggests that rent regulations that limit the ability of owners to move back into their own apartments may be the kind of thing the Supreme Court has in its sights as the next extension of its takings jurisprudence.

This issue came up in the post-2019 challenges to rent stabilization and was rejected by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. But the court noted that the plaintiffs had not actually tried to remove a tenant for personal use, and therefore had not pleaded sufficient facts to bring this kind of “as applied” challenge. 

If a challenge of this sort succeeded, and the Supreme Court held that owners must have the power to reoccupy their units, it could have a huge effect on New York’s system of rent stabilization. Owners of rent-stabilized units would have an incentive to sell to individuals who want to move in, to turn rentals into condos, leading to a very substantial flow of units out of the rent stabilization system.

### Inclusionary zoning

One of the most contested parts of New York’s broader system of rent regulations is its [“mandatory inclusionary housing” policy](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/our-work/plans/citywide/mandatory-inclusionary-housing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), under which new buildings in rezoned areas must include at least certain amounts of below-market-rate subsidized rents. The Court in recent years has built out its “exactions” doctrine, holding that governments cannot condition a land-use permit on surrendering money or property unless the condition bears an “essential nexus” and “rough proportionality” to the development’s impacts. That is, the condition must mitigate the effects the development itself has on the community, and must not be excessively harsh given the size of those effects. Recently, the Court has expanded this doctrine in a number of ways, including applying it to monetary conditions (i.e. requirements that developers pay money for the right to build.)

A number of courts have considered whether inclusionary zoning amounts to an “exaction,” meaning the demand of a payment or property in return for the right to build. Doing so requires answering two separate questions — whether inclusionary zoning is a condition at all, and whether it can be justified. 

From one perspective, inclusionary zoning is a condition, as a building permit is being conditioned on an agreement to rent out units at below market rents. From another perspective — [one adopted by the California Supreme Court ](https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-129/california-building-industry-assn-v-city-of-san-jose/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)— an inclusionary zoning requirement is just a normal zoning regulation, akin to a limit on the height of a building, something that has been constitutional since [Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty](https://www.oyez.org/cases/1900-1940/272us365?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The problem is that *any* regulation can be restated as a condition — a three-story height limit can be described as a rule that says “you can’t build unless you agree to build fewer than three stories.” As a result, it is conceptually difficult to say whether policies create ordinarily valid use regulations or conditions that may raise concerns under the Court’s takings clause jurisprudence. Given the ubiquity of inclusionary zoning regulations, the Supreme Court is going to have to clear this up at some point.

If the Court does determine that an inclusionary zoning regulation is a condition, it is likely to find that it is a taking. Jurisdictions pass inclusionary zoning regulations on builders of market-rate housing to encourage the creation of below-market-rate “affordable” housing. But new market-rate buildings don’t exacerbate the need for affordable housing. Instead, by inducing [“chains of moves,”](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119021000656?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) economists have shown that they [lead to lower rents](https://joeornstein.github.io/pols-4641/readings/Pennington%20-%20Does%20Building%20New%20Housing%20Cause%20Displacement%20The%20.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), even very nearby. This is the longstanding [“irony of inclusionary zoning.”](https://openyls.law.yale.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/8a395acf-18d3-4f7d-8f56-fc5357cec212/content?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) It is a tax on a product (new buildings) that would, on its own, reduce the problem the regulation is trying to solve. Governments might try to challenge this well-established social science finding, arguing that it is not true in a particular context, or would offer other justifications for the regulation, [like neighborhood economic diversity](https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-129/california-building-industry-assn-v-city-of-san-jose/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But it seems pretty likely that courts would reject these arguments, at least in most cases. 

However, even if New York City’s inclusionary zoning regulations are found unconstitutional, tax law might save parts of the basic setup. Under New York’s old 421-a program and its replacement 485-x program, builders in certain areas get partial exemptions from property taxes if they meet certain conditions, one of which is including affordable units. (The percentage and the rents vary with the size and location of the project.) It’s pretty clear that a voluntary tax incentive is not a conditional taking. And builders frequently need the tax exemption because of New York City’s punishing property tax regime for apartment buildings.

Further, it’s not exactly clear what the effect of removing inclusionary zoning would be on building in New York. The effect would depend on what else the City does. If the City responded to a Court decision banning inclusionary zoning by downzoning, arguing that if housing is not going to be “affordable,” it shouldn’t be built at all, then the decision wouldn’t encourage building. On the other hand, if the City responded by either allowing existing zoning rules to stay or, better yet, further relaxing zoning to encourage construction, it would lead to much more building. 

\*\*\*

Given the ideological balance on the Supreme Court, a successful constitutional challenge to aspects of rent stabilization has felt like the shoe that hasn’t dropped in local housing politics for quite a while. While there is a decent — quite good, even — chance the Court never takes this up, everyone on both sides of these fights should be ready in case they do. Washington could scramble New York politics, public policy and economics for the umpteenth time.
### Steven Fulop on Fighting for Business Interests in Zohran Mamdani's New York
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/steven-fulop-on-fighting-for-business/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:11.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/steven-fulop-on-fighting-for-business) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on March 29, 2026 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

Steven Fulop, the new President and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, the city’s leading big business advocacy group, spoke with The New York Editorial Board on the morning of March 19, 2026\. Fulop recently began in the role after 12 years as mayor of Jersey City and a 2025 run for governor of New Jersey. He replaced longtime Partnership President/CEO Kathryn Wylde. *(photo by Liena Žagare)*

*Participating journalists: Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Žagare*

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Max**  
Good morning. Thanks for being here. So start us off: The people who hired you for this role, what did they make clear were their top priorities for you coming into it, and for the Partnership, and what did you sort-of pitch as the direction you thought things could go? Give us a little of that bifurcation of where the minds met in terms of the priorities and the leadership for the new era.

**Steven Fulop**  
Let me explain to you how I ended up in the job, OK? That’s probably a good starting point, because I don’t think anybody initially thought that I was the pick that they coveted or thought that would be an ideal fit for this position.

I’d run for \[New Jersey\] governor, as you guys know, and I was very deliberate in the lane that I was taking as a candidate for governor. The same candidate when I ran for mayor and city council — it was outside the establishment. It was building on issues, single-issue voters — very, very concentrated on detailed policy. And I thought that if I could build an organization, outside of the typical political organization, of single-issue voters, you could become viable because they’re passionate people generally, OK? And one is mayor, outside the establishment doing that. You won two races in the country that Obama actually engaged in as president. Rahm Emanuel and Jeremiah Healy, my predecessor, was a ten-year incumbent.

So we won based on this structure. Run for governor, kind of in that same model. And I thought at the time that 550,000 people would turn out in the election. That was based on history in a similar election, when Chris Christie left and it was Trump’s first-year primary, you know, changeover in governor. There was five hundred or four eighty-seven \[thousand\]. So I thought five-fifty was a bump up. Same numbers Sherrill had, Ras Baraka had. I thought five hundred and fifty thousand people in the election, six candidates running that are viable — two congresspeople, two mayors, senate president, and the teachers’ union president — that if I got to a hundred and thirty thousand votes, single-issue passionate voters, I would get in through the primary with twenty, twenty-five percent, and then put it back together even though I was kind of the outside establishment guy.

I think I did everything perfect during that election, OK? With the exception of winning. Which is the big deal. But I miscalculated one thing. And I don’t know in hindsight how I could have changed anything. But I miscalculated that the turnout ended up spiking to eight-fifty, OK? So I said five-fifty. We all said five-fifty.

Going into Election Day on Tuesday, and I’m a pretty pragmatic person. Going into Election Day on Tuesday, if you said, *Steve, are you gonna win?* I would have told you, *we caught them and we’re gonna win,* OK? We have more volunteers. I mean, to give you perspective on it: Uber, which is a data company, like, the week before, they wrote a million-dollar check to my super PAC, five hundred \[thousand\] to Sherrill, five hundred \[thousand\] to Ciattarelli. Election Day, the New York Times embedded one reporter, photographer for most of the day with only one of us, me. CNN, the day before, me, right?

The trend was there. I miscalculated that there was an additional 300,000 people that came out. I saw, similar to here \[in New York City\], the voter numbers surging early, and I just thought it was a displaced Election-Day voter. I thought you were so excited to vote that you were voting early. I never imagined that there were 300,000 additional people voting. And if you tuned in late, then you would have ultimately– I had the wrong message. My message was, Trenton was broken, these are the things we would fix. And Sherrill, for example, was: I’m a helicopter pilot to fight Trump, right? Her message was better for that. It was over in five minutes.

So why do I tell you that? I was shell-shocked, didn’t really know what happened, and the way this business works is when you lose, your phone goes dead. Nobody calls. It’s just, that’s it. Silence. And so, I’m trying to think about what happened and two weeks after the fact, I get a phone call by this guy. His name is Jim Simpson. He was Christie’s [DOT chair](https://www.nj.com/news/2014/05/simpson%5Fcalls%5Fhis%5Ftenure%5Fas%5Fstate%5Ftransportation%5Fchief%5Fthe%5Fmost%5Fgratifying%5Fexperience%5Five%5Fever%5Fhad.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), OK? Commissioner. And he worked on the widening of the Pulaski Skyway with me as the mayor of Jersey City. And Christie went after me with [Bridgegate](https://www.nj.com/essex/2016/11/fulop%5Fbridgegate%5Fverdict%5Fa%5Fsad%5Fday%5Ffor%5Fnew%5Fjersey.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and I was a government witness during Bridgegate. But even when nobody in the Christie administration could talk to me, Jim Simpson was always like, *I have this major project going through Hudson County, predominantly Jersey City. I’m gonna deal with the guy*. And he would tell you that Steve was a professional, good guy to deal with. I think that’s what Jim Simpson would say.

I didn’t talk to Jim Simpson for 12 years. I lose the election. Two weeks after, I get a phone call. He leaves a voicemail. *Hey, Steve, it’s Jim Simpson. Can you give me a call back?* And I was kind of like fuck the world at that point. I didn’t want to call anybody back. And I called Jim Simpson back, and I was like, *Hey, Jim. How’s it going?* And he says to me, he says, *Look, I’m very thankful you remember who I am, blah, blah, blah, blah*. He said, *Look, I had an issue in a warehouse I own in Jersey City. Didn’t know really how to navigate the building department. I figured it out*, right? *But thanks for calling me back.* That was the conversation, OK? And I’m like, *OK, great.* You know? Whatever.

So the conversation ended. He says, *You know, I moved to Pennsylvania, but I’m sometimes up in New York. If I’m up there again, why don’t we just get together?* I said *Sure*. I got nothing but time, right? And so he calls again about a week-and-a-half later, says, *I’m gonna be in New York tomorrow. Wanna grab breakfast?* *Sure*. So we meet for breakfast, and he knew nothing about me. When I got there, he was googling me, OK? Like, he knew nothing about my deeds. He’s like, *Oh, you were in the military. That’s amazing*. Like, it was a weird conversation.

And, you know, towards the end of the conversation, he says, *What are you gonna do next?* And I said, *I honestly don’t know. You know, I think maybe this, maybe that.* And he says, *You know who you should call?* I said, *No idea. Who, Jim?* And he says, *I don’t get along with her*, he said. *I used to be a Rockefeller fellow. I do not get along with her. We do not see eye to eye, but you should call this woman named* [*Kathy Wylde*](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/nyregion/kathryn-wylde-retire-nyc.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.* And I said, *I met Kathy, ten years ago once. I don’t know if I would call her,* and I don’t…That’s a weird conversation, just to call a stranger and ask for help with a job, right? And he says, *No, you should figure out how to call her. We’re gonna figure out how to get you in touch with her again. I gotta think about it.* I said, *OK.* We left. I never thought anything of it. He calls me four days later, and he says, *I was giving it some thought. I was googling and I saw she’s leaving \[as President and CEO of the Partnership for New York City\]. You should apply for the job.* And I said, *I don’t know anybody. It’s a weird dynamic.* And he said, *We gotta figure it out. You know?* Good guy.

A couple weeks later, I was going to a conference in Montana, and three years earlier, I had met [Rob Speyer ](https://www.rockefellercenter.com/executive-team/rob-speyer/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)at the conference. Spoke to Rob probably twice in my life since then, OK? But, we had a night we sat next to each other at a dinner, had a nice conversation. So I texted him. I said, *Are you going to this conference by chance, in a couple weeks?* He said, *I am going*, right? I said, *Oh, can I grab you when you’re there for a couple minutes?* He said, *Sure.*

I go with my wife. He comes over, says hello. He knew my wife from a couple years ago, pleasantries. I said, *Hey, Rob. you know, I texted you, if I could speak to you.* He said, *Yeah, yeah. What’s up?* And I was, like, nervous at this point. I’m, like, sweating. Like, I’m gonna give a pitch. I said, I see you’re very involved with the Partnership. *I think I’d be killer at that job.* And he says, *Why?* And I gave him a pitch, which I’ll tell you in a second.

And he said, *Honestly*, he said, *Steve, there’s 12 people in the search committee.* He says, *I couldn’t even help you if I wanted to, nor would I. But what I can do when people ask me is just get in touch with* [*Heidrick & Struggles*](https://www.heidrick.com/en?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *and, go through the process*. I said, *That’s all I could ask. It’s fine*.

So I send him a text two days later with my resume, and I said I was serious about this. *Can you connect me to the person?* He says, *Sure*. Heidrick & Struggles would tell you that they did the interview as a courtesy. And that they thought that it was going nowhere, largely because when the search committee, which is a who’s who of business, outlined who they wanted, they said they wanted somebody from New York City, and they wanted somebody who was not in elected office.

So here I am. I would go through these interviews, and I would outline what I thought the Partnership was doing wrong, and how politics has changed, and where I thought the potential was. Largely that the model of shuttle diplomacy, of relationships in the way that it worked 20, 30 years ago, doesn’t work anymore. And today you see, both with Mamdani and Trump—

The assets that they \[Partnership member companies\] have are that they have 800,000 employees. They have the ability to communicate at scale, and they have a general centrist message, and none of those things are leveraged in any meaningful way, is what I would outline.

And I really believe, and I continue to believe, that if the Partnership is perceived as a voice of very wealthy people and the CEOs, it will no longer exist in five or ten years. And the reason I say that is because one of the assets that people value is this convening component. And it’s a convening component because you have everybody from, you know, the CEO of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs towards mid-level to low-level CEOs, and they want to be in the room with the next person in that food chain, so to speak.

And when people view it as not good use of their time, because it’s not effective, you start seeing deterioration and you no longer get that involvement. And I would explain this to them, and I would say, *This is how we’re going to organize employees, and I think is the most effective way to do it.* It’s something that I did as a \[mayor\] or a candidate when I was running these campaigns, so it’s something I know.

And they would ask a lot of questions, and we would go through this model in detail, and they would ask, and they would just move me along in the campaign in, in this situation. And then at the end, probably ten interviews in, the woman from, you know, Heidrick says, *You know, I think, you know, as crazy it is, you might land this plane.* And I said *I knew I was going to land the plane.* But—

**Josh Greenman**  
Can I ask? So you mentioned—

**Steven Fulop**  
Sorry to take so much time on that, but—

**Josh Greenman**  
Three hundred thousand, or I forget the number.

**Steven Fulop**  
Eight hundred thousand.

**Josh Greenman**  
Eight hundred thousand employees. And correct me if any of the assumptions embedded in the question are wrong. But you’re a membership organization, you’re supposed to be speaking for the large employers.

**Steven Fulop**  
Yes. Large employees. Employers and employees.

**Josh Greenman**  
Employers and employees. But you don’t canvas them every time an issue comes up. You described it as centrist. OK. An issue comes up. First of all, how do you, as the head of the Partnership, decide whether to get engaged and involved in that particular issue? And second of all, how do you decide what the posture of the Partnership is, if it’s not predefined? How much of it is your instinct? How much of it is, *Let me take the temperature of the employees and the employers first?*

**Steven Fulop**  
The honest answer is I think it’s a hybrid. At the last board meeting, I spoke about being more narrow in the things that we’re going to be involved in. I think it’s very important we’re very deliberate and specific on issues that we care about and being less involved in kind of broad things that don’t necessarily touch 250 of the different companies.

**Josh Greenman**  
Even though you made a statement about antisemitism.

**Steven Fulop**  
I made a statement on antisemitism because it touches a lot of our companies, if not all of them, because they have Jewish employees, and they’re all very invested here.

**Ben Smith**  
What’s something that you think the Partnership should get out of?

**Steven Fulop**  
We had a lot of time last year in the fashion industry. I think the fashion industry is important. I don’t know who reads that report ultimately or how you move the needle ultimately on the fashion industry. We did some work very publicly on short-term rentals. Not really sure that that’s the best place to be spending a lot of time, because I don’t think it pertains to every single person here.

I think that there are things that do pertain, quality-of-life issues that touch everybody. How do those things come to light? So I spoke broadly at the executive board meeting about things that I thought were important. They had lots of questions, *Why this, that*, and I outlined things both in a framework of government and politics: *This is what I think. This is where the opportunity is. This is where the vulnerability is, et cetera*, and we went through some of that stuff.

When we’re working, for example, now, I gotta review it. We’ve been going back and forth on a blueprint of things to change for New York City that I think, or our team thinks, are meaningful, practical, and tangible things that you could change that would impact the budget in a meaningful way. And a normal person would say, *You’re probably right about that.* And the politics could be tough for those. So put a litany of, let’s say, 330 of them together. A lot of it’s our team’s ideas. Some of them are a little bit maybe venturing into a place that the Partnership historically has felt maybe uncomfortable. Those are broader conversations because I don’t yet have 20 years of trust with those people. So I say, *Here’s what I’m looking to do. Here’s the reasons why.* And we have those conversations with the executive board.

**Liena Žagare**  
Does universal childcare fit into that?

**Steven Fulop**  
Universal childcare is a part of it ‘cause— universal childcare is a part of it. It’s definitely in there. And I’ll tell you this. We polled our employee base because we were curious. It’s something again that touches, I believe, the affordability crisis. I think Mamdani and Hochul are right on this. It touches everybody who lives here in some way or another. Roughly two-thirds of our employers provide some sort of childcare today. Some is on-site, some is off-site, some is subsidies for low-income, some is subsidies for everybody, some is using a tax credit.

And I’ve said this to the mayor before, that our knowledge of this space is vast because we have experience, practical experience on this sort of thing that others don’t have. They may have abstract experience or be ideological in a certain way. We experience it. We can tell you what works and what doesn’t work in the Building Department, what the challenges are in the bureaucracy, what the issues are in accomplishing this in a different way, because a lot of us have tried to provide that, right?

So how do we communicate that publicly in a way that makes sense from our objective, which is improving New York, and at the same time in a way that’s value-added to the mayor or the administration, is kind of where we are. But it’s a hundred-percent part of that blueprint. There is a section on this.

**Akash Mehta**  
It’s interesting to hear you emphasize that you represent the employees, not just the employers. Are there formal structures that put that into practice? Are there elected board positions from the employee base, or anything like that?

**Steven Fulop**  
What we’re starting to do now— So it’s a shift, OK? And what we’re doing now, the short answer is no. What we’re doing now is starting a lot of these town hall-type conversations with the CEOs and me. It is an April, May, June, two, three-year initiative, where we’re talking about civic involvement, the importance of New York, and people can opt to sign up for information from us. So we’re communicating in that way. People will opt in, and then we’ll have the ability to better communicate with the employee base with regards to what we’re doing. You know, there’s no secrets to what I’m saying. I mean—

**Ben Smith**  
But you think the opportunity is to mobilize employees?

**Steven Fulop**  
The opportunity is to better communicate because I think there’s a disconnect between a lot of the things that happen, and how and when we communicate to employees things that may impact them. Because you have all sorts of legalities, and general counsels, obviously, that put obstacles in place on this stuff. And we need to figure out a way, because people are invested here in a meaningful way, so they should have knowledge of this. I don’t believe–

Of course, our employee base is different than working for the Hotel Trade Council or Carpenters \[union\] or whatever, right? They’re monolithic, told to do something, they’re gonna do it. Employee bases aren’t that. I think that’s an asset. Having a generally college-educated employee base, if you lay out an issue in a reasonable way, they could make an informed decision whether that works for them or doesn’t work for them. The—

**Akash Mehta**  
Wait, the carpenters can’t make an informed decision?

**Steven Fulop**  
I didn’t say they can’t make an informed decision. I’m gonna say they’re more monolithic in what they do, and it’s driven by the decision of a leader, specifically in the Carpenters. The Carpenters would say from their executive board, maybe in Washington, maybe in New York, maybe in New Jersey, say, *Directionally, we are supporting Ben*. And then we support Ben. We don’t have that luxury. That’s not the way we’re structured.

**Akash Mehta**  
What does that have to do with them being college-educated?

**Steven Fulop**  
Well, it doesn’t have to. I mean, I think that you don’t have to necessarily be college-educated, it’s a fair question, to weigh something. But I think generally somebody that’s gone through some sort of rigorous education and training on pragmatic thinking has a better chance because they’ve been educated to think that way. I don’t think it’s a referendum on, you only could understand an issue if you’re college-educated.

**Alyssa Katz**  
But I want to dig in a little more to that when you’re talking about pragmatic thinking, because it’s not an elephant exactly, but the sort-of power in the room is the mayor, who’s elected with actually a lot of college-educated support. And also based on a sort of different way of looking at pretty much everything in some ways, right? Like around– OK, we’re gonna start with principles, we’ll figure out the practicalities later. And also around mobilizing large numbers of people who have interests potentially at odds with capitalism, right? Tenants, people who generally think that money and politics and billionaires are the core problem, or a core problem to address, and on and on. So I’m interested in your efforts to mobilize people in that light. I mean, are you looking to build a counterforce? How does that factor in?

**Steven Fulop**  
I don’t use a “counter force.” I don’t think people are generally sympathetic or upset with capitalism or sympathetic to socialism. I view it more as a couple of things were true in the November election. A, you had an alternative to Mamdani that was tremendously flawed. So they had a ceiling. It was an exact situation that happened in Jersey City, where you had a former governor who resigned in disgrace running for mayor, my old seat, same exact outcome.

So it wasn’t, it wasn’t a reflection of, everybody’s sympathetic to socialism. I think elections are choices ultimately, and these are the four choices that you ultimately had. Do I think that people are frustrated and more fiscally liberal than they’ve ever been before? Yeah, absolutely. I think that when people say that I, people say, a twenty-year model ago would say, *I am, you know, fiscally conservative and socially liberal*, that model has flipped really. People are fiscally liberal because what’s going on today isn’t working for them. They’re not necessarily sympathetic to socialism, but they’re open to trying things because there’s an acknowledgement that what’s happening isn’t working.

And we see that too. We’re not blind to that. So do I think that you can organize a counterweight, was the question? Is that what it is? I don’t know if I would frame it as a counterweight. I think that you need to organize something that has a voice that is relevant in the political atmosphere, definitely.

**Josh Greenman**  
Can you just explain both the number and percentage of people the Partnership represents of employees, versus the employment base of the city as a whole?

**Steven Fulop**  
Yeah, I don’t know the—

**Josh Greenman**  
What’s happened to that over time? I’m curious, like, is it—

**Steven Fulop**  
I can get that to you. I don’t know. I don’t know that—

**Josh Greenman**  
And then the other is inside the Partnership. What are the constituent companies and groups, and…Are there a couple of companies that have a highly disproportionate share of Partnership members?

**Steven Fulop**  
No.

**Josh Greenman**  
So how broad-based is it? Can you just describe it?

**Steven Fulop**  
I mean, there’s 350 companies. They range in size from– I mean, they would be significant companies, maybe 50 employees, OK, to several thousand employees. But on the executive board, you can see from the site and the broader board, they vary in size and background. Most of the companies you would have some familiarity with. But, they vary in size.

**Josh Greenman**  
How is it determined whether you’re part of the Partnership as a company in New York City?

**Steven Fulop**  
As part of the Partnership, is generally we go through a process of meetings. I meet with them initially, provide them some information. They express that they’re interested, I express that we’re interested. I take it to the board to make sure that we’re moving in that direction, and then the board validates that.This year we’ve had, I mean, a bunch more have joined, and we’ve restructured some things so some have left intentionally. It’s not intentionally, but I guess–

**Nicole Gelinas**  
You’re running pretty hard against the two income-tax hike proposals that the mayor ran for office and won on. Do you see the employee base as part of the battle against those tax increases? Would Partnership company employees go up to Albany to make their point known against that?

**Steven Fulop**  
Yeah. But I don’t think you’re gonna have that same sort of advocacy group that the DSA does. It’s a totally different type of person that would engage, number one. Do I think that a lot of the employees would be opposed to an increased tax structure in New York? I think without clear parameters on what that tax structure looks like, I think the answer is yes.

And it’s not only the income taxes that we’re concerned about. So we’ll go into that, too. The reality on this is, if you look at it from a reasonable point of view, if you added the income tax, the payroll, the [PTET tax](https://www.tax.ny.gov/bus/ptet/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which is one that we care a lot about and we’re concerned about, the corporate tax, the estate tax, and the property taxes: You put all of those together, right? And you said, *OK, we’re gonna do them all.* And without some structural changes to the budget, you will be at the trough again in three years. And I think a reasonable person who’s even supportive of, maybe, the highest earners paying more would say, *Does it make sense to do this every two or three years, and at what point is there a tripwire?*

So I think, yeah, the people would be sympathetic. It depends how and what information you provide and how those taxes are. But we don’t have that structure in place yet. I just got started. So we’re just building that stuff out, which I’ve told you, but it’s new days on this.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So there’s, there’s a reasonable person, and then there’s Albany. Now that the budget is—

**Steven Fulop**  
No, I gotta be careful ‘cause I gotta work with people. So I can’t say they’re unreasonable.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Now that the budget is just a week-and-a-half away, what do you see as your prospects for stopping those tax hikes? And if you don’t stop them, does that hurt your power early on?

**Steven Fulop**  
No. I don’t think any reasonable person would say that there’s a structure in place today, after two months of me being there, that is gonna push back against everything in Albany from a political standpoint. I don’t think that’s a fair thing to say. I don’t think the Partnership leadership think of it that way, and I think that most people wouldn’t think of it that way.

I think the governor has been very strong \[against tax increases\], so that’s good. That pass-through tax that was put in place when the SALT reduction was eliminated, and now there’s a proposal to eliminate that, that would be an income tax increase on not only the wealthiest people, it would be an income tax increase on business owners throughout the city.

And that is one that we’re keeping track of right now that I think doesn’t get the scrutiny that it deserves. Everybody focuses on the income tax and the corporate tax, which the governor is fairly clear, at least now, that she’s not supportive of, but we’ll see.

**Josh Greenman**  
On the corporate tax, Mamdani has repeatedly said it shouldn’t harm the climate here in New York City because it applies to anyone who does business in the state, not if you’re headquartered here, so it shouldn’t lead to corporate flight of any kind. Is that how you see it?

**Steven Fulop**  
No. So first of all, it’s challenging when it’s depicted as corporate flight, because then it becomes a conversation around, *Well, you didn’t leave. You didn’t leave. So I know what I did is OK because you didn’t leave.*

The reality of how this works is that it’s attrition over time, and decisions on where to scale outside of New York. That’s generally how this works. And because the immediacy isn’t there, people don’t view it as, *Well, I made this decision, and tomorrow you left.* And that’s a challenge for us, because the argument we lose, even though what we’re saying happens to be true, that people constantly are making decisions to scale \[businesses\] elsewhere. You see it. You see it.

So I think that his argument is flawed, although it’s a political argument ultimately is what he’s making, and I understand that. But if you do change the tax rate as he proposes, you will be one hundred percent higher than New Jersey, right, which is at 11 percent, and you would be at 22 percent, according to the [CBC](https://cbcny.org/research/risky-business-0?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), when you layer in all these other things.

So at that point, you start saying, *Well, I have the same talent pool that I’m pulling from here in the New York system. I’m no longer making the decision to go to Texas or Florida or Tennessee, where it’s a geographic total distance, but at a hundred percent premium to be in New York City, is that worth it, and should I be elsewhere?* Your competition is elsewhere at that point in proximity. That’s the dangerous thing to what he’s saying.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think even more broadly, there is just this sense among— ’cause I think you’re right. You talk to business leaders, and most of the really big businesses in New York don’t care about New York anymore. They’re not New York businesses. They’re global businesses that happen to be here, and New York taxes are a diminishing share of the thing they worry about. Because they’re so global now, they don’t have the kind of commitment they did when [David Rockefeller](https://www.rbf.org/about/our-history/timeline/new-york-city-partnership?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was running the Partnership.

And I think a lot of them and a lot of people just think, long-term, New York is cooked. There’s a flight not to Jersey, but to the Sun Belt — to Houston, to Dallas, to Atlanta, to Miami — that’s kind of unstoppable at this point. And you see just the growth of those cities demographically. You see it in terms of their businesses. You know, maybe that’s not this year or next, but I think if you just literally look at the lines on paper of New York, Philadelphia, Boston…these northeastern cities, versus the Sun Belt. Just feels like an irreversible trend: these places are in decline, these places are rising. This is probably beyond our professional careers even, we’ll be fine. But do you think long-term that it’s true, that New York is just sort of irreversibly declining?

**Steven Fulop**  
I think it’s fragile. There’s a lot of indicators and pressure to push people away, and there isn’t an easy solution to it. First, let’s just talk about last week. Regardless of what you say about the corporate tax conversation, we could disagree or agree, regardless. You know, your job isn’t to agree or disagree.

But using the estate tax that was proposed last week, OK, or two weeks ago, nobody above the age of 60 would live in New York City if that happened to be approved. Period. End of story. You would see flight, because no sane person would do that? Because the tax rates, that you’re not talking about the one percent, you’re talking about somebody who has a $750,000 home or apartment, OK? You know who that is.

So you have pressure because of the dialogue that’s happening there for sure. You definitely have gradual attrition and people moving jobs elsewhere because they’re more portable. There’s no question about that. You have pressure at the bottom because it is very hard for entry-level people to find jobs, and at the same time to find housing. It’s a true thing here in New York, the pressure.

So you have a lot of difficult situations going on and absence of a tough political solution, meaning willing to make decisions that are not popular, you won’t be able to change the trajectory. And that is only one that the mayor can actually drive, OK? So the property tax reform stuff that de Blasio and Adams both tried to do, it’s necessary. It’s really necessary, but it’s gotta be driven by the mayor leaning into it, making that a number one priority. Use things like [FHEPS](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hra/help/cityfheps.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), OK? You guys have all written about that.

**Ben Smith**  
I don’t know what that is, sorry.

**Steven Fulop**  
It’s the rental assistance program, OK? It’s growing at four percent per month. It’s a billion-dollar-plus program. Four percent per month! It’s not sustainable. And if the mayor was sitting here, he would say, *Well, I didn’t approve the expansion of the program*. That’s what he would say. Because I had a conversation with one of his people last night on this, and I said, *Yeah, but the expansion would have made it worse. The existing program is four percent per month, right? We need to solve for that*. How do you solve for that?

That program is a byproduct of the de Blasio administration when Cuomo got rid of the rental assistance program at the state, and so the city inherited that. There isn’t another city in the country that has a similar entitlement program. It’s not sustainable. That program belongs at the state or at the federal government, but it is a politically tough thing to do. So you gotta be able to make decisions like the property tax reform, that. Those are not easy things to do. But outside of that, your trajectory for the city is very, very dangerous. It’s a fact, you know?

*\[Note: After this interview occurred but before it was published, the Mamdani administration continued the appeal of a court ruling requiring the city to expand the FHEPS program as dictated in a law passed by the City Council, while the two sides of City Hall negotiate a potential settlement.\]*

**Akash Mehta**  
Do you broadly agree with Mamdani’s analysis that Cuomo shafted New York City — that Albany shafted New York City under Cuomo?

**Steven Fulop**  
Honestly, it predates me, so it’s hard for me to kind of give you a fair assessment on that. I would tell you that I was mayor for 12 years in Jersey City, economic backbone for New Jersey. We drive jobs, we drive the statewide economy, we drive every number. It’s disproportionately housing growth. Everything is Jersey City. And I used to say, *We don’t get what we put in. We don’t get that back*. It’s true, OK. I know New Jersey and New York both say to the federal government, you know, they both pay much more to the federal government than what they get back. I mean, this is a narrative that people say. It’s probably true. Does it get corrected? I don’t know. You know, it’s on the governor’s situation. I have no idea, is the short answer, ‘cause I’m not in the weeds on that.

**Akash Mehta**  
One quick question on the tax battle. The Partnership has a \[501\] C4 that was seeded with $10 million. What are your plans for the group? Are you planning to spend that money on this battle?

**Steven Fulop**  
Um…unclear. And, conversations this week on that. You know—

**Josh Greenman**  
Do you run the C4?

**Steven Fulop**  
We hired an executive director this week. There is a willingness, we had a call this week and there is a willingness to spend real money to make sure that New York City stays competitive. So this was literally this week. There was a call. I would tell you that there is a serious appetite there. It’s literally a ripe conversation that’s happening in the last 24 hours. Good question, though.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Large donors proved last year that they’re very good at spending a lot of money — but it didn’t work. In fact, it may have worked against them. Are you confident that beyond the money, you understand local and state politics well enough that some of these people are actually listening? I mean, is \[State Assembly Speaker\] Carl Heastie, is \[State Senate Majority Leader\] Andrea Stewart-Cousins listening to these arguments and saying, *We didn’t realize that the potential for attrition in the corporate side was this great*. Because the money hasn’t worked before.

**Steven Fulop**  
The short answer is, I’ve been there two months. I doubt at this stage, we don’t have that relationship. I mean, I’ve met everybody. I doubt that I have the standing or credibility with them to make, or the structure in place to make that argument today more compelling than it was made six months ago. It’s just the reality of the situation.

I think that you have two types of people that exist in any political sphere. You have ideologues and opportunistic people, OK, that just think about their next election. Those are the two types only. And absent somebody that has an alternative, the opportunistic person will only always be sympathetic to the ideologue, because they view that as their best route to get reelected because that’s where the gravity of energy is.

**Josh Greenman**  
What were you?

**Steven Fulop**  
It’s a good question. I was a hybrid.

**Josh Greenman**  
Oh, the only one.

**Steven Fulop**  
\[Laughing\] That’s right. I was unique. I think that when you look at Albany, you have a growing DSA base for sure. The question that I would have as I get into it is how much of those— the rest of the people that aren’t pure ideologues are there because there’s not an alternative that they see, can be supportive, and helpful to a pragmatic view. So I don’t know what they’ll listen to — Carl and Andrea — in the next week-and-a-half. I mean, who knows?

**Josh Greenman**  
Should we charge more for street parking?

**Steven Fulop**  
It’s a good question. I happen to be a supporter of some of those proposals on street safety and better streets. I don’t think it’s a broader position that the Partnership has taken, and I don’t think it’s something, going back to what I said earlier, narrowing view and going back to your question earlier on how we approve things.

I’ll tell you that, as I wrote out this idea of a blueprint of things that, pragmatically, that are politically difficult to change that I believe are the right things to do, I included it in there. And going back to what you said and questioned earlier in how we get these things approved, because the nature of what we wrote, you know, once we get it to a place, I will circulate that a little bit more to the executive board and get some more feedback on whether we wanna go down this road at this point or not, or not at this time. So there’s a process on this stuff.

**Ben Max**  
What are a few other examples? So property tax reform, some streetscape stuff, universal childcare, what else?

**Steven Fulop**  
If you can wait till next week, it’ll be better. OK. Like–

**Josh Greenman**  
Are you fast enough for the political world? What I’m saying is, if you’ve got to go through that process, and these conversations are happening, the budget’s gonna be cooked in ten days, are you gonna be behind the curve?

**Steven Fulop**  
I am obsessed with the political world. I mean, I, I lived in this—

**Ben Max**  
He means the Partnership.

**Josh Greenman**  
The Partnership. Is the Partnership behind the curve if it’s got to deliberate on all this?

**Steven Fulop**  
Look, I think the answer is yes. The short answer is, I don’t know, right? Like, I don’t know. I’ve not been in long enough to have a gauge on all of this. But my gut tells me yes, because the leadership there is hyper-engaged in New York City and the Partnership, it’s not something where they just kind of parachute in once every three months and think about, kind of the Partnership and what’s happening in Albany and happening in New York City. They happen to be very engaged here on a regular basis. So I think the short answer is yes. They will be able to turn stuff around relatively quickly, and I feel pretty good about that. It’s not where I think about obstacles.

**Ben Max**  
So big picture, I’m still trying to figure out right now: What does the Partnership care about, big picture. I know you’re working on a blueprint. I know you’re rethinking some of this, but is it first and foremost, the business climate and economic growth?

**Steven Fulop**  
Right now, I wouldn’t say this is in perpetuity. I mean, obviously, in this moment in time, it’s competitiveness and the business climate. But when the C4 was launched initially last year, they spent money on one initiative, OK? Spent a couple million dollars on the [discovery bill](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/fighting-recidivism-governor-hochul-announces-reforms-fy26-state-budget-improve-discovery?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It had nothing to do with finances, taxes. It had to do with public safety and what they viewed as in the best interest of quality of life.

So their interests aren’t necessarily only about taxes. We happen just to be in this fire drill at this moment that I got thrown into, where there’s a new tax proposal every other day. So trying to deal with that is where we are right now.

I think broadly speaking, the place of the Partnership is really wanting to have a relationship where we’re kind of helping bridge the gap between the public and private sector, and helping find solutions.

We have a venture fund, a $200 million venture fund, which I don’t think gets the recognition it deserves. It’s been involved in creating 37,000 jobs, seeding very early-stage New York companies that do a lot of good here. We have a [tech lab ](https://transitinnovation.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)that partners with DOT, with the Port Authority, with New Jersey Transit, experimenting on technologies to make government more efficient. It is a collaboration that has happened for 15 or 20 years. A lot of companies are a part of that, new companies helping on that on-ramp. It is a unique and special thing. We actually, I think, at the end of this month, have kind of that shark tank at our office where everybody comes in and pitches, and the board of that is like a who’s who. So, I mean, there’s a lot of things beyond what you guys see on the C4 and the advocacy and the lobbying sort-of side.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So on the Transit Tech Lab, some of the ideas that have come out of there have been very good ideas. But more broadly, for the MTA or the state and local government to actually save enough money so that we don’t have what you described with them coming back for new revenue every couple years, you have to confront the unions on some big issues, whether it’s work rules on the construction side, whether it’s two people on every single subway train, whether it’s Department of Education rules that mean they can’t be as flexible as charter schools. Do you see the Partnership taking on the unions in any sense?

**Steven Fulop**  
Going back to the pragmatic that you said, I would use the word pragmatic and then you asked me about kind of a little bit more about that. You brought up the conductors on the trains and the proposals on that. It is very expensive. There isn’t a city in the country that has that structure. If you outline that to an employee of XYZ Corporation, and you said to them, *Here’s the landscape*, OK, *We need help with XYZ*, I would venture to say that they would be sympathetic to our point of view. That’s what I was getting at, just to give that to you earlier.

You know, the *New York Post* called me the day that Mamdani entered into the— he said at the end of a press conference, I wasn’t there, obviously, but he mentioned that he wasn’t gonna do the sweeps of the homeless encampment. And it was probably my second or third day on the job. And the *Post* called and said, *Do you want to comment on this?* And I said, *Yeah*. And I said something critical of him at the time.

Prior to doing that, because it was like my second or third day, I did say to some of the people on the team, going back to how nimble the organization is, I said, *Hey, I would like to comment on this, OK?* *Because I think it’s wrong, his approach, and I think he’s gonna have to move off of where he is, ultimately.* And some people said, *Well, is that really the hill you wanna climb?* *Is that really that important to us?* And I said, *It absolutely is.* *Because, A, he’s wrong on the issue, and B, it’s a quality-of-life issue.* Going back to the fact that it ended up being right, he ended up moving on, and you could see it from, like, far away, just based on being a legislator versus an executive and accountability.

But I think our job is to call balls and strikes and just be fair about it. So do I think– Let me say it this way better. If you are gonna grow housing, OK, ‘cause he says it’s a priority. During his election, when he was a candidate, he would tell you if he was sitting here, he would tell you, you look at his CBS, the debates, he would talk about Jersey City and Tokyo, Jersey City and Tokyo as housing growth models. He would tell you that if he was sitting here — he said it on TV multiple times. Now, he followed that about what we did in Jersey City ‘cause we grew a lot.

How are we able to grow? OK, A, you had layers of government here that we do not have there, so you need to clean that up. We upzoned, of course, more aggressively than the [City of Yes ](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/our-work/plans/citywide/city-of-yes-housing-opportunity?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)around transit centers, which you have to do here for sure. And then the third part about it is that if you mandate affordable housing, community givebacks, the union labor, et cetera, et cetera, the projects financially cannot handle that. They don’t pencil out.

So what we would generally do is that, on the union labor front, because the people that get squeezed the most were the ones that pressure the building trades better, because their jobs are usually the ones that get–are most competitive, are the less skilled parts of the building trades. So when you build a high-rise building, the electricians, the plumbers, the operating engineers, the ironworkers are generally gonna be union, because it’s a more complicated thing. Carpenters, laborers, painters generally are the ones that have competition from non-union, and that’s really where it is ultimately. And we would say in Jersey City, on the projects that are important to us, if they were coming to the city for some sort of subsidies or big zoning changes, and it was an important project, we would work with the developer to give the unions a last look to be competitive with the open-shop bid, and some sort of grace between five and ten percent to be competitive.

Now, absent that, there is no way to get it built in union labor. So if the mayor continues to be strident that everything is gonna be a hundred percent building trades, you’re never gonna meet the objective of whatever he has a hundred, two hundred thousand units. So I think that our voice is gonna be that you need some practical reforms to these incentives, and practical reforms means that you cannot pay a 30 percent premium for the carpenters.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So something very simple on that, though. Two people on a train. Would you see yourself making a statement similar to the encampments that, you know, *Hey, intuitively, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to leave people in encampments.* Intuitively, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to mandate two people on a train. Would you just call up the *Post* and say that, or that’s a different—

**Steven Fulop**  
I don’t think that— I think if you called me and you said to me, *What do you think?* I’d probably just answer you, that I think it’s not something that any other city does, and in a financial crisis, you probably gotta be reasonable about that.

**Ben Max**  
This is what you got hired in part for, right? To be out there more and to be a voice pushing back.

**Steven Fulop**  
I think that it’s just my personality. I don’t know if it’s necessarily, it’s just like this is— You’d ask me, and I would say it. I wouldn’t go call up the *Post* and say, *Let me-- Carl \[Campanile\], let me comment on this, right?* I wouldn’t do that. Like, that’s not how I would think about it, right? I’d be going with my day, and then Carl would say, *Do you care to comment on this?* Or he would call, and I would just be like, *Yeah, I think so and so.* And he would say, *Is that on the record?* And generally, I’m not gonna say, *This is off the record*, on anything. I generally just talk. OK? So—

**Josh Greenman**  
You talked about incentives, government incentives. I want to talk about literal government incentives, like, Amazon, right? Remember how many years ago, half of Amazon’s HQ2 was gonna be here.

**Steven Fulop**  
Yeah, I remember. We tried to pitch it too.

**Josh Greenman**  
It didn’t happen. You tried to pitch it, too. What do you think of the state’s current corporate incentives? Do they make sense as currently structured? To try to attract businesses to New York State, to try and attract businesses to New York City, there are various programs. There’s been a lot of talk about restructuring those programs to make them more rational, and there’s a larger question of, should we have this environment in which cities chase corporations by throwing money at them or tax abatements at them, or should there be some kind of compact where cities agree that they don’t do this to each other?

**Steven Fulop**  
Yeah. I generally think — putting on my mayor’s hat — that the structure exists today is a race to zero, and it’s not healthy from the public side. But you cannot unilaterally disarm, is the unfortunate part of the conversation. And so absent governors getting together and having some sort of détente where they’re no longer doing that, I do not see how a state doesn’t participate in this.

That said, I think that the competitiveness conversation in New York and New York City is more complicated than just incentives. I think that, you think about other places in the country, where people have mobility to get to, and there’s opportunity, there’s more of a deliberate effort to attract beyond just the incentives. Texas reordered their entire court system to replicate Delaware, to make it more friendly for corporations. They’re having a Texas stock exchange to have better access to capital markets. It’s more of a deliberate strategy than just saying, *Hey, we’re gonna give incentives.*

Now, it is not helpful– you know, people, absent certainty on communication, they try to interpret a lot of what somebody means or what they say. So, governor or mayor says *X, Y, Z* in a statement, they try to interpret, what does that ultimately mean? How should I envision that to manifest itself for what I’m trying to do? And the thing that we are trying to calibrate for, and I say this publicly and privately, is that a lot of the rhetoric out of City Hall, which is consistent *tax, tax, tax* on any front that’s possible, whether you make $500,000, whether you have a house that’s $750,000, whether it’s a pass-through and you have a small business, it creates a very volatile environment. And that’s the problem ultimately. So I think you need certainty on that.

**Josh Greenman**  
I have one other topic that we haven’t talked about that I just wanna make sure we discuss, which is AI. You represent a lot of employees. And AI is going to be increasingly a large employer, in theory in the city, but it’s also coming for some of those employees’ jobs, maybe many of those employees’ jobs.

**Ben Smith**  
And the employers are very excited about it.

**Josh Greenman**  
And some of the employers, the CEOs, are excited about being able to save dollars and innovate in various ways.

**Steven Fulop**  
Well, they don’t communicate that with me, but just go ahead.

**Josh Greenman**  
So how do you, how do you balance those tensions, which are very, very real, among employees who might be excited and employers who might be excited about AI, and those who might say, *Holy shit, my job is gonna be gone in 10 years, or five*?

**Steven Fulop**  
I think that that is— I said this, maybe I touched on it a little bit earlier, I think that young people not being able to find jobs and the housing crisis was pressure from the bottom that is one of the most at-risk situations for New York. AI is part of that conversation, potentially — so you have macro environment, why people aren’t hiring, and then AI might be part of that too. You know, though they don’t clarify that with me. They don’t say, *Here’s the reason I’m doing this or doing that.*

I do think that one of the biggest risks over the next 12 or 18 months is the AI impact on jobs. I agree. And I don’t think anybody has a good solution, both in the Partnership or in City Hall, yet on that. And in order to kind of figure out how to do that and solve for that, I think that you need to have some sort of broader conversation on implications.

I will tell you that one of the things that we outlined in kind of what we were talking about on this blueprint was that, I do think that part of the procurement process for city government services needs to factor in who is training and who is factoring in the AI conversation, and those scores should be appropriately weighted, beneficial for companies that are thinking about training or have a training program as part of it. So we’re trying to think of ways to kinda think about training people and getting people into another space and using the leverage of City Hall to do that.

I don’t think there’s a broad enough plan yet to solve for it. It is the biggest risk for New York, because New York City relies on white-collar jobs disproportionately for its budget. And where AI is coming is directly at the white-collar jobs as opposed to the blue-collar jobs. And so New York City is poised to get hit in a different sort-of way than anybody else. Short answer is, I don’t think anybody has a clear-eyed solution on that. Some of that’s gotta be set by the mayor, you know, that’s the truth too.

I said earlier in the conversation, we had a roundtable on childcare in December with the mayor. And the mayor, at the end of it, I said to his staff, I said, *You know, we outlined some of the inefficiencies and bureaucracies to getting these childcare centers open*, which we’re familiar with. I told you earlier. *We can help you with that from a technology standpoint*, okay? And this goes back to making tough decisions. You’ve seen employee headcount since COVID skyrocket at City Hall. Whole, another conversation. I mean, that’s a fair thing to say. We said we’d help you with some efficiencies on that from a technology standpoint.

And they were nice in their response but there was really no follow-up on that. And, and my point on that is we can only do so much from the Partnership. You need a dance partner in order to dance, right? Like, that’s really the reality of this. So, I do not know the solution, and I push back. People aren’t— They don’t, at least they don’t express to me they’re happy about, you know, not hiring jobs. You know, maybe to you, Ben. But, and AI displacement, I think people are very concerned about it in the Partnership too.

**Harry Siegel**  
You said maybe without some changes, the Partnership won’t be there in five to ten years. We just did have a big turnout election, that led to an avowedly socialist mayor. Can you just step back and say—

**Steven Fulop**  
No, I think the Partnership— I think I clarified that on the, that current trajectory of how it positions itself needed to change. So I think that’s part of the reason we’re here, to make sure it’s relevant for the next ten years, but—

**Harry Siegel**  
But the business community seems increasingly less relevant to the political direction of the city. The Partnership seems less relevant. This is a bit of an inside conversation. For people who maybe vaguely know what it is or just spot its name in headlines or whatever, what is the point of the Partnership? And frankly, what is the good and utility that the business community brings to the city, if you just want to explain that?

**Steven Fulop**  
What does the Partnership add to the city?

**Harry Siegel**  
Sure.

**Steven Fulop**  
Or the politics shifting left.

**Harry Siegel**  
However you want to take it.

**Steven Fulop**  
I think, forget about the Partnership as an organization for a second. I think the big corporations add a disproportionate amount of philanthropy, revenue, budget help, employee help to the ecosystem here in New York City.

If those larger corporations migrate out, you would have a massive budget problem, you would have significant more unemployment, and the amount of philanthropy, which is tens of millions of dollars a year across, which sometimes is underreported or undershared, is a good thing ultimately, helps private institutions or public institutions, culture and arts institutions disproportionately, hospitals disproportionately.

So I think that the business community here has a huge impact. The Partnership acts as a conduit from them to the public sector, and has multiple layers to it as I touched on earlier, where we help incubate early companies, facilitate connection to New York City, help advocate for policy change, et cetera, et cetera.

**Harry Siegel**  
Outside of real estate, the business community, as you and Ben \[Smith\] were talking about, is less and less rooted here, and the problem is sort of a slow trickle to other regions, as opposed to people just pushing out and moving. Lots more people are voting. They seem less interested in the priorities of the business community. You’re talking about employees as a sort of base for the organization, 800,000 of them. I’m just trying to understand how business makes itself more relevant.

**Steven Fulop**  
That’s a little bit of a process that I touched on earlier, a little bit of the transition that I touched on earlier on why we’re here. I think that people, as you saw in this last election, are struggling, an affordability crisis is real. There’s a lot of pressure, whether it’s jobs or housing. I think that’s all real. And I think that people have become, as I said earlier, fiscally more liberal because what’s working for them today and not working today has shifted from 10 years ago. So in order to be relevant, we need to be cognizant of that.

**Alyssa Katz**  
People mentioned earlier that antisemitism is a priority for you, fighting it, and you know, I know you—

**Steven Fulop**  
It’s a priority for us, yeah.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Yeah, and we had a couple incidents that may have coincided with right when you arrived at the Partnership, right? The most visible one was, you know, this Israeli drone company.

**Steven Fulop**  
Oh, the Israeli drone company, Easy Aerial? Yeah. OK.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Yeah. What’s the other one?

**Steven Fulop**  
It was the Park East Synagogue situation.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Oh, right. Well, listen, but I’m talking purely on the business side. We can talk about it more broadly. But you know, there’s a company that was in a city-owned property. The city says it was a lease issue but it had been the target of a campaign saying, *Well, you’re providing drones to the Israeli military, and we need you out of here*. And then sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. And I’m just kind of curious about how you are approaching that kind of pressure on Israeli individuals and their businesses to get out of town, basically. How do you address that?

**Steven Fulop**  
I think it’s a new conversation, obviously. We do think that antisemitism is rising, and it’s a significant concern. The BDS conversation and singling out one country to different standards than other countries that the U.S. or the public agrees with or disagrees with, or that has human rights violations or doesn’t have human rights violations, is a totally different conversation that we don’t agree with — singling out a single country.

And the reality is that that BDS conversation, building on that, is not acceptable to us. And as you see elected officials more vocal in this space, unfortunately, if that ends up being, I think that is a place you’d definitely see us spend money.

**Liena Žagare**  
Do you think Mayor Mamdani is doing a good job, and where would you—

**Steven Fulop**  
Doing a good job?

**Liena Žagare**  
Yeah. Doing a good job in the city and—

**Steven Fulop**  
I think— Yeah, look, I think—

**Liena Žagare**  
Where should he be more careful?

**Steven Fulop**  
I think, I think there is— The short answer is, it’s been two-and-a-half months, so it’s hard to tell. I think that there’s a lot of mixed signals between things he says sometimes in smaller meetings versus what he says publicly. I think that, there’s been some missteps along the way, like for example the real estate tax proposal I thought was a misstep. I think that there’s been some really encouraging things. How he’s handled the president has been terrific.

And I think that the city is in a better place than anybody would have thought post-election with regards to the president as a result of his communication there. I think that he has shown some willingness to move away from an extreme left position that he came in. That transition from a legislator to an executive is a transition, and from being a backbench Assemblyperson to a prominent front and center mayor, that transition is always complicated. Homeless encampments, the library funding, the FHEPS situation, he’s moderated some of those views, which are good.

And at the same time, I think sometimes going back to how we interpret things that he puts out there, sometimes he’ll put something out that we’ll interpret in a way that I – ‘cause you have no choice but to interpret this stuff – you’re concerned about.

You know, like, and I’ve said to them, Look, when American Express [announced](https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/newsroom/articles/colleagues-and-culture/amex-build-new-state-of-the-art-global-headquarters-new-york.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) their headquarters, right? It’s a big deal. You know, a big American brand establishing a significant presence again here, recommitting. It’s good for his narrative ultimately, right? You know, that was in the works for some time. Or [the Bank of America situation](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/banking-finance/cny-bank-of-america-manhattan-expansion-20260316/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). If you look at the kind of statements that came out as a result of that, they never acknowledged the corporate side. They talked about the building trades. And that signals to us, A, questions about the housing conversation, right? And B, whether you understand the ecosystem that American Express employs thousands of people here, and they’re hugely involved philanthropically and committed to the city, and what that means. So I would say it’s mixed.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
One thing that’s been missing from the ecosystem is a person like [Dick Ravitch](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/28/opinion/new-york-city-metro-ravitch.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), who passed away a couple years ago, a trusted businessperson, trusted government veteran, where he could call up a governor, call up reporters, and they would believe him as a credible person. He wasn’t working for anybody. What he thought was good for the city and state they would heavily weigh. And nobody has emerged to succeed him in that position. Do you see any of your CEOs able to fill that position, or that’s just a sign of the times, that it’s just gone forever?

**Steven Fulop**  
I don’t know. I would hope that some of them do. I think that happens organically. It’s hard to be anointed or, I think that happens organically through relationships with you guys that are built over decades, to be honest with you. I don’t think it’s something that somebody’s just gonna emerge or be anointed into.

**Akash Mehta**  
You’ve talked a lot about sound fiscal management. I did wanna make sure that we touched on the fact that your successor in Jersey City—

**Steven Fulop**  
Love it. Go ahead.

**Akash Mehta**  
–says that there’s a budget gap equivalent to 30 percent of the annual operating budget of the city. I’ve seen you dismiss this as political theater and just *blame the last guy*, but I haven’t seen you give a substantive response. Is there a budget gap, and how was it created?

**Steven Fulop**  
No, I haven’t responded because I’m trying to be disciplined in not meddling in my previous job, even when I disagree with a lot of the things he says. He was on the City Council for eight years. The City Council has one responsibility by law. It is the budget. He kept my business administrator. He kept my HR people. He kept my director of economic development. He kept my director of the redevelopment agency, et cetera, et cetera. My director of recreation. All my leadership staff, he kept. Which should tell you something. He applied to the state, not for $250 million like his press conference was, but for a fraction of that. So I would push back on that entire narrative, because I think it’s just pure politics and fugazi. Our budget goes to the state for approval every year. It doesn’t happen in isolation.

**Akash Mehta**  
So there’s no budget deficit?

**Steven Fulop**  
Well, I’m gonna get to this in a second. I’m gonna tell you how the budget is structured. And it goes to the state for approval. So if the state saw some sort of red flag and some sort of issue, they do not approve it. It goes to a board. It’s a whole process. And again, I would highlight the fact that I’ve always been outside of that establishment. It’s not like I have a ton of friends in Trenton that are looking to bend over to help me do things that might be out there. If anything, they give me a harder time.

Every year, we have massive increased costs on labor, on insurance, et cetera, et cetera. And you come in every year with a budget gap of $40 million, $30 million. That’s generally how that works, OK? Could get to 55 million, could get to 20 million, but there is a budget gap every year.

You have one tool to solve that: Raising taxes. That’s it. Because you could have new people coming in and build more, to have a higher ratable base, but it’s never gonna be the same as 20 or 30 million dollars a year. So you always start off with a structural deficit. That is a fact in Jersey City, and that will not change under him.

If you listen to a credit rating agency, which all of our credit is still credit grade and equal or above where it was when I took office. If you listen to a credit rating agency, sometimes it went up, and then sometimes it went down while we were in office. But if you listen to credit agencies, they would prefer that you raise taxes every year. That’s what they would say. They would say that is the right thing to do, and they would say you should raise it every single year.

And we tried not to. That was just my view. I did not wanna burden people with it, and I do not regret that, ultimately. And so, yeah, we have a structural deficit, but nowhere nearly what he says, and he was on the City Council, so it’s all political theater to be honest with you. But it is what it is. Like I said, blame your predecessor.

And I blamed my predecessor. I came in and said, *Oh, is—* You know? I did that.

**Ben Max**  
And Mamdani’s doing it.

**Steven Fulop**  
And Mamdani’s doing it, right? This is a standard playbook, because it gives you the opportunity for some window of time to raise taxes, and to blame your predecessor for that raising taxes, so you are not culpable for that.

That’s the window of time that you have in that first year. You cannot do that in the second year. Then you have a higher tax base to build off of this the following year, right? So it’s just normal politics, ultimately, for that. And what do I get out of responding to the Hudson County View newspaper or a blog called the Jersey Times saying, *Hey, I disagree with you*?

**Ben Smith**  
Which he’s never, ever heard of and doesn’t even read.

**Steven Fulop**  
Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

**Ben Smith**  
Final question for you, which I’ll steal from Harry, which is, you ever gonna run for mayor of New York?

**Steven Fulop**  
No. No. These things are freaking behind me. The elected office component, to me, is something that I loved doing and I don’t see myself going back into that space, you know? Last weekend, weekend before, weekend before, I had my weekends to myself with my kids: A seven-year-old, a five-year-old, and a two-year-old.

And, I haven’t done that in 12 years. I would always have some church service to go to, some Saint Patrick’s Day dinner to go to, something. Even on a weekend that’s light, I would have some commitment for four or five hours a day. So you could never go and say, *Just wanna go to the mall with this kid*, or, *I just wanna go do this or go to a playground*. Couldn’t do it, right, because of the time structure that’s there. So it is the furthest thing from my mind, going back into the elected office situation.

**Ben Max**  
Real last question—

**Steven Fulop**  
I know people ask me all the time, as a matter of fact, and I say, *Hey, look, that’s not in the cards.*

**Ben Max**  
How far advanced are the discussions in the business community about running someone against Mamdani in 2029?

**Steven Fulop**  
Uh, not something that’s really, like, been something formal. I mean, people look at the landscape and there’s no surprise to you that there’s candidates already jockeying, four or five of them.

I think it happens to be really hard to beat an incumbent mayor. I think that absent some big missteps, Mamdani has a huge advantage in four years. I think there are a lot of things that can change in the next four years. You’ve probably seen publicly that electoral reform and open primaries, those things are healthy, not as a reflection of a referendum on Mamdani. I think they’re good government. You have them in LA, you have them in Chicago, you have them in places that work differently.

But we’re not in the business of selecting candidates for mayor. I mean, I think there’s a lot of things that they would say, like, be careful on, because we wanna have a relationship with Mamdani, so we’re not going down that road.

**Group**  
Thank you.

**Steven Fulop**  
Thank you.
### What’s the Deal with SEQRA?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/whats-the-deal-with-seqra/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:37:27.000Z
*In the latest episode of After Hours with Jamie Rubin, Annemarie Gray of Open New York joins the podcast to discuss the growing momentum behind housing reform in New York. Fresh off a major victory in reforming the City Charter, Gray breaks down the push for State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) reform — a 50-year-old law originally designed to protect the environment that she argues is now being weaponized to block green, transit-oriented development.*

*From the shifting political landscape under Mayor Zohran Mamdani to the "invisible" regulatory hurdles adding tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a single apartment, Gray explains why modernizing these rules is essential for an "all-of-the-above" approach to affordability.*

*You can listen to the episode on* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2JDRChkSXtVWN6byZaZZwS?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *and* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/seqra-reform-and-ye-shall-find/id1794619189?i=1000757178247&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*

---

**Jamie Rubin:** You're listening to After Hours with Jamie Rubin, a Vital City podcast. I'm Jamie Rubin. Hey, Liz.

**Liz Glazer:** Hey, Jamie. How are you?

**Jamie Rubin:** I'm well. How are you?

**Liz Glazer:** It's finally springtime.

**Jamie Rubin:** It is springtime. All the dirty snow, the disgusting snow has melted.

This episode is largely an interview with our friend Annemarie Gray about an important piece of state legislation in the state budget that will hopefully be passed sometime in the very beginning of April. We're sitting here on March 22nd, 2024 – so fairly soon.

I wanted to start by talking about something that you manifested into being — the Mayor's Office of Community Safety. You manifested it by thinking hard, writing a piece in Vital City about the Mayor's public safety policy, and then by having started Vital City, which led to an episode on January 28th called “Reducing Crime by Improving Neighborhoods: An Interview with Renita Francois.” Obviously, without any of those things, there would be no Office of Community Safety headed by Renita Francois. Do you want to link all those things together and demonstrate your immense power?

**Liz Glazer:** Hardly. First of all, Renita Francois was announced last week as the first-ever Deputy Mayor for Community Safety. If people haven't taken a look at her extraordinary announcement — her really moving remarks and the way she fielded questions — they should, because it will show in a snapshot what an extraordinary leader and thinker she is.

I had the good fortune to work with her for seven or eight years when she headed up the Office of Neighborhood Safety in the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice. She created a civilian approach to what safety should look like — led by residents, participated in by 20 city agencies and nonprofits, trying to figure out in sharp ways what makes neighborhoods safe. That included everything from summer youth employment to good lighting to community centers — all separate from simply calling in the police.

This new office is an expression of something that was a centerpiece of Mamdani's campaign promises around public safety: a new look at how safety could be secured through civilian power and civic power, not simply the police.

**Jamie Rubin:** During the campaign, most people would have thought he meant that instead of police being sent out for certain emergency calls, other kinds of personnel would be sent out — mental health professionals, substance abuse counselors — instead of police. So is that what we have now under Renita, or has it morphed into something different?

**Liz Glazer:** The devil's in the details. There were and continue to be very prominent incidents of people who were shot by police after their families called for mental health assistance on this mayor's watch. There's been a lot of focus on whether we can send civilians instead of police. The Mayor has doubled down on B-HEARD, which are civilian teams that respond to calls about someone in mental distress. But B-HEARD has been pretty universally acknowledged as not being particularly effective — there's a comptroller's report and other assessments. The idea is: how could it be amplified?

The problem is that this simplifies an incredibly hard issue. It's not just a question of who responds. It's a question of what happens after. Many of the outreach teams act in a moment of crisis, but there isn't a sense of: we are going to stabilize this person with housing and services, we are going to be with this person like glue, because these may be lifelong issues that come and go. That hasn't been our approach.

If the task before Renita is to figure that out, that's enormous. It encompasses many different agencies. She's also responsible for hate crimes, gun violence, and a whole array of other issues. She's an enormously talented person, but operationally, it's a lot.

**Jamie Rubin:** It's a steep hill. But my take is: as hard as the problem is, they've decided on a leader, which is always very important, and they picked somebody who is not going to ignore those details. You're not going to see something new and perfect spring up overnight until Renita says it's ready. That's a good thing for people who care about the government working well, as opposed to living under a government of bumper stickers.

**Liz Glazer:** Leadership is key. They couldn't have picked a better person who understands the complexity and has the skill to pull together all those strings to make something real. It's a great outcome, and she'll be terrific at it.

**Jamie Rubin:** Annemarie has been on before. Last year she came on to talk about the Charter Review Commission and specifically the ballot questions that passed — largely due to her activity — which led to some really important zoning reforms. The Governor has proposed a significant revision to the state's environmental laws, also in the furtherance of building more housing faster. Annemarie is at the forefront of the campaign to help the Governor pass that law as part of the budget.

I have my own views about all this because I live in the housing world a bit more than you do. What was your impression of what Annemarie said?

**Liz Glazer:** The first thing that struck me is, as Hemingway said about bankruptcy, it happens gradually then all of a sudden. For so many years, people have been fighting about these issues. Then, suddenly, we have these referendums that pass: Hochul getting behind the SEQRA stuff, and then Mamdani, on the very last day before the election, supporting it. I wondered: how much of this is a sea change? How important is it?

**Jamie Rubin:** Every piece of it is important, but the housing crisis is like anything else — we didn't get here quickly. We got here after decades of different decisions. SEQRA reform will help address one piece, but nothing is going to get resolved overnight.

The difference between this and zoning reform is that SEQRA revisions generally apply to people who have already secured the ability to build something and are now waiting for environmental clearance. It's less controversial — more about speeding things up and costing less money than about overriding local zoning, which is viewed as much more existential. That's why the governor has failed the last few times she's tried to do zoning reform through state legislation. It's a fundamentally harder thing to do.

**Liz Glazer:** When I hear Annemarie and you talk about this, I think about the “abundance book” and other cities. How applicable is what's happening in New York? Are we further behind, or are we going to be a light unto the nations?

**Jamie Rubin:** We're late to the game in some ways. The charter review was a big deal — no city has done something like what we did. But California has beaten us in some ways. Gavin Newsom got a similar environmental regulation reform passed in his last legislative session. We're getting there in our New York-y kind of way.

A quick update on where we are politically: the SEQRA reform is part of the Governor's budget for this year. It's generally thought likely to pass, maybe with some changes negotiated at the table. The single biggest issue is that the environmental community has looked at this and said: it's not a terrible idea to update 50-year-old laws to fit the ability to build more homes in a crisis, but we have some issues with how you're going about it.

My assessment is that it should work out. The Governor will back off on some of what she's proposing in the climate laws. The environmental community will get behind most of what she wants to do with SEQRA, and the budget will emerge with two key — by the way, non-financial — items that are basically both good for the state. But we won't know until the puff of smoke goes up and we have a new budget.

**Liz Glazer:** It's like a choose your own adventure in alphabet soup.

**Jamie Rubin:** Exactly. So we'll now listen to Annemarie Gray and hope you enjoy it.

---

**Jamie Rubin:** Annemarie, welcome back to the show.

**Annemarie Gray:** Thanks, Jamie, for having me.

**Jamie Rubin:** A lot has happened since you were last on — in the world and to you personally. What's the most important thing that's happened?

**Annemarie Gray:** Is the answer supposed to be that I had a baby?

**Jamie Rubin:** Yes, absolutely.

**Annemarie Gray:** I had a baby! We have a new New Yorker – very relevant to all the talk about childcare and affording healthcare and affording to live in New York City while trying to grow a family here. That's been very exciting. And simultaneously, the city and the state are really making good headway on building more housing. It's just been an exciting time all around.

**Jamie Rubin:** Second to your personal news, the other big thing was the Charter Review Commission's housing questions. Talk about what was at stake and what happened.

**Annemarie Gray:** About a year ago, the last administration formed a Charter Revision Commission charged with taking a hard look at the barriers the Charter creates for building more housing of all types, which we know is the core root cause of the housing affordability crisis.

They came out with four really strong questions — Questions Two through Five — all about fast-tracking city-financed deeply affordable housing, fast-tracking modest housing infrastructure proposals, creating a housing appeals board as a backstop to hyper-local vetoes of housing projects for no good reason, and replacing outdated paper maps with a digital map system.

We were really involved in shaping those questions. Then we launched a campaign called "Yes on Affordable Housing" — an independent coalition – but Open New York really made it happen. They passed on election night, and it's a really big deal. It's a national example. New York City is finally tackling some of the worst barriers upholding exclusionary zoning practices. We've already seen a couple of projects go through the process in ways they wouldn't have before.

**Jamie Rubin:** And to put a fine point on it, they passed overwhelmingly — without the candidate who ultimately became mayor saying anything supportive until the very final day. The tailwinds were the crisis and your campaign, basically.

**Annemarie Gray:** They won 50 out of 65 Assembly districts — 77 percent. They won in every district that went for Mamdani and some that went for Cuomo. Even in places where you'd expect less support, like homeowner-heavy southeast Queens, there was really strong performance.

And you're already seeing Mamdani prioritize the affordability crisis, lean into the need to build more housing, and start using these new tools. It's really exciting.

**Jamie Rubin:** Give me an example. What specifically has happened in the first six or eight weeks of this administration?

**Annemarie Gray:** Two weeks ago, I was with the administration as they announced the very first ULURP project — that's Question Three, the expedited review for modest housing proposals. They announced the first project in the Bronx, a deeply affordable housing project that HPD is doing, and it's going to move months faster.

Then we saw Council Member Vicki Paladino, who has been one of the staunchest opponents to new housing — she was outwardly opposed during City of Yes and the ballot measures — put out a long video explaining how she didn't like the measures but now that they were law, she couldn't stop them. She's wrestling with the politics: is it better to vote yes so she has some say, knowing that if she doesn't, it goes to the appeals board? And then the project got approved.

You're watching in real time how the political calculus shifted from a default hyper-local veto for bad-faith reasons to *okay, everyone needs to build housing.* Places across the country are watching us. We really started to curb member deference in the absolute worst cases, and we're just starting to see the impact.

### SEQRA Reform: What It Is and Why It Matters

**Jamie Rubin:** With that major victory under your belt, and having tried a couple times at the state level to pass legislation with similar regulatory impacts — cracking down on the most egregious obstructionism to new housing — there's new momentum. Scroll forward to the Governor's State of the State address in January. What did she announce?

**Annemarie Gray:** She announces reforms to SEQRA — the State Environmental Quality Review Act. It's a signature part of her State of the State speech and her executive budget, targeting an April 1 deadline. Very short turnaround. And she was extremely supportive of the ballot questions well in advance of Election Day.

Hochul has clearly been talking about housing for a couple of years now, and it's a big theme with governors across the country. Some of the other things she's tried haven't gotten full traction because the state grants authority to municipalities to control their own zoning, which has a really big impact on what actually gets built. But there are steps that can pave the way for bigger reforms, and one of them doesn't get a lot of coverage because it's invisible — but it really matters.

Building new homes requires going through thousands and thousands of pages of paperwork. You'd think from the name that the analysis has a huge amount to do with the environment and making sure there aren't bad impacts to climate. That is where this idea started about 50 years ago, but that's really not what SEQRA is actually measuring now.

It was written in the '70s, designed to stop environmentally destructive actions like new coal-fired power plants or highways bulldozing neighborhoods. But 50 years later, that same law is ironically preventing green infrastructure projects. It's preventing infill housing right next to transit. It's blocking exactly the climate action that makes sense for the 21st century because it's never been modernized.

**Jamie Rubin:** How does a state environmental quality act actually block climate adaptation?

**Annemarie Gray:** To build anything, you need to go through this required state process. If you're building a single-family home in a sprawling suburb, you're not required to go through anything like this, but you are for a small apartment building. Off the bat, it doesn't make sense how you're setting requirements.

It takes a lot of time, and time is money. It's become so broad that you're measuring things like shadow impacts, or what traffic signal changes might be needed 10 years down the road because new people will live there. It's designed against the status quo and slows down the process. And because you have thousands of pages of paperwork, anyone with money to hire a lawyer figures out some way to stop a project.

We did a huge amount of research on projects delayed by SEQRA. One example is 250 Water Street in the South Street Seaport — housing on a parking lot in a historic district. A lawsuit argued the developer's environmental analysis was insufficient, and the project got stalled. There was also a lawsuit against City of Yes arguing the city hadn't properly studied the environmental impacts of rooftop solar panels. That is ridiculous. Our environmental laws are being abused to stop solar panels. Something has gone really wrong.

This is a world where wealthy people figure out a way to stop housing in their district, and SEQRA gets weaponized. 

**Jamie Rubin:** The Citizens Budget Commission has done research showing that housing projects can cost as much as $82,000 more per unit due to unnecessary regulatory costs. When the average cost of a new unit in the city is $500,000 to $750,000, that's as much as 10 percent of the cost.

**Annemarie Gray:** And this does not suddenly open up development on greenfields or take away water quality protections — all of that is still in place. You're just modernizing it so it cannot be used for the worst reasons and making projects that obviously make sense move faster.

**Jamie Rubin:** So the Governor's proposal is framed as exemptions, right? Types of projects exempt from SEQRA review, new housing below a certain size, projects on previously disturbed sites where review has already happened or is unnecessary.

**Annemarie Gray:** It's mainly doing two things. One: exempting whole categories of projects — but remember, those projects still have to go through any discretionary process required by the local government, like zoning, site planning, and permitting. They just get exempted from full environmental review.

Two: for larger projects that don't meet the exemption criteria, they still go through existing environmental review but with timelines to ensure local governments don't delay forever. It's like a clock — analogous to what the ballot questions did with timelines on review.

Something to keep in mind: in many cases, these are projects that were already approved by local governments. They went through community planning. They went through discretionary reviews. They were already approved. And then someone decides they didn't like the outcome, hires a lawyer, sues, and it gets stalled. It's not even reflecting the democratic process as it currently exists.

That said, as a state, there are a lot of ways we need to keep building on this momentum and adding accountability for places that just aren't building homes. SEQRA is definitely not the end, but it's a really good baseline — something smart, something obvious — and then we keep tackling the affordability crisis year after year.

### The Environmental Community and the Politics of Reform

**Jamie Rubin:** Even on its face, this appears to be somewhat limiting of landmark state environmental review legislation. You'd probably say it's trying to bring the original purpose back into focus and take away the extraneous stuff that's been abused. But it sounds like the Governor has to side with either housing or the environmental groups, and the proposal has fallen on the side of housing developers. How do you deal with that?

**Annemarie Gray:** This is making it easier to build an energy-efficient home near the subway where people don't need a car. This is making it easier to build solar panels. This is making it easier to build infill housing on a parking lot so that homes don't get built as new sprawl development instead.

A lot of environmental groups see this, and the goals are really aligned. Our current land use and environmental review processes are actually exacerbating sprawl. The whole conversation has come a long way from a '70s-era environmental framework to 2026 climate realities. What does our land use need to look like to reduce emissions? Dense development done in smart ways is a conservation strategy. That's how you make sure you're actually preserving land.

You're seeing some opposition from groups fearing they'll lose a tool they've used for a long time. But we launched a coalition alongside RPA that now has 35 to 40 groups, including environmental groups. I'm having multiple conversations today with people working on climate issues alongside fair housing and planning groups. The battle lines are just not that clear.

Something we haven't mentioned: a version of environmental reform passed in the Senate last year. The Governor isn't alone on this. That bill was by Senator Rachel May, who comes from an environmental background. The bill was called the Affordable Housing and Sprawl Prevention Act. People are thinking carefully about how to be clear about intentions. Mayor Mamdani has been a staunch supporter, which has helped the conversation in New York City a lot.

### Abundance, Good Faith, and Climate Alignment

**Jamie Rubin:** Part of the problem is that it's been a really rough couple of years for the environmental community. It didn't start with the election of Donald Trump, but that was a watershed moment. Terrible things have happened, including basically the destruction of the EPA's key regulatory functions. The landmark state legislature – CLCPA that passed a couple of years ago – has been painfully slow to implement. And then you and I have talked about abundance a lot. You could see this coming for environmental regulation a mile away. I didn't love some of the dialogue around abundance a couple of years ago. There are good-faith abundance-people and less good-faith abundance-people, and on the less good-faith side, they've been targeting environmental regulation for some time. Is that fair?

**Annemarie Gray:** I spend my days working on housing issues, so I'm not the expert on everything happening writ large. It is a very scary time for people who care about climate — and frankly for all of us. I stay up at night worried about that, but it's not what I focus on day to day.

**Jamie Rubin:** But those are your allies.

**Annemarie Gray:** The fear — what those groups are actually wrestling with in terms of their policy priorities — is real and very scary and probably extremely frustrating. To your point about abundance, I honestly don't use that word myself because it means really different things to different people.

The way I see it is that dense housing in smart ways is a climate solution. And a lot of the folks thinking about this day to day — there's real good faith there. I actually think there's a huge amount of alignment.

### How Mayor Mamdani Is Doing on Housing

**Jamie Rubin:** I'm going to take the last few minutes to brag on you. Anybody who's been watching the Mayor over the last two months has noticed that, going back to his transition team, your face keeps popping up in close proximity to the Mayor. You're the closest thing we have to a housing celebrity. I mentioned the transition because you were on the Mayor's housing transition team — you were the chair.

**Annemarie Gray:** There wasn't a chair. I just spoke.

**Jamie Rubin:** Every time they wanted to talk about the transition, you were one of the people who spoke, so I'm going to call you the chair. We don't expect you to be unbiased, but you call them as you see them. How's the Mayor doing on housing?

**Annemarie Gray:** In a world where there's a lot to be dire about, I'm feeling really hopeful and excited. This mayor, from partway through his campaign, really recognized the role of building more housing — something he changed his mind on. You saw him lean into the ballot measures. You saw him use language that Open New York has been at the forefront of for years — that tenant protections and building new homes are not in conflict. And they can't be, because having buy-in for a neighborhood to grow means people have to not feel like they're getting displaced. That's really real.

Him leaning into that and running on the four-bill agenda was really huge. I've been impressed with the appointments. Layla Bozorg is someone I've worked with for a long time and think extremely highly of — a really smart pick to blend these priorities, rooted in fair housing and a truly progressive lane for building more housing as part of an all-of-the-above approach where every neighborhood has to be part of the solution. We have to think about tenant protections and the role of the public sector and public excellence. She's a really good person to run that.

Her chief of staff, Genevieve Michael, is a political genius and a smart person for that position. Good for New York, but a bit of a loss for me — Andrew Fine, my number two, our policy director and chief of staff, is now on her team. Great for New York.

Some of their first announcements are about how they're going to use the ballot measures. They're just getting started. I'm excited to see their full housing plan. There are still announcements and appointments to be made. But in general, it's an exciting moment to see a new administration embrace this momentum that cuts across different types of politics in a way where people are really serious about life getting better.

### Lightning Round: Sunnyside Yards, ADUs, and Pinball

**Jamie Rubin:** Before we go, quick lightning round. Sunnyside Yards.

**Annemarie Gray:** A smart, insanely complicated generational project that they should keep looking at — but knowing it's really complicated, really expensive, and should be one of a wide range of things they pursue. Leaning into the fact that building new homes is central to the affordability agenda and going to the president to talk about it — that's excellent. But it shouldn't be the only thing they're working on.

**Jamie Rubin:** Agreed. It's not going to be. ADUs — now legalized via City of Yes, you're starting to see the first projects come about, a couple of little companies popping up.

**Annemarie Gray:** Like in California! It's so cool. The ballot measures do this too — we've lost this whole industry of small-scale builders because it was illegal. ADUs are a great entry-level path for small home builders. It's a much more accessible way to enter the industry than the massive developer world that usually runs things in New York. In California and other states, you've really seen small business growth when these things get legalized. Super cool.

**Jamie Rubin:** We're all about middle-class creation here. That's great. Last one: best place to take a five-month-old on a rainy Saturday in Brooklyn.

**Annemarie Gray:** You're going to love this answer. There's a pinball museum that opened in my neighborhood.

**Jamie Rubin:** Is it in Red Hook?

**Annemarie Gray:** Yeah! It's really chill, really kid-friendly. It's free. The lights and sounds — the baby was really mesmerized. It's somewhere inside that's not a bar, with a lot to look at that's not screens. It's wholesome — old pinball machines from the '50s.

**Jamie Rubin:** I'm delighted that you're not taking your baby to a bar. You get a lot of points for that. Annemarie, it's so good to talk to you. We'll talk again after SEQRA passes.

**Annemarie Gray:** Sounds great. Thanks, Jamie.

**Jamie Rubin:** Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with another episode of After Hours with Jamie Rubin.
### It's a Jungle Out There
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/navigating-apartment-hunting-rising-rent-in-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:42:30.000Z
There’s a lot of talk in our politics about how rents are unaffordable. We see historically low vacancy rates and record asking rents flash across our screens. But it wasn’t until I had to find a new place to live that the problem literally hit home for me.

When I moved to New York City in 2017 to pursue my PhD, I remember being pleasantly surprised by the cost of rent. I was living on 157th Street in Washington Heights — but my rent wasn’t that different from what I had been paying on the outskirts of Boston. I used to tell my friends back in Boston that New York clearly had a wider distribution of apartment prices, even if the median was higher. Nearly a decade ago, that turned out to be true: My rent was $1,750 per month for a one-bedroom in a pre-war building right off the 157th Street C stop.

I was a bit of a chronic mover at that point in my life, hopping from place to place, upgrading slightly each year as my then-partner’s salary increased. We ended up in a place on 184th Street for $2,000\. Then the pandemic hit. My ex got a job in Chelsea, so we decided to move downtown.

It was early 2021, which in retrospect now seems like something of a golden age of apartment hunting in New York City. The COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread health and economic disruption, but it also led to a temporary softening of rental demand. It may seem unbelievable now, but according to [a report released by the Comptroller](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys-rental-housing-market/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com), the median asking rent for a one-bedroom in New York City had fallen to just below $2,600\. Nearly half of apartments were [offering incentives to get people in the door](https://inhabit.corcoran.com/new-york-city-residential-rental-market-report-february-2021/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including free months of rent. We found an apartment in a glorious, historic building called Chelsea Gardens, listed at an almost unbelievable $3,200.

That apartment became my dream home. Every window faced a beautifully kept interior garden. It sat just off the C/E and 1 trains on 23rd Street. The living room was huge, the bedroom equally so. The building was a co-op — meaning it was owned by its residents, with rentals a rarity — and the owner of our unit, based on his emails, seemed like a genuinely good person. When he raised the rent, he did so apologetically. Even then, it was $3,650\. Expensive, but still a deal for what and where it was.

Two years in, my partner and I broke up. Over the next three years, I made the apartment my own. It became part of my identity. It was large enough that I was constantly hosting friends. I leaned into the gay history of the neighborhood and the building. 

The co-op board president, Gil Neary, was a legendary real estate mogul and longtime resident of Chelsea and Fire Island Pines. [His firm’s motto was](https://gaycitynews.com/local-gay-real-estate-agency-has-a-new-home/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), “A castle for every queen.” As the broker for the building, he had originally rented us the apartment and was known for hosting fabulous parties. In many ways, he kept an old-school gay way of life alive at a time when much of that part of Chelsea’s culture was slipping away. 

He was on vacation in Maine when he tragically lost his life in a car accident in August 2024.

With his death came changes to the building. The new board, from what I was told, was no longer sympathetic to renters. My lease was set to expire in April 2026, and I did not expect a renewal, having already reached the five-year limit an owner is allowed to rent out their unit. Still, I thought there might be an exception. I was liked by my neighbors; one had even written a letter asking the board to let me stay. I was a responsible and respectful tenant who always paid his rent on time, and I felt like I was a member of the community. Moreover, the owner of the apartment, Paolo, who was doing humanitarian work in the Middle East helping refugees from Palestine, wrote a long and, I thought, convincing letter requesting the same. The board denied the request.

I have now re-entered the world of apartment hunting, and the market is bleak. The median asking price for a one-bedroom in Manhattan, according to a study by RentReboot that looked at 300,000 listings over the last year, has increased from its pandemic low of around $2,600 per month in 2021 [to over $4,730 in 2026](https://rentreboot.com/guide/nyc-rent-report-feb-2026?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Of course, Manhattan is far from the only place a New Yorker can live. I was willing to move anywhere, within reason, but asking rents were not meaningfully better elsewhere. The citywide median asking price for a one-bedroom is now [approximately $3,785, with Brooklyn at $3,800, and even the Bronx exceeding $3,100](https://rentreboot.com/guide/nyc-rent-report-feb-2026?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The same apartments in the Heights I lived in when I first moved to the city were now more than a thousand dollars more expensive a month.

To put this in perspective, [under the standard 40x rent rule](https://www.curbed.com/article/rental-income-requirement-landlord-mystery.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), qualifying for a median on-the-market one-bedroom in New York City now requires an income of roughly $150,000\. In Manhattan, the number is closer to $180,000\. Studios in many neighborhoods are now exceeding $3,500, yet are so small, they come with mini fridges. I have found it difficult to wrap my head around the number of people earning that level of income who are also willing to live in spaces that feel like college dorms.

One proposed partial answer to the affordability crisis in New York City is the [housing lottery](https://housingconnect.nyc.gov/PublicWeb/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), where people can apply for a rare, random shot at income-restricted housing, produced with a city subsidy. (I actually applied for — and “won!” — the housing lottery back in 2024, and went through two grueling rounds of paperwork before learning that all of the units had already been accounted for.) But the irony is that for middle-income earners, it is often not actually affordable. Take a real example from a new building in Manhattan. An “affordable” one-bedroom set aside for those at 130% of area median income is priced at $3,689\. For this apartment, the eligible income range for a single person is $130,800 to $147,420\. The same 40x rule would lead to an affordable rent range of roughly $3,270 to $3,685.

In other words, even at the top of the eligible income range, the rent as a percentage of income is at or above what most landlords would allow under the standard 40× rule. And even the highest earners of the income bracket would be rent-burdened, with close to half of their take-home income going toward housing. Middle-income New Yorkers are being squeezed from both sides, with little evidence of relief.

My friends keep saying, “just come to Brooklyn, or come to LIC, or Astoria.” And I would happily. I no longer need to stay in Manhattan the way I felt I needed to do when I was at Columbia. But the rental market in these places is not much better. In response, I have started sending them screenshots of StreetEasy maps showing what is actually available. Their usual response is just, “Oh.”

You might wonder who I am to complain. I’m a successful professional who has lived in New York for less than a decade, just one year shy of the [informal 10-year benchmark](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/andrew-yang-fran-lebowitz-and-who-gets-to-be-a-real-new-yorker?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for being considered a “real” New Yorker. But rising rents affect all New Yorkers. As rents increase, middle-income residents are pushed further out, and that pressure does not disappear but instead shifts, accelerating displacement in surrounding neighborhoods. Over time, the city risks becoming a place where the core is accessible primarily to the very wealthy, those supported by intergenerational wealth or buyers treating housing as an investment rather than a place to live.

I am not sure what the near-term solution is. Mamdani has proposed to “freeze the rents,” but that would apply only to approximately 1 million rent-stabilized units, not the market as a whole. Freezing rents for stabilized tenants may even [shift some pressure onto the market-rate side](https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/effects-rent-control-expansion-tenants-landlords-inequality?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com). The deeper issue is simpler, and it’s not solved quickly: There are not enough apartments.

If there is any silver lining, it is that people still want to live in New York City. There is a good reason people continue to compete for space here, even at these prices. Not just for the jobs or the density or the convenience, but the energy, the sense that something is always happening, the feeling that you are part of something larger than yourself.

Yet that same demand is what is making it increasingly difficult to stay. Many of the people who give the city its character, its culture and its history are being priced out of it. The version of New York that so many of us love becomes harder to sustain when fewer people can afford to live here for long.

Despite all of the financial pressures related to rent, I am not leaving. There is no place I would rather be. But staying is no longer a passive choice. It requires tradeoffs, compromises, and increasingly, luck. I’m hoping to get lucky again, as I did with my place in Chelsea Gardens, and find another needle-in-the-haystack apartment to call home for years to come. Let me know if you find one.
### London’s Quest for Low-Traffic Neighborhoods
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/london-low-traffic-neighborhoods-safety-urban-planning/
Last updated: 2026-05-21T20:09:13.000Z
[Vital City](https://soundcloud.com/vital-city-604970448?ref=vitalcitynyc.org "Vital City") · [London's Quest for Low Traffic Neighborhoods](https://soundcloud.com/vital-city-604970448/londons-quest-for-low-traffic?ref=vitalcitynyc.org "London's Quest for Low Traffic Neighborhoods")

*This is the first in a new monthly interview series, Borrow and Steal. In each installment, I’ll profile a different evidence-backed urban policy idea from around the world — and talk to a local who has worked to translate the idea into reality.* 

*Our first interview is with* [*James McAsh*](https://x.com/mcash?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*, a councillor in London who, since 2018, has represented* [*Southwark*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London%5FBorough%5Fof%5FSouthwark?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *— a district of about 300,000 residents on the south bank of the Thames, known for landmarks like Shakespeare's Globe and the Tate Modern. Until earlier this month, James was the council member responsible for street design across the borough, where he oversaw the scale-up of so-called “*[*low-traffic neighborhoods*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low%5FTraffic%5FNeighbourhood?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*,” a street management program enacted as an emergency measure to create more safe, outdoor space during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, James has worked to make many of Southwark's low-traffic neighborhoods permanent. And James has become an advocate for rolling out the concept to other cities, like New York, where there is* [*a nascent movement*](https://www.openplans.org/low-traffic-neighborhoods?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *to replicate London’s scheme. (Open Plans, a local street safety group, has advocated for* [*five low-traffic neighborhoods*](https://x.com/OpenPlans/status/2028850803163766957?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *in every New York City borough. Recently, Queens Community Board 6 \[Forest Hill and Rego Park\]* [*voted to request* ](https://www.qchron.com/editions/central/cb-6-looks-to-curb-cut-through-traffic/article%5F56880c35-131e-59a2-bd76-dd608d9bf313.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*the Department of Transportation stage a local low traffic neighborhood pilot, while Manhattan Community Board 8 \[Upper East Side\]* [*rejected a similar measure*](https://www.uppereastsite.com/anti-car-lobbyists-low-traffic-neighborhood-plan-rejected-by-ues-community-board-members/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.)*

*In this interview, James explains the low-traffic neighborhood (LTN) concept and shares insights from London’s experience. We dig into costs and benefits, including data on safety and congestion impacts, and the politics of rolling out low-traffic neighborhoods. James concludes with advice for other cities considering this as a strategy to create more livable streets.* 

*The following conversation has been condensed and annotated for clarity.*

**Cara Eckholm:** To kick us off: what is a low-traffic neighborhood exactly? And how does it relate to other, perhaps better-known, urban planning concepts, like the 15-minute city?

**James McAsh:** A low-traffic neighborhood is closely connected to the concept of a 15-minute city. You start by defining a neighborhood by its main roads — what we call boundary roads. Those boundary roads should be the routes built to handle higher volumes of traffic. You essentially draw a line around the neighborhood.

Inside the boundary, the goal is simple: no through-traffic on residential streets. That doesn’t mean the area is pedestrianized — cars can still enter — but you can’t cut through. If you want to get from one boundary road to another, you have to go around on the boundary, not straight through the neighborhood. Every home and business is still accessible by car, but every car journey inside the neighborhood starts or ends there, which dramatically reduces traffic. There's no reason why someone from outside should be driving through residential streets. 

**Cara Eckholm:** To address the boogeyman in the room — how do you deal with parking?

**James McAsh:** You can keep parking exactly as it was. You might lose a small number of spaces to install infrastructure — usually because you need turning space near the barriers used to block cars from entering — but we’re talking a few spaces here and there, not major changes.

**Cara Eckholm:** So if I’m a resident with a car, and I previously had a parking space, I’m keeping it. The difference is that people who were cutting through on their way to an alternate destination can’t anymore. Is that right?

**James McAsh:** Yes, exactly. In some ways, LTNs would work better for U.S. cities than U.K. cities because you have the grid. With the grid, it’s easier to define a clean box bounded by major roads, which cars can no longer cut through. 

The main tool to block passage is a modal filter, which is just a technical term for something in the road that blocks certain modes of transport. The simplest version is a planter or bollards placed so pedestrians and cyclists can pass through, but cars can’t. You can also do it with camera enforcement: the street stays open, but if you drive through, you get a fine. 

**Cara Eckholm:** How prevalent are low-traffic neighborhoods in London? My understanding is that London [introduced congestion pricing in 2003](https://www.arup.com/en-us/insights/two-decades-in-what-can-other-cities-learn-from-the-london-congestion-charge/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — but that the LTN push is more recent, and stemmed partly from experimentation [during the pandemic](https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/questions-mayor/find-an-answer/streetspace-and-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-1?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

**James McAsh:** That's mostly right. The phrase *low-traffic neighborhood* was popularized in 2020\. But actually, if you think about what a low-traffic neighborhood is, it's a quiet residential street where you can't drive through. Those have existed all across the world, including in London, for a very long time. Think about a cul-de-sac. Or social housing projects — they are rarely designed for people to drive through them. 

But yes, in 2020, we had a big leap forward. People went from talking about low-traffic neighborhoods to executing them. Social distancing exposed how narrow sidewalks were on routes that people depended on. At first, we did some sidewalk widening, but LTNs were also a way to redistribute space — not banning cars entirely, but shifting street space toward walking and cycling. 

*\[Note: While estimates vary, there are now at* [*least 80 known*](https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/early/2025/07/17/ip-2024-045571?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *LTNs throughout London.\]*

**Cara Eckholm:** How many LTNs did you roll out in Southwark?

**James McAsh:** In Southwark, we did about a dozen. The 2020 rollout was reactive. We put several in quickly, pulled a few back, and have since expanded others. It was driven by demand and which local politicians were keen.

It was great that we were able to have this big jump forward, but the speed of execution created some tension. If you don’t design boundary roads carefully, you can displace traffic onto nearby residential streets, and, understandably, the residents who live on those streets are upset. 

Now we’re doing things more holistically: mapping the borough’s main strategic routes first. Inside them, we’ve identified about 25 zones that *could* become LTNs; all 25 are designed so implementing one won't make a mess next door.

**Cara Eckholm:** Do you have a sense of how much traffic in these areas was cut-through traffic versus residents driving locally?

**James McAsh:** It varies massively. But I’ll give you a contrast. We did one in [Dulwich](https://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/s91328/Appendix%20A%20Dulwich%20Village%20LTN%20measures.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — which is in the south, further away from the center. It's more residential, affluent, whiter and has higher car ownership. And we did one in [Walworth](https://healthywalworth.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/walworthhealthystreetsv.11-18jun20.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which is very inner-city. It’s ethnically mixed, lower income, much lower car ownership.

Residents’ experiences in both neighborhoods reflected their relationship to cars. If you live in Dulwich, you probably drive, so you feel the route change immediately — some liked it, many did not. Whereas, in Walworth, many people walk, take the bus, or cycle. So traffic feels like an external force imposed on you. Making your kids choke, taking up space, and creating noise pollution. So people generally had a positive reaction when traffic was removed.

*\[Note: As a comparable, one* [*study in New York*](https://www.openplans.org/press-releases/whos-on-your-streets-data-shows-up-to-88-of-drivers-innbspsome-neighborhoods-are-only-cutting-throughnbsp?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *found that the majority of driving on residential streets in most Community Districts was cut-through traffic.\]*

**Cara Eckholm:** You started to get into the politics of deciding where LTNs are placed. How does an LTN actually get approved and implemented?

**James McAsh:** In 2020, our process for approving LTNs was very request-driven, but we saw the inequity and tensions that created. Now we’re trying to ensure every part of the borough has an opportunity, paired with community engagement about what people actually want.

The physical infrastructure is cheap — planters, bollards, benches. You start with the basic measures, then once the pattern is established and people are using the newfound space you can do lots of really exciting things. Like creating space for kids to play. 

**Cara Eckholm:** And the borough pays for it?

**James McAsh:** Yes. And we introduced a prioritization framework. At the center were deprivation, air quality and the number of people who’d been killed or seriously injured in collisions. So we focused on places that are dangerous, polluted and home to disadvantaged communities.

**Cara Eckholm:** What should other cities expect in terms of cost?

**James McAsh:** The bare bones — planters — are in the tens of thousands of pounds. Once you move into beautification and making it permanent — public realm upgrades — you’re in the hundreds of thousands. Even a relatively big LTN usually isn’t more than a million pounds.

*\[Note: A recent* [*study by a trio of U.K.-based academic researchers*](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214140524000173?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *found a per-person cost of £28-35 for LTNs implemented during 2020 as emergency interventions, or £112 for higher-cost, permanent LTNs. It estimated over £1 billion in health economic benefits on a program cost of £100 million.\]*

**Cara Eckholm:** The staggered nature of the rollout created natural experiment-like conditions, which seems to have offered a really [fertile ground](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213624X23001785?via%3Dihub&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for transportation research. What does the data say?

**James McAsh:** The strongest data is [London-wide](https://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-impacts-of-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-feb-2024-acc.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Inside the new low-traffic neighborhoods, there were [50% fewer casualties than there were before.](https://findingspress.org/article/25633-impacts-of-2020-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-in-london-on-road-traffic-injuries?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) And importantly, there was no increase in casualties on boundary roads, which is the common criticism.

We also saw that [74% of the streets within LTNs have reduced traffic](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d30896202a18c0001b49180/t/6481e3d5be84550c6c001470/1686234089805/Changes+in+motor+traffic+inside+London%E2%80%99s+LTNs+and+on+boundary+roads+%283%29.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). One figure I’ve seen is median traffic falling from roughly 1,200 vehicles a day to around 650 inside LTNs.

Some impacts are less expected. There’s [some preliminary evidence](https://findingspress.org/article/23623-short-term-association-between-the-introduction-of-2020-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-and-street-crime-in-london-uk?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of lower crime in LTNs. I think there's a lot of potential for exploring why that might be the case. 

And we’ve also heard concerns about emergency response times — especially from fire services — but the [evidence suggests response times remain the same](https://findingspress.org/article/23568-the-impact-of-2020-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-on-fire-service-emergency-response-times-in-london-uk?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). People notice the moment a vehicle hits a barrier and has to reroute, but they don’t notice that the rest of the trip is faster because there are fewer cars on the road. And if you use cameras instead of hard barriers, you can build in exemptions for emergency vehicles (or disabled drivers). All of a sudden they're on roads that have much less traffic, which can actually make motor vehicle trips faster. 

**Cara Eckholm:** To play devil’s advocate: You haven't seen any drawbacks? What's the case against LTNs?

**James McAsh:** The key downside is a feature, not a bug in my view: Short car trips inside the neighborhood become harder and slower. That is intentional. We want to reduce those kinds of journeys.

But unfortunately, some people do get caught in the crossfire. Maybe they've got lots of kids or they're plumbers or they're moving a piano or something like that. They need a motor vehicle. They can't do it on their bike. So that is a downside. They can still make the journey, but it may become longer because they have to go out to the boundary roads and loop around.

**Cara Eckholm:** What distance does an LTN typically cover?

**James McAsh:** Something like one to two miles, probably, at the upper end. You’re not talking about huge areas. The reason it connects to the 15-minute city is that the neighborhood should be walkable — how big it is depends on the road structure and specifically where you have boundary roads that can handle large volumes of traffic. But 15-minutes walking is about right. 

**Cara Eckholm:** The 15-minute city has been heavily politicized, as have LTNs. My understanding is that conservative MPs are generally opposed to LTNs, and your former prime minister, Rishi Sunak, [ordered a review of the program](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-66351785?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which created tension with London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who’s set a goal for [80% of all trips](https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/the-mayors-transport-strategy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the city to be done by bicycle or public transport by 2041\. How did LTNs get caught up in national politics?

**James McAsh:** It very much became tied up with a broader culture war and with conspiracy theories. In the U.K., often, low-traffic neighborhoods and the 15-minute city are used synonymously. They don’t mean the same thing, but in the discourse, they’re sort of used interchangeably. And there’s this conspiracy theory that we are putting in all these cameras so that eventually you will need a pass to get out of your neighborhood to go to a different neighborhood.

**Cara Eckholm:** Wow, that’s more nefarious than I was expecting.

**James McAsh:** Yeah, I mean obviously, that is far from the truth. Local government is nowhere near efficient enough to manage something like that! Now to be clear, Rishi Sunak isn’t a conspiracy theorist, but the “war on the motorist” is something that Sunak pushed — the idea that woke councils like Southwark are going to war with good working people who need their car to drive. 

So he did call for a review. The hook was that the 2020 LTNs were implemented without consultation — considered an emergency measure during the pandemic, with consultation only afterward.

Actually, when the [evidence came back](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/08/low-traffic-neighbourhoods-generally-popular-report-ordered-by-sunak-finds?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), it suggested that LTN’s achieved their policy objectives and that they are popular with the majority of residents.

The national debate has cooled down now. And we have a new Labour government. They’re not evangelical about LTNs, but they’re also not against them. They’re mostly leaving councils alone. Progressive councils do them, less progressive councils don’t.

**Cara Eckholm:** Is this mostly a London phenomenon? I am thinking about the congestion pricing analogy, where you haven't really seen a replication effect outside of large cities.

**James McAsh:** It’s a very London-centric project, but that’s not to say it’s just London. Oxford, which is a much smaller city, also has quite developed low-traffic neighborhoods, and there are a few others dotted around the country.

One difference is that congestion pricing needs scale to work and has high setup costs. In theory you can have a low traffic neighborhood in a pretty small town. A town of 20,000 could have a low-traffic neighborhood.

**Cara Eckholm:** What was your experience like rolling out LTNs in Southwark? What were you actually seeing on the ground in terms of the community's reception?

**James McAsh:** We’ve learned lessons and hopefully your readers can learn from our mistakes as well. 

We’ve essentially found that you’ve got this curve: At first, the only people who know about LTNs are those pushing for them. As an elected representative, your inbox is full of support. It feels very positive.

Then it’s announced and popularity really, really drops. The protestors come out. With most political issues, you can say “this is a systemic problem” — but an LTN is clearly a political choice with your name on it. It can feel like you’re under quite a lot of pressure at that point.

**Cara Eckholm:** Were you panicked?

**James McAsh:** I wasn’t panicking, but I was new to this and didn’t have the research I have now.

The downsides of a low-traffic neighborhood are experienced immediately. You could previously take a route, bollards go in and now you can’t take that route. 

The upsides take longer. It takes a while for that mom to realize there’s a new route she can walk with her kids, traffic-free. She won’t know the route is there immediately. Then when you start adding infrastructure like little parks, the benefits are clearer, but that takes a while to come through. 

So when implementing schemes like LTNs, you do have to steel yourself, be prepared for a lot of negativity, and understand that there is a cycle. You also need to set clear expectations on what your success criteria are and be honest about what you can and can’t measure. Air quality is a good example: Hyperlocal air quality data is hard to measure, even if broader trends are positive.

**Cara Eckholm:** Have the LTNs that were rolled out during the pandemic stuck? 

**James McAsh:** None were removed. Some were adjusted — rolled back slightly — but they stayed. The big shift now is moving from emergency implementation toward high-engagement, more deliberate design.

The one I worked on most recently is in the central part of the borough. The area includes the Tate Modern and Tower Bridge, and has high population density, low car ownership and lots of tourists. We recently did early engagement with multiple proposals — street closures, modal filters — and every proposal had majority support. In fact, the main feedback was to be more ambitious. More modal filters. 

**Cara Eckholm:** What should other cities take away? Do LTNs need to come after congestion pricing, or can they be a line of first defense?

**James McAsh:** I’d treat them separately. I support congestion pricing and it covers a bit of my borough, but it actually doesn’t overlap with the 2020 LTNs we introduced — it's a different geography. So if you don’t have congestion pricing, LTNs can be a strong tool in their own right.

The biggest lesson is that early engagement is really important. You need to know what's happening on the ground. The best example is your conversations with local businesses. Businesses often say, “If you ban cars, I’ll go out of business — my customers drive.”

So now we don’t start with business owners. We start with customers. We stand outside shops and ask: How did you get here? Usually, it’s overwhelmingly walking, cycling and transit. Then we go to the business and say: This is how your customers already arrive, and we’re going to make that easier.

**Cara Eckholm:** Do you have a team of ethnographers who go out and do this research? The type of engagement you are describing is pretty different from what we usually see in the U.S. — a community board meeting where people show up to lodge their support or their complaints. 

**James McAsh:** In Southwark, the engagement process I introduced has five stages.

Stage one is simple: We ask residents across the whole borough, *what do you want on your street?* Do you want more trees? A pedestrian crossing? People can tick boxes and show us on a map. The goal is to gather early, grounded data.

We also want to make sure the responses are representative. The typical approach in the U.K. is an online portal and maybe a few meetings at a library. Instead, we track response rates street by street across the borough. If a street had less than a 20 percent response rate, we knock on doors. That helps us reach people who are less likely to participate.

Stage two focuses on individual zones. We go back to residents with some initial ideas and ask: *What do you think of these proposals?* 

Stage three is when we present a full scheme. We show exactly what the area will look like — what routes might change for drivers, where public space will improve, where we might add planting, small parks or play areas.

Stage four is a statutory consultation — a formal public hearing, where people can lodge support and complaints. At that point, the scheme is essentially fixed. It’s largely a yes-or-no moment.

Then stage five is evaluation. We measure the project against the criteria we set at the beginning and give people the chance to say whether it’s working and make tweaks.

**Cara Eckholm:** And in terms of your role in this movement, you just wrapped up your term overseeing street design in Southwark. What's next for you?

**James McAsh:** We have elections coming up and I’ll be running for re-election. Beyond that, I’m talking to people and looking for where I can make the biggest impact — especially on sustainable travel and cities.
### Dan Garodnick on What Comes After Yes
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/dan-garodnick-housing-zoning-city-of-yes-interview/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:22.000Z
*Dan Garodnick, a former city councilman who represented Manhattan’s East Side for 12 years, led the Department of City Planning under Mayor Eric Adams. Seen by many as a bright light in the administration, he shepherded through the City of Yes rezoning — the most significant set of zoning reforms in decades — and pushed for a suite of charter reforms designed to make housing production easier.* 

*In the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s victory, Garodnick announced he was stepping down from his position. Last month, Mamdani* [*appointed Sideya Sherman*](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/02/mayor-mamdani-appoints-sideya-sherman-as-city-planning-director-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *to the role. On his way out, Garodnick spoke with Vital City about what he’d tell his successor, what comes next for housing and the policy levers that matter most.* 

---

**Vital City:** Imagine we had a tradition like presidents leaving notes to their successors. What would you want to convey to someone stepping into your role?

**Dan Garodnick:** I’d strongly encourage someone in my seat to go deep into the details and substance of the work. Zoning and everything else we do is dense and complicated. But at the same time, you need to speak with moral clarity and at a level of detail that’s accessible to most New Yorkers. This stuff is hard. It needs a translator. You need to be steeped in the details but also able to communicate them to a wider audience.

I’d also encourage them to invest time in the relationship with the City Council. They’re important players in the land use process, and that dynamic ideally works well. And I’d encourage them to build on our recent successes. We just took some of the biggest swings on housing that have ever been taken, and we got them done. There’s an opportunity to build on that.

**Vital City:** Is there anything you learned the hard way?

**Dan Garodnick:** One thing I learned walking into a city agency is that just because you give an instruction doesn’t mean it will be carried out in the way you anticipated — or at all. Managing an agency is itself a political process. You need single-minded purpose and determination to make sure things keep moving.

**Vital City:** City of Yes was a big swing — three pieces of legislation, plus charter reforms to make housing production easier. Does the Mamdani administration now need more policy changes, or is this mostly about executing with the tools already in hand?

**Dan Garodnick:** It’s a bit of both. There are definitely ways to take the important precedent of City of Yes and continue to add opportunities for housing supply through zoning. The mayor has been clear that’s a priority — whether it’s transit-oriented development or other approaches.

At the same time, you need to activate what you’ve already got. You need to make things easier to get built. That includes changes at the state level to environmental review, which will speed up the process before you even enter public review. And it includes changes the new mayor should make on the other end — regulatory approvals that would make it easier to get a building built or add an accessory dwelling unit after the public review process. So part of it is continuing to enable more supply, and part of it is making things easier and faster.

**Vital City:** Is there a big regulatory or legislative fix that you wanted to pursue but couldn’t?

**Dan Garodnick:** A really big one is now on the table: reform of the environmental review process, in the governor’s budget. That’s something that materially slows things up. When I was in the City Council, I thought the main risk for someone considering a big investment in New York was the politics — the volatility of the political environment. I now understand that while that’s true, there’s an equal amount of risk in the passage of time. Finding ways to shorten the process overall has an enormous impact on what projects actually proceed.

**Vital City:** The de Blasio administration picked specific neighborhoods for upzoning, and they happened to be lower-income neighborhoods where some residents feared development. The Adams administration went citywide. Now Mamdani is looking at various upzonings. What are the strategic considerations — and how big an obstacle are historic districts in wealthier parts of the city?

**Dan Garodnick:** It’s important for the city’s fair housing goals to enable housing in parts of the city that historically haven’t seen it. That was central to City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, and it should continue to be central to the Mamdani administration’s mission. In recent years, 10 of our 59 community districts produced as much housing as the other forty-nine combined. There are neighborhoods that have been functionally shut off to housing production. That will now start to change.

The way to build a thoughtful new program is to state some principles, like we did with City of Yes, and make them big and broadly applicable. That could mean focusing on areas with great transit access, or areas that have been the lowest producers of housing over time. There are a variety of ways to think about it, but stating a principle and applying it broadly is very useful.

**Vital City:** New York City contains what are essentially suburbs — parts of Staten Island, eastern Queens and sections of the Bronx that are indistinguishable from Westchester. Is single-family zoning compatible with being part of New York City?

**Dan Garodnick:** You want to respect the character of neighborhoods. People have a certain expectation for where they live, and I think that’s worth acknowledging. On the other hand, there are lots of ways to enable some amount of housing even in lower-density neighborhoods that aren’t harmful and that open doors to opportunities that don’t exist today. We need to do that because we’re in a longstanding crisis that’s been going on for so long that people have accepted it as a fact of life. 

**Vital City:** People say two things that seem contradictory: “It’s so expensive nobody can afford to live here,” and “We have far too little housing to meet demand.” How do you square those?

**Dan Garodnick:** They’re easily squared. With housing scarcity, you get high demand and everything that goes along with it: exorbitant rents, displacement pressures, homelessness and a real imbalance of power between landlords and tenants. When you’re looking to negotiate your lease and you have no other options, you’re out of luck. When you need a basic repair, you have very little leverage. We need to add considerably more supply to relieve that pressure and create options for people who live here now and who want to live here in the future. We’ve gotten so far away from a healthy environment that we need to take significant steps to address it.

**Vital City:** Is all housing that’s produced essentially equal, or does it need to be tagged “affordable” with income bands and protections to truly count?

**Dan Garodnick:** It’s important to create affordable housing to ensure that people of low and moderate means have a place to live. But it’s also important to create market-rate housing — because otherwise you have people with resources chasing after homes where people are already living, driving up costs and creating gentrification pressures. And the city can’t just subsidize its way out of this crisis. We need all the tools, both market-rate and affordable. 

**Vital City:** What drives construction costs up in New York? Nobody can wave their hands and make Manhattan land cheaper. What’s actually in a policymaker’s control?

**Dan Garodnick:** The things that are in the public’s control are the opportunities the law presents to build, the incentives that exist for housing creation and the speed at which you can enable something to go from idea to actualization. Those have been central in what has or hasn’t happened over time.

**Vital City:** Should union labor be required for City-subsidized affordable housing construction?

**Dan Garodnick:** In an ideal world, you can do it all. But there are obvious challenges, and the math will answer the question.

**Vital City:** There’s a lot of discussion about 485-x and whether its labor standards are incentivizing buildings of 99 units and below to avoid the higher pay rates that kick in at a hundred units. What’s your read?

**Dan Garodnick:** We need to give this one some time. Time will tell what is viable and what the results of the tax policy are. We need to be clear-eyed about what it does. But it’s too early to come to any clear conclusions.

**Vital City:** In the old world of spot rezonings, a developer would go to the City Council with a proposal, the council would demand more affordable units at lower income bands, and the developer would say it doesn’t pencil out — even though their first offer probably more than penciled out. The public never really knows the real math. Do you agree?

**Dan Garodnick:** It’s also true that different projects have different considerations for what makes them viable. So yes, in some circumstances it’s hard to suss out the real picture and the absolute final line between viable and not. But if a single dollar of public money is going into a project, the public should have absolute transparency as to what’s going on.

**Vital City:** [Henry Grabar](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-high-price-of-fine-print) wrote a piece for us about how much in the building code inflates costs and adds complexity. Have you had a chance to scour the code for the small things that add up?

**Dan Garodnick:** We did some of that when I was in the City Council — looking at a set of rules that each individually made sense at one time, but taken together started creating unnecessary obstacles and felt ridiculous. That should be a constant part of the agenda, and I’d encourage it to be a priority for this Council, too.

**Vital City:** Forget about the incremental approach of City of Yes for a moment. If you were starting from scratch and building a new zoning code, what would it look like?

**Dan Garodnick:** You’d start from a great transit system that works and is reliable, and you’d build most densely where transit was most accessible. You’d prioritize housing over cars in construction and make sure your neighborhoods were walkable, filled with parks and schools and everything you need within a small radius of your home.

Zoning has a purpose — to ensure that uses that don’t belong together stay apart. But it’s also had a real limiting effect, which we’re now starting to address. One thing we found with City of Yes for Economic Opportunity: the definition of manufacturing has changed enormously since 1961\. Back then, manufacturing was, for all intents and purposes, a cement factory. Today it could be a 3D printer or a jewelry maker — something that could easily live in a commercial district. We made that change, the largest expansion of manufacturing in sixty years. Zoning has a purpose, but it needs to evolve with the times and reflect a modern economy.

**Vital City:** New York puts a heavy share of the property tax burden on commercial property and tries to lighten the load on residential. But within the residential classes, renters bear a disproportionate burden — they just don’t see it broken out because it’s passed along in their rent. Is the way we tax rental apartment buildings itself a drag on housing production?

**Dan Garodnick:** It’s one of the reasons you need tax incentives to make housing production happen in New York.

**Vital City:** What are the realistic prospects for property tax reform? People have been talking about it forever.

**Dan Garodnick:** Any time you change the property tax system, it’s a zero-sum experience. Any mayor who takes it on will need to do so sensitively and carefully because it affects real human beings with certain economic expectations for their families. 

**Vital City:** Mamdani is embracing a lot of pro-development, abundance-style policy ideas while also pushing for a rent freeze and using landlords as a punching bag — think about the [boxing-style posters](https://www.nyc.gov/main/rental-ripoff?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for hearings about “Rental Ripoffs.” Good strategy?

**Dan Garodnick:** I happen to think that tenant protections and housing supply go hand in hand. It’s good to advocate for rules that make sure tenants aren’t being abused or taken advantage of. And at the same time, adding housing supply is another form of tenant protection, because when tenants have a little more leverage, they’re not subject to the same sorts of mistreatment. 

**Vital City:** Talk to a hundred economists and 99 will tell you rent stabilization isn’t great economic policy. Talk to a hundred New York politicians and all of them will defend it. Is there any world in which it gets meaningfully scrutinized?

**Dan Garodnick:** It’s here to stay.

**Vital City:** Right now, vacancy is around 1.4%. But if we were suddenly at 10%, the system would still be defended, wouldn’t it?

**Dan Garodnick:** We are far from being out of our emergency condition. It’s hard to imagine a circumstance in which anyone would advocate for rent stabilization to end.

**Vital City:** We’ve published pieces by [Alex Armlovich](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/a-housing-roadmap-for-new-yorks-next-mayor) and [Howard Slatkin](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-rent-is-too-damn-high-but-also-too-low) that both argue for a less blunt instrument than the Rent Guidelines Board’s single increase or freeze. There are many different types of rent-stabilized buildings and landlords. Is the current tool too simplistic?

**Dan Garodnick:** If the city had the tools to do this with more nuance, it certainly would help, because right now everybody is treated exactly the same, and that may or may not be fair. I remember representing 30,000 rent-stabilized tenants in Stuyvesant Town. The owner of those buildings — whether it was MetLife or Tishman Speyer — was in a very different condition than a small landlord in Brooklyn or Queens who owned one or two buildings. They’re only the same insofar as the law that covers them happens to be the same. Everything else about their circumstances is quite different.
### New York’s Worst Housing Production Impediment?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-seqra-slows-housing-development-new-york/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:37:28.000Z
A 123-unit senior housing building in NoHo. A new headquarters for a blood bank. A 79-unit affordable housing development in Sag Harbor. A neighborhood rezoning in Inwood. What do all these projects have in common?

They were all delayed, and in some cases denied, after private individuals challenged their land-use approvals under New York State’s environmental review law, the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA).

In recent years, federal and state lawmakers across the country have realized that initially well-intentioned environmental review laws like SEQRA have instead slowed down and increased the cost of development.

In her most recent budget, Gov. Kathy Hochul joined their ranks, proposing to exempt a handful of strategic priorities, like multifamily housing, childcare and resiliency projects, from SEQRA to accelerate their development.

These reforms did not come out of nowhere: The history of SEQRA can shed light on why she is proposing this now and how the proposal might play out in Albany.

### From good intentions to bad results

SEQRA requires state and local governments to identify and address the potential impacts of public actions like rezonings and infrastructure projects on the surrounding communities — and allows those communities to challenge those reviews in court if they believe them to be insufficient.

In passing SEQRA in 1975, state lawmakers hoped that environmental review would make the government more accountable to New Yorkers. But a half century later, these reforms have instead slowed public decision-making by burying new development in paperwork and opening the door to legal challenges.

Gov. Hugh L. Carey[ proposed the bill](https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/18/archives/carey-seeks-to-strengthen-states-role-on-land-use.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that became SEQRA in April 1975, at a moment when public trust in New York government was at an all-time low. Robert Caro had just published “The Power Broker,” his biography of Robert Moses’ use and abuse of power to build housing and infrastructure throughout New York. The New York State[ Urban Development Corporation](https://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/09/archives/the-monthlong-drama-at-the-udc-synopsis-of-a-near-tragedy.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was insolvent, causing Carey to appoint Richard Ravitch to stave off default on its $1 billion in outstanding debt. And New York City was in the middle of its fiscal crisis,[ teetering on the brink of bankruptcy](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/drop-dead-city-review) after banks cut off its access to the bond market.

Like many other governors at that time, the newly-elected Carey responded to the perceived failures of big government by placing checks and balances on the state and local agencies that had nearly bankrupted New York. Returning power to communities, he hoped, would enable individuals to hold executive power to account. 

SEQRA was one of the most far-reaching of those reforms. The idea was appealing: If only Robert Moses had been required to pause, crunch numbers and hold public hearings, he might not have pursued projects like the Cross Bronx Expressway that polluted the environment and displaced thousands of New Yorkers. 

During the early 1970s, many states passed state-level equivalents of the federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which Congress approved in 1969 after a series of environmental disasters including an oil spill off Santa Barbara, Calif. and a fire on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River.

But Carey’s proposal went further than other states’ local NEPAs. SEQRA would subject a broad range of actions to review; New York became one of just seven states, for example, that would require it for zoning and land use actions, in addition to the large-scale infrastructure projects subject to NEPA. 

Carey[ signed the bill into law in August](https://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/07/archives/carey-signs-bills-on-environment-impact-statements-required.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), over the[ objections](https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/14/archives/builders-upset-by-prospect-of-new-environment-rule.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of a coalition that included the Real Estate Board of New York, building contractors, construction unions and New York City Mayor Abe Beame. They all warned that interest groups could weaponize SEQRA to obstruct development, as had already happened after the passage of NEPA. After NEPA went into effect in 1970, environmental advocates and community groups successfully blocked federal projects across the country, including a 1972 lawsuit to halt the construction of the Metropolitan Correction Center in lower Manhattan.

Carey insisted those concerns were overstated — that SEQRA would only apply to “significant” projects and that any problems that arose could be fixed in the future. Those revisions never came, and the delays and cost concerns raised by SEQRA’s opponents became baked into New York’s planning processes. The genesis of Hochul’s determination to pass SEQRA reform responds directly to the warnings of those early critics.

<!DOCTYPE html> 

Environmental review adds years before a project even reaches the approval process

Median duration of environmental review and pre-certification for NYC zoning changes, before entering the formal land-use review (ULURP)

Full EIS  
Environmental Impact Statement

33 months

Streamlined assessment  
No significant impacts found

23 months

012 mo24 mo36 mo

These timelines are *before* the project enters ULURP — the formal approval process adds more time on top.

---

Elizabeth Street Garden

Affordable senior housing tied up in SEQRA litigation for nearly a decade

Mayor withdrew from project

Inwood rezoning

2018 rezoning won at lower court, overturned on appeal

First project delayed 3 years

0

states with SEQRA-like review for zoning changes

0

SEQRA court challenges decided in 2024

0

challenges that actually prevailed

**Even meritless lawsuits add cost and delay.** The threat of a challenge is enough to deter projects from ever being proposed.

Source: Sean Campion, Vital City. Median durations based on NYC zoning changes 2014-2017.

### How it works

Under SEQRA, state and local governments must conduct an environmental review for all “discretionary” actions: cases in which a public entity has a choice about whether to approve a proposal.

Review is required, for example, for land use actions that require zoning changes or special permits, for the construction of new public facilities like schools, libraries and highways, and for many private projects that are awarded public subsidies. It is not needed for routine actions where governments must issue approvals based on a set of criteria, like the issuance of building permits for projects that meet zoning rules, or for maintenance and repair work.

Before an agency can grant a discretionary approval, the applicant (a public agency in the case of public projects, or a private developer for many rezonings or permit applications) must extensively review the project’s potential effects on the surrounding community. 

After determining that the project is not explicitly exempted from review under law or regulation, the applicant first conducts a streamlined review known as an environmental assessment (EAS) to determine whether the project might have “significant adverse impacts” on the environment or surrounding community, such as traffic flow, construction noise, shadows, increases in the number of school-age children or water runoff.

Most projects end the environmental review at this stage. The reviewing agency declares that the project will not have adverse impacts, occasionally after a public hearing, and the project can move to the agency’s decision-makers for a final thumbs-up or thumbs-down. In New York City, projects enter the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) after completing this step.

A smaller number of projects, including many capital projects and neighborhood rezonings, however, are required to undergo deeper scrutiny through a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

An EIS requires its own extensive process. The agency or private applicant develops a scope of work, prepares for and holds a public hearing, then publishes a draft impact statement on up to 20 topics. This is followed by another public hearing and round of comments. The agency overseeing the review must declare that the review is complete before accepting a final EIS, which must include a statement of findings and any potential mitigations.

Even for simple projects that end review after the streamlined EAS, this process translates into months, and often years, of legal, lobbying, communications and executive time. Projects requiring a full EIS produce impact statements whose length can better be measured in linear feet than in page numbers.

 The threat of a SEQRA challenge is enough to deter projects from ever being proposed; a chilling effect that never shows up in court statistics. Some applicants shrink projects to avoid triggering a full EIS; others expand scope proactively to head off complaints.

### Review as roadblock

This complex process alone does not explain how environmental review came to become an obstacle to discretionary projects. On paper, SEQRA is merely an information-gathering requirement. Yet in the real world, its implementation has created a time consuming and bureaucratic exercise in risk management.

Three developments led to this point:

1\. **Environmental review is enforced through the court by individuals**: Like many reforms of the 1970s, environmental review empowers individuals to challenge administrative actions by suing public agencies, a concept known as a private right of action. The intent was that public accountability would keep agencies on the straight-and-narrow. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before project opponents leveraged SEQRA’s private right of action to obstruct projects they disapproved of, as had already happened under NEPA with the lower Manhattan jail. Over the past 50 years, private individuals and groups have challenged nearly every action that public agencies take in the environmental review process. As a result, agencies and applicants have potential lawsuits in mind at every step. 

2\. **Early SEQRA litigation made a “hard look” the law of the land:** A series of early court rulings increased the level of scrutiny required beyond Carey’s original intent. The most significant of these cases was[ a 1979 decision](https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1241&context=pelr&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Page%204,of%20whether%20the%20agency's%20decision) that temporarily blocked the construction of Syracuse University’s JWA Wireless Dome stadium. Neighbors sued to block the project, arguing that the State authority overseeing the project had failed to thoroughly analyze the stadium’s traffic impacts before approving it. The court agreed with the plaintiffs, halting the stadium project, and finding that agencies must take a “hard look” at all potential impacts before acting. Over time, subsequent cases applied this “hard look” test to every step in the review process, increasing the time needed to complete reviews.

3\. **How many technical analyses?!** SEQRA originally focused on a limited number of environmental impacts, but over time, the number grew. One City government veteran described the additions as driven by planners and advocates, like myself, who insist on data-driven and accountable governance. But the desire to improve analysis has increased review times and opened new opportunities for potential lawsuits. New York City, for example, now requires [20 technical analyses](https://www.nyc.gov/site/oec/environmental-quality-review/technical-manual.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), ranging from intensive analyses of impacts on infrastructure, traffic, and air quality to non-environmental concerns like neighborhood character, socioeconomic changes and historic resources. Mistakes in any one of those analyses can trip up a project, and scope changes can require starting the analysis over again. The ongoing redevelopment of Willets Point, for example, required [two supplemental EISs](https://a002-ceqraccess.nyc.gov/Handlers/ProjectFile.ashx?file=MjAyM1wyM0RNRTAwNlFcZmluZGluZ3NcMjNETUUwMDZRX1N0YXRlbWVudF9PZl9GaW5kaW5nc18wMjE5MjAyNS5wZGY1&signature=5748b7c8f368be0abfd2c9b1d94da747f4c9929c&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=A%20supplemental%20Final%20Environmental%20Impact,February%202024%20%28CEQR%2023DME005Q%29): one in 2013 to modify the original 2008 EIS, and a second revision in 2024 after the scope changed again.

### What it all adds up to

The good news is that relatively few projects get sued under SEQRA, and most lawsuits challenging environmental review fail. In 2024, for example, State courts decided[ 43 SEQRA challenges](https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5684&context=faculty%5Fscholarship&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), of which only five prevailed. But the mere threat of legal challenges increases the time, cost and uncertainty for projects that already undergo extensive environmental review.

My analysis of[ New York City zoning changes](https://cbcny.org/research/improving-new-york-citys-land-use-decision-making-process?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from 2014 and 2017 found that environmental review, even for projects that have no impacts, takes a long time. Projects taking advantage of streamlined environmental assessments took a median of 23 months to complete environmental review and pre-certification before entering the City’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), compared to 33 months for those undergoing a full EIS.

Simply dragging out the approval process can be enough to stop a project. Applicants can run out of money or lose financing. They can be required to redo analyses after a certain period of time. Markets and political winds can shift.

Opponents of a proposal to build affordable senior housing at the[ Elizabeth Street Garden](https://www.curbed.com/article/eric-adams-save-elizabeth-street-garden-flops.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), for example, tied up the project in litigation for nearly a decade before convincing Mayor Eric Adams to withdraw from the project in his final months in office. A lawsuit challenging the 2018 Inwood rezoning, which permitted 1,800 new affordable housing units, won at a lower court before getting overturned on appeal, ultimately delaying the[ first project](https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2021/06/17/inwood-affordable-housing-project-moves-forward-after-rezoning/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), with 174 affordable units and a new public library, from securing approvals for three years.

More rarely, a lawsuit can kill a project altogether. In 2022, wealthy Sag Harbor residents[ used SEQRA to block](https://www.eastendbeacon.com/sag-harbor-affordable-housing-code-struck-down/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a 79-unit affordable housing complex in a town where the average home is[ worth $2.2 million](https://www.zillow.com/home-values/47499/sag-harbor-ny/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Interested parties can also leverage the threat of a lawsuit to extract benefits. Recently a labor group[ challenged the EIS](https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2026/01/last-minute-lawsuit-aims-to-block-micron-chip-fabs-on-environmental-grounds.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for Micron’s new semiconductor factory in Clay, NY to secure labor commitments.

And even for the majority of projects that do not get sued, environmental review requirements can affect what gets proposed or built. Some applicants shrink projects to get below thresholds known to trigger a more extensive EIS. Others, especially in the public sector, proactively expand the scope of capital projects to anticipate complaints from potential detractors. Leah Brooks’ and Zachary Liscow’s[ analysis of federal transportation projects](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20200398&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), for example, found that highway construction costs tripled following the passage of NEPA.

### The shape of reform

Despite its economic success, New York faces an immense housing shortage, threats from climate change and aging infrastructure that is increasingly falling into disrepair. Addressing these challenges will require public actions that are subject to SEQRA, such as increasing housing capacity via rezonings, expanding renewable energy and upgrading storm sewers to mitigate climate risk.

New York’s land-use and permitting framework was adopted in the 1970s, in the wake of urban renewal and environmental disasters. It prioritized environmental protection, community input and transparency into public decision-making. By design, it slowed down and increased the cost of projects, and sometimes dissuaded them from happening at all. But in the process of addressing those concerns, environmental review often wound up preserving the status quo at the expense of progress.

Reforming environmental review does not mean abandoning state and local oversight. The development that Governor Hochul would exempt from SEQRA would still be subject to zoning and building codes. Approval processes like ULURP would remain in place. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation will enforce the state’s many environmental protections, most of which passed after SEQRA went into effect. 

The changes simply rebalance public decision-making processes so that New York can address its mounting needs at a pace befitting the scale of its challenges.
### Can Mayor Mamdani Freeze the Rent? It’s Complicated
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-rent-freeze-nyc-rent-guidelines-board-explained/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:23.000Z
Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected mayor who promised as a candidate to freeze the rent for rent-stabilized units each year in his four-year term, will soon seek to make good on his promise.

He can’t do it alone. He needs the cooperation of the NYC Rent Guidelines Board, an appointed body on which both of us have served as chair in recent years. The RGB was created pursuant to state law to set rent adjustments for apartments in the city that are subject to the Rent Stabilization Law. About one million of New York City’s over three-and-a-half million units of housing are rent-stabilized.

The incoming Board — on [which Mamdani has made a majority of appointments](https://gothamist.com/news/mamdani-names-new-rent-guidelines-board-majority-testing-rent-freeze-pledge?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — will begin its work [this month](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/2026-meetings/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). At the top of its agenda will almost surely be considering whether to keep the rents of rent-stabilized housing at current levels. As it does its work, the Board can best serve the city if all members are committed to carefully reviewing data collected and analyzed by RGB staff and other information brought to the board by experts and the public before reaching its decision.

Put differently, the RGB should not simply execute the mayor’s command. There are laws to follow and economic data to consider. The stakes are high for tenants facing increased housing burdens, for landlords facing increasing costs and for the fabric of our diverse city.

### The Rent Guidelines Board’s mandate

The City's rent stabilization system differs from rent regulation in other jurisdictions. While some jurisdictions allow landlords to increase rent when an apartment turns over to a new tenant, the Housing Stability & Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (HSTPA) eliminated vacancy rent hikes. Rent adjustments in New York are also set by a Board instead of being based on a formula that is tied to the inflation rate. The Board can therefore set rent increase rates higher or lower than inflation, based on the statutory criteria it applies.

The media rarely explains the RGB’s decision-making process clearly and sometimes echoes misunderstandings about how the Board works. Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding is that mayors decide whether and how much rents go up. But that is not how rent stabilization was designed to work. Even though one of us chaired the Board during the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio, who used the bully pulpit to advocate for a rent freeze, we know well it is the members of the Board who have the sole power to make this decision. Each of us had to work to get a majority of the Board to support what became the adopted guidelines each year. Board members take their roles seriously and typically engage in lengthy discussions about the data before deciding which proposals to support. Rather than seeing a rent freeze as a simple test of mayoral power, the public is best served by understanding the limited but important function of the Board and the constraints on its decisions. 

Let’s step back a bit. The [Rent Stabilization Law (RSL)](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCadmin/0-0-0-201924?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) charges the Board with one central task: adjusting rents of rent-stabilized units after reviewing “the economic condition of the residential real estate industry,” cost of living data and a catch-all, “such other data as may be made available to it.”Thus, there is no single, simple formula for the Board to apply. 

To get into the weeds, the law requires that the Board review data regarding the operating and financing costs landlords are bearing, including (1) real estate taxes and sewer and water rates; (2) gross operating maintenance costs (such as insurance premiums, governmental fees and the cost of fuel and labor, among other things) and (3) costs and availability of mortgage financing. The Board is also charged with considering the supply of housing as well as vacancy rates. While tenants’ rent burden — the portion of their income they spend on rent — is not explicitly mentioned in the RSL, the Board has interpreted its mandate for decades to include an assessment of housing affordability. 

While the mayor appoints all members of the Rent Guidelines Board (or a predecessor mayor, for holdovers), it is an independent body that is required by law to make its own determination about rent adjustments. The Board is composed of the chair, who serves at the pleasure of the mayor; two members who represent tenant interests; two members who represent landlord interests and four members who represent the general public. Other than the chair, members serve terms of two, three or four years. 

Tenant members typically focus on affordability for today’s tenants. Landlord members often focus on the finances of rent-stabilized buildings, such as whether they are earning enough to cover maintenance and capital repairs as well as a profit for their owners. Those are appropriate agendas for those two sets of members. Chairs consider all of this, but also usually focus on the long-term, asking whether proposed rent adjustments will ensure that the rent-stabilized housing stock has sufficient revenue to be maintained for its residents for years to come.

Landlords have repeatedly challenged the Board’s annual rent guidelines, but courts have generally deferred to the Board’s expertise and upheld its balancing of the competing concerns of increasing costs for landlords and diminishing affordability for tenants.

<!DOCTYPE html> 

How the Rent Guidelines Board works

The nine-member board sets annual rent adjustments for NYC’s roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments.

Chair

Tenant

Tenant

Owner

Owner

Public

Public

Public

Public

 Chair

 Tenant (2)

 Owner (2)

 Public (4)

All members are appointed by the mayor.

The chair and public members often are the deciding votes.

▼

Price Index

Tracks building expenses

Income Study

Measures rent burden

Supply Report

Vacancy & stock condition

▼

0%–5.25% typical increase

Guidelines aren’t the only increases.

Landlords can receive additional increases for MCIs and IAIs on top of the annual vote.

Source: NYC Rent Guidelines Board · Vital City

### The state of the housing stock

The Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, passed by the state Legislature and signed into law by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2019, dramatically altered the finances of the rent-stabilized housing stock. Proponents of the law wanted to limit ways that landlords could raise rents and, in particular, curb incentives to exit the program through high-rent/high-income deregulation. They succeeded in doing that, but rents flattened and buildings dropped in value as a result. Many buildings in the program are now showing financial distress as expenses have continued to increase each year.

A recent [Furman Center report](https://furmancenter.org/nyc-rent-stab-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) shows that there is reason to worry that the current regulatory environment has set up a dynamic where around two-thirds of the rent-regulated housing stock is on a trajectory of financial distress — potentially including mortgage default and bankruptcy — that will result in deteriorating quality in housing for tenants. This would mean more heat and hot water outages, more pest infestations and more lead paint hazards, among other health and safety concerns.

That picture of the current stock brings us back to how the Board makes its decisions. As we noted, many people think that the mayor simply tells the Board how to vote. That has not been our experience. Nor has it been our sense of the experience of other chairs we have spoken with. 

It is true that mayors often appoint members who are broadly sympathetic to either tenants or owners. Now, even with some members whose terms straddle previous administrations, Mayor Mamdani has tapped a majority of the incoming Board.

The mayor does not — and should not — “control” them. With a process designed to provide broad technical and public input, chairs and other Board members formulate proposed rent guidelines that reflect the data that the RGB’s research staff provides them. The Board staff and members take their work seriously. They must consider the data before them, and the Rent Stabilization Law requires the Board to make challenging calls to balance increasing costs for building owners with affordability concerns for tenants. If the record does not support a finding that the Board’s decision was based upon their statutory mandate, it is open to challenge. 

[Some have asked](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/new-york-needs-a-smarter-way-to-control-rents) [why a rent increase or freeze](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/a-housing-roadmap-for-new-yorks-next-mayor) needs to be boiled down to a single number when so many buildings and building owners face different pressures and conditions. It’s a fair question, but right now, the law doesn’t allow for fine-grained distinctions. Each year’s rent guidelines are a blunt instrument that applies to every building with rent-stabilized units. This means that the same figure applies to a building in the Bronx composed entirely of 99 rent-stabilized units and to the one remaining rent-stabilized unit in a 99-unit luxury building in midtown Manhattan where the owner has no limitation on how much it can charge for those ”market rate” units. 

The Mamdani administration will need to grapple with this blunt instrument, just as every previous administration has had to. Ultimately, the Board must pay close attention to the data to determine how rents should be adjusted — understanding that a freeze will likely harm buildings in deep financial distress even as it would aim to help tenants in buildings whose landlords are doing just fine. 

### The Board does not act alone

Whatever the Board decides, many stabilized buildings will continue to face financial distress. But the fate of the rent-stabilized housing stock does not solely rest with the Board. The governor, the Legislature, the mayor and the City Council can all act to ensure that the rent-stabilized housing stock has sufficient funding for maintenance and needed capital repairs. While the City and State have many tools at their disposal to address financial gaps, the three main avenues for helping distressed buildings are bigger rent increases, new subsidies or reduced costs for buildings in financial distress. 

After the passage of the 2019 HSTPA, rent increases for rent-stabilized units can only be authorized by the Board (or, subject to stricter limits under the HSTPA and subsequent amendments, through temporary Major Capital Improvement (MCI) increases and permanent Individual Apartment Improvement (IAI) increases). And because previous amendments to the RSL have limited the Board’s discretion to target certain subsets of the housing stock, rent increases cannot be targeted to the buildings that need them most (not to mention the fact that tenants in the most distressed buildings tend to have lower incomes and are less likely to be able to afford those targeted increases). RGB rent increases will not be enough on their own to resolve the financial distress of many of these buildings.

Direct subsidies to preserve this stock will be very expensive, easily measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and soon into the billions of dollars each year — at a time when the City is already struggling to close significant budget gaps. Nonetheless, the City and state may need to subsidize a large portion of rent-stabilized housing to keep it from failing, and that will redirect resources from other priorities.

Broader changes to the regulatory and property tax regime that govern revenues and expenses for this housing stock might help, but none of those changes will be easy, and indirect subsidies come with measurable costs as well, even if they are not showing up in State and City budgets. It will be difficult otherwise to reduce costs, such as insurance and interest on mortgages, as these are set by third parties over whom government actors have relatively little control.

There are no easy answers to this growing problem. But as the politics heat up, it is important that the public understand the basic nature, power and obligations of the Rent Guidelines Board. All New Yorkers should be concerned about the long-term viability of the rent-regulated housing stock, and we are all on notice that it is at risk. This part of the housing stock is a precious resource for a city rightly committed to socio-economic diversity, and we should all look for a path forward to preserve it.

We assume that the mayor will work hard to make good on his promise to freeze the rent. If he doesn’t, many of those who voted for him will see it as a betrayal. If the Board, following its mandate, agrees, preserving the stabilized stock will require partnering with the governor, the Legislature and the City Council to address the impending financial crisis facing a large swath of this vital source of housing.
### Landlords: The ‘Good,’ the ‘Bad’ and the Ugly Financial Realities
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/rental-ripoff-hearings-landlords-tenants-economics/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:12.000Z
The Mamdani administration has been promoting its series of [“Rental Ripoff Hearings,”](https://www.nyc.gov/main/rental-ripoff?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with publicity posters reminiscent of a prizefight, pitting New Yorkers against Bad Landlords. The hearings themselves have felt more like a resource fair. While this may have disappointed audiences hungry for the spectacle of a fight, the distance between the advertising and the product was apt: It’s not knockout punches but *resources* that are needed to make housing work better for millions of New Yorkers. 

The landlord-tenant relationship is far from a simple battle between good guys and bad guys. In a properly functioning housing system, it can be a mutually beneficial compact, with built-in incentives for landlords to maintain buildings in good condition and provide resident services, and for tenants to pay their rent and be good neighbors. But in a city where housing is scarce and [both rents and the costs of operating buildings are so high](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-rent-is-too-damn-high-but-also-too-low), the relationship breaks down and becomes heavily regulated. 

Housing is not a morality play; it’s an economically complex system. There are some bad actors who actively aim to break the rules for personal gain. But there are far more property owners and managers who are committed to maintaining housing in good condition for their tenants, and many of them are not succeeding. If we misunderstand distressed housing only as a product of landlord neglect or malice, we won’t succeed in solving the problems tenants face, and are likely to make them worse. 

In other words, rather than looking at landlords and tenants as prizefighting opponents facing off in the ring, it may be more helpful to understand them as competitors in an increasingly punishing [Hunger Games](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a competition in which the players aren’t truly antagonists but are forced into escalating conflict by dysfunctional financial and regulatory conditions.

### The will and the means to be a good landlord

To start, we should step back and review what a landlord needs to do. “Landlording” involves not just ownership and financial support of the building but also property management, a critical but often overlooked role in our housing system that encompasses staffing and operation of buildings, minor and major repairs, rent collection, administrative filings and numerous other functions. Property management may be performed by the owner or under contract with them. In any event, the owner as landlord is ultimately responsible for the quality of property management. 

There’s a common assumption that disrepair in a building — as evidenced by the issuance of housing code violations — is de facto evidence that there’s a bad landlord. The reality is often more complicated. While there are indeed neglectful landlords who purposefully underfund property management and allow their buildings to fall into disrepair, there are also high-capacity nonprofit and for-profit organizations that take on distressed housing with many violations in order to restore it to sound condition.

We shouldn’t look at housing code violations as reliable evidence of scofflaw behavior the same way we might see, say, a long string of red-light camera tickets. Building violations are less like a summons and more akin to a doctor’s visit where the patient shows a fever — an indication that a building is in poor health, but not evidence of why. Violations may be caused by a chronic condition like neglect, past disinvestment or advancing building age. They may be from an acute condition, like a fire in an apartment. The landlord might be at fault — say, because a prolonged disruption to building heat led a tenant to use a faulty space heater — or might not, as in a case where a tenant in psychological distress has set off the sprinkler system, causing water damage to multiple apartments. 

The conditions under which tenants live are partly a reflection on their landlord, but also a product of each building’s financial realities. In some neighborhoods and buildings, prevailing rents are high while in others they are lower, and in roughly half the city’s rental housing rent stabilization laws limit the rate at which rents may increase — more tightly since 2019 legislative changes. The basic costs of operating a building vary less: Lower rents don’t mean there’s less of a need to take out the trash or fix the boiler. For an increasing share of buildings, revenues aren’t covering operating expenses or the cost of capital upgrades. Under these conditions, even the best landlords can’t actually be good landlords.

To understand how financial circumstances affect buildings owned by various types of landlords, it’s useful to draw a simple diagram in which the horizontal axis represents the motivations of the landlord, and the vertical axis the revenues of their building. These aren’t absolutes; the point is that it’s a spectrum in both directions. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/image1-1776259647240.png)

On the right-hand side of this chart fall landlords who specifically aim to meet tenants’ needs, support their stability and uphold their rights. Among these are the city’s many operators of affordable housing, including both nonprofit and mission-driven for-profit organizations. At the left are those landlords whose motivation broadly derives from financial self-interest. 

Every landlord has a blend of motivations. For instance, there are many for-profit owners with a strong social mission, and nonprofits also need revenue to sustain their operations and advance their mission.

At the top of the chart, we have buildings where revenues are more than sufficient to maintain buildings in good condition. At the bottom, we have buildings with low rent rolls that are inadequate to cover the cost of operating the building properly, let alone making the capital investments needed in any building over the long run. 

We can use this diagram to help understand how different types of landlords respond to financial circumstances, and what types of public policies can be used to address these situations.

Let’s start with the upper portion of the diagram, where buildings generate sufficient revenue to do right by tenants. This is the way things are supposed to work. For instance, a socially-oriented landlord, on the upper right, has the resources to pursue their mission, maintaining buildings in clean and sound condition, employing attentive and respectful staff, providing prompt repairs and responses to complaints, remaining accessible for tenants’ questions, offering clear communication and feedback, and staying on top of myriad compliance requirements. This condition requires regulated affordable housing to be adequately funded, whether by subsidies that reduce the debt service on the building or by rental vouchers or other subsidies that bolster revenues. 

In the upper-left portion of our chart, we’ll find profit-driven landlords who maintain their buildings well. In a properly functioning housing system, there is an alignment between the financial interests of the owner and the interest of a tenant in living in a well-maintained building. If tenants can leave for comparably priced, better-maintained housing when landlords do a bad job, landlords will keep buildings in good condition to achieve lower vacancy rates and a more valuable asset. Under these conditions, there is little need for code enforcement to ensure housing quality. 

In a housing market suffering from a deep supply shortage, however, the rents tenants need to pay for quality housing can rise sharply. Rent stabilization was established to enable tenants to renew their leases without precipitous increases. Under rent regulation, though, the tools available to both landlord and tenant become duller. Because landlords don’t receive a financial benefit from further investment in their buildings, they have a disincentive to provide more than a bare minimum level of service. With few comparably priced alternatives available to them, tenants can’t act on their discontent by moving out. This makes even financially viable rent-regulated housing far more reliant on a system of enforcement. It also encourages buildings to slip down toward the equator of our chart, or below. 

Let’s move our way down to the lower-right quadrant, where we will find the well-intentioned, socially committed landlord whose rent roll doesn’t pay the cost of maintaining buildings and properly serving tenants. There are an increasing number of mission-driven affordable housing operators, nonprofit and for-profit, in this situation. Notably, the New York City Housing Authority can also be placed here: despite dedicated leadership and supportive State and local policy, the federal government’s systematic underfunding of public housing makes it impossible for NYCHA to be a good landlord. 

What can a landlord do in these circumstances? In years past, private owners may have been able to raise capital for improvements by refinancing their buildings at lower interest rates, but the rates that made this possible are no longer commercially available, and their return is not imminent. Raising rents to make their balance sheets work isn’t an option in rent-stabilized or subsidized affordable housing. This leaves the alternatives of cutting services to the bone — something a well-intentioned landlord really doesn’t want to do — or asking for government assistance. 

Finally, let’s look at the lower left of our chart, which is where we would find a textbook slumlord. Without a prospect of running a profitable building, this landlord’s angle is to squeeze as much cash flow out of the building as possible while spending as little as possible. This is terrible for the people who live there, and it’s terrible for the housing supply. Even if it’s possible to get the building into the hands of a well-intentioned landlord for rehabilitation that keeps it affordable, this requires significant government funding. With public resources limited, this may work for a relative handful of buildings, but not for large numbers of them.

When well-intentioned landlords cannot see a reasonable prospect of operating a building successfully, they will be sellers and not buyers of buildings. Bad landlords become the only buyers, and the worst outcomes multiply. 

### Policy implications

The goal of housing policy should not be to herd landlords along the horizontal axis of our chart, but to take constructive steps to increase the share of buildings in the upper half of the chart, and to minimize the number in the lower half. 

Where landlords are operating housing well, public policy should aim to sustain this. One way is to help manage operating costs. Administrative requirements, legal expenses insurance, utilities or other operating cost hikes all increase the price of delivering sound housing, making some share of well-performing buildings into poorly performing buildings. The City should pursue ways to alleviate burdens for landlords who do their jobs well, such as making low-cost insurance available. 

Housing policy should utilize the alignment between the interests of owners and tenants to keep buildings above the equator of our chart. For instance, both landlords and tenants benefit from the smooth renewal of housing vouchers, keeping missed rent payments from snowballing into massive arrears. Rather than sending these cases to drawn-out housing court proceedings, the City should embrace [proposals for diversion programs](https://thenyhc.org/2026/02/25/nyhc-report-nycs-affordable-housing-eviction-crisis-and-recommendations-to-fix-it/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that bring together landlords, tenants, case workers and public assistance agencies to work out timely solutions that prevent evictions and sustain building revenues. 

Regulations for affordable housing should be flexible enough to support long-term affordability within today’s financial realities. For instance, subsidized affordable housing is subject to a regulatory agreement with a housing agency that requires them to serve residents at a specified income level. Changes to rent laws in 2019 have in some instances imposed tighter caps on rents, leading to a revenue shortfall in affordable buildings. It’s possible to remedy this: when an affordable unit becomes vacant, it should be possible to reset rents based on the original regulatory agreement. This would help bolster the finances of affordable housing without raising rents on any tenant or removing any unit from regulation. 

A sustained policy of adding more housing will help bolster the market power of tenants to vote with their feet. But this will remain less true for residents of lower-priced rent-regulated housing. For these apartments, code enforcement should aim to improve the performance of landlords whose buildings have revenue sufficient to support proper maintenance when they are unresponsive to tenant complaints. The issuance of violations is less likely to produce satisfactory results for buildings in the lower-left quadrant of the chart, however. Violations of course do not create new revenues to cover the cost of repairs and upgrades, and financial penalties can actually diminish the ability to pay for these improvements. 

The City can and should intervene to address serious and urgent housing maintenance problems, and HPD’s enforcement system includes undertaking emergency repairs, which ameliorate conditions temporarily. Other programs, including Article 7A and Third-Party Transfer (defunct, but proposed to be [revived in modified form](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=7872930&GUID=DCC5EF0A-7863-47F2-A95A-B28A03D414E0&Options=&Search=&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)), have been created to transfer property management or ownership to a more responsible party. This can move them toward the right side of our diagram, but without the infusion of additional funding, these buildings will typically remain in or fall back into poor repair. 

This brings us to the elephant in the room: New York City has a large and growing population of buildings in the lower-right corner of the chart. For these buildings, tenants and owners aren’t Rocky Balboa and [Ivan Drago](https://youtu.be/966xtpEwYEo?si=mfae%5FsMpXvPklQ6l&t=65&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). They’re more like [Katniss Everdeen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katniss%5FEverdeen?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and her competitors, pitted against one another by a system that sets both up to fail. 

### Counting the lifeboats

First, the good news: The City has extensive experience in designing programs to recapitalize aging affordable housing. For instance, the Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT) program provides funding to recapitalize public housing as well as a [resident partnership model](https://chpcny.org/initiative/public-housing-revolution/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to help center the priorities of tenants for capital improvements and new property management. A comparison of violations data for PACT buildings and other housing, conducted by Citizens Housing and Planning Council, which I lead, suggests that the program’s capital investments are [dramatically improving building conditions](https://chpcny.org/publication/web-brief-what-the-data-says-about-housing-violations-and-pact/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Gov. Kathy Hochul has proposed reviving and enhancing the J-51 tax incentive program to support the rehabilitation of regulated housing. 

But the sheer scale of the financial needs is sobering. Many buildings that were developed under programs dedicated to social goals of long-term affordability and tenant stability have been systematically underfunded over time, reducing them to what I’ve called “[antisocial housing](https://citylimits.org/opinion-nycs-antisocial-housing-problem/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)” that fails to provide tenants with decent homes. NYCHA’s capital needs alone are estimated at roughly $80 billion. Estimates for other regulated housing vary, but Enterprise Community Partners and the National Equity Fund [recently found that](https://www.enterprisecommunity.org/sites/default/files/2025-10/Distress-in-NY-Affordable-Housing-Stock.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) nearly 60% of their New York housing portfolio was experiencing negative cash flow, indicating a large and growing problem. 

There are nearly 180,000 units of NYCHA housing, nearly 47,000 units of Mitchell-Lama housing under City jurisdiction, and nearly 200,000 units in subsidized, income-restricted housing. The City has both a financial interest and a moral obligation toward these buildings and their residents. If we can’t bring mission-driven affordable housing operators and tenants into a more harmonious relationship, there’s little reason to think it’s achievable for other categories of low-cost housing. 

There is also an enormous problem to solve in the non-subsidized housing stock. While rent-stabilized buildings that also contain a significant share of non-stabilized units have generally performed well, RGB data shows [pervasive financial trouble](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-rent-is-too-damn-high-but-also-too-low) in buildings containing primarily rent-stabilized housing. NYU’s Furman Center [estimates](https://furmancenter.org/overview-brief-rent-stabilized?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that there are more than 450,000 rent-stabilized units in this at-risk category. 

Some observers have imagined a future in which the City takes ownership of this housing to restore it and keep rents low. Even if we set aside [the experience of *in rem* housing in the 1970s and 1980s](https://www.furmancenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/04/AHistoryofHousingPolicycombined0601%5F000.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — when the City was unable to manage distressed housing and placed it back in nonprofit and private ownership to be rehabilitated and maintained — a major commitment of public resources would perversely prioritize this housing ahead of distressed income-restricted housing the City itself has financed. The City needs to explore solutions for non-subsidized housing that do not drain the resources needed to keep subsidized affordable housing afloat. 

In an environment where more of the city’s low-cost housing is sinking into the red, we run a very real risk of running out of lifeboats for it. We must reverse the widening gap between expenses and revenues. If we don’t, we can expect even harder choices about public priorities, housing conditions that continue to deteriorate and a further fraying of trust between tenants and landlords — with neither one emerging from this fight a winner.
### Stanley Richards on the Past, Present and Future of Rikers Island
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/stanley-richards-rikers-island-nyc-jails/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:44.000Z
*The new New York City correction commissioner, Stanley Richards, steps into his role with a perspective few in the history of the department have possessed: He has seen the system from both sides of the bars. Having cycled through Rikers Island in the mid-1980s before finding a path to leadership through advocacy and service, Richards brings that understanding of the jails’ environment to the top job — at a time when they are about to be largely taken over by a federal receiver.* 

*In this conversation with Vital City founder Elizabeth Glazer, Richards reflects on how his personal journey informs his approach to one of the city’s most entrenched challenges. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

---

**Elizabeth Glazer:** Commissioner, thanks so much for sitting down with me and congratulations on your position. You literally know the jail system inside out. I’m wondering if you’d describe how you first came into the system, what Rikers was like then, and how that has perhaps shaped your vision for the system going forward.

**Stanley Richards:** Thank you for this opportunity to speak with you and the readers of Vital City. My journey started years ago in Soundview Houses in the South Bronx, where I got involved early on in gang activities that escalated to drug use and drug sales. I found myself cycling in and out of jail. For a long part of my life, I believed that was the reality of my experience, and I learned to live in that system. I learned to survive on the streets and on Rikers.

When I was here, there were many more people — about 18,000 to 20,000\. \[*Editors’ note:* In the early 1990s, the jail complexes on Rikers Island held more than 20,000 individuals. Jail population fell to 3,800 in 2020\. Today, the population hovers around 6,800.\] The way you operated was to basically forget about everything in the community once you went over that bridge \[which separates Rikers Island from the rest of the city\] and focus on surviving in here. Survival was about movement and access to food and the right jobs.

My last incarceration happened in 1986, and I stayed here until 1988 fighting my case. Even though the jails were chaotic, we had steady officers. There was free movement. If you had a visit or a meal, they weren’t feeding you in the housing area; you went to the mess hall. If you needed the clinic, commissary or medical, they would call your housing area and you would get a pass. It was a way of managing the facility because everyone knew that if you got an infraction, you would lose that free movement. It was a way of saying, “We’re trusting you, and if you violate that trust, we’re going to take that from you.”

When I went upstate, I worked in pre-release and realized I didn’t have to live that life. I wanted to give back so others would know they didn’t have to live it either. When I was released, I went to The Fortune Society. While other organizations talked about reentry, Fortune was the organization that really walked the talk. That started my journey of trying to provide people with hope that life could be different.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** That philosophy seems to be what you’re taking into your current job. Over many decades, violence has been the problem. We’re now way above the levels of violence that the court found unconstitutional in 2015\. Why is this such a hard problem, and what is your approach?

**Stanley Richards:** When I look at how Rikers has operated over decades, I think we have a situation where hurt people hurt people. We have created a system structured in a way that increases isolation, devalues the people who work here and the people in our care, and diminishes hope. When you factor in violence and trauma, everyone ends up in a situation of “survival of the fittest.”

I’ve worked with an organizational psychologist who says the health or pathology of those in authority will be manifested in those with lesser authority. Our correction officers feel devalued, isolated, unseen and unheard. As a city, we have asked them to care for people who also feel that way. It is hard for members of service to extend care and comfort when they don’t feel it themselves.

Part of my work is the belief that a rising tide lifts all boats. I’ve told the unions and the members of service: I see you, I hear you and I value you. At the same time, we need to let the people in our care know they are valued. We are not the judge and jury. Our job is to care for you while you get your case adjudicated.

This isn’t a speedboat moment where I turn the ship around 180 degrees instantly. This is a cruise ship or battleship moment where it’s going to take critical inch-by-inch progress to turn around decades of neglect and harm.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** How do you see the role of the union in improving conditions? How do you get on the same side of the table?

**Stanley Richards:** The union is not my enemy; I need them in partnership. My goal of making sure we have safe jails is the same goal the union wants. I don’t want members doing 16-hour double tours. We may not all agree on strategy, but if we agree on our North Star, we can have conversations. Historically, they have been brought to the table only when implementation is happening. My strategy is bringing them to the table in the early stages.

We are looking at how we allocate officers. I want steady posts and a process that is fair and transparent. For example, during the recent major snowstorm, we experienced significant staff shortages. We came up with a strategy to provide incentives for officers to come in. Before rolling it out, I called the union heads at 8:00 PM to get their feedback. They were so appreciative that they sent out alerts on all their social media and chat rooms to support officers coming in.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** One flashpoint with the union has been over solitary confinement. What is the approach for someone who has repeatedly hurt others in custody?

**Stanley Richards:** We have to hold people accountable using the tools available, including prosecution through the District Attorney’s office. We also remove the person from the situation, but it is then our obligation to engage them to reduce the likelihood of them infracting again. Perpetual isolation does not reduce violence. If it did, it would have worked by now.

We are reaching out to experts around the country, including San Francisco, Connecticut, looking at models like Little Scandinavia in the Pennsylvania prison system and at the European system, anything that significantly reduces violence. 

**Elizabeth Glazer:** The jails are affected by many parties not under your control — DAs, defenders, judges. What role will you play in reducing lengths of stay?

**Stanley Richards:** We are looking at what levers we have to focus on population reduction. This includes working with the Office of Court Administration and DAs to move long-stay cases forward. I am also going to be using 6A \[*Editors’ note*: This refers to [a section of state law](https://law.justia.com/codes/new-york/cor/article-6-a/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=2025%20New%20York%20Laws%20COR%20%2D%20Correction,Program%20in%20New%20York%20City%20Correctional%20Institutions&text=Disclaimer:%20These%20codes%20may%20not%20be%20the%20most) that gives the correction commissioner the authority to “extend” a sentenced individual’s confinement to outside of jail when that person is enrolled in a work program or other program designated by the statute\] to make sure people who can be safely managed in the community get access to services so they don’t come back. Right now, we have about 520 people in the city-sentence pool.

We also have over 200 people who are state-ready \[meaning: awaiting transfer to state prison to start serving their term\]. Those folks should not be in our system. During COVID, [the population dropped from 5,000 to 3,800 in six weeks](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-state-of-new-york-citys-jails-year-end-2024/) because everyone — judges, DAs, corrections and City Hall — pulled in the same direction. We can use that experience as a live demonstration that we can bring down the population safely without a crisis.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** The federal courts have appointed a remediation manager with very broad powers. How do you anticipate working together?

**Stanley Richards:** Nick \[Deml\] and I have met a couple of times. Our role is to be in partnership to achieve safety and compliance with the Nunez contempt orders. He is going to be out here on Rikers Island with me. This isn’t about territory, ego or positional authority; it is about getting to safety.

My vision and model right now is people first. If we put the people who work in this department and the people in our care first, we can create the conditions that reduce violence.

My approach is to nail one corner of the blanket down at a time. The tendency is to try to nail them all down, but to do it in a way that is manageable, digestible and achievable, you nail one corner at a time.

**Elizabeth Glazer:** From your lips to God’s ears. Thank you, Stanley.
### What Molly Park Knows About Homelessness and City Government
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/molly-park-dss-exit-interview/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:13.000Z
---

*Molly Park spent 22 years in New York City government and almost nobody outside the policy world knows her name. That's partly the nature of the job: as commissioner of the Department of Social Services, she oversaw a $16 billion budget, 14,000 employees, and services touching 3 million New Yorkers a year — from SNAP benefits and Medicaid to the country's second-largest rental assistance program. Her last day was Feb. 27\. In this episode of "After Hours with Jamie Rubin," recorded less than a week after her departure from that role, Park gives what amounts to an exit interview — covering how she walked into an agency that was tens of thousands of cases behind on processing and what she did about it. Park discusses what she believes homelessness is fundamentally a housing problem that gets treated as a social services one, and what the right to shelter actually means in a city with 2 million rent-burdened households and a 1.4% vacancy rate.*

  
*The conversation is also a window into what the new Mamdani administration inherits. Park doesn't mince words about the federal threats bearing down on the social safety net: HR 1's broadened SNAP work requirements, which went into effect essentially on her successor's third day, now cover an estimated 230,000 to 240,000 New Yorkers — and the Trump administration's reinterpretation of the Welfare Reform Act could require immigration checks for everything from emergency shelter to food pantries.*

  
*Park wanted to stay on. The incoming team wanted its own people. She's at peace with that, and generous toward her successor, Erin Dalton. But the clock is already ticking on some very large problems.*

  
*You can listen to this episode on* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leaving-city-hall-an-exit-interview-with-molly-park/id1794619189?i=1000754684008&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *or* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/4mxtax5WK0LhFsoLEr23kg?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*

---

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

Molly Park's last day as the Department of Social Services Commissioner was February 27th, 2026\. If she never goes back into city government, she will have spent 22 years as a New York City public servant, becoming an expert in the budget, affordable housing development, homelessness, and every possible entitlement program.

I talked to Molly on Thursday, March 5th. It was definitely too early for her to reflect on her entire career, but our conversation was kind of an exit interview, touching on lessons learned from her many stops along the way — up to and including her discussions with the incoming mayor's team about staying on.

Molly's the kind of person who doesn't get much attention unless something is going badly on her watch. But New York City is full of extremely sophisticated consumers of government service, and like Knicks fans at the Garden, they know the right things to cheer for. Not the slam dunks, but the amazing pocket passes.

To stretch that analogy perhaps a little bit too far — Molly's departure has been marked by public and private send-offs and loud expressions of admiration and affection across the spectrum. The genius of Molly comes through in the article she wrote for Vital City back in December, entitled "System Coordination and Crisis Response to High-Acuity Homelessness."

When you read it, you'll see the distillation of her long career dealing with incredibly complicated problems. She acknowledges the challenges of bureaucracy and the limitations of fiscal resources, and in the end, she calls for individual accountability for performance at the highest level of government.

It's the kind of thing only someone like Molly could actually write — a career of mastery boiled down to a few simple ideas. There's every reason to think that agency leadership should turn over periodically, and you'll hear that Molly is a realist about that. She's proud of what she's accomplished and genuinely interested to see what the future holds, as well as curious about whether her successor comes up with some new approaches.

Okay. So Molly, thank you for being here.

**Molly Park:** Thanks so much for having me.

**Jamie:** We're recording this on March 5th, 2026\. When was your last day working for the city?

**Molly:** February 27th. So last Friday.

**Jamie:** So you've been in the wind for almost a week.

**Molly:** Yes, that is — I guess one way of putting it. There's been a lot of going-away parties. There are a lot of people leaving city government.

**Jamie:** Yeah. So let's start out — I gave a quick overview of what you've done, sort of the résumé version, but maybe it'd be helpful if you took literally two minutes to explain what you've done with yourself up to today.

**Molly:** So I've spent almost all of it in city government, working on issues primarily around housing and homelessness. Government was not the plan — I went to grad school at Berkeley, but was job hunting here for family reasons. I ended up at the Independent Budget Office, which is a watchdog city agency. I know you're familiar with it.

**Jamie:** Mm-hmm.

**Molly:** And that was going to be a landing point while I figured out something in the nonprofit sector. It seems, in retrospect, sort of immensely silly, but I was at a briefing on the new Housing Marketplace Plan — the Bloomberg housing plan — sitting in the basement at 100 Gold Street at HPD. And I just sort of had this realization: when you're in government, you get to write the strategy, you get to have a seat at the table, you get to be the one who shapes what happens. And I wanted in.

So from IBO I transitioned over to HPD, and then moved over to the Department of Homeless Services. Despite the fact that homelessness is fundamentally a housing issue — there are 86,000 people in the shelter system, and the one thing they all have in common is that they don't have an affordable place to live — homelessness is traditionally treated as a social service issue that's divorced from housing. Housing is considered an economic development issue; homelessness is a social service issue. And there are very few people in the city who speak both languages. So I wanted to be a bridge — to bring some of the real estate tools that I had over to the homeless services world and really try to service some of that connection within government.

That was the fall of 2019\. And what I ended up doing a lot of at DHS was public health, because COVID hit almost immediately after. It was certainly challenging, dealing with a population where thousands of people with underlying health conditions were living in congregate situations during a global pandemic. But I was able to do some of that bridge-building I had in mind — and even more so when I stepped into the commissioner role at DSS. It's been a combination of things I very deliberately set out to do and things that have been unbelievably happy accidents. But it's been a really fantastic 22 years in government.

**Jamie:** And do you leave with the same instinct that you had when you were sitting in that basement — that more than anything else, government is where you go to make the biggest difference?

**Molly:** New York City government in particular is amazing because you are responsible for the program operations, but it's also just an amazing scale. The budget at DSS was $16 billion. You're touching 3 million New Yorkers a year.

**Jamie:** Okay. Well, that makes sense. And that sort of leads me into the nature of what New York City actually does for the population you worked with most recently — your last stint at DSS.

On the one hand, you dealt with an agency that touched 3 million people. By the law of large numbers, you literally can't help every single person individually — you're trying to design or work with large systems and achieve the best outcomes on the whole. On the other hand, you wrote an article for Vital City back in December with Jody Rudin — we'll talk about it a little bit later — about an approach to housing the most difficult to house. You talked about accountability, and specifically about focusing on literally a thousand very specific people who the agency would ideally know by name. So on the one hand, your agency is this giant agency. On the other hand, you believe you can still make a big difference even in New York City by focusing on very, very small parts of the population.

The approach that New York City has adopted — the one you've participated in for the better part of your career — is enormous, very expensive, and brings in all kinds of outside players: nonprofits, government at all levels, experts, communities, everything else. My bias is that it's incredible that New York City does as well as it does. On the other hand, there are lots of people who would say we've thrown money at these problems and haven't gotten the outcomes we should expect — that we have to try something new.

The question I'd like to have hovering over this discussion is: Does New York City have the right approach, and what we need to do is work with it and make it better and more effective? Or does New York City have something fundamentally wrong? And if you could wipe the slate clean, would you want to do that? I think the best way to get at this is to talk about probably the most complex job you've had — the one you've had for the last four years or so, which is running DSS. Hyper-complicated agency. Most people think of you as the homelessness person, which is far from the truth. So maybe talk about DSS a little bit.

**Molly:** Sure. DSS is actually a hybrid of two separate agencies that was combined during the de Blasio administration. It's the Department of Homeless Services, which is the primary sheltering agency for the city. And that is a very heavily regulated space. New York City has the right to shelter, which was created out of several court cases back in the 1980s. Virtually everything that DHS does is regulated — down to the feet between beds, and exactly what we say to people when they walk in the door at intake.

There are some exceptions to that. The street outreach that DHS does — between DHS staff and contracted outreach providers, there's 24/7 street outreach — that is not mandated by either court or regulation. That is something the city does because it thinks it's the right thing to do.

The other half of DSS is the Human Resources Administration, which, despite its name, has nothing to do with human resources. It is the primary benefits agency for the city. The big ones that most people associate with HRA are cash assistance and SNAP — federal benefits with a lot of federal and state regulation associated with them. HRA also administers Medicaid for about 1.6 million New Yorkers — what the state calls the aged, blind, and disabled population. Everyone else on Medicaid receives it through the state.

HRA also runs an enormous rental assistance program — one that more than doubled under my tenure. That's the CityFEPS program, the city-funded rental assistance program. One of the things I was really working on was cementing DSS's identity as a housing agency, because it is in fact the second-biggest rental assistance program in the country behind NYCHA.

And then there are many other programs that are smaller but critical to specific constituencies: programs for domestic violence survivors, for people with HIV/AIDS, the IDNYC and Fair Fares programs — the city's ID program and discounted public transit. There's also a large career services component targeted at people receiving cash assistance who have work requirements — and as of five days ago, people on SNAP who have work requirements as well. I've certainly left things out that my former colleagues will be upset about, but it's just a huge agency serving lots of people in lots of different moments.

**Jamie:** You said half and half, but DHS is not half the people, obviously.

**Molly:** HRA is a much larger organization with respect to both budget and staff. I'd say DHS is probably higher-profile.

**Jamie:** Absolutely. Do you remember how many employees DSS has overall?

**Molly:** It's about 14,000\. About 2,000 give or take at DHS, the rest at HRA and DSS central.

**Jamie:** To what extent does DSS end up with that range of programs because the systems and populations are similar to what it's already doing — and to what extent does it reflect a philosophy about how to work with people in those situations? In other words, is this expedient, or is it a conscious policy decision?

**Molly:** You know — yes.

**Jamie:** Okay, good.

**Molly:** It's somewhere in between. And I think there's also a third element — the personalities of the people running the organization versus the people running other agencies. DSS has traditionally had a "yes, we'll take it on" attitude, whereas other agencies may be a little less so. CityFEPS could have lived in a housing agency. But it also makes sense at DSS because it's a program very much targeted toward people within the shelter system, and if you want to maintain that laser focus and manage the mission creep, you need to have control.

**Jamie:** So it sounds like it does make sense that it would be under one roof.

**Molly:** Yeah. And it goes back to the point I made earlier — the one thing all people experiencing homelessness have in common is that they don't have an affordable place to live. If you treat homelessness solely as a social service issue, you're not going to make a dent. Homelessness is fundamentally about a lack of housing, and having a housing tool to meet people's needs was incredibly important to what DHS does.

**Jamie:** You've referred a couple of times to new regulations on SNAP — the work requirements. What are the new work requirements as of five days ago?

**Molly:** So HR 1 — which I refuse to call the "big, beautiful bill" — imposed work requirements on Medicaid and SNAP. For SNAP, this applies to what are known as able-bodied adults without dependents, or ABAWDs. The concept of work requirements for ABAWDs has been on the books for a very long time, but there was a lot of flexibility for jurisdictions to get waivers. In New York, every county but Saratoga has had a waiver for many years. Don't ask me about Saratoga.

They took away most of the waiver authority and also significantly broadened the definition of who meets the ABAWD requirement. It is now any adult between the ages of 18 and 64 — used to be 54 — who does not have a child under the age of 14 — again, that was a change from under 18\. The bill also removed some exceptions for people experiencing homelessness, for youth aging out of foster care, and for veterans.

There are an estimated 230,000 to 240,000 New Yorkers who fall under this broadened definition of ABAWD and who must be working 80 hours a month in order to qualify for SNAP. If you fail to do that for three months, you lose your benefits — and it's a 36-month window before you can receive benefits again. If you can demonstrate you're working, you can come back in. The door isn't forever closed, but you can only receive SNAP without meeting the work requirements for three months out of a 36-month period.

**Jamie:** If you are terminated for reasons beyond your control and you're looking for work, how does that play in?

**Molly:** There are some opportunities to get credit for looking for work, but it's not an easy thing to document. One of the biggest challenges with work requirements — particularly for something as fundamental as emergency food access — is that they presuppose you have steady hours and a steady paycheck. That's just really not true for a lot of people in the shift and gig economy. There was a Senate hearing on this, and there was a home health aide who testified — she said, "When my patient's in the hospital, I don't have hours." That can mean the difference between qualifying for SNAP that month and not qualifying. If you're driving for Uber, how are you documenting your hours, even though you may very well be working plenty?

There's a lot inherent in the system that I think is going to be designed to kick people off of benefits. I will say HRA has been doing an immense amount of work to make it as flexible as possible so that as many people as possible can keep their benefits. But these are really challenging new rules.

**Jamie:** I assume the agency has some estimate of what the gap is ultimately going to be between folks who need SNAP and may currently be receiving it, and those who are going to lose their benefits for one reason or another. Is there a budget estimate in place for making up that gap?

**Molly:** At this point, the city has not planned to replace SNAP benefits — to come in with a city-funded SNAP for people who lose it as a result of the ABAWD work requirements. The city does support food pantries, and that funding was baselined during the preliminary budget that came out a couple of weeks ago, so that is positive. HR 1 also pulled back SNAP from refugees and various categories of legal immigrants — and it has always been the case that you have to be in the country legally for five years in order to receive SNAP. So there are absolutely universes of people who don't qualify.

HRA is experimenting with some voucher-type programs through the food pantry funding. There's a very small pilot that's live now, and there's an RFP that I think is on the street — or maybe just wrapped up — to do a larger pilot. It helps with providing those individuals with choice, but also with addressing the mismatch between where pantries are located and where people are. The highest level of food insecurity in the city is in the Bronx, but the Bronx has the lowest concentration of pantries. So it helps with some of that mismatch.

**Jamie:** Okay. So HRA and the state are doing their best, but there's not, at the moment, a full-on replacement — which would be extraordinarily expensive and hard to manage. Okay. Let's slip over to homelessness, which as you said is the higher-profile piece of what you've been doing. Is DHS first and foremost an operator and funder of shelters? Is that fair to say?

**Molly:** Yeah.

**Jamie:** Okay.

**Molly:** 97% of the people experiencing homelessness in New York City are sheltered — they are indoors. Very different from, say, some of the West Coast cities like Los Angeles. The last stat I saw was that 70% of people experiencing homelessness in L.A. are outside.

The shelters get periodic moments in the spotlight, largely because of NIMBYism — when City Council members, say, challenge police officers during siting discussions. But what most people think of when they think about homelessness is the roughly 4,000 or so people who are on the streets or in the subways. If DHS is the tail on the dog, then those 4,000 people are really the tip of the tail. They are the exception, but they are a particularly challenging situation — for the agency, for the individuals themselves, and for communities.

When I talk to groups of students, when I ask what they think of when they think of homelessness in New York City, it's always the guy on the subway. Very few people realize that a plurality of people experiencing homelessness in New York City are children.

**Jamie:** And those children are almost exclusively in shelters one way or another.

**Molly:** A hundred percent in shelters.

**Jamie:** A hundred percent in shelters.

**Molly:** A child on the street is a drop-everything, hands-on-deck emergency — the commissioner talking to the ACS commissioner and the police at two o'clock in the morning. That does not happen in New York City.

**Jamie:** And I think whatever people think of how New York City operates, what you just said is really worth sitting with for a second — it's remarkable that we've got so few people on the street. If you went to Los Angeles or San Francisco, most folks are on the street. It seems like, well, the weather's better — maybe that's just where they want to be. That's a fallacy, right?

**Molly:** It's the right to shelter. There are challenges with that.

**Jamie:** It's complicated policy.

**Molly:** Yes. But I've sort of come to believe that the only thing worse than the right to shelter is not having the right to shelter. There are 2 million rent-burdened households in New York City and a 1.4% vacancy rate. In some ways the miracle is that there aren't more people experiencing homelessness. It's a challenging thing to meet the need at this scale. But the right to shelter puts a floor on it — at a minimum, the city will be meeting people's basic needs. And I think that is incredibly important.

**Jamie:** One quick digression — what do you think about right to housing?

**Molly:** As a housing person and as a human being, I love it. It will be extraordinarily expensive. It requires building at a scale that is — look, forget Sunnyside Yards. We need hundreds of Sunnyside Yards, because there is such an absolute shortage of housing in New York City.

Just one telling example: the federal Department of Education has come out every fall with a students-experiencing-homelessness report, and the definition of homelessness in that report includes kids who are doubled up. The New York City number is typically 140,000 to 150,000 students experiencing homelessness. The number of school-aged kids in the shelter system is in the 20,000 to 25,000 range. So you're talking about orders of magnitude more people in doubled-up situations who are not a DSS responsibility at this point. If you're talking about a right to housing, it's not just the people flowing through the shelter system — it's all those people who are doubled up.

And the fact is, it's a really difficult policy to implement at the municipal level, because people make very economically rational decisions and come to places where there are resources. I say that not to blame anyone involved — we all make decisions based on where the resources that we and our families need exist, and low-income people do that too. Would I love to see the federal government adopt a right to housing? Absolutely. I have no illusion that that's coming. But I think it would be a really challenging municipal policy.

**Jamie:** So you don't think that waving a wand and implementing a right to housing would solve the homelessness problem?

**Molly:** I mean, it would — but it's the waving-the-wand part that I'm wrestling with. That's 22 years of government talking, right there. I am a great believer in thinking big and being ambitious, but I am also always cognizant of the pragmatic aspect of getting there.

The first step toward a right to housing is thinking about developing housing at a scale that is completely different than anything that has happened — or hasn't happened — in generations. I was joking about Sunnyside Yards, but it's exciting. The affordable housing sector does great work, but we're not solving this with a bunch of 150-unit buildings.

**Jamie:** No. And not surprisingly, I come back to NYCHA at some point in every episode. NYCHA was the last great example of building at scale in this city. In a lot of ways, that's where we should be starting — that government should be back in the development business, not exclusively and not as developer without any involvement from the private sector, but the role of government is needed. It's going to be extraordinarily expensive. But if you don't do it, we're going to continue to run on the treadmill.

As a government veteran and an expert — and as someone who has been a government official — everything you just described, which is just a thumbnail's worth of what your job actually entailed, sounds like an unmanageable system. How did you get in every day and try to manage through it?

**Molly:** There's a phenomenal team at DSS, and that goes a very long way. It really does come back to trusting your colleagues and teammates. When I walked in the door at DSS, we were tens of thousands of cases behind in cash and SNAP processing. The agency was being sued because we weren't processing benefits in a timely way. I walked in, sat down with a group of people, and said, "Alright, where's the plan for solving this?" And I got crickets.

That was a place where I was incredibly hands-on — really encouraging people to come up with solutions they believed in. Two years later, when HR 1 passed, there were different structures in place and different levels of people taking accountability for issues. I was very lightly involved in what the implementation strategy was on that, because there was a team really owning it and leading it — who could come and say, "Hey, can you help with this," or, "We should be worried about that," or, "We need to flag this to City Hall." But otherwise, they had it.

**Jamie:** We're going to put the Vital City article you wrote with Jody Rudin in the show notes. My takeaway from that article — and from what you just said — is that you need to focus at the operational level and also from the top down on outcomes, not process. You figure out where your pain points are. In that case it was the most intense users of the shelter system, but in what you were just talking about, the pain point was delayed payment of critical resources.

I think it's worth noting that it's incredibly hard to manage in government because you don't have a lot of the tools you have in the private sector. Some of it has to come from tone-setting at the top, because you don't have the same system of rewards. The example you just described — walking in the door, dealing with the payments issue — that was tone-setting at the top. Everybody probably realized: we've got someone who's very focused on outcomes, who figured out quickly what the biggest problem was, demanded accountability, and was herself willing to take accountability. You have to model the kind of behavior you want. Does that sound about right?

**Molly:** Yeah, absolutely. And really important to me is always making sure that I'm listening to the people who are the experts. At a place like DSS, there's absolutely no way I can be the expert in everything. Listening to the experts, respecting their opinions, really giving people the opportunity to raise ideas — and then when I do need to make an executive decision, making sure I'm giving people context as to why.

**Jamie:** Okay. So fast forward — there was an election in November. Mayor Ani was elected in early November. In the private sector, somebody in a senior position who is doing a really good job — particularly in an area of such sensitivity as you're describing — it's unusual that you'd seek to turn over that position. First question: Did you want to stay on?

**Molly:** I did, yeah.

**Jamie:** Did you have the opportunity to talk to them about what you'd done and your strategies, your thoughts about going forward?

**Molly:** I had quite a bit of engagement with the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services. But it became fairly clear — really across the board — that they were looking for their own people, which is their prerogative and not at all unusual in government. It's the exception rather than the rule that commissioners get carried over. So I can be sad that I didn't get to stay, but I certainly can't be angry or particularly surprised.

**Jamie:** I agree that it is sort of the exception. And you want your own people — if there are different parties or different governing philosophies, that's a different thing. But it's kind of hard to figure out what the next governing philosophy at DSS is going to be. Is there some fundamentally different philosophy you think the agency is going to adopt going forward?

**Molly:** I definitely don't feel comfortable speaking for the new folks. There is absolutely room to do things differently and to innovate. And there actually isn't an opportunity to completely start over, because there are so many external forces that guide what happens. But I'm sure there will be innovation and new ways of doing things that I look forward to seeing.

**Jamie:** Have you met your successor?

**Molly:** We had a conversation last week before I left, yeah.

**Jamie:** Okay, great. You didn't know her beforehand? If she said, "Molly, what's the single biggest pain point I need to watch — that is going to become glaringly obvious and that I need to focus on" — what would you say?

**Molly:** I'm not going to presume to give her advice. But there are a few things to be aware of. The full-throated assault on the social safety net from the federal government is one you can't ignore — the ABAWD work requirements went into effect basically on day three of her tenure. So keeping a close eye on all of that is very much an issue.

One of the things that worries me significantly is a reinterpretation of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996\. The Welfare Reform Act said you couldn't provide public benefits to non-qualified aliens. But almost immediately after it passed, there was an interpretation that defined "public benefits" in such a way that things like food pantries, emergency shelter, and other emergency services were not considered public benefits — on the theory that anyone should be able to qualify for them. The Trump administration rescinded that interpretation, which means that theoretically this vast array of services now requires an upfront immigration check.

That's going to hit immigrants who need the benefits. But also non-immigrants who can't, in a moment of crisis, prove their citizenship. Who brings their passport to a food pantry? There is a stay in place right now — AG James is my hero in fighting back on all of this — but that is temporary. The Welfare Reform Act also says that states can pass legislation that would allow at least state and local dollars to be used without immigration checks, but New York State does not have that legislation in place. That is an anvil over the whole state's head. I'm very much hoping that the state passes some version of that.

I don't think there is something akin to being tens of thousands of cases behind in cash and SNAP processing. I'd like to think I left the agency in better shape than I found it.

**Jamie:** I was going to say — maybe that's part of your legacy: that you didn't leave anything like that for whoever came next.

**Molly:** I do think I left DSS in better shape than I found it. But there are immense challenges, of course — 86,000 people in the shelter system, infrastructure that is challenged. I have no doubt that Commissioner Dalton has a tough job in front of her, and I really do wish her all the best.

**Jamie:** Of course, and everybody else does as well.

**Molly:** Yeah.

**Jamie:** Two things can be true at once. You can think that Molly Park did a phenomenal job at DSS — as she's done everywhere else — and you can hope that Erin Dalton does a great job as her successor. Because if you live in the city and you care, or even if you live elsewhere and you care about New York City or just about people — we're all better off if everything goes really well.

Okay, the last question. Most obvious. What are you going to do next? I assume you're going to run a hedge fund, because that's the well-trodden path, right?

**Molly:** Clearly.

**Jamie:** Yeah.

**Molly:** I am figuring it out. I'm confident I'll be somewhere in the space around social services, housing, and homelessness — that's what I've spent my career doing and it's what I care about. In a perfect world, I'd really like to be in a space that does straddle some of those silos. One of the challenges that this sector needs to address is the fact that people are complicated. When we talk only about housing or only about food insecurity or only about homelessness, we're missing the intersection of those issues. I'm hopefully looking for a role where I can bring some of that cross-sector work.

**Jamie:** Not yet?

**Molly:** I'm going to take a little break.

**Jamie:** Good. Well, nobody deserves it more — and then you're going to have tons of opportunities. Molly, thanks a lot.

**Molly:** Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.

**Jamie:** Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with another episode of After Hours with Jamie Rubin.
### Can Erin Dalton Make Progress in Curbing Chronic Homelessness?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/erin-dalton-data-driven-social-services-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:13.000Z
Local agency appointments are often dismissed as insider news — meaningful to City Hall watchers, distant to the public. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s appointment of Erin Dalton as commissioner of New York City’s Department of Social Services deserves a different reaction. Though the choice of Dalton was met by some with an eyeroll, as though someone from out of town, in this case from Pittsburgh, had no business taking such a big job in the nation’s largest city, it is in fact a signal that competence and evidence matter in governing a city — and that management choices in human services can translate into real, measurable changes in people’s lives.

That may sound obvious. But in an era of deep cynicism about government, it is worth saying aloud. It would have been easier for Mamdani to promote someone from within city government or reward a political ally. He looked outward across the country and recruited someone widely respected for doing something that often feels rare in public policy today: building systems that learn and use data, partnership and evaluation to improve results over time.

Dalton’s tenure as the Director of Allegheny County’s Department of Human Services (DHS) has been closely associated with a culture of experimentation, collaboration and rigorous evaluation. Again and again, when new approaches to complex social problems are discussed, Allegheny DHS shows up as a partner or model.

Developing integrated data systems that link information across housing, health, schools and human services? Allegheny DHS built one of the strongest local government models in the country — and policy decisions flow from what those data reveal. It is not surprising that Dalton led the Office of Analytics, Planning, and Information Technology at Allegheny DHS before she was promoted to oversee all of DHS. Among many awards and accolades over the years, in 2024, Allegheny County was featured by the U.S. National Institute of Justice in the opening plenary of its [2024 National Research Conference](https://nij.ojp.gov/events/conference-2024?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#1-0), titled “Advancing Justice Through Science: Tracing Allegheny County’s Journey.”

Pioneering innovations in housing and supportive services for frequent utilizers of public services — people repeatedly cycling through emergency rooms, homeless shelters and jails who typically have long histories of mental health issues and substance use? Allegheny DHS used its integrated data system to [identify key intervention points](https://www.alleghenycountyanalytics.us/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/21-ACDHS-13-FrequentUtiliziersReport%5FAug2022.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), then created systems and strategies that promote long-term wellness, reduce repeated high-intensity service use and in turn lower costs across emergency, housing, justice and health systems. For instance, Allegheny recently became the [first jurisdiction in Pennsylvania to offer assisted outpatient services](https://www.wpxi.com/news/local/allegheny-county-becomes-first-community-pennsylvania-introduce-assisted-outpatient-treatment/3CUDQFMGNJCZTE3KIUZS4UGTJE/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for individuals with mental health and substance use disorders, adding an important service option designed to stabilize people in the community and reduce unnecessary court involvement.

Rolling out alternative crisis response? Not surprisingly, Allegheny County’s focus on reducing unnecessary public costs and system involvement led them to [build](https://www.alleghenycounty.us/Services/Human-Services-DHS/DHS-News-and-Events/Accomplishments-and-Innovations/Improving-Crisis-Prevention-and-Response?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [measure](https://govlab.hks.harvard.edu/project/launching-alternative-emergency-response-in-allegheny-county/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a system in which clinicians — not just police — respond to eligible mental health emergency calls, with police support when safety requires it. Although the program, which sends an “A-Team” to respond to nonviolent, non-medical 911 calls at the request of the participating police departments, is too new to have rigorous outcome evaluation results at this date, Allegheny DHS built a [public dashboard](https://tableau.alleghenycounty.us/t/PublicSite/views/AlternativeResponsePilotPublicDashboard/Home?%3Aembed=y&%3AisGuestRedirectFromVizportal=y&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for the system to provide the public with up-to-date information that displays call volume over time, response types, call types and response outcomes. The dashboard also supports data and statistical analyses and interactive visualizations. A quick look at the dashboard’s “interventions and outcomes” page shows that between October 15, 2024 and November 10, 2024, the A-Team was able to assess/interact with clients in 95% of responses.

Bolstering prisoner reentry support and jail-cycling reform? Allegheny DHS coordinated supervision and services beginning inside the jail and continuing into the community. [An Urban Institute evaluation](https://www.urban.org/research/publication/evaluation-allegheny-county-jail-collaborative-reentry-programs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found a 24-percentage-point reduction in rearrest risk, which translates to roughly two dozen fewer rearrests per 100 people served.

Understanding the harms and costs of violent criminal victimization in order to help drive prevention? When our research team at Temple University and NORC at the University of Chicago launched the [NIJ-funded HAVEN project](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418825.2025.2456182?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Allegheny was a natural partner. Dalton and her team shared their integrated data system to help quantify the often-hidden health and economic consequences that follow violent victimization.

Creating a community violence intervention “ecosystem” where anti-violence programs are carefully layered together to fill service gaps for both the people and places most touched by violence? Allegheny County DHS was featured as one of three “jurisdiction immersion” sites at the 2025 Cities United convening, where other jurisdictions come to learn about successes in creating and sustaining a comprehensive anti-violence strategy that includes prevention and intervention. In a country with thousands of urban jurisdictions, that kind of recognition is rare.

Getting swifter and smarter child welfare decisions after allegations of maltreatment to help predict foster care placement? Allegheny DHS experimented publicly with a machine-learning screening tool (the Allegheny Family Screening Tool or “AFST”) that pre-selects investigation as the starting choice for the highest-risk referrals. [An evaluation](https://www.alleghenycountyanalytics.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Impact-Evaluation-from-16-ACDHS-26%5FPredictiveRisk%5FPackage%5F050119%5FFINAL-6.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) commissioned by Allegheny County found it reduced Black-white disparities in investigation, case opening and removal rates. More specifically, the evaluation found a 20% reduction in first entries into foster care from 2016-20, the years when AFST was implemented. Additionally, a [later study shows the potential power of AFST for child protection](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32761210/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): The model’s risk scores strongly predicted serious child harm measured through hospital injury encounters. This means the algorithm is effective at identifying children most likely to experience serious physical harm, allowing agencies to prioritize resources and interventions for families facing the greatest risk.

Dalton has had a significant hand in shaping all these innovations.

I first met Erin about 25 years ago when she was at the National Institute of Justice as a project manager for the Strategic Approaches to Community Safety Initiative. What stood out even then was how consistently she emphasized two things she viewed as nonnegotiable: partnerships and good data.

Those are also the two hardest things to achieve in complex social policy. Partnerships require agencies with different missions and incentives to share responsibility and information. Fealty to data requires careful and ethical governance — and the discipline to measure outcomes honestly, even when the evidence forces you to rethink what you are doing. And not surprisingly, Allegheny DHS carefully surveys clients, community members and providers — asking them how to best meet community needs and where they could do better. They use the feedback to add and change programs, shift funding and improve program monitoring.

Allegheny County DHS repeatedly invites evaluation. It partners with researchers, publishes dashboards and allows (usually by directly asking) outside researchers to test whether programs actually worked. In many jurisdictions across the country, evaluation is treated as a threat. In Allegheny, it became part of governance.

Dalton did not build these systems alone. But she clearly created a culture where experimentation was encouraged, collaboration expected and data used to guide decisions. 

That matters in New York.

New York’s Department of Social Services, with a [budget of $18.5 billion](https://www.ibo.nyc.gov/content/publications/2025-social-services?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and roughly 12,500 employees, sits at the center of housing stability, poverty reduction and crisis response in the largest city in the United States. It oversees the city’s core public benefits operation and its homelessness response system — administering major assistance and rental subsidy programs and managing the shelter and outreach network delivered through a vast nonprofit provider infrastructure. Yet many of the systems most closely tied to large-scale system challenges, including child welfare, public health and public safety, sit outside the department, run by nonprofit groups that contract with the City.

What Dalton has demonstrated repeatedly is an ability to work across those silos, regardless of whether the systems are under her purview, using partnerships and shared data to tackle problems that no single agency can solve alone.

In a city as large and complex as New York, that kind of leadership is invaluable.

I consider this appointment a vote of confidence in evidence-based governance and in the idea that cities should reward leaders who test ideas, rigorously measure results, collaborate across systems and enable responsible access to integrated administrative data for external researchers so evidence can accumulate and lessons can travel across jurisdictions. That’s welcome coming from Mamdani, who some worry is going to be guided more by ideology than a desire to innovate and get results.

If the culture she helped build travels with Erin Dalton, all of New York City will benefit, not just New York City residents served under DSS. And importantly, the rest of the country will benefit too. In the nation’s largest city, results don’t remain local, they shape the field. And every other city loses the excuse that it can’t be done.
### Sewer Socialism, Meet Toilet Socialism
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-public-bathrooms-mamdani-plan/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:24.000Z
Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani [announced](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-announces-new-commitment-to-expand-access-to-publi0?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a $4 million investment in 20 to 30 modular public restrooms. The idea is that installing these units will be faster and cheaper than building traditional public restroom projects — which require more digging, heavier construction and complicated connection to sewer lines. 

Many New Yorkers applauded, and I was among them. 

I’ve got a small bladder and am a bit of a public toilet aficionado. Over the past few years, I’ve [rated each of New York City’s privately owned public toilets](https://nycpolitics101.substack.com/p/pops), criticized City Council legislation that mandated new public toilets [without streamlining any associated costs](https://nycpolitics101.substack.com/p/cost-of-maintaining-public-toilets-in-nyc) and written about how [neighborhood opposition](https://nycpolitics101.substack.com/p/neighbor-opposition?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) affects what gets built in New York City and when. 

So when the Mamdani administration released the RFP for the new public toilet plan, I was excited to read through and understand what we’d get for the money — and whether this mayor is likely to learn from many failed attempts by his predecessors. 

We’ll get to that in a second, but let’s start with an important question. In a city of 8 million people, why are there so few places to pee?

Countless private businesses have toilets, but most of those are for customers only. Parks have bathrooms, sometimes called “comfort stations,” but many of those are in very poor shape. Indeed, a report in The City reveals that [50 park bathrooms sit closed](https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/03/03/public-bathrooms-parks-closed-repairs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Underground, where so many of us have long waits and no easy access to a urinal or toilet, there are many bathrooms run by the MTA, a state authority. But too few are open and too few of those are in good shape. [An audit earlier this year by the agency’s inspector general](https://gothamist.com/news/most-nyc-subway-bathrooms-lack-basic-amenities-like-toilet-seats-and-soap-audit-finds?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) spot-checked 32 of the 125 bathrooms in the system and found 85% lacked a basic need like toilet seats and soap.

Add it all up, and New York City [ranks 93rd out of the country’s largest 100](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/discomfort-stations-the-conditions-and-availability-of-nyc-parks-bathrooms/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) cities for public bathrooms per capita. That’s especially problematic given that our city has the most vibrant street life and more visitors than anyplace else. Little wonder that adding public toilets was listed among the [top 17 ways](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/05/arts/design/mamdani-how-to-improve-new-york-vote.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the new mayor could improve the city in a recent survey by The New York Times. [According to Mamdani](https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/12/business/zohran-mamdani-bathrooms-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), “When you can’t find a restroom, you are made keenly aware of just how few public bathrooms there are and how dependent we have left New Yorkers on either the generosity and kindness of a business owner or a requirement that they pay seven bucks for a coffee.” 

But remedying the problem is easier said than done. As a bare minimum, the Parks and MTA bathrooms need to be kept in much better condition. Then, the City should create a network of new, clean, street-level toilets available to whoever needs them by learning from previous efforts that didn’t go the distance.

So what went wrong in the past?

In the early 90s, Mayor David Dinkins [piloted a coin-operated, self-cleaning toilet kiosk](https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/27/nyregion/yes-new-york-city-plans-sidewalk-toilets.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); it died due to a combination of factors, including procurement problems that caused delays, and neighbors like Steve Stollman, who made a name for himself as the loudest activist voice against the plan (he was mostly mad about ads on the bathrooms). Stollman called his campaign against the public toilet program [“The Privy Council,”](https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/23/nyregion/about-new-york-amid-artifacts-of-past-gadfly-visions-of-future.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the New York Times referred to him as “New York’s leading toilet gadfly.” In the early 2000s, Mayor Bloomberg’s administration bought 20 public toilets, but [installation got stymied](https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/03/29/nyc-promised-public-bathrooms-still-waiting/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by neighborhood opposition and engineering concerns. 

When previous mayors’ plans hit snags, implementation stalled — or, to use toilet terminology, clogged. For a higher-priority, higher-profile issue like housing or public safety, it’d be worth the attention, effort and political capital to get out the plunger. But there’s not a powerful, organized constituency hounding elected officials for public toilets, so for the last 30 years, bathroom projects have limped through years-long pilots, making slow progress until they die a quiet death. 

New Yorkers have called out the red tape that has been holding up public toilet projects for 35 years now. A New York Times headline from 1991 read: [“In New York, Few Public Toilets and Many Rules.”](https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/21/nyregion/in-new-york-few-public-toilets-and-many-rules.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 

This time, with fresh attention being paid to the legacy of [“sewer socialism”](https://www.slowboring.com/p/learning-from-milwaukees-sewer-socialists?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that emphasizes effective investment in public works, we shouldn’t settle for procurement problems that cause delays or neighborhood opposition that drives up costs. 

### Stretching every dollar

Is that $4 million Mamdani price tag realistic? Let’s do some basic math on a toilet-paper square. In 2023, New York City purchased five modular Portland Loo toilets — a [fancy prefab model](https://portlandloo.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — for [$185,000 each](https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/02/27/portland-loo-park-bathrooms/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Extrapolating from that price, $4 million could today buy the city 21 Portland Loos. 

But that’s just the cost of buying the units — not the full cost of implementation. In 2023, *installing* each pre-fabricated Portland Loo was $815,000\. That’s much higher than in other cities, where it [typically costs around $220,000](https://www.amny.com/news/modular-restrooms-nyc-parks-million-install/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) per unit, attributable to New York City’s red tape and complex public infrastructure. At 2023 building and installation prices, $4 million would only get us four public toilets. That’s basically nothing.

Here’s where the new administration is changing it up. In the past, New York City public toilets had to connect to water, sewer and electrical lines. [This RFP](https://edc.nyc/modular-public-bathroom-installation-and-maintenance-services-citywide-rfp?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) aims to save on installation costs by requiring that each bathroom unit be self-sufficient without requiring connection to any utility lines. That could yield many more toilets, since companies selling fancy portapotties have lower capital costs. 

Also helpfully, the $4 million budget doesn’t just include development and installation, it also includes one year of maintenance. 

That’s essential — because the only thing worse than no public bathroom is a dirty bathroom with no toilet paper or soap. The RFP specifies that maintenance not only includes making sure toilet paper is refreshed and toilets are clean, but also that graffiti and debris are removed up to five feet around the toilet (i.e., snow, ice, trash, leaves). And that a vendor arrives on site to respond to emergencies within two hours and non-emergencies within 24 hours. In its RFP, the City also makes clear that it prefers that the vendor manually clean each unit, as opposed to self-cleaning models. 

What can $4 million cover, once we take lower installation costs and ongoing maintenance costs into consideration? One fancy portapotty company that services D.C., Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, [Throne](http://thronelabs.co/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), charges about $90,000 per toilet per year for hosting and maintenance. At $90,000 per toilet, $4 million would cover 44 bathrooms, higher than the goal of 20-30 bathrooms. 

All of which is to say, the RFP points in the right direction. But in these preliminary stages, what else can be learned from previous failures? And where are the likely places that costs could overrun, potentially leading to fewer units installed or ballooning costs down the line?

### Flush “everything bagel liberalism”

One way costs can balloon in toilet development, like in so many realms, is when government piles on expensive, well-intentioned mandates, rather than sticking to the core purpose at hand. That’s what Ezra Klein termed [“everything-bagel liberalism.”](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/02/opinion/democrats-liberalism.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 

One requirement that increased New York City’s costs for the 2023 toilet project was related to the fabricator’s location. In that case, the City required that if a fabricator is outside the five boroughs, they need to be approved by the Department of Buildings or have the products inspected by a registered special inspector. None of the pre-approved manufacturers were willing to take on the project, so the company had to go through the process of getting certification — a step that added delays and costs. 

Mamdani’s current RFP gets the balance right. Overall, I found the stipulations for the units very reasonable. Here’s a snapshot of what the current RFP requires each modular bathroom unit to include: one toilet fixture; one sink fixture; receptacles for trash and menstrual products; a mirror; a hand-dryer; dispensers for toilet paper, liquid soap, and menstrual products; at least one hook (to hang clothing, bags, etc.); a fold-down babychanging station; an exterior ramp leading to the entrance; signage; ventilation; exterior lighting adequate for public safety, particularly at the entry, as well as a safety mirror for exterior corners; and an emergency call button and non-emergency customer service button. 

I don’t see many extraneous things there. Though it is worth at least thinking about innovative models like that in Paris — where, in addition to fully fledged public toilets, they tried installing [open-air urinals](https://time.com/5366560/open-air-urinal/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (which made some people upset). The point is not that those are suited for New York, simply that there’s nothing wrong with a mix of facilities that serve different people, rather than ensuring that every single one must be suited to every single person.

Overall, the RFP does a good job of requiring the need-to-haves, outlining possible nice-to-haves and aligning incentives between the City and the vendor.

### Siting and installation pitfalls

The risks don’t end with the requirements delineated in the RFP — far from it. Another hoop that can trip up a project like this is commission approvals. Most of these modular units will end up in parks, plazas and sidewalks. That means they’ll need to get approved by the [Public Design Commission](https://www.nyc.gov/site/designcommission/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (PDC), the 11-member design review board with jurisdiction over permanent structures proposed on public property.

If the proposed bathroom is in a landmarked area, it will also require approval from the 11-member [Landmarks Preservation Commission](https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (LPC). The LPC protects historically significant buildings and neighborhoods; they’re the gatekeeper of the city’s historical fabric.

Both commissions have their own multi-month process for publishing information about projects, soliciting community feedback and providing a decision. For example, the LPC process requires applicants to present their proposal to the local Community Board at one of its monthly meetings, which must be scheduled well in advance. When I served on Manhattan Community Board 5’s Landmarks Committee, it was common for applicants’ presentations to include multiple staff, presenting detailed slide decks that clearly took many hours to put together. Applicants must also submit their completed application at least four weeks before presenting to the LPC at one of its monthly hearings. Prior to the public hearing, applicants meet with their assigned LPC staff preservationist to review the proposal, confirm presentation requirements and submit all required materials. 

The process involves multiple sequential steps, each of which adds time and coordination requirements. If a commission rejects a project, the project needs to edit their proposal and re-apply if they want to keep moving.

Fortunately, there’s an asterisk. Both commissions have staff that can issue approvals on a rolling basis to move projects along faster. For example, the Landmarks Preservation Commission decided a couple of years ago that bus shelter infrastructure could be approved by staff going forward — no need to go to the full commission for a formal vote anymore. Their reasoning: Bus shelters are critical infrastructure that provide protection from rain, wind and sun. This is a reasonable approach to take for public toilets as well, since they’re also critical infrastructure that would be best designed for function rather than historic relevance. The Commission voted to change the Landmarks Preservation Commission Rules in order to streamline the process. 

The Public Design Commission also has categories of projects that can be approved at the staff level, instead of going through the full vote. Mamdani should use both expedited processes.

Team Mamdani can also learn from how previous administrations’ attempts broke down at the siting and design stage. In the past, many holdups with public toilets in New York City have stemmed from communities' inability to agree on the details. For example, [in 2006](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/nyregion/31toilets.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the City asked community boards to propose locations for new public bathrooms, but many of the sites put forward weren’t feasible. Brooklyn Community Board 2 in Prospect Heights proposed two sites, but one wasn’t perfect because the Public Design Commission was concerned that the modern design clashed with the existing “Victorian stylings” and the other proposed site wasn’t great either because the area was being redeveloped. When agencies and electeds couldn’t reconcile all the tradeoffs, nothing got built. 

City agencies should propose the most optimal sites, solicit public input to highlight any significant unforeseen challenges and move the projects forward. 

### Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance

Every piece of public infrastructure needs to be maintained, but for obvious reasons, toilets especially so.

The City’s goal is for the units to be accessible 24/7, 365 days a year. That means they need to withstand manmade challenges like vandalism, as well as weather ranging from extreme heat to snow and ice. The City ought to plan for ways to pay for and save on maintenance from the start, lest ballooning maintenance costs lead to dirty facilities, or even worse, facilities falling into disrepair and becoming unusable.

Here, I worry the administration is making it difficult for vendors to get creative to save on costs. The RFP specifies that the vendor must employ a minimum of three full-time service technicians to keep all the toilets in good working order. While the language doesn’t rule out self-cleaning toilets, it does state a preference for manual cleaning, which is a recurring labor cost. Historically, self-cleaning toilets haven’t been that reliable in this city — but technology is always advancing. They shouldn’t be ruled out.

Nor is the City allowing for ads to recoup costs, at least at first. The RFP states that “Advertising on or inside these units will not be allowed for the full Contract Term \[of one year plus any extensions\].” That’s a mistake.

Yes, historically some of the loudest complaints from neighbors about toilets have centered on ads. But again, if we’re prioritizing function and usability as the most important goal, we need a way to fund ongoing maintenance. Why not let advertisers make paid appeals at least to passersby, if not to the captive audience inside the restrooms themselves? LinkNYC wi-fi kiosks put many more ads in many more places for an arguably less important reason.

A good maintenance plan must think through ways to discourage use by people who might not treat the bathrooms properly. We may never have a population as respectful of public toilets as Tokyo’s, but that doesn’t mean we should surrender them to a future of terrible treatment. It’s not uncommon for other cities to charge for public toilet use, or require a smartphone or a touch card. For example, [Throne](https://thronelabs.co/how-it-works/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) requires a smartphone or tap card for users to enter, implements a 10-minute time limit, and bars future use if there’s evidence of vandalization or misuse. [Portland Loos](https://portlandloo.com/why-the-portland-loo-is-a-safer-bathroom/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) also employ multiple methods to deter inappropriate activity in their bathrooms: open grating that preserves privacy while allowing law enforcement to observe how many people are inside, hand-washing station on the exterior of the unit and [blue lights to deter intravenous drug use](https://www.npr.org/2019/09/03/756976676/blue-lights-may-deter-intravenous-drug-use-in-public-spaces?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (yes, that makes it difficult for people to find their veins). 

All of those steps technically make restrooms less accessible — but they’re worth the tradeoff to ensure they remain operational for most people most of the time. Optimizing for safe bathrooms up front not only eases community members’ fears about crime, but also holds down maintenance costs and extends the life of the unit. 

New York City may be sharply divided on the wisdom of opening public grocery stores. But a network of sparkling new public bathrooms could be in the city’s near future. We just have to make some smart decisions.
### Tokyo’s Toilet Teachings
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-tokyo-built-clean-accessible-toilets-nyc-wants/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:14.000Z
Tokyo’s public toilets have attracted a surprising level of global attention in recent years — perhaps best exemplified by the 2024 Academy Award nomination for the Wim Wenders film “Perfect Days,” with its meditative portrayal of a Tokyo public toilet cleaner’s inner life. Despite the film’s depiction of Tokyo restroom maintenance as an almost monastic activity, however, the reality is a more prosaic tale — one that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani should pay close attention to as he seeks to give New Yorkers and visitors more places to go.

Tokyo has a strong, interlocking system of public and “semi-public” toilet infrastructure that combines to produce a highly functional urban environment. Tokyo boasts an average of [eight public toilets per square kilometer](https://disegnojournal.com/newsfeed/in-praise-of-public-toilets-tokyo-toilet-project?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), putting it ahead of European capitals such as Paris. But these fully public toilets are only part of the story; nearly all of the roughly 900 train stations in the Greater Tokyo area have one or more public bathrooms. As discussed below, these ‘semi-public’ bathrooms are central to the average Tokyoite’s daily experience.

These are the lessons from Tokyo for New York’s public bathrooms as I see them — from the perspective of a [scholar of Tokyo urbanism devoted to finding ways we can learn from Japan’s megacity](https://www.amazon.com/Emergent-Tokyo-Patterns-Spontaneous-Micro-Urbanism/dp/1951541324?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to improve urban life here at home.

**1) In a transit-dense city, train station bathrooms are the backbone of public bathroom access** 

Tokyo’s rail transit network is rightly held up as a global exemplar, but few outside of Tokyo realize that about two-thirds of the Tokyo metropolitan area’s railway stations are operated by private railway lines. These *shitetsu* (私鉄) corporations [don’t merely provide transit](https://da.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/da/kernel/D1006598/D1006598.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); they operate multi-story shopping malls above their train stations, develop real estate around their stations into commuter bedroom communities and even operate quality-of-life businesses (such as subsidized affordable childcare services) along their train lines in order to make their neighborhoods more attractive places to live.

In a city where trains and stations are everywhere, the restrooms in these private railwaystations — generally located right inside the fare gates — are the most common public restrooms that the average Tokyoite interacts with in his or her daily life. They can be thought of as “semi-public” infrastructure — in private hands but accessible to the general public, particularly as railway fares are [politically negotiated between the government and the railway operators](https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3097&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and thus kept low by global standards. The aggregate effect is powerful: When your city is dense with rail and every station offers clean, plentiful public toilets, you organically end up with a city full of public bathrooms.

In New York, ironically, subway stations and their bathrooms are publicly managed by the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but the trend for New York City transit bathrooms has moved in the opposite direction: neglected, almost entirely closed off to the public (with those that are open having heavily limited opening hours, 7AM to 7PM with an inexplicable one-hour cleaning break around lunchtime), and/or reserved for staff. An attempt to find an open bathroom in an MTA station frequently requires begging a station attendant for help, and the odds of success are low. The ostensibly ‘public’ bathrooms of the MTA are in actual practice much less open to the public than the ‘semi-public’ bathrooms of Tokyo’s private railway conglomerates.

This dearth of station bathrooms — which even at their full intended capacity now appear in only about [10% of the MTA system’s nearly 500 stations](https://www.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/bathrooms?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — appears to be the result of two negative trends in New York’s transit infrastructure: budget scarcity from the MTA being funded at the state rather than municipal level, and a separate failure of public services for the unhoused and mentally ill that then reorients transit stations around reactively managing spillover social dysfunction rather than serving the median member of the general public. 

San Francisco’s recent experience here is instructive. As the Bay Area’s BART system installed stronger fare gates through its “Next Generation Fare Gate” program, the [maintenance costs at the upgraded stations dropped off a cliff](https://growsf.org/news/2026-02-12-bart-fare-gates-10-million/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — suggesting that only a small portion of the population (fare-evading, to boot) had been causing an unusually high share of damage and wear to station infrastructure. With the MTA [moving in a similar direction](https://www.mta.info/project/modern-fare-gates?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), New York may be able to begin investing in its train stations as welcoming public infrastructure once again, including via well-maintained public restrooms.

**2) Put public toilets where the city already has eyes on the street**

Beyond train stations, Tokyo’s ward governments are clear-eyed in their planning around the linkage between public toilets and public safety. Public toilets in parks and public areas are frequently located near the *koban* police boxes that have been [the cornerstone of local policing in Japan since the Edo period](https://www.japan.go.jp/tomodachi/2016/spring2016/sharing%5Fpolice%5Fmodel.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and in other locations with a combination of good public order and predictable foot traffic — [a decision aimed at increasing feelings of safety and reducing the likelihood of their use for illicit purposes](https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/minister-of-toilets-aims-to-transform-japans-public-loos?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

In many ways, the value of any given public bathroom is downstream from the general maintenance of the public realm around it. If the general public feels safe walking through a city park at night, the impact of a public toilet in that park changes dramatically. The same staffing investment and active management that parks and stations require to be safe and welcoming to ordinary residents, rather than havens for illicit activity, also enables public bathrooms to better serve their intended purpose.

**3) Designing public toilets with diverse needs in mind**

Presently, the global norm in cities across the developed world is to offer a single ‘multipurpose’ toilet in addition to gendered toilets, designed to encompass everything from disabilities to caregiver needs, and Japan was until recently no exception. Starting in 2021, however, many high-traffic public spaces such as train stations [now offer multiple ‘accessible’ bathrooms](https://www.mlit.go.jp/sogoseisaku/barrierfree/content/001913509.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (referred to as ‘barrier-free’ in Japan’s parlance) differentiated by use in an effort to relieve user congestion. So rather than a single bathroom serving as a catch-all for those with disabilities, mobility issues, caregivers, and diaper changing, diaper changing rooms are explicitly differentiated from ‘barrier-free’ restrooms. The goal is to maximize the odds that a person in need of an accessible bathroom will actually find one available, rather than having everyone who requires privacy competing for a single space.

Japan’s new push puts it at the forefront of the developed world in this regard, and if the MTA works to revitalize its station bathrooms, it should similarly add enough accessible capacity that its “special needs” spaces aren’t a single overburdened stall doing three jobs. Diversity is also a question of time; an MTA station restroom that [technically exists but is closed most of the night](https://www.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/bathrooms?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is effectively a restroom for the same office workers who are already well-served by private bathrooms, not a restroom for shift workers, late-night riders or caregivers navigating a 24/7 city. Part of Tokyo’s success in this regard is that it treats restroom access as part of everyday mobility, not as a special or exceptional service.

That said, Tokyo has its own struggles in this regard. The Tokyo-based journalist Phoebe Amoroso [went viral during the 2019 G20 Summit](https://x.com/PhoebeAmoroso/status/1143098870605332480?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) when she pointed out that rubbish bins had been preemptively sealed shut in toilets at one of the city’s main train stations as a matter of security, seemingly with no concern for women needing to dispose of sanitary products. And despite Tokyo’s general reputation for cleanliness, it is only in recent years, particularly with a [modernization push in preparation for the ill-starred 2020 Tokyo Olympics](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12045882/pdf/IJPH-54-801.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), that soap dispensers have been installed in many of the city’s public toilets. 

**4) Make cleanliness measurable, not notional**

Although standards differ across the city, Tokyo’s public and semi-public toilets generally have fixed maintenance regimes that specify not only the frequency of cleaning (typically three times per day) but are now in some cases [introducing external audits](https://tokyotoilet.jp/en/maintenance/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). These third-party inspections are not yet the norm in Tokyo by any means, but that should not keep them from serving as an example for New York. The audits involve quantitative measures like adenosine triphosphate wipe tests (a common proxy for surface cleanliness), plus periodic measurements of ammonia and environmental conditions.

Third-party audits can make the difference between a municipal promise (“we clean regularly”) and a service standard (“here is the protocol; here is the result we test for; here is who verifies”). Frequency of cleaning matters to an extent for hygiene, but, according to studies on the topic, less than one might think. Actual accountability matters more, as audits create feedback loops. 

New York is perfectly capable of this kind of rigor. The city already accomplishes it in other domains, ranging from food safety and water quality to building inspections. The lesson is simply to treat toilets as a public health interface worthy of the same kind of measurement.

As the American city most comparable to Tokyo in terms of the density and reach of its transit network, New York can learn from Tokyo without fetishizing it. Japan’s enviable public toilets are not an outgrowth of national culture, but rather the result of a public policy that takes toilets seriously as public health infrastructure, centered on transit-located toilets and other sites with a high natural degree of public oversight. New York can embrace transit toilets once again, while designing for real users and their diverse needs. And, above all, the MTA can make toilet maintenance a measurable, audited public service rather than a meaningless promise. As our taciturn toilet cleaner in “Perfect Days” would surely agree, a city isn’t made livable by grand gestures. It’s made livable by standards — and by the people and systems that rigorously keep them.
### Reality Check: Why Do New York City’s Crime Numbers Change?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/real-crime-numbers-nyc-nypd/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:22.000Z
Each month, in a familiar ritual, the police commissioner announces the latest crime statistics — the standard way the NYPD has reported data since the de Blasio administration ended monthly in-person CompStat press conferences. On Monday, the department [announced](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR004/nypd-fewest-shooting-incidents-shooting-victims-murders-recorded-history-the?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that major crime fell about 8% in February, with record lows for murders and shootings. The accompanying press release used restated February 2025 figures as its year-ago baseline — but those figures look nothing like the ones the department originally [published](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr535/nypd-crime-continues-decline-february-2025-shatters-30-year-shooting-record?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). (New York calls these "major" or "index" crimes, echoing but not exactly mirroring the FBI's legacy classification of seven serious offenses: murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny auto).

Those numbers were accurate as of March 3, 2025, when they were posted. But compare them to yesterday's press release, when the NYPD used that same month as its comparison baseline, and the numbers are different: Index crimes are now at 8,250, not 7,821; subway crimes grew from 135 to 162; and the month's murder count rose from 19 to 24\. The February 2025 numbers increased by 5.5% overall and 20.0% for transit between the time they were first announced and their appearance in yesterday's release. A month ago, Commissioner Jessica Tisch celebrated "the third consecutive month of double-digit declines in nearly every major crime category" and credited the department’s subway safety plan with a 15.1% reduction in subway crime. What was initially reported as a “double-digit” decrease in subway crime is now a slight increase after the numbers settled.

This isn't a mistake, nor is it an artifact of delayed reporting or fraud. The NYPD classifies every crime by the date it was first reported, not the date it occurred. Report a burglary today that happened a month ago, and it lands on today's ledger.

What changes is the *classification* of those crimes — for example, whether the crime is a felony or misdemeanor assault, an attempted murder or a murder. Seriousness upgrades, downgrades or lateral reclassifications occur as complaints move through the department’s extensive auditing process. A hospital exam reveals a victim’s broken jaw, upgrading a misdemeanor assault to a felony; someone who reported a car stolen learns it was actually towed, removing the crime from the ledger. 

A Vital City analysis of eight years of revisions reveals a consistent and one-directional pattern. New Yorkers, journalists and policymakers should treat the monthly figures that drive the city's public safety hot takes as a first draft, not a final verdict.

### This is a national phenomenon. New York City just lets us measure it.

The reliability of crime statistics has become a national and partisan issue. During the 2024 presidential campaign, the two federal pillars of crime measurement— the FBI's [Uniform Crime Reporting Program](http://fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/more-fbi-services-and-information/ucr?%5F%5Fcf%5Fchl%5Ftk=GXfiR51ZNsQHBMA%5FOTZJ80JrvptEwV6.rZGpHmWrMNs-1772371544-1.0.1.1-Xqgc6bPDYaofpUMb4WeirVTC4%5FoRYMqjbC2dL2.w9T8&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which compiles crimes reported to police, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics' [National Crime Victimization Survey](https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which asks households directly whether they've been victimized— told [contradictory stories](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/06/27/trump-and-biden-spar-over-crime-rates-ahead-of-their-debate-what-do-we-really-know?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) about whether violent crime was rising or falling. When the FBI quietly revised its 2022 figures, changing a reported 2.1% decline in violent crime to a 4.5% increase, it [deepened suspicion](https://www.factcheck.org/2024/10/crime-stats-still-show-a-decline-since-2020/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on all sides. The Council on Criminal Justice [noted](https://counciloncj.org/when-crime-statistics-diverge/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that the FBI revised its data "without explanation," and called the absence of transparency a threat to public trust.

The FBI has since moved to [monthly data releases](https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-monthly-crime-and-law-enforcement-data?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with a built-in three-month lag, acknowledging that data needs time to “stabilize.” In effect, the FBI is trading timeliness for greater stability — a reasonable choice, but one that sacrifices the real-time figures that drive policy and politics. Cities like New York don’t wait three months. They announce crime numbers within days of a month closing, and those numbers are treated as facts by reporters, elected officials and the public, much the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report drives headlines and markets.

New York gives us an unusual opportunity to study the phenomenon. The NYPD releases monthly crime data through press releases and updates its numbers continuously through weekly CompStat reports, the [CompStat 2.0](https://compstat.nypdonline.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) website, and quarterly open data releases. Each new monthly release includes updated year-ago comparison numbers. By archiving these releases over time, it is possible to track how the same month’s crime count changes as it is reported, re-reported and eventually finalized. 

### Why the numbers don’t always match

Astute readers of Vital City’s year-end crime reports may notice that the figures cited there sometimes differ from the NYPD’s own published totals. This is not an error. It reflects the fact that the NYPD effectively publishes crime data through multiple channels that do not always agree: monthly press releases (the first and most widely reported), [weekly CompStat pages](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/crime-statistics/borough-and-precinct-crime-stats.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the [CompStat 2.0 website](https://compstat.nypdonline.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the City’s [Open Data](https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) portal (updated quarterly) and [historical CompStat tables](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis%5Fand%5Fplanning/historical-crime-data/seven-major-felony-offenses-2000-2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (the numbers used in historical reporting).

Because each source captures data at a different point in the revision cycle, discrepancies are inevitable. The latest available press release for a given month will typically report higher crime counts than the historical end-of-year tables, because the press releases reflect the most recent reclassifications while the year-end tables appear to freeze counts closer to when the “books are closed” — meaning that late-arriving reclassifications for December, in particular, may not be captured. 

Vital City’s analyses draw on whichever data source is most appropriate for the question at hand, and differences from NYPD-published totals generally reflect these timing gaps rather than any disagreement about the underlying facts.

### The numbers almost always go up

Of the 95 monthly major crime totals examined, spanning 2018 through November 2025, every one was later revised upward between the initial press release and subsequent available data. None were revised downward. The average upward revision for total index crime was 2.7%, ranging from less than 1% to just over 6%. This is not random noise; it is a one-directional measurement artifact that systematically understates crime at the moment it is announced.

That translates to roughly 3,000 additional major crimes absent from the initial annual count. But recent months have run more than double that average, with revisions reaching 6%, suggesting the gap between what's announced and what actually happened is widening. And unlike polling error, which fluctuates randomly in both directions, these revisions moved only one way — upward — in every month examined. The initial numbers are the ones that make headlines; the corrections arrive quietly, if they are noticed at all.

This pattern has an institutional logic. There are asymmetric pressures at work in police crime classification. On one side, individual officers and precinct commanders face [well-documented incentives](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1350/ijps.2010.12.3.195?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to classify crimes at lower severity levels: Lower crime numbers mean better performance metrics, and felonies generate more paperwork, mandatory investigations and supervisory scrutiny than misdemeanors. On the other side, the department’s auditing apparatus exists precisely to catch and correct underclassification, because undercounting the seriousness of crime carries real consequences: delayed detective involvement, misallocated resources, and victims who don’t receive the investigative attention their cases warrant. 

The auditing process tends to run in one direction because underestimating a crime's severity carries real costs, such as delayed detective response and misallocated resources, while overestimation is the less consequential error. The result is a system that reliably undercounts crime on first release and reliably adjusts upward over time.

What does this mean in practical terms? Under the more conservative historical rate, a reported 3% decline is likely to finish nearly flat; a 'flat' month is probably an increase of about 3%. Under the recent rate, the adjustments are larger: a reported 5% decline may land closer to flat, and a 'flat' month likely finishes up 4 to 5%. Either way, the direction of the revision is the same, and any announced decline of less than 5% is at risk of shrinking substantially or flipping signs entirely.

The problem occurs when the public conversation treats first-release numbers as final, when elected officials cite them at press conferences without caveat and nobody reads the 'preliminary' fine print at the bottom of the press release.

### How a crime gets counted — and recounted

Better understanding this phenomenon requires a brief primer on the NYPD’s complaint process. When someone calls 911, walks into a precinct or even mails a letter (yes, it happens), a responding officer conducts an initial investigation and determines whether a crime has occurred. That officer classifies the offense, assigning both a crime type (such as murder, robbery, or larceny) and a severity level (such as felony or misdemeanor), and files a complaint report.

A supervisor reviews and signs off. The report enters the system within hours.

The process that follows is governed by the [Crime Complaint Reporting System Guide](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/public%5Finformation/public-pguide1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#page=148), which sets out the rules for categorizing offenses. From there, the precinct's Crime Analysis Unit, a small team of civilian and sworn staff responsible for reviewing complaint reports, may upgrade or downgrade the classification, sometimes calling complainants back for additional information, usually within a day or two.

If the case warrants investigation, detectives take over. As new evidence or witness statements come in, detectives can request reclassifications through the precinct. In the ensuing weeks and months, the department’s Data Integrity Unit, which sits outside precinct command structures and is generally indifferent to local pressures, samples complaints for quality and sends them back to precincts for reclassification when errors are found. The Quality Assurance Division investigates specific complaints of misclassification.

It is sometimes assumed that prosecutors play a role in how crimes are classified in police statistics. They do not. Under the FBI’s [Uniform Crime Reporting](https://www.rccd.nv.gov/siteassets/content/about/ucr/FAQsforUCR.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), crime statistics are collected and reported exclusively by law enforcement agencies. The system was designed to capture offenses known to the police, not charging decisions or court outcomes. The NYPD is no exception: District attorneys have no say in how the department classifies a crime complaint.

Auditing is what separates serious crime statistics from wish lists. The problem is that the original numbers (the ones that make headlines, shape narratives and inform policy decisions) carry an asterisk that nobody reads. There is also a practical cost: When a crime is initially classified at a lower severity than it deserves, it can delay the investigative response. Detectives may be notified late, witness memories fade and cases that warranted immediate attention get a slower start.

### Not all crimes revise the same way

The direction and magnitude of revision varies dramatically by crime type, and the pattern reveals something about the mechanics of each offense.

**Murder** has the largest average revision: +13.5%. This is almost entirely driven by the Medical Examiner’s office. When someone is shot or seriously injured, the initial complaint is often classified as a felony assault or as “investigate aided,” NYPD shorthand for a case involving a person requiring medical attention whose outcome is still uncertain. If the victim dies days or weeks later, the crime is reclassified as a homicide, often too late for the initial CompStat report. Some death investigations take months to determine the cause. A month that initially reports 16 murders routinely closes at 18 to 20\. The absolute numbers are small, but the percentage shift is large enough to change the story about whether murder is rising or falling in any given period.

Year-over-year murder comparisons can swing by 8 percentage points as the data matures, wide enough to flip the sign of the trend when comparing to prior years. When the department announces that “murder is down 10% this month,” the honest answer is often: We don’t know yet. (The department does track these pending cases internally and generally knows which deaths are likely to be reclassified, but that information doesn’t make it into the early press releases.)

A [January 2025 press release](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr006/new-york-city-crime-continues-decline-1-700-fewer-major-crimes-january-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) illustrates the problem. At the time, the NYPD reported 25 murders for the month, a 24.1% drop from January 2024’s 33\. By [January 2026](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR002/nypd-fewest-shoooting-incidents-shooting-victims-murders-january?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the January 2025 figure had been revised to 30\. The actual decline was 9%, not 24.1%. The headline number was directionally correct but dramatically overstated.

**Felony assault** revises upward by an average of 4.4%, and it does so with remarkable consistency. This is predictable undercounting, and it makes mechanical sense. The line turns on the victim's injuries: broken bones, loss of consciousness, or hospitalization can upgrade a misdemeanor to a felony once medical records arrive. And while 4.4% may sound modest, applied to the tens of thousands of assaults recorded annually, it represents a substantial number of violent crimes missing from the initial counts. Felony assault is the single largest contributor to total revision in 56 of the 95 months studied.

**Grand larceny** revises by a more modest 2.2%. But because it is the city's [highest-volume index crime](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/crime-in-new-york-city-trends-statistics) (roughly 48,000 cases a year, compared with 309 murders), it accounts for about a third of the total revision in absolute terms. Some of the reasons for this volatility include the nature of the crime: When a credit card is used fraudulently, the evidence of that fraud may arrive after the initial report. Grand larceny and felony assault together drive approximately two-thirds of the total revision each month. 

**Burglary** revises upward by 5.0%. Some of this may be driven by retail theft cases where an arrestee turns out to have been previously banned from a store. Under New York law, burglary requires entering or remaining unlawfully in a building with intent to commit a crime. A shoplifter with no prior ban is simply trespassing or committing larceny, but once a store has formally excluded someone, any subsequent entry becomes unlawful, satisfying the burglary statute and upgrading the charge. What began as a larceny becomes a burglary, but only after investigators confirm the prior ban, a fact rarely known at the time of the initial report.

And then there is **grand larceny auto**, the only index crime that consistently revises *downward*, by about 1.0%. The reason is straightforward: Initial reports of stolen vehicles are sometimes reclassified once it turns out the car was towed by the city, the owner misremembered where it was parked or the complaint involves insurance fraud rather than theft.

### The revision rate is increasing

Across all index crimes, the annual revision rate was relatively stable from 2018 to 2023, hovering between 1.7% and 3.3%. In 2024, the rate averaged 3.2%, but with a clear acceleration in the second half of the year, when monthly revisions regularly exceeded 3.5% and climbed as high as 4.4%. In 2025, the average monthly revision rate jumped to 4.5% — and because most of those months are still maturing, the final figure will be higher. 

The monthly time series tells a more granular story. The revision rate was remarkably stable under most commissioners, averaging between 1.9% and 2.7% during the tenures of O'Neill, Shea, Sewell, Caban and Donlon. Under Tisch, the average has jumped to 4.7%, and because those months continue to mature, the final figure will climb further.

### Transit crime is revising more than anything else

Transit crime numbers deserve special attention. Since 2022, subway crime has been a central focus of the department’s public messaging. Gov. Hochul [secured $77 million](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/safer-subways-governor-hochul-announces-subway-crime-track-reach-lowest-levels-generation-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) last year for enhanced transit patrols, and transit crime figures have become among the most closely watched numbers the department publishes.

The NYPD is revising transit crime upward at rates that far outpace revisions for the city as a whole, and the gap is widening. Between 2018 and 2022, the department revised transit crime upward by a stable 2.2% per year on average, consistent with citywide crime numbers. In 2023, the revision rate started to diverge from other crime revisions, jumping to 4.6% while the overall revision in citywide index crimes was 2.3%. In 2024, transit crime revisions reached 8.7% while citywide index crimes were at 3.2%. For the 2025 months analyzed, the average transit crime revision has hit 11.2%, compared to 4.6% citywide.

This means that a headline claiming transit crime is “down 10%” in a given month, based on initial data, could finish flat or even up once the numbers stabilize. The February 2025 transit numbers are a case in point: reported as 135 crimes last February, it has since grown to 162, a 20.0% increase.

This analysis cannot say definitively why the transit revision rate has climbed so sharply. The pattern is consistent with several possible explanations: heightened political attention to subway safety may have increased auditing scrutiny on transit complaints; the influx of officers on transit patrols may mean more initial reports filed by personnel less familiar with transit crime classification or the same downclassification pressures documented in the Hyland case may be more widespread than a single district, with the department's auditing apparatus catching and correcting them after the fact. The data alone cannot distinguish among these explanations, and they are not mutually exclusive. What is clear is the practical implication: Transit crime numbers are now the least settled figures in the department's monthly releases.

### A note on transit data integrity

One data point that may bear on the 2025 transit revision numbers: in March 2025, the NYPD [stripped Captain Steven Hyland](https://nypost.com/2025/03/19/us-news/nypd-transit-commander-demoted-for-allegedly-faking-subway-crime-stats-victimized-the-victim/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from his command at Transit District 20, which covers central and northern Queens, after an Internal Affairs audit found that he had allegedly directed subordinates to forge signatures and reclassify legitimate complaints to make his district's numbers look better. The department confirmed that a “[handful](https://nypost.com/2025/03/19/us-news/nypd-transit-commander-demoted-for-allegedly-faking-subway-crime-stats-victimized-the-victim/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)” of reports had been “intentionally misclassified.” The department said the misclassified reports did not significantly affect Transit District 20’s overall numbers, in spite of the overall increase in transit revisions in 2025\. 

### The damage premature crime stat announcements can do – 2023 example

The changing crime data is not an abstract concern. At the end of 2023, Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD announced that crime had declined for the year. As data continued to mature early into 2024, the numbers told a different story. By spring, the [New York Post reported](https://nypost.com/2024/04/03/us-news/crime-was-in-fact-up-year-as-mayor-adams-tries-to-downplay-disorder/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that crime had in fact risen and that the celebrated decline was a product of preliminary numbers that had not yet been revised upward. But by then the damage is done. The initial numbers have already shaped coverage and public perception, leaving a false impression and further eroding trust in official data.

This is the scenario the data predicts. With an average upward revision of nearly 3%, any initially reported decline of less than 3% is at serious risk of flipping signs. And because the revision is systematic, not random, the “preliminary” caveat buried at the bottom of each press release is not just boilerplate. It is one of the most important sentences in the document.

### What should change

Four things can improve how the city communicates and consumes crime data.

**First, the NYPD should publish revision tables alongside each monthly release.** Include a sidebar in each press release showing how the comparison month's numbers have changed since they were first reported. If January 2025's crime numbers were initially reported as 8,433 and are now 8,940, say so. Let the reader calibrate. The department should also timestamp all data releases, as it already does for its [historical Compstat tables](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis%5Fand%5Fplanning/historical-crime-data/seven-major-felony-offenses-2000-2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Clear labeling of different versions would reduce unnecessary confusion when observers notice discrepancies between sources.

**Second, the mayor’s office and the department should be cautious about making definitive trend claims based on single-month preliminary data.** A month’s crime report is a useful data point, not a verdict. Claiming “eight straight months of decline” when each month’s number is still maturing is an invitation to the kind of embarrassment that followed the 2023 end-of-year announcement — and to the broader erosion of trust that follows when official numbers don’t hold up. Confidence intervals belong in the conversation, at least informally.

**Third, journalists should routinely compare the prior year’s numbers in the current press release against the original press release for that period.** This is a five-minute check that would immediately contextualize every monthly crime story. The raw materials are public; the NYPD archives its press releases online.

**Fourth, the NYPD should invest in better front-end classification.** The revision pattern is not just an accounting problem. It reflects thousands of individual moments where an officer or supervisor got the severity wrong on the first pass. The goal isn't to eliminate revisions; some reclassification is inevitable as facts develop. It is to reduce the share driven by errors that better training could have prevented.

### How to read the next headline

When the next monthly crime report drops, and it announces that major crime is up or down by some percentage compared to the same period last year, observers should mentally add 4 to 5 percentage points to any reported change in total index crime. Add more for burglary, felony assault and especially murder. Subtract for grand larceny auto. Treat transit numbers, for the moment, as provisional sketches rather than finished portraits.

The NYPD’s crime data is among the most granular and well-audited in the country. That auditing process is a strength. But the public conversation about crime — in the press, at the podium and in politics — runs on first drafts. And first drafts, it turns out, are systematically wrong.
### Abundance On a Budget
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-can-mamdani-do-nyc-budget/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:24.000Z
It is budget season and New York is arguing about the [numbers](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/02/shhh-listen-did-mamdani-say-percent-or-percentage-point/411517/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as City Hall and its defenders and opponents frame their tax proposals. Is the mayor’s proposed tax increase on high earners 2% or 2 percentage points? (It’s two more percentage points on incomes over $1 million.) Is an alternative property tax increase 9.5% or 1.17 percentage points? (It’s the former — which happens to also be the latter.) Is the city’s [deficit $5 billion](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/feb26/sum2-26.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), $7 billion or [$12 billion](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/02/tada-nyc-budget-gap-now-down-7-billion-mamdani-says/411354/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)? (The current figure, down from earlier estimates, stands at around $5 billion.) The differences matter, both for substance and presentation, but any way you slice it, the City has a substantial hole in its budget, the [economy is not to blame](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/comptroller-levine-projects-2-2-billion-budget-shortfall-in-fiscal-year-2026-and-10-4-billion-in-fiscal-year-2027/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the City’s [commitments](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/nyregion/mamdani-nyc-class-size.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are set to continue to grow. On top of local structural issues, Mayor Zohran Mamdani faces a [Trump administration](https://cbcny.org/advocacy/how-new-york-city-should-prepare-changes-federal-funding?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=The%20fiscal%20year%202026%20budget%20includes%20$7.4,%2A%20School%20food%20programs%20%2A%20Family%20shelters) that is likely to be more of an [obstacle](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/nycs-federal-funding-outlook-under-trump/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) than a backstop, no matter how many pleasant meetings the mayor and president may have. 

To address the budget gap, Mamdani proposes increasing taxes on high earners and corporations. Given substantial [inequalities](https://fiscalpolicy.org/new-data-show-rising-inequality-strong-wage-growth-for-top-earners?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in recent wage growth — incomes for high earners are outpacing those for everyone else — there is a strong argument for more progressive taxation. That said, the move is fiscally and politically challenging. Despite the Trump administration’s [giveaway to high earners](https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/by-the-numbers-harmful-republican-megabill-favors-the-wealthy-and-leaves?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and big businesses nationally, New York City is still a [high-tax](https://cbcny.org/newsroom/cbc-releases-top-charts-3-new-york-and-its-localities-are-1-taxing-3-spending?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email) place to work and do business relative to elsewhere in the country, which could eventually hurt its competitiveness. Given the [disproportionate](https://joshgreenman.substack.com/p/raise-taxes-or-the-girl-gets-it-mamdanis?utm%5Fsource=post-email-title&publication%5Fid=234560&post%5Fid=188671995&utm%5Fcampaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=7b0b6j&triedRedirect=true&utm%5Fmedium=email) share of taxes that high earners pay, this is a fiscal risk for New York. Further, Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is up for reelection and who has taken a collaborative approach to working with the mayor, seems to be drawing the line at a tax hike (for now).

Whether or not the mayor wins this budget battle with Albany, he should consider emphasizing reforms that give the City more bang for its buck by pursuing an abundance agenda — namely, making it easier, faster and cheaper to build what New Yorkers need, and that close the gap between what government promises and what it delivers. These reforms are achievable in tight fiscal conditions and would set the stage for a higher-capacity public sector when fiscal conditions improve and spending can increase. 

The place to start, as detailed in our recent [policy agenda](https://www.abundanceny.org/agenda?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), is improving the government’s own capacity. For example, the City had [pursued reforms](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/home/downloads/pdf/press-releases/2024/Capital%20Process%20Reform%20Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to its own capital construction process under the Adams administration. Mamdani should return to those efforts and push them even further. Currently, the School Construction Authority and Economic Development Corporation enjoy flexible authorities that allow them to build and procure without many of the requirements that the City’s departments of Transportation, Design and Construction or Parks have to follow. While some argue that the state should make some of these [agencies](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/S2765?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [authorities](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/mocs/downloads/Regulations/legislative-regulatory-reform/CP-Reform-Task-Force.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with some of the same flexibilities, Mamdani should argue for a comprehensive reform to reduce the requirements on City agencies and make it easier to build. 

Alongside empowering agencies, the mayor could push to make it easier for them to hire. More than[ 13,000 city positions sit vacant](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/new-yorks-mamdani-ny-civil-service-system), leaving departments unable to keep pace with basic demand. The civil service exam system — designed a century ago to prevent patronage — now makes hiring far too cumbersome and time-consuming. The State’s [NY HELPS](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-new-resources-help-new-yorkers-find-careers-state-service?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) program proved that flexible, experience-based hiring can work, cutting weeks and months off timelines without leading to corruption. Under the last administration, the City[ nearly followed the state’s lead — and then backed off](https://nysfocus.com/2026/02/11/mamdani-civil-service-exams-hiring?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) under union pressure. Mamdani should revisit that decision. And as the state pursues a permanent reform to civil service rules, the City should join efforts that would make the exams faster and job-appropriate and in the [meantime](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/what-it-will-take-to-deliver-for) use plainer language, more user-friendly design and better track applications to improve the hiring process. 

Further, while Mamdani’s primary instinct may be to augment the public services that New Yorkers already receive and increase the number of eligible recipients, a more progressive approach would be to improve [access](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-new-resources-help-new-yorkers-find-careers-state-service?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for the people already eligible, who tend to be the neediest. Fair Fares, for example, [reaches](https://rpa.org/work/reports/reduced-fares?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) only 40% of eligible riders. Rather than having to find $600 million or more to enable everyone to take the bus for free, the City could improve coordination and auto-enrollment to ensure that everyone eligible gets the benefit they are due. The same is true for [housing](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/04/29/housing-lottery-apartment-application-less-paperwork-rent/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [cash assistance](https://citylimits.org/why-are-you-making-it-so-difficult-nyc-cash-aid-applicants-face-denial-surge/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) benefits, which have [burdensome](https://chpcny.org/publication/brutal-bureaucracy-nyc-housing-connect-analysis/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) requirements aimed to prevent fraud, putting a [time tax](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/how-government-learned-waste-your-time-tax/619568/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the city’s poorest. Indeed, City Hall could start by extending the time between required renewals and then assemble a [team of technologists](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nHcH6zLXYfl1Gn7vh8IF7aIp5jAS8kCJ/view?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from within and outside of government to overhaul application processes across government. 

On housing, the mayor has already demonstrated the right instinct. His support for Hochul’s[ SEQRA modernization](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/let-them-build-governor-hochul-unveils-landmark-reforms-cut-red-tape-and-build-more-housing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which would exempt infill housing from lengthy environmental review, is aligned with his support of last year’s City Charter amendments. Now, the mayor should build on City of Yes and the charter amendments by [rezoning along subway lines](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/a-housing-roadmap-for-new-yorks-next-mayor) to both add homes and improve subway revenue. Fixing permitting is equally essential: Between 2010 and 2023, the average permit for a new residential building of five or more units took [18 months](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2025/2025-Charter-Revision-Commission-Preliminary-Report-DIGITAL.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), with four years typically passing from initial filing to occupancy. Other cities have [cut](https://www.constructionowners.com/news/san-francisco-pushes-major-permitting-reforms?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) permitting to weeks. The mayor should also focus on [building codes](https://www.centerforbuilding.org/publication/beyond-zoninghidden-code-barriers-to-middle-scale-housing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to make [elevators](https://www.centerforbuilding.org/publication/elevators?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) cheaper for buildings to install by reducing size requirements and allow for bigger single-stair buildings to cut costs. The administration also seems [interested](https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/02/05/leila-bozorg-mamdani-housing-rent-freeze/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in expanding [modular construction](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/building-better-piece-by-piece) and [mass timber](https://progresschamber.org/research/mass-timber-promising-housing-tech/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which bring factory efficiency to home construction. 

The mayor also should throw his weight behind making it cheaper and easier to build and establish new lines. Without reform, Phase 2 of the Second Avenue Subway could [cost as much $4 billion](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/why-it-costs-4-billion-per-mile-of-subway-track) per mile, [many times the global average](https://transitcosts.com/transit-costs-study-final-report/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#case%5Fnewyork). To make projects like it and the Interborough Express cheaper, the City could reduce and streamline demands it makes on the MTA and support the MTA’s ongoing efforts to reduce costs (such as by right-sizing stations). On buses, [results are available sooner](https://transalt.org/big-ideas-bus?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): busways, all-door boarding, automated bus lane enforcement and curbside improvements would [meaningfully accelerate the system](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/68014662afada372eb0560ca/t/68f6457384978845da0d64ab/1760970099339/Riders+Alliance+Much+Better+Buses%5F+It%E2%80%99s+About+Time+%281%29.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Combined with more Fair Fares uptake, this would result in a huge improvement for affordability and quality of life for working-class families. 

Many of these reforms would involve Albany, but progress to improve the government’s plumbing may be easier now that the state sees the City’s fiscal challenges and the voters’ clear demand for change. And relative to a bruising budget fight, Albany lawmakers may well welcome the opportunity. 

By moving on these fronts, Mamdani would be doing a few crucial things to advance his agenda. First, he would make life more affordable for millions of New Yorkers who cannot access public services and who see themselves as being squeezed out of their city. Second, he would be delivering on his [promise](https://jacobin.com/2026/02/zohran-mamdani-efficiency-nyc-budget?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to create a government “where excellence is no longer the exception.” Mamdani generated an enormous amount of hope and goodwill in his campaign. He may well win the state revenue fight eventually. Federal funding will eventually start flowing again to New York. If those new resources come, New Yorkers would benefit even more from having them flow through a more streamlined, outcome-oriented process.
### For Whom the Plows Come
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/snow-complaints-staten-island-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:24.000Z
When the snow started falling on the evening of February 22nd, it came down the way the forecasters said it would: fast, heavy, and indiscriminate. [By sunrise, 22 inches had accumulated at LaGuardia.](https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2026/02/23/new-york-city-blizzard-snow-storm-february-2026-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Schools were closed. Roads were impassable. And across all five boroughs, New Yorkers picked up the phone.

On February 23, [15,387 of them called 311](https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/311-Service-Requests-from-2020-to-Present/erm2-nwe9/about%5Fdata?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a roughly 50% spike over the winter daily average. The number alone tells you little. Storms cause surges; surges recede. But the shape of those calls (who made them, from where, and about what) tells you everything. The snow fell on everyone equally. What happened next did not.

Here is the first thing the data shows, and the most disorienting: Staten Island, population 496,000, the borough that consistently files the fewest 311 complaints on any given day, filed the most. Not by a hair. By a mile. Its 4,027 complaints on the 23rd outpaced Brooklyn (3,803), Queens (3,425), the Bronx (2,287) and Manhattan (1,834). Of those, 3,546 were for snow and ice, outnumbering the other four boroughs combined. Eight of the 10 hardest-hit zip codes were on the island. Meanwhile, Manhattan, population 1.7 million, logged 146 snow complaints.

One hundred forty-six.

Adjusted for [population](https://data.census.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Staten Island’s snow complaint rate was 715 per 100,000 residents. Manhattan’s was 9\. That is an 83-to-1 ratio.

The 311 system is one of Michael Bloomberg’s most lasting legacies. Before he launched it in March of 2003, New Yorkers seeking city services were left to sort through over 40 agency-specific phone numbers: one for potholes, another for rats, a third for noise, most of which rang and rang or went to voicemail. Bloomberg, ever the systems thinker, saw this as an information problem. Consolidate the intake, route the requests, track performance. A McKinsey fix, neatly boxed into three digits. It worked. And then it became something else.

Because every 311 call is also an act of faith: a New Yorker picking up the phone and trusting that someone on the other end will do something. Over 23 years, tens of millions of those calls have piled up, and they tell you, in close to real time, where the city is failing. When 6,524 people called about snow and ice on a single day — nearly five times the previous winter’s worst — that was thousands of people saying: I cannot get out of my house.

Staten Island is the least urban borough by a lot, and it shows. One subway line (the Staten Island Railway, 14 miles, unconnected to the rest of the system). A bus network that leaves much of the South Shore immobile without a car. Most days, they make it work, as people all over America do. But when 22 inches of snow fall and only 41% of your street segments are designated for priority plowing — compared with nearly two-thirds of street segments in Brooklyn and Manhattan — that independence turns into isolation.

Staten Island has always felt a little like a stepchild. In 1993, [65% of its voters sought to leave New York City *entirely*](https://www.silive.com/news/2023/08/65-of-staten-islanders-voted-to-secede-from-new-york-city-in-1993-from-the-vault.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.* The vote was symbolic, but the frustration was real. Many of its residents have spent their lives feeling like Manhattan and Brooklyn politicians only remember them when it is time to collect a toll. 

When Nicole Malliotakis, the island’s congresswoman, rails against [congestion pricing](https://malliotakis.house.gov/media/press-releases/malliotakis-joins-bipartisan-group-elected-officials-unite-against-potential?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), she is channeling a community exhausted by paying for a city that rarely pays them any mind. Zip code 10314, Mid-Island, where strip malls meet single-family homes, filed 791 complaints on the 23rd. That is more than any Manhattan zip code filed all week. 

The 311 data tells a second story too. The Bronx, which ranked fourth in total complaints, led the city in one category that has nothing to do with snow: lack of heat and hot water. Of the 2,256 heating complaints filed that day, 766 came from the Bronx alone, outpacing every other borough, including Brooklyn, which has nearly twice its population. The most common descriptor was two words: “entire building.” Not one apartment, not one floor. The whole building. No heat in the freezing cold. 

So on the same day, in the same storm, Staten Island was calling about snow in the streets and the Bronx was calling about cold inside the walls. The first problem is a city that did not send enough plows. The second is landlords whose buildings lost heat. One is a failure by the government. The other is a failure by a landlord.

The Department of Sanitation fielded 43% of the day’s complaints. Housing Preservation and Development fielded 23%. Snow removal is the Department of Sanitation’s job; heat is a landlord’s obligation, enforced by HPD. The snow and the cold came from the same sky, but the failures had nothing to do with each other. Yet we talk about all of it as ‘storm response,’ as if the answer is always more salt and more shovels. The snow, at least, will melt. The landlord will still be there in April. 

Then there are the trees. On an average day, about 44 New Yorkers call to report a damaged tree; the previous winter’s worst day drew 306\. On the 23rd, 1,496 people called. That number includes 572 reports of entire trees falling, and 724 of major limbs coming down. The Parks Department, which on most days concerns itself with mowing schedules and playground permits, was suddenly an emergency response agency. And while fallen trees might sound like a secondary concern next to frozen pipes and buried cars, they block streets, take out power lines, crush parked vehicles, and, on occasion, [kill people](https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/tree-fall-kills-woman-in-backyard-nyc-pool-police/3825149/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In the language of emergency management, this is called a cascading emergency: one problem that generates five others. The less glamorous companion stat: 88 complaints about “wood pile remaining,” a 60-fold spike over the winter average. The trees came down fast. Cleaning them up took considerably longer.

It snowed in Manhattan too, by the way, triggering 146 complaints. You might wonder how an entire borough gets through a blizzard with 146 complaints. After the January storm, DSNY issued over [4,500 sidewalk violation summonses across the city.](https://www.amny.com/news/nyc-blizzard-sidewalk-shoverling-rules-tickets/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Manhattan received 179\. Queens got 1,529\. The sidewalks in Manhattan were already clear, because Manhattan has doormen, building managers, commercial landlords and BIDs like the Downtown Alliance, whose [60-person sanitation team](https://downtownny.com/about-us/services/sanitation/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) clears bus stops, crosswalks and sidewalks after every snowfall. It feels as if below 96th Street, the borough handles itself. That is how it works when you have money. You do not call 311\. You do not need to. 

Staten Island has no equivalent of the Downtown Alliance, and its business improvement districts cover far less ground. Neither do the Rockaways, where zip code 11691 still cracked the top 10 in complaints. In neighborhoods like these, when the plow does not come, 311 is the only thing between you and waiting. During the January storm, CBS New York [reported](https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/staten-island-snow-removal-frustration-dsny/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that DSNY had pulled crews off the island and reassigned them to Brooklyn while streets were still buried. Borough President Vito Fossella did not mince words: “Staten Island became second-class citizens a couple of days ago.”

When schools reopened, citywide [attendance was 63%.](https://abc7ny.com/post/2026-blizzard-mayor-zohran-mamdani-announces-public-schools-will-reopen-tuesday-snow-day/18643037/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) On Staten Island, where accumulations reached 28 inches, [elected officials put the figure at 16%](https://www.fox5ny.com/news/nyc-schools-reopen-backlash-staten-island?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It took 4,000 calls and two buried days before the city sent [reinforcements](https://ny1.com/nyc/staten-island/news/2026/02/25/mamdani--dsny-doubles-staten-island-crews-to-clear-snow?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and it was not the first time the borough had been left waiting. Weeks earlier, the Sanitation Department had [reassigned](https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/staten-island-snow-removal-frustration-dsny/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) its crews to Brooklyn mid-cleanup. According to its own priority maps, only 41% of Staten Island’s streets are designated for first-pass plowing, the lowest rate of any borough. The snow did not fall unevenly, but the plows did.
### The Hidden Cost of Trash
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-trash-removal-cost-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:23.000Z
Last year, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani captured the public’s imagination with a series of [snappy affordability pledges](https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): a rent freeze on stabilized units, fast and free buses, City-owned grocery stores and free childcare for all. But as the father of his vanquished opponent once said, “you campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.”

Now, as mayor, he has to figure out how — or whether — to deliver on the promises made during his campaign. Childcare looks like a winner; even [moderate](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/12/menin-and-mamdani-could-find-common-ground-on-child-care-push-00686809?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [Democrats](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-investments-deliver-universal-child-care-new-york-children-under?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) were eager to work with him on it. On the flip side, even many New Yorkers who support free buses don’t think the government [should actually do it](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/upshot/polling-experiment-free-buses.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and the campaign and now administration have been quietly shifting the emphasis from “free” to “fast.” As for City-owned grocery stores, [Vital City readers know how I feel](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/nyc-grocery-cost-explained).

That leaves the rent freeze. People can debate (including in [Vital](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/a-housing-roadmap-for-new-yorks-next-mayor) [City](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/new-york-needs-a-smarter-way-to-control-rents)) the wisdom of zeroing out increases on the roughly one-third of housing units in New York City that are subject to rent regulation. But the campaign promise was simple, clear and — if the Rent Guidelines Board goes along — squarely within the mayor’s control. The administration has [reaffirmed its promise](https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/02/05/leila-bozorg-mamdani-housing-rent-freeze/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of a four-year rent freeze.

The task now at hand is how to pay for it. Mamdani the candidate argued that landlords are already on average [so far ahead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn0sFssPZTg&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that they can handle a few years without rent hikes. Mamdani the mayor understands that [averages obscure outliers](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-rent-is-too-damn-high-but-also-too-low). A growing share of rent-stabilized buildings are in [dire financial straits](https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/experts-warn-distress-in-part-of-rent-stabilized-housing-stock-poses-growing-risks-for-tenants-and-new-york-city?%5F%5Fcf%5Fchl%5Ftk=y7b2uFKf2bQ.sU2BI3zvUhDhcvuk1Kt.HfIP3XuTcls-1771432893-1.0.1.1-FxoJxWWJ4qOh.pEKnHInEh6anKVfm9qtMiOWdt6MS0E&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — which soon might get even worse with a looming [property tax hike](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/nyregion/budget-mamdani-property-taxes.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). When costs exceed rents, buildings risk a return to the dark days when landlords simply walked away from their properties.

With a rent freeze seemingly a foregone conclusion, the administration has been casting about for how to rein in landlords’ operating costs. The conversation has focused on things like insurance and property taxes, but there is one more tangible item that often gets overlooked: trash.

The rotting, leaking bags of trash piled onto the city’s sidewalks have long been an embarrassment for the city, and the Department of Sanitation under Eric Adams finally made a move to do something about it, requiring some buildings to put refuse in bins. But hidden beyond the cleanliness struggles are big costs for New York City residential building owners.

The journey of a few hundred miles from curb to landfills, incinerators and recycling centers [costs taxpayers](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2025/03/Department-of-Sanitation-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) around $35 per dwelling unit per month, facilitated by Department of Sanitation workers and private waste management companies. The cost to building owners to move trash, recycling and now compost just a few feet from the city’s cellars and courtyards to the curb is, surprisingly, much higher. The cost has never been tallied up, so my organization, [the Center for Building in North America](https://www.centerforbuilding.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), worked with [the Center for Zero Waste Design](https://centerforzerowastedesign.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to interview dozens of owners and pore over financial statements to figure out how much it costs and [published a report with our findings](https://centerforzerowastedesign.org/all/advocacy/hidden-cost-of-trash/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). To get this right, we found owners of everything from brownstones to large campuses, and worked with them to determine what share of their labor and other budgets were going towards waste handling and related work. The number that we arrived at is about $75 per month, on average, for each apartment in the city. While building owners pay the cost directly, one way or another, operating costs are passed along to residents. And at least for small and mid-sized buildings, this is a cost that is completely avoidable if New York City would adopt the same waste collection policies that you find across Europe and beyond.

Seventy-five dollars a month might not be a lot of extra cost for a new luxury apartment, but it’s a sizable sum for most New Yorkers. Citywide, the median household income is around $81,000\. That $75 a month means $900 a year — more than 1% of all income that the typical New York City household earns before taxes goes towards paying to move their rotting banana peels, Amazon boxes and used yogurt containers from the trash room to the curb.

For rent-stabilized housing, $75 a month means the difference between a cost-neutral rent freeze and one that will cost owners dearly. The median rent in a rent-stabilized building is $1,384 a month, so if the City can deliver landlords an operating savings of $75 per month by relieving them of the duty to handle waste, that would pay for about two years of a rent freeze, assuming the alternative is rent hikes of around 2.5% per year.

Seventy-five dollars a month also means that new affordable housing that the City subsidizes will not be able to serve the tenants most in need. When the City finances new fully affordable housing, it tries to ensure financial sustainability by setting rents at levels that at least cover operating costs. It’s the same when the City sets affordable rents in private developments receiving tax breaks, or built under the Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program. An extra $75 per month in costs for affordable housing translates to an extra $75 per month in rent, which means an extra $3,000 that applicants must demonstrate in yearly income to rent a given apartment (the City uses the same 40-times-your-rent formula that private landlords do).

It might seem surprising that it costs more than twice as much to move waste a few feet, from building to sidewalk, than it does for the almost 10,000-strong Department of Sanitation and its private contractors to take it hundreds of miles from curbs to landfills and incinerators as far away as South Carolina. But when you consider the inefficiency of the work, it starts to make sense — as does the logical solution.

My own five-story condo building in Williamsburg shows how high the costs of waste handling can be. We have a storefront on our ground floor, so residents trudge downstairs to leave bags of trash and recycling in the cellar. Three times a week, the management company sends a porter to haul the bags up the narrow staircase and onto the street. Back when buildings were still allowed to leave refuse on the sidewalk, that was the end of it. But in an attempt to clean up the streets, the City now requires that waste be placed in bins. So, after bringing the bags up, the worker has to bring the bins up as well, where they sit on the curb until collection. The next day — another three times a week — they come back to the building to haul them back downstairs. Along the way, there is constant cleaning — cleaning the waste room, fishing pedestrians’ stray trash out of bins that sat at the curb, spraying the bins down. And much of this work now has to happen after hours, with the City pushing the old 4 p.m. setout time to 6 p.m. or even 8 p.m. in an attempt to shrink dining hours for rats, in the process lengthening hours for supers and porters and driving up costs for those who employ them.

The actual work is unpleasant and physically taxing, but the real hassle is in traveling to and from the building six times a week. It’s a small building with just seven apartments and minimal other cleaning needs, so most trips are just to move waste and bins between the cellar and the sidewalk. Co-op and condo fees have [skyrocketed in the 2020s](https://millersamuel.com/?charts=manhattan-hoa-monthly-cost-per-sq-ft-based-on-sales-during-each-quarter-2&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and the growing difficulty of finding labor to move all of this waste around is one reason why. When accounting for how much of the building workers’ time is spent hauling around bags and bins of waste, the total comes out to $750 per month for my building, or $107 for each of our seven units.

As it turns out, this is not an uncommon amount for a small building. One owner of a Brooklyn brownstone reported paying a service a whopping $214 per unit just to move bins from her front yard to the curb and back. Most owners, especially of bigger buildings with economies of scale, pay less, but the average for waste handling works out to $75 a month for each apartment.

Trash needs to be taken out, but there is a better way. Visitors to Spain might notice that there are large bins on the street, taking up a few parking spaces near the corner, and residents bring their trash and recycling down to them directly. There is no super, porter or “trash concierge” (as new luxury buildings are now branding it) to handle your waste. Your landlord or condo board has no involvement in your waste at all — it’s between you and the City.

For large or luxury buildings with waste chutes or luxury expectations — and the rents and maintenance fees to go along with them — paying staff to ferry waste from the building to the curb might still make sense. Indeed, our research found that larger buildings have lower per-unit handling costs. But for the typical row house or small apartment building, the sort of building that most New Yorkers live in, the waste-handling intermediary adds little value and imposes huge costs.

New York is a city that most people experience on foot, so one person in almost every household walks down their street every day. Carrying a bag to a bin somewhere on the block would not be that onerous (and for many buildings, like my own, it would even spare schlepping down a flight of stairs to the cellar or to a courtyard). Many buildings were not built with waste storage areas that are convenient or adequate to today’s trash, so removing buildings from the business of storing their own waste would relieve residents of the smells of stinky bags of garbage in and around their buildings. It also means that far less of our public space has to be given over to trash, since mechanical collection from common containers means that the City can pick up waste more frequently.

There would be a related benefit: making the City’s pickup job much easier. Beyond the costs and hassle to owners, the City pays tremendously for door-to-door collection. With the typical New York City lot being just 25 feet wide, sanitation workers must crawl down every block in the city two or three times a week and manually lift bags from the curb (and increasingly from inside bins) and then toss them into the back of a truck. The wall of parked cars between the sidewalk and the street means that it’s not realistic to mechanically collect the suburban-sized bins the City is asking owners to put their waste out in. The work is [back-breaking](https://swana.org/news/swana-news-archive/article/2024/12/19/SWANA-Statement-on-BLS-2023-National-Census?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the constant need to jump on and off of trucks in moving traffic is [dangerous](https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-toughest-job-in-town?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). When heavy snow creates an impassable wall between the street and the curb, collection grinds to a halt and bags pile up.

New York City has been [dipping its toes](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dsny/collection/containerization/m9-bins.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) into more efficient practices, but old paradigms have limited the appetite for innovation. The City calls its “Empire Bins” — large containers as part of a pilot program that hold far more waste than typical suburban-style bins, and which can be mechanically collected — “European-style,” but the way they use them is not as efficient as in Europe. In New York, only building staff can access the containers, so building owners still have to pay to store waste on-site and have supers and porters carry it out to bins, meaning minimal cost savings. The bins are also specific to one building, so they are limited to large properties lest entire streets be taken over by them, one in front of each house or small tenement — not something that New Yorkers would tolerate given competing demands for parking, the [return of outdoor dining](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/02/04/city-council-to-bring-back-year-round-outdoor-dining-after-adams-era-decimation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [curb extensions](https://www.nycstreetdesign.info/geometry/curb-extension?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for pedestrian safety. And while Empire Bins are lifted mechanically, making collection far more efficient than the old manual methods, the Department of Sanitation has not updated its pick-up frequency to capitalize on these efficiencies — they still only collect two or three times a week (and just once for recycling and compost), compared to up to [twice *per day* in Europe](https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/reports/future-of-trash-april-2023.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), allowing for far fewer bins and less smelly trash sitting out.

Moving to a system of City-owned containers might some day open up possibilities for waste management beyond what door-to-door collection can manage. In New York, most waste that could be recycled [is not](https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/04/04/new-yorkers-recycling-less-sanitation/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In parts of Europe, properly sorting waste into separate streams is encouraged by charging for disposal of trash destined for landfills, while offering recycling for free. Collection from larger, City-owned containers also allows greater investment in infrastructure, moving waste containers underground, as [in the Netherlands](https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/190s8vb/the%5Ftrash%5Freceptacles%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fnetherlands/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), keeping smells and bulky containers off the street, and enabling even greater quantities of waste to be collected in one go. Some places in [Scandinavia](https://www.envacgroup.com/us/projects/bergen/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have even taken this to the extreme with underground vacuum tube systems, eliminating the need to collect waste with trucks at all — a system that New Yorkers might be familiar with on Roosevelt Island, installed back when the city still had grand visions for improvement.

New York isn’t the only city in North America that struggles with waste and could benefit from a new approach. The United States and Canada are historically low-density and suburban nations, leaving cities to struggle with suburban-style solutions. In Toronto, many new buildings must [sacrifice huge amounts of ground-floor retail space](https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/parking-type-g-loading-toronto-retail-haf-giaimo/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to make way for enormous loading docks that can host enormous garbage trucks making three-point turns. Other American cities on the Northeast Corridor struggle with similar inefficiencies as New York — bins or even bags put out by individual buildings, but with mechanical collection blocked by a row of parked cars. In Philadelphia, a strike by sanitation and other municipal workers even forced the city to temporarily embrace a more efficient model — [centralized collection points](https://www.fox29.com/news/philly-strike-where-drop-off-your-trash-district-council-33-goes-strike?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) rather than door-to-door pick-ups — albeit in a slapdash, smelly way compared to the modern sealed containers on every block that residents have access to in, say, Madrid or Prague.

It may feel to New Yorkers today like supers and porters hauling bags and bins back and forth from the curb are in the city’s DNA, but waste practices have changed before. [In 1971](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/02/upshot/nyc-trash-rules.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the miracle of plastics let the city move away from Oscar the Grouch-style metal cans to thick contractors’ bags. [In 1982](https://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/20/nyregion/2-man-garbage-crews-agreed-on-for-the-city.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), reeling from the City’s brush with bankruptcy, the sanitation workers’ union agreed to cut three-man crews down to two workers per truck. Under the [rat-hating](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/nyregion/rat-sightings-trash-new-york.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) administration of Eric Adams, the City is finally signing up for waste containerization — forcing bags into suburban-style bins and even larger containers. Now, with Mayor Mamdani’s pledge to deliver on a rent freeze for rent-stabilized tenants and housing affordability for all, it may be time for New Yorkers to learn to take out their own trash.
### Of Molehills, Mountains and Snowballs
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-nypd-snowball-fight-police-arrest/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:16.000Z
At this rate, we might have to rename the West Village’s Washington Square Park the Place Where That Snowball Fight Happened. For the moment, that great public space has been redefined by an incident in which a social media-generated snowball fight in the aftermath of a blizzard devolved into a crowd of people [pelting NYPD officers](https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/2026065265201475765?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the back, chest and head with snow and ice. The officers were responding to 911 calls that the event had turned disorderly, and within seconds, a few people turned from hurling snowballs at each other to targeting the police. As the officers beat a retreat, they were hit again and again by members of a jeering crowd that seemed to delight in watching them wince and grimace.

The snowball fight has taken on a life of its own, aggravated by the comments of the city’s political actors. Politicians, activists, and the commentariat writing off the forceful pelting of cops with snowballs as a minor kerfuffle or all in good fun are wrong. Clobbering police officers with snowballs as they try to assess a situation and determine what to do, knowing it could hurt them and will definitely humiliate them, long after they have made it clear they aren’t there to participate, is dangerous and undermines the function of city government by normalizing the disrespect and mistreatment of its police.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who rightly expressed some concern about the incident, should have been more alarmed by how the NYPD was treated and called for a more decisive response by the city, acknowledging that a crime — even if it was a minor one — had been committed. Instead, he insisted it was a minor incident that should be put to rest without further action: “I've said that what I saw was a snowball fight. It should be treated accordingly. It was one that got out of hand. But that's what it was.” But contrary to the claims of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association and hardened critics of everything Mamdani that the incident amounts to a series of violent felonies that call for prison time, this doesn’t indicate a rampant crisis of disrespect for the city’s police. It is more like the usual actors responding to a police-involved incident as we’ve come to expect: by either dismissively brushing it off, or treating it as the crime of the century.

In 2012, when I was commanding the NYPD’s 6th precinct, which covers the West Village, I policed [a massive pillow fight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVcgGsNlO40&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the same park. It consisted of no less than 1,000 people spending hours hitting each other with pillows. Like the snowball fight, it was social media-generated, done without a permit (and therefore technically unlawful), and intended to be harmless. Feathers and other pillow parts wafted into the air and left the park a mess, but otherwise it went off without a hitch. 

The reason it remained a recreational pillow fight and not a free-for-all was that we sent several officers to the location, cordoned off an arena for the fight, and made sure it didn’t disrupt anyone else using the park. I coordinated the police response from a perch atop the park’s memorial arch, accessed by a secret stairwell. The participants respectfully followed our instructions, ended the event when we asked them to, and didn’t target bystanders. More important than our attempt to control the crowd through a police presence, nobody got it in their head to run up to cops and relentlessly hit them with pillows. If that were anything more than brief and playful, or [looked anything like](https://x.com/BGOnTheScene/status/2026065265201475765?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) how the crowd treated the police in the park on Monday, we would have shut the event down and arrested the people who impeded police operations.

Hitting police officers in the head with snowballs might be funny or even cute if you’re six years old, but not if you’re a grown man. Repeatedly throwing snow and ice at someone’s face is not good-natured frolic. Anyone who has been hit square in the head with a snowball, let alone an icy one, knows this. But since the line between winter fun and aggression can be blurry, and the most common snowball fight is indeed consensual, it is the type of act people exploit to harass or hurt someone under the cover of play. Think of it as a more dangerous version of a child twirling a finger inches from a sibling’s face while saying “but I’m not touching you,” or a protester thrusting a phone camera inches from a police officer’s face and following them around while insisting they are doing nothing more than exercising their rights. 

In the latter case, the person can be arrested for impeding the officer. The same logic applies to hurling snowballs at police who are trying to do their job, except it can also be injurious. As a police officer, I’ve seen people bullied to tears by a mob hitting them in the face with snowballs, as a parent, I’ve seen it result in bruises, and as a teacher, my wife has seen it cause eye injuries.

It is a crime, no exception, to throw anything at anyone in public without their consent if it doesn’t serve a legitimate purpose and causes annoyance, alarm or injury. This is a settled matter under [New York State Penal Law](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/240.26?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The only questions are whether the crime is disorderly conduct, harassment or assault, and whether it is a violation, misdemeanor or felony. This includes throwing snowballs at police officers. When the act also prevents officers from performing their job, you have the additional charge of obstructing government administration. While I doubt the offenses rise to the level of a felony assault against an officer, which are reserved for cases of intentional physical injury or use of a weapon, it doesn’t mean the crowd’s actions weren’t criminal in nature, deserving of a response that holds people accountable and sets the tone for the future.

It’s true, in the past, police officers have engaged in snowball fights with members of the public. But those incidents were generally congenial and voluntary, and the police weren’t dispatched to the fight by 911 after citizens called them to the scene. In the case here, the throwers were not children laughing along with the police; the emerging account is that the incident consisted of adults and teenagers repeatedly throwing snow and ice at officers long after it was extremely clear the officers wanted no part of it, and it was a form of aggression. When you watch [the](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/nyregion/nypd-snowball-fight-washington-square-park.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx7PbRpJPOA&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the pelting intensifies even as officers take the hits passively, on the retreat, and show obvious discomfort and stress at being struck in the head. If anything, all of this seemed to just embolden some of the participants, leading frustrated officers to shove people out of their path and threaten the use of pepper spray. If their jeering and relentless persistence were any indication, those throwing the snowballs were attempting to humiliate police officers in a way that could injure them.

That’s why Mamdani’s response missed the mark. To understand what I mean, you only have to imagine the mayor’s likely reaction to treating anyone else this way. Picture nurses going to work being pelted with snow by a crowd, or law professors walking to NYU getting repeatedly hit in the head with snow and ice while being cursed at. Picture the Parks Department employees who keep Washington Square Park clean being treated this way, or Sanitation workers picking up trash being hit by a crowd while they fled. Finally, imagine congregants exiting a mosque, synagogue, or church, maliciously hit in the head with snowballs at close range, long after they made it clear that they wanted no part of it. 

So what makes Monday’s incident different? I only see two ways it could be. One is if a person thinks the New Yorkers who work as police are less deserving of their dignity and safety than everyone else. When I read the bios of the people who’ve made the most strident defenses of the crowd in the park, I can’t help but conclude many of them are looking for reasons to be glad the responding officers were humiliated, because they don’t like the police. The other way it could be different is if you have lived a life where you have never been surrounded by bullies who used the pretext of a snowball fight to hurt you. The most charitable explanation is therefore that the mayor has never had this happen to him, and so he has no idea what it feels like. Nobody deserves it, let alone the city’s uniformed public servants. That is why the conduct we witnessed in the park was a crime, even if the most appropriate charge is a comparably minor one. The histrionics of the police union haven’t been helpful because they are as much a caricature as people laughing the incident off as harmless — what happened was not on the level of a bona fide assault on an officer, the kind that occurs when they fight it out with a robbery suspect, or get in the middle of drunks throwing punches. But the union was right in criticizing the mayor for denying that what took place hurt police officers, was against the law, and demanded action.

If something like this happens again, I invite the mayor to turn to the wisdom I learned growing up in 20th-century Brooklyn. If you wanted to rope a stranger into a snowball fight, you could toss one snowball at them, aiming for the legs. If they didn’t join in, you smiled and let them pass. You definitely didn’t surround them and unload snowballs on their head as they walked away. In the era I am from in Bensonhurst, that person and his friends would soon be back. With baseball bats. I am not recommending that type of retaliation, but I understand what motivates it.

As Snowballgate grinds on longer than most people want it to, it seems to be settling in the right place. The police have released [images](https://www.amny.com/news/nypd-images-teens-snowballs-washington-square-park/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the most egregious attackers, and one, after being arrested on assault charges, has been [arraigned on a misdemeanor](https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/video/charges-reduced-to-misdemeanor-in-nypd-snowball-fight-arrest-1/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). If the NYPD’s track record of apprehending people who’ve assailed its officers is any indication, other arrests will follow. The mayor, as of late Friday afternoon, has been silent on the NYPD’s decision to pursue suspects and level charges. People will be watching closely to see how he handles the next incident where the city’s police are subject to a humiliating indignity, especially one that rises to the level of a crime. And for the rest of us, the lesson is as simple and pure as the driven snow: Don’t throw anything at the police.
### A New Mayor’s Trial By Snow
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-snow-emergency-response/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:25.000Z
In the brief time that Zohran Mamdani has been a household name for New Yorkers, he has been plagued by criticisms of inexperience. “He’s young,” they say, and it’s true — he is the youngest person, in fact, to hold the title of mayor in a century, and the first Millennial to do so. “He doesn’t know City Hall,” they say — also true, as he’s spent his time as a lawmaker in Albany. “He’s never managed anyone” — fair, as his staff of a handful in the State Assembly pales in comparison to the 300,000-plus people he’s suddenly overseeing.

Then came a record winter, a major challenge for any mayor, let alone a new one. A “bomb cyclone” levelled half of the country in late January, followed by 13 days of sub-zero temperatures in New York City, which meant all that snow just wouldn’t melt. And just as residents were donning thinner coats, another blizzard — the ninth largest in recorded history — dumped 22 inches onto LaGuardia Airport this week.

It’s a blessing in disguise for a man who won more on sweeping promises than on management competence. There is perhaps no better crash course in city operations than an extreme weather event like a snowstorm — a time when our government’s capacity to *act* instead of just *legislate* is put on full display to the public. And though Mamdani took some fair [hits](https://gothamist.com/news/facing-historic-blizzard-mamdani-says-nyc-learned-lessons-from-last-snowstorm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for management, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the first storm, the cold wind in his face will serve his mayoralty well over the long run, forcing him to grapple with the daunting reality that grand ambitions are nothing without day-to-day government competence. Like my friend Hayden Clarkin [wrote](https://x.com/the%5Ftransit%5Fguy/status/2026377062601072756?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): “Every politician must understand that the public feels delivery and not policy.”

As most New Yorkers know, snowstorms are legendary tests for mayors. The disastrous “Lindsay Blizzard” of 1969, for example, laid bare the notion that John Lindsay, like Mamdani, was also young (44, not 34) and not up to task. A 2010 storm, which first found Michael Bloomberg in Bermuda, didn’t help the image he was already battling of a billionaire being out of touch with New Yorkers. Disasters are not make-or-break events for mayors, per se, but they can deepen views that voters might already have of them.

For Mamdani, this past month not only provided a premier “stress test” for a socialist’s managerial chops, but also offered Hizzoner a rare opportunity to prove himself to New Yorkers. He mostly passed, and where he didn’t, he learned valuable lessons that should serve him well. Chief among them: that a manager must adapt on the fly. 

After the bomb cyclone in late January, the Mamdani administration placed an emphasis on the plow. The mayor’s earliest videos were shot in Sanitation garages. With the city’s now well-tested online tracker showing plow activity live for all to see, Mamdani was spotted high-fiving and waving to drivers. 

This focus makes sense: People are conditioned to take how passable the streets are as the leading barometer of how well their city is doing during a storm. 

But the infrastructure we traverse each day is much more granular than that. There were problems. Bus riders trudged through stops encased in snow. For days, crosswalks remained treacherous for pedestrians, let alone those with disabilities or strollers. Citi Bike stations went untouched for a long stretch, infuriating users. The plows are essential, of course, especially for emergency vehicles. But in a city where most trips are taken by foot, these daily perils matter.

The City and the mayor noticed — and in the second storm, it focused on making sure more than just the street was passable. Mamdani’s travel ban expedited plowing. City workers prioritized bus stops and shelters. 

In the first storm, the city likely waited too long to call on and pay New Yorkers to shovel. Earlier alerts in this week’s blizzard raised the headcount (and pay) to over a thousand New Yorkers signing up to help. In the first storm, complaints came in that heating centers were insufficient or ill-positioned. This time, more than double were deployed. In the second, emergency workers, paid $30 an hour, cleared sidewalks and intersections and bike lanes all across the city.

The second time around, Lyft, which manages and operates Citi Bike, didn’t [delay](https://x.com/vinbarone/status/2025977390686413147?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in digging out docks. And later, the mayor [said](https://x.com/joeanuta/status/2026006789758841137?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the city has begun geotagging bus stops and crosswalks to monitor their conditions in future storms. As the saying goes: Don’t waste a crisis.

Perhaps most significant was Mamdani’s change of course on encampment policies. When he came into office, he said encampment sweeps clearing homeless people off the streets and into services would be a thing of the past, and paused the policy. Then, when people tragically died in the cold — at least 20 of them [over 18 days](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/02/13/nyregion/nyc-winter-snow-storm-cold-deaths.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — Mamdani reminded New Yorkers that none of them technically had been in encampments. 

But still, it didn’t dull the pain; many of the dead had still been unhoused and likely would've been helped by more aggressive policies bringing them indoors. So before the second storm, Mamdani shifted his encampment policies, taking up a more proactive posture to get people out of the elements. After cutting 311 queue times, his administration also started directing people to call 911 for faster responses. (It’s early, but thus far, no street deaths have been reported after storm two.) An honest responsiveness shows a new administration willing to think smartly on its feet.

Mamdani’s habits as a communicator are also evolving in ways that seem to serve him well. In the election, he changed the paradigm of how politicians in New York communicate with people. His remarkable rise was fueled, in large part, by his uncanny ability to distill complex issues into catchy clips — and look like he was having the most fun of anyone doing it. His transition and first few weeks in office followed the same playbook: an endless reel of appearances practically everywhere you looked.

The snowstorms flipped this script. For the first time, Mamdani had to use that platform to translate potentially life-or-death information to New Yorkers in real-time — a serious vibe shift for an otherwise fuzzy presence. 

He didn’t skip a beat: he often spoke directly to New Yorkers, touting his now-signature black jacket; he somehow spoke with every TV anchor, radio station and influencer I follow (my friends elsewhere noticed and messaged, too); and he FaceTimed a student to announce a snow day. Mamdani should also take to heart the truism that the message can get away from you fast: Many New Yorkers saw it as a stumble when he failed to forcefully condemn the pelting by snowball of cops in Washington Square Park.

During an emergency, mayors are often talking to people who either didn’t vote, or at least didn’t vote for them. Clear and present communications with a feedback loop is critical to making sure New Yorkers feel seen and heard. In the words of a famous former mayor: “How’m I doin’?”

It’s too early to parse what lasting effect the storms will have on Mamdani, if any — whether it will cement him as a man who can manage as opposed to a naive guy with big ambitions. The next tough choice, and the next, and the next, will shape that perception. Navigating a snowstorm requires a different skill set than, say, negotiating a tough budget. But the city is actually seeing him grow in office. Mark the line on the doorframe and expect him to get taller soon.
### Criminal Risk Assessment and the Character Trap
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-birth-cohort-affects-criminal-outcomes-robert-sampson/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:17.000Z
Over the past three decades, successive birth cohorts in the United States have come of age in very different worlds of crime and its control. These shifting contexts shape people’s life chances in ways that challenge the belief in stable, individual propensities to commit crime and in timeless rules for predicting risk. Focusing on the life course of different birth cohorts — on *when* *we are* rather than who we are — reveals the power of the birth lottery of history.

This matters because common risk-assessment practices pervade the criminal justice system and extend well beyond it. Formal risk instruments are used to inform [pretrial release](https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/probation-and-pretrial-services/evidence-based-practices/pretrial-risk-assessment?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [probation](https://bja.ojp.gov/program/psrac/basics/what-is-risk-assessment?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) decisions, while criminal history information is used in sentencing, employment screening, [tenant screening](https://smartscreen.clearscreening.com/criminal-history-laws-for-tenant-screening/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and occupational licensing. With the emergence of [AI tools](https://partnershiponai.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Report-on-Algorithmic-Risk-Assessment-Tools.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and large-scale databases, predictive risk assessment is accelerating.

But prognostications like these rest on assumptions of an individual’s stable criminal propensity or character. New research exposes the perils of this approach, revealing how rapidly changing times challenge common notions about prediction and enduring propensities to commit crime.

To isolate social change in life experiences — or when, not who, we are — requires a departure from the usual developmental approach of tracking one group of children born at the same time. To meet this challenge, my research team studied multiple cohorts of over 1,000 Chicago children coming of age over the past three decades.

Consider Darnell Jackson and Andre Lewis (both pseudonyms), one born in the mid‑1990s and the other in the early 1980s. They shared the same race, the same city and the same economic, family and neighborhood backgrounds. Yet children born in the 1980s, like Andre, held different tickets in the birth lottery of history and came of age in a very different social world than those born just over a decade later, like Darnell.

Andre’s cohort witnessed the rise of drug‑related violence, became teens during the murder epidemic of the early 1990s and lived through rising incarceration and aggressive drug policing. By contrast, when children born in the mid-1990s arrived, violence was plummeting and drug arrests in Chicago had fallen by 90% while disorder arrests dropped nearly 100% between 1995 and 2020.. Children in Darnell’s cohort were lucky in other ways too. Lead exposure, known to impair child development, declined sharply, and when they turned 25, incarceration had dropped to its lowest point in over 25 years.

These are just two individuals, of course, but they reflect the broader picture. By the time they were 20, children of the mid-1990s were arrested at half the rate of kids born a short time earlier, in the early to mid‑1980s. The younger cohorts were also less likely to witness gun violence and use guns as adults. 

You might think these differences are due to usual suspects like demographic composition, poverty or early life conditions that varied across cohorts. But that’s not the case. Even after I accounted for factors like race, family socioeconomic status, parental criminality and childhood neighborhood disadvantage, large gaps in life trajectories persisted.

Here’s what’s also surprising: The decline in arrest rates between cohorts was strongest for the most disadvantaged — particularly poor Black youth. So among the poorest children especially, things got much better, which is not what we might expect from today’s popular narrative of decline.

These findings challenge the growing risk assessment paradigm that cuts across the political aisle. The Senate’s [bipartisan criminal justice reform bill of 2018](https://www.congress.gov/115/plaws/publ391/PLAW-115publ391.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) called for the development of new risk assessment and prediction tools. Yet in my data, risk assessment instruments trained on kids born in the 1980s using factors like family poverty, first-generation immigrant status, low self-control, male sex and having a single parent overpredicted the arrest probability of children born in the mid‑90s by more than 50%. This large overprediction is due to both changing crime and the shifting relationship of predictive factors with arrest.

History is baked into criminal records, in other words — which, in this case, leads to a systematic gap between actual and predicted arrest patterns across birth cohorts. This bias exists within all racial groups and among those arrested as juveniles, so it is a unique form of bias. It also exists for absolute as well as relative rankings. This matters because even a prediction algorithm that rank-ordered properly — the usual practice — might successfully identify the highest-risk individuals even if they don’t pose a high risk in absolute terms. As in medicine, absolute risk matters most.

The implications for justice are troubling. Inflated risk predictions may lead individuals to be denied bail, sentenced more severely, denied a job or [rejected for an apartment](https://www.propublica.org/article/landlords-use-secret-algorithms-to-screen-potential-tenants-find-out-what-theyve-said-about-you?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). These mechanisms can trigger further criminalization, leading to what I call the “character trap,” a self-reinforcing cycle that labels and punishes individuals based on assumptions about their stable criminal character. This can backfire, severing social connections and blocking opportunities for those criminally labeled, leading them to conform to the very same negative predictions.

And when certain individuals or groups repeatedly commit or are arrested for crimes, they are typically deemed to possess a criminal character. This idea manifests in terms like “chronic offenders” or “superpredators.”

To be clear, mine is not a call to abandon individual responsibility, punishment or even predictive tools. Humans are biased too, of course, so machines are not the enemy. But recognizing the challenge of social change is a first step to pragmatic solutions. 

At a minimum, updates to criminal information systems are needed. To decide who gets released before trial, New York City used risk assessment instruments that were unchanged for nearly two decades. We can imagine how outdated the prediction models are in less-resourced departments. 

Yet updating alone cannot solve the problem. We also need to incorporate into our prediction models the changing way common risk factors forecast future behavior across successive birth cohorts. This will not be easy. We need to invest in the science of studying societal and organizational changes, both to improve predictive performance and to advance knowledge about how the changing world around us influences human behavior.

Perhaps the deepest challenge is cognitive bias in the face of a changing world. Perceptions of past crime waves, with images of superpredators, rampant immigrant criminality and chronic offenders looming large, still drive policy. The [Executive Order from the White House in 2025](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/strengthening-and-unleashing-americas-law-enforcement-to-pursue-criminals-and-protect-innocent-citizens/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), for example, can be read as unleashing anew the superpredator logic and prison‑filling mandate of prior decades, despite clear evidence of falling crime. That’s fighting the last war on crime.

Despite good news on declines in arrest, incarceration, violence and gun use, we continue to look for the Andres of the world when there are more Darnells. We should focus less on predicting individual criminality or a supposed criminal character and more on cultivating the institutional and environmental conditions that prevent crime and help us meet the unexpected challenges that will come. Put a bit differently, perhaps we need to be thinking more about the morality of societies than the morality of individuals.
### Dan Goldman on Zohran Mamdani, Donald Trump, and His Case for Reelection
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/dan-goldman-on-zohran-mamdani-donald/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:10.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/dan-goldman-on-zohran-mamdani-donald) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on February 24, 2026 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

The New York Editorial Board spoke with Congressman Dan Goldman, a Democrat who represents New York’s 10th Congressional District (Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn), on the morning of February 19, 2026\. Goldman, first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022, is seeking reelection this year for a third term and is facing a June Democratic primary challenge from former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. *(photo by Liena Žagare)*

*Participating journalists: Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Christina Greer, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Myles Miller, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Žagare.*

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Smith**  
Thanks so much for joining us. I always say at the top, but it is true, we’re in this moment when officials don’t have to talk to journalists at all, and some choose not to. So, you know, we’re pleased that people come in. These things exist, institutions such as this exist — depend on political figures feeling like it’s important to answer hard questions. So thank you for coming by…

**Christina Greer**  
Thanks for being here. Brad Lander has been very clear and confident that he can win this race due to his long-standing ties in the community, and your relatively recent presence in the district. What is your case to voters as to why they should stick with you as opposed to voting for a known quantity that’s Brad Lander?

**Dan Goldman**  
Well, I think a couple of reasons. First, I have a record, and it is a proven track record of being effective, both in terms of standing up for our democracy and the rule of law, but actually getting a lot of stuff done in the district and for the district. And I’m proud to run on my record. Congress is a completely different animal than city government. It has been a steep learning curve for me, and I went down there already having worked there and having led the first \[Trump\] impeachment investigation.

And I think that I am the exact right person that we need in this moment, because when we take over the House majority in November, which I believe we will, I will be in a position, because of my seniority and because of the credibility I bring, to be leading a lot of the investigations into the Trump administration to bring transparency and accountability to what is the most lawless administration in history. So when you look at what the requirements are for the job, and you’re looking at whether people have the skills and experience to do this particular job, I think I’m very clearly the best candidate.

**Josh Greenman**  
Impeach again?

**Dan Goldman**  
My view of it is, the more important thing is the investigations. I do not think throwing articles of impeachment on the House floor, voting for them or against them, is especially constructive, in large part because if Donald Trump was not going to be convicted by the Senate after Jan. 6, it’s almost impossible to imagine that the Senate will convict.

But that does not mean that it is not an important and worthwhile endeavor. What we did with the Ukraine impeachment is we brought the public along. We proved our case. Republican senators who voted against us said we proved the case that Donald Trump abused the power of his office. And the American public had that to consider, and not just the conclusion, but they had the evidence.

**Josh Greenman**  
On the merits, though, do you think there is a stronger case now, a weaker case now, about the same?

**Dan Goldman**  
I think there are far more impeachable offenses that appear to have been conducted. I think there’s no question, in many respects, the Ukraine impeachment seems kind of quaint compared to what Donald Trump is doing right now in taking an absolute hatchet to the Constitution, and our basic fundamental democratic values across the board. You know, whether it’s militarizing ICE, whether it’s politicizing and weaponizing the Department of Justice, whether it’s unilaterally declaring that birthright citizenship is not birthright citizenship, the list goes on and on. And these are all, in my view, more egregious conduct than the Ukraine impeachment.

But for me, what I truly believe, and it’s the exact opposite of what the Republicans did with the Biden impeachment, where they reached their conclusion, they made the allegations to reach their conclusion, and then they tried to backfill the facts and the evidence, and they failed. Catastrophically, they failed, and I think there was a lot of blowback on them because of that.

So I think it’s very important for us to do the investigations first, and find the evidence. And it’s not gonna be easy, because we’re gonna have unprecedented obstruction. We had a tremendous amount of obstruction in impeachment, and I used my ten years as a prosecutor and my experience investigating difficult cases to figure out ways around the obstruction from the administration, which is sort of the conventional congressional method of investigating, and we’re gonna have to be even more creative to build the case — to build these *cases* — this time around.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
But hasn’t this strategy been failing for ten years now? I mean, it’s safe to say the public knows a lot about Trump’s irregularities, but still, they chose Trump over the Democrats. And how does more investigation change that, except for that Trump has run out the clock? He’s done.

**Dan Goldman**  
Well, I continue to believe that the transparency that we brought to the Ukraine abuse of power had an influence on the 2020 election, which Donald Trump lost. What has happened since then unquestionably has raised questions about efficacy of investigations, but I think a lot of it comes down to the quality of the investigation. And when you look, actually, at Jack Smith’s investigations, they were very thorough. He ended up suffering from spillover prejudice from the New York investigations, which had, I think, some more political question marks. But if you do a solid investigation, and you do it right,and you follow the facts and the evidence, then that is, I think, still a very important role for Congress to play, and it’s a role that impeachment is still important for, as well as to set historical precedent as to how to interpret the Constitution.

**Ben Smith**  
Did you tell \[New York Attorney General\] Tish James and \[Manhattan District Attorney\] Alvin Bragg at the time that you thought they were screwing it up?

**Dan Goldman**  
I didn’t. I didn’t make any recommendation to them.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you regret that?

**Dan Goldman**  
No, it’s not my job. I don’t know the evidence. I don’t know the facts. I don’t know what went into their decisions. And I don’t, I’m not sure they’re wrong. I’m not sure either one is wrong, but I think Trump did a very good job of flipping them on their head to make them look wrong.

I’m on record as having called into question some of Attorney General James’s campaign tactics of specifically declaring that she will go after Donald Trump. I think she actually executed a very thorough and good investigation stemming from Michael Cohen’s testimony. But there was some degree of taint because she had declared before she got into office that she was going after him. Alvin Bragg did not do that, and I thought that was important. But I think there are lots of considerations when you are a prosecutor or you are an attorney general as to the equities of discretion that you use, and I wasn’t in that seat, so I can’t make that decision.

**Ben Max**  
One of the things in all of this seems to be that, in the court of public opinion, in just the public relations aspect of it, even when there are strong cases the people investigating them, prosecuting them, and then the Democrats who support them are not out there really making the case. So whether it’s Jack Smith or Tish James or Alvin Bragg or others, it doesn’t seem like there’s anywhere near the same type of effort to talk about the merits that you have from Donald Trump and Republicans trying to discredit the merits. Have you seen that as a big imbalance? Is that on Democratic leadership in some way? How do you account for that? Is it a media ecosystem thing? How do you think about that?

**Dan Goldman**  
I can’t speak for others. I can only speak for myself, and I talk about it all the time. I bang the drum as much as I possibly can. I try to be a leader in setting a message because I understand those particular issues very well, and a lot of my colleagues don’t have that experience and so they’re understandably a little wary about how far and aggressive they can be. So I try to get out there and set a message that they can follow, knowing that I have credibility on those issues. I certainly focus on this a lot because I am incredibly concerned about the future of our democracy and the future of our rule of law.

And it absolutely drives me up the wall that people believe there’s some degree of equivalency between what the Biden Justice Department did and what the Trump Justice Department is doing now. It is completely night and day. When you have a president’s Justice Department that has criminally charged his son, it is absurd to say that the Justice Department is weaponized, no matter what you think about the pardon. But on the other hand, you have Donald Trump directing his attorney general to prosecute his political enemies regardless of the evidence, which we know, both because the U.S. attorney resigned and because the grand jury rejected it, is insufficient even to get an indictment, and it’s just night and day.

And I think one of the things that I try to aggressively point out is, this is gaslighting by them. This is completely outrageous behavior that is destroying the Department of Justice, which has a real trickle-down impact on the rule of law in our society in general. It’s not just those cases. It then calls into credibility every case that they do, and if you see the government not adhering to the law, that’s gonna spill over into any contract.

Donald Trump is just deciding unilaterally to end collective bargaining agreements. What’s to say that another employer, why can’t they just say, *Well, the president’s doing this. I’m just gonna do this ‘cause I don’t like this contract?* And imagine our economy and our society if, all of a sudden, basic contracts are up for question as to whether they’re legitimate or not. That will be catastrophic.

**Ben Smith**  
Can I sort-of try to bring it back to New York, and this congressional race — Liena?

**Liena Žagare**  
Why do you think your district went so heavily for Mamdani in the Democratic primary?

**Dan Goldman**  
I thought Mamdani was, and is, an incredibly charismatic and good candidate. I thought he ran a terrific campaign, which really focused on the issues that New Yorkers are worried about, and I thought Andrew Cuomo was a very bad candidate. And so I think part of it was the combination of those two things and a yearning by many in this city for something different.

Because wealth inequality has so dramatically increased over the last two decades that I think there are many young people who look around, and part of the reason why we struggle to push back on the democracy a little bit, why it sometimes doesn’t get as much traction, is they look around, and they say, *Well, if this is democracy, it’s not that great. You know, I don’t have those opportunities that my parents had.* And it’s pretty frustrating and debilitating for kids to come out of high school or college or whatever and to look at what’s in front of them and feel like they’re not going to be able to match or exceed their parents. And the wealth inequality is something that we absolutely have to tackle because it’s corrosive for society. It will lead to really, really bad outcomes, including threats to our democracy.

**Josh Greenman**  
What was your personal posture in — refresh my memory — during the mayoral campaign, the primary phase, and then the second part of it, the general?

**Dan Goldman**  
In the primary, I endorsed Zellnor Myrie, and then in the general, I stayed out of it.

**Josh Greenman**  
So you endorsed in the primary. You’re saying some quite positive things about the kind of campaign that Mamdani ran and what he stood for, but you didn’t see fit to support him in the general. So what was that about, and how does that affect how you see him now?

**Dan Goldman**  
That was unrelated to his agenda, which by and large, I agree with. I worked with him on a [pilot ](https://www.mta.info/document/177466?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)program for the free bus fares when he was in the Assembly. I was a co-founder of the Congressional Dads Caucus, and our number one pillar is universal childcare, which I’ve been a strong advocate for. I think the idea of the Department of Community Safety is a terrific idea, and much needed.

And mental health is something that I’ve focused on a lot. I have two bills that would [dramatically expand](https://goldman.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-dan-goldman-introduces-michelle-go-act-help-alleviate-mental-health-crisis?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) mental health treatment for those on Medicaid, because it has become an equity issue: If you are wealthy enough to afford mental health, you can get it, but if you aren’t, you can’t get it. And so a lot of his affordability agenda, I agreed with.

I had many constituents, Jewish constituents — I have a very large Jewish constituency — who were, I think, very understandably concerned about the dramatic rise in antisemitism and some of the mayor’s past comments on it. And I had spoken to him, and I had really hoped that he would address it in a way that understood the distinction between a mayor who is responsible for the safety and security of all New Yorkers and an Assembly member or a member of Congress like me, who’s not, and I never felt like he fully got there so I stayed out of it.

But I’ve spoken to him a number of times since he won the election, and I’m eager to work with him to improve the lives of New Yorkers and our shared constituents, and I’m already doing that.

**Harry Siegel**  
I just want to go back to something. You just posited that income inequality is a profound threat to democracy, and I wanted to ask about you then, as the representative for the district in a competitive primary, as heir to a fortune, why you’re the right person to be the representative, given the Democrats in a lot of instances are going to do the same thing.

**Dan Goldman**  
Sorry, what do you mean do the same thing? You said Democrats are gonna do the same thing?

**Harry Siegel**  
In a primary challenge, on many issues, you know, the party functions as a unit, and so why it makes sense, if income inequality is a profound threat to democracy, to have somebody from a very wealthy background and family money as the representative for this district in this part of Brooklyn?

**Ben Smith**  
And maybe address the \[campaign\] self-funding in there.

**Dan Goldman**  
I think as you build coalitions to get results, it is very helpful to have people from all sorts of different backgrounds. And as somebody who will be paying more taxes under my own tax proposals, it brings a different element of credibility to the broader movement to address this. I have introduced a bill called the [Robin Hood Act](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/6438?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which I think is the right way to tackle the massive wealth inequality.

It’s not income inequality, it is wealth inequality, because what has happened is if you own assets, your wealth has generally increased. If you are a wage earner, on a relative basis, your wealth has decreased. The middle class is shrinking, and that’s because the haves and have-nots. So when you have Elon Musk, who pays a 3 percent effective tax rate, and you have Jeff Bezos, who pays a 1 percent effective tax rate, [because they don’t sell](https://www.wsj.com/finance/billionaires-low-taxes-are-becoming-a-problem-for-the-economy-27a560ca?gaa%5Fat=eafs&gaa%5Fn=AWEtsqdsMBz-FAVxvci3laZOWRjDxph6Uru7AKSzkVtv0sPlwZgRqdC646WzS2m1zMY%3D&gaa%5Fts=699cfb82&gaa%5Fsig=vCm8WYKIZ4P0ftzjUBDjCpBfEv-jMGsoNKlx1MYkppprfRSSOFr%5FumiwlVTszwmf5U2l9-UDI3Ifj6ar%5FjPh6w%3D%3D&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) their Amazon or Tesla and pay capital gains, they just borrow against it, and they don’t pay taxes. So my bill would tax those loans at a similar price to the capital gains so you can’t avoid paying tax. So billionaires like Musk and Jeff Bezos will pay their fair share, and by some estimates, it could generate as much as $30 billion a year of revenue, which can pay for universal childcare and have some left over. And so I think that I bring a different perspective to the same goal that ultimately, as we are trying to, as a party, unify together to tackle this, is beneficial more broadly to the party.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think Mamdani and his people are too hard on the rich? Like they sort-of lack sympathy for New York’s upper class?

**Dan Goldman**  
We need all Americans, need to combat the outrageous cruelty and negativity that Donald Trump has brought to our discourse. And the way to do that is not necessarily to fight within ourselves, but it is, try to build as large a tent as possible, where as many people who believe in the same objectives should be welcomed. And there are many, many people who are very wealthy, who are very grateful for the opportunities that they received in this country, and who want to give back, want to help other people, and we should be welcoming anyone, no matter what their background is, into that coalition.

**Josh Greenman**  
Speaking of, you mentioned Jews, so I wanted to point it back to Alyssa. \[Laughter\]

**Dan Goldman**  
To the Jew? \[Laughter\]

**Alyssa Katz**  
There are a few of us at the table. So actually, two questions on antisemitism, and the first, picking up from the Mamdani conversation: What do you make of his actions on the front of fighting antisemitism?

**Ben Smith**  
I just want to state for the transcript that Alyssa is the editor of the Jewish [*Forward*](https://forward.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and that explains the humorous exchange. Anyway, go ahead.

**Alyssa Katz**  
The new editor, and so I get a little razzing, too. So, yeah, what do you make of Mamdani’s actions generally as related to antisemitism? And is it possible for him to be an effective fighter against antisemitism, given his positions in strong opposition to Israel?

**Dan Goldman**  
I think it’s too early to tell. I am hopeful that him keeping the Office to Combat Antisemitism demonstrates a meaningful commitment, in combination with the \[City Council\] speaker’s plan to address antisemitism, that he will be an advocate and a partner in fighting antisemitism. Put it like this, I was a prosecutor for ten years. When I walked in that door, I put my personal beliefs to the side and I focused on what my job was, and my job had different obligations than my personal views.

As mayor, it doesn’t necessarily matter what his personal views are. What matters is what his actions are, what his statements are, what his message is. So I don’t really care what his personal views are. What I care about is how what we’re seeing in actions and deeds and words — and I think he still has, you know, a good opportunity to address it. I think addressing it requires proactive work, not reactive, not solely reactive statements.

**Alyssa Katz**  
But just to clarify, this actually pivots directly into my next question.

**Dan Goldman**  
I knew I was gonna do that.

**Alyssa Katz**  
So his position, [strongly against Israel](https://forward.com/news/733657/zohran-mamdani-gaza-israel-jews-antisemitism/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), you do not think that in and of itself, enables and emboldens people who are attacking New Yorkers because they are Israelis or Jews who support Israel?

**Dan Goldman**  
I think what his personal beliefs are don’t necessarily matter. If his personal beliefs become public and become part of his governing of the city, then I do think it matters. And I think what is very important, as we have seen the dramatic rise of antisemitism — where Jews make up 10 percent of the city but 57 percent of hate crimes in the last year were antisemitic crimes — that it is very important to recognize that we need to take proactive action so that there isn’t a permission structure for people to be on the streets chanting pro-Hamas chants. Actual terrorist group. And that–

**Ben Smith**  
Wait, isn’t the permission structure for that the First Amendment?

**Dan Goldman**  
No. The First Amendment is the legal structure for it, and they absolutely have a right to say that. But what we need to do as a society is condemn and inform and engage so that they do not say it, even though they have the right to say it.

**Josh Greenman**  
What about a pro-settler, a strongly pro-settler demonstration, a strongly pro-Netanyahu demonstration, a strongly, strongly pro-war in Gaza on the Israeli side demonstration? Would that raise any concerns in your mind?

**Dan Goldman**  
I fundamentally disagree with all of those three examples. I’ve been a leader in opposing the settlements and the expansion of the settlements in the West Bank. I’ve been very outspoken about my opposition to Prime Minister Netanyahu and his extremist government, dating back well before Oct. 7 and his judicial overhaul efforts. And I think the military action in Gaza has been way overboard, extremely and increasingly excessive and counterproductive and damaging. But just like people have the right to chant and support Hamas, they have the right to do that under the First Amendment. I don’t think they should, but –

**Alyssa Katz**  
OK, I was gonna say, what they clearly don’t have a right to do is, you know, your district office got attacked multiple times in Brooklyn after the Gaza war had started and after Oct. 7\. You got [vandalized](https://nadler.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=395104&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and your office moved, right? And I think currently the district office is inside Industry City. It’s not facing the street anymore. It’s kind of in hiding a bit. And I’m wondering why you made that choice and what message that sends? Are we in a city now, and are you kind of participating in a life where people who are viewed as being too friendly to Israel have to go into hiding?

**Dan Goldman**  
I wouldn’t say we’re in hiding. We moved our office to Sunset Park because over 90 percent of our casework was coming from Sunset Park. So we actually wanted to move closer to where the people who were reaching out to us are. My staff was definitely shaken up by the vandalism. I chose to be in this position where that kind of criticism is part of the job. I wouldn’t say vandalism, antisemitic vandalism, should be part of the job, but being in the public eye is something I chose. My staff did not. And so I was very concerned that they felt unsafe going to the office. But the reason we moved was to be closer to the constituents that we were helping the most.

**Myles Miller**  
I want to get back to where we started with the race. Sort of out the gate, this reelection fight has been sort of very negative against Brad Lander, very beloved in the district. Obviously, ran a race for mayor that did not pan out the way he wanted to. With this redistricting fight likely to go the way of this district being changed and you basically running in the 11th, why so negative with Brad Lander when he’s decidedly not negative against you? ...You guys share Berlin Rosen — I mean, he was with Berlin Rosen, now you’re with Berlin Rosen.

**Dan Goldman**  
So, I’m not— I don’t agree with you about the redistricting. I would peg it at much less than 50 percent that ultimately, through all the different hurdles and the timing, that this is resolved before the primary. And I don’t think I’m running a negative campaign. I don’t think I’ve said anything negative about Brad. And–

**Myles Miller**  
Do you think your surrogates have? I mean, I see the stuff on Twitter and all that from campaign officials and, you know—

**Dan Goldman**  
I think we’re running a campaign against someone who’s challenging me and whose record needs to be evaluated and who needs to make a coherent case for why I should be removed from office and why he should take this position. I am running to protect my seat so that I can continue to represent this district, so that I continue doing the work that I’ve done for more than three years.

I have already been endorsed by 80 percent of the NYCHA TA \[Tenant Association\] presidents of the 31 developments in my district. And I’ve been doing the work to help the people who need it, and I want to continue to do that, and I want to be there on the front lines, which is the primary reason I ran in 2022, to stand up to an increasingly authoritarian government. And if someone is gonna challenge me, they’re gonna have to weather scrutiny. And –

**Nicole Gelinas**  
On the redistricting, that district \[NY-11\] has been a bellwether, sometimes electing a moderate Republican, but sometimes electing a moderate Democrat. The redistricting would make it essentially impossible for a Republican to win anywhere in New York City, and that means Democrats don’t have to engage with issues that the country is thinking about: more moderate stance on immigration, on transgender issues, are just entirely out of the conversation.

Is that healthy to have…an entirely Democratic city that isn’t thinking about things that the rest of the country is thinking about and voting on?

**Dan Goldman**  
Well, I’m not sure that the new district would be so solidly Democrat. But I think that it’s very important that as the best and most significant and largest city in the country, that New York City set the tone not just locally but nationally, and be a case study for how to govern, what policies are effective.

We can do things in New York City that will have a dramatic impact on the country. And it’s part of the reason why I am so determined to win this race, because I think my vision of a positive, coalition-building Democratic Party that encourages growth and innovation while also making sure that we have a bold agenda to give people access to the American dream that is just not available to too many people, is the path that we should go. And so whether there’s this district or that district or what the constitution of it is matters less to me than what the elected officials’ policies are and goals are.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So the power that New York already has — Senator Schumer, Congressman Jeffries, are they using that effectively? Do you think they’re doing a good job? And particularly during the open border crisis, which helped get Trump reelected, did they use New York’s power adequately to try to turn that around?

**Dan Goldman**  
It’s a good question. I’m not sure that I have the definitive answer on that. I think that there were a lot of conver– I know there were a lot of conversations. I had conversations with the administration to figure out how to maintain our welcoming immigration system and philosophy while also doing it in an orderly and moderated way.

I think what you are seeing right now, in the House especially, is Hakeem Jeffries really emerging as a strong leader. In many cases, we now really control much of the House floor from the minority, which is incredibly difficult. We have passed three discharge petitions, which is more than what has been passed in the last 30 years.

We last week were able to put on the floor, despite Mike Johnson’s best efforts to stop it, a vote on Trump’s tariffs, and we stopped his really damaging tariffs against Canada, and you will see more and more of that. And so I think as we are moving forward in this Congress in particular, you’re seeing that we’re not only fighting Donald Trump, but that we are figuring out how to be effective from the minority, which is very difficult.

**Christina Greer**  
If the Democrats gain the majority in November, do you think that Hakeem Jeffries should sort-of be the heir apparent \[House\] speaker, or should it be a competitive process to see who the new speaker will be?

**Dan Goldman**  
Well, I always welcome a competitive process if people feel like they could do a better job, but I strongly believe Hakeem Jeffries should be the speaker.

**Ben Smith**  
We have a couple of immigration questions over here.

**Josh Greenman**  
Assuming that the Democrats do take the House, it’s very clear where you and most Democrats stand on opposing Trump excesses. Can you sketch what the affirmative Democratic agenda ought to look like? Because I think a lot of voters don’t really understand what Democrats stand for. They understand what they stand against.

**Dan Goldman**  
Well, I would start with what I believe is the most fundamental problem, which is the escalating wealth inequality, and it’s part of the reason why I think this Robin Hood bill is a really important start, because I’ve actually gotten some positive feedback from Republicans about it. And so when we’re in divided government, you’ve got to figure out a way to compromise to get anything done. And part of the reason why I’m encouraged about this is that it does tackle the problem of wealth inequality in a way that I think Republicans can potentially swallow.

And the way I approach this job stems from my prosecutorial background, where I couldn’t go into court and just continue to repeat my argument and expect to win. I had to address the opposing side’s arguments and convince a judge that my argument is actually better. And I think what we need to be doing is thinking more creatively about how we can get Republicans on board with our policy objectives, even if it’s for totally different reasons. And that’s the way I’ve approached renewable energy as one example, where renewable energy is as America First as anything you can come up with. When I talk now about renewable energy to Republicans, I don’t talk about climate because they don’t believe in that. I’m not going to convince them that we need renewable energy to fight climate change. But I am going to talk about American manufacturing, investment in America, American jobs, energy independence, lower energy prices, all of the things that they talk about and all of which renewable energy helps to accomplish.

I think in divided government, it’s really important to have creative thinking and real analytical arguments so that we can actually get stuff done and achieve our policy objectives. If the agenda were up to me, we would pass this Robin Hood Act. We would pass universal childcare. We would dramatically increase healthcare and focus much more on federally qualified health centers and community health centers, which are really the centers of preventative medicine for poor people. And the bang for your buck on preventative medicine is so much greater than waiting until someone gets really sick. We need to restore the money that they have cut from Medicaid, but I think that we ought to take this as an opportunity to make it better, not just return to the status quo.

**Harry Siegel**  
You visited the ICE holding cells at the Metropolitan Detention Center in your district for the first time yesterday, Wednesday \[February 18\], after setting up an appointment with the Bureau of Prisons. Do you wanna just speak to what you saw there, or why you think maybe that diverged a bit from what detainees have described in some of their habeas petitions, and to whether you think you should need an appointment to visit any place where ICE is holding people?

**Dan Goldman**  
Yeah, if it’s OK, I’ll take a quick step back, because I think what this administration is doing with their secret immigration dragnet is so fundamentally un-American and unacceptable that in many ways I think it is becoming the civil rights era of our time. And I very early on recognized the danger of these policies, dating back to last May, when I encountered secret, I mean, I encountered masked plainclothes officers arresting people coming out of court and asked them directly, because I know that I worked for ten years with criminal law enforcement agents who were actually going after murderers and rapists, unlike what this immigration dragnet is doing, why they were wearing masks. ‘Cause none of the agents I ever worked with wore masks. And when I got an answer that kind of mocked the question by saying that it was cold in the lobby of 290 Broadway, I knew we had a problem. And so I quickly introduced the first bill to require ICE to be unmasked, the [No Secret Police Act](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4176/text?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

And from that point forward, I have really dedicated a tremendous amount of my time to fighting what is an absolute travesty of a process, and that is degrading our entire social fabric, and that was through litigation. Getting back to immigration oversight, when I went to 26 Federal Plaza and was denied access — even though the statute very clearly says that unannounced visits are permissible, we were denied — and I thought it was a complete violation of the law. So even though the minority in Congress does not have enough votes to file a lawsuit on behalf of Congress, ‘cause it’s one entity, I realized that this related to individual members. And so I gathered 11 of my colleagues, and we filed a lawsuit, and we won to get access to oversight unannounced. And the importance of that unannounced oversight I have seen firsthand at 26 Federal Plaza.

They thought I was coming at 10 a.m., the very next day after this court order. I came at 8:45 a.m. There were four cleaning people there, and at first, I, you know, was a little–I don’t know, I was a little wondrous as to what was going on here before that required four cleaning people to hurriedly clean it up. But then I realized that that’s the point of oversight, and that’s the point of unannounced oversight, is they don’t know when we’re coming, and the transparency that we bring is a significant deterrent. And I have been back to 26 Federal Plaza at least once a week since then. We’ve had another moment, blip in the case, and we had to refile the lawsuit and won again.

But unannounced oversight is essential because they need not to be able to prepare for a visit with seven days’ notice. The [MDC](https://www.bop.gov/locations/institutions/bro/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is a slightly different animal because the BOP, it is a BOP building and BOP’s policies and procedures have always required advance notice. I’ve been there a couple times to do oversight of the MDC, which is a notoriously bad prison, jail. But it was the first time we’d been in there, yesterday, and I thought it was worth it even though we had to make an appointment to see what was going on.

**Myles Miller**  
Can we just go back to last week’s \[Homeland Security\] hearing, and very sort-of explosive testimony from the Democratic side against folks that you wanted to get in the seats directly after what happened in Minnesota to have that oversight hearing as soon as possible, and \[House Homeland Security Chair Rep. Andrew\] Garbarino called that hearing really, really quickly.

But I wonder about the language used there saying that Todd Lyons was acting like a fascist. How does that language get you to the point of working with ICE to get reforms? Do they respond well to that? Has it led to any changes that you want to see, with the language of calling the ICE director a fascist? How does that help your case?

**Dan Goldman**  
I didn’t call Todd Lyons fascist himself. But we have tried in every different way to influence and change the draconian policies of DHS right now. And when it escalates to the point where agents are indiscriminately and completely unwarrantedly killing Americans who are not a threat to them, and then the FBI refuses to investigate and blocks the state from investigating, so then you have no accountability for the lawlessness, that is fascism. That is government violence without accountability from the government.

And that’s not what I did. That’s just what I have observed. And I take umbrage with the idea that somehow using inflammatory language is the problem here. That is not the problem.

The problem is what their actions are that meets the definitions of the inflammatory language. I’m calling it as I and many others are seeing it, and I will stand behind the language I use, because when you look at fascism and fascist regimes, they do stop citizens and demand their paperwork. And that is what happened in Nazi Germany, that is what happened in the Soviet Union, and that is what Todd Lyons admitted.

Now, are there other aspects of it? Is it exactly equivalent to Nazi Germany? Of course not. But that is one particular thing that is very similar, and it is as anti-democratic as you can imagine some actions. So the reason I questioned him on that is because the threats to our fundamental values are escalating. And so, you know, last summer, we tried to get ICE to change their tactics. They ignored us. I’ve written numerous letters as part of the Homeland Security Committee to Kristi Noem asking for answers, asking for transparency. I’ve got nothing in return. And so at some point, you know, we’re not gonna be Lucy to Charlie Brown, or –

**Ben Smith**  
Do you see people, whether it’s Noem or whether it’s rank-and-file ICE agents facing criminal charges in a Democratic administration?

**Dan Goldman**  
Well, there’s not gonna be a Democratic administration till 2029\. I–

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think there are crimes being committed that will wind up producing federal charges, specifically around immigration?

**Dan Goldman**  
I think there definitely could be. I certainly think it should be investigated. I think frankly it should be investigated right now. I don’t think we need to, we shouldn’t wait. It shouldn’t be partisan. We should not be waiting until a Democratic administration comes in to hold officers accountable for acting way outside of their appropriate duties and responsibilities in shooting and killing Americans who did not pose a threat to their life. That should not be a partisan issue, and I would encourage the FBI right now to do a proper investigation of that and let the facts and the evidence lead that investigation.

**Josh Greenman**  
Aside from those who are killing Americans, to what extent are ICE agents being given what you consider illegal orders, and should they defy illegal orders?

**Dan Goldman**  
Yes. You know, I think that’s part of the transparency, and that’s part of what I will be demanding if we are in the majority next year, is exactly what are those orders? They have not disclosed a lot of their rules of engagement or their directions, but what we have seen is pretty clear that it is lawless. And just like my six colleagues who made the video reaffirming what the obligations are of anyone in the military to reject an illegal order, the domestic law enforcement agents also have to stand up for legality, and they are required to know what the law is. That is part of what their training is, and so they are not excused because they’re being told to do something lawless.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So we have an asylum and refugee system created for the purposes of after World War II, not created for an age of global migration. How many asylum seekers and refugees can the U.S. realistically absorb each year, not just economically but politically? And if someone came here in 2023, applied for asylum and is rejected for asylum, should that person be deported?

**Dan Goldman**  
So when Secretary Mayorkas came to testify before the Homeland Security Committee last term, two times I specifically asked him: How many asylum applicants ultimately are granted asylum? And the answer is between 20 and 25 percent. So I actually don’t think the problem is how many people are being granted asylum. I think the problem is that the process cannot keep up with the numbers who are applying.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So should those people not have been admitted entry to the U.S.? What’s going to happen to the rest of those 75 percent of those people?

**Dan Goldman**  
So what we need to do is reform our asylum system along the lines of what \[Senators\] Chris Murphy and James Lankford’s bipartisan bill would have done to – I actually think it went too far in restricting the timetable, but we have to make the asylum process much more efficient. There’s a huge pull for people to come to the United States to claim asylum to get a work permit, knowing that they’ll be here for seven years.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
What should happen to them?

**Dan Goldman**  
So we need to make the process happen much faster.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And ultimately, if you are not eligible for asylum—

**Dan Goldman**  
Then you should be deported. Absolutely.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
OK.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you think the Democratic Party is on board with that, broadly?

**Dan Goldman**  
I think the Democratic Party— that there isn’t unity in the way that the Democratic Party approaches immigration. And, you know, that’s part of being a big tent. And my view is that asylum is vital. It is absolutely critical that we are always a country that welcomes refugees and those who are escaping persecution or danger.

But we should not be an open country for anyone who just wants to come in here, and I think we should dramatically increase the number of visas that are for — the wide range of the spectrum, you know, whether it’s agricultural workers or whether it’s scientists and doctors and H-1B visas.

And we need wholesale reform of our immigration system that I fully support, that maintains our values, that maintains what makes this country so special, that maintains the reason -- Part of the reason I love this country so much is that my grandmother escaped antisemitism in Russia and came through Ellis Island, like so many others did, and that’s what makes this country special and unique. And that’s what makes it great, and we have to preserve that, but we have to make sure that it’s happening in an orderly fashion, and that people are not unduly taking advantage of our immigration system.

**Ben Smith**  
Time for a couple more questions.

**Liena Žagare**  
I had a question going back to the first half of Nicole’s question, whether there is a level of immigration that might be politically unsustainable?

**Dan Goldman**  
Politically unsustainable or, you know – I mean, look, there’s the politics and there’s the policy, right? I think that we should have an orderly process, a more orderly process for people entering this country, whether they are entering legally or through asylum or other special-access visas. I do not think that our border should be entirely closed and that nobody should be able to come into our country. I think that’s contrary to our fundamental values. I also don’t think that people should just stream in across the borders and be given work visas and permission to be here.

**Josh Greenman**  
Back to New York. What do you think is the biggest problem facing your district right now?

**Dan Goldman**  
Well, the one thing that I am focused on the most right now and that I hear the most about from my constituents is this immigration dragnet, and I think the work I’ve done in this area is reflective of the way that I approach this job and the way I do this job. I mentioned some of the legislation that I’ve proposed, which also includes prohibiting ICE officers from arresting people coming to court or to check-ins.

I recently introduced a bill that would get rid of qualified immunity for ICE and CBP civil immigration officers, so that there is some accountability that is not being had. I talked about the litigation. I called on the NYPD to be prepared to arrest ICE officers who are acting outside of their duties and responsibilities, which changed the conversation from whether or not the NYPD is helping ICE to whether or not the NYPD is protecting New Yorkers and I think was a significant – it got all the way, you know, Trump was asked about it.

But what I’ve really spent most of my time with over the last several months is this rapid response triage center that we have created in our district office, where we now are working with court watchers, with advocacy groups like New York Immigration Coalition and Make the Road, to bring in and receive the families of anybody who’s been detained, so that they get necessary support that they need, we are able to then coordinate directly with ICE, and we’ve been able to bring medicine in to detainees. We’ve gotten property back that they were unable to get. We’ve helped them supplement their immigration cases.

And we’ve then dealt with Department of Homeless Services to make sure that they have shelter, and we have referred them to lawyers who are working out of our office, who are then able to interview them so that they can file habeas petitions the same day. And we’ve been able to help 17 people get released from immigration detention and reunited with their families.

**Josh Greenman**  
And if ICE descends on New York the way that it has on other cities, what would your recommendation be to Mamdani, specifically, about what New York City’s governmental posture should be?

**Dan Goldman**  
I think the most important thing will be for the NYPD to figure out de-escalatory measures to protect New Yorkers, and I’ve spoken to the NYPD about this directly. And there are ways of doing it that. Begin by a presence and barriers and separating the immigration officers from the civilians. I think there’s going to have to be a massive advocacy and organizational effort to oppose this lawless dragnet that is really intended to terrorize our communities.

And it’s actually even worse than that, because what I believe is that this is all part of a process to give Donald Trump a pretext to cancel the elections. Because he is sending in a militarized ICE agency that is inciting violence, that is inflaming tensions intentionally, so he can then invoke the Insurrection Act and send the military in. So then he can then say, “Well, since we have an invasion and an insurrection and we need the military in our cities, we can’t have an election.”

**Josh Greenman**  
Just one real quick thing on this. You said the NYPD should figure out, like, I don’t know, you might have said the word barriers. Are you saying you want the NYPD to be much more active in preventing there being direct conflicts–

**Dan Goldman**  
Yes.

**Josh Greenman**  
–like filming conflicts that we saw in Minnesota between civilians and ICE? And if so, what role does that put the NYPD in vis-à-vis ICE?

**Dan Goldman**  
Well, I think that the NYPD needs to remember that its number one responsibility is to protect New Yorkers. And if there are federal agents who are acting completely outside of the law to put New Yorkers in danger, I think the NYPD needs to figure out a way to protect New Yorkers within the sort of reasonable restrictions and considerations that exist.

So yes, I think the NYPD, I think there should be more of a presence on the streets if we see something like we saw in Minnesota. What you saw in Minnesota was outrageous, excessive use of force. When people are in cars trying to get away, or even if they’re blocking, that they’re breaking windows, yanking them out of their cars, injuring them, arresting them –

**Ben Smith**  
So would you have a local police officer dive into that situation and tackle the ICE agent? I just want to paint a picture–

**Dan Goldman**  
No. You’ve got to be realistic here, that we don’t want a situation where one law-enforcement agency is having a confrontation or even worse, with another law-enforcement agency. I think the presence there, and de-escalatory measures, can make a big difference. What ICE needs right now, what ICE officers need and agents need, in addition to proper training, proper instructions, legitimate qualifications, removing their masks, etc., is a deterrent. They need to know that they will be held accountable if they act outside of the law, because right now they believe they are acting with impunity, and that’s why accountability is so important.

That’s why I introduced the ICE Out Act to provide some measure of civil accountability. And if there’s a presence, law enforcement presence that is designed to de-escalate situations, I think there are ways of doing that without having a physical confrontation that can be effective.

**Ben Max**  
Let me come back to the race here, we’re about four months from primary day, and it ties in with some of the issues we’ve been talking about, where electoral meets policy issues and your stances.

In this primary, assuming it goes forward as designed, you’ll likely do very well in the Manhattan portion of the district, and if you were to lose this primary it would be because there would be a huge groundswell in sort-of Brownstone Brooklyn in support of your opponent and against you, and likely very much spurred — tell me if you agree or disagree with this — by where you’ve stood on the Israel-Gaza conflict, and where you’ve spoken out or not spoken out. And of course, that ties in as well with your views on Mayor Mamdani and how he’s approached the issues as you talked about as your biggest concern about him. Do you agree with that assessment, that that would be, if you were going to lose this race, that would be how it would happen and why? Or do you have a different assessment of the political meets policy stance elements of this race?

**Dan Goldman**  
I don’t believe it breaks down as cleanly, borough versus borough, as you’re saying. And I think that – well, first of all, when you look at my policy record, it is very much in line with the district. I’m one of the most progressive members of the House, based on my record.

**Ben Max**  
Well, that’s why I’m bringing up this one—

**Dan Goldman**  
So as it relates to Israel, I think it’s important for people to understand exactly what my view is. And my view is that what has happened in Gaza is an absolute travesty. It is horrific to see the destruction. It is horrific to see the death, and it has been awful to watch, and I think that the Israeli government has used excessive military action during this conflict. I strongly oppose this Israeli government and the actions and the approach that it has taken, and especially recently what’s going on in the West Bank.

I have always believed strongly in a two-state solution, because I believe in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and as a democracy, and the only way that can happen, in my view, is if there is also a state for Palestinians, and they deserve self-determination as much as Israelis do.

I strongly, though, do believe in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, the only Jewish state in the world, and my definition of Zionism that I grew up with is very simple, which is that Jews have a right to have a state of their own in their ancestral homeland, but not to the exclusion of anybody else, and there shouldn’t be the exclusion of anybody else.

And so I am optimistic that the ceasefire can hold, and it presents, actually, the best opportunity for Palestinian self-determination since 2000, and I’m going to continue to advocate strongly for this ceasefire, which really was constructed by the Biden administration.

Now, I was much less publicly vocal on these issues during the Biden administration because I had a direct line into the seniormost national security officials, and I was advocating in private where I thought I could be more effective. This is an issue that I view purely from a policy and non-political perspective ‘cause it’s so important to my core values and so many of my constituents.

But since Trump has come along, given Bibi much more of a free rein, I was – With the Biden administration, I was strongly advocating putting more demands on humanitarian aid, and I thought that Israel all along should be providing much more humanitarian aid. I’ve become much more vocal about that during the Trump administration, ‘cause I don’t have a line –

**Josh Greenman**  
Or else what? Would there be U.S. consequences if not?

**Dan Goldman**  
Yes, I think that, as with any diplomatic relationship, that there needs to be an understanding and a partnership. And I think frankly, even though he begrudgingly did it during the Biden administration, Prime Minister Netanyahu did significantly surge humanitarian aid when the president demanded it of him.

And I think that we also have to recognize the importance of Israel as our only democratic ally in a region where it’s not just Israel that neighbors want to eviscerate, it’s also the United States. It’s important for our national security. Iran calls Israel Little Satan and calls the United States Big Satan, and these are mostly Iranian proxies who surround Israel and want it to be eliminated.

And so I think Israel’s security is a much more complicated question than so-called offensive or defensive weapons, because I do not believe that Israel should be left to defend itself based on the Iron Dome itself, without the opportunity to have a deterrent effect of being able to either preemptively or reactively respond to attacks.

That being said, I do not think that this Israeli government should continue with its military operation, and the ceasefire prevents them from doing it. Now, there have been obvious, significant issues with the ceasefire, and I think Israel has overreacted and used far more force than is appropriate in response to what they deem to be Hamas violations. But we are now in a point where the crux of the military operation is over, and what we need to be doing, and what I would urge President Trump to do, is to widen the scope of investment in the rebuilding of Gaza, make sure that we are including our allies in Europe, in addition to the Arab states – that this does not become another avenue for him to grift.

**Alyssa Katz**  
I was going to ask you about the Board of Peace. I mean, it’s meeting \[today, February 19\], right? You’re calling on Trump to take these actions. Is the Board of Peace a viable vehicle for this, or what do you make of it?

**Dan Goldman**  
I think the Board of Peace, in theory, hypothetically, is a viable pathway. I think the way it is constructed right now is problematic, because we are going to need — there’s not going to be Palestinian self-determination based on the United States and Israel alone crafting an outcome or a deal.

What we need is the expansion of the Abraham Accords. We need Arab states to invest, both financially but also politically. But we also need support from the broader international community, so that everybody is invested in the same ultimate outcome.

And what I worry about is, as with everything, Donald Trump is looking at his own pocketbook and his own personal interests far more than he is looking at the best outcome for the Middle East.

And it is a grave mistake for him to exclude European allies from the Board of Peace, and I think the Board of Peace needs to – he needs to stop focusing on how much money the members of the Board of Peace are putting in and focus on putting together a strong coalition that can provide the political and governing and security support so that there can be a state in Gaza.

**Christina Greer**  
This is an incredibly important issue for your district, but what would you identify as, say, three other really important issues for your district? And also, what’s your internal polling telling you about your primary race?

**Dan Goldman**  
We don’t have any internal polling that is recent at all. And I think the issues— I actually, it’s interesting, if you look at an open-ended issue list, Israel and Gaza is not high on the list.

What is high is democracy, is, well now, ICE and the immigration dragnet, and issues of affordability, housing crisis, generally, you know, too many people literally not being able to survive much less succeed in our city. And so that’s certainly what I’m focused on, and because I think those are the issues that really matter.

And what’s important for everyone to understand is, the job in Congress is a complicated one because in city government, state government, you essentially have supermajorities of Democrats who are required to have a balanced budget and need to figure out how you’re chopping up that budget.

In Washington, it is a totally different animal, with Republicans very powerful, in this case in control, and no budget that you need to necessarily chop up. I mean, effectively, it works that way in some ways, but it’s a very different environment.

And I firmly believe that the way that I have approached this job, which is using my position in Congress effectively and aggressively, in collaboration with advocacy groups, with outside groups, which are really, really important to the overall goal that we have of preserving our democracy, of tackling wealth inequality, of lifting up all New Yorkers, has been an effective way of going about it. Because I was able, for example, to use my relationships with the Republicans to reopen [Empire Wind 1](https://www.empirewind.com/ew-1/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the offshore wind project in South Brooklyn, that was well on its way back in April or May when the Trump administration paused it the first time. I have been able, even in the minority, to get the largest infrastructure grant ever given to EDC \[the New York City Economic Development Corporation\] for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal. I’ve been able to help to make sure the IRS reimburses small businesses for tax credits that they were owed from COVID. The list goes on.

I’ve done a lot of work on the local level, advocating for my constituents in Chinatown and in NYCHA, in Sunset Park. We’ve created a lot of mobile office hours that go out into communities that are traditionally underserved. So we go where they are, so they understand what services we can provide, because too many of them don’t think government is a force for good, it’s just a force for bad, and we’re trying to change that.

And it’s part of the reason why I was very proud in my launch event to have, you know, more than 200 community members from more than 10 different NYCHA developments in Chinatown, and Lower East Side, and Sunset Park, who were there for my launch because that’s where I’ve really invested my time in those relationships. And it’s been a true honor and privilege to be able to really see a meaningful difference on the ground for the communities that really need it.

And that’s what I’m gonna continue to do, and I’m gonna use my position in Congress to bring in outside groups, as we have done with our triage center, and to coordinate.

But it would be a waste of my position in Congress if all I focused on was leading outside protests without also using the power that I have and the platform I have to bring real change, which I will continue to push for as long as I’m in office.

**Ben Smith**  
Final slightly, maybe, oddball question. Your first cousin, friend, Dan Lurie, is probably the most successful, politically speaking, executive in the country right now. Mayor of San Francisco, doing remarkably well. Curious if there are lessons Mayor Mamdani, New York, can draw from him and his experience?

**Dan Goldman**  
I think he’s one of a number of mayors around the country that are really using their opportunities to both address the problems, but do it in a really pragmatic and constructive way. And what Democrats around the country need to show is that we can govern when we’re given that opportunity.

And I think what you see, for example, from the housing crisis in New York City, is either an unwillingness or an inability to accept the realities of our limitations, and figure out a way to still move forward. I think that’s what he’s done. I think Mayor Mike Johnston in Denver has done a really good job with that. And I think it’s important that we have really pragmatic and practical leaders who are focused much more on results, even if it may be somewhat incremental, but are still determined to improve people’s lives rather than holding out for the most significant disruption that you can imagine.

**Ben Smith**  
Would you ever run for mayor of New York?

**Dan Goldman**  
I don’t know.

**Ben Smith**  
All right. On that note, thank you.
### Evidence Over Intuition
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/jennifer-doleac-book-review/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:25.000Z
Over the past decade or so, the field of criminal justice reform has seemed to tilt on its axis. Thanks in no small part to Black Lives Matter, what had been for many years a fairly technocratic, under-the-radar area of endeavor became the stuff of front-page news — and yet another battleground in the culture wars that have consumed so much of American life.

As the environment became more and more politicized, many intellectuals effectively turned themselves into cheerleaders, signing on to support either Team Social Justice or Team Tough-on-Crime, no matter the issue at hand. Others were cowed into a dull silence, wary of sticking their heads above the parapet to voice their real opinions on hot-button topics. Our public discourse has been much impoverished as a result.

Against this backdrop, economist Jennifer Doleac has been a one-woman conversation starter. She is the rare public thinker with the courage to speak her convictions, come what may.

Of course, speaking your truth doesn't always make you friends. In 2022, when she was a professor at Texas A&M, Doleac found herself in the eye of the storm when she started collecting and publicizing [#MeToo allegations](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/economics-sexual-harrassment-women-sexism/672239/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of abuse and harassment from female economists.

The following year, when Doleac was named senior vice president at Arnold Ventures, one of the largest funders of criminal justice research in the country, [left-wing activists protested her appointment,](https://www.slowboring.com/p/more-courage-less-fear?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) upset that she had conducted research suggesting that the widespread availability of naloxone has had some unintended negative impacts. Sociologist [Alex Vitale](https://x.com/ian%5Ft%5Fadams/status/1634951703341711360?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the author of "The End of Policing"and a member of Zohran Mamdani's transition committee, issued a stinging public denunciation: "She has been unwilling to engage with those who disagree with her views, has no standing in the communities most affected by policing and incarceration, and is deeply distrusted by most of my intellectual and political colleagues." (Full disclosure: Vital City has received several grants from Arnold Ventures.)

Upon landing at Arnold, Doleac quickly found herself enmeshed in yet more controversy. When she publicly criticized a study of college-in-prison programs conducted by the Vera Institute of Justice for its methodological weakness, she drew a strong rebuke from Vera's president, [Nick Turner](https://www.vera.org/news/impact-over-orthodoxy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): "By privileging a rigid research standard and creating divisions over methodological differences, Doleac is giving comfort to the opponents of reform."

Doleac doesn't address any of these incidents in detail in her new book, "The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice" (Macmillan), but neither does she seek to avoid contentious debates. Instead, she comes out swinging, amply demonstrating that she is still willing to call 'em like she sees 'em. "Good research doesn't always tell us what we want to hear," she announces.

In "The Science of Second Chances," Doleac makes the case that instead of defaulting to locking people up, the criminal justice system should err on the side of leniency, giving those who have committed offenses multiple opportunities to get their lives back on track. While her thesis would seem a run-of-the-mill, left-wing argument, Doleac's commitment to data means that she is not content to just parrot standard-issue Democratic talking points. Indeed, over the course of her book, Doleac throws cold water on a host of ideas and initiatives embraced by progressives. She suggests that efforts to "ban the box," which limit the ability of employers to uncover the criminal histories of job applicants, have backfired, making things worse for the intended beneficiaries. She dismisses the evidence on gun violence interrupters as "thin" and writes positively about the crime-fighting possibilities of DNA databases and electronic monitoring devices. She avers that incarceration is sometimes effective at reducing reoffending, citing the example of Norway, where prisons take rehabilitation much more seriously than they do in the United States. The list goes on.

But Doleac is nothing if not an equal opportunity truth-teller. Throughout "The Science of Second Chances," she takes up many causes that will no doubt vex conservatives, arguing — again, rooted in research findings — that we should spend more money on early education, health care, summer jobs for kids, cognitive behavioral therapy and direct cash transfers to people coming out of prison, among other things.

In issuing all of these judgments, Doleac is trying to make a larger point: "We need to let go of trusting our intuition — which often leads us astray — over evidence on what is effective in practice."

Doleac believes deeply in the power of social science. She cites dozens of studies to support her arguments and goes out of her way to credit a myriad of researchers by name. In doing so, "The Science of Second Chances" essentially functions as a literature review for lay readers. Instead of pursuing esoteric questions of interest only to a narrow band of her peers, one of our most prominent criminal justice researchers has taken the time to distill the wisdom of her field for the general public. Every academic discipline should be so lucky. (Academics will note that Doleac exhibits a strong preference for the kinds of "causal research" conducted by economists over other forms of knowledge. Qualitative research and studies conducted by criminologists rarely feature in "The Science of Second Chances.")

There are, of course, limits to what social science can tell us. (Indeed, Vital City devoted [an entire issue](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-7) to this topic.) Much, perhaps most, of what government does has never been subjected to rigorous evaluation. Perverse incentives constrain the choices of researchers, limiting the types of questions that get answered and the types of studies that get published. Government officials operate on a much faster time clock than academic researchers, who typically require years to complete their work. And our messy, complicated world often doesn't lend itself to randomized trials or even the kind of natural experiments that Doleac highlights throughout her book. Sometimes we really do need to trust our intuition — in many cases, it is all we have to go on.

Still, for all its limitations, I would much prefer to live in the world that Doleac imagines, where evidence-based policymaking is the norm, rather than the alternative. In general, anecdotes and ideology are good for storytelling but bad for policy. On the right, these forces tend to encourage an instinct to "back the blue," come hell or high water. On the left, they lead to a distrust of the "carceral state" in almost every circumstance.

This kind of black-and-white thinking isn't a very accurate reflection of the world — in real life, law enforcement isn't always trustworthy and the coercive authority of government is often a force for good — but it does offer the benefit of simplicity. The science-based approach to criminal justice reform that Doleac advocates offers no such comfort. "The world is complicated, and uncomfortable trade-offs are inevitable," she declares.

Epistemic humility is a recurring theme in "The Science of Second Chances*.*"Notwithstanding all of the confident declarations made by politicians and advocates that "we know what works," the truth is that we don't really know how to prevent crime without spending an exorbitant amount of money or significantly eroding the kinds of freedoms that make life worth living. "Most good ideas we try won't work," Doleac writes. Even the programs that Doleac views approvingly tend to have rather modest effect sizes. While academics might get excited about a 10% reduction in recidivism, the general public is unlikely to share their enthusiasm.

Criminologist [Joan Petersilia](https://www.innovatingjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/daring%5F2%5Ffail.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) once offered the following assessment of the state of criminal justice research: "The data now supports the mantra that 'some things work for some people, some of the time, in some settings.' It's not as catchy as 'nothing works' or 'everything works,' but it is a truer and more nuanced understanding." "The Science of Second Chances"is a powerful affirmation of Petersilia's appraisal.

Over the past decade, Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" has become a staple of college curricula, assigned in [more than 4,000 classes since 2012](https://www.cmcforum.com/post/claremont-professors-find-lack-of-ideological-diversity-in-university-syllabi?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). A despairing look at enduring racial disparities in the criminal justice system, "The New Jim Crow" literally encourages readers to see the world in black and white. Perhaps as a result, it has sparked a passionate response, encouraging many young people to dedicate their lives to criminal justice reform.

With its cool presentation and commitment to evidence, "The Science of Second Chances" is unlikely to engender such enthusiasm — moderates, data nerds and policy wonks rarely take to the barricades — but that doesn't make it any less valuable. Indeed, with any luck, it too will become required reading on college campuses, helping readers develop a more nuanced perspective on criminal justice reform and underlining just how difficult it is to achieve solutions to the public safety problems that continue to plague us.
### The NYPD’s Crime-Reduction Strategy: Chief of Department Michael LiPetri in Conversation
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nypd-crime-strategy-questions-michael-lipetri/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:25.000Z
*New York City recorded fewer than 700 shootings in 2025, the lowest total since the NYPD began tracking the statistic. For a city that saw nearly 2,000 shooting victims in 2021, the turnaround is striking: 1,020 fewer people shot in four years.*

*What's going on, and how does that progress compare to what's happening with other crimes? Chief of Department Michael LiPetri, who oversees the Department's crime strategies, sat down with Vital City to walk through the mechanics: hyperlocal "violence reduction zones" where shootings, shots fired and street robberies overlap; thousands of officers deployed on foot during peak hours; and narcotics and gang enforcement concentrated in the same tight geography.*

*As Vital City makes clear in* [*its year-end crime report*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/crime-in-new-york-city-trends-statistics)*, the picture isn't uniformly rosy. Assaults have risen stubbornly since 2020\. Juvenile involvement in gun violence hit its highest recorded percentage. And the Bronx, despite leading the city in shooting reductions, still demands disproportionate resources.*

*LiPetri explains what the data show, what they don't and where the Department is quietly reassessing its approach under Commissioner Jessica Tisch and Mayor Zohran Mamdani.*

════════════════════════════════════════

**Vital City:** The NYPD had a banner year on shootings and murders. Can you put that in historic perspective and explain what you think the main drivers have been?

**Michael LiPetri:** It's amazing. I sat in this office as commanding officer of the Chief of Department's Office during our previous banner years — 2017, 2018 and 2019\. So to say that we're now under 700 shootings in New York City, especially after what transpired in the summer of 2020, is incredible. The credit goes to the men and women out there.

We focused on very small areas with a high propensity for violence. When we overlaid shooting incidents, shots fired and street robberies, we saw they lie on top of each other regardless of precinct or borough boundaries. The No. 1 crime strategy is field deployment. We put thousands of officers in those areas on foot patrol at the right times. Officers coming out of the academy don't have weekends off their first year or year-and-a-half — they're all working Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. We reached maximum force figures during those long summer nights, and the momentum continued through the fourth quarter.

Four out of five geographic boroughs had a 25% reduction in shootings. Brooklyn had a 15% reduction only because we broke the record the year before and then broke it again. In South Jamaica, Queens — the 103rd, 105th, 113th and 115th precincts — there were 23 shootings in 2025 compared to 51 in 2024.

But field deployment was only part of it. We focused narcotics enforcement within the violence reduction zones. Every week, I got a report on what percentage of narcotics arrests were within those zones. We asked our field intelligence officers to provide intelligence on recidivists, parolees and modus operandi for officers on foot posts. We asked our gun violence suppression division to focus in these areas. Housing developments within the zones were part of it; transit lines and stations within the zones were part of it. It was a force multiplier.

This is the fifth year in a row we've been over 3,000 gun arrests. Prosecution has never been better. We share more data with the DA's offices than ever before. I give them all our zone maps and say, "This is where we're focused — you need to be focused here also."

**Vital City:** Over the decades, we've seen remarkable reductions, but traditionally, violence has concentrated in the same places. Are you seeing geographic areas change? And what's the nexus between narcotics enforcement and violence?

**LiPetri:** We are focused on trigger pullers and robbery recidivists. With the data mining and automation we can do, if someone is a suspect in two different shooting incidents, we know that. My thing has always been: If this person has been around gun violence twice in six months as a suspect, you really need to look at them.

That's why the criminal group database is so important. If I'm looking at a crew with 20 members in the database, I can see how many are incarcerated, how many are out, how many shooting incidents they've been involved in as suspect, victim or perpetrator. I might see a crew involved in 27 violent incidents in the past year and say we need to focus our resources there.

**Vital City:** Can you explain the linkage between today's victim being tomorrow's shooter?

**LiPetri:** Approximately 65% to 70% of our shootings have a gang or crew nexus. Retaliation is highly likely. When we identify which crew member was shot or perpetrated a crime, we look at which crews are aligned with them and who their adversaries are. We overlay that with housing developments or small pockets they might frequent. The field deployment is built into all of this.

We document the specific method of flight for every geographic borough. I can look at a shooting and know whether they're using Citi Bikes, vehicles or walking between developments. All this intelligence is shared with officers every night. CompStat in 32 years hasn't changed that much — what's changed is our analytical ability to get granular by embedding civilian data scientists with experienced law enforcement professionals.

**Vital City:** There's been this incredible achievement in murders and shootings, but assaults have been rising. What's fueling that?

**LiPetri:** Assaults have been stubborn, rising year over year since 2020\. Last year was driven by three categories: assaults on NYPD officers, up 53; assaults on other public servants like conductors, correction officers and nurses, up 104; and domestic violence victims, up over 350.

On domestic violence, we made some decisions. We were having trouble with complainants becoming uncooperative, and victims were speaking to many different officers — the domestic violence unit, the patrol officer, then a detective. So we put it all under the detective bureau. The same person who catches the case deals with the victim and advocates. We're already seeing results. We also ramped up our warrants teams to focus on misdemeanor domestic violence, not just felonies.

**Vital City:** Domestic violence often involves an escalating scale of behavior that may end in homicide. How do you think about anticipating that?

**LiPetri:** That's why we have high-propensity lists and top 10 offenders within each precinct and housing PSA. A good, seasoned investigator knows the questions to ask. They can look at a victim and see they were a victim of harassment a month ago and ask follow-up questions. They have access to the whole case folder and can identify individuals with multiple incidents — sometimes with different victims but the same perpetrator.

**Vital City:** What do you make of the reported increase in mental illness associated with these attacks? And how will the new Department of Community Safety work?

**LiPetri:** I can't speak to the mayor's community safety plan — I haven't been briefed. But on unprovoked assaults, we absolutely tie a high percentage of those offenders to prior mental illness contact with the NYPD. The data shows that.

But here's something I don't think I've been asked: We had 250 fewer people shot than in 2024 and 1,020 fewer shooting victims than in 2021 — from 1,876 to 856\. How many lifelong injuries prevented? How many deaths? And we were down over 500 stabbing and slashing victims. The violent crime picture is incredible.

**Vital City:** Let's talk more about stabbings and slashings. How do you see that trajectory?

**LiPetri:** We've never had more cutting instrument recoveries. We've focused on transit — recovering cutting instruments during enforcement or when someone's arrested for something else and is found in possession. We know 80% of transit crime is on trains and platforms, and we've really increased enforcement there.

**Vital City:** Lightning round. First, the aging of the offender population — violence used to be a young man's game, but now we're seeing it clustered in people's 30s. Second, what's interesting that no one would know from looking at CompStat? Third, what's going on with the Bronx?

**LiPetri:** The Bronx led the city with 86 fewer shooting incidents — a 25% decrease. We've put enormous resources there across detective bureau, transit, housing and patrol. We're taking a hard look at some things we're not ready to announce yet.

On juvenile crime: Last year was the highest percentage of shooting victims under 18, shooting perpetrators under 18 and juveniles arrested in possession of a gun. We started tracking this about eight years ago and have never seen it this high. In September, at my direction, we focused on school zones before and after dismissal. We've seen a sharp decrease in violent crime in those school cars citywide.
### How To Deploy AI To Improve Policing in New York
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-to-deploy-ai-policing-nyc-nypd/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:26.000Z
The New York City Police Department has long stood at the forefront of developments in policing and public safety. In the early 1900s, for example, it led the country in the collection and use of fingerprints in criminal investigations, when, for a time, its [fingerprint archive](https://www.mcny.org/story/photographs-fingerprints?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was larger than the federal government's. In the decades that followed, the Department experimented with tools such as [digital mapping](https://iris.unive.it/retrieve/3312c516-36a2-4110-9e9e-cc81270d3be9/Pasquinelli%20%20-%20Arcana%5FMathematica%5FImperii.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and CompStat, pioneering an empirical approach to crime-fighting and resource allocation. Many argue that these innovations have improved life for New Yorkers; they have certainly influenced the practice of policing across the country.

Yet here we are in the heyday of AI, with accelerating improvements arriving every month and with these new tools transforming [software engineering](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-developers-havent-written-a-line-of-code-since-december-thanks-to-ai/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [health care](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2825%2902464-X/fulltext?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [education](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-97652-6?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [beyond](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh2586?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In this new world, it's unclear whether the Department can still claim a reputation as a national leader in policing innovation. As of March 2025, the Department's [official stance](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/oti/downloads/pdf/reports/2024-algorithmic-tools-report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was that it had not permanently adopted any new AI systems since rolling out an algorithm, [*Patternizr*](https://www.wsj.com/articles/nypd-built-bias-safeguards-into-pattern-spotting-ai-system-11572514202?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), that I helped develop when I was the Department's director of analytics 10 years ago.

A natural instinct for the Department might be to break out of this innovation funk by seeking out AI tools that accelerate crime-fighting objectives. But we're fortunate that crime rates for many offenses are plunging, both [here in New York](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR002/nypd-fewest-shoooting-incidents-shooting-victims-murders-january?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [across the country](https://jasher.substack.com/p/2025-year-in-review-a-remarkable). At the same time, a concerted push to test crime-fighting AI carries serious risks — best represented by Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE's) recent unencumbered embrace of technologies like [phone geofencing](https://www.404media.co/inside-ices-tool-to-monitor-phones-in-entire-neighborhoods/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [phone-hacking spyware](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/17/ice-surveillance-immigrants-antifa/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which has Americans on edge about law enforcement use of AI-driven surveillance. More broadly, a [majority of Americans](https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans-view-ai-and-its-impact-on-people-and-society/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are wary about the potential societal risks of AI.

At the same time, while crime is falling, many of the City's key reform efforts have stalled. Despite [widespread public support](https://assets.aclu.org/live/uploads/2025/04/IPM%5FNY%5FApril-28.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for diverting some 911 calls to nonpolice responders, New York City's call-diversion program — aka B-HEARD — saw a [substantial portion](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/new-audit-comptroller-finds-over-a-third-of-eligible-mental-health-calls-did-not-get-a-b-heard-team-response-for-untracked-reasons/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of eligible calls fail to receive program services. The federal monitor established by Floyd v. City of New York in the wake of the Department's disastrous stop-and-frisk policies has been in place for 13 years, with [recent reports](https://legalaidnyc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/STATUS-REPORT.-Twenty-first-Report-of-the-Independent-Monitor.-Document-filed-by-Mylan-L.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from the monitor noting the NYPD's continued noncompliance with important court orders. And the City looks [certain to miss](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/01/timeline-closure-rikers-island/376662/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the legally mandated deadline to close Rikers next year, with horrid conditions on the island continuing to decimate the credibility of our justice system.

This constellation of factors presents an unusual opportunity for Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch: accelerate reform efforts through the adoption of AI in contexts where this technology promises to improve outcomes. This focus would help the NYPD build the policymaking muscle it needs to develop effective policies around the responsible use of AI, preparing it for potential deployments of ethical crime-fighting tech in the future. And in an era of extreme budgetary pressure, these technologies present a rare chance for the mayor and the Department to advance key justice priorities while keeping costs down. Of course, there are many reasons why reform efforts have stalled — including lack of adequate staffing and the negotiation of tricky political questions — where technology cannot help. But a couple of examples highlight where AI has the potential to make a real difference in these efforts: first in the AI-supported expansion of 911 diversion, and second in AI-assisted review of police conduct in body camera footage.

As my colleagues at the [Policing Project](https://www.policingproject.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) noted in a [couple of recent](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/calling-the-cops-less-often) [Vital City articles](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-devil-is-in-the-details-of-911-dispatch), New York City has struggled to divert nonviolent 911 calls, like those involving a mental health crisis, away from police response. The City's B-HEARD pilot, launched in 2021, diverted [thousands of calls](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-of-the-behavioral-health-emergency-assistance-response-divisions-effectiveness-in-responding-to-individuals-with-mental-health-crises-and-meeting-its-goals/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) away from police response, with many of those served connecting with community-based care. But these thousands of calls represent a mere 0.01% of the city's total call volume. This places New York City behind national leaders like Minneapolis, which has diverted 9% of calls and recently set an ambitious target to divert 20% of calls.

The largest constraint on B-HEARD is staffing, where technology is unlikely to help much. But if the City is able to hire more alternative responders, the natural next hurdle will be devising validated criteria that identify more nonviolent calls suitable for alternative response, and then training the City's call takers and dispatchers to act on these new criteria.

AI could accelerate this process in a number of ways. First, AI could review historical calls for missed opportunities for diversion, providing empirical evidence for new call diversion criteria. Once these criteria are drafted, AI could simulate and stress test their use: first on historical calls, and then in parallel to actual call taking to evaluate whether they would work in practice. Once these criteria are finalized, AI could accelerate the training of call takers and dispatchers by simulating callers in a zero-risk practice environment, helping staff get repeated exposure to tricky situations so they'd be ready to act in high-pressure, real-world scenarios. AI could scale up quality assurance monitoring once new diversion criteria are in place, finding opportunities for improved staff performance — at a cost much cheaper than hiring employees to do this quality assurance at the same scale.

A different context where AI could advance reform efforts is in tapping the Department's enormous body-worn camera footage archive. In theory, this repository is a tremendous public asset, providing an opportunity to detect and correct problematic or risky officer behavior before tragic incidents occur, as well as to identify models of excellent policing worth holding up as exemplary. This vision for body cameras is what drove support for their rollout across the country; indeed, one of the [key conditions](https://ccrjustice.org/files/Remedy%20Decision%20Summary%20-%20Final.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the Floyd ruling in 2013 was that the NYPD pilot the use of body-worn cameras.

But the NYPD has neither the personnel capacity nor the budget to review most body camera footage using traditional approaches. As of 2019, [about two years'](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/View.ashx?GUID=D661482E-99BA-4A99-8805-DF4DEDAA0C8B&ID=7951413&M=F&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) worth of video was recorded and stored by the Department every *week*. It's impractical for the Department to hire humans to review footage at this scale; thorough review would require a staff of [hundreds of new analysts](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/View.ashx?GUID=D661482E-99BA-4A99-8805-DF4DEDAA0C8B&ID=7951413&M=F&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to watch this footage full-time.

A well-trained AI tool could review all footage and isolate short clips of officer behavior — both good and bad — for supervisor review. This tool would likely cost much less than what it would cost to hire hundreds of analysts. A handful of private-sector vendors, including Truleo and Polis, have built technology that can support this goal. Recognizing this promise, the NYPD [announced a pilot](https://gothamist.com/news/the-nypd-is-using-ai-to-analyze-body-camera-footage-civil-rights-activists-have-privacy-concerns?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with Truleo in the fall of 2023\. But since its announcement, there has been neither public communication on the results of the pilot nor any indication of whether the Department intends to proceed with a permanent contract. This lack of communication is a lost opportunity to build credibility around the deployment of AI in service of reform at the NYPD.

It's worth noting that even reform-oriented applications of AI present tricky policymaking challenges for the Department and the City. The Department will need to allay concerns that AI algorithms used to review BWC footage and 911 calls are being used as a covert surveillance tool or that sensitive BWC footage or 911 call audio is used to train commercial AI models. The Department will need to convince its staff that these algorithms won't automatically impose discipline but will flag short clips of footage or audio for review, deferring any decision-making to human supervisors. Besides surveillance risks, those who have dabbled in generative AI might have been alarmed by new modes of failure: [hallucinations](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/us/prosecutor-artificial-intelligence-errors-lawyers-california.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (incorrect or fake but convincing claims), [sycophancy](https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (AI saying whatever it thinks you want to hear) or [deepfakes](https://abcnews.com/Politics/trump-shutdown-troll-democrats-deepfake-memes-threatening-targeted/story?id=126185886&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (synthetic images or video that are indistinguishable from authentic media). Automated systems have the potential to [perpetuate biases](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1915768117?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found in training data.

There are plenty of good ideas on how to reduce these risks, both through careful design of technology as well as the policies that surround their use. But convincing a skeptical and nervous public — and the Department's uniformed force — that appropriate safeguards are in place is a bigger challenge. In light of recent scandals, it's not clear that the NYPD is thinking about these risks. In 2020, for example, [reporters at BuzzFeed found](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/clearview-ai-fbi-ice-global-law-enforcement?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that over 40 members of the Department had signed up for Clearview AI using free trial accounts. These members ran over 11,000 searches on Clearview's database of people's faces, which were scraped from millions of social media posts without user consent. The NYPD scrambled to release [clearer guidance](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr0313/press-release---nypd-facial-recognition-policy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) around the proper use of facial recognition a few weeks later, but the reputational damage was done.

In response to public pressure — and likely a desire to avoid new scandals like officers' unsanctioned use of Clearview AI — the NYPD has adopted a crude approach to internal use of AI. For a time, the NYPD had a blanket policy of blocking all access to chat-based interfaces like ChatGPT and URLs that ended in "ai" (such as clearview.ai), fearing inappropriate use and data leakage. But this approach is shortsighted if staff resort to using their personal phones for access to AI platforms. We need the Department to proactively recognize and reduce these risks through more mature policies and training. In the meantime, a locked-down agency will struggle to accomplish any goal — including those in service of justice reform. The NYPD will function fine if these reforms continue to stall. It's our most vulnerable residents who will pay the price for the City's lack of innovation.

════════════════════════════════════════

Outside of New York City, a stampede of private-sector vendors is aggressively pursuing contracts to deploy AI in law enforcement agencies [across the country](https://www.jai-t.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Anyone who has been to the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in recent years has seen its exhibition hall filled with vendors touting apparently revolutionary [AI-powered crime-fighting products](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/cop-companies-want-all-your-data-and-other-takeaways-years-iacp-conference?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). And these vendors are finding customers across the country: American law enforcement agencies are using AI to [transcribe jail calls](https://alaskapublic.org/news/public-safety/2025-09-23/anchorage-police-adopt-ai-to-analyze-investigative-data?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for detectives, drive [unmanned cruisers](https://cbs12.com/news/local/miami-unveils-pug-the-nations-first-ai-powered-police-cruiser-miami-deade-sheriffs-office-mdso-artificial-intelligence-police-unmanned-ground-october-3-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [flag officers](https://media.api.sf.gov/documents/PoliceCommission10423-SFPD%5FPolice%5FCommission%5FPresentation%5F2023-07-19.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with past patterns of misconduct. Even the historically lethargic MTA is one step ahead of the NYPD in testing AI to [deter fare evasion](https://gothamist.com/news/modern-nyc-subway-gates-tested-by-the-mta-use-ai-tech-to-track-fare-evaders?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [detect erratic behavior](https://gothamist.com/news/mta-wants-ai-to-flag-problematic-behavior-in-nyc-subways?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Several recent events have underscored concerns about the private sector's full-court embrace of AI for public safety. Amazon's [Super Bowl commercial](https://www.geekwire.com/2026/what-rings-search-party-actually-does-and-why-its-super-bowl-ad-gave-people-the-creeps?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for its Ring camera network reminded Americans that if the tech company can automatically track a lost dog in a neighborhood, it can probably automatically track people, too (emails [leaked yesterday](https://www.404media.co/leaked-email-suggests-ring-plans-to-expand-search-party-surveillance-beyond-dogs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) suggest this is indeed a goal). The public's uneasy reaction to this ad caused Amazon to [void a collaboration](https://www.theverge.com/report/879320/ring-flock-partnership-breakup-does-not-fix-problems?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with another surveillance provider, Flock Safety, which has its own track record of [questionable policy](https://apnews.com/article/immigration-abortion-license-plates-cameras-cc5f29df94a29ee2c6c2feb2151c8f5e?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). And in the last few days, the FBI announced it was able to [recover footage](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cybersecurity-experts-nancy-guthrie-surveillance-footage-recovery/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from a Google Nest camera many days after Nancy Guthrie's disappearance — an apparent discrepancy with the company's policy for accounts like Ms. Guthrie's, which says such footage will only be accessible for a few hours.

Adding to these concerns, we don't know whether most marketed AI tools work as claimed or whether they'd make any difference in real-world practice. The most discussed generative AI product in policing is Axon's "Draft One," which uses transcriptions from Axon's body cameras to write a draft crime narrative for officers. While [Axon claims](https://www.axon.com/getstarted/draft-one?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) use of Draft One will reduce report-writing time by 50% — a salivating prospect, given the administrative burdens associated with law enforcement reporting duties — independent researchers ran a peer-reviewed [randomized experiment](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-024-09644-7?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and found that the use of Draft One didn't reduce report-writing times compared to status quo practice. That's not to mention the [potential pitfalls](https://komonews.com/news/local/king-county-prosecutor-tells-police-not-to-use-ai-artificial-intelligence-for-official-reports-for-now-errors-concerns-law-enforcement-perjury-criminal-justice?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that may arise in court when officers are cross-examined about a narrative they didn't write themselves, including words they don't know.

Surprising results from experiments like this one underscore why it's crucial to pilot and evaluate promising new technologies before they are fully adopted. Any such effort at the NYPD — including those in service of reform goals — must be credibly and rigorously evaluated before new technologies are rolled out permanently. These evaluations are essential because they will help policymakers and the public understand if AI lives up to its promise and whether there's any evidence for its misuse or abuse in practice. And technology is not the only unproven piece of this new puzzle. We also lack compelling evidence on which *policies* will be effective at preventing misuse and abuse of AI. Careful iteration and learning via testing and evaluation is the only real way to make progress on these open and important questions.

In theory, it's possible that such evaluations are already happening inside the NYPD, but it's hard to know for sure — with the lack of transparency around its Truleo pilot serving as a prime example. The Department did pilot another AI technology recently as part of a transparency requirement under the City's new POST Act: [Evolv scanners](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2024/03/mayor-adams-nypd-commissioner-caban-pilot-new-technology-additional-clinicians-be?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to detect firearms on people entering subway stations. But messaging around this pilot's intent left a lot of room for improvement. In advance of the pilot, then-Mayor Eric Adams called it a ["sputnik moment"](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2024/03/transcript-mayor-adams-nypd-commissioner-caban-pilot-new-technology-additional?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for the City and said, ["I think it's good technology."](https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2024/07/evolv-gun-detection-tech-rolling-out-nyc-subway-stations-week/398274/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) These enthusiastic comments suggested that the City was conducting a pro forma pilot of a technology it had already determined to be useful. But these preliminary conclusions [were dubious](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/subway-gun-scanners-the-wrong-tech-in-the-wrong-place). After the monthlong experiment, the Department had recovered [zero guns](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2024/10/results-are-evolv-gun-scanners-recover-zero-guns-subways/400522/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) but had 118 false hits — almost 10 times as many as the 12 knives they had recovered in the same time span. Although the former mayor had a penchant for gaffes, framing this pilot as an objective test would have saved the City a lot of embarrassment when it didn't end as hoped.

It's also [no secret](https://citymeetings.nyc/meetings/new-york-city-council/2025-02-19-1000-am-committee-on-public-safety/chapter/nypds-use-of-ai-technologies-in-patternizer-shotspotter-and-facial-recognition/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that the City and the NYPD have struggled to define what counts as AI. Although the City [passed a law](https://intro.nyc/local-laws/2022-35?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 2022 requiring City agencies to disclose use of "algorithmic" tools on an annual basis, the mandate doesn't appear to include technology that most people would consider to qualify as AI. While the NYPD's use of facial recognition and ShotSpotter — both of which make use of algorithms — are included in the City's annual AI inventory, not included are the Department's Truleo pilot or its numerous [license plate readers](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/public%5Finformation/post-final/License-Plate-Readers-NYPD-Impact-and-Use-Policy-2.4.26-FINAL.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Traditional algorithmic technologies like fingerprint matching and DNA analysis aren't qualified. They're older methods, to be sure, but they use algorithms the same way.

Whether a tool qualifies as new "AI" technology is a distraction from the deeper question at stake: whether government can wield new police powers to keep the public safe while respecting civil rights and minimizing undue costs imposed on its denizens. Put this way, current struggles with AI are the newest example of the fundamental challenge of the justice system, which has always been a delicate balancing act between the state's extreme power and safeguards against the irresponsible, overbearing or unequal use of this power. We've been struggling with this balance for a long time — illustrated by the fact that 4 of the 10 constitutional amendments in the 1789 Bill of Rights guard against government overreach in criminal procedure.

But in the past, it's taken us a long time to strike an acceptable balance. With fingerprints, for example, it took [decades](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/394/721/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of [litigation](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/470/811/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [mistakes](https://www.oversight.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/2018-02/s1105.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) before we devised mature policy on when fingerprints could be taken, how matches would be documented and challenged, and who could access this sensitive information. Today, AI is evolving so fast that we don't have decades to spare. We need a competent public sector that can draw from historical parallels — and learn from the ineffective or effective ways we've curbed overreach in the past — to address new threats posed by AI, all while finding opportunities for its responsible use. In New York City, an earnest effort to design technology that builds state capacity on stalled reform efforts is a good place to start.

To kick-start this process, the Department can draw on our city's deep bench of public-interest talent. I have many colleagues who run applied research labs in the city's numerous universities who would be eager to help the NYPD. Reasonable voices in the city's civic tech and advocacy community could assist the Department in thinking through the risks inherent in new AI technologies. Resources outside the city can assist, including [other agencies](https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2024-01-24%5Fpm%5F-%5Ftestimony%5F-%5Faguilar.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) pioneering responsible adoption and national organizations like the Council on Criminal Justice, where a new [Task Force on AI](https://counciloncj.org/artificial-intelligence/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (on which I am serving) is drafting guidelines on the safe and effective use of AI technologies in justice settings. Historically, the NYPD has been reluctant to ask for help — e.g., at last year's ["Pilot Pitchfest,"](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/an-antidote-to-doge-strengthening-urban-policy-entrepreneurs) where the Department was absent from a crowd of over 20 City agencies pitching research and technical projects to over 1,000 volunteers. Reconsidering this reluctance would help the Department rekindle its capacity for responsible innovation.

In tandem, the Department needs to begin the slow process of reestablishing internal capacity like it had 10 years ago, when there were multiple civilian experts working across the agency alongside exceptional uniformed staff. AI's disruption has brought about a new moment where capable technical talent is easier to hire: [Massive recent layoffs](https://www.challengergray.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Challenger-Report-December-2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have made it possible to recruit experienced technologists who are tired of supporting the tech sector's march toward [enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and who want to make a positive difference in the world instead. Aside from hiring new civilian staff, the Department needs to better support talent that matures within its own ranks. An unfortunate ["brain drain"](https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/inside-city-hall/2025/01/24/nypd-detectives--endowment-association-president-on-retaining-detectives?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) since the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed out many talented uniformed members who could be helping devise a responsible and informed path forward on the Department's use of AI.

Confusing, inconsistent and spotty information about the NYPD's use of AI has only served to raise fears among the public that new technologies are being used in an irresponsible way. The mayor has a talent for wonky, policy-dense communication; the NYPD should consider adopting his approach in helping the public learn about responsible innovation at the Department. In particular, the Department should show — not tell — the public how it is making responsible use of these new technologies. And to do so, it can spotlight the Department's many diverse, talented and passionate civil servants who work hard to do the right thing and keep our city safe.

Implementing these changes would improve the NYPD's ability to adopt AI responsibly, promising concrete benefits to the city's most vulnerable residents while reducing the risk of improper use. But the benefits wouldn't stop there. The NYPD occupies a special position — both by virtue of its internationally respected brand and its incredible size (with more sworn officers than [most American states](https://bjs.ojp.gov/media/67846/download?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) — from which it can lead the nation in the safe development and testing of these new technologies. With both an effective commissioner and an idealistic yet pragmatic mayor in office, this seems like an unusual moment where the right leaders are in place to make this vision a reality.

This kind of leadership is sorely needed. The AI genie is out of the bottle, and private corporations are leading the development of AI in justice settings. While the private sector is a crucial engine for innovation, our institutions have ceded too much leadership to technology companies, which aren't incentivized to serve the public interest. Instead, we need a competent public sector, accountable to the public, that can identify the narrow path forward between ineffective, sclerotic government and limitless technology that — if unchecked — will impinge on our civil liberties. It's a narrow path. But it's one we can and must do our best to travel down.
### Gang Databases Are Crucial to Shooting Reduction Efforts
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nypd-gang-database-shooting-reduction/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:26.000Z
Fair and effective policing is required to both reduce shootings and ensure public support. Essential to the task is accurately identifying individuals who are most at risk of being shooters, gunshot wound victims or both. But the NYPD's Criminal Group Database, colloquially known as the "gang database," is a frequent target of reformers, who say it mistakenly sweeps in too many people.

The [critics' claim](https://theintercept.com/2019/04/25/bronx-120-report-mass-gang-prosecution-rico/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), specifically, is that New York City's gang database produces enhanced targeting of people based on questionable allegations of gang membership. These concerns have motivated City Councilwoman Althea Stevens and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to [propose a bill](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=6632643&GUID=4604B635-C83C-4448-9AA5-1F670D42592D&Options=&Search=&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) intended to abolish the database. [They have questioned](https://citymeetings.nyc/meetings/new-york-city-council/2025-02-24-1000-am-committee-on-public-safety/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), without rigorous empirical evidence, the violence-reduction efficacy of the Criminal Group Database, noted a lack of transparency in gang membership designations and decried the fact that 99% of people in the database were Black or Hispanic.

Disproportionality alone, however, does not establish bias. It must be evaluated against victimization and offending patterns.

It is well known that shootings are not a democratic crime when it comes to race and place. [In 2024](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis%5Fand%5Fplanning/year-end-2024-enforcement-report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), New York City shooting victims were primarily Black (67%) or Hispanic (29%). Fewer than 3% of shooting victims were Asian or Pacific Islander, and about 1% were white. Shooting suspects (65% Black, 33% Hispanic) and arrestees (64% Black, 32% Hispanic) have the same racial demographics. These racial characteristics closely match the almost exclusively nonwhite entries in the NYPD Criminal Group Database.

In October 2025, the NYPD gang database had only [8,563 individuals identified](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doi/oignypd/web/report.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), representing only 0.1% of New York City's 8.5 million residents. [By one estimate](https://www.city-journal.org/article/nypd-criminal-group-database-gang-violence-crime?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), upward of 65% of New York City shootings involve gang members as victims, perpetrators or both. Importantly, [shootings tend to occur in Black and Brown neighborhoods](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00027162231173324?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) characterized by concentrated disadvantage and disinvestment that lead to limited access to safe and affordable housing, quality education, gainful employment, clean air and water, and transportation. Preventing recurring gun violence in these neighborhoods is clearly a matter of social justice. Investments need to be made to address the underlying structural conditions that generate persistent gun violence.

It is equally important to recognize that these neighborhoods need immediate relief from the associated economic, social and psychological burdens of fatal and nonfatal shootings. [Effective policing](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/policing-gun-violence-9780199929283?cc=us&lang=en&&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is key to the success of any comprehensive effort to reduce shootings in the near term.

Police departments can reduce shootings in cities by focusing on the gangs, drug-selling organizations, street robbery crews and other criminally active groups involved in a disproportionate share of fatal and nonfatal shootings. Group-involved violence stems from personal disputes, drug-market business, ongoing gang rivalries and other conflicts. [A study of more than 20 cities](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-25/beyond-broken-windows-what-really-drives-urban-crime?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that, on average, less than 1% of a city's population was involved in gangs, drug crews and other criminally active groups, but were connected to more than 50% of a city's shootings and homicides. The public safety implication is clear: Shootings can be controlled by focusing on and changing the violent behaviors of a small number of very risky people.

The NYPD has been a pioneer of ["precision policing"](https://manhattan.institute/article/precision-policing-a-strategy-for-the-challenges-of-21st-century-law-enforcement?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) strategies that focus law enforcement attention on the small number of violent criminals who harm communities and seek to work with neighborhood residents to increase public safety in affected neighborhoods. Rigorous evidence suggests this approach works in preventing gun violence. [An evaluation of precision-policing gang "takedowns"](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pam.22323?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in New York City housing projects between 2011 and 2019 found that shootings in and around public housing communities fell by approximately one-third in the first year after the enforcement action was launched. No evidence was found of substantial displacement, which is to say, there was no sign that gun violence just moved elsewhere. This was a meaningful reduction.

[The NYPD maintains](https://citymeetings.nyc/meetings/new-york-city-council/2025-02-24-1000-am-committee-on-public-safety/chapter/importance-of-reducing-gun-violence-and-the-role-of-the-criminal-group-database/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that the Criminal Group Database is critical to such strategic efforts and important to solving violent gun crimes. That tracks with [how the Department uses the database](https://www.city-journal.org/article/nypd-criminal-group-database-gang-violence-crime?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): After gang-involved shootings, the NYPD rapidly deploys resources to prevent retaliation by rival gangs and advance investigations to quickly hold shooters accountable for their crimes. The NYPD associates these actions with achieving its record low of [688 shooting incidents in 2025](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR001/nypd-safest-year-ever-gun-violence-fewest-shooting-incidents-shooting?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

More broadly, gang databases are part of an evidence-based gun violence reduction strategy known as ["focused deterrence."](https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/framework-for-addressing-violence-and-serious-crime/F82356B840A48359FE04C019FD5E357B?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [These programs](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12682?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have been shown to be [effective in many cities](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-9133.70012?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The goal of focused deterrence is first to focus on high-risk individuals and then stop further violence through a strategic blend of law enforcement, social services and community-based action. For example, after a gang shooting, officers and their partners need to identify gang members who are likely to retaliate and who are likely to be shot. Knowing which gangs are involved and their membership is necessary to do this.

> While no system is free from error, the research literature suggests that formalized gang databases with clear inclusion criteria and oversight may reduce — rather than exacerbate — the risks associated with purely individual, intuition-based determinations of gang involvement.

People living in high-crime neighborhoods, particularly young men of color, bear a disproportionate policing burden. Though these young men are overwhelmingly uninvolved in crime, they are far more likely to be stopped and questioned by police than youth living in more affluent neighborhoods, certainly an infringement of their civil liberties. The NYPD remains under the [supervision of a court-appointed monitor](https://www.nypdmonitor.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to ensure that its stop-and-frisk practices are lawful and not generating excessive racial disparities. Since 2011, NYPD stops have [fallen by roughly 97%](https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/How%5FMany%5FStops%5FAct%5FFinal.pdf??ref=vitalcitynyc.org), sharply reducing the burden young men of color experience. But stop-and-frisks [continue in smaller numbers](https://www.nypdmonitor.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/963-Twenty-Fifth-Report-of-the-Independent-Monitor.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and the burden disproportionately falls on Black and Latino men.

A key question is whether abolishing the NYPD Criminal Group Database would lessen the undeserved policing burden on youth of color or, rather, unintentionally increase it. We know of no academic research that has studied this question for New York City or any other city.

Related academic work is possibly suggestive. [An important study](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.p20171003&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) examined the effect of "banning the box," that is restricting employers from asking about job applicants' criminal histories. The authors used an audit study where fictitious black and white individuals applied online for jobs. Prior to ban-the-box implementation, they found that employers that asked about criminal history were 63% more likely to call applicants with no record. However, they also found that white applicants received 7% more callbacks before ban-the-box. After its implementation, this gap increased to a whopping 43%. In short, when employers were not able to ask about criminal history, they were far more likely to discriminate against Black candidates. [Other studies](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/705880?af=R&mobileUi=0&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have found similar patterns of racial discrimination in employment outcomes when prior criminal histories were not available to prospective employers.

Boston's experience is also informative. In the early 1990s, and prior to that, Boston did not have an effective, much less focused, deterrence strategy for dealing with gang violence. The result was twofold: With the introduction of crack, the city experienced a period of uncontrolled gang violence; Black youth were indiscriminately and frequently stopped by police. The latter happened most dramatically after the [Carol Stuart murder in 1989](https://apps.bostonglobe.com/metro/investigations/2023/12/charles-stuart/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), when young Black men, no matter who they were or their circumstances, were, in the language of the police, "tipped upside down." The Boston police had no idea who might have been responsible.

Similarly, without its Criminal Group Database, the NYPD would not have a reservoir of timely intelligence on gangs and gang dynamics to focus its deployments and investigations in the wake of shootings. The resulting harm could be twofold: A diminished capacity to control gun violence in traumatized neighborhoods and a broadening of police enforcement activities to identify and apprehend shooters.

Though we can't say for certain, the evidence suggests that banning the NYPD's gang database could have just the opposite effect that reformers intend. Without having specific knowledge about who is gang-involved, officers may well stop a far broader set of individuals, increasing the policing on innocent individuals, particularly young people of color.

Decades of psychological research on judgment and decision-making raise important concerns about relying solely on individual officers' discretion to determine gang membership. When decisions must be made under time pressure, stress and incomplete information — conditions that typify street-level policing — human judgment is known to rely heavily on [cognitive shortcuts](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1738360?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [and heuristics](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-26535-000?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). A [large body of research](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-70006-003?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [demonstrates that such circumstances](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15598112/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) increase susceptibility to confirmation bias and stereotype-based reasoning, even among well-intentioned professionals. [Experimental](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-08203-006?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [studies](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/511799?seq=1&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) further show that racial stereotypes can shape perceptions of criminality and threat when objective criteria are absent or unclear. [Organizational research on street-level bureaucracy](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7758/9781610447713?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) also finds that discretionary decision-making without standardized rules leads to inconsistency and "drift" across officers and units.

In contrast, extensive evidence from [psychology](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10752360/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [decision science](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.2648573?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) indicates that structured, rule-based or actuarial classification systems consistently outperform unaided professional judgment in risk assessment and categorization tasks, producing more reliable and equitable outcomes. While no system is free from error, this literature suggests that formalized gang databases with clear inclusion criteria and oversight may reduce — rather than exacerbate — the risks associated with purely individual, intuition-based determinations of gang involvement.

None of this is to say that the NYPD's gang database is beyond reproach. Research makes clear that gang databases suffer from vague inclusion criteria, weak oversight, a lack of due process and potential law enforcement biases about who is involved in gang activity. [A recent study](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Pyrooz/publication/382623580%5FPulling%5FBack%5Fthe%5FCurtain%5Fon%5Fthe%5FCalifornia%5FGang%5FDatabase%5FEvidence%5Fof%5FRacial%5FEthnic%5Fand%5FGender%5FDisparities%5FAmong%5F222%5FLaw%5FEnforcement%5FAgencies/links/66a79fbe75fcd863e5e8680a/Pulling-Back-the-Curtain-on-the-California-Gang-Database-Evidence-of-Racial-Ethnic-and-Gender-Disparities-Among-222-Law-Enforcement-Agencies.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) found young men of color were overrepresented in the California gang database (CalGang) and raised questions as to whether these disparities could be explained by legal factors and whether the database properly balanced public safety value with individual rights. The NYPD has faced similar questions. In response to [a 2023 Office of the Inspector General report](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/reports/pdf/2023/16CGDRpt.Release04.18.2023.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the Department tightened its inclusion and removal criteria. It is certainly possible that the NYPD Criminal Group Database could benefit from further examination and reforms. A more focused and targeted database would increase police efficiency, lower gun violence rates even further and lessen the civil liberties burden — the primary benefits of a focused policing approach. But those who champion eliminating the gang database entirely might harm the very individuals they say they want to protect.
### The Top Five Crime and Justice Stories of 2025
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/biggest-crime-justice-stories-america-2025/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:26.000Z
Disappearing data. Sweeping cuts to federal justice grants. A historic drop in homicide. 2025 was an undeniably tumultuous year on the nation's criminal justice landscape. As an incoming presidential administration imposed its vision with vigor, policymakers, practitioners, researchers and advocates adjusted to new realities, and communities long plagued with high rates of violent crime cautiously celebrated a continuing decline.

Channeling DJ Casey Kasem's famous "American Top 40," we count down the top five developments that captured the most attention and held the greatest implications for future criminal justice policy and practice — and take some peeks at what 2026 may bring.

## **5\. Data about crime and justice came under attack**.

Beginning in January, the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) took [thousands of federal data sources offline](https://counciloncj.org/federal-data-in-the-crosshairs-whats-at-stake-for-public-safety/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or altered or eliminated them outright. The casualties included a database on police officer misconduct and statistics on racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. The credibility of law enforcement statistics also came under fire, particularly in New York City, Chicago and other communities where falling crime numbers conflicted with the Trump administration's portrait of urban dystopia.

Nowhere was this skepticism more visible than in Washington, D.C. Amid resistance to President Donald Trump's deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops to the nation's capital, congressional Republicans [challenged reports of a decline in violent crime](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/us/politics/house-republicans-dc-crime.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the District and accused police commanders of manipulating data by downgrading violent incidents to lesser offenses — even while other data from D.C. hospital emergency rooms were showing similar declines in shootings. The police chief denied tampering with the numbers but resigned.

Historically, concerns over accurate and timely data have kept researchers and academics up at night but captured little public notice. In 2025, however, data reliability took center stage, in part because of the president's [firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics director](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/sep/17/labor-statistics-chief-trump-erika-mcentarfer?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) over what he perceived as poor job growth numbers.

Public officials, reporters and other stakeholders should scrutinize obscure statistical systems and processes; shining a light on them would tend to spark improvements. But undermining trust in the fundamental credibility and accuracy of the nation's data systems — systems that are the envy of the world — has consequences that can harm law enforcement agencies and public safety. Perhaps when (and if) the numbers in 2025 and 2026 tell a positive story, the inevitable partisan clashes will focus more on crime strategies than on the soundness of the statistics.

## 4\. Criminal justice funding was on the chopping block.

As part of an unprecedented push by DOGE to slash federal spending, the Department of Justice (DOJ) in April [canceled grants](https://counciloncj.org/doj-funding-update-a-deeper-look-at-the-cuts/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) initially valued at about $820 million to a wide range of law enforcement, violence intervention, juvenile justice and other programs. Coming in the middle of budget cycles, the cuts actually eliminated some $500 million in program dollars, causing large-scale layoffs and forcing some agencies to close. Organizations providing training and technical assistance to the field were hit particularly hard, while money spent on data collection for research studies and other partially completed projects turned into pointless investments, as work stopped midstream. On a human level, not only did the cuts [disrupt the lives and careers](https://www.npr.org/2025/11/10/nx-s1-5552704/doj-crime-prevention-public-safety-grant-cuts?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=The%20cuts%20affected%20hundreds%20of%20organizations%20around,ability%20to%20consider%20appeals%20and%20reimburse%20organizations.) of thousands of dedicated frontline crime-prevention and -intervention staff, they removed these professionals from working with at-risk youth on the nation's streets.

Almost no one would argue that federal justice programs are universally efficient or that some of the funded programs simply weren't producing sufficient results. Indeed, many inside and outside of the criminal justice ecosystem believe it has become too sprawling and could use a round of streamlining and consolidation.

But aside from targeting grants that contained triggering buzzwords like "gender," the administration's cuts appeared to lack a clearly defined public safety strategy. An appeals process is now underway, though a new head of the DOJ's grantmaking agency, the Office of Justice Programs, has yet to be nominated. While the cuts caused significant setbacks for many crime and justice workers and their organizations, 2026 may bring the restoration of some grant funding, as challenges have led to a reversal of several grant eliminations. On Jan. 14, the Department of Health and Human Services [cut $2 billion in funding](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/health/samhsa-funding-cuts.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for mental health and addiction services (to some 2,000 programs nationwide) only to reverse those cuts a mere 24 hours later in the face of bipartisan outcry from lawmakers and the public. The severed slate of justice programs is unlikely to be revived en masse, but the stronger ones, especially those with patrons on Capitol Hill, have a decent shot.

## 3\. The postpandemic justice system reboot made strong headway.

In 2025, [courts made substantial progress](https://www.floridabar.org/the-florida-bar-news/chief-justice-canady-courts-are-making-headway-in-clearing-case-backlogs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the massive backlogs caused by widespread system shutdown and disruption during the pandemic. In-person trials became the norm again, case processing times shortened, pretrial systems stabilized, supervision agencies normalized operations, and reentry programming and service delivery gained momentum.

Police ranks continued to bounce back as well, recovering from hits inflicted during the pandemic and the George Floyd-related protests of 2020\. There's still a long way to go — recruitment and retention are a big challenge for many departments. [The correctional workforce also shrank](https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/apes.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) during the early COVID-19 years, and while some gains have been made, staffing levels there remain down.

The flip side of unclogging the justice system's pipes meant more people made it through the process to jail or prison. The revived postpandemic system [ticked up the incarcerated population in 2023](https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/correctional-populations-united-states-2023-statistical-tables?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) after 15 years of decline.

Surely, the long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the criminal justice system and [criminal justice policy](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12562?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) will take time to play out. And with so much volatility in the system, and crime and arrests [trending down](https://counciloncj.org/who-gets-arrested-in-america-trends-across-four-decades-1980-2024/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), it's hard to predict what's in store for the incarceration rate in 2026\. But in [one of the most interesting pieces](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/prisoner-populations-are-plummeting/683310/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) last year, Keith Humphreys of Stanford University estimated that the prison population will "fall off a cliff" over the next decade, driven down by declining rates of juvenile crime.

## 2\. Public perceptions of crime did not align with the data.

With high-profile incidents of political violence, National Guard troops deployed to cities and dramatic footage of ICE enforcement actions flooding screens everywhere, 2025 gave Americans ample opportunity to think about crime — and [some surveys](https://news.gallup.com/poll/695519/mood-subdued-crime-unity-concerns-rise.aspx?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) showed public anxiety about it on the rise. Despite data showing overall crime numbers falling, [political rhetoric](https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-trump-portland-oregon-protests-antifa-203826406efb7420911ae756b4331f60?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) often implied it was spiraling upward, and [subway killings](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/us/charlotte-murder-conservatives-crime.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), other random violence and street-level disorder kept many people on edge.

As a general rule, the disconnect between perceptions and reality when it comes to crime trends is complicated and cause for concern. If people form views of crime and criminals from sloppy news stories and social media feeds, or proclamations by agenda-driven lawmakers, poor policy — and the vilification of certain groups of people — can result.

Nowhere is this more evident than with respect to the belief that immigrants are responsible for a wildly disproportionate share of crime and violence in America. Two decades of research — using different samples, different methodologies and different units of analysis ([city-level macrodata](https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-criminol-032317-092026?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [individual-level microdata](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10964-013-0045-z?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) — show that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit less crime than native-born Americans. And despite popular assumptions, that finding does not reflect [under- or overreporting](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-016-9314-9?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of crime among immigrants. A recent [New York Times analysis](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/04/us/ice-arrests-criminal-records-data.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) shows that most immigrants arrested in recent national, statewide and citywide crackdowns (including those in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles) do not have a criminal record here.

This does not mean, of course, that immigrants don't commit crimes or that removing those who are dangerous won't improve community safety. It does mean that the right question for public policy is how to target the violent repeat offenders, secure our borders and deter illegal immigration without causing widespread panic, tearing families apart unnecessarily and creating conflicts between citizens and law enforcement that end fatally, as happened with the Minneapolis shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Failing to do so will further erode public trust in the legitimacy of law enforcement and American government.

## 1\. Homicide likely fell to a historic low.

The violent crime drop underway in the U.S. is not only real, but it is large and extends across geographical boundaries and city sizes. Continuing a trend that started two years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2025 decline includes a staggering [estimated 20% drop in homicide nationwide](https://counciloncj.org/crime-trends-in-u-s-cities-year-end-2025-update/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), with some cities experiencing their lowest number of murders since the 1960s.

These trends are consistent across multiple crime indexes, police data sources and organizations that use a combination of FBI and local agency numbers, including the [Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ)](https://counciloncj.org/crime-trends-in-u-s-cities-mid-year-2025-update/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the [Real-Time Crime Index](https://realtimecrimeindex.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the [NORC Crime Tracker](https://livecrimetracker.norc.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#home).

New York City in particular recorded one of its smallest [yearly murder totals](https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-on-track-for-near-record-low-number-of-homicides-in-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on record. As of Dec. 31, 2025, the city of more than 8 million people had recorded 307 murders, a decrease of 86% from the 2,245 killings [logged in 1990](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/dataviz/new-york-city-homicides-and-homicide-rates-1800-2023) and of 33% since 2020 (when there were 462 murders).

Theories about what's driving the drop and credit-taking claims are abundant, but, at this point, there's scarce evidence to back up any single explanation. We do have some strong suspects, though, as explored in [the latest CCJ report](https://counciloncj.org/crime-trends-in-u-s-cities-year-end-2025-update/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [an expert roundtable](https://counciloncj.org/event-recording-whats-driving-the-crime-decline/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that followed. Chief among them are changes in criminal justice policy and practice (including a combination of more targeted and proactive law enforcement and scaling of community violence intervention programs), advances in crime-fighting technologies (especially the proliferation of integrated surveillance systems) and shifts in society and culture (including declining alcohol consumption and youth spending more time home alone).

We still don't fully understand what powered the great crime drop that began in the 1990s and especially [in the years after the height of the pandemic](https://www.cbsnews.com/video/what-drove-2025-decline-crime-across-us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), so divining what's behind the trends of the last three years is a tall order. But that is all the more reason to double down on rigorous, independent research. Because when it comes to public safety and justice, we need more hard evidence and less guesswork.
### CompStat, Meet SafeStat
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/compstat-safestat-public-safety-nyc-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:24.000Z
New York City is a global exporter of culture and capital ("Seinfeld"! Wall Street!), but in the world of government data nerds, one of its most enduring exports is a management tool that has been adopted across the globe: CompStat. Developed by the NYPD in the 1990s, CompStat was a deceptively simple innovation. It tracked measures of crime at the precinct level, created forums for holding commanders accountable and reinforced a basic management insight: You cannot manage what you do not measure.

The model spread to police departments all over the country and birthed "Stat" programs across federal, state and local governments for everything from pothole repair to child welfare caseloads. At their best, [performance stat programs](https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/performancestat-potential-leadership-strategy-producing-results?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) enabled a relentless focus on outcomes that energized accountability, rapid innovation and a push for results. But three decades later, as New York stands up a new Department of Community Safety, we need a new innovation. The rigor of CompStat needs to be harnessed to a new measure that can tell us more about whether city residents feel safe.

When my team [interviewed mayors](https://govlab.hks.harvard.edu/insight/mayor-to-mayor-police-accountability/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across the country recently, we asked each one: "What is your top priority?" The answer was almost always public safety. Next we asked, "How do you measure it?" Imagine my surprise when mayors said to us, "We don't have a way to measure whether people feel safe. And we need one."

CompStat measures crime reports and police activity. But it does not measure public safety directly. Mayors have dashboards filled with proxies: shootings, burglary reports, arrest rates. These are measures of system activity and system failure. They tell us how busy the police are and how often residents report that specific laws are broken. But none of them answer the fundamental question that mayors — and residents — actually care about: Do people feel safe in their city?

Without a reliable outcome metric, we pour resources into interventions without a feedback loop to tell us if they are working. And policymakers continue to make promises to historically disinvested communities without an objective measure to use to see if their promises have actually been achieved. To move to governing for outcomes, New York needs to invent a new metric — one that measures safety not merely by the absence of crime but by the presence of vibrant community life.

## Safety shows up in how people act

One way of finding out whether people feel safe is to ask them. But to have a performance measure you can really manage toward, it needs to be as inclusive, real-time and easy to gather as possible. While micropolling is gaining ground in some cities, surveys and polls are usually expensive and slow to run, plus have such low response rates that they skew whose voices get heard. Is there a way to represent everyone's experience much more equally without having to continuously ask them to respond to intrusive questions? This feels especially important to me since we've heard from many community members that they are frustrated and fatigued with research and "community engagement" that doesn't lead to tangible change.

What are some other indicators that might give us real insight into what communities experiencing safety actually looks like?

Because they're constantly in touch with residents, mayors possess an instinct for what safety looks like outside of their dashboards. [We asked them](https://govlab.hks.harvard.edu/insight/beyond-crime-statistics/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), "If you were dropped into a strange city with no access to their crime data, how would you know if it was safe?" They answered immediately that they'd look first to the use of public space. They'd want to know: Are women jogging alone after dark? Are children playing in parks? Can they ride their bikes outside in their neighborhood? Are people strolling easily, or do they walk looking over their shoulders?

Crucially, these mayors' instincts are shared by the residents we talk with as well. In St. Paul, Minnesota, we interviewed young people from neighborhoods most impacted by violence. We asked them what they would do if their neighborhood felt safe to them. They said safety meant being able to hang out in a park, play outside or walk without scanning for threats. One 17-year-old participant [told us](https://govlab.hks.harvard.edu/insight/new-measures-of-public-safety/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), "I would love to just be able to go outside without worrying that something will happen to me, when someone else will just do something violent, and yeah, having walks without worrying."

If families in a neighborhood don't let their kids use the local park, that is a data point. If foot traffic on a commercial corridor evaporates at 8 p.m., that is a signal. These behaviors are the "revealed preferences" of public safety.

Measures of revealed preference are how we assess many other areas of urban policy. We measure the success of a transit system by ridership, not by asking people if they like the bus. We measure the vitality of a housing market by demand. We should measure public safety by the degree to which residents trust their environment enough to inhabit it.

There may be drawbacks to using perceptions of safety as a metric. What if feelings of safety are based on inaccurate perceptions of crime, for example? Survey data for the past few decades [show an ongoing gap](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) between the perceptions of crime and actual measured crime rates (though people tend to believe that crime increases are worse nationally than locally). Many city leaders right now are celebrating violent crime rates dropping to historic lows in their cities but may not see those drops leading to historic improvements in perceptions of safety (though overall perceptions may have [improved somewhat](https://news.gallup.com/poll/697124/crime-seen-less-serious-second-straight-year.aspx?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 2025). Mayors we talked with were frustrated with resident perceptions of safety that they felt were based not on personal observations but on alarmist media, true crime shows or social media and neighborhood apps that drive engagement by amplifying a sense of vulnerability to crime.

However, the divergence between measurements of crime data and resident perceptions underlines the importance of finding a way to better understand how residents are experiencing the city. Reducing crime does not necessarily increase resident sense of safety. One reason is that many factors outside of crime may influence perceptions of safety. One mayor told us that his residents told him that one of the major factors driving their sense of public safety was the number of discarded needles in public areas. Another mentioned community members asking for help from the city with blighted lots that made the neighborhoods feel more dangerous. Many of the factors that mayors and residents described as influencing their sense of safety (the presence of individuals experiencing severe mental illness, blight, unlit walking paths etc.) sit outside the purview of law enforcement. A metric that draws on the behavior of residents to answer the question "Do people in this community feel safe to use public space here?" would allow a mayor to capture much more than crime stats alone will show.

## Designing the metric

New York has a unique opportunity to operationalize this insight. The incoming administration and the new Department of Community Safety should test a "Felt Safety Index" based on observable behavioral data. Call it SafeStat.

The ultimate goal would be to build a [composite index of stable indicators](https://govlab.hks.harvard.edu/insight/beyond-crime-statistics/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that track the use of public space. This might include anonymized, aggregated cellphone location data to track foot traffic patterns in parks and commercial corridors; data on playground usage; or counts of pedestrian density at key times of day. Measures that show whether residents feel safe enough to walk alone to a bodega after dark or to let their kids play outside after school.

This approach would move us from focusing lagging indicators (crime reports) to leading indicators (community vitality). The City would need to validate these measures against self-reported senses of safety and test their robustness to other inputs (weather, holidays). But if we could create reliable measures that helped us tell whether people were acting as though they felt safe, this new form of CompStat (SafeStat?) could unlock accountability and innovation in areas that have long been overlooked. If the City deploys a team of credible messengers or installs new lighting in a neighborhood, a behavioral metric would allow us to see — in near real time — if residents vote with their feet and change their behavior in those spaces. And if an area of the city reads as unsafe on SafeStat, leaders and community members would have an accountability tool that would allow them to keep pushing until they saw meaningful change.

In a [recent interview](https://after-hours-with-jamie-rubin-a-vital-city-audio-project.simplecast.com/episodes/reducing-crime-by-improving-neighborhoods?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Elizabeth Glazer described the [Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety](https://map.cityofnewyork.us/neighborhood-stat/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), an initiative of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice that brought together law enforcement, a wide set of City agencies and community members to codesign approaches to improving public safety. Glazer said the central question of MAP was "What's important to neighborhoods? What's actually driving their sense of safety, or not? And what can you actually do about it?" Glazer said, "The idea of MAP was there are so many things that compose safety, and one crucial piece of it is the experience of people living in neighborhoods. They should be not just the subjects of patrol, but should themselves be the people who are saying, 'Look: Here are some ideas that we need to push forward in order to be safe.'" A SafeStat metric that showed whether residents felt their community was safer could allow for the structured measurement and accountability that could allow deep community engagement programs like MAP to direct more City funds to resident-centered solutions generation and testing.

## Governance and trust

Is it as simple as creating the tool and deploying it? Of course not. The power to measure behavior is also the power to surveil, which makes the governance of this data an important design question. Rather than being held by the NYPD or City Hall, this data could be held in a **Community Data Trust**. The City could help a community or neighborhood designate a third party nonprofit entity to hold the data gathered from the community. Community members could approve a charter that would govern the mission of the trust and how to gather, store and share the data. They could elect trustees with a fiduciary duty to oversee the use of the data. The Community Data Trust could then share the data back with the City to contribute to efforts to improve public safety within the community, but with greater transparency and trust from community members. Taking the data out of the hands of the government itself would allow residents to say to the City: "Policing actions have gone up, but our data show that seniors are still too afraid to walk to the grocery store. This intervention isn't working — we need to try something new."

## The next export

Imagine a mayor's dashboard that displays not just the count of tragedies, but a trend line of community confidence.

If it flatlines despite a surge in police overtime, we know to pivot. Resources would finally flow toward outcomes, rewarding the organizations and leaders that actually change the way people live. New York invented CompStat, changing the way the world polices. It is time for New York to invent what comes next: a system that holds government accountable not just for controlling crime, but for cultivating the freedom to live without fear.
### The Invisible Thread That Connects Cases of Excessive Force and Low Clearance Rates
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/ice-impunity-police-law-enforcement-accountability/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:25.000Z
Accountability is as American as apple pie. Indeed, some [90% of Americans](https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/01/CAP-Public-Safety-Polling-November-2023.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) support doing more to catch a greater percentage of people who commit crimes. By the same token, the explosive reaction to the shootings of [Renée Nicole Good](https://abcnews.go.com/US/minneapolis-ice-shooting-minute-minute-timeline-renee-nicole/story?id=129021809&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Alex Pretti](https://www.wsj.com/us-news/videos-contradict-u-s-account-of-minneapolis-shooting-by-federal-agents-fbe1e488?gaa%5Fat=eafs&gaa%5Fn=AWEtsqdl3S55ueBbya-s8kw5blAX%5FxA-11rcCKAdW54yLx9h3yHDBmg9plzdns-cE4Q%3D&gaa%5Fts=6977eb6b&gaa%5Fsig=YgF1tblsDjo6cmtIXQRq%5F83WRmNNp7fo6f4500-Eko3DsuN1pAYjpY7bKryl2jdH%5Fdf7ClmH7diWLGoas8GfaQ%3D%3D&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) demonstrates that the public also demands accountability for those with a badge.

Law enforcement is a core government function, but officers are subject to human nature just like the rest of us. When a criminal or an officer believes there will be no serious consequences for egregious conduct, the predictable result is more egregious conduct and more tragedy. Yet impunity largely persists, whether it's for the [90% of nonfatal shootings](https://download.ssrn.com/2026/1/20/6062074.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline&X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEFMaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJIMEYCIQCdwVALYM7zK%2FJ5H6S1wXIbFzwqwh2J8%2B46c84SCW9rkAIhAJNDh%2FHasZZjg8GMgLay79VHrfpsCTlTbWZ3fPCiZcitKr4FCBwQBBoMMzA4NDc1MzAxMjU3IgxMUC0ef4p8hINT%2B38qmwUB9YGWKVivjcfBHUx5Vflci%2BVf7RF9BGLJEi4zbz%2BC8DVRvRK09bWyQozmPRAQrRmvgBiENzHAPRMS817d9FiVvbak1kk7BMlgRbg9%2FMiMc87bUDLSPipWbTeov4qfsdC07IhG3iYf%2BzPmen512v2O6%2BLvMFmOfS8tngxSYD5QqnzdvINH%2BuwWErxFQR6RBIYDo%2FNDvMeK03awgJU9YPDgh8X4y2plIuJ6ccGFe%2FlPyEbarEeDEZxLOKnn1L%2FnGEKStBRVhJEs22NpHLSN3CMBdWddZ49nBkBBMp3LQnWZbn5ZCPm8FsslaboR5Gfapc8RqABHqUmjMSPFUHD7%2Fmyv8FZQ9oaZVLmyowlRjcPqZZdbFXV2%2F9xICGqlToX3ePd5GhPPfgoJAdMUSrVEUPVlIbSw6yzkR49iROK6%2FbI2azvIVXvceRq6SIkaJOupMy7nCNQ3FdYZyJDPsEAREu2lxEa2Qgai%2BAeNf2Sb%2BIIotmPUOu9HoX1bqT6jqoOBSo6mRmflgIA2LD5AXGbv4QgANB1%2BoRtYD4UjuUMlLOd9YV2FHYISb8kswSmcEQQv4AhNQQ2Sdie0idliyBQuPOZ1oy7exgYLx4eJLljp5%2FjFIrWc4ZvAFyKMy2VXeWBheQ5TCBg3xj0h8Y6ymlnxHrrNEXHkIFRaywEvh9TQmnspJY2k%2FQnTkJuIGLmC%2FuiBp5s3Vcp6%2Bexs3eSE5qe2nFZPhww66lUZ00PjqZkCaXkq%2BvhZlnd%2FUATdAskGfNlu0SWZQ1G7isOpJCRhgD6YFjI3zN%2BvhgStStFtAdj5uffkMqaKEX4om5yOmKFLXhV3EkswwGHIluiQLLO0G5fuQATmFMxDVkrabT3RaVoDf9DgekbZ1sYPPzIG9jlRMLqvjswGOrABFuovA6Eq8%2FB0oiZk0KpL3L82qCXfanEArZ4zwJ2wadTevwFS2cn9b1bhXP3kMe8LBiJ5s3192xj5lLSyJaYRCVAXyWOyPIgNKHVJqK0GFQlb67qfEhKtE0SMk6g0XUiiiAgfeTf4SBqjStZqILG7IS%2Bjqb30zi5TDuFmL%2FVJR5nwUlq13%2F%2BE%2B9nX9Z9eANDjRHUq8plBbxy8ouheNVJWoHo5Z%2FYRG3MqJFzJ8V2SvWI%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20260204T194137Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAUPUUPRWETUYAKWGD%2F20260204%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4%5Frequest&X-Amz-Signature=d378891fc53ab733ef58ad4f70d131c0894bbc6051d92a0f2e25a2eb4c6da66e&abstractId=6062074&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that continue to go unsolved or for what appears to be a growing number of [excessive force cases involving federal immigration agents](https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2026/0203/homeland-security-excessive-force-ice-immigration?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=In%20more%20than%20a%20dozen,in%20the%20face%20and%20head.).

Impunity is a political loser and a policy nightmare, but in different contexts it's embraced by the most extreme elements of the right and left. One side insists that those with a badge can do no wrong; the other too often [underestimates the role of police visibility](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359178924001010?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the right place and at the right time in deterring and solving crime.

But both positions miss the mark**.** Neither law enforcement officers nor street criminals can be unleashed to violate the law without consequence. Either scenario invites impunity, eroding the social compact through which we form and fund government to protect us.

Of course, when comparing street crime with abuses by law enforcement, the causes of impunity are largely different. In the former case, police are too often unable to identify and arrest the culprit. In the latter, as we're seeing with the two Minneapolis shootings, investigations often suffer from a lack of will and independence. But if we keep accountability as our north star in both contexts, we can do better.

A related challenge is low [clearance rates](https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/12/policing-crime-public-safety/680854/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a measure of the share of reported crimes that are solved. In 2024, 35% of homicides [went unsolved by the Minneapolis Police Department](https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/10/10/st-paul-solved-more-crimes-had-drastically-fewer-homicides-in-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as did some 77% of non-fatal shootings. While [many other cities](https://www.murderdata.org/p/blog-page.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) had a worse record, these figures mean that many perpetrators were left free to commit additional offenses. When criminals believe they won't be identified, arrested and prosecuted, they have little reason to refrain from violent acts.

We need a strategic approach to end that impunity. [Research](https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/12/policing-crime-public-safety/680854/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) suggests there are real crime-reduction dividends to focusing more on increasing clearance rates than on the severity of punishment. A [review](https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by the National Institute of Justice finds that the likelihood of being caught has a stronger preventive effect than harsher penalties. Likewise, economists analyzing changes in arrest probabilities [have found](https://www.nber.org/papers/w28523?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that increases in the risk of apprehension are associated with measurable reductions in violent crime.

This means departments across the country should invest aggressively in detectives, forensic labs and investigative technologies that improve the prospects of solving violent crimes. A city that solves a greater share of its murders, shootings and armed robberies sends a clear and tangible message: Violence will not go unpunished.

States are increasingly recognizing that they have a role as well. In their 2026 legislative sessions, [Pennsylvania](https://www.palegis.us/legislation/bills/2025/hb1511?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Utah](https://legiscan.com/UT/bill/HB0137/2026?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are looking to enact grant programs that boost crime-solving capacity at the local level, especially in under-resourced rural areas. [Texas](https://rightoncrime.com/texas-finally-has-a-plan-to-solve-more-crimes-now-it-must-be-funded-%EF%BF%BC/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Missouri](https://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=650.040&bid=57651&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) took this step last year, although Texas [still needs to fund](https://www.statesman.com/opinion/columns/your-voice/article/texas-finally-plan-solve-crimes-now-funded-21219123.php?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) its grant program.

The cooperation of the community also plays a role in the quest to boost clearance rates. [Research](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235225000522?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) indicates that too often, victims and witnesses hesitate to come forward because they don't trust police, don't think police can protect them from those they are "snitching" on or believe nothing will change even if they do. This illustrates the value of policing strategies that [build relationships](https://www.journalcswb.ca/index.php/cswb/article/view/244/736?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with community members, as well as [procedural justice training](https://policing.counciloncj.org/assessing-the-evidence/vi-procedural-justice-training?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that ensures officers treat those they encounter with dignity.

Just as we must hold a greater percentage of offenders accountable for their actions, we must shine the lens of accountability on excessive force used by the very agents sworn to protect our lives and liberties. The Minneapolis shootings and their aftermath are a powerful case in point. The [Good](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-agent-resigns-investigation-shooting-renee-good-minneapolis-source-rcna255702?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Pretti](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/us/pretti-minneapolis-shooting-dhs-investigation.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) cases are not being independently investigated, as federal authorities [boxed out](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/us/federal-exclude-minnesota-shooting-investigations.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) state investigators. [One analysis](https://www.propublica.org/article/why-local-state-police-rarely-investigate-ice-cbp-fbi?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that in 6 of 12 shootings by federal immigration officers since September, there has been no investigation by local police.

Indeed, perhaps because ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents often [lack the same training and protocols](https://www.npr.org/2026/01/09/nx-s1-5671120/homeland-security-expert-talks-about-ices-truncated-training-after-hiring-blitz?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as officers in local police departments, their excesses risk surrendering recent [gains in public trust](https://news.gallup.com/poll/647303/confidence-institutions-mostly-flat-police.aspx?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in police. Gallup found that 51% of Americans in 2024 had confidence in police compared with 43% in 2023\. Though it is challenging to pinpoint the reasons for this uptick, many states, cities and law enforcement agencies embraced transparency accountability measures after the murder of George Floyd. Now, [many police chiefs](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/us/its-all-just-going-down-the-toilet-police-chiefs-fume-at-ice-tactics.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text='It's%20All%20Just%20Going%20Down%20the%20Toilet':,setting%20back%20efforts%20to%20improve%20public%20trust.) are rightly worried that their hard-earned gains could be eroded insofar as undocumented immigrants and people of color are [less likely to report crime](https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/03/911-calls-midway-blitz-little-village/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the [reality or perception of local police collaboration with ICE and CBP](https://policingequity.org/when-law-enforcement-meets-ice-how-a-loss-of-local-autonomy-puts-public-safety-at-risk/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

When it comes to earning public confidence, there is no substitute for holding officers of all types accountable, but how do we do it? We at the Council on Criminal Justice have provided a [blueprint](https://counciloncj.org/task-force-on-policing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In addition to requiring [independent investigations](https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-128/enhancing-accountability-and-trust-with-independent-investigations-of-police-lethal-force/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of officer-involved shootings, the [national database of officers decertified](https://policing.counciloncj.org/assessing-the-evidence/ix-decertification?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for proven misconduct should be revived. This ensures that the [small percentage of officers](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/police-misconduct-peer-effects/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) who chronically abuse their authority cannot simply obtain work at another department that is unaware of their past.

We must also make better use of body-worn cameras. Though [80%](https://www.rstreet.org/research/the-past-present-and-future-of-police-body-cameras/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of law enforcement agencies regularly use the devices, [fewer than a quarter](https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/01/24/ice-bodycams-cameras-shootings-immigration/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=The%20latest%20figures%2C%20which%20were%20compiled%20in,many%20of%20those%20cameras%20are%20in%20use.) of ICE and CBP agents wear body cameras. Even so, the policing task force found that they [are often inactive and that the public faces excessive barriers](https://policing.counciloncj.org/assessing-the-evidence/x-body-worn-cameras?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to obtaining footage.

Another critical step is to [rein in broad qualified immunity](https://policing.counciloncj.org/assessing-the-evidence/iv-effectiveness-of-police-training?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that shields officers from consequences when constitutional rights are violated. Such immunity makes it [almost impossible](https://reason.com/2026/01/27/the-feds-who-killed-alex-pretti-are-heavily-shielded-from-being-sued-blame-the-supreme-court-for-that/?utm%5Fcampaign=reason%5Fbrand&utm%5Fcontent=&utm%5Fmedium=social%5Freason%5Fnon%5Fpaid&utm%5Fsource=twitter&utm%5Fterm=) to successfully sue the officers who shot Petti, even if the evidence demonstrates their conduct was objectively unreasonable. This is primarily because the plaintiff must prove the conduct was [clearly established](https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/Schwartz%5FQualifiedImmunity%5F88UCLR605.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as unlawful by a published court opinion in that jurisdiction involving almost the exact same fact pattern. In 2020, Colorado took a [balanced approach](https://jlsp.law.columbia.edu/2024/04/17/searching-for-judges-who-hear-analyzing-the-effects-of-colorados-abolition-of-qualified-immunity-on-civil-rights-litigation/?cn-reloaded=1&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by removing this requirement and at the same time capping the amount any officer would pay out at $25,000 in the absence of criminal intent. Though police agencies across the nation indemnify officers in [more than 99% of cases](https://www.generalservices.state.nm.us/wp-content/uploads/9%5F18%5F20%5FNYULawReview-89-3-Schwartz.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), reforming qualified immunity provides a financial disincentive through indemnification and risk-based insurance rates to hire and retain officers with a chronic history of abuses and settlements.

Confronting impunity on both sides of the badge brings us closer to a justice system that protects the safety of every American while also earning their trust.
### The State of Crime in New York City: 2025 and Beyond
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/crime-in-new-york-city-trends-statistics/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:27.000Z
### The big picture

New York City made progress on public safety in 2025\. Shootings and murders fell to historic lows, and most major crime categories declined compared to the year prior. These improvements reflect gains in the city's most serious forms of violence.

But it is not good news across the board. New York City has not returned to its 2019 prepandemic levels for most crimes, and its recovery has been slower than that of many peer cities. In two areas in particular, things are not so rosy. Felony assaults increased for the sixth year in a row, now reaching a level not seen since 1997\. This is a significant problem, as this is a serious and high-volume offense that outnumbers murders by 97 to 1\. And after a promising start to 2025, major crime rose in the final months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, creating worries that the positive trends that marked the earliest part of Jessica Tisch's term as commissioner may not be sustained.

There is another issue also that swims against the general narrative of "crime is falling" and may be the reason why many New Yorkers feel uneasy. When we look at *all* reported offenses, not just the seven major crimes, these are about 25% above pre-pandemic levels and at a level not seen since at least 2006, when these crimes were more consistently tracked. These crimes — harassment and misdemeanor assault, among others — are far more numerous than major crimes (579,549 vs. 121,756). And they are more visible, more felt in everyday life because unlike murder, which is highly concentrated in geography and relatively rare, these are citywide, above and below ground. They consist of the punch, the shove and the shout on the street and the subway, and are daily signals of insecurity.

Understanding the complex crime picture beyond the well-deserved victory laps around murders and shootings will be crucial for Mayor Zohran Mamdani if he is to successfully translate campaign promises into pragmatic policies, including the planned establishment of a Department of Community Safety. This report first summarizes what happened in 2025, then examines the key nuances beneath headline declines, and finally outlines the trends to watch in the coming years.

## 2025: safer than 2024, but not yet recovered from pandemic highs

In 2025, New York City experienced modest declines in major crime compared to 2024\. Totals in most of these categories fell compared to 2024, continuing a downward trend from the pandemic peak.

However, overall major crime in 2025 remained substantially higher than it was in 2019, the last full year before COVID destabilized communities and New York City, like most U.S. cities, experienced a surge in violent crime from which it is still recovering.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26985192?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ip1jiOLje6zHTAK0oBFdXOaXmzMDhonoIeaLU06Hb5g/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Looking back over the past 30 years, the steep drop in crime seems worth the moniker of "New York miracle." It is not just that the sheer number of crimes committed has declined, but also that the kinds of crimes New Yorkers suffer most often have changed. This horserace-style chart is like watching a movie of New York history as, for example, car thefts — once so common that ["Nothing in Car" signs and Bensi boxes](https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/16/automobiles/a-sign-of-the-times-no-more-signs.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) marked the culture of 1990s New York — drop from first to fourth place while felony assault climbs from fifth place to become the second most common major offense.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27572522?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X4y1-elHc1Evd5cstx%5FbkD1eSXK0CYTSXn%5FulNnRyyk/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Shootings and murders fell to historic lows**

Some crimes have fallen below prepandemic lows. Shootings are at their lowest level since consistent records began in 1993, while murders are lower than they've been in every year since the 1950s, except for 2017 and 2018\. The city also experienced more shooting- and murder-free days in 2025 than in any year since 2019\. This is another, and perhaps more intuitively understandable, way to measure safety, again reflecting how much lethal violence has declined in New York City.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26769061?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WMYdpqVSgLV%5FOaUPOzOOPVvDgxuvqgplrV3-2BVzp1o/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26768975?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BtooeA6rywbKxIwk-jY05ttSCjytHWyOMpzcMloUZFI/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**An asterisk: New York is recovering more slowly than other big cities**

Despite low homicide levels, New York City's reduction in this category since the prepandemic period has been modest compared to other large cities and the nation overall.

Since 2019, New York City has experienced a roughly 3.1% reduction in murders — less than a third of the national decline and smaller than nearly all other large cities. In absolute terms, New York remains safer than most large cities. In relative terms, however, its recovery has lagged.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26942014?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zAcYFg%5F261aV2qHS6yiCFMq1itrjEBTTFtd7E%5FjtCh0/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26955266?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1%5FSNLylcCUZO1o8r0WdKlxajvNOKAwLvkOd0oK%5FYb%5FII/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Beyond murders and shootings, most other crimes, especially assaults, remain above prepandemic levels**

Despite the good news on shootings and murders and significant declines in most crime categories between 2024 and 2025, most major crime categories remain above their 2019 levels.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26966401?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tVECxKo7uTfDP97BkpHmhMDYFUkASgm88oSra-TZMDQ/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

It is also notable that **crime declines were not uniform throughout the year**. The largest reductions compared to the same period in 2024 occurred in January and February. By contrast, November and December 2025 recorded higher crime levels than in 2024, raising questions about whether the downward trend will continue into 2026, beyond the cold-weather months when crime traditionally declines as people stay indoors.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27513317?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/151tRULQAFsV0lnhPmZz2FN06r%5FKjfwyyfiEMPOJjrIc/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Perhaps the city's single most troubling trend is that** [**felony assaults**](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/120.05?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — defined as assaults that intentionally cause serious physical injury, involve use of a weapon or dangerous instrument, or victimize a protected worker or individual — have been a persistent and growing problem in the city and are the highest they have been since 1997\. This is a significant problem not only because the crime is fearsome, but because its overall numbers are high: Felony assaults outnumber murders 97 to 1 (29,841 vs. 309). Total felony assault counts have risen 84% since 2008, when they were at their lowest level, 44% since 2019 and 1.3% between 2024 and 2025.

Misdemeanor assaults, defined as those that intentionally cause physical injury without use of a dangerous weapon, also rose year after year from 2020 through 2024\. They declined by 3.3% in 2025 — the first drop since the pandemic period began.

Total assaults, both felony and misdemeanor, remained 23.2% higher in 2025 than they were in 2019.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27695732?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17er7EojFqoSNG4fZlrZYQDK0xZtkVa7Tkbi%5FzeDeWjw/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Domestic violence remains a central and often under-recognized driver of serious crime.** In 2025, 39% of felony assaults were classified as domestic violence, a share consistent with recent years. And domestic incidents — those involving members of the same family or household, including spouses, intimate partners, parents and children — also accounted for a persistently high share of murders and rapes. Because these offenses typically occur behind closed doors, they are less responsive to traditional street-level enforcement and instead require sustained coordination across policing, social services and the courts.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26984895?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Kgoa2izMV1zQukxH1ZS1faWN-Nk0L912hE0eTPoP9wY/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**The total volume of crimes experienced by New Yorkers is up 25%.** While official record-keeping in New York City and across the country focuses on the seven major crimes (and sometimes shootings) we have outlined above, it is often the increasing incidence of crime, even if termed "minor," that affects the quality of daily life of New Yorkers. The top 10 crimes by volume, many of them considered "less serious" crimes, account for more than three-quarters of all reported crime. Misdemeanor assaults outnumber shootings 91 to 1\. Petit larcenies, which refer to small thefts of under $1000, outnumber shootings 158 to 1.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27514899?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27514132?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tX8KSBUndx2TkMolkH9S5t795dcETVWzNp3LqRhw3SM/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

An increase in the count of a given crime does not necessarily mean that the city is less safe. **Some counts are highly sensitive to policing strategies**; for instance, if police decide to escalate or dial back on fare-beating or drug-possession enforcement, the counts for those crimes will surge even though the incidence of the offense may not have changed much from year to year. To account, roughly, for this phenomenon — so crime fluctuations are not skewed by changes in police enforcement — we have isolated [crime counts that rely on victim and witness reports](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xkCVZN6sQr44CE9t6JDl8H%5FApobnYv%5FxvkhtXAJzeTg/edit?gid=0&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#gid=0) from others.

Even with this adjustment, victim- or witness-reported crimes remain 21% above prepandemic levels and higher than any year since at least 2006, indicating that New Yorkers' unease on the streets reflects real conditions rather than perception alone.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27517413?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nKldKB3EW-qQ0%5Fx-b6p626PCF-2aGAh6%5F4WKhW%5FNPCI/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**What about the subways?**

Crime on platforms and trains is of outsized concern for New Yorkers because the subway is New York City's mobile public square, the place where millions of people come together on a daily basis. Adding to anxiety is that trains are enclosed spaces where people can't easily remove themselves from dangerous situations. As a result, even though crime is a very rare occurrence on the subway, incidents — whether rare horrific ones or more common quality-of-life problems — reverberate through the city, provoking concern.

In 2025, the issue was a political football as well, as federal officials used it [in a pretextual way to threaten funds to the City](https://abcnews.com/US/judge-blocks-trump-administration-withholding-counterterrorism-grant-new/story?id=126593842&ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27637936?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1%5FSvgaogh%5FK4ptuEUtwB%5F0PNbAEWaO3YWak1vCNm08gA/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

By some measures, crime is getting lower, even touted by the governor as the ["lowest levels in a generation" in 2025](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/safer-subways-governor-hochul-announces-subway-crime-track-reach-lowest-levels-generation-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Measuring based on total crime counts, that is true (ignoring the peak of the pandemic, when crime counts were for a brief period extremely low because ridership hit unprecedented lows). By another measure, crime underground is not at record lows. Once ridership is taken into account, the rate of major crime per ride remains approximately 13.4% higher than prepandemic levels.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26956155?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oAhXBDGQXLlJFmBjDUftvBhIUcA%5FOfRQxut6zt0JHG8/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27518027?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1il6O1D409yvVOU0igD%5FcgHPUOo4nBOXbNr8HhorPTHk/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27607918?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1u2MKZOE6Ee6A-VqZb7%5FiU7CNqoey9zraRqpPWsqxr0k/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Total subway crime counts are highly sensitive to police enforcement. Shifts in police presence and intensified fare-evasion enforcement can raise overall counts without a comparable increase in actual victimization. For example, in 2025, there were 34,559 total crimes on the subway, of which 13,725 were related to fare evasion.

Focusing on victim- or witness-reported crimes shows a pattern similar to major subway crimes: Total counts have declined since the pandemic, but the per-ride rate remains 21% higher than in 2019.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/story/3584921?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## What to watch for under a new administration

**Public safety, trust and accountability.** The Mamdani administration took office on Jan. 1, promising a new approach to public safety policy — one that relies [less on police enforcement and more on civilian interventions](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a7ejjSZWWIAcxfcWnkYaqvnjihTb0LAOQkj8g10-npg/edit?tab=t.0&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#heading=h.2gazcsgmxkub). There are some glaring challenges, as we have noted: the rising number of assaults; the overall volume of crimes, even as murders and shootings decline; the stubborn problem of domestic violence. Here, we note a few other issues that require attention from the potential threat posed by federal enforcement, to some fundamental issues in the functioning of the justice system, including the decades-long spiraling violence in the jails.

**Increasing federal immigration enforcement in New York City**

No description of the public safety and law enforcement landscape in New York City would be complete without a mention of federal immigration enforcement, which has ratcheted up across America. Nationwide, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents are arresting far more individuals suspected of immigration violations — usually a civil, not a criminal offense — in the interior than under previous administrations. The majority of these individuals are not suspected of any criminal activity, but enforcement itself has become a significant source of fear among many immigrant New Yorkers.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27696978?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1b8EovM%5FAUDRpmgRPMKmOyYpRe-RG0QqdlxMRXbke8p8/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

We note this even though it is not an issue that New York City or New York State controls, because it can affect the life of the city and the functioning of its justice system. We have seen elsewhere that a sudden influx of ICE and/or the National Guard affects the lives of residents, whether documented or not; can damage the economy as people are afraid to go out; and can harm civic life as residents fear taking their children to school and using public parks. The conduct of ICE agents — including [brutality complaints](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/01/27/minnesota-ice-violence-lawsuits?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [a documented failure to abide by basic constitutional guarantees](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-appointed-judge-rules-ice-025732180.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — is destructive by itself, but also has an effect on local law enforcement and its own ability to build a relationship of trust with New Yorkers.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27681605?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TE0xqkTA2PqHk4NUKf7oChO%5FYJ6O5sSj0L%5FFkrVmNkc/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Hate crimes** remain a persistent issue in New York City, with 68% more reported hate crimes than there were in 2017\. Jewish New Yorkers have accounted for a majority of victims in recent years. These offenses affect the daily life of all New Yorkers and determine whether they are at ease in the city or fear attack.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26966966?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17FAjE-zjOAXYR9vXNn6VKPeHlsDWgsAP90JZmUo8Xrw/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

How police interact with the public affects their ability to address crime. Here we look at stops and frisks, complaints against officers and clearance rates, a measure of the number of cases being solved and thus, directly and indirectly, a measure of the confidence that New Yorkers have in the police's ability to help them.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27591529?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YUHE2Qfe6MU8L7avBzglpB7HmksIYQHo4o1LN8M8iX0/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

The number of misconduct allegations against police officers more than doubled during the administration of Mayor Eric Adams. Abuse-of-authority allegations constitute the majority of complaints and account for much of the recent increase in total allegations. These cases generally involve claims of improper stops, searches, questioning or arrests. Some of the post-2021 rise may reflect a structural change in oversight, as beginning in 2022, the Civilian Complaint Review Board gained authority to open investigations without a civilian complainant, which can increase case volume independent of underlying misconduct.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/22163700?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TVWZNiVmHGlO8otIcJu%5F52QDiOno7jx3m%5F3tl0TzAME/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

While Mamdani has said he does not support defunding the NYPD and will maintain current police staffing levels, his past criticism of the department and focus on alternative models have generated public interest in how policing strategies and tactics will evolve going forward. How police training, accountability and community relations change under new leadership will shape not only enforcement outcomes but also public trust in the criminal justice system.

**Justice system operations**

The role of prosecutors, defenders, courts and incarceration are also important when creating a strategy to reduce crime. While there are many parts of the criminal justice system, two metrics are particularly worth monitoring because they reflect the health — or lack of health — of the larger system: clearance rates and dismissal rates.

A clearance rate is the proportion of cases the police solve, measured as a percentage of the number of crimes. The police define clearances as the percent of cases that result in an arrest (meaning that a judge or grand jury has determined there is probable cause that the person has committed a crime) or that the department "exceptionally" clears, for example, in the case of a person against whom evidence was sufficient to charge, but the person has died. Because solving a case requires evidence, and more often than not the evidence is in the form of a witness coming forward, clearance rates are a good marker of the confidence of New Yorkers in the department.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27590425?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1npyT13gAGe6Usozl2wbAiRwQ4urGhR0DjIdZNbmVVJU/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27628953?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XfDnoJ8z7sfHlLq4d7cytEFWuKr2TuYIr2pIZ%5FOSdY8/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

How a case proceeds through the system can be a canary in the mine for where there are problems, just as clearance rates can be a signal of New Yorkers' willingness to cooperate with police. Dismissal rates can be a marker of different problems at different points. In New York City, the dismissal rates are very high overall and contrast with dismissal rates in the rest of the state, showing a troubling variation in the administration of justice and potentially undermining confidence in the system.

At arraignment — the first appearance of a person before a judge after arrest — approximately 20% of cases do not proceed to the next stage (indictment). Of that 20%, a remarkable 52% are dismissed, giving new meaning to the notion that "the process is the punishment." For the 80% that do make it past arraignment, an astonishing 75% are dismissed. Looking further into the reasons for dismissal, at least two seem that they could be remedied: dismissal for speedy trial reasons or for a legally insufficient instrument, meaning that the evidence did not support the charge.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27682211?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1T8e2a8T0ooHg1ZzxPM3OIIdsgOdtSNVWxsirNXEdLTs/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27196814?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17C7guK1-iJsyrUfP-AHvA42GMdleyyKDVrcAq3Xb%5FtI/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27196283?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nj3ZY0VDTmOx-OVgavyHxRMIJtSYMxKLZsMFsJgezCM/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Jails**

The city's jails have a long and brutal history of violence and mismanagement. In 2015, following a suit by the U.S. Department of Justice, the city agreed to a consent decree in Nunez v. City of New York that put the jails under a judicially supervised monitor. The aim of the consent decree was to reduce the unconstitutional levels of violence. Since 2015, [violence has soared](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-state-of-new-york-citys-jails-year-end-2024) [well above the levels considered unconstitutional in 2015](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/conditions-inside-the-citys-jails-continue-to-be-violent-a-data-story).

In the face of this abject failure, the court took a highly unusual step of appointing a [receiver](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/can-a-receiver-bring-enduring-change-for-the-better), called a "remediation manager" here, who has broad executive power, beyond any commissioner, to remedy the wrongs.

As this federal official, now named, gets situated and his working relationship with the city's new correction commissioner is defined, the city must address violence on Rikers Island, including use of force by correction officers, deaths, stabbings and slashings and the average length of stay of those incarcerated there.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/story/3578021?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27605793?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RfRMPFihPaezVAjLr6eTM1NFjzm2nkfkc4ithVV8EEQ/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27605819?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ErEvxrjlXhZCuDvm4VGLhaiNnccA9XZb6jZV9K%5FLJwA/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27647243?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Egh0fYIsamqDcQw5veY07B3n0Ym-gyqkTtsg9dycHI4/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27647329?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1%5FsQSORnY7yYe-3AHWqppJRxQ%5FbojhUFDlIx0s8hXRnQ/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)
### New York City’s Crime Puzzle
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-york-city-gun-violence-down-major-crime-high/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:19.000Z
History, polls and comparative data show that New York City has more major crime than it should. Gun and lethal violence are down, but overall major crime is too high. That has been the story of New York's major crime in 2025 and for the last four years. We need to properly diagnose the problems of the present to adjust policy for the future.

## Where things stand

Historical perspective is essential. In the 1950s, New York City's major crime fluctuated between 1,800 and 2,000 index crimes per 100,000 residents. Crime began to rise in the 1960s, peaking at around 10,000 crimes per 100,000 in the early 1980s and again from 1988 to 1990.

Over the next three decades, crime declined, making New York the safest big city in the United States. From 2016 to 2019, index crime reached lows not seen since the 1950s. New York City had a crime rate of 1,987 index crimes per 100,000 residents in 2017; 2,043 in 2018; and 2,030 in 2019.

(Unless otherwise noted, major crime or crime refers here to the federal definition of [seven index crimes](https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/glossary.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). They include murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, larceny/theft and motor vehicle theft.)

Crime then increased during the Adams administration (between 2022 and 2025) to levels not seen since the first year of Mayor Bloomberg's term in 2002, reaching approximately 3,000 index crimes per 100,000 residents (or nearly 250,000 index crimes per year). Crime decreased by 3% from 2024 to 2025 — but it remained around 45% above the 2017 level.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27610975?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TwSSjumLDRDi8SSjkLkvElMtA8Jf9HMeLx0M%5FNMA3%5F8/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Public opinion surveys also show that people think crime is too high. In September 2025, the [New York Times/Siena Poll](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/09/09/polls/nyc-mayor-poll-likely-voters.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that crime ranked as the most important issue for the largest share of likely voters in the 2025 mayoral election (27%), surpassing the cost of living (26%) and housing/rent prices (19%). [That same month](https://sri.siena.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/SNY-September-2025-Poll-Release-9-16-25-FINAL.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), only [25% of registered voters](https://sri.siena.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/SNY0925-Crosstabs-2.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) thought crime in New York City had "gotten better" over the last year.

Finally, the city's trend dynamics differ markedly from those of the rest of the state and the nation. In the United States, index crime was down 8% in 2024 and another 10% in preliminary 2025 data, to its lowest level since 1960\. Index crime in 2025 is estimated to be 25% lower than in 2019\. Index crimes in upstate New York were down 7% in 2024, and a double-digit decrease is estimated for 2025, resulting in the lowest crime levels in six decades.

So while New York City remains one of the safest big cities in the United States, there is no reason to celebrate current crime rates based on the three criteria discussed above.

As I see it, there are three burning questions about crime in New York City in 2025:

1. Why were gun and lethal violence totals down in 2025, but not major crime overall?
2. Why was major crime down elsewhere in 2025 but not in New York City?
3. How can we return the city's crime rate in 2026 to the levels of 2016-2019 and reduce crime by 70,000-80,000 crimes?

This assessment offers preliminary answers to these questions and outlines a road map for areas that need immediate attention.

## Why were gun and lethal violence down in 2025, but not major crime overall?

New York City, which started to track shootings in the 1990s, registered more than 5,000 shootings in 1993\. Shootings fell in the 1990s and 2000s, but New York City still had over 1,100 shootings in the last year of the Bloomberg administration. From 2017 to 2019, New York had three consecutive years with fewer than 800 shootings per year. Then, shootings doubled in 2020 and 2021, and the targeted work of reducing shootings renewed.

In 2025, for the first time, New York City had fewer than 700 shootings in a calendar year (688), a total that's 9% lower than the prior low, and a new record. That is remarkable.

In 2025, New York also had the third-lowest murder rate (305 murders, or 3.6 murders per 100,000) since the postwar historic low of 1951 (244 murders, or 3.1 murders per 100,000). That's near the lows of 2017 (292 murders, or 3.4 murders per 100,000) and 2018 (295 murders, or 3.5 murders per 100,000).

There is no question that the City's [data-driven strategy](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR001/nypd-safest-year-ever-gun-violence-fewest-shooting-incidents-shooting?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — starting with the work of the police and prosecutors taking down gangs and removing guns from the streets — along with record-high investments in violence interruption and community-based programming, is helping to successfully drive down gun violence.

That said, it is worth noting that New York City's progress in reducing gun and lethal violence is nothing out of the ordinary when compared to current national and local dynamics.

After [three years of declines](https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/pages/home) (11% in 2023, 15% in 2024, and a preliminary 18% in 2025), the U.S. murder rate in 2025 is expected to hit its lowest postwar level (from 1946 to the present), or approximately 4.1 murders per 100,000 in 2025.

Similarly, sharp decreases in murders have occurred across the country. For example, [Los Angeles had the lowest homicide rate](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-01-06/la-me-homicide-stats?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) recorded since 1959\. [Chicago homicides fell](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/chicago-homicides-in-2025-fell-to-lowest-level-in-60-years-cpd-says/ar-AA1TD8t4?ocid=BingNewsSerp&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to the lowest level in 60 years after a 30% drop in 2025\. [Philadelphia's 2025 homicides](https://philadelphia.today/2026/01/philadelphia-2025-homicide-rate/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) hit their lowest total since 1966\. [San Francisco](https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/sf-2024-homicide-rate-lowest-in-decades-officials-say/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) recorded its lowest number of murders in over six decades in 2024 and then went lower still in 2025, recording its lowest number of murders since 1954\. In 2025, among the 17 most populous cities in the United States (those with more than 800,000 residents), three cities had a murder rate lower than New York's: San Jose, San Diego and San Francisco.

We also see more progress in reducing gun violence in upstate New York in the jurisdictions under the [Gun Involved Violence Elimination (GIVE) program](https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/ops/gunviolencereduction/index.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The [nationally recognized](https://giffords.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Investing-in-Intervention-02.14.18.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) initiative provides State funding to local law enforcement agencies and supports 28 jurisdictions (including Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Yonkers and Long Island, among others) in 21 counties. As in New York City, after record years in the 2017 to 2019 period (679 shootings in 2019), gun violence almost doubled upstate in 2020 and 2021\. In 2022, shootings started to decrease. After setting a record low in 2024 with just 587 shootings, shootings in upstate GIVE jurisdictions [went down again in 2025](https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/tableau%5FGive%5FShooting%5FActivity.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by another 17% to 475\. That's 30% fewer shootings than the 2019 low.

To give a sense of the gap between upstate and the city's performance, New York City would need to have 163 fewer shootings than it did in 2025 (from 688 to 525 shootings) to be on par with the reductions upstate.

Similarly, compared to the low of 2019 (248 murders or 2.2 murders per 100,000), the 2025 upstate murders were down by more than 10% by September. Although we do not have the final number for all murders, upstate murders by firearm were down 25% in 2025\. Based on preliminary data, the upstate murder rate is likely to be between 5% and 10% lower than the prepandemic low of 2019, outpacing the New York City decline.

What accounts for this variation in performance between New York City and the rest of the state or other big cities in the United States? We must always bring a measure of humility to connecting cause and effect in crime declines. But other places seemed to have been more successful in utilizing the components that have also been the hallmark of New York's past success: a combination of data-driven precision policing, deterrence-focused strategies driven by police and prosecutors (including hot-spot policing, gang takedowns and the daily work of the multiagency [Gun Violence Strategies Partnership](https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/new-york-city-gun-violence-strategic-partnership/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)), along with investments in non-law enforcement initiatives that reduce mortality, from summer youth employment and violence interruption programs to streetlights and other environmental design.

In short, when it comes to gun violence and homicide, New York City is historically safe and is experiencing positive year-over-year trends. The [numbers for January 2026](https://compstat.nypdonline.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are impressive and point to an acceleration in the downward trend. But New York from 2022 to 2025 has not been leading the nation as it once did. This is a notable thing in and of itself.

But what gets especially interesting is comparing the City's ability to drive declines in gun violence and homicide to its seeming inability in 2025 to significantly move the needle in a positive direction when it comes to other types of offenses.

## Why was crime down elsewhere but not in New York City?

The United States overall experienced unprecedented new lows in major crime in 2024 and 2025.

The [2024 crime victimization survey](https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv24.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (covering crimes experienced from July 2023 to November 2024) already indicated a downward trend and the fact that crime victimizations were near historic lows.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27611025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iGxJa4wLs7zR4zCVrrrf0HQY%5Fd8xy9HUrp%5FuJqBMZTk/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

In 2025, the [FBI Crime Data Explorer](https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/pages/home) dashboard indicates that index crime is down roughly 11% nationwide, following an 8.5% decrease in 2024\. The estimated 2025 crime rate (approximately 1,876 crimes per 100,000) fell to levels not seen since 1960, when there were 1,887 index crimes per 100,000.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27611062?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BRQoph6beC8vn66KJKTrSKxYtpHh7qogAD%5FVbLzE3P4/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

All major cities in the United States, including the group of 17 cities with more than 800,000 residents, experienced decreases in index crime in 2025\. Los Angeles crime was down 15%, Chicago down 16%, Houston down 12%, Phoenix down 10%, Philadelphia down 6%, San Antonio down 14%, Dallas down 11%, Fort Worth down 17%, San Jose down 7%, Austin down 6%, Charlotte down 7%, Columbus down 20% and San Francisco down 25%.

By comparison, New York City was down 3%, lagging behind the pack.

Outside the confines of New York City, New York State experienced double-digit reductions in crime, and new lows. A review of available preliminary 2025 data suggests that the estimated 2025 upstate crime rate of approximately 1,400 crimes per 100,000 was the lowest rate since 1965\. In the first eight months of 2025, violent crime decreased by 13% and property crime decreased by 16%, according to data from the [FBI Crime Data Explorer](https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/pages/explorer/crime/query) Discovery Tool and the State's [Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS](https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/tableau%5Findex%5Fcrime%5Fby%5Fagency.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)).

Nothing exemplifies the problem of crime in New York City more than the rise in aggravated assaults and larcenies. Under Mayor Adams, in 2024, aggravated assaults were at 2000-2001 levels. Felony assaults, the most serious assaults, were up to levels not seen since 1997, and once again they were up in 2025 at a time when murders and shootings were declining at a remarkable rate. Larceny was above its 2000 level. Aggravated assaults and larcenies account for 80% of all index crimes.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27611151?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tcSWY9ueFFvdcuHkXObFS76ZN0NYThp%5Fc-JBI7UAVa8/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27611187?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Kg3HftdGe9NRa9QNoK21haZF3-c2J3vaOOVCkgtRw24/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Why is New York City lagging behind the state and the nation in crime declines, when [30 years ago it led the state and the nation](https://www.amazon.com/City-That-Became-Safe-Lessons/dp/0199324166?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), setting an example of how to reduce victimization and disorder? Why hasn't the City been able to implement a strategy that effectively reduces both lethal violence and crime overall?

Several factors may explain this. However, one likely contributing factor is the mismanagement and incompetence of the Adams administration. While New York State was establishing new partnerships across jurisdictions to address various crime problems, from motor vehicle and retail thefts to the rise in domestic violence and aggravated assaults, the City fell short. One area where the partnership took place, the subway, saw significant progress — the [lowest levels of crime in 16 years](https://abc7ny.com/post/nyc-safety-subway-crime-lowest-level-16-years-ridership-8-gov-kathy-hochul-says/18298460/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

## How do we return to the city's recent lows?

The City's goal should be to return crime rates to the levels of 2017-2019, which means reducing crime by at least 70,000 incidents annually.

Why is New York City lagging behind other places? Four dynamics seem to separate New York City from other places.

There is one strategy that does not seem to work in New York City — the deterring effect of certain, swift and fair enforcement — and three initiatives that have not been explored and are worth pursuing.

First, what not to do. Looking at the first three quarters of each year, arrests went up from 141,063 in 2022 to 212,486 in 2025\. Arrests are up 50%, yet crime is almost on par with 2022, the first year of the Adams administration. Increasing the number of arrests by itself is not an effective approach: For an arrest to have an effect on crime, a prosecutor needs to have enough evidence to prosecute successfully. But today, prosecutors are expressing their doubt about the quality of the evidence through their rising declination rates: Prosecutors currently decline to prosecute 18.5% of all arrests, up from 10% in 2019, and 54% of arrests are dismissed, up from 45% in 2019\. The outcome is that only 1 in 4 cases results in a conviction, compared to roughly a 50/50 split prior to the pandemic. (To be clear, conviction does not equate with incarceration, as 60% of convictions result in probation, fines, conditional discharges and other noncarceral outcomes.)

In the 2010s, the [perceptual deterrence theory](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-22890-013?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [showed that](https://crimejusticelab.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Criminology-Public-Policy-2024-Braga-Disorder-policing-to-reduce-crime-An-updated-systematic-review-and.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the [certainty of the outcome](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691148649/when-brute-force-fails?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is [more important](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315724393-8/beyond-deterrence-david-kennedy-mark-kleiman-anthony-braga?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) than the [severity](https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/less-law-more-order-9780275990770/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It is possible to reduce crime, unnecessary enforcement and incarceration if we have a strong strategy that emphasizes [swiftness, certainty and fairness](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12258?msockid=02e6b9c65b9760742129af565a186122&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The City must return to an enforcement that deters criminal conduct.

So what else should New York City leaders and policing practitioners do, then? There are three specific initiatives worth pursuing given the current resources available.

First, there is the need for a place-based, borough-based strategy. The Bronx's crime rate is approximately 3,750 crimes per 100,000 residents, which is 25% higher than the city's average. The Bronx crime rate remains nearly unchanged from its 2000 level, when it was around 3,900 crimes per 100,000\. Using CompStat data that only measure the seven major felony offenses, the Bronx had 13% more offenses in 2025 than under Giuliani in 2001\. More importantly, from 2001 to 2025, felony assaults increased by 64% and grand larcenies rose by 108%. The City needs a comprehensive place-based plan for the Bronx and beyond. The NYPD seems to agree and has announced [a new initiative for the Bronx](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/PR003/commissioner-tisch-new-strategies-keep-new-yorkers-safe-improve-officer-training-and?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). You cannot fix the city without fixing the Bronx.

Second, a recent report from the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice shows that the age curve is changing, locally and nationally. The share of felony arrests for individuals under 18 years old and those aged 18 to 24 has decreased from 37% of all felony arrests to 31%. However, the share for the group aged 35 to 44 has increased from 16% to 22%. From 2018 to 2024, the number of felony arrests for the 35-44 age group almost doubled from 4,376 to 8,437\. Equally important, as the rearrest rate for the age group under 25 years old has remained stable, the felony rearrest rate for the 35-44 age group has increased from 24% in 2018 to 33% in 2024\. They recidivate more often. That group now has the highest rearrest rate of all groups. Further, the violent felony rearrest or recidivism rate has also increased from 16% in 2018 to 26% in 2024\. An analysis of the Rikers population also shows that this group has, on average, more open cases than their young counterparts. The City needs a comprehensive, people-centered plan for this age group, similar to the many initiatives available for youth and young people, such as summer youth employment. The City needs to develop a specific program for this cohort and understand a fundamental finding from [Robert Sampson](https://robertjsampson.com/projects/lifecourse?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on crime and life courses: There are significant cohort differences in the historical contexts through which individuals come of age. Cohort fortunes diverge due to crime and enforcement rates.

Third, the [OCA Pretrial Release](https://ww2.nycourts.gov/pretrial-release-data-33136?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) dashboard was created with DCJS to aid in studying the 2019 bail reforms. The tool indicates that, for the last available time period, from June 2024 to June 2025, the overall rearrest rate in the New York City Criminal Court was 19% (18% for release-on-own-recognizance cases and 16% for bail-set cases). (Note: There were 200,745 arraignments during this period.) By comparison, the rearrest rate was 44% (15,778 out of 36,066) for cases on supervised release or nonmonetary conditions. If there is a warrant for failure to appear in court or other reasons (9,863), the rearrest rate for people on supervised release increases to 72% (7,079 out of 9,863). These are cases in which the risks of flight, noncompliance with court conditions and reoffending are highly correlated. These individuals are under the supervision of the court and the City; the City needs a comprehensive network analysis and plan for this group.

This is not a comprehensive strategy, but rather some of the steps that are needed in the months ahead to reduce crime in certain areas, just as the City has reduced gun violence. For a comprehensive initiative, much more work is needed to develop a crime strategy similar to the plan that brought crime and violence to the lowest levels in decades in the 2016-2019 period.
### Historic Declines, Contested Borders
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/crime-reduction-trends-immigration-enforcement/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:17.000Z
There are six violent deaths in William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," a tale of love and tragedy set in 14th century Verona — then, as now, a prosperous city in northern Italy. With 28 named characters, the play's death rate is a sobering 21%, a reflection of the brutal reality of the place and time in which the story unfolds. Renaissance Italy is often remembered for its flourishing trade, rising prosperity and the creation of some of the most celebrated works in the Western canon. But it was also, by modern standards, an extraordinarily violent society.

As Manuel Eisner documents in his [seminal work](https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article-abstract/41/4/618/468305?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on homicide across European history, the murder rate in 14th century Florence — just 145 miles south of Verona — may have reached 150 per 100,000 residents. That level of violence is unmatched today in any American city and would be seen only in a handful of the most distressed communities anywhere in the United States. By contrast, the U.S. homicide rate in 2024 was roughly five per 100,000\. In New York City — the nation's flagship metropolis — it was 4.7, fully 97% lower than Florence's medieval peak.

While the comparison is selective, it is perhaps notable that a 97% decline in homicides compares favorably to the effectiveness of another remarkable lifesaving intervention: vaccination. Indeed, two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine are estimated to be about [97% effective](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1703309?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at preventing infection. A century ago, measles killed roughly 8,000 Americans annually. In 2024, it killed none. Through vaccination, disease had effectively been eliminated as a cause of death in the United States — until the antivaccination movement, encouraged by new leadership in Washington, [gave the measles virus a new lease on life last year](https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), when it caused three casualties. Of course, we cannot quite make the same assertion about homicide, which still claims roughly 17,000 American lives each year. And yet viewed through a long historical lens, the conclusion is unavoidable: To a remarkable degree, modern societies have inoculated themselves against lethal violence. Were the United States to experience the homicide rate of 14th century Florence, more than half a million Americans would be killed by other people each year.

The long-run decline in homicide is nothing short of astonishing. What makes 2025 exceptional, however, is that the short-run trends are astonishing as well. According to a recent [Council on Criminal Justice report](https://counciloncj.org/crime-trends-in-u-s-cities-year-end-2025-update/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), large U.S. cities saw homicides fall by roughly 21% in 2025, following an already remarkable 15% decline in 2024\. Homicide rates are now about 25% lower than in 2019, before the sharp pandemic-era spike. In Philadelphia and Baltimore, homicide is as low as it was [in the mid-1960s](https://jasher.substack.com/p/the-cities-that-saw-historic-murder). In San Francisco, one must look back to 1942 — when many young men were overseas fighting World War II — to find a comparably low rate.

When measles deaths plummeted in the 1920s, the explanation was clear: Vaccination worked. The causes of the post-COVID-19 homicide decline, by contrast, remain elusive. There is no shortage of theories, including a generalized return to normalcy after the pandemic, but many familiar explanations do not fit the facts. Poverty has barely changed. The unemployment rate is essentially the same as it was in 2022\. Police staffing is flat or declining. The prison population has stabilized after a decade-long fall from its 2008 peak. Nor can this decline plausibly be attributed to the long-lag effects of legalized abortion or lead abatement, factors sometimes credited with contributing to the crime drop of the 1990s.

Understanding what went right in 2024 and 2025 is critical. Without a clear account of the forces behind this decline, policymakers risk squandering a rare opportunity to learn how to sustain and deepen gains in public safety. The contributors to this volume take up that challenge. They identify the most consequential public safety developments of the year, examine how New York City compares with other major U.S. cities, analyze what police have focused on in 2025, consider what advocates and officials should prioritize in 2026 and — critically — grapple with the central question of why 2025 proved to be such an extraordinary year for public safety.

Contributors also engage the other defining public safety story of 2025: a dramatic and highly visible escalation of interior immigration enforcement.

## What happened to crime in 2025?

[**Alex Piquero**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/biggest-crime-justice-stories-america-2025)[ and **Adam Gelb**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/biggest-crime-justice-stories-america-2025) set the stage by identifying what they see as the five most important crime and justice developments of the year. They describe mounting attacks on federal crime data and a growing distrust of official statistics as well as deep and abrupt cuts to federal justice grants, disrupting prevention efforts and meaningful progress in rebooting courts, policing and corrections after pandemic shutdowns. They also highlight a sharp disconnect between public fear of crime and mounting evidence that crime is falling. Their essay underscores the historic nationwide drop in homicide — reaching lows in some cities not seen since the 1960s — while emphasizing how much remains unknown about its causes and how essential rigorous, independent research will be for future policy.

> A central tension of the moment: There is extraordinary progress in reducing lethal violence alongside more limited progress in addressing the everyday challenges in everyday safety.

New York City [led the nation](https://www.amazon.com/City-That-Became-Safe-Lessons/dp/0199324166?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) during the great crime decline of the 1990s and achieved an extraordinary 50% reduction in homicide between 2010 and 2019\. While the city had a banner year in 2025 with respect to homicides and shootings — which were down by 21% and 20% respectively — Vital City's [**End of Year Crime Report**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/crime-in-new-york-city-trends-statistics) suggests that recent public safety trends in the city are actually something of a mixed bag. Indeed, with respect to murders, the city's 20% decline mirrors national trends and is broadly similar to peer cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia. What's more, assaults, robberies, burglaries and especially motor vehicle thefts remain notably higher than they were in 2019\. Crimes on the subway also remain elevated, which, given the universality of subway travel among city residents, forms the basis for widespread discontent even as murders and shootings are in free fall. This is despite an increase in street stops and the rate at which crimes are cleared by arrest. Together, the data suggest that although the police have successfully engaged [the power few](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-007-9044-y?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) who drive the problem of lethal violence, they have not solved the problem of illegal behaviors that have a broader base of participation.

Building upon the end-of-year crime report, [**Marcos Soler**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/new-york-city-gun-violence-down-major-crime-high) emphasizes that while the city has since reached historic lows in gun violence and homicide — largely mirroring state and national trends — it has failed to reduce overall crime. Total reported crime remains roughly 45% higher than its 2017-2019 low and declines now lag behind those in other large U.S. cities. Soler attributes this divergence to policy and management failures under the Adams administration, pointing to sharp increases in assaults and larcenies that now dominate citywide crime. He contends that simply increasing arrests has been ineffective because diminished certainty of prosecution [has eroded deterrence](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0735648X.2025.2527065?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#d1e132). To restore New York to its prepandemic crime levels, Soler calls for a renewed focused deterrence strategy, place-based interventions in high-crime areas such as the Bronx, people-centered strategies for high-recidivism adults aged 35-44 and stronger supervision and accountability for individuals on pretrial release.

In a provocative essay that gets right to the crux of the matter, [**John Roman**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-prevention-reduced-crime-suggestions-analysis) asks why 2025 was, in fact, such a banner year. He argues that the nationwide crime decline was not driven by changes in policing or incarceration — the traditional levers of crime control — but by large-scale federal investments in prevention. Pandemic recovery funds, Roman suggests, stabilized and expanded local social services by funding teachers, counselors, clinicians and prevention workers, thereby reducing risk and creating opportunity for the young people most vulnerable to violence. What makes this argument especially compelling is its scope: Because the decline was broad and consistent across cities and evident across crime types, Roman contends that the cause must be a national one. Alternative explanations — changes in police staffing, gun availability, drug markets, or long-term demographic trends — fall short. Based on his hypothesis, Roman warns that enforcement-only strategies have diminishing returns and argues that sustaining crime reductions will require a philosophical shift toward prevention as a central public safety strategy.

## What should the police be doing?

In a Vital City interview, NYPD Chief of Department [**Michael LiPetri**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/nypd-crime-strategy-questions-michael-lipetri) offers a rare window into the Department's operational strategy, explaining how New York drove shootings to a historic low in 2025 — fewer than 700 citywide — through highly targeted, data-driven policing. The approach emphasizes hyperlocal "violence reduction zones," intensive foot patrols during peak hours, coordinated narcotics and gang enforcement and sophisticated analytics to identify high-risk individuals, groups and locations. Close collaboration with prosecutors and sustained gun arrests reinforced deterrence and produced broad declines in shootings and homicides, including notable gains in the Bronx.

At the same time, LiPetri acknowledges the limits of these successes. As Soler observes, assaults — particularly domestic violence, assaults on public servants and unprovoked attacks often linked to mental illness — remain stubbornly high. The Department is responding by restructuring domestic violence investigations to be more victim centered, increasing warrant enforcement, focusing on transit and school zones, and reassessing strategies for persistent problem populations and places. The interview captures a central tension of the moment: There is extraordinary progress in reducing lethal violence alongside more limited progress in addressing the everyday challenges in everyday safety.

To this end, what should the Police Department be thinking about in 2026? This is a key question at any time but is an especially important question during a period in which there is a new mayoral administration that has a philosophy on crime control that is notably different from that of the prior administration. Where can the new administration and the NYPD, staffed by senior personnel who have served previous administrations, find consensus? And which issues are most critical when it comes to maintaining public safety?

[**Anthony Braga**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/nypd-gang-database-shooting-reduction)[ and **Christopher Winship**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/nypd-gang-database-shooting-reduction) argue that gang databases — including the NYPD's Criminal Group Database, [which Mayor Mamdani staunchly opposed](https://gothamist.com/news/at-first-joint-presser-mamdani-says-nothing-as-tisch-defends-nypd-gang-database?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as a candidate — remain essential tools for reducing gun violence and should be reformed rather than abolished. Critics contend that such databases are discriminatory and overly broad. Braga and Winship counter that gun violence in New York is highly concentrated among a small number of individuals involved in gangs and crews and disproportionately harms Black and Hispanic communities — the same populations overrepresented in the data. [Research shows](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pam.22323?%5F%5Fcf%5Fchl%5Ftk=HNQOVBTe2xnaTGSHeTU%5FKg0ZYb.HEi8DCdeYqMKDYK8-1770751524-1.0.1.1-RshP4Ml2FYKTCDtJmIjihom05o5hTc3VF.NCTBQgJxU&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that focused, data-driven policing targeting high-risk groups can substantially reduce gun violence without displacing crime. Eliminating these databases, they warn, could lead to more indiscriminate policing by forcing officers to rely on subjective judgment, which is more prone to bias. Reform — clear criteria, transparency, oversight and due process — offers a better path forward.

[**Alex Chohlas-Wood**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-to-deploy-ai-policing-nyc-nypd) argues that artificial intelligence provides an extraordinarily powerful opportunity for the NYPD to deploy its limited resources more effectively. Drawing on his experience developing Patternizr — an early AI tool used by NYPD detectives to identify patterns based on crimes' modus operandi, Chohlas-Wood argues that the Department has fallen behind as AI has advanced rapidly elsewhere. Carefully tested systems, he suggests, could improve officer training through analysis of reams of body-worn camera footage, automate freedom of information requests and reduce administrative inefficiencies. Chohlas-Wood urges proactive but cautious adoption, emphasizing that practice must be grounded in transparency, rigorous evaluation and collaboration with outside experts to enhance legitimacy while maximizing learning.

## Should public safety be reconceived?

[**Gloria Gong**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/compstat-safestat-public-safety-nyc-mamdani) closes the public safety section by questioning whether conventional crime metrics ultimately fail to capture what matters most — how people actually experience safety in public spaces. While CompStat revolutionized crime tracking, Gong argues that it fails to measure what residents care about most: whether they feel safe. She proposes a new metric — a citywide "Felt Safety Index" — built from real-time, anonymized behavioral data such as foot traffic, park usage and patterns of public presence. The goal is a next-generation CompStat tool that treats safety not merely as the absence of crime, but as the presence of confident, vibrant public life. A decade ago, such an idea might have seemed utopian. Today, given the explosion and democratization of data, it feels firmly within reach.

## Immigration enforcement and public safety

The other defining public safety story of 2025 is a dramatic escalation in the scale and visibility of interior immigration enforcement by federal authorities — culminating in the killing of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents.

There is much that can be written about this topic, but, for starters, it is fair to wonder whether undocumented immigrants do, in fact, make the United States less safe. While the scholarly literature is clear that immigrants, as a whole, [do not increase](https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-criminol-032317-092026?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) violent crime rates and are [less likely than U.S. natives](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=3382542&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to end up in a state prison pursuant to committing a serious crime, studying the effect of undocumented immigrants specifically is a little harder to do due to the difficulty of obtaining accurate data. Still, several conclusions are well supported. Most research finds that undocumented immigrants are [not an important driver](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9125.12175?%5F%5Fcf%5Fchl%5Ftk=m3d.CfQpnBs0rrvtHc5mg5tVnTIbqhYxgvYARBNg5WQ-1770232300-1.0.1.1-0o.xIk5ZTes3A6jT9fe7F5HuNzOBE9v8NTF5LbRK.Ik&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of violent crime and are [not disproportionately represented](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=3382542&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in state prisons. Moreover, ICE's own data show that, in 2025, [only about 13%](https://www.cato.org/blog/5-ice-detainees-have-violent-convictions-73-no-convictions?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of detained individuals had prior convictions for violent or property crimes — suggesting that enforcement targeted a population at lower risk of serious offending than those typically arrested by local police. This finding aligns with [earlier research](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/680935?casa%5Ftoken=QIYgtsIE1NgAAAAA:%5F-1UU8PzrSwoIdENmtlXwfpXW8eZ6UlNqb2dwg4EV5onx%5FENE5FA-dd32xtZmiszH1MAoZzl-ow&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the Secure Communities program, which expanded federal-local cooperation on immigration enforcement during the Bush and Obama administrations. While investments in local policing reliably [improve public safety](https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-criminol-111523-122746?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Secure Communities — and the increase in removals it produced — did not generate measurable crime reductions.

Beyond empirical debates lies a deeper conflict over the appropriate role of federal immigration enforcement in local communities: how such enforcement should be carried out, how constitutional norms should be respected and how federal law enforcement officers should be trained, managed and held accountable. These questions intersect with enduring disputes over federalism, the balance of power between states and the federal government and the meaning of sanctuary policies.

[**Erwin Chemerinsky**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/trump-sanctuary-cities-funding) addresses the constitutional limits of federal authority, arguing that President Donald Trump's threats to withhold federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities are unlawful. Supreme Court precedent, he explains, bars the federal government from coercing states and localities into enforcing federal law, and only Congress and not the president may attach conditions to federal spending. Courts have previously struck down similar efforts. Chemerinsky also clarifies that sanctuary cities do not shield undocumented immigrants from enforcement — they simply decline to assist federal authorities, often for practical reasons such as encouraging crime reporting and protecting public health.

With respect to the tactics employed, [**Brandon del Pozo**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/minnesota-ice-alex-pretti-policing) sharply criticizes recent ICE actions in Minneapolis — particularly the killing of Alex Pretti — as emblematic of reckless and illegitimate force that corrodes public trust. He contrasts ICE's conduct with the norms of professional municipal policing, emphasizing restraint, legitimacy and accountability. Del Pozo argues that low training standards, quota-driven enforcement, erratic use of force and resistance to oversight have damaged ICE's credibility and weakened community safety. He suggests that this moment offers municipal police departments an opportunity to model legitimate policing by deepening reforms, engaging communities transparently and pairing enforcement with preventive strategies.

The volume concludes with [an interview with **Jeh Johnson**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/questions-answers-trump-noem-dhs-ice), former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, who reflects on the Trump administration's aggressive interior enforcement strategy. Johnson criticizes the deployment of large, militarized federal immigration forces into local communities, warning that it fuels fear, undermines safety and erodes trust between residents and law enforcement. Echoing del Pozo, he notes that a fixation on arrest quotas departs from traditional enforcement priorities and has intensified resistance in sanctuary cities such as New York. Johnson calls for better training, stronger emphasis on de-escalation and a more collaborative relationship between federal and local authorities, suggesting that ICE itself may require a fundamental rethinking of its mission and public role.

When it comes to serious violence, 2025 was a banner year for public safety in cities across the United States. The homicide rate in large U.S. cities is as low as it was during the early 1960s and, for a majority of Americans, the country has never been safer in their lifetimes. Yet it is not clear that the public has noticed. Do people actually feel safer? Do Americans even believe the crime data in a world in which truth sometimes takes a back seat to ideology?

In such a world, the challenge for politicians and policymakers is not only to achieve greater safety but to ensure that Americans feel safer. Given that [crime is concentrated](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9125.12070?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to a considerable degree in a small number of places, this is a challenge. Most Americans live in communities in which crime is uncommon. Their beliefs about crime then center on what they believe is happening in places in which they probably spend little time. A [recent New York Times article](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/us/san-francisco-super-bowl.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) captured this phenomenon well, observing that tourists who flocked to San Francisco for the recent Super Bowl were surprised to find that the city was pleasant and not postapocalyptic as they'd heard about in social media postings. Indeed, San Francisco experienced only 30 murders during the past 12 months, a rate of homicide among the lowest in the United States and only slightly higher than European capitals such as Paris and Brussels (and, in fact, lower than Berlin). But will anyone believe it?
### How Prevention Reduced Crime and How To Get More of It
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-prevention-reduced-crime-suggestions-analysis/
Last updated: 2026-06-23T14:01:03.000Z
Today, broadly shared events are rare. We are divided by politics and scattered into increasingly insular networks, so it is not surprising that we are having trouble digesting the news: [In 2025, crime declined](https://johnkroman.substack.com/p/the-quietest-crime-story-of-the-year) almost everywhere and in [all major crime categories](https://jasher.substack.com/p/2025-year-in-review-a-remarkable). And not just a little, but by record-breaking amounts, as five of the seven categories showed the largest one-year decline since modern national crime statistics began in 1960\. In these situations, we collectively tend to cling to comforting beliefs. In the case of the crime decline, that means [nodding along](https://johnkroman.substack.com/p/why-has-crime-declined-part-deux) with those who point to policing and, particularly, to tactical enforcement and strategic initiatives undertaken this year.

But that wasn't why crime went down practically everywhere in 2025\. I think there is powerful evidence that crime went down practically everywhere because of a nationwide embrace of prevention.

We can be excused for failing to understand this because this prevention strategy was poorly marketed, and, in some cases, even unintentional. In 2022, more than $350 billion [in COVID-19 state and local recovery funds](https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/coronavirus/assistance-for-state-local-and-tribal-governments/state-and-local-fiscal-recovery-funds?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) began flowing to every state, and from there to counties, cities and townships. The dollars replaced state and local revenue lost to the pandemic and were used to maintain vital public services. That sounds ponderous, as public finance discourse often does. But what those dollars purchased in large part were more teachers, counselors and clinicians at a moment when they were scarce. These are the people who interact directly with young people at the greatest risk of violence and victimization to develop opportunities for them and to reduce the risks they face. The term for this work is "prevention." What we set out to do was stabilize reeling social supports. We did that, but we also removed risks and created opportunities on a grand scale.

As we move into the second half of the decade, we do so on a high note, at least with respect to reported crime. But most of the next steps under consideration today are focused on fragments of success and do little more ambitious than memorialize recent gains. However, if the decline in crime was driven by deep investment in prevention delivered through existing social structures, then the next step toward even steeper declines requires even more robust support for these local systems.

\*\*\*

To show that federal funding of prevention is the largest single contributor to the crime declines, it must be true that the decline, like the federal investment, was national in scope and not driven primarily by local factors. How broad was the 2025 crime decline? For the first time since 2014, every measure tracked in the FBI's national crime statistics shows a decline. If the data from the [Real Time Crime Index](https://realtimecrimeindex.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — which looks at data from policing agencies serving about one-third of the U.S. population — bear out, the decline from 2024 to 2025 will be record-breaking or nearly so in every crime category. Every large city, save one or two, showed a decline in violence, some to almost pre-Vietnam War levels. The downward trend has momentum and may be accelerating, with homicide declining by 6% [in 2022](https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2022-crime-in-the-nation-statistics?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), followed by 12% [in 2023](https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2023-crime-in-the-nation-statistics?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), 15% [in 2024](https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2024-reported-crimes-in-the-nation-statistics?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and a 20% decline [in 2025](https://realtimecrimeindex.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Cities that generally failed to benefit from the [Great American Crime Decline](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12103-022-09714-4?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the 1990s, like Baltimore, experienced unprecedented declines (31% in homicide from 2024 to 2025). Cities often vilified for their lack of safety, such as San Francisco, had 2025 homicide numbers equal to levels last seen during World War II (1942). Already the safest megacity in the United States, New York City still had a substantial year-over-year decline in homicide in 2025 (21%).

The only possible conclusion from these data is that the 2025 decline in crime was a national phenomenon. It follows, then, that the causes of the decline were national in scope. This comes as a surprise to followers of Tip O'Neill and his "all politics is local" mantra. While the politics of crime may well be centered in small places, and crime itself is a hyperlocal phenomenon, the crime decline occurred more or less everywhere.

\*\*\*

Skeptics would begin their deconstruction of the "prevention drove this crime decline" argument by noting that post hoc ergo propter hoc is a classic logical fallacy: Just because an event occurred before the outcome it aims to achieve does not mean it is the cause. One counter is simply to test competing hypotheses to determine if they are of sufficient scope and scale to present as plausible alternatives. [Policing changed little in scale](https://www.policeforum.org/trending5jul25?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) recently, as the year began with about the same number of sworn officers as at the beginning of the prior year. Firearm purchases declined in 2025 — but only by about 1%, according to [The Trace](https://www.thetrace.org/2020/08/gun-sales-estimates/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The trajectory of crime is very different today as well: Crime was increasing going into the pandemic, and it has since accelerated downward, so this is likely not merely a return to long-term trends. Demand for and harm from synthetic drugs [is declining](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but less steeply than in 2024.

The case for massive federal investments in state and local governments' funding of broad prevention is comparatively strong. Between March and May of 2020, [more than 1.25 million Americans](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9093000001?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) lost local government jobs. To provide a sense of scale, [this is approximately equal](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/06/6-facts-about-the-us-military/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=As%20of%20the%20end%20of,while%2014%25%20are%20stationed%20internationally.) to the total number of active-duty military personnel across all six branches. By 2022, this number starts to turn around, and employment begins to grow. By the end of 2024, there were more local government employees than there were before the pandemic. This past year, local employment grew even more. For more scalar context, the $350 billion investment in state and local government is about 67% of the $550 billion [state and local governments spent](https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/criminal-justice-police-corrections-courts-expenditures?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on police and courts during this same period.

The growth in the number of local government employees is compelling not because of the number of employees, but because of what those employees do in their jobs. Teachers and police officers are generally paid by the local government. So too are counselors, coaches, behavioral health clinicians and other social work and social service providers. Critically, these investments include state funds directed locally toward all manner of violence prevention and intervention. These were investments directly in the people who work directly with young people who are at the greatest risk of violence and victimization. The [Brookings Institution has shown](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-did-u-s-homicides-spike-in-2020-and-then-decline-rapidly-in-2023-and-2024/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), for instance, that new funds were used to address chronic absenteeism that emerged during the pandemic, and this correlates with local crime declines.

\*\*\*

So, what does the future hold? It is hard to be terribly optimistic. Partially because, while we have all been exposed to the Ben Franklin aphorism that an ounce of prevention is a pound of cure, putting off for tomorrow what you can have today is deeply challenging to human beings. Thus, funding for prevention is rarely popular, partially because we lack the philosophical orientation to give credence to a prevention-based crime-fighting policy architecture. Successes from prevention are statistical rather than personal. There is no potential victim for politicians to point to and explain how their prevention policy protected that person.

Picking up on the second point, the decline in crime is unlikely to be sustainable, because our conceptions of safety mechanisms are too narrow to move to the next, lower level of crime prevention. Our dialogue is too constrained. We talk mainly about levels of police manpower and task forces as plausible means to improve public safety. We do not talk about broad prevention levers like education and behavioral health as ways to reduce crime. Doing that requires a philosophical shift.

This is not a new idea. Americans strongly prefer technological solutions to philosophical changes. [Writing in the journal Science](https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 1968, U.C. Santa Barbara professor Garrett Hardin states, "An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution."

Hardin argues that there is no technological solution to many key problems. He cites the nuclear arms race as one in which every technological advance undermined national security. More directly on point, Hardin finds the same problem of the limits of technology in the production of pollution. Pollution is often used as a metaphor for crime policy reforms. Both produce bad outcomes for bystanders who become unwilling victims of crime or consumers of pollution. But, in Hardin's theory, technocratic solutions will always fail to protect the commons, as technology will always be suboptimally deployed. Policing, for instance, is a public good that everyone can use and no one can be excluded from its benefits, including deterrence. Hardin shows that public goods are always overused and underfunded, a universal effect known as the tragedy of the commons. In crime policy, the technological solution is coercion, or its modern cousin, deterrence, which also has technological limits, just as pollution deterrence or nuclear deterrence do. Deterrence is a public good and thus underprovided.

My argument here is not that policing is somehow unsuccessful. Rather, I believe that effective policing is a necessary but insufficient precondition for public safety. But policing has limits. I would argue that gains are available if police use DNA more broadly in criminal investigations, for example, or focus more on clearing cases. But with the current crime decline, we may have reached an asymptote where each step gets us halfway closer to that limit, but each step is half as big as the last, until we are only taking the tiniest baby steps toward safety.

\*\*\*

How do we solve pollution problems? Hardin argues instead for shared temperance through "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected." Traditionally, this means taxes and laws for those who prioritize individual property rights over the public good by polluting. But there is no reason this cannot also lead us to prevention.

To do this requires a rather profound change in moral philosophy, at least with respect to crime policy. Hardin notes that "the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed." The idea is this:

> A hundred and fifty years ago a plainsman could kill an American bison, cut out only the tongue for his dinner, and discard the rest of the animal. He was not in any important sense being wasteful. Today, with only a few thousand bison left, we would be appalled at such behavior.

The argument for temperance through prevention is essentially the same. One hundred and fifty years from now, will leaving a struggling child, or a struggling school, or a struggling place behind in the interest of protecting personal property be considered appropriate or appalling? Hardin would argue that if the system's state remains unchanged, moral reasoning will remain unchanged as well. I would argue that the way to change the system's state is to invest more in prevention and to use temperance rather than coercion to nudge it toward a more humane state. How we do this is straightforward: We simply broaden our conception of public safety mechanisms to include universal prevention, like schools and behavioral health.

And why not? What we have seen in the last four years is evidence that doing this is not just humane but effective.
### Does Mayor Mamdani Have a Public Safety Strategy?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-public-safety-strategy-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-05-21T20:11:28.000Z
In the early 1990s, when New Yorkers murdered one another at a clip of 2,000 a year (compare this to the 309 murders in 2025), I served as a federal prosecutor, heading up the Organized Crime Unit in the Southern District of New York. My storied predecessors had laid low the mob through a series of landmark racketeering cases, but I began to turn attention to [New York's street gangs](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB864778788738127000?gaa%5Fat=eafs&gaa%5Fn=AWEtsqdTqRj5u0xhUVcVCIvIww8-a5PD2HhYdHLprTeD1PUyZZudR9dgeV8YQ69z-Vc%3D&gaa%5Fts=6995d6eb&gaa%5Fsig=TjNZKQ%5FHdme9uPGxsgEvLEyxREVuF3uNiSqGBa-1mwKQE6VDBoj3kXfl5N-BG7palI1gYuXNwIrMFY8eWhlihQ%3D%3D&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — who, while much less famous than La Cosa Nostra and with monikers not at all as picaresque as Vincent "The Chin" Gigante and Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo, wreaked carnage in the city's poorest neighborhoods. To give some sense of relative scale: In 1992, a bloody war for succession inside the Colombo crime family left 12 people dead. That [same year, more than 30 people died](https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/01/opinion/treat-new-yorks-gangs-like-a-crime-family.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in a three-block area in the Bronx after two street gangs whose names have been forgotten got into a rivalry.

This marked a [new entry of the feds](https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/19/us/using-the-racketeering-law-to-bring-down-street-gangs.html?searchResultPosition=1&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) into the world of violent street crime, which had been the exclusive purview of local prosecutors. I was in close touch with Washington because for every racketeering indictment we wanted to file, we needed approval from the mothership Department of Justice. My colleague there never failed to start each conversation by asking: "How many people have you put in jail today?"

At the time, not 15 years distant from the Vietnam War, it didn't seem out of place to be measuring progress by body count. In fact, it was positively modern to be measuring anything at all, let alone setting a goal like reducing crime. The New York City Police Department had only recently staked its reputation on what seemed at the time an either incredibly foolhardy or courageous claim: that they could control crime. And yet through a department-wide, painstaking and disciplined twice-weekly look at what the numbers were saying and where the cops were deployed — which everyone now knows as CompStat — they were able to mobilize the department to help drive a crime reduction that was nothing short of miraculous. While there were many factors behind the drop in crime, the "New York miracle" stands as one of the steepest and most durable reductions in the history of recorded crime.

I recite this ancient history because, like living with a kid whose growth spurts you don't notice, it's often hard to see how far we've come in thinking about crime. We're way beyond that "aha" moment that crime is controllable. We now understand that many people and conditions, beyond cops, affect crime. Crime has more than one cause and so requires more than one solution. Strong evidence shows that, well before anyone is arrested, a change in someone's conditions can affect a life's course. For example, [summer youth employment reduces arrests for violent crime](https://www.nber.org/digest/202104/nycs-youth-summer-jobs-program-and-rate-criminal-activity?page=1&perPage=50&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by double-digit percentages in numerous cities where it's been implemented. [Street lighting](https://www.nber.org/papers/w25798?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), in randomized controlled trials in New York City, has been shown to drive down serious crime by 36%. While no one is shouting (yet!) "turn on the lights" when crime goes up, this among many approaches both strengthens civic life and also reduces crime. What makes a city hum is more often than not also what keeps crime low.

All of this poses a unique opportunity for an ambitious and creative mayor like Zohran Mamdani. He ran on a platform that hinted in this direction, suggesting that his public safety plan would look beyond the police to engage a wide variety of civic resources. At a conceptual level, this makes perfect sense. But now comes the hard reality of governance. How does Mamdani turn these vague inclinations into a concrete plan? What role will the police play in all of this? And perhaps most important, who in the administration is responsible for public safety?

The good news is that many of the pieces of a blended strategy that keeps the use of police force to a minimum and focuses on the promotion of vibrant civic life are already in place. Among just a few: [The Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety](https://map.cityofnewyork.us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which I helped to launch when I was the director of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, brings together residents, a score of city agencies and community-based organizations to address issues relating to neighborhood life [in a civilian "NeighborhoodStat"](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/nstat-should-be-key-to-mamdani-public-safety-plan); the Brownsville Alliance has been modelling a program that provides [largely civilian response to 911 calls](https://www.wnyc.org/story/when-two-block-stretch-brownsville-policed-itself/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); the [Crisis Management System](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/press-releases/nycs-crisis-management-system-interventions-reduced-gun-violence-by-21-comptroller-landers-report-finds/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) fields scores of violence interrupters to quell disputes before they turn deadly. These are all pieces of what can and should be a [larger safety strategy](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/civic-life-can-create-safety), of which the police are an important piece, but not the only part. But someone needs to put all of these pieces together and figure out how they should intersect with the formal criminal justice system and how progress should be measured.

The criminal justice system — and all the systems that it touches, like agencies dealing with homelessness and mental illness — doesn't run itself. It is vast, sprawling, crosses many domains, and reports to many bosses. Within the criminal justice system itself, the mayor oversees the police and the jails, but prosecutors are independently elected, judges and prisons are under the state, and defenders owe an obligation only to the zealous defense of their clients. As the mayor will soon discover, if he hasn't already, any strategy requires a deft touch, a bit of gravitas and a way to navigate among the different interests to produce a common goal. Without clear goals and constant attention, the entire enterprise devolves to entropy.

To be fair, the new administration is not even two months old. But thus far its public safety plans seem modest, cramped and rudderless. The two visible pillars, the creation of a new Department of Community Safety and the use of the Police Department, stand in awkward and unbalanced counterweight to one another.

Left unanswered: What are the public safety goals? How will these two pieces connect to one another and to the larger network of agencies and entities? Who will synthesize the work into a strategy? How will the public know whether they have achieved results?

As sketched so far, the Department of Community Safety will house many civilian-run programs related to crime and justice, from violence interrupters to organizations offering alternatives to jail and prison, reentry services and B-HEARD, a civilian-only response to calls relating to people in mental distress. The new department has turned out to be a Rorschach test, with each group filling it up with meaning. From the point of view of some advocacy groups that have rankled under previous forms of city control, it represents an opportunity to have more prominence and control over their activities. From the point of view of some in the business community and in law enforcement, it seems a naïve and dangerous way to address crime, a "defund" agenda in sheep's clothing.

To work, both the department and its relationship to the rest of the city need to be better defined. As described, DCS seems to be the inheritor of the tradition of the turn to civilianization of many functions that have traditionally been the purview of the police or that the police have accreted over time because, well, they are there. Prominent among these functions are interactions with people living on the street, sometimes suffering from serious mental illness. This strand of thinking evolved not just as an affirmative search for the best way to achieve safety but also as a reaction to a bitter and brutal history of police violence and wanton patrolling, concentrated most often in traditionally Black neighborhoods in our city and beyond. These excesses have been well-documented, from the [LaGuardia](https://www.archives.nyc/blog/2019/3/1/the-mayors-commission-on-conditions-in-harlem-1935?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Kerner Commissions](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/national-advisory-commission-civil-disorders-report?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), to Ferguson and George Floyd and, in our own city, where the practice of widespread stop and frisks reached a citywide high of almost 700,000 stops before being declared unconstitutional by a federal court. It has been a phantom limb, an unerasable reminder of the misuse of force and authority, and the role of race that may be a part of the motivation behind DCS. Deaths of people suffering from mental illness at the hands of police have become the most prominently expressed reason for DCS.

With the recent deaths of 18 people in the cold, questions have sharpened about what DCS will do and how a massive expansion of civilians responding to calls of mental distress without the police will operate. The unanswered questions here could stand in for questions about DCS as a whole. B-HEARD has [struggled, answering only a third of eligible mental health calls](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/new-audit-comptroller-finds-over-a-third-of-eligible-mental-health-calls-did-not-get-a-b-heard-team-response-for-untracked-reasons/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), failing to stabilize those it does respond to and overall suffering from a lack of governance. This is not surprising because — putting aside the looming issue of whether a civilian-only approach is best — it does not have adequate places to bring people in need. That is, [the rest of the system is not built out or coordinated so that B-HEARD can function](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-to-do-about-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways).

Beyond B-HEARD, what is the role and function of DCS? It is unclear. Right now, it looks like a rearrangement of the many programs run by nonprofits that already operate in the city. They are united under the DCS umbrella less by topic than by form. Each of those needs to be coordinated and connected to the various systems that surround it. For example, diversion programs need judges (and prosecutors who make recommendations) to be confident that they will place defendants in them. Violence interrupters need connections to the Police Department so that they have, at a minimum, additional information about where violence is brewing. And the City, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on nonprofits, needs to carefully track what results they are producing and ideally hold them accountable. This is a tall order even when the City directly supervises its workers. But it becomes even more challenging when, through a glass darkly, the City has to eke out performance through the contracting process.

Without knowing that this is the case, I guess that DCS was conceived as a counterweight to police and police alone occupying the field of safety. I understand and appreciate that instinct. But as presented, the department does not appear to have the power or place or mandate to be that balance. In fact, the lack of clarity over function, governance and connection leaves the field of public safety to the police. Of course, police will always be a part of safety when force is necessary. They can do things that no one else can do. They have the budget, manpower, range and coverage of the city to be the mainstay as they have been for decades. But they can't and shouldn't do everything. As has become plain over the decades, public safety is about more than investigation, arrest and prosecution. It touches on many aspects of visible distress — homelessness and mental illness. It can be secured through many avenues — the design of public places, the development of work and of housing.

Pulling back the camera to the great array of ways to reduce risk and control behavior — at the heart of crime reduction — shows why the police department alone is not a public safety strategy. But because of their size and prominence, despite knowing all this, the city defaults to the primacy of the police. Structurally, the police commissioner reports directly to the mayor. Symbolically, the mayor and [even presidents](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/nyregion/biden-new-york-gun-violence.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) traditionally make the pilgrimage to police headquarters when there is a crime announcement, the police commissioner doesn't come to City Hall. In a world where all the resources that contribute to public safety were mobilized, the police department and the other civic resources important in this endeavor, whether housed in DCS or arranged another way, would report to one responsible person in City Hall, preferably a deputy mayor for public safety with the power to devise and execute on a blended and coordinated strategy.

What has always been 3-D chess — trying to make a criminal justice system with no boss and many cross currents function well — has now become even more complex with an erratic president driven by vindictive and destructive impulses. The entry of the feds into the world of street violence in the 1990s is a stark contrast to the aggressive and brutal presence of the president's growing army of ICE agents. We do not know whether that presence will grow and how it might, among many other things, threaten the relationship of New Yorkers to the NYPD and require new safety strategies. We face some uncertain times ahead that will require New York City to marshal all its resources in the most focused way. We will likely face cuts from the federal budget that could send us hurtling off a fiscal cliff even steeper than the one that the mayor has recently spoken about. And there are so many other twists and turns that we cannot even guess now.

But we should expect that the feds' diabolical inventiveness this past year in undermining the law, untrammeled by any restraints of custom, history or decency, is prologue to the next three. The antidote to all of this will be the creation of a citywide strategy led by someone who thinks broadly — and every day — synthesizing the power of both enforcement and civic authorities toward common goals.

What is the plan?
### Governments That Get Results
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/gloria-gong-interview/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:21.000Z
*Policymakers spend enormous energy debating what government should do. But who's paying attention to whether it actually gets done? Gloria Gong runs Harvard's Government Performance Lab, where she's spent 11 years sending teams into more than 100 state and local agencies to work on that exact question. In this episode of "After Hours with Jamie Rubin," Gong explains why government defaults to process over outcomes, how a Detroit violence intervention program cracked the code on results-driven contracting and why her lab mostly skips New York City — which she says has the best government talent bench in the country but makes a terrible model for everywhere else. She also tells the story of how her husband's carefully maintained list of her passions saved her from a career in corporate law.*

*As always, you can listen to the episode on* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/governments-that-get-results/id1794619189?i=1000749185914&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *or* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/77UfMDWfGbpXOn5TVnufIh?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​*

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**Jamie:** Gloria, thanks for being here.

**Gloria:** Happy to be here.

**Jamie:** Why don't we start by you describing what you do for a living?

**Gloria:** Absolutely. I run a lab at the Harvard Kennedy School called the Government Performance Lab. We have an unusual model for an academic setting. We focus specifically on questions around design and implementation of social services, not just the policy, in part because the thing that we noticed when we started this is that there was so much work that goes into that initial question on what should government do. But a lot of times people are asking that in this complete ivory tower way of, in a perfect world, what should government do? And no one seemed to be noticing that those things didn't actually happen once all the policymakers walked away and handed the initiative to some agency to actually implement.

So we really focus on the questions around when you hand something to an agency and ask it to get it done, what actually happens in that black box and how can you make it happen better so that services actually get delivered for people? And so we do this by actually sending people out to partner with state and local governments to help them design and test innovative new fixes to their services or their operations, to actually see whether we can improve service delivery.

**Jamie:** And so you do it on a consulting basis?

**Gloria:** Harvard is absolutely not allowed to use the word consulting, but we do a thing that might look similar to people who have seen consultants, which is that we send really talented, early career staff out to sit with government side by side with their staff and actually help them figure out what to do, how to do it, how do you actually do the design?

**Jamie:** What's the scope and the spec for doing this? Do they come to you and say, look, we want to solve homelessness in Des Moines or something? You then take that away and come back with a plan and then go help them implement? Or is it they have the plan and you help them? What's the model?

**Gloria:** What we typically do is we'll put out a call for applications on a particular topic that we've heard from a bunch of governments represents a common concern. So we did this recently around places that were trying to improve their coordinated entry systems for homelessness, places that are trying to improve their placements into permanent supportive housing. We just ran a big cohort of governments that are trying to set up alternative emergency response programs, and we're very oversubscribed, so we might get like 70 applications for five slots in a cohort or something like that. But then we'll take that group of governments and work with them intensively, maybe over one to one and a half years to actually figure out what does it take to do this intervention and what do we learn from it? And then we'll try to take the learnings from that and hand it, spread it to the other governments who weren't able to get the direct assistance.

**Jamie:** Got it. Just through education and writing and all that kind of stuff.

**Gloria:** We've run custom executive education courses at Harvard, but we also do just a lot of very practitioner-focused creation of materials and tools. And we also run these communities of practice. So for example, on alternative emergency response, we've done cohorts of like 15 to 16 governments that were all working on setting those programs up. But then we also created this community of practice that has like 450 government leaders from other cities who aren't necessarily in the cohort, but we're sharing out the information that we learn with them as quickly as we can.

**Jamie:** Having been in government, it sounds like the kind of thing that you always hope somebody will do. I worked for the governor for five years. I don't remember ever getting plugged into something like this.

**Gloria:** Our big insight, which is not going to sound interesting to anyone who knows anything about government, but it turned out to be exciting in the academy, is that there's just almost no support for anyone past that first level of executive leadership. And it's all the folks who are doing things. So everyone who has a question of how will we create these, expand these pre-K seats, how will we send out these new teams? There's nothing for them. And so that's what we're trying to focus in on: those doers who have very little support from external places.

**Jamie:** So it's what people who have not been in government call the gigantic bureaucracy. Basically, as you said, government is starved for resources. There is no level of government that has the resources it needs. Period.

**Gloria:** The way we describe what we do when we talk to mayors or governors about coming in is that we say, look, we really deeply are not on that team that thinks government's incompetent. You have a bunch of staff who are very capable. They can do really, really good work. They are probably maxed out keeping the trains running. These are big, hard things to run. It's very hard to ask the same people to design new train tracks, and that capacity to think about what's a system that we should shift to a lot of times also needs to be protected. They need to be firewalled from the emergencies in the day to day. So that's often the role that we're trying to play for folks, is to be able to come in and say, let us be a team that's firewalled a little bit from the daily emergencies that can help you try to figure out how are we going to go from the system we have today to the system we want to get to.

**Jamie:** And how did you get to this place? Were you in government at one point or were you just a junkie?

**Gloria:** Just a junkie.

**Jamie:** Okay, great. So how did you get to this place?

**Gloria:** So I was actually in law school. I had a clerkship and an offer from a law firm. What they say to everyone is, well, you have something you want to do, but what you should do first is you should clerk for one to two prestigious judges. Then you should go work for five to six years at a law firm. And at that point you should start doing the thing that you want to do.

**Jamie:** I just want to pause for a second. I don't know who's still telling people that kind of stuff, but we need to figure out who that is because that's extraordinarily bad advice. It wasn't good advice when I was in law school and it's not good advice now.

**Gloria:** I went to the career services folks my first year and I was like, I'm really interested in public service. And they're like, oh, you know what you should absolutely use your summers to work at corporate law firms to make sure that isn't what you want to do. And I was like, well—

**Jamie:** Such bad advice.

**Gloria:** I think I just said it's not what I want to do.

**Jamie:** It's like no other area of your life would somebody tell you that. Once you know what you don't want to do and what you want to do, what you should do first is do more of what you know you don't want to do, just to make sure.

**Gloria:** So the funny thing about this is this specific advice, which was given to me by so many people, and also taken by so many people in my cohort. They have some stat that they tell you, which is like 90% of you came in saying that you want to do something in public interest, but 90% of you will exit to the top corporate law firms. And the thing that was funny for me about it now sitting where I am, is that a bunch of people took that advice because the thing that was sitting behind it was people telling them, oh, you'll be able to lateral from that to anything you want to do. And now that I'm sitting on the side of hiring, I'm like, that is not true. Five years at a corporate law firm does not prepare you to run an agency or do many of these other things.

**Jamie:** You're definitely right. I mean, it doesn't prepare you to run anything really.

**Gloria:** It might, but I think everyone just got told you will definitely be able to go from this into anything and nobody said, yeah, you will have spent six years doing something that you at least said at the beginning was not what you wanted to do. That's very expensive.

**Jamie:** And honing a bunch of skills that probably are not going to translate necessarily unless what you wanted to do is be a government lawyer or something like this.

**Gloria:** That just never was said to me.

**Jamie:** Yeah. Okay, got it. All right. So you dodged the bullet or what happened?

**Gloria:** Yeah, so the short version of the story is I have a little bit of contrary instinct, so I'd been working internationally previously on human rights China stuff, and I was like, I think I want to work on U.S. domestic things. And so everyone was like, great: White House, DOJ. That's where our connections are. And I was like, oh, well what about state and local? And everyone I talked to was just like, I don't think that's a thing, or we don't know anyone there. So that made me be like, okay, I want to go that direction. When people would tell me, we don't know anything about that, I was like, well, great. That means there's more of a need there. So I started looking into state and local, no connections out of YLS—

**Jamie:** Yale Law School.

**Gloria:** Yeah. For years.

**Jamie:** Well, by the way, not 100% true. So for example, I regularly tell the people in the career services office that if anybody comes through wanting to talk about state and local government, they should absolutely send them to me, and I've been doing that for 10 years.

**Gloria:** There you go. So I was like, I'm going to go this other direction. Then the other thing that basically happened is my husband saved me. So I had signed up to do this clerkship law firm thing and he was like, hey, just tell me really quickly about what you're excited about this. And I said whatever you gear yourself up to say in the interview. So I was like, something, mergers, acquisitions. And he's like, okay, that's awesome. Well, because I care about you so much, I keep a list of the things you're passionate about so that I can support you and whatever your dreams are. So I'm just going to open it up real quick and write mergers and acquisitions right here under women and children and intergenerational poverty. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I got it. I'm not okay.

**Jamie:** So parenthetically, your husband sounds like—I mean, I'm embarrassed that I don't think I've ever really done that for Gretchen, but what does he do just out of curiosity?

**Gloria:** He's an awesome person. He's amazing. He does strategy stuff.

**Jamie:** He is a saint. Say he is a partner to love.

**Gloria:** Get out of here. All right, fine.

**Jamie:** Anyway, the long and short of this is I asked my judge if I could have a hot second to look at other things, which I did not realize at the time—massive. Very—

**Gloria:** You're not supposed to do that. You're not supposed to do that. He was incredibly generous. He was like, yes, please feel free to look around. I found Jeff Liebman in this moment where he'd come back from the White House and I was like, hey, I want to start the state and local thing. We got coffee and by the end of it he was like, hey, why don't you come and just start this with me right now? Don't take the bar, don't clerk. Just let's just do the thing we want to do right now. So that's what I've been doing.

**Jamie:** Great. Oh, so you've been doing it really since graduation?

**Gloria:** Yeah.

**Jamie:** Okay. Having done this now for 11 years, I guess, and having seen all of the stuff you've seen and having advised governments, there's a very obvious question, which is when do you decide that you need to go put it into practice?

**Gloria:** Someone asked me the other day if I was keeping a list of all the people I'd want to work for.

**Jamie:** Oh, that's an interesting question.

**Gloria:** It was a great question. I don't know the answer to it, but it did make me think there are some people who are really inspiring. I think I want to work for a team and that's why I've been where I am. Where I've been so long, my team is amazing.

**Jamie:** Yeah. How many states and locals have you worked with?

**Gloria:** Over 100.

**Jamie:** Yeah. A hundred. So I mean, you must have seen every flavor of competence and not competence.

**Gloria:** Yes.

**Jamie:** Okay, got it. I mean, all the other things aside, do you at least feel like you could do this? You could get into the game directly?

**Gloria:** I mean, of course. That's what I'm saying. If you see a team that you want to support, you're like, I'd love to support that person, go ahead and put me in.

**Jamie:** So you've been there for 11 years. Give me one of your favorite teams to work with, and we'll stipulate that you love everybody equally, but if you had to go back in time and start again, you would start with?

**Gloria:** Lisa Morrison Butler when she was running the Chicago Department of Family and Social Services just ran a great team. They had great strategy people. They really were trying to figure out how can we realign all of our spending and contracting around clear outcomes. We're working with Governor Wes Moore's senior cabinet right now. They have just pulled in a ton of very competent people. They've been dealt a tough hand, just in terms of the things happening in their state, but they're really trying to push on his vision around child poverty and how to help families in the state.

**Jamie:** Oh, interesting. So he's given them a mission generally.

**Gloria:** He announced that he was going to eliminate child poverty. And he gives these funny talks where he's like, every person on his staff is like, don't say eliminate—

**Jamie:** Don't say it. Don't do it.

**Gloria:** Exactly. And then of course, what always happens, you come in, there's the bridge collapse, all these things happen. But he's pulled together a really strong group of people who are doing really good work on how do we move our infrastructure forward in terms of AI, digital, the actual core capabilities of the state so that we can layer on top questions like how can we get people benefits faster and quicker? How can we serve more families who are at risk of falling into poverty and those kinds of things?

**Jamie:** So one from Chicago, one from the state of Maryland. Okay. Have you worked in New York? I'm just curious.

**Gloria:** We've done a little bit here. We tend not to work in New York for two reasons. One is New York actually has an unbelievable talent bench. From what I've seen, the folks in government in New York are the top talent bench in government in the U.S. out of some of the top federal roles. You guys have a great talent bench here. And so we tend to think, don't take water to the sea. You don't need extra people necessarily. The second reason is pilot projects done in New York tend to not translate into scalable solutions elsewhere, because literally every city in the country would be like, hmm—

**Jamie:** Yes.

**Gloria:** That means nothing to us. We have none of those resources, none of that infrastructure. And we are a tiny fraction of the size. You do a project in New York if you want to have direct impact, because it's such a huge direct impact in New York is phenomenal because it's just so big. But if you're trying to say, can we do it here because it can be a model for what's done elsewhere, it's just often not the case.

**Jamie:** I think it's interesting. I mean, there are institutions in New York, so for example, the Furman Center, which is at NYU, the housing center run by people who I know well, all of whom have been in government in the housing world. They're spectacular. When I became the board chair of NYCHA a couple years ago, I thought, okay, great. I know a lot of people. I will be the bridge to NYCHA for lots of people who should be helping and never have. Great. So I went and sat down with my friends at Furman and I explained what the strategy was going forward, which made a lot of sense. And they were like, that's awesome. And I said, I'm sure you guys have been helping NYCHA along the way because you have all these resources and you have analytics and you're thinking about things to do. Blank face. And I said, how is it possible that you've got a third of all the public housing in the country within two feet of you in the five boroughs? And they said the same kind of the same thing you did, which is it's so big, it's kind of not relevant to anybody else. And so if we want to be relevant to everybody else and be sort of scalable, we have to go elsewhere. And also, it's not that NYCHA doesn't need help, but they really do have a lot of resources that other places don't have.

**Gloria:** We try to do these knowledge exchange things between different cities. And the trick if you bring New York in is they'll be like, okay, well the first thing you should do is have your internal analytics team. And everyone's like—

**Jamie:** Okay. And that would be who?

**Gloria:** Exactly. They're like, take your 20-person data team.

**Jamie:** It's incredible. Yeah. Now it's funny because you say that because if you—I mean just taking NYCHA or really, but this is true of any agency that I've had any interaction with. They will all tell you they're understaffed and I can tell you for sure NYCHA is understaffed. And I don't think you'd find another agency that would say different. We have 600,000 residents. We have 12,000 staff, and most of them are in the field, and that's just, you wouldn't, if you were running a private company that housed that number of people, you would have four or five times the number of people in the field. But for whatever reason, we do have a breadth of functionality. So to take your example, we do have an analytics department, but we also have other needs. It's just we can't hire—if we could hire five more people in the field and give up the analytics, that wouldn't really make any sense.

**Gloria:** Exactly.

**Jamie:** So it's just very, very challenging. So if you had to say, I don't know if you've done this, I've read some of the other stuff you wrote—spoiler alert, you and my mom—

**Gloria:** And my mom.

**Jamie:** And I didn't see anything in particular that was like, here's everything I've learned from a high level over my time here. If you were writing a book, you would say, okay, well what are the five magic keys to running a good government or something like that. Have you ever thought about it that way?

**Gloria:** I love that question. I can give you my version of it right now. And the funny thing is, it's going to be the same thing I'm saying in every piece. I only have two ideas, but one of them is we don't see people focus on outcomes enough. There's so much focus on process. And that's such an easy thing to say. It's a really hard thing to do. You just default immediately to being like, well, we had the meetings. We did the town hall. And the ability of a leader to say, we are trying to get something done. We're just going to measure if that gets done and work backwards from getting that done. Not to say, well, if we do a lot of meetings, that counts.

**Jamie:** I think that's a great—again, I co-sign that. I think I've never—it doesn't happen in government for the most part. Nobody in government gets rewarded for outcomes. Do you think that's why it is or is there something else going on?

**Gloria:** I think that's partly why you do process things because it's a risk mitigation thing.

**Jamie:** Mm-hmm.

**Gloria:** I just wrote a case about this thing that Mike Duggan did when he was mayor in Detroit, where they shifted their community violence intervention funding to be outcomes-focused on did you drop shootings in your zone. I think it's an incredibly innovative approach to a type of funding that people are doing all over the country but isn't really being connected to accountability around outcomes. Really innovative design. They let the providers design their intervention. So it was much less micromanaged.

**Jamie:** So this is for nonprofits?

**Gloria:** Mm-hmm. These tiny nonprofits.

**Jamie:** Yeah.

**Gloria:** Community violence interrupting groups. Community violence interrupters are super proximate to their communities, from the communities. They base it around outcomes. I taught this teaching case around it that I'm hoping we can teach to government leaders in the different programs we do at the Kennedy School. And I was teaching it to this class of students and I break them up into sections where I'm like, okay, you guys think from the mayor's team perspective, you guys think from procurement and legal, you guys think from the provider's perspective, and we use it to tease out what's hard about this. And the kids on the mayor's team—one kid raised his hand, he's like, sorry, let me just see if I understand this. I have all this money from ARPA and I could do two things. I could set up a thing that's called Office of Violence Prevention and have a ribbon cutting, and then let them just go spend the next three years setting up an office. And there is zero downside to me. And I get to say I started an office that has violence prevention in the name, or I could say to the community, I'm going to put this money towards bringing shootings down and we're going to measure it and put it out in dashboards.

**Jamie:** Yes.

**Gloria:** And he was like, that sounds like it's only political downside. So much risk. Why? Where do you get this kid?

**Jamie:** Well, but it's exactly to your point, right? Everyone we see who's doing outcomes-based work is taking a risk, because they really are trying to get the thing done. There's so much more safety around doing process, where you can say, yeah, I named a person and we did a task force, and then we have a committee. And the people who are like, look, I really want to push around this are doing it because they're actually trying to get it done and they care, but not because all the political rewards are set up that way.

**Gloria:** I hope you weeded them out quickly before they get into government.

**Jamie:** That was the core insight that they were pointing out, was like, hey, this is a hard thing. This is a hard thing for a leader to do.

**Gloria:** Yeah, it is.

**Jamie:** Actually, stay at Harvard kid. You're doing okay. Yeah, you go. Sorry. Look, that is, it's probably true because the one thing that politicians in general, elected officials are really good at, more or less, is figuring out what it is that's going to get them reelected.

**Gloria:** I do think there's a separate set of reasons we don't focus on outcomes, which is—and this is a lot of the stuff that we focus on—it's actually not what the structure is right now. So you say you're trying to do something as an elected official. People get together and do this policy work or whatever. You then hand it off to an agency to implement and then it goes through a set of standard processes. The agencies, where typically—unless it's a thing that the agency has direct control over, which is the minority of things in government—you're going to send it out through procurement and a contracted provider is going to do it. Typically, a nonprofit. That process is almost never oriented around outcomes.

**Jamie:** Yes.

**Gloria:** So the contracts are not, we want kids in this community to have better reading scores and ultimately better economic mobility. It's you will create X number of seats and you'll invoice for those seats, and then all of the focus is around the compliance around that process. And so one of the issues that we focus on a lot is the translation between what you're trying to do and the way that it gets done. One of the main things that gets dropped out is what the thing was that you actually were aiming for. And you replace it with things where you're like, we will pay you to deliver showers at this shelter.

**Jamie:** Yep. We're already down a rabbit hole and we didn't even get to your two, three, and four or five.

**Gloria:** Same. Outcomes is pretty good.

**Jamie:** But this one is interesting. I'm going to guess that you spent time around the performance bond, social impact bond world.

**Gloria:** Yep. That's how we got started.

**Jamie:** My prior is I don't believe in that stuff. Tell me what you think about it.

**Gloria:** Social impact bonds?

**Jamie:** Yeah.

**Gloria:** So my short take on social impact bonds—the GPL started out as the Social Impact Bond Technical Assistance Lab. My short takeaway on it was the third-party investor stuff ended up being too complicated and government can borrow at a lower rate. So also not necessary, as in government should be more risk-taking with the money it has. It doesn't need to pay investors to offset that risk. And the transaction costs were incredibly high because it was these very sophisticated financial transactions that the governments weren't set up to do.

**Jamie:** Yep.

**Gloria:** So we essentially were, after we tested it in a bunch of places, we were like, we don't need that piece. And governments came to us and said, they're like, actually, we can pay for stuff. The piece that they really liked that we have kept, and it's the backbone of the work that we do now, is the stuff around measuring outcomes. Get your contracts organized right and then do data-driven performance management around the thing that you're trying to deliver to actually figure out what is stopping this from happening and problem-solving in a really agile, fast way. So that piece—

**Jamie:** Yeah.

**Gloria:** Of social impact bonds. I actually think it was incredibly successful.

**Jamie:** That makes sense to me. I had not followed the space really. We had some experience with it in New York State. We actually did the first, I think the first social services one we did was a recidivism one. Yeah. We did the CEO, right?

**Gloria:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

**Jamie:** So which did not work well.

**Gloria:** Worked in the sense that you now have evidence.

**Jamie:** We can talk about this some other time.

**Gloria:** No, no. But actually this is part of it. Government should be finding out what works.

**Jamie:** Totally agree. It just goes back to that—

**Gloria:** Right conversation we were just having around whether people want that or—

**Jamie:** It's great. It was great for us. But having said that, the missing piece there, which maybe doesn't matter, is the incentive structure, right or no?

**Gloria:** There is a thing that I think is really tricky, which is who is going to buffer the risk for the provider if they don't get their outcomes payments? But what we learned in subsequent projects, like the original social impact bonds put a lot of the payments at risk. What we've learned in subsequent projects is you don't have to have as much of it at risk to still incent some of the same behaviors. And you can still drive the same kind of adaptation. So this project in Detroit that I was talking about, I think is a really nice example of this. They took their ARPA funding. They made these super generous operational budgets for the social service providers who got selected to do the community violence intervention. They then made also very generous incentive payments on top of it if they hit target. So it was—

**Jamie:** Sort of a bonus. So you got the original payment—

**Gloria:** But then it was a bonus. Yes, but it was a bonus. So the operational funds, and I think that's the right way to structure—what I would think was the next generation of results-driven contracts, which is you can't be putting the providers' operational funding at risk so that they're like, well, at the end of the year we might find out we're not going to make any money from this year. But if you cover their operational costs, then using performance incentives as bonuses, I think is really effective.

**Jamie:** Are you seeing any of that in practice?

**Gloria:** This Detroit project's my favorite one that I'm seeing right now. And I heard the mayor talk about it and I was like, this is so smart. I called my friend who was in the mayor's office and I was like, hey, this is a really, really smart program design. I want to write a case about it. And she's like, oh, Gloria, that was actually my project and she had worked at the GPL, so I was like, oh, darn it. We're not seeing any independently seeded version.

**Jamie:** Oh, that's too bad. When was this?

**Gloria:** It's now. This was now.

**Jamie:** Okay. So all right, well, so it'll get out there. All right, so here's—we intended to talk about the article that you wrote for Vital City, and instead we ended up talking about the work that you do that led to that article and lots of other stuff. So I think we're just going to presume on your time and say, this is going to be part one of the conversation. And part two of the conversation is going to be about that article because that's free advice to the new administration, drawn on lots of other stuff. And if they're lucky, they'll find a way to drag you into helping. But one way or the other, it's very closely related. Okay. Great. Gloria, thanks a lot.

**Gloria:** Yeah, thanks.
### Mayor Mamdani, Here’s What Mass Engagement Looks Like in Practice
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mass-engagement-mamdani-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:27.000Z
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"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)," goes a line from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." Each of us immediately recognizes its truth. What would our democracy look like if it, too, contained multitudes — embracing not only the multiplicity among us but the multiplicity within us?

[Sixty-four percent](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/02/polls/times-siena-poll-registered-voter-crosstabs.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of Americans believe we are too polarized to solve our problems, a stark increase from just five years ago. Yet freed from rigid categories — progressive/conservative, urban/rural, migrant/native, Democrat/Republican — we are unpredictable and eccentric. Like the man who showed up to a mayoral rally in New York City, my home, wearing a "MAGA for Mamdani" hat. He was one of the [estimated 20%](https://www.aaldef.org/news/exit-poll-49-of-nyc-asian-american-voters-backed-mamdani-in-historic-mayoral-victory/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of New York City Trump voters who supported Zohran Mamdani for mayor.

Our political machinery flattens the many complexities and internal contradictions of the electorate. Traditional polling methods, referendums and even our ranked-choice voting system tend to force complex human preferences into reductive choices. The 2016 Brexit referendum is a striking example: a binary vote — in or out — that forced people into opposing camps when their actual feelings about European Union membership were far more nuanced.

In New York City today, we have a chance to do things differently. Mamdani won the mayoral election by mobilizing New Yorkers from all walks of life. His newly created [Office of Mass Engagement](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-establishes-office-of-mass-engagement-to-transform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) plans to sustain that energy beyond Election Day by embedding public feedback directly into city policy. But how do you genuinely engage a city of more than 8 million residents who speak an estimated [750 languages](https://languagemap.nyc/Explore/Language?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), hold diverse religious and cultural beliefs and live in radically different economic circumstances? And how do you do this in ways that surface real preferences — rather than amplifying voices that happen to align with the administration's predetermined goals?

To his credit, Mamdani has already made a genuine effort to hear what his constituents want. Last December, he spent 12 hours listening to 142 New Yorkers at his '[The Mayor is Listening](http://youtube.com/watch?v=xj89tYvwr6k&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)' event. As he goes about his daily business, he is — at least so far — considerably more approachable than many past leaders of the city. But events like this won't scale to millions. And one-way listening, where many speak to one, can't capture the collective wisdom that emerges when people both speak and listen to each other.

For close to a decade, I've overseen the deployment of a tool that offers a path forward: a nonprofit, open-source technology called [Polis](https://pol.is/home?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), designed to understand public opinion in its complexity. I've helped governments worldwide use Polis to gather input on everything from climate policy and urban planning to food pantries and mental health services. Across all these deployments, one pattern emerges consistently: Common ground exists even in the most fraught terrain. New York City is no exception — beneath the noise of competing interests and divided communities lies the same potential for unexpected consensus.

Polis inverts the logic of typical social media. It's a tool for broad listening, rather than broad *casting* of opinions. It works like this: On each topic raised on Polis, participants — from thousands to tens of thousands, and scalable to hundreds of thousands — share their perspectives in tweet-length statements and vote "agree," "disagree," or "pass" on each other's statements. The Polis algorithm then breaks people out of their bubbles by showing them not just the statements they are likely to agree with, but also those they are likely to disagree with. The conversation is displayed as an interactive map and summarized by a large language model in real time, showing areas of agreement and disagreement. Consensus is reached when there is broad agreement across otherwise divided groups.

Polis's most famous application is in Taiwan. After the 2014 Sunflower Movement opened space for citizen participation, the government invited [g0v](https://g0v.tw/intl/en/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (pronounced gov-zero) — a hacker community that rose to prominence during the movement — to prototype a process for mass engagement in policymaking. The result was [vTaiwan](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xyhft%5Fv1?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which combines in-person deliberation with virtual participation via Polis. Audrey Tang, a g0v member who helped design vTaiwan, later became Taiwan's digital minister.

vTaiwan was not a patronizing experiment to make people feel like they were being heard. It solved real policy deadlocks. For example, the government had been trying for years to legalize online liquor sales, but alcohol merchants, e-commerce platforms and people concerned about underage drinking couldn't find common ground. When the issue went through vTaiwan, 450 stakeholders reached consensus within weeks and formulated recommendations the government went on to implement. The alcohol case wasn't unique. Under Digital Minister Audrey Tang's leadership from 2016 to 2024, vTaiwan tackled more than 28 issues ranging from Uber regulation to revenge porn, with [80%](https://info.vtaiwan.tw/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) resulting in government action.

vTaiwan is [often framed](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/opinion/ai-democracy-government-authoritarianism.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as an example of how AI can invigorate democracy. The truth is actually the opposite: Democracy invigorated AI. The 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement is what initially inspired a group of Seattle-based technologists — led by Colin Megill — to build Polis. It was proprietary software at first, but Tang insisted that any tool used for public deliberation be fully transparent. So in 2016, Polis became open source, and it has remained so ever since.

Yet in all of America, only Bowling Green, Kentucky, has used Polis at scale. Last year, I helped thousands of residents come together for citywide planning — proving they're not bowling alone in Bowling Green.

Once the provisional capital of Confederate Kentucky, Bowling Green — a Republican-led city of about 75,000 — is now home to Western Kentucky University, two major Japanese aluminum plants and one of the highest per capita refugee populations in the nation. It's about an hour's drive from Nashville, one of the fastest-growing hubs in the South. City leaders were convening to plan for a doubling of Bowling Green's population in the coming decades. My Polis colleagues and I — with funding and support from Google — were invited to help. It was our first public-private partnership, but Polis's open-source license meant even Google's code contributions had to remain public.

In March 2024, Bowling Green held a three-week digital town hall using Polis, and approximately 10% of the city's population participated online to share their perspectives on what the city could become by 2050\. To make sure the participants were as representative as possible, volunteers canvassed at local businesses and international grocery stores. They took iPads to soup kitchens, rural diners and flea markets. They talked to bored people in the DMV line, farmers at the agricultural gala, Afghan Uber drivers, fans at a college basketball game and congregants at local churches and the Islamic Center. They reached longtime locals, the recently arrived Burmese refugees and the Bosnian refugees who had arrived in the early 1990s. The Bowling Green Daily News pitched in by creating a mock issue from the year 2050, which was hand-delivered at 5 a.m. by a crew of volunteers.

The city and county administration went all in. Doug Gorman, the judge executive of Warren County, a Republican and the highest elected official in the region, appeared on T.V., on the radio and at events promising residents that their elected officials would listen to what they had to say.

"My perspective is growth can either happen to us, or it can happen for us," I heard Gorman say repeatedly.

The multiplicity of views in Bowling Green — both individual and collective — were reflected on Polis. This happened because residents weren't choosing between preset options. Instead, they were sharing their own visions for the city's future and voting on each other's contributions — from what they valued in community life to what they hoped local leaders might address.

Take two issues that emerged as salient to residents: more locally-sourced food options — meaning more farm-to-table restaurants, farmers markets and farm-based tourism — and allowing drag shows in public spaces. Locally-sourced food brought people together. Drag shows divided them. The most common stance was supporting both. But nearly as many favored locally-sourced food while opposing drag shows. Smaller groups opposed both, supported drag shows while opposing farm-to-table food, or didn't feel strongly about one or both issues. Every possible combination existed. Knowing someone's stance on local food gave you no information about their views on drag shows. People were not following a progressive or conservative script.

And amid the multiplicity, shared priorities emerged: farm-to-table restaurants and year-round farmers' markets among them, but also protected farmland and support for small businesses. More green spaces and a well-maintained historic district. More social services, particularly for the elderly. More child care, venues for family activities, better schools and vocational training — especially in trades like electrical, plumbing and carpentry. More affordable housing, with stricter oversight of developers and incentives to reuse vacant buildings. More bike lanes, an enhanced bus system and a stop on the Amtrak line. More jobs that pay a living wage.

Alongside all this, there were sharp disagreements about LGBTQ rights, about immigration, about who the town was for, and who it was not — statements that, when mapped, clustered with discussions about the role of churches in the community (issues Bowling Green will have to grapple with outside of Polis).

City and county leaders are now using these and other insights — drawn from nearly 8,000 perspectives and over a million votes — to develop a comprehensive plan expected to be ready in 2027\. Ben Peterson, who leads the City-County Planning Commission, told me that hearing from the larger community gave them "the confidence for having the right conversations" with officials and developers alike. Unprompted, he noted that the amount of consensus surprised him.

Zohran Mamdani won New York City not just by having strong opinions, but by finding common ground across divides. Governing will require expanding that common ground across neighborhoods, across boroughs, across countless competing priorities.

The city could launch a pilot within the first 100 days on any mayoral priority — housing, child care, public safety or city-owned supermarkets. For example, CUNY's Brooklyn College used Polis during the pandemic to support food pantries — identifying what the community most needed, who needed it most and how to connect resources like neighborhood fridges and local gardens.

Imagine the Office of Mass Engagement using this approach to augment the [Rental Ripoff Hearings to be held in every borough:](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/rental-ripoff?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) engaging tenants, landlords, housing advocates and developers to find where even divided stakeholders agree.

City Council members could deploy Polis in their own districts to understand constituent priorities, inform legislative decisions or find common ground on local issues. This would complement participatory budgeting programs, which give residents decision-making power over capital projects like playground upgrades and library renovations.

Participatory democracy can be tricky — any serious attempt to open new channels for direct public engagement upsets existing power structures. But as has been widely reported, Mamdani's listening event felt different. The participants gave it their all. They didn't come simply to be heard or to blow off steam; each came to help their mayor make policy. The Office of Mass Engagement can build on this momentum, helping build a real listening infrastructure that transforms how the city governs.

If individuals contain multitudes, cities do too — and so must the democracies that govern them.
### An Underutilized Tool in the Fight for Good Government
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-department-of-investigation-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:45.000Z
Very few mayors love the city’s Department of Investigation. There are understandable reasons for this. When the department makes headlines, it is rarely good news for the mayor. For example, in recent years, the Department of Investigation (DOI) in New York City has played a major role in the explosive investigations of Mayor Eric Adams and his top aides for corruption.

Despite the potential that DOI could train its sights on his administration, Mayor Zohran Mamdani should actively seek to bolster DOI’s independence. A reimagined DOI would not only be very good for New York; it can become a model for how the federal government can reinvent the role of inspectors general going forward.

At the federal level, IGs prevent and combat fraud, waste and abuse through audits, investigations and recommendations. IGs are appointed by the president, but report to both the president and Congress. Their removal requires prior notice to Congress. Historically, IGs have not been subject to turnover during changes of administration.

Right now, federal IGs face an existential threat.

In January 2025, President Trump [took the unprecedented step of firing](https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/contributors/2025/02/07/inspectors-general-independence-trump-firing/78253578007/?gnt-cfr=1&gca-cat=p&gca-uir=true&gca-epti=z112828p000150c000150d00----v112828b0046xxd004665&gca-ft=270&gca-ds=sophi&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 17 IGs en masse at the end of the first week of his second term in office. And when the U.S. Agency for International Development IG appropriately exercised his jurisdiction by publicly reporting on the negative effects of freezing funding and mass firing at that agency, [the president retaliated by firing him as well](https://ig.ny.gov/news/hill-opinion-retaliatory-firing-usaids-inspector-general-travesty?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Subsequently, Trump has [appointed](https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5277564-white-house-inspector-general-nominees/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) IGs with records of ethical lapses and political partisanship, leading many to question their independence. All this has left accountability and oversight of federal agencies in shambles.

New York City can write a different story. [Under the New York City Charter](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCcharter/0-0-0-2399?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), DOI — led by an official appointed by the mayor with consent of the City Council — is charged with making any investigation directed by the mayor or Council as well as any study or investigation which the DOI commissioner believes to be “in the best interests of the city.” The Charter also mandates DOI’s specific investigative responsibilities for three high-profile city agencies — the police department, the Department of Correction and the New York City Housing Authority. All City department IGs report to DOI.

DOI has often played a primary role in the criminal investigation of municipal corruption cases. The agency has subpoena power and a staff that includes criminal investigators. [In 2024, DOI made 370 arrests and 498 referrals](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/press-releases/2025/March/12CYend2024.03.06.2025FINAL.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for criminal prosecution. 

Crucially, in recent years, DOI has maintained its independence even as it helped lead criminal investigations of the mayor that it reported to.

Before the Trump Justice Department withdrew the prosecution, Eric Adams was the first New York City mayor in over 150 years to be indicted while in office. That was in no small part due to the dogged investigations of DOI, led by then-[Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber. Strauber joined with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the FBI in announcing the indictment](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/new-york-city-mayor-eric-adams-charged-bribery-and-campaign-finance-offenses?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). U.S. Attorney Williams specifically praised the outstanding work of DOI in the case and Commissioner Strauber noted that DOI’s “unique access to City records and expertise in matters of City government make us a critical partner” in the investigation.

According to Strauber, [at no time was the independence of DOI under threat](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/01/eric-adams-appointee-highlights-unprecedented-ethics-problems-in-city-hall-00321530?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This was a remarkable testament to DOI’s independence, and it stands in stark contrast to the state of federal IGs under Trump.

In prior administrations, DOI’s independence has been questioned. 

Mayor Rudy Giuliani appointed a long-time friend, Howard Wilson, as his first DOI commissioner. DOI was removed from an investigation into the award of $43 million in city contracts after [federal authorities said](https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/13/nyregion/mayor-moves-an-ally-to-schools-post.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the inquiry, which had reached into the mayor’s cabinet, had been put at risk because Wilson had briefed Giuliani on the investigation’s progress.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s initial appointment to DOI, Mark Peters, was denounced because Peters had [previously served as de Blasio's campaign treasurer](https://www.nydailynews.com/2014/01/18/mayor-de-blasio-nominates-mark-peters-to-head-department-of-investigations/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). De Blasio [eventually fired Peters](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/nyregion/mark-peters-de-blasio-doi.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) after a damning investigation of his conduct at DOI — but also after the agency had issued a series of critical reports of the administration. The Peters case is an interesting one — it raised concerns about independence based on both the prior relationship of the commissioner and mayor and the removal of a commissioner after DOI fulfilled its oversight role.

Rather than relying on mayors and DOI commissioners to do the right thing, Mayor Mamdani and the Council should take strong steps to enhance DOI’s structural independence.

Right now, the City Council must confirm the DOI Commissioner, and the mayor can only remove the commissioner after a public statement of cause. Those are essential features safeguarding DOI’s right to act as it sees fit. But a series of additional guardrails could further guarantee the agency’s independence. 

DOI commissioners could be appointed for a fixed term that does not overlap with the mayor’s term. City Council review could be required before any removal takes place. In the event of a vacancy in the commissioner’s office, it should be filled by a chief deputy who was also subject to City Council approval.

Beyond that, the Mayor and Council and DOI leadership should reimagine and reinvent DOI’s role so it does more to make city government honest, efficient, effective and fair. This would be aligned with DOI’s broad powers delineated in the City Charter, which go beyond the investigation of corruption to include “the affairs, functions, accounts, methods, personnel or efficiency of any agency.”

First*,* DOI should **focus on making City government work for those who need it most**. Pervasive economic inequality and the affordability crisis have eroded confidence in government at all levels. DOI should look hard at where the process seems rigged against the interests of low-income and working-class New Yorkers.

A few examples:

The Rent Guidelines Board is responsible for setting rent increases for rent-stabilized apartments based, in part, on increases in landlord cost. For years, tenants have questioned the validity of this price increase data — which is self-reported — and have argued that the price index of operating costs (PIOC) is “[one-sided](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/nyregion/06rent.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).” DOI could use its full investigative powers — including subpoena power — to assess the PIOC’s validity as part of the debate over a rent freeze.

There is a 50 year history of fraud and corruption related to City leases for child care facilities. In 1976, City daycare leases were the subject of a grand jury investigation and were [“one of the biggest giveaways in the history of the city.”](https://www.nytimes.com/1976/06/04/archives/new-jersey-pages-morgenthau-investigating-leasing-of-daycare-units.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) A DOI investigation of current daycare center leases could detail how to minimize taxpayer cost and ensure that any move to universal childcare is protected from similar corruption.

*Second,* DOI should **support effective government**. While the agency should never hold back on investigations or audits finding fraud, waste and abuse, it should simultaneously speak with an equally loud, clear voice when government is working effectively and efficiently and, perhaps more importantly, when failures are due to policy decisions rather than malfeasance or misadministration.

For instance, cuts in federal SNAP funding will reduce the affordability of food for the [roughly 1.8 million city residents who currently receive benefits every month](https://www.osc.ny.gov/reports/budget/fed-funding-ny/nutritional-assistance?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The Trump administration and congressional Republicans justified work requirements and a shift in administrative costs to states and local governments as ways to reduce or prevent fraud in the program. A DOI investigation could independently assess the fraud risk and determine the effect of SNAP cuts on New Yorkers’ access to needed benefits. 

*Third,* DOI should **put the public back into public integrity**. This means connecting productively with ordinary New Yorkers to help identify and combat potential government malfeasance. The City Charter already [requires DOI](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCcharter/0-0-0-2399?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to “conduct annual outreach campaigns to educate the public on forms of government corruption, fraud, and waste, and provide information regarding how the public can submit complaints to the department.” This should be done with much more vigor and imagination.

[The City of Chicago Inspector General](https://igchicago.org/information-portal/data-dashboards/community-engagement/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), for example, uses community engagement as one of its key metrics, tracking participation in community events to “listen to community concerns, talk about our work, and even initiate intakes for complaints or suggestions to make city government better.”

And [the New York City Comptroller](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/comptrollers-office-kicks-off-new-resident-powered-audit-process-with-survey-and-roundtables-of-nycha-residents/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), along with other audit agencies, has used public engagement as a means of both determining areas of focus and methodology for its audits.

*Finally,* **DOI should focus more intensively on results**.The true test of effective oversight is whether the work of the watchdog produces better government — less fraud, waste, abuse and corruption. The measure of effective oversight is not the number of audits or investigations, but the impact that those efforts have. Repeated investigations of an area of government may lead to multiple arrests and indictments. But if those investigations don’t also lead to programmatic reforms that prevent corruption and improve performance, oversight has not really succeeded.
### Too Cold for New York City’s Streets
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/explained-what-is-involuntary-removal-outdoor-deaths-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:21.000Z
[](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?display=page&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vitalcitynyc.org%2Farticles%2Fexplained-what-is-involuntary-removal-outdoor-deaths-nyc)[](http://www.twitter.com/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vitalcitynyc.org%2Farticles%2Fexplained-what-is-involuntary-removal-outdoor-deaths-nyc&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vitalcitynyc.org%2Farticles%2Fexplained-what-is-involuntary-removal-outdoor-deaths-nyc&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

*New York is enduring its coldest stretch in years, with temperatures set to plunge again this coming weekend. On Wednesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani reported that 17 people have died outdoors during the freeze, including three from overdoses and one from unknown causes. (To compare these death totals to those in previous years, see* [*here*](https://x.com/nicolegelinas/status/2016639896941715924?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.) He said the City has placed more than 1,100 people in shelter, opened over 100 new low-barrier Safe Haven beds in Lower Manhattan and involuntarily removed 20 people from the streets.*

*Those numbers prompt obvious questions. Is 20 involuntary removals a lot or a little? What does involuntary removal actually mean, and who has the authority to do it? Why can't the City simply bring everyone inside when temperatures turn deadly? And what, if any, is the role of Mamdani's approach to homeless encampments?*

*The answers are more complicated than most people realize.*

**As a general matter, what legal authority does the City have to remove someone from a public place against their will?**

Two sections of the state's Mental Hygiene Law govern the great bulk of involuntary removal from sidewalks, parks and the like. [Section 9.41](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.41?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) authorizes police officers to make the call. [Section 9.58](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.58?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) extends that authority to specially trained and certified clinicians. In both cases, involuntary removal means one thing only: transport to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation. A psychiatrist then has up to 72 hours to determine whether the person should be admitted to inpatient care.

Separate and apart from this, there's authority to uproot homeless encampments — which we'll get to in a bit.

**What has to be true before someone can be removed involuntarily?**

Two boxes must be checked for removals under the Mental Hygiene Law. First, the person must appear to be mentally ill — showing symptoms like incoherence, delusions, hallucinations or catatonia. This isn't a clinical diagnosis; that comes later. Second, the person must be engaging in conduct likely to result in serious physical harm to themselves or others.

**Who actually performs these removals?**

Police are involved in 100% of involuntary removals — because by definition, force is required. The only question is who makes the decision to involuntarily remove an individual. Monthly involuntary transports [averaged 652 in 2024 and 745 in 2025](https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiZWMwZGU5YTMtOTFiZS00NTYxLWIwMjItZDBkOTgwZDU5YzdkIiwidCI6IjM1YzgyODE2LTZjNTYtNDQzYi1iYWY2LTgzMTIxNjNjYWRjMSJ9&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (through October, reflecting the latest data available).

Even when it's a clinician who has made the call to involuntarily transport an individual to the hospital, cops still do the physical work of getting the person onto the ambulance. No one expects nurses or social workers to physically compel someone who refuses to go. Involuntary removal, by definition, requires police involvement.

**What changes when the temperature drops?**

The involuntary removal criteria remain the same. But extreme cold changes how those criteria apply in practice.

At 32 degrees, someone who appears well-bundled may not meet the threshold for danger to self. At 10 degrees, the calculus shifts dramatically. Refusing all efforts to come inside and insisting on sleeping outdoors in single-digit temperatures demonstrates both an extreme lack of awareness of danger and exposure to objectively life-threatening conditions. As a result, the refusal itself might constitute conduct likely to result in serious harm.

**Where do people go after an involuntary removal?**

People are brought to hospitals. There's no such thing as involuntary removal to a shelter or warming center — those facilities aren't locked and can't by law hold anyone against their will. So for those who aren't thought to be mentally ill and a danger to themselves or others, voluntary acceptance of shelter remains the goal. Safe Haven or stabilization beds — there are about 4,000 of these low-barrier-to-entry shelters, with fewer rules than traditional shelters — and shelters with single rooms are typically the most effective sell for people thinking clearly enough to weigh their options.

**When someone is brought to the hospital, what happens?**

The person can be held for up to 72 hours while psychiatrists determine whether they meet criteria for involuntary admission to the inpatient unit. Admission (sometimes initially on an "emergency" 15-day basis under [Section 9.39](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.39?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and sometimes for longer under [Section 9.27](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.27?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) requires a more definitive finding of mental illness than was required for removal, plus affirmation of the finding of danger to self or others, by a psychiatrist (under 9.39) or by two psychiatrists or one psychiatrist and a psychiatric nurse practitioner (under 9.27).

Many people never make it past the psychiatric emergency room. This is often because behavior that on the street appeared to be psychosis turns out to be the temporary effect of substances the person ingested. Once those effects wear off, if there's no apparent underlying mental illness, there is no basis to hold the person.

Mayor Mamdani wants to limit police engagement with seriously mentally ill individuals and has said he believes in involuntary commitment [only as a "last resort."](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/zohran-mamdani-talks-public-safety) It's as yet unclear how this posture will become policy and if so, how that might affect the determination of who gets brought into hospitals.

**The Mamdani administration reported 20 involuntary removals during the recent cold snap. Is that a meaningful number?**

Context matters. The City isn't canvassing every block looking for unsheltered people to bring in. Instead, the approach is more targeted: Outreach teams run by nonprofit groups focus on people who are known to be unhoused, typically at familiar locations, while police and sometimes EMS respond to reports from the public received via 911 and 311\. Many people encountered during extreme cold do agree to come inside, but many still refuse.

A more aggressive street-by-street canvassing operation would likely yield far more — but would require police manpower the City has not deployed for this purpose.

**Is ideological opposition to involuntary removal resulting in leaving people on the street during dangerously cold conditions?**

The ideological divide over involuntary removal is real. But that divide concerns cases where harm is not imminent — situations where mental illness is causing deterioration but has not yet created an emergency.

During extreme cold, imminence is not in question. Someone refusing to come inside at 10 degrees faces obvious, immediate, life-threatening danger. The limiting factor is not ideology about when to intervene — it is operational capacity to find everyone who needs help.

**Does the Mamdani administration believe involuntary removals can happen without police?**

The preference for non-police responses to mental health calls contemplates situations that will not result in involuntary removal — encounters where a skilled clinician can build rapport and convince someone to come inside voluntarily. When force is necessary, police are necessary. That is definitional, and no serious participant in this debate believes otherwise.

**Mamdani has said none of those who have frozen to death have been in encampments. What exactly is an "encampment," and how does the term matter in this context?**

An encampment is a structure — makeshift or otherwise — that someone builds around themselves on the street. A sleeping bag does not qualify. A shopping cart full of belongings does not qualify. The functional test under [city regulations](https://www.scribd.com/document/595747623/Encampments-Cleanups-DHS-PB-2022-009?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): If someone has more possessions than they can physically carry away, they have established an encampment. They have permanently affixed themselves to that location, demonstrating intent to make it a home. The definition is not based on group size.

Many of the people who've died outside in this extreme cold were likely unhoused and could well have been mentally unstable. The question of whether they were in an encampment just speaks to whether they tried to claim a particular swath of public space as their "home." According to the City, that wasn't the case with these deaths.

**What was the encampment policy under Adams?**

Zero tolerance. Any reported encampment triggered a protocol: approximately 10 days' notice, followed by a scheduled sweep. On the designated date, a team including NYPD, Sanitation and DHS outreach workers would arrive. The structure would be dismantled and removed. Outreach workers and other staffers would offer shelter at that moment, typically while carting an individual's possessions away.

**What's changing under Mamdani?**

The dismantling stops. Outreach continues — teams will still engage with people in encampments and try to connect them with services and housing. But without a scheduled sweep, there's no definitive end date forcing the issue. Some who work closely with the homeless say [encampment sweeps and offers of service can and should complement one another](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/unhoused-new-yorkers-randy-santos-mamdani).

**What should you do if you see a person on the street who seems unable to care for themselves during a period of extreme cold?**

When a life might be in danger, the best course of action is to call 911\. During Code Blue, calls to 311 about vulnerable individuals on the streets are supposed to get routed to 911\. Then, if the system works as designed, both police and EMS respond. The officer can make an involuntary removal determination on the spot if the person refuses to come inside.

**What about someone who seems mentally unstable but isn't facing weather danger — agitated, incoherent?**

Verbal threats or menacing behavior warrant a 911 call. Someone sitting and talking to themselves should trigger a call to 311\. Response times will be slower, but someone will come.
### Hochul’s Going Nuclear. Environmentalists Should Cheer Her On.
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/hochul-nuclear-energy-climate-new-york/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:27.000Z
It's every bit as bold as congestion pricing. Perhaps bolder.

Kathy Hochul didn't just say nice things about nuclear power in her [State of the State address](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/remarks-prepared-governor-hochul-delivers-2026-state-state-address?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). She pledged her troth to it.

Directing the New York Power Authority to undertake a gigawatt (1 GW, or 1,000 megawatts) of new nuclear electricity capacity, as the governor did [last summer](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-directs-new-york-power-authority-develop-zero-emission-advanced-nuclear-energy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), was one thing. Her promise now to augment that with 4 GW of privately financed and managed reactors makes for a whole new ballgame — and, paradoxically, one that may prove easier to sell to wary New Yorkers.

Details are sketchy, but the possible benefits are tantalizing. By my calculations, five gigawatts of new nuclear power would be enough juice to dispense with half of the entire output of the state's gas-fired electric plants — and their malignant carbon emissions. (See endnote for link to this and other calculations.) The nukes would also help fortify the grid against blackouts, with none of the intrusive and costly battery storage banks required for equivalent solar and wind capacity.

Gov. Hochul's initiative is well-timed. The state has done next to nothing to replace the enormous [carbon-free electricity supply it discarded](https://www.carbontax.org/blog/2025/04/30/5-years-on-the-indian-point-disaster-is-its-shutdown/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) when it closed down Indian Point's two 1 GW reactors five years ago. Factoring in nuclear power's minuscule carbon footprint along with the reactors' late-life technical excellence, those 2 GW were providing a larger carbon benefit than the state obtained from all of its wind turbines, rooftop panels and solar farms combined in 2024, the most recent full year with available data.

Lower carbon pollution and a "reliability backbone," to use the governor's term, are the most palpable benefits from going big on nuclear, along with well-paying union jobs and, quite possibly, lower electric rates and bills compared to a fossil-dependent grid subject to [increasingly volatile gas prices](https://www.nyiso.com/documents/d/guest/costs-behind-rising-electricity-prices-whitepaper?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Here's another less well-understood benefit from Hochul's nukes: leveraging more wind and solar.

That's right. Getting those five nuclear gigawatts into the energy pipeline will, I believe, make it harder for the bad hombres in Washington to cancel indispensable renewable energy ventures like Empire Wind, the Atlantic Ocean complex off Nassau County's south shore that a federal judge this month [ordered](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/climate/empire-wind-court-ruling.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the Trump administration to let construction proceed on. By reframing green energy as nuclear and renewables — not just wind and solar, which still have NIMBY opponents as well as detractors on the right — Hochul is fashioning New York into a state of can-do climate hard hats that Trump messes with at his peril.

## **Nukes are the grid's energizer bunnies**

Key to understanding these benefits is opening our eyes to the sea change in the operating record of the country's 90-odd nuclear power plants.

Since 2000 — a full quarter-century ago — U.S. nukes have collectively averaged 90% "capacity factor" (a power plant's electricity output relative to its maximum possible output). That's a far cry from nuclear's early decades, when the average reactor's output rate was stuck at around 60%. It's as if underachieving Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe (lifetime OPS: .662) blossomed into Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio (OPS: .977).

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27383785?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

The change is profound. Nationwide, reactor downtimes have shrunk fourfold, from a 40% out-of-service rate to just 10% — mostly routine maintenance in times of low demand. That allows for less back-up capacity as well as less runtime needed for the grid's polluting fossil-fuel generators. The vastly improved reactor performance has also granted a new lease on life for a technology that, to many, couldn't be trusted to be a safe neighbor.

## **Why not just wind and solar?**

Still, you could ask: Can't New York decarbonize its grid and keep it humming with solar and wind alone? The solar tribune Bill McKibben thinks so, as do legions of New Yorkers who drank deep from his 2025 book ["Here Comes the Sun"](https://wwnorton.com/books/Here-Comes-the-Sun/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and are already mobilizing against Hochul's new nukes. Instead, they say, New York should focus on somehow ratcheting up the state's wind and solar supply two- or threefold. (That's what it would take to match the climate value of the governor's 5 GW of nukes. Note that additional hydro-power from Quebec is no panacea; the nearly complete [Champlain-Hudson Power Express](https://chpexpress.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) transmission line from Quebec to downstate New York will provide only around [1 GW worth of new nuclear electricity](https://www.carbontax.org/blog/2025/04/30/5-years-on-the-indian-point-disaster-is-its-shutdown/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) running at high capacity factor, and is a one-off, besides.)

Yet it should be plain as day that the quickest and cheapest way to decarbonize the state's grid is to build nuclear and renewables *in tandem* rather than going all-in on just one. If that's not obvious enough, just look under the hood of the all-renewables vision propounded by McKibben's West Coast energy guru Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor with a [large public-facing profile](https://www.allamericanspeakers.com/celebritytalentbios/Mark+Z.+Jacobson/386877?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

The mainstay of Jacobson's [energy sketch for New York](https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/21-USStates-PDFs/21-WWS-NewYork.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is 67 GW of offshore wind turbine capacity. That's more than 30 times the capacity of the Empire Wind I and II projects that Trump tried to thwart before Hochul seemed to get him to change his mind (in [a wise but controversial deal](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/kathy-hochul-nese-pipeline-empire-wind) in which she acceded to a natural gas pipeline). Permitting and erecting the equivalent of 30 more such projects — a venture necessitating 4,500 giant turbines — feels not just daunting but quixotic. Ditto, the 17-fold increase in solar farms and roofs that Jacobson's scenario requires as well.

**Going big on nuclear upends the energy debate**

True, undertaking new reactors is also no minor feat, largely on account of costs — I'll get to that in a moment. But it's worth considering how Hochul's gambit could recast not just New York climate and energy discourse but our nuclear power debate as well.

In the wake of Hochul's play, the nuclear debate isn't whether a lone large reactor (or an equivalent brace of smaller ones) can cut carbon emissions. It's whether a state grid anchored by nuclear power and supplemented by renewables can outperform a solar-plus-wind-plus-hydro electricity system alone.

Moreover, by setting an ambitious goal, New York State is no longer relegating the nuclear option to standalone, hence politically vulnerable, reactors but is pursuing just the type of holistic cost-reducing strategy that undergirded France's early successful nuclear program and underlies South Korea's current one. In addition, the proposal's big reach could shine a spotlight on reactor benefits and finally turn the page from long-expired nuclear myths.

**The "Vogtle" fiasco isn't destiny**

For decades, investments in U.S. nuclear power were stymied by memories of a 1979 slow-drip reactor meltdown that turned [a Jane Fonda movie released just days earlier](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078966/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) into prophecy, petrified opinion-makers in New York and decision-makers in Washington, heaped the nuclear industry with ridicule and soon saddled it with budget-breaking design changes.

But the Three Mile Island calamity dates back almost half-a-century, a generation or two before Bitcoin, iPhones and Instagram. In the years since then, U.S. reactors have racked up nearly 20 times as much operating experience — every bit of it trouble-free. Today's scary scenario, endlessly flogged by opponents, concerns a *financial* meltdown at [Vogtle 3 & 4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle%5FElectric%5FGenerating%5FPlant?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a grossly over-budget nuclear construction project in Georgia. Those overruns bankrupted the venerable Westinghouse Electric Corp. and are today burdening electricity consumers across Georgia — even as the plant itself [dependably churns out](https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-reactor-database/details/Vogtle-4?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) gobs of carbon-free power.

To detractors, Vogtle, the sole brand-new reactor venture to reach fruition in the United States in three decades, is proof positive that dreams of nuclear unaffordability invariably become nightmares. But reactor boosters have been busy dissecting the plant's torturous construction for lessons learned, as in ["Understanding Vogtle,"](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyouH0mkPJXHR0hKW%5FiLkIBCsu5D5xO2b&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) an epic YouTube conversation between nuclear savant James Krellenstein and podcaster Chris Keefer. (Think "Marty Supreme" for reactor builders, except longer.)

I researched nuclear power cost escalation exhaustively in the 1970s and 1980s, publishing [a book](https://www.komanoff.net/nuclear%5Fpower/PPCE%5FSummary.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the subject and representing officials in 15 states whose job it was to make investors pay for the overruns. I consider Vogtle not a harbinger but the death rattle of a cost virus that afflicted the U.S. nuclear sector even before Three Mile Island.

Many years ago, what inflated nuclear costs was "the environment of constant change," as a prominent industry rep [termed the regulatory churn](https://inis.iaea.org/records/bzpza-3pn83/preview/10421637.pdf?include%5Fdeleted=0&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) arising from one reactor mishap after another. In contrast, costs at Vogtle skyrocketed largely due to the singular blunder of starting major construction [before finishing the design](https://www.publicpowerreview.org/p/debunking-the-latest-antinuclear?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Additional Vogtle cost culprits also seem unlikely to pop up elsewhere: the COVID-19 pandemic hit midway through, atrophying supply chains that are now reviving globally.

## **Positive learning vs. negative**

Differences of opinion on future reactor costs turn on disagreements over *learning*. Nuclear detractors look at increasing past costs and [see only "negative learning"](https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/web.sas.upenn.edu/dist/0/896/files/2026/01/NY-Nuclear-Report-1-8-26-FINAL.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — costs inexorably rising as more reactors are built. Advocates see those same increases not as inherent in fission as a technology but the result of problems — project mismanagement, design immaturity, shriveled supply chains — that can be understood and fixed.

But won't regulatory turbulence re-emerge, destroying the design stability needed to learn from each reactor project to the next? I consider that improbable, not because of potentially supine federal regulation but because of the competence demonstrated by U.S. nuclear builders and operators in the past quarter-century — and, over time, the exhaustion of the pool of mistakes that in the last century emerged one by one in construction or operation, feeding regulatory churn.

One additional factor: The antinuclear power movement that once could force action on every reactor document's undotted "i" or uncrossed "t" has shrunk. Anti-nuke salience appears to have dwindled as Three Mile Island (and Chernobyl and Fukushima, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki) have receded; as nuclear power's immense climate benefit comes to trump its hypothetical drawbacks; and as the vast quantity of electricity required to electrify everything from cars and trucks to making steel and heating homes outpaces even the fabulous progress in renewable energy and grid management.

Gov. Hochul is betting that bucking the remnants of antinuke sentiment can deliver her and New York State a big win. Staking the state's energy future to a large new block of nuclear power is a bold environmental and economic gambit. So too was championing congestion pricing. She prevailed in that skirmish. Her chances here look good as well.

*You can download a brief Excel sheet with the author's electricity and carbon comparisons* [*here*](https://www.komanoff.net/nuclear%5Fpower/Vital%5FCity%5Fnuke%5Fcalculations.xlsx?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*
### Where Juvenile Justice Goes From Here
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/juvenile-justice-close-to-home-nyc-results/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:46.000Z
With a [new lawsuit](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/nyregion/new-york-children-solitary-confinement.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) alleging unconstitutional conditions in state youth facilities, calls to try more children as adults and [more than $1 billion](https://imprintnews.org/top-stories/new-yorks-raise-the-age-fund-receives-more-money-while-hundreds-of-millions-remain-unspent/249024?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) sitting unused in a state fund to launch programs to help rehabilitate young people to which New York City has been denied access, youth justice is at an inflection point in the state and city. At such times, it's crucial that policymakers not only improve public safety, but treat young people humanely. When the City and State confronted a similar watershed moment 15 years ago, the changes we enacted — reducing youth incarceration and funding a raft of rehabilitative programs — reduced youth crime and improved decency in ways that reverberate to this day.

## An inflection point

I know an inflection point when I see one. Around 2010, it was a watershed time for youth justice in New York. I was the City's Probation Commissioner then, and my colleagues and I had to wrestle with decisions not unlike those confronting the city and state today.

In 2009, like today, the state's Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) had been sued — back then by the U.S. Department of Justice and Legal Aid — after the [2007 in-custody death](https://www.nyclu.org/press-release/childs-death-raises-concerns-about-procedures-and-oversight-ny-prison-facility-boys?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of a 15-year-old boy from the Bronx; he'd been killed in a harsh takedown by staff in the notorious Tryon Residential Center outside Albany. That happened within a year of a [scathing ACLU/Human Rights Watch report](https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/girls-abused-new-yorks-juvenile-prisons-say-aclu-and-human-rights-watch?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the girls' portion of Tryon. The same month that OCFS was sued, a gubernatorial task force [found](https://vera-institute.files.svdcdn.com/production/downloads/publications/Charting-a-new-course-A-blueprint-for-transforming-juvenile-justice-in-New-York-State.pdf?dm=1647370720&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), "New York's juvenile justice system is failing in its mission to nurture and care for young people in state custody … \[damaging\] the future prospects of these young people, wast\[ing\] millions of taxpayer dollars, and violat\[ing\] the fundamental principles of positive youth development." DOJ's investigation [revealed](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/nyregion/25juvenile.html?scp=1&sq=4%20youth%20prisons%20in%20new%20york&st=cse&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that "Anything from sneaking an extra cookie to initiating a fistfight may result in a full prone restraint with handcuffs … \[leading\] to an alarming number of serious injuries to youth, including concussions, broken or knocked-out teeth, and spiral fractures." OCFS Commissioner Gladys Carrión called her facilities ["toxic"](https://www.villagevoice.com/shutting-upstate-jails-for-city-kids-has-made-a-fiery-bronx-bureaucrat-a-host-of-enemies/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and proceeded to close dozens of them and increase funding for community alternatives.

The facilities weren't just dangerous; they were patently failing at their core mission of rehabilitating young people. One 2010 state [report](https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/ofpa/jj/documents/2010-jjagreport.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) revealed an 89% recidivism rate for boys released from OCFS facilities.

The coup de grâce for city leaders was the extraordinary, and growing, cost of youth confinement, which city and county leaders shared equally with the State. The cost per child per year to purchase brutality and an 89% recidivism rate was around [$260,000](https://www.aecf.org/blog/new-york-city-youth-to-be-shifted-out-of-state-run-facilities?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Fortunately, those crises spurred policy ingenuity. In December 2010, Mayor Michael Bloomberg toured an OCFS facility with Reverend Al Sharpton and announced a bold proposal. "The current system is not helping kids, it isn't helping taxpayers and it isn't helping public safety," he said. "\[W\]e need to stop sending kids miles away from their families and communities. And, instead, authorize the city to fully operate its own juvenile system here in the five boroughs."

With that, a policy known as Close to Home was born. The Mayor tasked his staff to work with the governor's office to draft a bill transferring young people and resources from state to city custody, and had us initiate an intensive planning process to design a system that would remove hundreds of young people from harmful, distant state facilities into a City-run system.

The [Dispositional Reform Steering Committee](https://www.nyc.gov/html/prob/downloads/pdf/reinvisioning%5Fjuvenile%5Fjustice%5Freport%5Frevised.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), co-chaired by Administration for Children's Services Commissioner Ron Richter and me, included representation from the City Council and the Mayor's Office, along with judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, police, education specialists, mental health professionals and advocates. With consultation from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Vera Institute of Justice and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, we conducted a deep dive into the City's youth justice data and looked at best practices nationally, even conducting site visits with our state counterparts.

On the state side, OCFS provided hands-on oversight to ensure program fidelity and quality. OCFS staff supported local providers through training, coaching and technical assistance, helping them adopt best practices in youth-centered, community-based care. The Mayor's Office also regularly convened stakeholders to problem-solve implementation issues alongside OCFS' watchdog role.

In the end, when the [Close to Home Act](https://ocfs.ny.gov/programs/rehab/close-to-home/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (C2H) passed in 2012, the State and City amassed huge savings from no longer sending kids to state custody, *plus* [$31 million](https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/funding-added-to-increase-security-at-close-to-home-juvenile-placement-facilities-march-2016.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) annually that the State transferred to the City, generated by savings from having fewer city kids in OCFS facilities. The City used those savings to provide intensive wraparound services near the communities where young people live. The Probation Department also adopted a new risk assessment instrument and state-of-the-art structured decision-making model that judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys had input into.

The Administration for Children's Services designed and procured 300 residential beds from 11 different nonprofit organizations in 37 small, homelike facilities in or near the five boroughs. Because we provided judges with expanded options in lieu of commitment, the city was able to reduce by two-thirds the number of youth placed out of home, so most of those beds were never filled.

All of that is what policy reform should look like when it's well thought out. There's coordination between agencies and between the City and State, not haphazard, headline-chasing "wins" that ultimately yield no lasting victories.

The [outcomes of Close to Home were strong](https://justicelab.columbia.edu/sites/justicelab.columbia.edu/files/content/Justice%20Lab%20C2H%20Case%20Study%20FINAL%20%28Web%20Version%29%20%281%29.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=State%20OCFS%20juvenile%20facilities.,of%20conditions%20in%20OCFS%20facilities.). Within a few years, the city's juvenile courts placed no young people in state custody, a remarkable achievement for the nation's largest city. By 2016, as outcome data started to roll in, 91% of C2H youth had passed their academic classes; 82% had transitioned from C2H to a parent, other family member or guardian; and 91% were enrolled in community-based programs. The decline in the [city's juvenile arrest rates accelerated](https://justicelab.columbia.edu/sites/justicelab.columbia.edu/files/content/Justice%20Lab%20C2H%20Case%20Study%20FINAL%20%28Web%20Version%29%20%281%29.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from -24% in the four years preceding C2H's passage to -52% in the four years after its enactment. And of youth released from C2H placements, only 8% had their aftercare revoked for violations of the terms of their release, including rearrests.

## Flash forward

Today, although young people make up only 11% of the violent crime arrests in New York City — down slightly from 12% in 2018 before policymakers raised the age of the state's juvenile courts so more young people were retained in the juvenile system — some have [called for trying more children as adults](https://nypost.com/2026/01/06/us-news/prosecutors-demand-changes-to-nys-raise-the-age-law-as-hochul-weighs-proposals/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Further, the Administration for Children's Services is spending [$340 million](https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/12/21/nyc-seeks-to-grow-bronx-youth-detention-center-amid-spike-in-juvenile-crime/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to expand the city's juvenile detention capacity by 48 beds.

As city and state leaders are poised to undertake expensive and harmful (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has [found](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5609a1.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that trying juveniles as adults increases their recidivism rates by 34%) solutions to perceived youth crime increases, they should look to a time of similar tumult for guidance. Here are a few takeaways from C2H's success story.

**Get the right people on the bus**

The advocates and City Council could have scuttled C2H legislation. Judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys could have refused to place kids in the new programs. The Department of Education's new school could have failed, or mental health services been inadequate. State and city negotiators could have cared more about turf than kids or public safety. Any of these would have meant more crime, worse outcomes, higher placement rates and an "F" grade for C2H.

In "Good to Great*,"* management guru James Collins recommends getting the right people on the bus as a key ingredient to elevating business and government functioning. By bringing diverse stakeholders together and keeping lines of communications open between city and state officials, we not only gained important insights into how this radical new system should function but also garnered significant buy-in from those stakeholders.

As his predecessor did with C2H, Mayor Zohran Mamdani should empanel divergent partners into a no-nonsense working group charged with the duty of examining real data (not media-generated hyperbole), costs and realistic options, to chart a course for the future of youth justice in the city that has consensus and can be implemented expeditiously.

**Follow the data and best practices (and don't forget to innovate)**

There's a need to focus on the small group of the city's young people committing a disproportionate share of very violent crimes. While it's true that there was a doubling of very serious violent juvenile crime arrests from 2018 to 2024, it's also important to [remember](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/reports/nyc-youth-crime-in-context-arrest-recidivism/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that (1) the overall proportion of youth arrests for violent crimes *dropped* slightly during this time and (2) the serious violent crime increase amounts to 334 arrests out of 1.7 million young people under age 18 in the city.

Nationally, and here in the city, there's growing progress and innovation focusing on high-risk, hard-to-reach young people. When I was Secretary of Juvenile Services in Maryland, building on research showing that gun violence is concentrated by person and place, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott launched a police-based effort to focus resources on people at the highest risk of gun violence in the most violent area in the city, West Baltimore. The University of Pennsylvania's [independent research](https://crimejusticelab.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/GVRS-Baltimore-Evaluation-Public-Summary-vFINAL.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that there was a significant decline in gun violence in that neighborhood without displacement to the rest of the city (New York City, in collaboration with John Jay College and neighborhood credible messengers, has recently launched a similarly focused community-based effort in Staten Island).

Working with grassroots credible messengers in the four jurisdictions that accounted for 80% of youth homicides in Maryland, my department mirrored that focused, resource-rich approach to youth under our supervision at highest risk of gun violence, launching [The Thrive Academy](https://djs.maryland.gov/Documents/publications/MD-DJS-Thrive-Academy-Joint-Chairmens-Report%5FFY2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In its first two years, *no participating youth* were homicide victims and four out of five had no subsequent gun arrests. UPenn will also independently evaluate Thrive.

In March, the [National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform will issue a](https://nicjr.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) report outlining several other programs that combine cognitive behavioral therapy, relentless outreach and robust support services from [Chicago](https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5303292?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), to [Oakland](https://www.air.org/resource/brief/implementation-study-findings-neighborhood-opportunity-and-accountability-board?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), to [Boston](https://rocainc.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), to [New York](https://commonjustice.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), with impressive results with "HR2" — high risk, hard to reach — youth. As a sign of how salient this population has become nationally, the report is being released on a keynote panel of the [National Conference of Juvenile and Family Court Judges](https://www.ncjfcj.org/event/2026-national-conference-on-juvenile-justice/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which is devoting a track of five additional workshops focused specifically on HR2 youth.

New York City has a strong network of organizations with deep roots in communities that work with young people who have had contact with police, including community violence intervention, mentoring and parent support services — services that work for youth and community safety. Unfortunately, this work has been chronically underfunded in New York City. Following the evidence means not only focusing on, but investing in and scaling up projects like these.

**Follow the money**

Costs to institutionalize young people are extraordinarily high and yield remarkably disappointing outcomes. The annual cost to house a youth for a year in OCFS facilities has grown to nearly [$1 million](https://justicepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Sticker%5FShock%5F2020.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). While some young people need to be in custody, confinement should be deployed parsimoniously, only after other options are exhausted.

As collaborative as the City-State work was on C2H, that relationship deteriorated badly when Bill de Blasio was mayor and Andrew Cuomo, governor. Governor Cuomo allowed C2H funding to sunset five years after it started even though the State was saving buckets of money by no longer having New York City youth in its custody. That exclusion has persisted for more than a decade, weakening one of the state's most effective youth justice models.

Worse, when state lawmakers raised the age of juvenile court jurisdiction from 16 to 18 in 2018, one of the last states in the nation to do so, *none* [of the $250 million](https://www.cityandstateny.com/opinion/2025/12/opinion-kids-are-alright/409928/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) allocated annually to help localities absorb additional youth into their youth justice systems was allocated to New York City. This exclusion has denied the city, home to the largest share of the state's court-involved young people, the resources necessary to sustain community-based responses and meet the law's goals. The expectation that the City can deliver reform without access to the same funding as every other county is both unrealistic and unjust.

The real crisis in youth justice is not these laws; it is the State's persistent failure to fund and implement them equitably.

State lawmakers need to redress this childish tiff between the governor's office and the state's largest city by fairly reallocating much of the largely unspent $1.6 billion that has accrued in that fund since Raise the Age was enacted in 2018\. Additionally, passing the proposed [Youth Justice Innovation Fund](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S643?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which would allow nonprofits to apply directly for a portion of those unspent funds, would help jump start innovation and provide much-needed services to young people.

In 2010, when the state and city were at a youth justice inflection point, we didn't panic. We governed, acting carefully, decisively and collaboratively to improve youth outcomes, public safety and decency. By contrast, bromides like adding expensive locked beds or prosecuting more kids as adults provide only temporary relief, while the ulcer continues to fester below the surface. Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani have started on a positive youth justice note, with Hochul withdrawing her support for trying more juveniles as adults. They should now build upon that to make real improvements in safety and youth wellness.
### Evaluating Mamdani’s Diagnosis of New York City’s Budget Deficit
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/eric-adams-zohran-mamdani-nyc-budget/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:22.000Z
With an air of indignation worthy of Captain Renault discovering gambling in the back room of Rick's Café, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced in a late January City Hall press conference that he was shocked to discover that New York City is facing a deep budget deficit, of approximately $12 billion between the current and upcoming fiscal years.

What is surprising about Mamdani's surprise is that New York City's dire fiscal condition has been widely known for the last year but was conveniently ignored by Mamdani and the New York City press corps during the mayoral campaign. Mamdani's close ally, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, [estimated in August 2025](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/comments-on-new-york-citys-fiscal-year-2026-adopted-budget/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that "the City will end FY 2026 with a gap of $4.2 billion (3.6% of total revenues), growing to $8.8 billion in FY 2027." The [Independent Budget Office](https://www.ibo.nyc.gov/assets/ibo/downloads/pdf/city-budget-overview/2025/2025-december-analysis-of-the-november-2025-financial-plan.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the [Citizens Budget Commission](https://cbcny.org/sites/default/files/media/files/CBCPRESENTATION%5FNYC-NYS-FY26-Briefing%5F07172025%5F0%5F0.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the [New York State Comptroller's](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-18-2026.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) office issued similar forecasts during 2025.

So how did New York City get into this position? Mamdani's explanation at his press conference was simple: the deficit was caused by a combination of "gross fiscal mismanagement" by Mayor Eric Adams and actions taken by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (before he resigned in August 2021) to take money away from New York City.

Mamdani is not entirely incorrect: Adams' budgeting practices and decisions made at the state level both played roles in contributing to the City's budget deficit. However, Mamdani ignores the larger contributors to the City's budget deficit, which he and his political allies had a direct role in creating.

At a surface level, the sources of the budget deficit were identified by newly elected City Comptroller Mark Levine in his [FY 27 Budget Preview](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/fy-2027-budget-preview/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as being attributable to the loss of nonrecurring revenue received in prior years that will not be available in FY 27 and, especially, to chronic underbudgeting of expenses by the Adams administration.

These two tables from Comptroller Levine succinctly lay out the differences in estimated budget gaps between the last budget of the Adams administration and current estimates and the specific areas of chronic underbudgeting:

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27485946?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27485654?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

But Levine's analysis does not address the *underlying* causes of the City's precarious budget condition. It is also instructive to understand why the City's financial condition is so much worse than that of New York State, which is in unusually good financial condition this year, largely because of a windfall in tax revenue.

Two main factors explain why New York State is in a better position than the City in terms of revenue. First, in 2021, New York State increased its personal income tax on high earners (who account for roughly 40% of total income tax revenue in both the City and the State), as well as modestly increasing the State corporate income tax rate, while New York City's personal income and corporate tax rates were not increased.

More importantly than the increase in tax rates, New York State benefited from the recent surge in personal income to a greater extent than New York City because a much higher percentage of the State's tax receipts come from personal income taxes (including the Pass-Through Entity Tax) and corporate income taxes than is the case for New York City. These taxes account for [nearly 80% of State tax receipts](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/finance/pdf/2025-financial-condition-report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but only for about [35% of City tax receipts](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/documents/FY-2026-Adopted-Budget-Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Although New York City's other revenue categories, such as property tax and sales tax, have also been increasing, the rate of personal income and pass-through tax revenue has grown at a higher rate, especially in the last three years, because of the booming stock market.

On the expense side, New York City engaged in the unwise practice of using one-time federal pandemic aid to fund ongoing programs, while the State mostly used that revenue to build up reserves. Rather than ending or contracting these programs when the inevitable federal funding cliff arrived, the City just substituted its own funding to keep them going.

Perhaps the most prominent example of this was the decision of Mayor Bill de Blasio to use roughly $1 billion in federal pandemic aid to greatly expand the city's 3-K early education program. When the temporary federal funding expired in fiscal year 2024, the City backfilled the spending out of its own budget. The baseline cost of 3-K in New York City is now $1.3 billion.

Similarly, the City used temporary federal pandemic aid to expand the number of child care vouchers and subsidized slots. When the funding ran out in September 2024, it created a need for close to $900 million in funding annually [to avoid taking away childcare slots](https://nysfocus.com/2025/03/27/nyc-child-care-voucher-900-million?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The City effectively held these slots hostage to negotiate additional funding from the State. Ultimately, the State provided $350 million in additional funding in the FY 2026 enacted budget, but still stuck the City with the obligation to increase its own spending for this purpose by $350 million while accepting an increased City maintenance of effort requirement for child care spending of an additional $328 million.

An even larger contributor to the City's current fiscal distress was the City Council's creation of new programs which New York City's tax base could not support. Ironically, in light of Mamdani making Adams the fall guy for the City's budget problems, Adams sought to resist a number of these expanded spending programs while Mamdani supported them.

The most expensive of these new initiatives was the expansion by the City Council of the City's rental subsidy program, known as CityFHEPS. The original objective of the program is to prevent evictions by providing taxpayer-funded rental subsidies as a last resort to prevent homelessness. The cost of the CityFHEPS program was exploding even before the City Council adopted legislation to lower these barriers to entry and, in effect, create a massive new entitlement program to rental subsidies.

As [noted by Comptroller Brad Lander in 2025](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/comments-on-new-york-citys-fiscal-year-2026-adopted-budget/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the Adams administration "estimated that expanding the eligibility rules would increase City costs by $17.2 billion over five years… \[while\] \[t\]he City Council estimated the cost of the package of laws over five years at $10.6 billion." Although the increased costs of the CityFHEPS expansion were repeatedly cited by both critics and supporters of the expansion bill, Mamdani supported the expansion while in the Assembly and pledged to implement it if elected mayor. Comptroller Levine estimates that the cost of the expanded CityFHEPS program in FY 27 will be approximately $2.5 billion, of which $2.0 billion is not reflected in the Adams administration budget. That's a significant sum, even in a budget that likely will exceed $120 billion. And as with child care slots, once awarded, the benefit will be hard to take away.

Finally, another source of the City's current budget problems involves unfunded mandates from the state. The most prominent example was the law ordering the City to slash class sizes across the board, an initiative that the Independent Budget Office estimated will ultimately require New York City to spend approximately $1.6-$1.9 billion to be in compliance, in addition to requiring capital costs — bringing new classrooms online — that have been estimated to be well in excess of $10 billion. Levine's analysis estimated that the class-size reduction will cost New York City more than $500 million in FY 27 and more than $1 billion in FY 28 and going forward.

As an assemblyman, Mamdani voted for the bill lowering class sizes and pledged to implement it as a candidate for mayor regardless of whether the State provided additional funding.

While the fiscal vise tightened, the Adams administration avoided the day of reckoning mostly by aggressive cash management — using reserves from prior years, allowing unprecedented staffing vacancy levels in City agencies (which undermined operational performance) and stretching payment terms almost beyond the breaking point with the not-for-profit sector that delivers much of the City's social services.

So while it's true that Adams' budgeting practices didn't help, neither did a series of policy choices made by Mamdani's allies and supported by Mamdani himself.

\*\*\*

What of former Gov. Cuomo's role, who Mamdani blamed for the City's budget deficit along with Mayor Adams? (Disclosure: I served in the Cuomo administration in various capacities, and served as a policy advisor in his mayoral campaign.) Mamdani claims that the city is in this fix in large part because Cuomo reduced funding for various city programs between 2011 and 2021, in actions "too numerous to mention." One example Mamdani often cited during his campaign was New York State's 2011 decision to reduce funding for the Advantage rental subsidy program by $65 million.

Cherry-picking individual perceived fiscal slights, however, ignores the bigger picture — namely, that state funding to the city has been growing and growing over the years.

Under Cuomo, the aggregate funding increase and budget relief for New York City between 2011 and 2021 was approximately $15 billion — which then increased by another nearly $5 billion between 2021 and 2025\. One of the most significant sources of that increased funding was actually budget relief offered to the City by reducing its required contribution to Medicaid. The Cuomo administration froze the local contribution to Medicaid beginning in 2015\. By 2021, that action reduced New York City's required Medicaid contribution by more than $3 billion annually. That annual benefit is now $5 billion annually. That alone dwarfs the cost of any other individual program reductions to New York City over the last 10 years.

\*\*\*

Mamdani's larger argument is that New York City does not receive its "fair share" of total State funding, a disparity that he said needs correcting. But even establishing the baseline facts for this discussion is less straightforward than you might think. In his press conference, the mayor asserted that "New Yorkers contribute 54.5% of state revenue and receive only 40.5% back."

However, as [EJ McMahon of the Empire Center](https://x.com/EjmEj/status/2016571700243058913?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), among others, points out, Mayor Mamdani's figure includes personal income taxes paid by commuters into New York City. Tax payments from New York City residents alone account for approximately [46.7%](https://islg.cuny.edu/blog/fiscal-flow-nyc-albany-press-release?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of total State tax revenue and a better estimate is that New York City receives back approximately [41%](https://islg.cuny.edu/blog/fiscal-flow-nyc-albany-press-release?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of State tax revenue. That is a much smaller difference in the "balance of payments" than Mamdani asserts.

But what constitutes New York City's "fair share" of state revenue? Part of the point of taxation is redistribution — between income groups and between geographic areas that have more resources to those with less ability to meet their own needs. It's a truism to note that Blue states send more to the federal government than they receive back, but few would argue for dollar-for-dollar distribution parity.

In terms of the relative financial strength of the City and the State, there have been several "reversals of fortune" between the City and the State over the last 50 years. During the New York City fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, the State stepped in to provide more support for New York City. To name one example, in 1976, it assumed full responsibility for the governmental funding of CUNY's senior colleges, which now stands at approximately $2.5 billion annually, while New York City spends approximately $600 million annually almost entirely for CUNY community colleges.

Beginning with the Bloomberg administration, those fortunes shifted. New York City was in a stronger financial position and was able to increase spending at a higher rate than the State for nearly a dozen years.

Since the COVID pandemic, for the reasons described above, the relative financial fortunes of the City and State have shifted once again. Today, in light of the State's stronger relative financial position, there clearly is no justification for unfunded State mandates like the small class size law, which applies only to New York City.

\*\*\*

A paradox of Mayor Mamdani's press conference is that while he complained about the budgeting process of the Adams administration, he would cite only trivial examples of spending decisions of the Adams administration that he would have made differently. As a result, most observers who have commented on the press conference have concluded that its primary purpose is to pressure the State to adopt Mamdani's campaign goals of increasing New York City income taxes and State corporate income taxes, with the proceeds directed to the City. Suffice to say that calling for these taxes to keep the lights on is a less compelling proposition than using the tax increases to fund bold new initiatives.

Mamdani pledged to introduce a balanced budget, which is his legal responsibility, but he deferred until the release of his Preliminary Budget later this month the identification of any meaningful spending reductions, although he did suggest that the City might slow down the CityFHEPS expansion. He also pledged to work hard to find "efficiencies" in City government. Last week, after the press conference, he [signed an executive order](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-signs-executive-order-to-require-chief-savings-off?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to create "Chief Savings Officer" in every City agency.

It's a good idea at the start of an administration to embark on a serious effort to identify operating efficiencies and program-savings opportunities. At the beginning of the Cuomo administration in 2011, I led an initiative called the Spending and Government Efficiency (SAGE) commission. We issued a report two years later that identified $1.6 billion in potential savings initiatives. Many of these initiatives were adopted while others were not. But the analysis that went into the Final Report (which ran to more than 100 pages) by itself helped the public better understand these issues and their impact on the Budget — something Mamdani said was one of his goals.

Particularly if the City is willing to make ambitious use of AI and to take on sacred cows that inflate the cost of government, it should be possible to achieve meaningful savings and reduce the need to cut core programs. The obstacles to achieving these reforms are daunting, but if New York City is in a budget crisis, as Mayor Mamdani insists is the case, then why not take the attitude that "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste" and embark on an ambitious plan to make New York City's operations and spending programs more efficient?
### Continue Encampment Sweeps — But Do Them Right
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/unhoused-new-yorkers-randy-santos-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:27.000Z
The trial for Randy Rodriguez Santos, the man accused of murdering four unhoused New Yorkers in 2019, is [underway](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/nyregion/santos-murder-homeless-chintatown-trial.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This case is horrific, but the violent death of people living on the streets is unsurprising. It happens all too frequently.

The danger of being unsheltered has been compounded recently by the deep winter freeze. As many as 16 New Yorkers (as of this writing) have died as a result of the extreme cold. While we don't know their living situations, it's reasonable to assume that at least some were unhoused.

Living on the streets is dangerous, whether you live alone or you live with one or more people in what is typically referred to as an encampment.

This behavior also impacts all New Yorkers. Neighborhood residents and businesses are concerned about people living on the streets, and particularly by encampments. Expectedly, this issue was raised during the recent mayoral campaign. Then-candidate Zohran Mamdani made clear he rejects the blunt-force tactic of dismantling encampments without viable alternatives and he put efforts to address encampments on hold. This is the position he continues to take as mayor.

Recently, he said, "the heart of this has to be the connection with services that they want, that they will use, that they will actually utilize." That perspective is right, but it shouldn't prevent us from addressing encampments. Indeed, the city should dismantle encampments — *and* connect those in encampments to the services and housing they want and need.

We can't see this issue as an either/or proposition: either we prioritize clearing encampments over the needs and preferences of individual people, or we let people live in encampments as long as they prefer to.

If we care about people and care about the city, we should not accept encampments as a permanent feature of urban life. It is not humane to allow people to live this way; it robs people of their dignity and puts their lives at risk. New York can and has done better than either letting people struggle in encampments or evicting them without providing an alternative, safe place to go.

I have seen a different approach work, one that balances the needs of individual people with the understanding that encampments are bad for everyone.

## The risks of living on the streets

According to the [National Bureau of Economic Research](https://www.nber.org/digest/202402/estimating-mortality-rates-us-homeless-population?page=1&perPage=50&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), mortality rates for unhoused people are 3.5 times higher than for housed individuals. Furthermore, according to the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, [traumatic injury is the second leading cause of death](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working%5Fpapers/w31843/w31843.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) among unhoused people under the age of 45, and people who live on the streets die on an average of 20 years earlier than people who are housed.

We shouldn't just be concerned about higher premature deaths. People who live on the streets, according to the [Centers for Disease Control](https://www.cdc.gov/homelessness-and-health/about/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), experience higher rates of infectious and non-infectious diseases such as hepatitis, tuberculosis, HIV, diabetes, heart disease and more. Allowing people to live on the streets results in worse health, and therefore, unnecessary serious struggle and suffering.

Nearly 20 years ago, when I was serving as an assistant commissioner at the New York City Department of Homeless Services under Mayor Bloomberg, encampments were a visible and growing concern. We faced many of the same challenges we see today: people who had been living outside for years, deep mistrust of government, untreated mental illness, substance use and a shelter system that too often felt ill-suited to people's needs.

We understood that our choice wasn't between letting encampments languish and callously uprooting people with force.

Rather, we created a dynamic, citywide list of encampments, informed by outreach teams, community members and other agencies. Each site became a focus of coordinated interagency work. Outreach providers took the lead, and they were supported by housing specialists, health professionals and city agencies responsible for the physical space itself.

Crucially, we started with the people.

Outreach teams spent time understanding who was living in each encampment and what they wanted. Not what was easiest for the system — but what would actually work for them. Did they want to move directly to permanent housing? Transitional housing? Which borough? Did they want roommates or privacy? Were there medical needs that had gone unaddressed for years?

Plans were built person by person. Timelines were set based on readiness and available options. Outreach happened every day leading up to a move. Housing placements were often secured before an encampment was formally cleared.

This was time-intensive and personnel-intensive work, and it was not perfect. Some people declined help. Some moved to another outdoor setting. But many ended up inside, in settings that made sense for them, with their belongings and dignity preserved.

And critically, the City did not simply walk away afterward. Teams returned regularly to prevent repopulation and to make physical improvements like better lighting, repaired fencing and safer design that reduced the likelihood that encampments would re-form.

Street homelessness [declined by 40% from 2006 to 2011](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704463804576291441663287036?gaa%5Fat=eafs&gaa%5Fn=AWEtsqdxNIO%5FL62fgDg2HBlZ2QyGAymwIUmYGZJ35rHQ96qXpepX9AFIzSJlEiZwJYU%3D&gaa%5Fts=6980c2f2&gaa%5Fsig=6y-d6yAKXNAxeFv1Vz1Q9JbReuYh4ArJRXgP9yBehBMNZ-I7fWUJ1MjCaLFbzF%5FimnR3OHifOjBT0-%5FSS3F1vw%3D%3D&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) because we were serious and deliberate about getting results.

## Compassion requires accountability

One of the reasons this approach worked was that it was grounded in clear accountability.

There was a single point of responsibility for street homelessness. Outreach providers were expected to produce outcomes. City agencies were expected to coordinate. And City Hall was paying attention.

Over the years, fidelity to this model eroded as the political and policy approach shifted between the administrations and resource investment made responsibility more diffuse. The result has been more visible street homelessness, more encampments and more people struggling and at increased risk of dying early through violence or as a result of health challenges or extreme weather.

The Mamdani administration has an opportunity to advance a humane, disciplined approach that aligns with its values. Importantly, New York now has far more, and better, options to offer people than it did two decades ago.

Innovations under multiple administrations have helped fill out the continuum of care. De Blasio-era investments in [Intensive Mobile Treatment](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/program/intensive-mobile-treatment-imt?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) created new pathways for people with serious mental illness who were failed by traditional programs. NYC Health + Hospitals has [expanded medical respite](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/pressrelease/mayor-eric-adams-nyc-health-hospitals-ceo-dr-katz-announce-expansion-of-innovative-program-to-keep-more-medically-vulnerable-homeless-new-yorkers-out-of-shelters/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [bridge-to-home](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/pressrelease/mayor-adams-and-nyc-health-hospitals-celebrate-opening-of-bridge-to-home-facility/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) programs that allow people to recover safely after hospitalization rather than being discharged back to the street. And recent state investments have brought new crisis and stabilization options into the system.

Programs like SOS teams, short-term transitional units, and [ICL's STEPS](https://iclinc.org/institute-for-community-living-report-shows-new-program-increased-capacity-to-serve-new-yorkers-with-the-most-significant-mental-health-challenges-including-individuals-living-on-streets-and-subways/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) now exist to serve people with the highest acuity in the ways that best fit their individual needs.

The issue today is not a lack of options. It is prioritization and coordination. People living in encampments should be offered choice and the resources they need and want.

## A both/and strategy

A humane approach to encampments rests on a few core principles:

First, we should be clear that encampments are not an acceptable outcome. People deserve better than a tent and a shopping cart, especially in a city with New York's resources.

Second, clearing encampments must be inseparable from offering real, desirable alternatives that reflect people's needs and preferences.

Third, outreach must be persistent, well-supported and accountable for outcomes.

Fourth, the City must invest in preventing encampments from re-forming through design, ongoing outreach and rapid response.

It is a people-first strategy that takes people seriously enough to insist on better.

Mayor Mamdani is right that connection to services and housing must be at the heart of the City's response. But that connection must be paired with a clear commitment to ending street homelessness.

New York has done this before. We have the values, experience, the infrastructure, and the tools to do it again.
### Technology Transformation Will Make or Break Progressive Governance
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/zohran-mamdani-technology-innovation-new-york/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:23.000Z
Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept to victory on transformative promises: 200,000 units of affordable housing, free buses, universal childcare, City-run grocery stores. These can't be delivered by pushing harder on institutions without rebuilding the underlying machinery. Take affordable housing: projects need [four to eight years](https://thenyhc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/NYHC-Tracker-2025-SpecialReport.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#page=5) of approvals, financing and construction before move-in; November's Charter reforms [should shave six months](https://www.rosenbergestis.com/media/blog/industry-updates/nyc-voters-approve-significant-changes-to-accelerate-land-use-approvals?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) off those numbers. Making buses free could well lead to overcrowded routes, which likely requires hiring drivers — a huge challenge given that exams are only administered[ every 18 months](https://www.mta.info/careers/bus-operator?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). A City-run grocery store, staffed and supplied through [standard civil service](https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/robert-mosess-unfinished-business?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and procurement, would be lucky to open within three years.

These would be constraints even in perfect political conditions, but the mayor faces headwinds that make his recent predecessors' playbook — coasting on growth while avoiding trade-offs — untenable. A [$12 billion inherited deficit](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-details--adams-budget-crisis-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) means Mamdani must wring efficiency from existing systems just to sustain current services, let alone deliver new ones. Which is precisely why Mamdani should overhaul the city's back-office IT department, the Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), into a transformation engine with the authority, talent and political mandate to accelerate delivery across his entire agenda.

## **Technology as the unlock**

City government as currently structured operates on timelines that delay or kill ambition. A few examples among many: Taking publicly funded affordable housing from first concepts to occupancy averages over [10 years](https://www.fasterhousing.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Neighborhood-scale rezonings, like Long Island City's recently approved [OneLIC](https://qns.com/2025/11/city-council-approves-onelic-neighborhood-plan/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and its promised 15,000 units, regularly involve [a decade](https://qns.com/2017/11/plaxall-family-aims-revamp-long-island-citys-anable-basin-ambitious-15-year-project/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of negotiation, even if the Governor's [proposed SEQRA reforms](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/let-them-build-governor-hochul-unveils-landmark-reforms-cut-red-tape-and-build-more-housing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) pass.

The tech sector has solutions that can help collapse such timelines. Some are big bets: modular construction can [erect housing in days](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OwfILenBS0&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), digital twins can integrate real-time, citywide conditions to [increase bus speeds](https://www.digitalbluefoam.com/post/exploring-digital-twin-in-traffic-management-for-smart-transportation-systems?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#toc-singapore%E2%80%99s-intelligent-transport-system), autonomous buses [could run continuously](https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/consortium-wins-8-1m-contract-to-deploy-driverless-public-buses-in-marina-bay-one-north-from-2026?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) without driver overtime, [warehouse robotics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79tJIM8X6k4&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) could automate grocery logistics. AI implementations could have shorter horizons: [flagging compliance errors](https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/04/30/governor-newsom-announces-launch-of-new-ai-tool-to-supercharge-the-approval-of-building-permits-and-speed-recovery-from-los-angeles-fires/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) before applicants submit and [approving straightforward permits](https://bakersfieldnow.com/news/local/bakersfield-launches-ai-powered-instant-permitting-system?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in minutes. AI can likewise empower the new [Office of Mass Engagement](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-establishes-office-of-mass-engagement-to-transform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to translate a city's worth of public input into consensus.

Beginning to think through these tech propositions, big or small, exposes the daunting complexity of deploying such systems inside government. Each demands specialized technological expertise, comprehended and coordinated across agencies, and none fits neatly into existing city procedures, norms, skill sets or budgets. If AI opportunity in government is to match the accelerating hype, a confident institution must move with urgency, not let cautious process dictate agenda success. Without a deeper reconstruction, Mamdani's agenda will die a slow death within the bureaucracy he inherits.

## Rebuilding New York's transformation engine

New York City already has the theoretical capacity to make this leap. OTI emerged at the [outset of the Adams administration](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2022/01/executive-order-3?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a consolidation of the city's IT department (DoITT) and NYPD Cyber Command with the Mayor's Offices of Data Analytics and the chief technology officer. His transition team's vision was to create a citywide innovation hub — one that would prototype, de-risk and accelerate technology adoption across all agencies.

But that vision has so far failed spectacularly. Without direct mayoral backing and authority to override agency resistance, OTI became another siloed IT department, at times even adding procedural layers, such as the still unfinished [Critical Application Portfolio review](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/oti/downloads/pdf/about/strategic-plan-2022.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#page=19), which has effectively frozen agency software installations. It has not challenged citywide practices, stepped on commissioners' toes or pursued the grander vision of using technology and innovation to fundamentally transform government operations.

Instead, under a CTO pulled from law enforcement, OTI [killed](https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-kills-internet-master-plan-for-universal-public-web-access?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) universal broadband in favor of corporate subsidies, alienating and eventually driving out the agency's civically-minded technologists. To fill the tech talent void, the agency pivoted to a sprawling network of vendors to build the flagship "MyCity" portal for New Yorkers to access everything from traffic tickets to school report cards. The result, however, has been a $100 million [boondoggle](https://nysfocus.com/2025/03/19/mycity-eric-adams-child-care?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) delivering a fraction of its promise.

OTI can still become a transformation engine and durable vector for delivering Mamdani's agenda. There are precedents worth emulating in other cities. One is Boston's in-house civic innovation lab, the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, which describes its limited role as "[performing acupuncture](https://www.boston.gov/sites/default/files/file/2025/12/2025%20MONUM%20and%20Analytics%20Year%20in%20Review%5F0.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#page=2)" on existing systems. Pennsylvania's [Office of Transformation & Opportunity](https://responsivegov.org/research/pennsylvania-red-tape-reduction-a-case-study/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) frames its mission as shepherding businesses through bureaucracy rather than building new institutional capacity. As Jennifer Pahlka, who led the Healthcare.gov rescue and helped launch the U.S. Digital Service, [recognizes](https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/bringing-elon-to-a-knife-fight?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), achieving transformation requires an institution empowered to remake government itself.

Those are models of what OTI, properly reimagined, can and should become in Mamdani's New York.

## What overhaul looks like

Previous transformation attempts have foundered because tech offices can't hire tech talent themselves or spur other agencies to do so, nor do they have leverage over agencies to rewrite procedure, influence contract structure or force in-house development over established vendors. Overhauling OTI means first installing leadership with real authority — a commissioner with explicit mayoral backing to override agency objections and the courage to use it.

That leader should then go out and get talent through every available channel: fellowships like [Urban Innovation Fellows](https://urban.tech.cornell.edu/urban-innovation-fellows/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and Bloomberg Philanthropies' [i-team](https://www.bloomberg.org/government-innovation/spurring-innovation-in-cities/i-teams-and-innovation-programs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [USDS](https://www.usds.gov/how-we-work?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)\-style tours of service and talent sharing with [agencies](https://edc.nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) operating outside of civil service. A model worth following for deploying that talent is [New Jersey's Office of Innovation](https://innovation.nj.gov/blog/2026-01-12-BNJlessons-part2/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which embeds five-person innovation teams within city agencies to build high-impact tools and implement new processes.

From there, a reinvigorated OTI should assert control over how the City buys technology and hires technologists, coordinating or absorbing functions now fragmented across the Mayor's Office of Contract Services, the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services. [Deeper structural reforms to civil service rules](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/new-yorks-mamdani-ny-civil-service-system) and union contracts will require legislation and years of negotiation, and will provoke resistance. But a capable OTI need not wait. It can collapse permitting timelines, accelerate procurement and build tools that multiply agency capacity now, and push further as constraints loosen.

Every OTI action should be aimed at delivering tangible benefits, not press release headlines. Digital governance leaders Estonia and Ukraine grounded their transformations in refreshingly [ambitious public targets](https://agenticstate.org/paper.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#introduction): putting 100% of services online, enabling one-minute interactions between the public and agencies and more. Equivalent targets in New York would be metrics such as halving housing start times, eliminating bus bunching and launching City-run grocery stores within a year while keeping them fully stocked.

Mamdani insists government should be ["wedded to outcomes, not process"](https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-speaks-to-me-about-abundance?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); he must now use the communication prowess that made affordability a winning issue to show New Yorkers, and crucially, labor unions, that transcending old procedures means more jobs, more opportunity and a more livable city.

Along the way, OTI should leverage technology's ability to promote transparency and give New Yorkers more meaningful ways to shape what's being built. Few will fault him for bold, [Hamiltonian](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/opinion/trump-liberals-government.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) attempts to consolidate the authority needed to bring about positive change. All will notice his grand promises going unfulfilled.

## The closing window

The challenges Mamdani has chosen to take on are elemental: more affordable groceries means making it easier for people to feed their families; free childcare means giving parents a better chance to land a job and cheaper, more abundant housing means not being forced out of the city that raised you.

Unfortunately, inertial forces threaten to strangle his attempts. The question is whether Mamdani will target these structural barriers quickly enough. The alternative is settling into the existing systems and hoping that this time will somehow be different.

For the New Yorkers who elected him on transformational promises, hoping isn't enough. The machinery must be rebuilt, and that work can't start soon enough.
### Reducing Crime by Improving Neighborhoods
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/renita-francois-interview-neighborhood-safety/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:27.000Z
*In the transition to a new city administration, the spotlight often falls on big promises — from making buses free to creating a brand-new Department of Community Safety. But as New York looks to innovate, it doesn't have to start from scratch. The building blocks for a more holistic, resident-driven approach to public safety already exist in the city's recent history.*

*On this episode of After Hours, Jamie Rubin sits down with two architects of that history: Elizabeth Glazer, former head of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, and Renita Francois, former executive director of the Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety (MAP).*

*Together, they dive into the legacy of Neighborhood Stat — a model that treated safety not just as a matter for the police, but as a joint project involving sanitation, parks, and, most importantly, the residents themselves. From clearing needles in the South Bronx to build "serenity gardens" to using asset forfeiture for community reinvestment, Francois and Glazer argue that true safety is found in the details of the physical environment and the strength of local trust.*

*As the Mamdani administration begins its work, Glazer and Francois offer a roadmap for "putting the public back in public safety" and a cautionary tale about why the data that drives these decisions must never be allowed to go dormant.*

*You can listen to this episode on* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reducing-crime-by-improving-neighborhoods/id1794619189?i=1000746961580&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *or* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/5bDoU1pIXZarh35ucsMOdA?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*
### Observation Decks for All New Yorkers
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/free-observation-decks-new-york/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:24.000Z
Of all the movie scenes set in New York City, my favorite is from "The Muppets Take Manhattan." About to give up on his New York dream, Kermit takes a trip up to the observation deck of the Empire State Building — where he has a change of heart. ""I'm staying!" he shouts to the city below: "You hear that New York? The Frog is staying!"

So many New Yorkers know what it's like to feel down, out and hopeless, but to draw the inspiration you need from the city. You might get that inspiration from a friend, a neighbor, a stranger on the subway … or you might get it from the top of the Empire State Building.

I don't know what income bracket the frog falls in, but could Kermit even afford to visit the top of Empire State today? Or would he take a look at the admission charge, swallow hard and pack his bags to head back to the swamp?

When the Empire State Building opened in 1931, [a ticket up to the observation deck cost a dollar](https://time.com/5955419/empire-state-building-history/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). By 1984 (when "The Muppets Take Manhattan" came out), it was up to $2.75\. Today that's a little more than half the cost of the $5 add-on transaction fee. The cheapest ticket itself is $44, an increase over five times the rate of inflation since Kermit made his trip. And it's not just the Empire State Building — the other large observation decks, from the World Trade to Hudson Yards to Rockefeller Center, have comparable prices.

Mayor Mamdani got elected largely on promises to address four key areas of expense for large numbers of New Yorkers: rent, food, transportation and childcare. The focus on these is admirable, and vitally necessary if New York is going to stay a leading global metropolis.

But New Yorkers also deserve to enjoy their city, not just be content with putting food on the table and a roof over their head. Things that used to be an occasional treat for a typical family — a [ballgame](https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/04/business/its-not-just-the-super-bowl-going-to-a-game-is-becoming-unaffordable?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [a show](https://www.theatermania.com/news/story-of-the-week-why-are-broadway-ticket-prices-so-high%5F1768215/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a trip to the top of the Empire State — have become increasingly out of reach.

Mamdani's focus on things like the cost of World Cup tickets or having a beer at Yankee Stadium demonstrates that he understands this basic dynamic. But while it's harder to see what city government can do to bring down the price of an international event in a New Jersey Stadium, the City does play an enormous role in making sure that New Yorkers have places of wonder and relaxation, pride and comfort, open and available to all.

Upon appointing a new parks commissioner, Mamdani recently noted that, "In a city where almost everything costs something, our parks are … the rare corner of our city that are truly accessible and affordable to each and every person who calls the city home." This is because our parks are municipally owned.

Most other examples of these corners of accessibility and affordability are also due to the public sector. For instance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "pay what you want" policy (although now only offered to New York State residents) is largely the result of the leverage the City holds as owner of the land that it sits on. Where costs have grown prohibitive is where the public sector isn't involved. Despite four large observation decks opening in the last 20 years, and one more (1 Times Square) soon to come, admission charges continue to skyrocket.

No, I'm not about to argue that City Hall should take over the Empire State Building. Rather, we should use creative approaches to create free access to observation decks for all, taking the chances we have to add to these rare corners. My organization, [Regional Plan Association](http://www.rpa.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), looks at ways, big and small, to improve the quality of life for everyone in the tristate area. We first [proposed a free public observation deck](http://fourthplan.org/action/public-space-in-core?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in our 2017 [Fourth Regional Plan](http://fourthplan.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a long-term vision for improving equity, health, sustainability and prosperity in the region.

Here are three ways we could go about it.

First, we can leverage our land-use authority. The most illustrative example of this is offered by our neighbors across the pond. London, a city no less expensive than New York, has managed to open three [free](https://horizon22.co.uk/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [observation](https://skygarden.london/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [decks](https://www.8bishopsgate.com/lookout?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with views to rival those from its tallest building, the Shard. Reservations need to be made in advance, but they are free, open to all and generally available with a little planning ahead.

The formula was simple: New skyscrapers needed planning permission to be built, and the City asked for these decks as a condition of that approval. According to Peter Rees, the former City Planning Officer for the City of London, "we made it clear we expected freely-accessible public facilities at the base and apex of the new towers. The result was a group of buildings that have free public sky-gardens or viewing platforms at the top." In New York, where new skyscrapers also often need some kind of municipal approval, a similar bargain could easily be struck.

Second, we could negotiate with one of the existing observation decks to provide free access. We already provide free or discounted tickets and membership to 27 different New York cultural institutions through IDNYC — how about for one (or more) of our observation decks too?

Lastly, the City itself owns several buildings. None of them feature the spectacular vistas of an Empire State Building, but all are still great options that would provide unique and inspiring views. The Municipal Building, whose deck has [been open before on special occasions like Open House New York](https://tribecacitizen.com/2017/10/16/show-us-your-roof-the-municipal-building/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), is the best and most likely candidate. Or we could go even bigger — why not do a bridge climb of one of the East River Bridges, similar to the [Sydney Harbor Bridge Climb](https://www.bridgeclimb.com/climb-the-iconic-sydney-harbour-bridge/?utm%5Fsource=google&utm%5Fmedium=cpc&gad%5Fsource=1&gad%5Fcampaignid=16508281869&gbraid=0AAAAAD1RBrJ46Gys5XuEEhleQPQD%5FZayP&gclid=CjwKCAiA95fLBhBPEiwATXUsxMVPSYrBv9KlUMm20vM%5F3e-8uQ0RoL4d1WvqWnvA7CHDbpYijyqjEhoCT-0QAvD%5FBwE&code=usd)?

If there is one thing we've learned from the most recent election, it's that we don't have to be content in our ambitions when it comes to a more affordable New York City. "For too long in our city, freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it," Mayor Mamdani said in his inaugural address. "Our City Hall will change that." The sky's the limit.
### Tokyo and London are Test-Driving Waymo. New York, Take Notes.
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/waymo-robotaxi-autonomous-driving-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:37:35.000Z
New Yorkers who travel to places like San Francisco, Austin, Phoenix and Atlanta might do double-takes, seeing fleets of cars with no driver at the wheel. Thousands more have watched viral videos of robotaxis, typically gliding down wide and sunlit boulevards, wondering if and when we'll be able to summon one ourselves, with fascination and/or anxiety.

Waymo and its competitors have spent years refining autonomous vehicles in the Sun Belt, where streets are wide, weather is favorable and pedestrians are relatively sparse. (The exception is San Francisco, which can still hit the mark on wide streets and decent weather, at least more so than New York.) A robotaxi's ability to navigate a Phoenix arterial in perfect weather does not mean it is ready for Midtown gridlock in sleet, double-parked delivery trucks and cyclists threading the needle. Yet those are the conditions that will define success or failure in New York City.

Scale offers another reality check: Waymo trips in all the cities where it currently operates totaled 64,000 per day, [a peak reached](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/waymo-paid-rides-robotaxi-tesla.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in November — the most recent data available. However, that's less than 8% of daily trips in New York's taxi and high-volume ridehail vehicles (a total of 830,984 trips, [according to NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission data](https://www.nyc.gov/site/tlc/about/aggregated-reports.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from November 2025). Making a meaningful dent in New York's ridehail economy, if that's the goal, will require vastly more vehicles, trips and experience in navigating urban traffic.

Soon, Waymos might be only a Metro-North ride away. As New York State [moves to legalize robotaxis outside the five boroughs](https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+state+hochul+robotaxis&rlz=1C5CHFA%5FenUS1075US1075&oq=new+york+state+hochul+robotaxis&gs%5Flcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRigATIHCAUQIRigATIHCAYQIRiPAtIBCDM5MTVqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Waymo is actively pursuing the approvals necessary to operate in New York City — where it's currently against both state laws and local rules. Essentially, as it does so, it is also beginning testing in two cities that look far more like ours: Tokyo, where it is running limited [test rides](https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/waymo-begin-data-collection-tokyo-with-driver-operated-test-rides-2025-04-10/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and London, where it plans to train driverless vehicles for rides across [100 square miles](https://www.ft.com/content/7e838cc1-7095-4921-ae87-4779fc10468a?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) this year, then launch with passenger service upon meeting approvals soon thereafter, in step with the [UK Automated Vehicles Act](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/10/contents?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The London and Tokyo deployments matter more to New York than any viral video from Arizona.

Why? Because, though they're in foreign countries, they are far more similar to New York than Phoenix, Los Angeles or even downtown San Francisco will ever be. London and Tokyo are both dense, transit-rich cities with complex street environments, powerful pedestrian cultures, strong taxi industries, occasionally bad weather and constant competition for curb and road space. If robotaxis can function and add value in those places, they are far more likely to work here.

Importantly, this isn't really about street safety. The odds are high that Waymos, which have [racked up an impressive safety record](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/we-absolutely-do-know-that-waymos?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to date, will be deemed "safe enough" in London and Tokyo. New York should take note less on street activity and more on governance if we hope to allow Waymos to operate in — and contribute to — public life.

## New York's robotaxi test track

Waymo has plenty of hurdles to get past before it can even entertain the possibility of rolling out an Uber competitor (or partner) here. The company would need state government approval, city Department of Transportation functional testing (beyond the very limited test that the Adams administration [approved last year](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/08/mayor-adams--dot-announce-approval-of-first-application-to-test-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)), and designing a new NYC Taxi and Limousine regulatory model — for number of licensed vehicles, insurance liabilities, and training requirements. (I use Waymo as a synonym for robotaxis throughout this piece because, while other companies are likely also vying for approval in New York, Waymo is miles ahead of the others across the country.)

So what specifically will the London and Tokyo tests tell us, Mayor Mamdani and his newly tapped Taxi and Limousine Commission Chair Midori Valdivia?

As I suggested earlier, there's probably not much to be learned on the safety front. When measured per mile driven, automated vehicles are already involved in far fewer crashes than human drivers, cutting injury-causing crashes by about 80% and police-reported crashes by more than half across Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, according to a [2024 study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39485678/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Human driving is in some ways getting worse thanks to distractions; self-driving cars are getting more sophisticated by the day. And driverless vehicles don't get drunk, text while driving or experience road rage, nor do they add to the [growing numbers](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/business/uber-scrutiny-sexual-assault.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of accusations of sexual assault by drivers. Nor do they break the rules, while as every New Yorker knows, some human drivers take speed limits, red lights and turning rules as mere suggestions.

The bigger reason I'm carefully following Tokyo and London is to help answer this question: Can robotaxis be ushered into New York in a way that genuinely adds value to city life and well-being, in ways articulated in the NYU Rudin Center's 2022 work, ["AVs: A Policy Framework?"](https://wagner.nyu.edu/impact/research/publications/avs-nyc-policy-framework?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

We should pay very close attention to several indicators in particular:

**1\. The street ballet**

New York's streets are akin to a mosh pit: Drivers are constantly made to avoid double-parked cars, zooming e-bikes, active package delivery trucks, buses trying to get to the curb, rushing emergency vehicles and jutting construction zones. These scenarios require constant alertness and patience from all drivers, human or robotic. London and Tokyo, while not as complex, present similar challenges.

How will Waymos, which at least to date are very rule-bound, navigate these circumstances? Can they make tiny subtle judgments needed to keep the flow of traffic moving? What level of aggression will the vehicles tolerate from other road users? Will the vehicles stop behind a double-parked car for eternity? Will they honk at unaware pedestrians? Will the resulting street "dance" be closer to a ballet, with light, fluid movements, or more like a drunkard's walk, with randomized paths and perhaps unintended consequences?

Essentially, will these vehicles help traffic throughput, or cause further delays?

**2\. The "good neighbor"**

Cities like New York, where congestion is a constant challenge, have the opportunity to require new road users to not just travel safely atop them, but also improve the underlying infrastructure.

This can be accomplished in two ways: First, any deployment of new, technology-based vehicles should share data about road conditions with cities. This would help city planners locate obstacles like potholes, low-hanging tree branches, blocked bike lanes and (with the help of hard-braking data) hazardous intersections. If a Waymo sensor detects a missing street sign in the Bronx, that data should go straight to the DOT's repair queue. As automated vehicles share road conditions amongst themselves, they can also be required to do so with the city, presenting an opportunity to partner with the city through relevant data and safety improvements.

As the UK continues to develop its data-sharing requirements (and related cybersecurity requirements) in its Automated Vehicles Act, London can tap into its authority and "good partner" goals by seeking these and other helpful data streams.

Likewise, AV companies should actively contribute to physical improvements. For example, AVs rely on lane markings to ensure their positioning. As such, AV companies can help improve weather-worn lane markings, as well as other road safety features on which they rely, like bike lane separators and maintenance of traffic signals.

(Ideally, all profit-generating road users, not only AV companies, would contribute to infrastructure maintenance funds. Curb improvements, bike lane maintenance and loading zone upkeep are all areas that could benefit from increased contributions from heavy users.)

Both London and Tokyo have yet to establish the standards of good partnership that would earn these companies brownie points on the path from pilot to practice. However, their demands, and AV companies' responses, will be instructive to New York in seeking high-fidelity data that helps the DOT fix potholes and hazardous intersections.

**3\. Interfacing with transit and human-driven ridehail**

In New York, London and Tokyo, robotaxi ridership will likely compete with taxis, Ubers and, critically, subway and bus ridership. In New York and London, where congestion pricing was hard-fought and deliberately designed to limit the number of cars on city streets, the policy goal is clear: "choice riders," who can opt between private rides and public transit, should generally choose transit. It remains the most efficient way to move large numbers of people in dense cities, and too many vehicle trips (whether they are human-driven or automated) will produce congestion and gridlock.

Although shifting from a crowded subway to a robot-driven journey sounds like an introvert's dream, widespread shifts of this kind would cannibalize both public transit and the existing ride-hailing market. In fact, according to [research by Obi](https://rideobi.com/waymo/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a rideshare data analytics company, riders in San Francisco paid a premium to ride in Waymo over Uber and Lyft — 30-40% more on the same routes.

Like New York, Tokyo and London offer a variety of travel options: public transit, walkability and for-hire rides.

From New York's perspective, the indicators to watch in London and Tokyo are: to what extent do riders choose robotaxis over public transportation, other ride services, or personally-owned vehicles? If people choose robotaxis over London's Tube or Tokyo's Metro, they may do the same for New York's subway, resulting in lower ridership, on-street gridlock and reduced transit services due to less farebox funding.

Mode shift, even more than safety, may be the greatest risk robotaxis pose to New York City. It risks unraveling the hard-won victory of congestion pricing and forces a simple question: are robotaxis replacing existing ride-hail trips, or are they adding more cars to the street? If automation increases the total number of vehicle trips, congestion will rise, regardless of who, or what, is behind the wheel.

**4\. The human factor**

The final big question about this AI is a deeply human one: What will be the impacts on taxi drivers' livelihoods? In New York City, approximately [179,381](https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiMzlhMzA3NTItM2VkZS00NGM4LTgxYTQtNjRlMDc3MTkxMDkzIiwidCI6IjMyZjU2ZmM3LTVmODEtNGUyMi1hOTViLTE1ZGE2NjUxM2JlZiJ9&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) individuals were TLC-licensed drivers at the end of 2025; our new mayor made a name for himself as a staunch driver ally. Like so many other workers worried about AI taking their jobs, these workers are on the frontlines of fear.

Both Tokyo and London share New York's respect for their local taxi driving forces, so the impacts felt there will be instructive. So the big questions are these: Will London and Tokyo require ride-pricing models that are comparable to human-driven rideshare? How does the driver-pay formula translate to a ride with no driver (but still requires cleaning, charging and maintenance)?

According to [Gridwise Analytics](https://7021468.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/7021468/Gridwise%20Analytics%202025%20AV%20Impact%20Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a transportation data analytics company, ride-hail monthly gross driver pay (excluding tips) declined in Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin, all markets offering autonomous rides, from July 2024 to July 2025\. Still, in San Francisco, driver pay actually increased, potentially offering policy lessons on pricing and driver pay formulas.

Locally, the political alliance between the mayor and the drivers might help to develop compromise solutions, such as dynamically capping the number of vehicles to reduce congestion, or adding surcharges to Waymo rides to support a transition fund, which would support medallion debt relief, driver retraining or a pension-style supplement for long-term drivers whose livelihoods are being automated away.

Another key human factor is accessibility. Here in New York City, [more than half of yellow taxis are wheelchair accessible,](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/tlc/downloads/pdf/annual%5Freport%5F2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and Uber and Lyft must provide "equivalent service" to riders with disabilities, in a nation-leading accessibility initiative. In London, [100% of taxis are wheelchair accessible](https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/passengers-and-accessibility?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), while Tokyo is [adopting similar vehicles](https://global.toyota/en/jpntaxi/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The big question: Will all city residents be served by robotaxis? How are London and Tokyo mandating the servicing of all riders? How will riders who require assistance to board and secure their mobility device into a vehicle be serviced if no driver is present, or locate a vehicle from a crowded curb if they are vision-impaired? Is New York willing to adopt a new technology that could potentially leave the [7.3% of residents with ambulatory disabilities](https://a816-dohbesp.nyc.gov/IndicatorPublic/data-explorer/accessibility/?id=2459&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#display=summary) behind?

In short, as London and Tokyo move forward, New York should focus less on their technical performance and more on their governance. The real question is whether robotaxis strengthen or undermine the systems that make city life function: public transit, shared streets and the livelihoods of the people who depend upon them.

If these cities and Waymo can pass those tests, they will deserve to earn a place on New York's streets — under rules that reflect the best thinking about how to let driverless vehicles share our streets.

*Disclosure: Waymo has contributed funds to the NYU Rudin Center to support a forthcoming panel discussion on autonomous vehicles in New York. Waymo had no role in the research, analysis or views expressed here.*
### Urban Design as Social Infrastructure
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-parks-public-spaces-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:28.000Z
Zohran Mamdani's campaign for mayor treated New York's physical city not as backdrop, but as protagonist. Mamdani met (and, as mayor, has continued meeting) New Yorkers where daily life actually unfolds — on sidewalks, buses, subways, beaches and street corners — underscoring a simple truth: The physical city is where government shows up most tangibly in people's lives.

Streets, parks, plazas, housing, transit, libraries, waterfronts and public buildings form the connective tissue of civic life. When these places are well designed, well maintained and well programmed, they function as social infrastructure, enabling relationships to form, civic trust to grow and communities to thrive. Investing in social infrastructure is therefore not just an urban design strategy — it is a way to make policy visible and effective on every block, every day.

Today, investment and upkeep in this essential social infrastructure are fragmented and often depend on private fundraising or volunteer labor, leaving too many neighborhoods behind. This patchwork model undermines fairness — and makes it difficult to deliver improvements at the scale New Yorkers need. To deliver on Mamdani's promise of a fairer, more affordable city, the administration should create a social infrastructure plan to coordinate capital investment, maintenance and stewardship across agencies and communities.

In his early days as mayor, Mamdani has given every indication that he understands the importance of investing in the physical city to make the city a more livable place where people can connect and thrive. The appointment of Mike Flynn, the co-author of New York's first [Street Design Manual](https://www.nycstreetdesign.info/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), to run the Department of Transportation is one of multiple steps in the right direction. Now, strong appointments and symbolic gestures must be matched with good policy. Making a citywide social infrastructure plan an early governing priority will serve as a practical blueprint for guiding investments in the physical city and the people who steward it. In practice, it's a framework to guide what gets created, where, and who maintains and programs these spaces over time.

## Public space as essential social infrastructure

Mamdani understands that public spaces are not simply nice-to-have amenities; they are platforms for building civic trust, creating resilient neighborhoods and connecting New Yorkers to social and economic opportunity. His recent commitment to complete the redesign on [McGuinness Boulevard](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-announces-city-to-complete-redesign-on-mcguinness-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a safe streets project stalled by the Adams administration, is evidence of this. Beyond safety, well-designed public spaces can lower the cost of living by providing free or low-cost places to gather, rest, play, learn, meet neighbors and access services.

Research consistently shows that access to quality public spaces strengthens social cohesion and trust in government. A [2017 Center for Active Design report](https://cdn.plataformaurbana.cl/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/assembly-civic-engagement-survey.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that residents without access to quality parks report lower levels of connection and trust in government. The same can be said of libraries, [rec centers](https://nycfuture.org/events/putting-the-rec-back-in-nyc-parks-and-recreation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and other well-designed buildings and civic spaces maintained with pride.

Features as simple as seating, greenery, shade and interactive programming can significantly increase social interaction and a sense of belonging, as Gehl (my urban design firm) found in ["Rx for Social Connection"](https://thebentway.ca/publication/rx-for-social-connection/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) research with The Bentway and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Public spaces also play a critical role in safety, broadly defined. [Environmental design](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/headway/philadelphia-gun-violence-environmental-design.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) features in urban spaces, such as greening vacant lots or improving street lighting, have been [associated with crime reduction](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/crime-and-the-built-environment). [New York City's Active Design Guidelines](https://www.centerforactivedesign.org/publications/active-design-guidelines-2?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) correctly suggest that public spaces are vital to supporting public health. And new research from the [Shared Mobility Center](https://popresearchrobot.populartransport.net/disaster-proofing-communities-how-to-measure-and-invest-in-the-invisible-infrastructure-of-social-capital/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) connects social infrastructure to climate resilience.

All of these positive outcomes come from treating public space not as a nice amenity but as essential social infrastructure, something the government must intentionally design, fund and sustain.

## From fragmentation to coordination

New York has a long history of investing in the physical city, but these efforts have too often been fragmented, under-resourced and inequitable.

Park maintenance relies heavily on private fundraising. Without it, [parks, especially in the outer boroughs, often don't meet the Department of Parks and Recreation's own standards for cleanliness, safety and accessibility](https://www.ny4p.org/news/new-yorkers-for-parks-releases-parks-2030-platform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Many plazas and streetscapes depend on Business Improvement Districts for upkeep; [open streets and school streets depend on volunteer labor, complex permitting and costly insurance](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/03/14/open-streets-wont-survive-without-more-money-from-the-city-organizers-warn?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

This patchwork model undermines scale and fairness. It also contrasts with Mamdani's commitment to relentless competence — a government that delivers faster, fairer and more visible results.

While the city urgently needs more affordable housing, housing alone does not create thriving neighborhoods. Mamdani seems to understand this; he has spoken of parks as among the few spaces that are "truly accessible and affordable to each and every person who calls the city home," saying the goal of public spaces is to ensure that a "dignified life is available to each and every New Yorker."

Residents badly need safe routes to schools, green space, convenient and dignified bus stops, libraries, plazas and non-commercial "third spaces" where people can simply be. Social infrastructure must be planned with housing, not added later if and when funding allows.

A social infrastructure plan would mark an important shift for New York, serving as a practical implementation guide for programs from school streets to bus stops and helping to operationalize a people-first approach to governance that requires multi-agency involvement.

Such a framework would move New York from patching together one-off wins to a reliable citywide system built on neighborhood planning models already put in place by the Department of City Planning. It would focus on five things:

- assessing social and physical needs and assets in neighborhoods together
- identifying priority neighborhoods where investment can deliver the greatest benefit
- aligning public realm improvements with planned capital projects and service delivery
- setting measurable outcomes related to affordability, safety, health and connection; and
- establishing sustainable models for stewardship, programming and funding in partnership with community organizations and leaders

Because social infrastructure functions as a network, no single agency can deliver it alone. Effective implementation requires a networked governance model, with clear accountability for coordination across agencies such as the Departments of Transportation, Parks and Recreation, Design and Construction, Housing and Preservation, Sanitation and even the new Mayor's [Office of Mass Engagement](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-establishes-office-of-mass-engagement-to-transform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This could mean strengthening the role of Chief Public Realm Officer created by Mayor Adams, perhaps creating a [deputy mayor of operations for the public realm, as a coalition of public realm advocates is calling for](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TGjJdKB4QYgMnTaSNiDfHKyHHGbToF-KogIAS%5FCgA0M/edit?tab=t.0&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — or establishing a dedicated social infrastructure officer with a mandate to oversee the system, identify priorities and drive implementation.

New York already has strong local precedents for how city agencies and community partners can work together to develop social infrastructure. At [Paseo Park](https://www.paseopark.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Jackson Heights, what began as an Open Streets pilot during the pandemic has become a permanent, multi-block civic asset supporting thousands of public school students and local residents alike. The new street furniture designed to slow vehicular traffic at intersections was designed and installed in close collaboration with the local community.

The [city's pedestrian plaza program](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pedestrians/nyc-plaza-program.shtml?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is another example. By providing a clear application process and design toolkit, neighborhood organizations can apply to create their own plazas. [The Public Space Equity program](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pedestrians/equityprogram.shtml?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is a tool to ensure neighborhoods with fewer financial resources can maintain these spaces as well.

Scaling these efforts requires reducing red tape, standardizing permitting and insurance pathways, and making it easier for local organizations to occupy and activate public space. A people-first city invests not only in physical improvements, but in the systems that allow communities to use and care for them over time.

## Sweat the small stuff

As he presses ahead, Mamdani should be mindful of the fact that investing in connection often means making straightforward, human-scale improvements: securing safe places for children to play, shaded seating at bus stops that double as platforms for community information, lighting that enhances safety without floodlighting neighborhoods and greenery that supports both mental health and climate resilience. On a recent [Brian Lehrer](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1cq1wu4Q63GxmLPfcM8goj?si=ZmmkCqB7RTue1DiPbyXRlg&nd=1&dlsi=7cf33771093d4b20&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) episode about "sewer socialism," the New Yorkers who called in made clear they were not asking for the moon — just basic quality urban design and upkeep: evenly paved sidewalks, painted crosswalks, street trees.

This is not an argument against major citywide infrastructure projects. New York needs those too, from new pedestrian and bike bridges, as Sam Schwartz has recommended, to the redesign of Penn Station. Jens Kramer, the former four-term mayor of Copenhagen who was largely responsible for its transformation into one of the most livable cities in the world, has said that mayors have to identify how investments in citywide spaces are balanced with those in neighborhoods. The challenge is ensuring that flagship investments are matched by neighborhood-scale improvements that people experience every day.

By heeding this wisdom, and by treating social infrastructure as essential civic infrastructure, Mayor Mamdani can position New York as a global leader in people-centered urban policy — strengthening the physical city as the backbone of health, connection and democracy itself.
### How Off the Rails Is ICE? A Q&A With Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/questions-answers-trump-noem-dhs-ice/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:26.000Z
*With the nation's eyes on the ICE agents unleashed in Minneapolis and the chaos and bloodshed that have followed, Vital City turned to Jeh Johnson for sane answers on federal immigration enforcement.*

*Johnson served as secretary of Homeland Security from 2013 to 2017, overseeing Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Obama administration. He has close ties to New York City where, earlier in his career, he served in the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. He's no immigration dove: Under his watch, DHS pursued aggressive border enforcement and pushed cities to transfer undocumented individuals from local jails directly to ICE custody. But Johnson is now watching the Trump administration's immigration crackdown with alarm — particularly the deployment of thousands of masked, battle-armed federal agents to Minneapolis and other cities in what he describes as an apparent strategy to "prey on local immigrant communities."*

*With New York potentially on the administration's list for an enforcement surge, Vital City spoke with Johnson about what it might mean for local law enforcement, why he thinks ICE may need a "major rebranding" and what advice he'd give Mayor Mamdani as the city navigates an increasingly volatile standoff with Washington.*

**Vital City:** The Trump administration has significantly altered the composition and mission of federal law enforcement, investing resources in a [ramp-up of the ICE budget that now dwarfs other federal law enforcement offices, such as the FBI and DEA](https://www.npr.org/2026/01/21/nx-s1-5674887/ice-budget-funding-congress-trump?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). At the same time, news reports note that FBI, DEA and other agents are being detailed to assist in ICE operations. What do you make of the massive infusion of dollars to increase ICE's manpower? What does it mean structurally for the balance of federal interests, how does it affect training, mission and deployment?

**Jeh Johnson:** Without a doubt, President Trump campaigned on securing the border and immigration law enforcement. The bumper sticker was "mass deportation," but the more subtle message was prioritizing deporting "the worst of the worst."

Securing the border and deporting "the worst of the worst" undocumented are two legitimate government objectives. Indeed, those were my objectives. To that end, while I was in office, we saw [some of the lowest levels of illegal border crossings in years](https://www.axios.com/2025/03/04/illegal-border-crossings-february-decline-trump?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and worked with city governments through our [Priority Enforcement Program](https://www.ice.gov/pep?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to encourage them to transfer those undocumented released from jail directly to ICE custody for deportation.

The current administration seems to have gone far beyond this mandate. ICE has [reportedly set arbitrary numeric goals for arrests](https://www.axios.com/2025/12/04/trump-ice-immigration-arrests-deportations?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), without regard to prioritizing public safety. To the contrary, given the manner in which the current administration is pursuing the immigration mission, ICE is reviled in the very communities in which it must operate and the sanctuary city movement is turbocharged, to the detriment of public safety.

As we speak, DHS \[the Department of Homeland Security\] has surged thousands of law enforcement personnel to Minneapolis and St. Paul though there has been no recent, great surge of illegal immigration into that area. I watch the videos of DHS personnel, masked and in menacing warfighting gear, and they appear to be looking for a fight with the local civilian population. ICE is now reportedly moving on to [Portland, Maine](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/were-being-terrorized-what-mainers-are-seeing-as-ice-launches-operation-in-the-state?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). From all appearances, the strategy seems to be to go from city to city to prey on the local immigrant communities there. It is hard to believe this is America.

I also worry about the surge in recruitment of personnel to the sensitive immigration law enforcement mission. Across law enforcement, personnel need to be well-trained in tactics of de-escalation, so that a confrontation does not escalate into a loss of life. Renee Good did not have to die over the manner in which she blocked the street with her car. The confrontation that led to George Floyd's death started over a counterfeit $20 bill. New Yorkers will remember that Eric Garner died by chokehold in 2014 over allegations he'd been selling loose cigarettes.

I also worry about the character of the people we are recruiting to the ICE mission. DHS personnel should look like America. The recruitment message ["defend your culture,"](https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1952718231455592667?lang=en&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) which was at one point on the ICE website, is a dog whistle. America is a multicultural society. If you are a Mexican American in South Texas interested in law enforcement, that message says in effect "you need not apply." If you are a Muslim American in Minnesota or Michigan interested in law enforcement, that message says in effect, "you need not apply."

**Vital City:** DHS was controversial when it was created in 2002 because it was such a massive agency and covered such a wide range of topics. How do you think it has worked out? Given the changing shape of the ICE mission and understanding that each administration will have its priorities, are there issues that it would be wise for the federal agencies to safeguard against, no matter what the administration? What changes might you suggest?

**Jeh Johnson:** In the wake of 9/11, DHS was established primarily for the counterterrorism mission. Up until then, the United States did not believe we needed a "Ministry of the Interior" to address domestic security because we were separated from most of the rest of the world by two oceans. That assumption collapsed on 9/11\. The thinking then was that terrorism was an extraterritorial threat, therefore we must consolidate into one cabinet-level department the regulation of all the different ways someone can enter our country — land, sea and air. Therefore, CBP (Customs and Border Protection), ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), TSA (the Transportation Security Administration) and the Coast Guard were all merged into one department. People wonder why the Secret Service, FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and the cybersecurity mission were given to DHS as well. Like everything in Washington, DHS was a political compromise. In some respects we went too far in its creation and in other respects we didn't go far enough.

As the character of the terrorist threat to the homeland has changed — it's now largely domestic-based, falling to the FBI to address — and immigration has become a political red-meat issue, DHS's primary mission has become immigration law enforcement.

While I was in office, people used to approach me and say, "thank you for keeping us safe." Now, DHS is known primarily as DOD — the "Department of Deportation." Whether a Democratic or Republican administration, the secretary's time and effort is overwhelmingly on the politically volatile mission of immigration.

The DHS model is now outdated for its original purpose. If I were king — and I'm not — I would start from scratch and create a large "Department of Public Safety" into which we place every federal law enforcement and security agency, including immigration, TSA and cybersecurity, deconflict all their missions, and leave all the prosecutors and civil litigators in Department of Justice. But this will never happen for multiple reasons and the FBI would fight mightily to stay in DOJ, where it enjoys relative autonomy.

**Vital City:** There have been increasing concerns about the conduct and reach of ICE operations, up to and including abolishing ICE. Some of this has to do with what appears to be an extraordinary failure to follow basic tenets of constitutional policing, failures that have attracted the [attention and condemnation of local law enforcement](https://x.com/prem%5Fthakker/status/2013683292910850153?s=46&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). What is your view?

**Jeh Johnson:** I am opposed to the outright elimination of ICE, though it is becoming so toxic in communities across the country it may require a major rebranding. If you were opposed to the Vietnam War in the 1960s-70s, the answer was not the elimination of the Department of Defense. We need an agency to enforce the immigration laws. If we don't like the way the agency is doing that, we change the policy. If the leaders who promulgate the policy don't change it, we change the leaders. That's what elections are for.

**Vital City:** ICE and the NYPD sometimes work together — but in other respects, federal law enforcement is at odds with or complicates the work of local cops. Can you talk about that tension and how you think it ought to be resolved?

**Jeh Johnson:** High-profile confrontations like Minneapolis complicate the relationship in a way that is contrary to overall public safety. If ICE is toxic in a community like New York, the Mayor, the city council and even the police commissioner don't want the local police drawn into the toxicity. I encountered this with various sanctuary city laws and policies when I was secretary. I had to negotiate city-by-city with the mayor to arrive at a solution that worked for both of us. Simply storming a community with thousands of DHS law enforcement personnel unfamiliar with that community is not the answer. No responsible public official can want what is happening in Minneapolis right now.

**Vital City:** The videos shared each day of ICE encounters with residents, as well as statements from DHS and ICE officials — even before the deaths of Good and Pretti — show apparent violations of law with respect to stops, detention and uses of force, as well as other troubling behavior such as the wearing of masks and the use of highly militarized equipment, from tear gas canisters to tank-like vehicles. What is your view of these abuses of power? If you were secretary, what would you do to address them?

**Jeh Johnson:** There is a legitimate concern about appearing to overmilitarize domestic law enforcement. We had this very concern in the Obama administration in providing federal grants to local law enforcement for public safety. It can inflame the local civilian population. We see that playing out in real time right now in Minneapolis.

Masks add to that toxic dynamic. Masks are not typical among local law enforcement, even in big cities with a crime problem. The NYPD do not wear masks, even when operating in dangerous neighborhoods. Masks detract from accountability. Whether on the federal, state or local level, law enforcement must always be accountable to the public they serve. Masks also increase the risk of impersonation by those not in law enforcement.

**Vital City:** What is your view of the appropriate role, either for local prosecutors or for the USDOJ Civil Rights division, or any other accountability mechanism, in a situation such as the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent?

**Jeh Johnson:** As a federal prosecutor in 1991, I once prosecuted a federal law enforcement officer for criminal civil rights violations. In 1992, I defended pro bono a New York City police officer accused of a homicide. Following an extensive grand jury investigation by the Manhattan DA, no charges were brought against the officer, who went on to be a hero on 9/11.

Many law enforcement agencies require an investigation where there is a civilian death involving a law enforcement officer, even though no charges are ever brought. It lends to accountability and helps remove any suspicion of a cover-up. It is also true that, in general, no agency can investigate itself, except where there is a truly independent inspector general. If an IG \[Inspector General\] identifies a problem, the matter should then be referred to the Department of Justice.

Federal agents have limited (not absolute) immunity from local prosecutions for conduct while on the job. But including local law enforcement in any investigation, and appointing local prosecutors as special assistant U.S. attorneys, can lend to credibility and accountability. It is also true that local law enforcement likely knows the community better, and can provide leads and access to evidence that the feds cannot reach.

Arising out of the death of Renee Good, DOJ has threatened investigations of the governor and mayor, but there would appear to be no investigation of the shooting itself. Seems odd.

**Vital City:** How do you think ICE activity, and the manner in which it is carried out, affects the legitimacy of local law enforcement and the willingness — in this case, of New Yorkers — to obey law enforcement commands and to otherwise cooperate. And relatedly, what kind of position does this put NYPD and other local police departments in? They may be called to a location to ensure ICE can execute on its lawful mission, while at the same time mediating with protestors/residents who may be angry at the role that PD is playing.

**Jeh Johnson:** When I was secretary of DHS, I used to counsel ICE leadership, Tom Homan included, that one notorious incident in a community — the arrest of somebody's grandmother on the church steps or a high school student leaving class — can create a local uproar, turn us into pariahs, embolden the sanctuary city movement and completely undermine our ability to pursue our mission in that community. We see that exact scenario playing out now in Minneapolis, on steroids. In the current environment, the arrest of a single individual by ICE likely requires far more officers and equipment on the scene than it normally would, drawing people and resources away from other public safety missions. I suspect this dynamic is not now limited to Minneapolis.

**Vital City:** What, realistically, could New York City do if the Trump administration insists on a Minneapolis-style confrontation?

**Jeh Johnson:** New York City is unique. It is too large a city, with the largest police department in America. Even those who seem itching for a fight hopefully know better than to take on New York and New Yorkers. The New York City equivalent of the current federal presence in Minneapolis would deplete all of DHS nationwide.

**Vital City:** If you could advise Mayor Mamdani on New York City's posture vis-a-vis immigration and the feds, what would you tell him?

**Jeh Johnson:** This is not an opportunity to take a stand. Lay low. Don't provoke a fight politically. Focus on snow clean-up.
### What ICE’s Recklessness Teaches Us About Real Policing
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/minnesota-ice-alex-pretti-policing/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:59:37.000Z
In 2017, when I was the chief of police of Burlington, Vermont, I gave our highest award for valor to an officer who had faced down a robbery suspect making his getaway in a Volkswagen. Cut off at an intersection, the suspect threw his car in reverse and barreled toward the officer, who was running up the narrow street in pursuit. Gun drawn and pointed, standing in the path of the car, the officer knew he had a split second to save his life.

He stepped to the side. The car passed inches from him, and he holstered his gun. He had a legal right to shoot, but he didn't. Later, he told me even if he'd killed the driver, the car still wouldn't have stopped. If he could save his life by getting out of the way, then there was no need to fire in the first place. Shooting, he concluded, wouldn't help him; it would just make the situation worse. "I knew it would be dangerous and futile," he told me. His medal of valor was for showing bravery and restraint.

This is the essence of American policing done right. The New York City Police Department prohibited shooting at people in cars in 1972, having realized that shooting a driver does nothing to stop the car and turns a guided missile into an unguided one. The number of police shootings soon plummeted, and officers were no less safe. Many cities followed suit, banning or strongly discouraging shooting at cars. Beyond all of this, officers with good judgment don't need a policy to know when not to use reckless and counterproductive force, even if they are in danger. It is simply a hallmark of professionalism.

Contrast this with the work of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who killed Minneapolis resident Renée Good last January when one of them stepped in front of her car as she tried to drive away to avoid arrest. Instead of taking one quick step to his right and apprehending her the next day, the agent shot Good three times, twice after he'd already gotten out of the way and needed to fire through her driver's side window. Good lost control of her vehicle, careened into a parked car and died. In response, the federal government called her a domestic terrorist and hailed the officer as a hero, while his colleagues warned other citizens that people who didn't obey them could meet a similar fate. The Department of Justice ordered its prosecutors to see if they could dig up dirt about the political activities of Good and her wife. Six prosecutors resigned in protest; Good was a mother of three with no criminal record.

ICE is an agency that literally embodies everything the people who police a democracy should be against. It has [low hiring standards](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/as-ice-boosts-recruitment-critics-concerned-over-changes-to-hiring-and-training-standards?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [perfunctory screening](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/ice-recruitment-minneapolis-shooting.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [a 47-day training program](https://people.com/ice-academy-training-shortened-47-days-under-trump-report-11881592?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that's shorter than nearly all municipal police departments' academies, and half the length of the training program for Minneapolis police. Its leadership imposes [a deportation quota](https://www.axios.com/2025/12/04/trump-ice-immigration-arrests-deportations?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on employees that forces them to make bad decisions, petty arrests and alienate vast swaths of the public. Many of its agents [wear masks](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article310480665.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) out of a strange mix of cowardice, brazen unaccountability and perhaps a desire to menace the public. Their [use of body cameras](https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/21/us/ice-cbp-cellphones-minnesota-mobile-fortify-invs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is spotty at best, and the agency is [trying to roll back funding for the ones they do use](https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/01/24/ice-bodycams-cameras-shootings-immigration/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). They use tear gas and pepper spray against protesters so capriciously that a federal judge had to [order them to desist](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgprwlplqwo?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

And ICE agents continue to shoot citizens who protest them. Last week, agents killed Alex Pretti, a Minneapolis ICU nurse who was lawfully carrying a holstered handgun. By all video accounts, including [microsecond-by-microsecond breakdowns](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/01/25/minneapolis-shooting-video-gun/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by [media outlets](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D99WRV4aWVE&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), ICE agents opened fire after they had pepper-sprayed Pretti, thrown him to the ground, punched him, kicked him and pulled his firearm out of his waistband. Nevertheless, ICE's leadership and its federal overseers immediately demeaned the victim, spread lies about him, called the killing justified and obstructed the state of Minnesota from investigating the incident. In the view of many Americans, ICE is an agency that has lost its legitimate authority to govern us.

> ICE is an agency that literally embodies everything the people who police a democracy should be against.

All of this presents American police departments with a tremendous opportunity. Never before in our lifetime have they had a better foil than they have in ICE. Emerging from years of turbulence between the police and many communities, Americans worry the agency is the new face of U.S. law enforcement, and are starving for reassurance that their own police can be professional, accountable and capable of effectively doing their jobs while respecting rights and liberties.

This isn't to say that critics of policing should feel lucky their home team isn't as bad as ICE. This is where the opportunity arises: the nation's attention is rightly focused on flagrant abuses at the federal level that constantly dominate the news and provide a clear moral compass for how police shouldn't behave. In the meantime, the Department of Justice has explicitly said it [will not investigate police departments for patterns of misconduct](https://capitalbnews.org/trump-doj-ends-police-reform-cases/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In other words, hardly anyone is looking at our nation's municipal police at the moment. Police departments that continue to engage, innovate and reform will be doing it because they ought to, not because anyone is breathing down their neck or protesting in front of headquarters. It will provide the ingredients they need to forge deep ties with their communities in good faith.

So it is critical for police to continue with the things that have shown promise, even if they don't have to. Agencies should aggressively continue to target their city's most violent offenders, since this small number of people account for an outsized share of any given community's violence. They should train officers to keep themselves and the public safe while using an economy of force. Cities with subways should ensure they are places of fast and efficient transportation, not places for people to dwell or disrupt a commute. Simultaneously, police should implement or expand co-responder programs that bring clinicians to behavioral health crises rather than just police officers. They should explore ways for police and their counterparts to link people to housing, addiction treatment and social services as an alternative to defaulting to arrest as usual, since these measures reduce crime and disorder by better addressing the behavioral problems that can cause them. If police departments do these things with transparency and accountability, it will give millions of Americans a huge sense of relief at a time when many of them are watching the news and questioning the very legitimacy of the nation's law enforcement.

The last embers of the ill-fated and infeasible police defunding and abolition movements have been extinguished, and not a moment too soon. Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York only after decisively distancing himself from previous commitments to defund the police; he even pledged to keep on his predecessor's no-nonsense commissioner. Voters from Philadelphia to San Francisco have made it clear that public safety and quality of life matter greatly to them, and the police have a critical role in delivering these things. Amidst all this, we are witnessing a daily exhibit of some of the worst law enforcement practices in living memory. This mix of tragedy and opportunity has set the stage for a long-needed renaissance in American municipal policing. After spending 23 years in the profession and another six studying it, I am convinced there are more officers who would step out of the way of a car than shoot its driver. Americans need to know this, and they need to see it in practice.
### Julie Menin on Leading the City Council, Working with Mayor Mamdani, and Tackling Challenges Facing the City
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/julie-menin-on-leading-the-city-council/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:10.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/julie-menin-on-leading-the-city-council) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on January 26, 2026 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

Julie Menin, a Manhattan Democrat recently elected by her colleagues to serve as City Council Speaker, spoke with The New York Editorial Board on the morning of January 22, 2026\. Menin, chosen to lead the legislative body for the 2026-2029 term, was first elected to the City Council in 2021 after having led the city’s consumer and worker protection agency, its media and entertainment office, and its 2020 census operation. *(photo by Juan Manuel Benítez)*

*Participating journalists: Juan Manuel Benítez, Nicole Gelinas, Christina Greer, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Myles Miller, Harry Siegel, Liena Žagare.*

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Max**  
First, thank you for being here.

**Julie Menin**  
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

**Ben Max**  
I will very lightly moderate things. We’ll just have a good open conversation. And we really appreciate you being here.

**Julie Menin**  
Well, I appreciate the invitation, particularly this early in the tenure.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Thank you for being with us today. So I’ve always seen you as someone who is really outcome-oriented and very much so in executing ideas and programs, like when you were [census director](https://www.nyc.gov/site/census/about/about-the-director.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) here in the city. And so what is the main outcome that you want New Yorkers to judge you by once your speakership is over in four years?

**Julie Menin**  
Well, thank you for the question and thank you again for inviting me. I am outcome-oriented. I just believe city government needs to work for New Yorkers and I think it emanates from my background as a lawyer and a small business owner and former commissioner. I think right now faith in city government is at an all-time low because of the last administration. I think we’ve seen tremendous amounts of corruption, waste, fraud, abuse.

We’ve also seen an incredibly fractured relationship between the past mayor and speaker. That doesn’t really inure — with warring charter revision commissions and things of that nature — which really doesn’t inure to the benefit of New Yorkers in terms of moving issues forward. So to answer your question, what would be the outcome to me? Getting city agencies to function again at the highest levels of city services, which is the least that New Yorkers should expect from city government.

You have all of these city agencies that have been hollowed out by the last administration. And so I am someone who spends a tremendous amount of time looking at the [Mayor’s Management Report](https://www.nyc.gov/site/operations/performance/mmr.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), because when I served as commissioner, it was something that I was very focused on, which is we have to be data driven, we have to look at the data and the outcomes.

And so I believe success will be, if we can get city agencies really performing at the highest levels — on social services, on everything from sanitation, public safety, the Department of Education. It’s very exciting what the work that we’re going to do around childcare, that we’re working with the mayor on pre-K, 3K. I mean, I could give you dozens and dozens of examples of what happened in the past four years where city government was not working for New Yorkers. I mean pre-K and 3K alone are a perfect example of that.

Why did we have to have situations where parents would have to travel an hour and a half to drop their child off when there really were seats that were located nearby? I mean, it just was a dysfunctional system and I’m someone who tries to get government to function in an orderly way at the highest level. So that is one of the outcomes. There are a lot of other outcomes, of course, that I think one should measure success by, but that is one of them.

And I guess the other one that I would say in terms of outcomes is: it’s my belief that the City Council is largely a reactive body. And by that I mean on the budget, you see a budget dance always between the Council and the mayor. And certainly in the last iteration of the Council, there was a focus on restoring the mayor’s budget cuts, which obviously was so important.

I mean, there were just draconian cuts to education, to libraries, to cultural institutions, all of which the Council so rightfully restored. But we need to move beyond that and have our big picture, big idea priorities that we are trying to get through. On land use, we’ve also largely been reactive. We wait until [ULURP](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/planning/public-review?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) comes before us. I think ULURP is a broken system. I think there’s a negotiated settlement with a different outcome each and every time. But my main point is that we are reactive. We’re not in a proactive body. So what I view, again, success in the next four years is if we can push forward an agenda, a proactive agenda, on land use, on the budget, on oversight, which are our core critical functions.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
So you mentioned \[getting\] city government to function, which with your oversight role, obviously you’ll try to do that and we’re going to be talking a lot about affordability and housing. But what are two decisions that you plan on making this year that are going to impact New Yorkers’ lives immediately. We know housing, land use, all those things…But what are those two decisions that you’re going to make this year that New Yorkers will be, *Huh, now I know what the speaker does in the city and whatever she’s doing, her job is impacting me in a positive way?*

**Julie Menin**  
So the first is healthcare. Medical debt is the leading cause of debt for New Yorkers. And several years ago, the Council passed my bill to create the nation’s first municipal [office of healthcare accountability](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/about/local-law-78-healthcare-accountability-report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which lists the price of every medical procedure at every New York City hospital. Because, for example, if you’re a woman and you’re giving birth by C-section and you go to one New York City hospital, you’ll be charged $55,000 for that C-section. At another New York City hospital, that same C-section is $17,000\. Or a routine colonoscopy is $12,000 at one hospital, $2,000 at another. I could give you hundreds of examples. This new office that was created under my legislation is now embedded at DOHMH \[the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene\] and it lists the price of every medical procedure at every New York City hospital. One of the main focuses that I would like to focus on is lowering skyrocketing healthcare prices.

We as a city government spend approximately $11 billion a year on public sector healthcare, $11 billion. And just five years ago, that number was $6 billion. It has literally almost doubled in five years. It is unsustainable. So I want to utilize our purchasing power. We’re actually the second largest purchaser of healthcare in all of New York state. I want to harness New York City’s purchasing power to drive down costs because this is going to make a difference. It’s not only going to make a difference in terms of the New York City budget, and it’s estimated that we could save $2 billion a year by harnessing our purchasing power, but it’s also going to make a difference for all New Yorkers because now that we know what hospitals are charging, which is what this office did, and it did many other things, but that is one of the primary things. It allows New Yorkers to save money whether you work in the public sector or the private sector or whether you’re uninsured and you really need to know what these hospitals are charging.

So healthcare pricing is something that I have, and I formerly was a healthcare regulatory attorney, so it’s something I’m deeply passionate about. We have to address this issue. And so to me, this is one of the many things that we can do that I think will make a measurable difference in New Yorkers’ lives.

The other one, of course, we’ve been working on childcare in the New York City Council since 2022\. We passed a package of bills on childcare. I had five bills in the package. The bills were literally called the [Universal Childcare Act](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2022/10/12/2283/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It was supposed to put New York City on a path to universal childcare in five years. They were largely not fully implemented by the last administration. Now we really have an opportunity and an obligation. In order to get to universal childcare, it does require the city being able to first of all build more childcare facilities and addressing some of the payment issues that have served as obstacles.

We have a number of bills. Some of them are my bills that I’m actually giving to colleagues to pass — these bills are going to loosen the red tape of [restrictions](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/dc/approval-other-floors-child-care.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) around building childcare facilities like the second-floor restrictions and things like that, as well as make it easier in general for the payment system. So I think childcare, again, on average $21,000 a year, we’ve had several hundred thousand parents have to leave the workforce, which has an economic and fiscal impact to the city as well. But I’m very focused as we have been for years on universal childcare and excited to finally make that a reality and we’re working obviously closely with the mayor and the governor on that.

**Christina Greer**  
So you’ve stated…“I want my vision of leadership…to be as focused on dissolving division as it is on uniting all coalitions.” So how do you plan to do that explicitly as a moderate Democrat with a Democratic Socialist mayor and calls where many people think that you should be the counterbalance to—

**Julie Menin**  
Well, I don’t think I’m an ideological person. I find these labels to be sort-of a false narrative in the sense that I have done progressive things: paid sick leave, living wage, when I served as commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs. This idea of moderate-progressive, this is about just government functioning. I think Mayor LaGuardia said it best: *There’s no ideological way to pick up the trash*. What we need to do is restore faith in government, get government functioning at the highest of levels. And that’s not an ideological issue. That’s an issue that every single New Yorker should hopefully agree on. In terms of divisions, I think as the first Jewish speaker, one of the things that I’m focused on is trying to unite communities. I spoke in the speech where my colleagues elected me about the fact that I am the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.

And at the same time, I’m very focused on trying to unite Jewish, Muslim, all communities across the city. And I’ve talked in particular when I chaired community board one for seven years after 9/11, one of the issues that I was really focused on was the [Islamic](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/11/nyregion/muslim-islamic-center-9-11.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [cultural center mosque](https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/debating-park51?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) where I physically, literally wrote the resolution backing the project and got the community board, board one, to back the project. And that was something that was really important to me. I mean, our country is built on these principles of freedom of religion, and we saw such divisive hate and Islamophobia around the Islamic cultural center mosque that was really despicable. And I will tell you at the time that many elected officials called me and said, *Why are you taking a stand on this? Why is the community board doing anything?* Well, we took a stand on it because it was the right thing to do and that’s what leadership is.

I think we have a historic opportunity with the first Muslim mayor and the first Jewish speaker to bring the temperature down. We’ve got to, first of all, bring the rhetoric down. I a hundred percent fully support the right to peacefully protest. That is sacrosanct. That is what our country is built on. It is so incredibly important. And I think one of the things that’s been lost, particularly in the last couple years, is the fact that yes, you have the right to peacefully protest but you don’t have the right to intimidate and harass. And there is a distinction, I believe, in reasonable time, place and manner restrictions.

I’ll give a particular example of that. I served for a number of years on the board at Columbia. I went to Columbia. I was an adjunct professor at Columbia. The former president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, who’s a real First Amendment scholar, made the decision to bring \[then President of Iran Mahmoud\] Ahmadinejad to Columbia. It was heavily criticized. However, what Lee did was he gave a really strong speech before introducing Ahmadinejad that gave the context about why this was, to sort-of provide the context of some issues around that. And so again, I believe in the First Amendment right to peacefully protest and we need to have reasonable time, place and manner restrictions. And so I think it’s an opportunity actually to try to bring communities together and I’m excited to hopefully be able to play that role.

**Christina Greer**  
So do you see yourself as a counterbalance to the mayor or a partner with the mayor?

**Julie Menin**  
We’re going to agree on many issues. We agree on childcare, on the absolute urgent need to build more affordable housing. We agree on this affordability crisis, but there will of course be areas of disagreement. There always are between the Council and the administration. And so it is going to be my job as speaker to work with the mayor when we align. And there’s a lot of alignment on affordability, but of course there are going to be areas of disagreement. The Council is an independent, co-equal branch of government. And so it is really both. There are issues again where we will absolutely agree and then there’ll be issues of disagreement.

But I think in the areas of disagreement, what I am most focused on is not repeating what happened for the last four years, which was this tit for tat between the mayor and the speaker — competing charter revision commissions, which doesn’t inure to the benefit of anyone that is not. If you were to ask New Yorkers what is really going to help improve their lives, they’re certainly not going to say, I want to see two charter revision commissions. That doesn’t make any sense. So when we do disagree, and I’ve already had these conversations with the mayor, we’re going to do so in a productive way that is not this interpersonal tip for tat that doesn’t benefit anyone.

**Harry Siegel**  
I’m hoping you can talk a bit, going back to some of your answer there, about your five-point antisemitism plan. I know you’re planning, you told the [*Forward*](https://forward.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)’s Jacob Kornbluh, to bring that to a vote quickly, like next month.

There’s this question, back to Chrissy’s, about your alignment with the mayor there, whether you need to pass it with a veto-proof majority. And I’m baffled by this idea of having 25 and you said maybe a hundred feet outside of synagogues and schools. It’s already a crime to block people from entering a place, and I’d like to understand how that isn’t just on the face of it a First Amendment violation.

**Julie Menin**  
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. So basically [what happened at Park East Synagogue](https://forward.com/fast-forward/787498/nyc-synagogue-protest-leads-to-a-new-bill-and-a-rally-by-jewish-groups-outside-park-east-shul/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in my opinion was completely unacceptable because there you had a situation where congregants couldn’t really freely worship — enter and exit. This to me is about safe access. The Council in 2008 passed a bill under Speaker Quinn around reproductive health centers and creating safe access. That is really the model that we would utilize here. That model has been legally upheld, it has withstood any type of legal challenge. We’re not trying to penalize free speech at all.

In fact, on the contrary, if we want people to be able to have the right to engage in free speech, the Skokie case is probably one of the seminal First Amendment cases that really talks about it, where Nazis were marching in the town of Skokie, which had a huge population of Jews, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. Was that morally repugnant? Absolutely. Were they legally allowed to silently march? Yes. And in my opinion, Skokie did the best thing possible, which is the town then decided to build a Holocaust museum, which I think was a really beautiful way to address the situation.

So we’re not looking to penalize peaceful First Amendment right to protest. We’re looking to do similar to what was done with the reproductive health centers, a similar type of restriction, which is you’re not allowed to engage in intimidation and harassment around houses of worship or schools within certain bounds. So we are working on the legislation right now. I can tell you as a lawyer, I’m heavily involved in this legislation. We certainly are not going to put forward legislation that does not pass legal muster. So it’s carefully crafted, but it’s crafted on precedent. We already have the precedent around the reproductive health centers and that is a really good model to be able to utilize.

I’m excited to put forward this plan, and the other thing that I would just say is on the five-point antisemitism plan that I announced on Friday, you saw in Borough Park just the other day, 57 swastikas on a playground. I mean, what is happening in the city? I mean this is abhorrent. This is unacceptable. It’s unconscionable. We have to do something about it. Jews are 10 percent of the city’s population and yet 57 percent of hate crimes are antisemitic. We do need to act. The plan that I announced does a number of different things. You asked about the house of worship and school perimeter. Yes, that is one piece of it. But the other critical piece of it is we are creating a hotline to support\[sic\] antisemitic incidents, because I believe they’re underreported. I know this for a fact because many people tell me that they’ve seen things but they’re not sure: *well, who do you call?*

And people are sometimes nervous to call. They don’t want to report things. So we think the hotline is a good way so that we can then get the data and it helps to inform our policies. But the other points of this plan are, we’re providing security cameras to all houses of worship, not just synagogues, but all houses of worship that don’t have the budget to do that. We are also providing safety plans to all houses of worship who don’t have the budget to be able to come up with a safety plan. We are giving $1.25 million to the Museum of Jewish Heritage for Holocaust education. About a year and a half ago, I launched a project where we’re bringing 85,000 public school eighth graders to the museum because studies were showing that 34 percent of young people believe the Holocaust is a myth or is exaggerated. So I think again, education is the best antidote to fight hate. And so those are a few of the things that we’re doing in this whole antisemitism package.

**Christina Greer**  
So you chose to relegate Council Member Vickie Paladino to \[only\] the Committees of Veterans and Emergency Management, and you [made very clear](https://www.nydailynews.com/2026/01/15/menin-slashes-vickie-paladino-fewer-nyc-council-assignments-abhorrent-posts/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that her past incendiary comments weren’t acceptable. What do you see as your role as speaker about the Council members who are inappropriate either in words or actions and/or those who speak out on issues that you disagree with?

**Julie Menin**  
Well, we certainly are not going to curtail any member’s right to free speech. So any member, it doesn’t matter if I personally agree or disagree. We’re not going to curtail First Amendment speech. I made my comments regarding Council Member Paladino last week and so you know what those comments are, they stand. I really believe we need to have a tough, fair, equitable, transparent process around our standards and ethics committee because there was immense frustration in the last four years that there wasn’t a lot of action coming out of that committee. And I think members felt very frustrated by that. And I think that’s something that we definitely need to do. The Council has a very clear harassment policy and that harassment policy is really what needs to govern us. As someone who— I believe in, like, we need to bring some more order and structure in this regard so we’re going to have a really, I think, very fair, balanced but strong ethics committee. Which is what—

**Christina Greer**  
Sorry, who did you assign to the ethics committee?

**Julie Menin**  
[Sandra Ung](https://council.nyc.gov/district-20/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). So basically I combined the rules and the standards and ethics committee into one committee, so it’s now a [broader based committee](https://council.nyc.gov/committees/rules-privileges-standards-ethics-and-elections/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and Council Member Ung, who is a lawyer, will be the chair.

**Ben Max**  
When you say there was frustration last Council with similar types of things that we just saw—

**Julie Menin**  
There are many things. There were a number of matters that were referred to standards and ethics where members were frustrated that they did not feel there was a sense of accountability and also a sense of transparency around it. The other frustration was if a member was referred to standards and ethics, oftentimes they weren’t made aware of that. That’s a problem too. We have to have the proper processes in place so that there is communication back from the Council’s office of general counsel to the member if they are being subject to a standards and ethics complaint. That has to also happen.

**Ben Max**  
What kind of categories – categories of behaviors — are we talking that weren’t followed up on? Was it more sort-of online comments?

**Julie Menin**  
Yeah, I am somewhat limited legally in what I can say about that. I can just suffice it to say there were numerous referrals to standards and ethics that we’re not really acted on. And I think we need to have the highest levels of integrity and professionalism within the body. Standards and ethics is a very broad based committee. It handles a lot of issues around harassment, violations of the Council’s harassment policy. It handles [EEO](https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/discrimination?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) issues. There are a lot of very serious issues that that committee is charged with. And my intention is to have a very strong, fair, balanced, and transparent standards and ethics committee.

**Akash Mehta**  
I want to return to the theme of making the Council a more proactive governing partner. You’ve talked about using the Council’s subpoena power for the first time to investigate businesses and agencies and contracts. Could you talk more about plans in the works there? Is that going to be a routine part of what the Council does, or saved for emergencies?

**Julie Menin**  
So, I was always struck that the Council never utilized its subpoena power against bad actors that were clearly flouting the Council’s laws in a very significant and material way. When I served as commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs, we strongly utilized our subpoena power against for-profit colleges that were scamming New Yorkers, against debt collectors, against Santander Bank. I mean, a number of different areas where we were very aggressive in utilizing the subpoena power. We have a situation where the Council will pass laws and then sometimes they aren’t implemented by the administration, but sometimes they also aren’t implemented by the businesses that we are seeking to regulate. And my background is as a regulatory attorney. So this is something that I care a lot about. I think that we have an obligation, and I talked about this in my speech about a week and a half ago.

We can do two things that might seem inconsistent at the same time. So I want to be able to attract new businesses to our great city. I want to make sure that businesses stay in the city. I want to make sure that we are growing the economy, and there’s a lot of ways that we need to do that. And when I served as Commissioner of Media and Entertainment, I brought film and TV production to the highest levels the city had seen, which is a real job creator for the city. We need to do all of that.

At the same time, you have certain bad actors who are truly flouting the law and engage in predatory conduct. That is where we need to come down harder. And I think perhaps the best example of that that I can give is when I was at Consumer Affairs, I launched a project called the Small Business Relief Package, where we lowered fines intentionally by about one-third on businesses where there was no consumer harm, like a word in a sign is incorrect, or picayune violations.

But conversely, if the business was engaged in predatory conduct and real consumer harm, we came down harder, and we increased consumer restitution to over 70 percent. So that’s what I mean. We want to be really hard on these bad actors that, by the way, are not good for businesses, because the ones that are really engaged in predatory conduct, you’ve got all of these good businesses that are doing the right thing, so they’re creating an unfair playing advantage.

So that’s what I mean by focusing on the use of our subpoena power. The Council has rarely, very rarely, ever used its subpoena power, but it’s certainly never used it in the way that I am intending to. And again, it is not because I want to be clear about this, it is not in any way to try to create an environment where we are not supportive of businesses in the city, because I’m someone who has worked with the business community and tried to grow the economy in many ways. But we are going to come down hard on businesses that are engaged in truly predatory conduct.

**Liena Žagare**  
Could you talk a little bit more about the oversight of city agencies and how is that going to change for you? Which agencies do you believe would benefit from more oversight?

**Julie Menin**  
I think all. Honestly, I think one of the things we saw in the last four years is frequently commissioners wouldn’t even show up to hearings. I served as commissioner of several agencies. There was never a City Council hearing that I personally did not attend and answer questions. That is completely disrespectful to not have commissioners attend City Council hearings, checks and balances, we’re the oversight branch.

So that is something that is going to change. I fully expect that commissioners show up at the City Council hearings and not only show up but be prepared to answer questions because it wasn’t just that the commissioners weren’t showing up, if they did show up or if a deputy commissioner showed up, I can’t tell you the number of times where the most rudimentary basic data points they could not answer. That’s also disrespectful. As commissioner, I would prepare for a long time to be in front of those City Council hearings because that is what you do and you make sure that you know your data cold.

And so again, it was just an eminently frustrating experience the last four years, because if they did show up, they couldn’t oftentimes answer the questions. And then they would say things like, “*oh, OK, well, we’ll get you that data*.” And yet there’d be no timeline put in the data. So I started in my hearing sometimes saying, “I want the data by the end of the day,” because otherwise we’re not even getting the data.

So I do think that that will change because we’re going to run this Council in a different way, which is, we are going to insist on the commissioners showing up and answering questions and providing the data. Because that’s what oversight is. Everyone should want oversight. Oversight means that you get the city agencies to function at the highest level. So that’s why oversight, I think, is a very important function that we perform.

**Akash Mehta**  
Are there particular city agencies that you’re worried about underperforming right now?

**Julie Menin**  
Yeah. I’m very concerned about the vacancies. You have a situation where many city agencies have been hollowed out. I used to work at the city Law Department. That agency is incredibly important because the city Law Department serves as counsel to every single city agency. By the way, it serves as counsel to the City Council. It performs a number of different functions. It has affirmative litigation, torts, settlements that they’re doing. I mean they have so many different areas that they function on, but that agency has been hollowed out. And so as a result we’re seeing real issues.

You’ve got other agencies where we’re not seeing the same kinds of data metrics. And so whether it’s response times on EMS, whether it’s on sanitation and trash pickup, whether it’s complaints up to 311, I mean that, to me, is…the most basic function of city government, is to have the agencies perform their stated function. So there are going to be a lot of agencies that, I mean, we need to have oversight over every agency that we have the ability to have oversight over and we need to be fair, balanced but have fulsome oversight.

And my old agency, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), I’m deeply concerned that we’re asking that agency to do too much with too little. So DCWP — and I was commissioner when we started to morph the agency into the field of worker protection, first with the paid sick leave law, living wage, the carwash workers bill, the Freelance Isn’t Free act — but things keep getting put on that agency, and yet you see in the data, it’s taking that agency longer times to close out paid sick leave cases. It’s taking them longer to close out a lot of cases. So I am concerned about that agency and believe we need to more properly resource it.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
In terms of the city budget, Mayor Mamdani reiterated yesterday, it’s at the feet of Eric Adams’ ‘colossal mismanagement’ that we face these massive budget gaps and that is a key reason why he needs his tax increases. Would you agree with that characterization and what would you have done differently over the past four years to rein Adams in, if you do agree with it in terms of, is there agency spending that should never have happened? Are there raises given out that should not have happened? How would the budget look differently under your speakership?

**Julie Menin**  
Sure. Well first of all with the budget, the Council, as you know, is going to do its own assessment of this. And that will be coming out in the coming months where we are really going to take a very hard look at the budget and come up with our own assessment of where we think things are. So I’ll reserve our comment until we do our own economic analysis.

But I will say that I believe, and we’re actually going to have a hearing on this, I have several bills to eradicate no-bid contracts during emergencies. And what I think happened, by the way, not only in the last administration, but in several administrations, you see mayors utilize no bid contracts to the tune of billions of dollars. So for example, during COVID, the no bid contracting was suspended over a hundred times to the tune of over $7 billion, which is why the city paid sometimes exorbitant rates for protective equipment.

And to me, an emergency [should be no more than 30 days](https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-migrant-contracting-mess?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). An emergency is an emergency, i.e., it has a short duration in time. So one of my bills that I introduced a number of months ago, six, seven months ago basically states that an emergency is 30 days and it then puts in very specific criteria through which that emergency no bid can be extended. And so as someone who owned a small business, you competitive-bid. You don’t just take the first, no one in their right mind who owns a business would bid something out and then just take the first bid. But that is basically what city government has done for years and years and years.

So to answer your question, I believe there are enormous savings that can be had in the city budget. And what I certainly would’ve done if I had been in charge differently, is I would’ve eradicated the utilization of no big contracts.

I had urged the Council to do that when the asylum-seeker crisis started because the reason the cost balloon to over $4 billion a year is largely because of no bid contracts [to DocGo](https://nypost.com/2024/06/16/opinion/how-city-hall-blew-41m-on-docgo-migrant-shelter-deal/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), over a billion dollars to the [Hotel Association](https://hanyc.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). You have to competitive-bid. And when I served as commissioner, we always did that you have to do competitive bidding. And so I think there are real savings that we can find in the city budget when we stop the use of these no bid contracts, which are being utilized a lot when we do things like harness our purchasing power, as I mentioned, utilizing our new healthcare accountability office.

And that, by the way, would involve conversations directly with the hospital CEOs because again, for states that have done hospital price transparency such as California, they’ve actually seen a drop of approximately 20 percent in costs on numerous medical procedures. I mean, imagine if we can do that through this new office. So I do believe there are numerous areas in the city budget where we could actually save money. And I look forward to our Council team doing our own analysis on where we think the budget is.

**Myles Miller**  
Can I just follow up on something you said about DCWP? One thing that is seeming to come out of the administration is that they want to focus EDC \[New York City Economic Development Corporation\] on some of that worker protection work, union jobs, fair wages versus what EDC is known for, which is economic development and all of that. What do you make of that? The changed DCWP has a focus, but that focus gets added in at EDC and a move away from economic development?

**Julie Menin**  
Look, I think DCWP is absolutely an agency that can engage in robust worker protection. I mean, we started it and so because we could never have a city department of labor because we’d be preempted by the state, that is really why we morphed DCWP to start to engage in this worker protection. So I think DCWP has the tools that they need to be able to do robust work or protect, and they are, and we started that. So I think they have the tools they need. I haven’t been briefed on this plan on a switch to EDC, so I don’t really have, I’d have to understand what exactly they’re intending to do before I could comment on that.

**Harry Siegel**  
Another followup there, you were talking about ways to save money within government. The Council has done some pretty ambitious things in recent years that were more press release than practice. And I’m thinking about the right to counsel in housing court. Now there’s nominally a right to counsel for every low-income person there. My understanding from numerous people who I’ve talked to who’ve been through that process is that this sort-of exists in concept but the legal services they get are extremely limited, largely as a budget matter. The money isn’t sufficient to actually have any sort-of competent lawyer — the way one person put it was: *who can do more than five minute advice sessions*? And I’m interested if that’s on your–

**Julie Menin**  
No, thank you for flagging that. I mean, right to counsel is obviously incredibly important and something that…started under a previous iteration of the Council and that was continued. It’s definitely something we will look at. We want to obviously make sure that if the Council, it has launched a project, that, then New Yorkers are getting the services that they expect from it. So I will take a look at it.

**Harry Siegel**  
It just costs a lot of money.

**Julie Menin**  
Yeah, no, it definitely does. I did a bill last session that gives right to counsel to victims of domestic violence who are engaged in divorce proceedings. So we just launched that. So that is just starting to go, but I appreciate you flagging it and I will definitely go back and look at the overall right to counsel, the original bill and then the expansion to make sure that the services that the Council says are being provided are being provided. I mean, I think that’s really important.

I mean, the other thing I will say that I plan to do is I want to make sure that when the Council is disseminating funding, and I have not been on the budget negotiating team for the Council and the past four years, so I have a different approach that I want to take, which is data metrics. We should not be disseminating funding unless we are clear that organizations have very specific measurables and that they’re meeting those measurables. So when I served as census director in 2020, we disseminated money to approximately 150 community groups on the ground who were the trusted messengers in their community, but we were very clear. We did staggered payments, we had clawback provisions, and we had very tight data measureables. I want to make sure that when we are disseminating City Council funding that we have those same robust and rigid checks on it.

**Akash Mehta**  
Beyond emergency contracting, do you have plans on procurement reform? And in particular, the city spends $28 billion this year on contracting, which is almost as much staff salaries, and a lot of that is extremely opaque. At New York Focus, for instance, we’ve [reported ](https://nysfocus.com/2025/03/19/mycity-eric-adams-child-care?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)on how extremely opaque social services contracts have involved more than a hundred million dollars on [MyCity](https://nysfocus.com/2025/03/19/mycity-eric-adams-child-care?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a social services website that doesn’t really work—

**Julie Menin**  
It doesn’t work, exactly.

**Akash Mehta**  
…Hundreds of millions of dollars for [internet connections on Chromebooks](https://nysfocus.com/2025/12/22/eric-adams-school-chromebooks-contract?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) almost entirely for kids that already have internet at home. Is the city relying too much on contracts and do they receive enough oversight?

**Julie Menin**  
Yes, they’re relying too much on that. And yes, we’re going to have very robust oversight. On procurement reform, the fact that it costs the New York City Parks Department approximately $4 million to build a bathroom in a park is unconscionable. I mean, that’s absurd. The fact that it takes the New York City Parks Department sometimes a decade just to repair a park — unacceptable.

So we are a hundred percent going to tackle procurement reform. We have to reform the way that procurement is working in New York City by cutting through some of the bureaucracy, the red tape that is jacking up the price and jacking up the length of time. And we also need to just have it more transparent because to your point, it is largely unaccountable and it’s this very bizarre, opaque system that it’s really hard to look under the hood. We’re going to look under the hood, and we’re going to get the answers.

So procurement reform is absolutely something we’re going to tackle. I just took a note when you were talking, because the MyCity portal is also a problem. So I think it was in 2022, 2023, I did a bill to create a one-stop shop for all small business licenses and permits. The idea being that oftentimes if you’re a small business owner, you have to take a day off work, you’ve got to go physically into a licensing center, you have to fill out paperwork. I mean, the whole thing was completely antiquated. And so the idea behind the bill is we will create one website, one app where you could access all city licenses and permits, and by the way, pay fines so that if you’re a current business, you’re not — again, it all needs to be centralized. If you look at what the administration did with that bill, the implementation is not at all what the bill said, and they did it through that MyCity portal.

It’s unbelievably frustrating to see what happened with the MyCity portal. And I think that’s another area of oversight. We need to look into that, like what happened there? And by the way, how much was spent on creating this, all of these outside vendors that were brought in? And then lastly, you mentioned WiFi access. And so in 2022, 2023, I launched a project in my district because I’ve had a tremendous amount of public housing in my district where residents could not access the internet. And so when I was census director, we saw that when approximately a third of New Yorkers truly didn’t have real access to the internet. And so we needed to change that. And so I launched a project that used a federal [ACP](https://www.fcc.gov/acp?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) benefit, and I went to Verizon and Spectrum and got them to lower the price. And then when we paired it with the ACP benefit, we brought the cost to zero and we were able to do events.

So we signed up residents of NYCHA, they could pick whichever plan they want because we can never be plan-specific. And we got so many residents signed up for free WiFi. And I briefed the Eric Adams administration on it and [OTI](https://www.nyc.gov/content/oti/pages/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Then they launched their own project, I think it was called Big Apple Connect, which was approximately $90 million, when we had a program that was free. Why were we spending $90 million when we had a scalable program that could have been rolled out to every resident of NYCHA? So again, these are the areas when we talk about the budget and savings, these are the areas where it is just incredibly frustrating to see what happened.

**Akash Mehta**  
Will you bring the vendors themselves to your hearings in addition to the commissioners?

**Julie Menin**  
Absolutely. Absolutely. And by the way, that’s where our subpoena power can come in, because if we are spending city money on a service and if that vendor is not going to come to our hearing, we do have the subpoena power to compel them to be there.

**Ben Max**  
I think we have a couple questions from me and from Liena…about whether the City Council and the city is over-legislating and overregulating. So we’re interested in your perspective on that.

First from me, it relates to the housing bills that Mayor Adams [vetoed](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2025/12/eric-adams-goes-out-fighting-city-council/410428/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on his way out, and a lot of housing experts, including at the agencies, were very concerned that those sort-of overregulated city housing projects and deals in terms of unit size, et cetera. So the Council passed those, Mayor Adams vetoed, now you have to lead the Council in deciding whether to override those vetoes. A lot of concern from housing experts that that’s over-meddling. Are you planning to override those vetoes?

**Julie Menin**  
We’re taking a very hard look obviously at every bill, bill by bill one at a time. I absolutely, and again, these are bills from the last Council, so I now am inheriting this. I will say that I do have some concerns that some of the bills could impede the building and construction of affordable housing. And so I do and have already started going back and looking at that and beginning conversations with the administration on that to see are there ways that some of the bills could be changed so that they wouldn’t have that negative impact of unintended consequences where we’re actually unintentionally hurting the construction of affordable housing, which was certainly not the intent of the bills at all, but sometimes bills do have unintended effects, and so I’m looking at that.

**Ben Max**  
And the other one in that package that’s different. But a lot of concern is the Community Opportunity \[to Purchase Act\]—

**Julie Menin**  
Right. We’re looking at every single bill. Every single bill. I will have more to say on that soon.

**Liena Žagare**  
Turning slightly to the private sector, what metrics would you be looking at to see if, to know when regulatory changes are hurting the economy and which sectors, industries are you most concerned about?

**Julie Menin**  
So again, we do not want to have a situation where businesses are leaving our city or businesses not wanting to come to the city. So I am very sensitive to that question because it is incredibly important. We want to make sure that we provide an atmosphere for new businesses to locate here.

We have a situation where Texas is now, I mean, in some respects, getting a lot of our financial service business that are relocating to other states, [Texas](https://nypost.com/2025/09/29/us-news/jpmorgan-chase-now-employs-more-workers-in-texas-than-ny-top-city-biz-advocate-calls-it-scary-development/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Florida, and we don’t want that. We want businesses obviously to remain in the city, that the businesses are what creates the revenue so we can build affordable housing and build more schools and build more parks and all of the vital social service programs that we need to do. So it is absolutely imperative that we keep businesses here and that we attract new businesses.

As someone who served as commissioner of media and entertainment, again, one of the first things I did that when I took over as commissioner, the number of TV shows, movies and pilots, every metric had dropped, which is why the mayor asked me to then take over that agency and we were able to bring everything back up.

But we brought it back up by, I worked very hard to reach out to media and entertainment companies to say, *New York City’s open for business. We want your business. We want you to come here.* And it was very successful and we brought production to an all-time high, and I did the deal to bring the Grammys to New York, which is a $200 million economic benefit.

So I’m very sensitive to, of course, we do not want to have bills that are having those effects. At the same time, I believe you can attract new businesses, keep businesses here, and also at the same time have some of the strongest worker protections in the country. I don’t believe those two ideas are mutually exclusive at all. So when we do regulate, we want to make sure that we’re regulating in a responsible fashion where we’re really getting at the core issues of consumer worker protection, things of that nature.

**Myles Miller**  
Can I just follow up? There’s been so much focus of this new administration on small business, on consumers. Obviously my outlet \[Bloomberg News\] focuses on big business, economic drivers of the economy. Can you tell me, are you concerned about the effect on big business based off some of these policies? And what will the City Council do to try to keep big business here, work with, I mean, I think \[Mayor Mamdani’s\] talked a lot about over-reliance on public-private partnerships, but what will the city do to continue working with our largest companies?

**Julie Menin**  
I am a huge fan of public-private partnerships, and I’ve done numerous ones. Probably the biggest public-private partnership that I launched was NYC Kids Rise, where we have seeded every public and charter school kindergartner with a college savings account. We’ve now done over 300,000 of them worth over $60 million. I also launched a public-private partnership around free swim lessons where we are giving free swim lessons to second-grade students and communities in need. So I’m very proud of that program as well.

In terms of the business sector, some of it is through communication. I speak regularly with the business sector. I talk to business leaders. I talk to small businesses, medium-sized businesses, big businesses across the board because again, we need to hear comments from all. Again, I really believe that having robust consumer and worker protection is not antithetical to attracting and keeping businesses here.

That is my approach. It is certainly the approach I took when I was commissioner of Consumer Affairs, which is I worked with businesses, we supported businesses. And the same when I was Commissioner of Media and Entertainment — but when there were businesses that were truly engaged in predatory conduct — like we found with certain for-profit colleges, certain debt collectors and other businesses — we came down incredibly hard. But we also loosened regulations for businesses that really, for example, if one word in a sign was incorrect, we gave businesses 30 days to cure those violations. So I think it is that type of approach–

**Ben Max**  
What about taxes? The mayor wants to increase corporate taxes—

**Julie Menin**  
But that’s not something that the City Council has any jurisdiction ever. That’s an Albany issue. What I’m really focused on again is—

**Akash Mehta**  
Do you have an opinion on that, though? The corporate tax.

**Julie Menin**  
First of all, what I’m trying to do with the City Council is focus on where our powers are, because I don’t want to get distracted. The governor has made clear, at least for this budget, that she’s not moving forward on that issue. She’s indicated in future years she might, but again, that is really an Albany issue.

I’m trying to focus where we actually have our power, and our power is on the city budget. There are, I believe, enormous areas of potential savings. I outlined a few of them: the no-bid contracts, the healthcare savings, there are more savings by the way — these contracts. So I’m going to really try to focus our attention on what we, the City Council, can actually control.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
One place you have a great deal of power, is regulating e-bikes. Do you consider an e-bike to be a motorized vehicle wherein the driver of that motorized vehicle has responsibility for being licensed, meaning being trained somehow, having insurance, and having registration? And would you hold a \[vote\] on [Intro 606](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=6566032&GUID=23754149-1A86-4F52-A97C-E183CF6F9D0B&Options=Advanced&Search=&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which would do those things?

**Julie Menin**  
Yeah, we definitely need to have regulation in this area. It is probably one of the top constituent issues that I hear from many Council members, including our office as well. Something really needs to be done about this, and so we are going to look at a number of different legislative solutions on it. We have a new transportation chair. Our majority leader, Shaun Abreu, I know he’s going to do an outstanding job leading that committee. I’m really excited about that. And we are going to do something on e-bikes. So we’re still looking at what is the best approach. There also needs to be regulation of third-party apps, because these apps are doing business in our city, and I believe they’re creating a situation where the *deliveristas* have to do these rapid deliveries that are then endangering the *deliverista* and the public, and we really can’t have that.

So there was a situation with a company, [Gopuff](https://www.gopuff.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which was about two years ago in my district, making a promise that they would deliver within 15 minutes, and that was like a guaranteed promise on their website. So I sent them a cease and desist letter saying, you have to remove this claim because the claim, A) violates the city’s consumer protection law, B) I believe the claim, it was a nuisance. It literally violated the state’s nuisance law. Why? Because it’s actually creating a public nuisance. You’re endangering the delivery worker and the public.

And so we are going to, and I did get the claim off, so we are going to do something about e-bikes. I think it’s reached just a point of absolute necessity that we do that. We don’t in any way want to penalize the *deliverista*. That is absolutely not what we want to do. What we want to do is regulate the third-party apps. We want to create a system where we’re really promoting safety, and so we’re looking at all these different things to come up with the right approach.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
[Revel](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2023/11/03/electric-moped-company-revel-bails-on-two-wheelers-in-full-transition-to-taxis?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) had, they geo-fenced where the scooter driver could not go on the sidewalk or go the wrong way. Should it be a condition of doing business in this industry in New York City, that the e-motorized vehicle has to be geofenced, where it just cannot go the wrong way down the street?

**Julie Menin**  
Again, we are still analyzing options on how to do regulations, so I’m not going to get ahead of our analysis. We’re looking at a number of different approaches where we can have regulation in this area.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
I’m going to steal a question from Nicole: I’m curious to know, how did you arrive here today and where’s your security detail?

**Julie Menin**  
I think that they’re out there, I would assume. Yeah. I mean, the security issue is unfortunately very real. It’s a situation where we’ve seen threats to elected officials, New Jersey, Colorado. We saw what happened in Washington DC. So the security issues are real, and so I’m following what the NYPD says. Commissioner Tisch called me when I became speaker and said that they’re the experts on the security. I’m not a security expert, so I don’t pretend to be so, nor would I want to be, again, I have to defer to what the NYPD says.

**Ben Max**  
You [put out on social media](https://x.com/SpeakerMenin/status/2011813903383105856?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) traveling to City Hall on public transit. Do you still plan—

**Julie Menin**  
Absolutely. Whenever possible, when we can. I think it’s very important that we do that, that elected officials do that. I plan to take the ferry because I want to expand ferry service. I think the ferry is something that a lot of New Yorkers are not utilizing, but we should be expanding it. We should be making it more accessible for people to take the ferry.

I will say on accessibility, we didn’t discuss this, but I’m very pleased that we created this new [disabilities committee](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/DepartmentDetail.aspx?ID=55536&GUID=25D9230C-69EE-4A5E-8343-9031B7E1955D&G=2FD004F1-D85B-4588-A648-0A736C77D6E3&Search=&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Disabilities was actually under — Mental Health, Disabilities, and Addiction was the name of the committee, and I’ve now created a new disabilities committee. I just think that was not, disabilities deserves its own committee, and part of that has to do with accessibility. I think for a lot of our subway stations, they’re not accessible. My father, when he was alive, was in a wheelchair and it was just unbelievably hard to get him anywhere.

And so I look forward to this, but it’s not only about the subways. We need to look at small business access. We need to look at the ferries. We need to really look at all different modes of transportation. We did a program on the buses that we announced maybe the MTA like two years ago about strollers and wheelchairs and the collapsibility of them. So I think that there’s a lot of opportunities around accessibility that really haven’t been focused on, so I’m excited about that.

**Julie Menin**  
So, actually, am I allowed to ask a question or no? OK: so one of the things that I am interested in is how do we promote community journalism? Because when I served as MOME \[Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment\] Commissioner, we launched this new media center to train community journalists in new media techniques, because what we were seeing unfortunately, is the closure of a lot of community newspapers. And studies were showing that 50 percent of New Yorkers actually derive their news from local community journalism — doesn’t need to be papers, it could be online — but local community journalism. So if there are thoughts on ways we can expand on that to support community journalism — very committed to doing that.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
A hundred percent. We’ll have dinner together and speak about that.

**Julie Menin**  
Yeah, I think that that’s very important because unfortunately, we’re seeing local news and the coverage of local news by many outlets shrink, and that’s the problem.

**Ben Max**  
Usually the answer to that is first and foremost, city advertising dollars and where they go. There’s other ways to do it too, and something you might want to look into: maybe 10 years ago at this point, I know Rory Lancman, when he was in the Council, was looking at ways that city government could be helpful to local media, but obviously there’s a balancing act in terms of of government subsidizing journalism in ways that—

**Julie Menin**  
But I think one of the big things that we haven’t talked about is the language access piece. So for example, a lot of the city agencies’ communications are in a small number of languages, generally eight, generally eight to 10\. But we need to go beyond that. When we launched a paid sick leave law, I made the decision that we were going to disseminate materials in 26 languages. That had never been done before. People thought, well, that’s crazy. How could we do that? Well no, we have to do that. There over 200 languages spoken in the city. It’s really important. So I think some of it is through language access, and that’s really important because for so many of our, and I’ve just again, focused on the consumer and worker protection portfolio, but for many of those laws, if we are not disseminating materials in numerous languages, if we’re not advertising in local community papers, we’re not reaching, you know, what could be nail salon workers. It could be—

**Christina Greer**  
I mean, I’ve worked with the[ *Amsterdam News*](https://amsterdamnews.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and ethnic media, the community groups that you’ve used for the census and that outreach, in lot of ways that Black media is having Coro Fellows, in getting college or college age students sponsoring them to become journalists in some ways, or to sort-of subsidize that, so I think some of the organizations that you’ve worked with during the census, in 26 languages, could be resources to help train a new cadre of journalists.

**Julie Menin**  
I think that that’s exactly right because I mean, one of the things we did on the census is, and this was at the time really hadn’t been done. We tried to give money to a lot of groups that had never received city money before because when you are not-for-profit, it’s unbelievably hard to access city funds, the city tends to just give money to the same groups again and again and again. And oftentimes really without those stringent data metrics that I mentioned. And so I think it’s very hard for new groups to break in.

So what we did on the census, we gave money to some group called [Sure We Can](https://www.surewecan.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which were canners, they were canners, that worked in communities where they have been hard to count for the census. So they were unbelievable messengers and they went back there and that was, I think, really exciting.

The last thing I’ll say on the census is that we have to pay more attention to the 2030 census. We have a situation where House Republicans are trying to add the citizenship question back onto the census. I served as executive assistant corp counsel when I was the census director and worked on the citizenship case with our New York Attorney General. We won that case at the Supreme Court and got the question off the census.

But the challenge is that House Republicans are now trying to put it back on, and we won the case on administrative law grounds, meaning that the Supreme Court found that the addition of the question was arbitrary and capricious. So I mentioned that because there is a path now where House Republicans are trying to put it on, if they succeed and that question goes back onto the census, it’s going to have disastrous implications for the city of New York for generations to come, on funding and on Congressional representation.

So I did a bill to create a permanent city Office of the Census that bill passed in December. So I’m going to be very focused, and I haven’t talked to the mayor yet about it, but I’ll be very focused on who is hired to staff that office, who is running that office, how that office is resourced. Because leading into the 2030 census with what is happening in this climate, I am really deeply concerned that we are going to have real issues on the 2030 census. And you’re going to see that play out not only in loss of funding for over 300 vital social service programs like Head Start and SNAP and others, but you’re also going to see it play out in the Congressional seats. I mean, you just saw the redistricting news today.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Do you think former Governor Cuomo dropped the ball in 2020 \[on the census\]?

**Julie Menin**  
He did not assist on the census, and that was really everyone, and I know journalists focus on, oh, if 89 more people would’ve been counted, we would’ve had an additional House seat.

That is actually, in my opinion, not the way to look at it. The way to look at it is, since 1950 and every decade, New York state has lost a minimum of two House seats. And in 1985, seats, sometimes four seats in some decades, sometimes three, no less than two. 2020 was the first year that we didn’t lose two seats. We lost one. And yes, we came within 89 people of losing zero. It was very frustrating, because the city really was on its own in many respects in dealing with the census.

**Ben Max**  
We’re going to sneak in three more things.

**Harry Siegel**  
Very quickly, just to mention, we talked off the record right before this started about [the City Council employee](https://www.thecity.nyc/2026/01/12/council-staffer-ice-arrest-julie-menin/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) who remains in New York and in federal custody. Understand there are limits on what you can say about that.

I did want to ask you, now that you’re a proto citywide person, I’m just angry at the city about this. There’s been for 10 years a big public movement, signature movement, to have something [named in honor of Sonny Rollins](https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/04/13/harry-siegel-rename-it-the-sonny-rollins-williamsburg-bridge/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). He’s the last surviving person in the iconic [great day in Harlem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vao3d%5FQNnA&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) photo, he’s 95, native New Yorker, seminal artistic figure who’s alive, who’d appreciate this honor and it baffles and angers me at the city generally that there seems to be, there was a bill just at one point, just absolutely no momentum toward doing that with this artistic trailblazer.

**Myles Miller**  
We’ll take the Williamsburg Bridge.

**Harry Siegel**  
That’s one possibility. So I’m just putting it out there. I will judge your Council, this government, New York City generally, on whether or not they competently manage to do that.

**Julie Menin**  
Thank you for flagging it.

**Akash Mehta**  
I wanted to get in a question on land use, which is related actually to redistricting in so far as it’s a function of population growth. I wanted to ask you how you’re thinking about land use, which is an area where the Council has an enormous amount of power. You appointed two people who voted against the City of Yes \[for Housing Opportunity\] to the subcommittees on zoning and also on landmarks and public siting, which oversees the use of city-owned land. So could you talk—

**Julie Menin**  
But the majority, I would say the majority composition of the Council strongly voted in favor of City of Yes. So on those two committees, the vast majority of composition of that Council is strongly in favor of City of Yes. So you’re always going to have different viewpoints within the Council. I was a huge supporter of City of Yes.

I will say on the land use question, one of the things that we’re doing to make the Council proactive instead of simply reactive is we are analyzing the 215 public-library branches to see which sites are suitable to build affordable housing on top of. So we’re doing a whole analysis on this right now. We’ll be releasing a plan on this in the coming months. We are also analyzing the one thousand DCAS sites, some of which are vacant land, some are underutilized or underpurposed buildings.

I believe it’s incumbent upon the Council to issue its own plan on affordable housing, to not just be a reactive player by answering ULURPs, but to actually affirmatively put out our own plan. So we’re looking at both tranches, both the public library branches and the DCAS sites and other sites, so we can really be a leader in identifying sites within various Council districts that are suitable to build affordable housing on.

I’m very excited about this library plan because I think it’s a historic opportunity to ensure that our libraries are fully supported and we have fantastic libraries. And at the same time, many of those sites are incredibly suitable to build affordable housing on top of, not all of them, but many of them. So I think that you’re going to find that this iteration of the Council is very aggressive and proactive on building more affordable housing, because the affordable housing crisis is a key crisis that we have for New York City.

**Akash Mehta**  
You’ll have a seat on the new appeals board that has the power to overrule individual Council members on ULURP decisions. Do you anticipate voting against the local Council members?

**Julie Menin**  
Again, this is a hypothetical. I mean, until we get on that appeals board, I can’t tell you how we would vote yet. But I think what is important here is that this is a Council that is deeply committed to building affordable housing. This is a Council that is going to be proactive about building affordable housing, and we are going to be putting out our own ideas about how to do that. And so I’m very excited about that.

In terms of that appeals board, again, it’s hard to engage in a hypothetical. Obviously I understand that Council members know their districts best, but at the same time, we have an affordable housing crisis. So it is that balance that we need to try to achieve here.

**Ben Max**  
Well, thank you so much.

**Julie Menin**  
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
### Trump’s Unconstitutional Coercion
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/trump-sanctuary-cities-funding/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:42:31.000Z
If he carries out his threat to cut off funds to jurisdictions that resist his immigration policies, President Donald Trump will violate the Constitution. In [a speech on Tuesday, January 13](https://apnews.com/article/trump-sanctuary-cities-states-federal-funding-f0bb01398d9d955a498170e7334ce14a?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Trump announced that starting February 1, he will deny federal funding to any states that are home to local governments resisting his administration's immigration policies.

This, of course, is not the first time Trump has made threats to jurisdictions that do not cooperate with deportation efforts led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He tried to do exactly this in his first term, only for the federal courts to [declare his actions unconstitutional](https://law.yale.edu/sfalp/major-cases/sanctuary-cities?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Last year, just a day after the inauguration, Acting Deputy Attorney General (and now federal court of appeals judge) Emil Bove wrote a memo to the Justice Department calling on United States Attorneys to prosecute state and local officials who do not cooperate with the deportation efforts of the Trump administration.

President Trump also has expressed this, saying that [state and local officials face prosecution](https://www.npr.org/2025/01/22/nx-s1-5271541/doj-immigration-trump-memo-prosecution?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for failing to assist his immigration policies.

These pronouncements, which obviously are meant to intimidate state and local governments, ignore the constitutional limits on the ability of the federal government to coerce state and local governments to carry out federal mandates. The Supreme Court has long held that the federal government may not commandeer state and local governments and force them to administer federal mandates.

In 1992, in [New York v. United States](http://google.com/search?q=new+york+v.+united+states+1992&rlz=1C5CHFA%5FenUS1075US1075&oq=New+York+v.+United+States+1992&gs%5Flcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgAEAAYgAQyBwgAEAAYgAQyCAgBEAAYFhgeMggIAhAAGBYYHjIICAMQABgWGB4yCAgEEAAYFhgeMg0IBRAAGIYDGIAEGIoFMg0IBhAAGIYDGIAEGIoFMgoIBxAAGIAEGKIE0gEIMTQ3N2owajeoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the Court declared unconstitutional a federal law that required that every state clean up its nuclear waste by 1996 or face significant legal consequences. The Court held that this violates state sovereignty and the Tenth Amendment. In an opinion by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the Court explained that Congress can try to induce state and local governments to act, but forcing them to adopt laws or enact regulations is unconstitutional. For example, when Congress wanted there to be a 21 year old drinking age it said that every state receiving federal highway money had to adopt this or it would lose five percent of those funds. This was deemed to induce, but not coerce state and local governments to act.

> Under the Constitution, state and local governments are not enforcement arms of the federal government and cannot be treated as such.

The Court extended this in 1997, in [Printz v. United States](https://www.oyez.org/cases/1996/95-1478?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), declaring unconstitutional a provision of the Brady Handgun Control Act that required state and local law enforcement departments to conduct background checks before issuing permits for firearms. Once more, the Court said that the federal government could do its own background checks, but it could not conscript state and local governments and compel them to administer a federal law. The Court, in an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, stressed that the federal government cannot require state and local governments to serve as its enforcement arm — and concluded that it violates the Tenth Amendment for Congress to commandeer the states and force them to administer a federal mandate.

More recently, in 2018, in [Murphy v. NCAA](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-476?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the Court unanimously concluded that the federal government could not force New Jersey to have a law banning betting on college sports. Congress certainly could use its power to regulate commerce among the states to prohibit such gambling everywhere in the country. But the Court, in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, ruled that it violates the Tenth Amendment for Congress to compel that state legislatures adopt laws.

Thus, the law is clear that Trump cannot force state and local governments to assist federal immigration officials. This would be impermissible commandeering.

Indeed, this was the basis for declaring similar efforts in Trump's first term unconstitutional. Then, too, Trump adopted a policy to cut off federal law enforcement money to local governments that did not cooperate with ICE. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that this was unconstitutional. Also, California, during the first Trump term, adopted a law limiting state and local cooperation with federal immigration officials. A federal district court upheld this law as constitutional.

There is a separate, important constitutional reason why Trump cannot unilaterally cut off funds: Only Congress, not the president, has the spending power and can set conditions on the receipt of federal money. The Supreme Court has held that the legislature can put strings on federal grants, but only if the conditions are clearly stated, they relate to the purpose of the program and they are not unduly coercive. Congress has not conditioned federal law enforcement money on state and local governments cooperating with ICE. As mentioned above, this is why Congress could say that state governments would lose five percent of their federal highway money if they did not set a 21-year-old drinking age: the condition was clearly stated, it related to the purpose of the highway funds and five percent was not unduly coercive. The Trump administration cannot add requirements that are not found in the federal spending law.

> Throughout American history, it has been conservatives, and conservative justices, who have championed states' rights and federalism.

Additionally, the Supreme Court has been clear that the federal government cannot coerce state and local action by withholding federal funds. In 2012, in [National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2011/11-393?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the Court declared unconstitutional a provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that required state governments receiving Medicaid funds to provide coverage to those within 133% of the federal poverty level. Those not complying would lose all federal Medicaid funds. The Court said that this was "dragooning" the states, impermissibly commandeering them to comply with a federal mandate. Such coercion, it ruled, violated the Tenth Amendment.

But that is exactly what Trump is trying to do if he cuts off money to state and local governments for not adequately cooperating with federal immigration officials. He is using federal money to coerce state and local governments that disagree with his immigration policies.

These cases reflect the Supreme Court's upholding of the basic principles of federalism, which safeguard the autonomy of state and local governments. These are not new, and they are not historically liberal. Quite the contrary: Throughout American history, it has been conservatives, and conservative justices, who have championed states' rights and federalism. That is why it is realistic to imagine that the Roberts Court, which so far has generally been supportive of President Trump, would be likely to rule against his administration if he carries through his threats to cut off federal funds to jurisdictions that do not cooperate with federal immigration authorities to his satisfaction.

To be clear, despite the use of the phrase "sanctuary cities," that is a misnomer. No state or city can or does protect undocumented individuals from ICE enforcement or deportation. Rather, "sanctuary cities" are jurisdictions that say that they will not explicitly assist the federal government in its immigration efforts. In other words, the state or local government cannot literally provide sanctuary to anyone, but they also don't have to assist the federal government's immigration enforcement efforts.

There are compelling reasons for cities to adopt such policies. Law enforcement agencies are understandably concerned that victims of crime and witnesses to crime will not come forward to the police if they fear deportation. This is not a new concern. In 1979, the Los Angeles Police Department adopted [Special Order 40](https://lapdonlinestrgeacc.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/lapdonlinemedia/2021/12/SO%5F40.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which provides that "Officers shall not initiate police action with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person. Officers shall not arrest nor book persons for \[violating\] the United States Immigration code."

Public health officials worry that sick people, including those with communicable diseases, will not go for treatment if they fear that it could lead to their deportation. Education officials fear that parents will not send their children to school if they think it might lead to deportation. This is not hypothetical. Cities are reporting [significant absenteeism](https://edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1202?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in schools as parents fear ICE actions there.

Under the Constitution, state and local governments are not enforcement arms of the federal government and cannot be treated as such. Federal authorities — such as ICE and border patrol agents — can enforce federal law so long as they do so in a manner consistent with the Constitution. But whether state and local governments wish to cooperate is entirely up to them. Cutting off funds from jurisdictions that don't assist ICE would be unconstitutional.
### How Criminals Get Their Guns
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/underground-gun-markets-urban-violence/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:27.000Z
Gangs, drug-selling crews and other criminal organizations generate a disproportionate amount of gun violence in U.S. cities. While these groups drive much of the shooting and homicide plaguing urban neighborhoods, most people (including many policymakers) don't understand how these dangerous actors actually acquire their weapons.

City-level studies reveal the stark concentration of gun violence among criminal networks. Gang- and group-involved conflicts drive more than one-third of homicides in[ Chicago](https://popcenter.asu.edu/sites/g/files/litvpz3631/files/problems/drive%5Fby%5Fshooting/PDFs/Block%5Fand%5FBlock%5F1993.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), half in[ Los Angeles' Boyle Heights area](https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph%5Freports/MR1764-1.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and nearly two-thirds in[ Oakland](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022427818821716?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). A[ study](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-25/beyond-broken-windows-what-really-drives-urban-crime?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of more than 20 cities found that less than 1% of a city's population was involved in gangs, drug crews and other criminally active groups, but they were connected to over 50% of shootings and homicides.

This concentration creates both a challenge and an opportunity. While a small number of high-risk individuals drive most gun violence, it also means that disrupting their access to firearms could have outsized effects on urban safety.

Contrary to popular belief, gang members, drug dealers and other serious criminals generally do not obtain their guns by purchasing them from licensed dealers. Instead, they acquire weapons through informal transactions in underground markets supplied by guns diverted from legal commerce.

A 2016 federal survey of state prison inmates found that[ fewer than 10% purchased their last firearm at a gun store or pawnshop](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/policing-gun-violence-9780199929283?cc=us&lang=en&&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Instead, gun criminals tend to acquire their firearms from family members, friends, acquaintances and connections to the underground economy such as fences, drug dealers and other "street" sources.

This reality points to a crucial fact: The primary challenge isn't stopping criminals from buying guns legally — federal law already prohibits most of them from doing so. The real challenge is stopping the flow of weapons from legal markets into illegal ones.

## Inside the underground gun market

Data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) provides a window into these underground markets.[ Between 2017 and 2021, ATF traced nearly 2 million crime guns recovered by law enforcement agencies](https://www.atf.gov/firearms/national-firearms-commerce-and-trafficking-assessment-nfcta-crime-guns-volume-two?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The patterns revealed tell a compelling story about how illegal gun markets operate.

Most traced crime guns were semiautomatic pistols with medium and large calibers — the weapons of choice for urban violence. Pistols accounted for 68% of recovered crime guns, with their share increasing to 75% by 2021\. Almost half were 9mm firearms, primarily from quality manufacturers like Taurus, Glock and Smith & Wesson.

Perhaps most revealing is what ATF investigators and researchers call "time-to-crime" — the period between a gun's last legal purchase and its recovery in a crime. Short time-to-crime periods indicate trafficking, as legitimate gun owners rarely have their recently purchased weapons show up at crime scenes. Between 2017 and 2021, 25% of traced crime guns were recovered within one year of purchase and 46% of traced crime guns were recovered within three years of purchase, and these percentages increased dramatically during the study period.

Even more telling: Only 12% of traced crime guns were recovered from their original purchaser. Most had changed hands multiple times through underground networks, often very quickly after their initial legal sale.

Crime gun traces also reveal the geographic patterns of illegal gun flows. Location data show that firearms migrate from states with less restrictive gun controls to states with more restrictive laws. States with strong gun controls like New Jersey (82%), New York (80%) and Massachusetts (67%) have high percentages of traced crime guns originally purchased in other states. Meanwhile, states with weaker controls like Texas (86%), Wisconsin (84%) and Ohio, Virginia and Indiana (all 83%) see most of their crime guns purchased locally.

This interstate flow creates what law enforcement officials and researchers call "iron pipelines" — well-established trafficking routes that move weapons from states with lax gun laws to cities with stronger controls but higher demand from criminal networks.

## The pathways of illegal diversion

[ATF investigation data](https://www.atf.gov/firearms/national-firearms-commerce-and-trafficking-assessment-nfcta-firearms-trafficking?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) reveals the specific channels through which guns move from legal to illegal markets. Unlicensed dealing by private persons (40.7% of cases) and straw purchasing from licensed dealers (39.5%) are the most frequent trafficking methods.

Straw purchasing — where someone legally eligible to buy guns purchases them for prohibited persons — represents a particularly important pipeline. These buyers can receive significant markups for their services.[ Research in Boston](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9125.12187?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that gang members and drug dealers paid nearly 200% markup over fair market value for handguns acquired through trafficking networks.

Other significant sources include theft from licensed dealers (17.3%), theft from private persons (7.9%) and increasingly, privately made firearms or "ghost guns." The number of these unserialized, homemade weapons recovered in crimes increased by nearly 1,100% between 2017 and 2021.

Research in cities like[ Boston](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9125.12187?ref=vitalcitynyc.org),[ Chicago](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4625574?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and[ New York City](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32888157/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) reveals how criminal networks facilitate gun access among their members. Gang membership significantly eases access to firearms through established supply lines and shared connections.[ As one gang member explained to researchers](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32888157/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): "Basically, people in gangs … they got guns ready … They know more people … got more connects."

These networks don't just share weapons — they share suppliers. Gang members pool their connections, meaning that disrupting access for one member can affect the entire network's supply chain.

Studies also show that gang members tend to acquire older firearms that have changed hands multiple times, suggesting they're purchasing from established trafficking networks rather than directly from recent legal sales. In[ Boston](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9125.12187?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), traced guns recovered from gang members had a median age of 14 years, compared to 10 years for guns recovered from non-gang members.

Underground gun markets operate differently from legal markets due to their illegal nature. Research in[ Chicago](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4625574?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found these markets are "thin" — meaning few buyers, sellers and total transactions — with considerable friction that makes guns harder to obtain for some participants.

This friction creates opportunities for law enforcement. The underground gun market doesn't operate under the law of one price. Instead, access and cost depend heavily on "who you know." Even within criminal networks, many actors cannot successfully purchase guns, while others — particularly gang members — have easier access through established connections.

Privately-made firearms represent an emerging and concerning trend. These weapons, assembled from kits or parts, bear no serial numbers and are untraceable. While they required some technical skill in the past, today's kits can be assembled with basic tools and online instructions.

In[ Oakland](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0091743522002808?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the percentage of ghost guns among all recovered crime guns increased from 1% in 2017 to almost 25% in 2021\. Research suggests criminals prefer these untraceable weapons for violent crimes, as they cannot be connected back to specific purchasers through ATF tracing systems.

In 2022, the Biden administration enacted[ Final Rule 2021R-05F](https://www.atf.gov/rules-and-regulations/definition-frame-or-receiver/summary?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which included several important reforms such as a requirement for licensed dealers to identify privately made firearms with serial numbers before entering regulated commerce. Multiple states have also passed legislation regulating privately-made firearm commerce and possession. It remains unclear whether these reforms have produced the desired impacts.

## What works: disrupting underground markets

Despite the challenges, research shows that law enforcement can effectively disrupt underground gun markets through strategic, problem-oriented approaches. The key is understanding local market dynamics and targeting specific trafficking channels rather than just focusing on possession.

The[ gun market disruption strategy implemented as part of Boston's Operation Ceasefire](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9133.2005.00353.x?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) suggests a successful model. Based on analysis of local gun trafficking patterns, the intervention focused enforcement on new handgun diversions from retail outlets. The strategy included expanded focus on both interstate and intrastate trafficking, attention to guns with short time-to-crime intervals, and systematic tracing and investigation of firearms used by violent gangs.

The results were significant: The percentage of new handguns recovered by Boston police decreased substantially, suggesting the strategy increased the "effective price" of acquiring new firearms for criminal use.

Similar approaches in[ Detroit, Chicago](https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/12/4/225?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and[ Milwaukee](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11524-006-9073-2?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have shown notable changes to local gun market dynamics. In[ Los Angeles](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-010-9113-5?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a simple intervention sending letters to new gun buyers about their legal responsibilities resulted in higher rates of theft reports — suggesting some buyers were using theft reports to distance themselves from future misuse.

## The path forward

The evidence suggests several promising directions for reducing criminal access to firearms:

**Focus on secondary markets**. Since criminals rarely purchase guns directly from dealers, closing loopholes in private sales and better regulating secondary markets could significantly impact criminal access.

**Target trafficking networks**. Law enforcement should focus on the intermediaries — straw purchasers, brokers and traffickers — rather than just end users.

**Comprehensive tracing**. All recovered crime guns should be traced and analyzed to identify trafficking patterns and suspicious purchase activities.

**Problem-oriented approaches**. Successful interventions require understanding local market dynamics and tailoring enforcement strategies accordingly. This approach could be particularly effective in addressing local gun theft problems.

**Interstate coordination**. The geographic patterns of gun trafficking require coordinated responses across state lines, particularly between source and destination jurisdictions.

Stemming the flow of illegal guns to gangs and violent groups requires adequate resources and sustained commitment. Success against underground gun markets demands separating firearms trafficking strategy from broader gun politics and focusing on evidence-based approaches.

Local police departments should take problem-oriented approaches to understand how criminals access guns in their specific jurisdictions and collaborate with federal and state partners to implement targeted interventions. The concentration of gun violence among small numbers of criminal actors creates an opportunity: disrupting their access to firearms could yield significant reductions in urban gun violence.

The underground gun market isn't unstoppable. It operates with friction, inefficiencies and vulnerabilities that smart policing can exploit. But success requires understanding how these markets actually work — not how we assume they work — and designing interventions based on evidence rather than assumptions.

As cities continue to grapple with gun violence, focusing on the supply chains that arm the most dangerous actors represents one promising path toward safer communities.
### A Crucial Tool in the Fight Against Pollution
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-local-law-97-enforcement-pollution/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:28.000Z
Deep down in the basements of many of New York's large buildings sits an old, dirty beast: a decades-old oil- or gas-fired boiler. These boilers are our city's [top source](https://www.nyc.gov/content/climate/pages/initiatives/nyc-greenhouse-gas-inventories?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of pollution. Replacing aging, inefficient and polluting oil and gas boilers with energy efficiency upgrades and clean, energy efficient heat pumps that don't rely on fossil fuels is a big challenge. And though it costs something up front, it also gives us an enormous opportunity to reduce utility bills over time, create good jobs and slash pollution.

In 2019, New York City enacted [Local Law 97](https://www.urbangreencouncil.org/what-we-do/driving-innovative-policy/ll97/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to meet the challenge. The city's landmark law — the first of its kind worldwide — covers roughly 50,000 buildings, all larger than 25,000 square feet. That's about half a football field, and any building from, say, a 4-6 story residential building to One World Trade Center is covered. Local Law 97 requires these buildings to reduce their pollution under annual limits.

Any given building's pollution cap is defined by type and use, so a large property's limits over time take into account a sometimes complex mix of uses, which can have quite different energy use profiles. The law also sets specific standards for rent-regulated and public buildings.

The statute's first pollution limit applied in 2024, which gave building owners five years to prepare. Every five years, the pollution caps will ratchet down. The initial 2024-2029 pollution limit is relatively easy to meet, while the 2030-2034 limit is much lower.

As of 2023 — a full year before the law's first annual limits applied — [92% of large buildings](https://www.urbangreencouncil.org/what-we-do/explore-nyc-building-data-hub/local-law-97-progress/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) were below their initial five-year pollution caps. That's a major improvement from about 80% when the law passed in 2019\. In 2023, [49% of multifamily buildings](https://www.urbangreencouncil.org/what-we-do/explore-nyc-building-data-hub/local-law-97-progress/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) were already below the law's tighter 2030-2034 pollution limits, a full seven years "ahead" of schedule. That's up from about 25% when the law passed in 2019, which is also a major advancement for the city.

It's quite likely that when the data is crunched, even more than 92% of buildings will be shown to have been in compliance with the law's 2024 limits. Indeed, at the current rapid pace of pollution reductions — with a few percentage points worth of buildings upgrading to better systems and practices per year — virtually 100% of covered buildings are on track to meet Local Law 97's pollution limits for 2024-2029\. Moreover, at that pace of improvement, compliance will remain close to 100% in 2030-2034, when the pollution limits become much tighter.

Almost every week, [green building](https://be-exchange.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [experts](https://www.urbangreencouncil.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [advocates](https://www.nycommunities.org/ll97-in-action?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [government](https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/Multifamily-Buildings-of-Excellence?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [academics](https://cunybpl.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [expert consortiums](https://retrofitplaybook.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [specialty](https://www.habitatmag.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [publications](https://www.skylight.nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) document another success story: a large building slashing its energy waste in response to Local Law 97\. Public energy use reporting by big buildings has been in place for about 15 years now under Local Law 84, enacted under Bloomberg. If a building is covered by Local Law 97, anyone can [easily look up](https://www.be-exchange.org/calculator/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) its status. Energy efficiency is advancing rapidly as large buildings remedy wasteful, inefficient practices.

And there are still plenty of "low-hanging fruit" energy efficiency opportunities: Many of the city's buildings are yet to implement easy upgrades, such as insulating exposed heating pipes; weather-stripping; switching to LED lighting; covering or removing window unit air conditioners in the winter and installing simple valves, vents and controls to reduce energy waste. Those upgrades cost something but pay off over time, sometimes in short order.

Many building owners are also financing more complex energy efficiency upgrades and in the process saving themselves more than the cost of their financing through reduced operating costs.

Yet the real estate lobby, which bitterly opposed the law's passage, has been hard at work trying to convince policymakers, political insiders and the media that Local Law 97 is unaffordable or impractical. Their goal is to roll back the law — or to defang enforcement by eliminating penalties.

Advocates for Local Law 97, such as New York Communities for Change and our allies, are massively outspent by industry-financed [ad campaigns](https://nypost.com/2023/04/30/co-op-owners-rebel-against-massive-nyc-climate-law-costing-millions/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Super PACs](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/nyregion/mamdani-opposition-attack-ads.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [PR](https://www.rebny.com/press-release/report-local-law-97-fines/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [work](https://www.ll97facts.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [big campaign donations](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/nyregion/eric-adams-fund-raising.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [front groups](https://www.amny.com/news/co-op-condo-owners-real-estate-local-law-97/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [astroturfed](https://www.homeownersforastrongerny.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [support](https://www.law.cuny.edu/publications-library/public-problems-and-private-landowners-lessons-from-new-york-citys-groundbreaking-climate-mobilization-act/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and a [lawsuit](https://www.climatecasechart.com/collections/glen-oaks-village-owners-inc-v-city-of-new-york%5F1b885d?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that took years to dismiss in the courts.

Some of the arguments made by the law's deep-pocketed opponents are rank fear-mongering. For example, the $1.3 million Super PAC against Local Law 97 [distributed outrageous flyers](https://x.com/SaveNYC2025/status/1977054892205523256?s=20&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in co-op buildings claiming "your monthly maintenance will go up, possibly by $1,000 per month or more", amidst other outrageous claims. Such false messaging can genuinely scare people. Of course, it can cause them to turn against well-considered public policy.

If only Local Law 97 could sue for defamation!

Rebutting every argument we have heard would take a long write-up, indeed. But to take one leading complaint: the law's opponents commonly claim its penalties are "draconian." Under the law, buildings are to be charged up to $268 per ton if the property exceeds its pollution limit. Opponents take the worst-case scenario — in which a building does nothing to reduce its pollution — and multiply the total penalty out to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to make the legislation seem ridiculously punitive.

But some of the covered buildings are billion-dollar properties. Even outer-borough co-op complexes' annual revenues from maintenance come to many millions annually. Per unit, Local Law 97 penalties will not be draconian. Divided by the number of units, potential penalties are not much bigger than nuisance parking-ticket level.

For example, in 2023, a leading Local Law 97 opponent [claimed](https://www.amny.com/news/nyc-coop-condo-owners-local-law-97-climate/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that the co-op complex he leads would pay $394,000 penalties in 2024, when the law's first pollution limit began. That sounds like a lot, but on a per unit basis it's only $135 because the building complex has [2,904 units](https://www.glenoaksvillage.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Meanwhile, the complex can simply avoid breaking the law by improving its energy efficiency — and as of 2023, 92% of buildings were under those 2024 initial limits. If a building doesn't exceed its pollution cap, there are no violations and no penalties at all, naturally. Far from "draconian," the dreaded penalties are more of a firm nudge in the right direction than an executioner's falling ax.

Moreover, the law includes provisions to adjust pollution limits — loosen them — to take account for unusual, outlier circumstances not already fairly considered in the law's pollution cap formula for any given building. If a building is undertaking "good faith" action — defined as such by regulation and law — a building will be able to demonstrate its case for an easier path if it so chooses, and regulators can adjust its pollution limit. But of course, at the end of the day, there must be some penalty assessed on non-compliance or the law is easy to disregard.

Local Law 97's success thus far came with very little support from the former mayor of New York, who was elected two years after it passed. When he was in office, Eric Adams [delayed enforcement](https://api-prod.gothamist.com/news/adams-wants-to-soften-enforcement-of-landmark-climate-law-that-aims-to-reduce-building-emissions/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [opened loopholes](https://gothamist.com/news/major-nyc-climate-law-in-jeopardy-as-400-people-virtually-crash-buildings-meeting?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for landlords to evade pollution limits. Meanwhile, [much-hyped](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/climate/local-law-97-fines-co-ops-condos-slashed-city-council-bill?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) legislation to [gut Local Law 97](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W0EvFNg77tphs7SRn0gvyJNPbx9%5FuZxRzfczukagB0U/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) stalled amidst fierce grassroots opposition to a roll back.

As political forces battle, dedicated public servants in multiple agencies — who rarely get the public praise they deserve — are implementing the law, which takes hard work, good judgment and real expertise.

That's good news, but the job is far from done. Under Zohran Mamdani, the city should fully implement and enforce Local Law 97.

In the near term, Mamdani should take enforcement actions against the [tiny minority](https://www.nyc.gov/site/buildings/dob/pr-dob-mayorgsd.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of building owners who are thumbing their noses at the law by not getting below the law's pollution limits — or even failing to report at all. These buildings unfortunately tend to be very wasteful in their practices, as they are at the very high end of energy use per square foot and therefore outsized drivers of pollution in the city. They typically waste real money and add to the city's air pollution because they haven't implemented even some of the basics of energy efficiency. Deeply unfortunately, the scare campaigns and the now-dismissed lawsuit against the law have led some owners to believe that the law will never be enforced — and that they therefore can just ignore it to no consequence. That's a serious mistake. (It also implies widespread problems in their properties that should be remedied, not further covered up.) 2024 public data on each building and its compliance will soon be available. Local Law 97 will expose some owners who have been swimming naked in the ocean as the tide runs out.

The City should also [close regulatory loopholes](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F6akBERobrDlSEfb2sYXmHXe3OE46NvmuZX61OtLUQY/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that allow building owners too much leeway to purchase Renewable Energy Certificates in place of reducing pollution. It should properly issue the many necessary further rules, regulations and guidelines for the law, which detail everything from how building owners can apply for an adjusted pollution limit for 2030 and onwards to a critical formula defining how much pollution the law attributes to the electric grid from 2035 onward as part of the calculation of any given building's total pollution. These are technical tasks that require ongoing expertise and effective civil servants — and so far, talented staff in multiple agencies covering this program have done a good job. With the State, the City needs to reauthorize the J51 tax credit for energy efficiency, which lapsed at the end of December (Hochul recently proposed to do this at the state level, so between her and Mamdani's commitment, this particular ball is set to roll). By 2035, the City should allocate hundreds of millions of dollars more per year to energy efficiency investments in affordable housing, in addition to properly maintaining NYCHA.

Mamdani's already made a strong choice in appointing Ahmed Tigani as his Department of Buildings commissioner, the top post at that key agency. In the next several years — perhaps the length of a two-term Mamdani mayoralty — the City should pursue a multi-pronged strategy to accelerate energy efficiency upgrades. First, it should [drive down the cost](https://www.urbangreencouncil.org/funding-the-future-of-decarbonization-live-from-urban-green-conference/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of energy efficiency equipment and services by aggregating demand and using the City's financing and credit to backstop a loan fund for owners to tap for standardized loans, which would lower borrowing costs and thus make larger capital upgrades cheaper. Secondly, it should expand its [already-considerable work](https://accelerator.nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to [educate owners](https://cunybpltraining.org/course-catalog/becs-2/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [contractors, firms](https://education.urbangreencouncil.org/public-on-demand?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [workers](https://cunybpltraining.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on best practices. Third, it should increase the scale and ease-of-use of existing subsidy programs delivered by [government](https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/Multifamily-Building-Programs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), utilities through [ratepayer programs](https://www.coned.com/en/save-money/rebates-incentives-tax-credits/rebates-incentives-for-multifamily-customers/electric-heating-and-cooling-technology-for-multifamily-buildings/heat-pump-incentives?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [nonprofits](https://be-exchange.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that [help finance](https://nyceec.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and offer [free expert help to execute](https://accelerator.nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) energy efficiency upgrades. Finally, the City should run a major public education effort to teach the general public about the necessity of climate action and its opportunity for energy bill savings and good jobs.

Mamdani and the City Council should also push Gov. Hochul to begin the state's [Clean Air Initiative](https://capandinvest.ny.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (aka "Cap and Invest"), which would cap pollution statewide and make polluters fund investment into reducing pollution, including that which comes from dirty oil and gas boilers. Similarly to congestion pricing, the program was ready to be introduced, but in a major surprise even to her own agencies, the Governor delayed the program at the eleventh hour. The program is now in a similar limbo to the one congestion pricing stood in before Hochul waved it forward, although a [court ordered the state to proceed](https://nysfocus.com/2025/10/24/new-york-climate-law-regulations-trial-clcpa-decision?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with it after climate justice groups sued, an order the Governor is currently [appealing](https://nysfocus.com/2025/10/30/clcpa-ruling-hochul-appeal-new-york-climate-law-cap-invest?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

The City should also advocate that in future decades, the State allocates much more funding, raised from progressive revenue sources, than even the Clean Air Initiative would provide. This would help make it financially beneficial for every building owner to go entirely fossil-free. For example, the City should push the State to enact Sen. Gustavo Rivera and Assemblymember Al Stirpe's [Bucks for Boilers](https://www.bing.com/search?FORM=K413DF&PC=K413&q=bucks+for+boilers+rivera&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Act, which would pay for heat pumps and energy efficiency upgrades and phase out all oil and gas boilers over time.

Fortunately Mamdani, for whom reducing pollution is presumably a larger priority than affordability, clearly understands the importance and value of Local Law 97\. Energy efficiency, after all, lowers utility bills over time. Mamdani has [repeatedly pledged](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/13/nyregion/zohran-mamdani-climate-law-97.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to fully implement and enforce the statute. He has demonstrated a [grasp of the issue's specifics](https://www.facebook.com/nychange/videos/mayoral-forum-february-6th-2025/1355424332142943/), from applying penalties on recalcitrant owners to lowering the cost of heat pumps and extending the generous [J51 tax credit](https://www.skylight.nyc/articles/resources/what-is-the-j-51-jax-abatement?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for energy efficiency for low- and middle-income co-ops and condos. While in the Assembly, Mamdani also helped defend Local Law 97 when then-Governor Andrew Cuomo [attempted to override it at REBNY's behest](https://nysfocus.com/2021/02/18/cuomo-override-nyc-climate-law?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the state budget process.

As Mamdani points out, fighting climate change and lowering bills aren't incompatible, even though major energy efficiency upgrades add up front costs that are typically financed over time. Indeed, how can New York City be affordable in future years if [about 30% of it chronically floods](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/15/nyregion/new-york-climate-flooding-solutions.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)?

Decades ago, our buildings used coal and the city choked on pollution. While that seems unthinkable now, the coal lobby of its day tried to hang on to its profits then, too. The coming decades will bring another transition: from polluting oil and gas to heat pumps and energy efficiency. As in his electoral campaigns, Mamdani should power past the fearmongering of vested interests and stick to his guns on Local Law 97.
### Supporting Children Who Experience Violence at Home
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/children-domestic-violence-acs-family-court/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:28.000Z
Who decides what's best for children? These days, many people believe that the government should, to the extent possible, stay out of it. But what happens when parents are harming each other and/or the children? What is the government's role then?

Policymakers thinking about this question tend to focus on child protective services, or the Administration for Children's Services (ACS) as it is called in New York City. ACS's actions — or lack of action — make headlines, drive debate and frustrate advocates. But the overwhelming majority of children in New York City who are experiencing violence at home are *not* in ACS custody or even under ACS supervision. They often do have cases being heard before judges in Family Court, however — because one parent, a grandparent, or another relative has filed custody, visitation, guardianship or order of protection cases. In these scenarios, judges are being asked by the family itself to help stop the violence.

Unfortunately, many of these families fall through the cracks when it comes to accessing services. Children in ACS custody and their parents get government assistance — but families with histories of domestic violence that have never been under ACS's watch are effectively forgotten, even when kids are in desperate need of help. That's a huge blind spot that needs to be addressed.

As I saw firsthand when I was on the bench, once a case reaches Family Court, it is rarely easy to figure out what is best. Families are often marked by histories of intergenerational trauma, racial bias, abuse, mental health issues, substance use, economic hardship and more. In the middle of these cases, there are children who — because of their age, a lack of resources, family conflict or all of the above — may not have a voice or a choice in the matters that affect them the most.

For families entangled with ACS, there are well-established rules and procedures intended to ensure that kids get the help they need. But when ACS is not involved, it is up to the litigants to decide what to put in the paperwork that the Court sees. Frequently, these litigants, most of whom don't have lawyers, focus on violence between the adults and issues around "fair" parenting. Judges may not even know whether a child has been hit or witnessed violence — the adults filling out the paperwork are doing so based on their own perspective, not what the children have experienced. The Court's forms don't help in this regard: court statistics don't track allegations of violence towards children in custody or order of protection cases. It is difficult to address what we don't even see.

> Many parents simply won't take advantage of services if they think that ACS is lurking around the corner.

The Children's Law Center, the organization I now lead, has been working on trying to figure out the scale of the problem. Conservatively, based on triangulating sources, we estimate that between a third and a half of all the children whose fates are being decided in Family court custody, visitation and guardianship cases come from families that have experienced domestic violence. There were over 150,000 of these filings in New York City Family Court in 2024, so that is a lot of children.

Until just 25 years ago, children could be removed from their own home just for witnessing a parent experience domestic violence. In the seminal case of[ Nicholson v. Scoppetta](https://nycourts.gov/reporter/3dseries/2004/2004%5F07617.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the New York Court of Appeals set an important new standard. It said kids should not be removed from a home just because their parent has been a victim of domestic violence. It may seem obvious that a parent does not become unfit just because they were a victim of violence, but it required litigation to set the standard.

After Nicholson, the City generally stopped charging the protective parent — meaning the one who tried to shield his or her child from the abuser — with neglect. But children who remained with their non-abusive parent during a domestic violence case were considered effectively under the control of the Administration for Children's Services and subject to intrusive home visits and the risk of being removed.

Thanks to two recent appellate decisions, [A.R. v. ACS](https://law.justia.com/cases/new-york/appellate-division-first-department/2025/motion-no-m-1247-m-1268-m-1483-nn-00057-24-docket-no-nn-00057-24-appeal-no-4207-case-no-2024-06363.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Sapphire W.](https://law.justia.com/cases/new-york/appellate-division-second-department/2025/2023-10606.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), ACS is no longer automatically able to put children who are exposed to domestic violence under its supervision. Generally, ACS's rationale for supervising the home was to make sure the abuser didn't come back. But children under ACS supervision often feel unsafe in a different way. They want to be with the family they know and love. It is very rare for children to want to go into foster care.

The Appellate Court rulings are therefore an important step in recognizing children's rights to self-determination and family integrity. But ironically, these decisions may mean that children and their parents are less able to access services. Remaining at home in the care of a parent is only one basic priority when it comes to court proceedings. Another is to try to prevent more exposure to violence and provide access to vital programs and services — from therapy to supervised visitation to legal counsel — to support the children's well-being.

Right now, most services for children exposed to domestic violence remain tied up in systems connected to ACS. This produces a strange distortion: Children and parents who are actively under supervision of the child protective agency or are in foster care are able to access a lot more services than other kids who experience violence at home. So, for example, kids not under ACS supervision rarely have a safe place to see a parent. In practical terms, this means that kids may not see their other parent for six months or a year while they wait for services. They don't get access to counseling or housing support or childcare vouchers. Nor do they have a right to an attorney. Those services should be available to all kids who have been exposed to violence in the home. Kids shouldn't have to be subject to ACS supervision to get the help they need to be safe and maintain relationships with both parents.

The Children's Law Center [recently released a report](https://www.clcny.org/news/report-children-exposed-to-domestic-violence-face-barriers-to-care/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that documents the experience of children who are outside the child protective system but exposed to violence in the home. Our analysis suggests that fewer than a third of children exposed to domestic violence in Family Court were connected to any therapeutic or social services at all.

ACS not long ago issued [a strategic plan](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/PressReleases/2025/three-year-strategic-plan.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that aims to increase access to services for families that are not subject to official ACS supervision. The problem is that many families are understandably reluctant to get services from the very agency that has the power to remove a child from the home.

At the Children's Law Center, we represent more than 5,000 children each year. That includes a client we'll call Jennie, who recently told us that she was being sexually abused by two men living in her father's apartment. Luckily, the judge in her case assigned an attorney for her and we were able to get her to a safe place without involving ACS. But finding services for her or a program to help her dad? That was much harder to do. Stopping the violence is critical but preventing further harm is also essential.

As someone who has worked in family justice for over 30 years — and as someone who grew up in a home marked by violence — I don't have all the answers, but I do have some ideas about how to fill the child-sized holes in our safety net.

We must start building the infrastructure for community-based, voluntary services for children exposed to domestic violence outside the Administration for Children's Services. Many parents simply won't take advantage of services if they think that ACS is lurking around the corner.

A good first step would be to recognize that children in custody, visitation and guardianship cases have a particular need for services. Resource coordinators should be embedded in all Family Courts, so that service referrals become a standardized component of court proceedings. The new mayor could have it both ways: reducing ACS involvement in families' lives while also reducing the impact of violence on children by separating the issue of children exposed to violence at home from child welfare debates.

At the legislative level, we should pass the bill authorizing the [Child and Family Wellbeing Fund](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S6431?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The state legislature should also ensure that all children who have been exposed to domestic violence have a right to counsel in Family Court. The interests of children often overlap with those of one or both parents, but not always. Providing young people with their own attorney is the best way to ensure that their voice is truly represented as decisions about them are being made.

Kids want to be safe, but they also want to see both parents, and they deserve access to support. Let's make sure they have the right to be heard.
### Small Children, Big Looming Policy Questions
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-universal-childcare-policy-questions/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:29.000Z
Just days into his term, Mayor Zohran Mamdani scored a significant win when he and Gov. Kathy Hochul [announced a pathway to universal, free child care in New York](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/transcript--mayor-mamdani---governor-hochul-to-launch-free-child?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). For New York City, the pathway begins with major investments in “2-Care,” free child care aimed at 2-year-olds. 

By all appearances, Mamdani and his team are adopting a reasonable and responsible strategy: communicating an ambitious end goal while designing a step-by-step process to get there. This increases the likelihood that Mamdani will be able to avoid stumbling blocks around promising too much too quickly; in New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is already [running into a major challenge](https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local%5Fnews/new-mexico-lawmakers-spending-plan-wont-fully-fund-free-child-care/article%5F6757d75c-55f3-40e9-bc7a-9ad9bf2402eb.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as the state legislature threatens to meet less than 10% of the budget request needed to fully fund that state’s universal free child care initiative.

That said, Mamdani still has difficult choices ahead, as any new policy inevitably brings tradeoffs. Here, I highlight five areas that are likely to prove thorny.

## Site prioritization

One challenge with a phased-in approach is that it may be a number of years — maybe even into Mamdani’s potential second term — before some families start seeing benefits from the new child care investments. The mayor has indicated the 2-Care plan will begin this fall with 2,000 slots in high-needs neighborhoods, rising to roughly 10,000 slots by the end of 2027\. (It’s estimated that around 55,000 slots will be needed in total, given the percentage of families likely to take advantage of the offering.) This is sensible, and reflects how the City rolled out 4K and 3K, although the scale-up for 4K was much faster due to the ability to lean heavily on public school infrastructure. There may be an obstacle ahead, however, as [reporting suggests](https://www.nydailynews.com/2026/01/13/hochul-state-of-the-state-plan-to-deliver-child-care-for-nyc-2-year-olds-may-fall-short-of-need/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Hochul’s planned state investment will cap out somewhere north of 30,000 slots. Mamdani will need an answer to how he plans to close the gap in the later years of the rollout. While projections so far out — before the initiative has even gotten underway or there is a sense of economic conditions in, say, 2030 — cannot be ignored, it’s worth noting that the details are less vital. 

That said, even among and within high-need neighborhoods, there may be 2-Care winners and losers. Mamdani will therefore need to determine and communicate a fair system for determining where the free seats go — and to what type of child care sites — and also whether the benefits flow through individual families or through programs open to anyone in a given geographic area. 

The downside risk is ending up in a situation where, as social policy analyst Leah Libresco Sargeant [posted on X](https://x.com/LeahLibresco/status/2009345208211919064?s=20&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), there are “big disparities between the 2yo in Apt 5J who is getting $37,500/year to support care vs the 2yo in 11B who doesn’t.” The planned expansion of child care subsidy vouchers, which will occur alongside the 2-Care launch, should help mitigate this risk (and also offer benefits for parents with children below the age of two), but it is unlikely to eliminate it entirely.

## Educator pay parity

New York City’s child care workforce is fragmented in a way few other places can comprehend. Some child care workers are employed by community-based nonprofits, some by the Department of Education, some by Head Start agencies, some by private providers — which range from large national for-profit chains to single-site mom-and-pop centers — and some, especially home-based providers, are self-employed. This patchwork is a legacy of the city’s size and [particular child care history](https://www.the74million.org/zero2eight/new-york-citys-60-year-old-fight-for-universal-child-care/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): New York was the only state in the nation to use substantial state and local funding to continue operations of World War II-era child care centers, and some city providers track their origins back even further to the days of settlement houses. There are also multiple unions involved. Sometimes several employers of record (and several unions) are present at the same program site.

In his campaign, Mamdani pledged to “bring up wages for childcare workers — a quarter of whom currently live in poverty — to be at parity with public school teachers.” That’s easier said than done, and not only because at least one-fifth of child care educators in community-based settings [make less than the DOE minimum](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/documents/FN23-085S.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for those with equivalent credentials, and equalization will cost millions. Figuring out how to equitably compensate all of these educators is going to be a headache, because there is no single answer that will satisfy everyone. Focus on bringing up pay among educators in private settings may lead to complaints that they are getting paid more despite often lacking many of the credentials as DOE-employed educators. Focus on recruiting new educators into the field with generous starting pay may lead to complaints that veteran educators are being ignored. Focus on improving the pay of educators in two-year-old classrooms may lead to complaints among educators in infant classrooms down the hall. 

Many of these complaints are entirely valid. The best path likely leads through a classic compromise that leaves everyone a little unhappy but serves the larger goals of the project. Washington, D.C. has been largely successful in balancing competing demands [within their Pay Equity Fund](https://www.mathematica.org/projects/washington-dc-early-childhood-educator-pay-equity-fund-impact-and-cost-effectiveness-study?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which has contributed to raises of $10,000 or more for some child care educators and substantial growth and stability within their child care workforce. 

## Inclusion of home-based child care providers

Speaking of displeased groups, the question of home-based (also known as family child care) providers looms large. Many of these providers, who operate licensed programs out of their homes and apartments, felt excluded from or disadvantaged by the 4K and 3K expansions; for instance, small home-based providers were ineligible for 4K contracts as the City prioritized center- and school-based settings. These providers — of which there are approximately 6,500 spread throughout the city — are particularly important for younger children whose parents may be less comfortable with center-based settings, and home-based providers frequently offer more flexibility in terms of hours and languages spoken. Yet as a [2025 report](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53ee4f0be4b015b9c3690d84/t/69558138575781688a76dbf7/1767211320269/Dignified+Pay+for+Quality+Care-+What+New+York%E2%80%99s+Family+Child+Care+Providers+Need+to+Thrive.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from researchers at the New School suggests, pay rates for home-based providers can be as low as half that of center-based providers, and the City has struggled to pay many home-based providers in a timely and effective manner. 

To his credit, Mamdani seems to recognize this, stating during his press conference with Hochul that, “we will deliver care by working in partnership with child care providers, especially home-based providers who have been doing this work without thanks or recognition for far too long.”

There are, of course, meaningful differences between home-based providers and center-based providers in terms of cost structures and operations; supporting both simultaneously is feasible but tricky. Importantly, doing so will require some flexibility, as a one-size-fits-all regulatory system will not work. The 4K and 3K expansions clearly missed the mark when it came to this part of the sector. Ensuring that home-based providers are fully included in the policy design process, and navigating the tension between home-based and center-based providers, will be paramount to the success of 2-Care and further efforts.

## Whither “family, friend and neighbor” care?

Along the same lines, the plans announced to date are light on details regarding how ‘family, friend, and neighbor’ (FFN) caregivers — people like grandparents or close friends who provide regular child care to one or two children, but who are not licensed home-based providers — may or may not be included in the 2-Care system. The group was not mentioned at the recent press conference. This is an active conversation across the country; for instance, in New Mexico’s expanded child care system, these types of caregivers can register with the state and receive $750 a month per eligible child. There are again tradeoffs here: Including FFN caregivers expands the pool of providers and meets the preferences of substantial numbers of families that prefer to intimately know their child’s caregivers, but FFN providers can also be difficult to incorporate into a publicly funded system due to the inherent informality of the arrangements. Grandparents obviously aren’t unionizing, but there are open questions about what type of regulation and accountability is needed when public monies are involved.

## Communicating costs

Finally, as Sargeant’s post illustrates, the cost figure being bandied around — approaching $40,000 a year per child, when you divide the $73 million initial investment by the 2,000 kids to be enrolled — may raise some eyebrows. In an objective analysis, the figure is perfectly defensible: It reflects the true cost of care in a high cost-of-living city where commercial rent is expensive and a competitive wage for child care educators is not $10 an hour. Getting the figure down significantly would require cutting back on plans to boost educator compensation, which works directly against the goals of scaling up the workforce to meet demand and of high-quality classrooms run by well-trained practitioners who don’t constantly turn over. Indeed, the figure is close to the [New York average](https://nysfocus.com/2025/08/06/does-new-york-spend-more-per-public-school-student-than-any-other-state?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of over $36,000 per K-12 student, and public school classrooms can have many more children per educator. 

There simply isn’t a long menu of options for reducing the costs of delivering child care because so many costs are fixed, most notably personnel and facilities. Important services sometimes require significant funding, and it makes no more sense to nickel-and-dime child care than it does to nickel-and-dime fire departments. That doesn’t change the fact that these are very large numbers. It will be important, then, that Mamdani continues explaining to a public not steeped in the economics of child care where the cost figures come from and why they are necessary and worthy investments.

In the end, none of the challenges facing Mamdani and his team are insurmountable. So far, the Mayor seems to be applying lessons from the 4K and 3K rollouts and setting his administration on a road to success. How the mayor’s office navigates the visible boulders and the not-yet-visible ones that will surely appear (such as the Trump administration’s [recent attempt to freeze federal child care funding to New York and four other states](https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-freezes-child-care-family-assistance-grants-five-states-fraud-concerns.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) will help determine how far he’s able to take the city’s families over the coming years.
### Mamdani as Mr. Fix-It
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/just-fix-it-after-hours/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:30.000Z
*Grand visions win elections, but functional governance is what keeps a city running. In this season premiere of "After Hours," Jamie Rubin and Vital City founder Liz Glazer dig into a pragmatic to-do list for the new Mamdani administration: 11 tangible fixes for the first 100 days,* [*the first installment of Vital City's new "Just Fix It" project*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/government-improvements-mamdani-can-tackle-in-the-first-100-days)*. They discuss why unsexy improvements — like dismantling some of the city's 350 miles of scaffolding, turning on more outdoor lights to reduce crime, and clearing out the "spaghetti" of obsolete commissions — are critical to restoring New Yorkers’ faith in government. As Liz argues, there is no public policy without turning government gears that make it happen.*

*You can listen to this episode, “Just Fix It,” on* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mamdani-as-mr-fix-it/id1794619189?i=1000745087582&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *or* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/44AWHFZgMPcILbPKY1oWXy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*
### Mayor Mamdani, Here’s the Real Reason New Yorkers’ Groceries Cost So Much
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-grocery-cost-explained/
Last updated: 2026-09-11T02:20:46.000Z
The first few days of 2026, as Zohran Mamdani’s term as mayor began, were frigid. After a trip, I came home to an empty fridge. Rather than brave the sub-zero temperatures to bike to the Wegmans at the Brooklyn Navy Yard like I normally do, I walked to my local CTown grocery store to stock up. What I found was something New Yorkers have long griped about from our local chains: shockingly high prices.

What first caught my eye was the price of four kiwis (organic, gold): $9.99 at the CTown, compared to [$6.99 at Whole Foods](https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/product/zespri-produce-organic-gold-kiwi-16-oz-b079jmtdh4?clientContext=132-2359637-1053152&openid.pape.max%5Fauth%5Fage=31536000&openid.identity=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fap%2Fid%2Famzn1.account.42TIMLJXP7BG2HC5L7S5PXXXYQ&openid.op%5Fendpoint=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fap%2Fsignin&openid.pape.auth%5Ftime=2025-12-30T11%3A47%3A30Z&siteState=133-3799680-3932515&openid.signed=assoc%5Fhandle%2CaToken%2Cclaimed%5Fid%2Cidentity%2Cmode%2Cns%2Cop%5Fendpoint%2Cresponse%5Fnonce%2Creturn%5Fto%2CsiteState%2Cns.pape%2Cpape.auth%5Fpolicies%2Cpape.auth%5Ftime%2Csigned&stashKey=58a6851e-cb1c-42e4-8a15-c5ffd6fbbfdf&openid.return%5Fto=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wholefoodsmarket.com%2Fredirect%3FisUsingEagerSSO%3Dtrue&serial=3&openid.assoc%5Fhandle=amzn%5Fwfm%5Fweb%5Fsso%5Fus&openid.ns.pape=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fextensions%2Fpape%2F1.0&openid.mode=id%5Fres&openid.pape.auth%5Fpolicies=http%3A%2F%2Fschemas.openid.net%2Fpape%2Fpolicies%2F2007%2F06%2Fnone&openid.sig=hghq9wt9x8lTRVPB9D1%2BrY%2FGgZ0spASupXxAWG7wR0oUodHglT5pl1WmNNnQEOm3XmWkF%2FnYY0yi%2BxwI2H4XcHjsBFjk8IewoacZuirD8CegVGR0EMMvGjqgSxyewVSbmIwSJ4LVeZ0whMful%2BAuCssUjpBQyOtmcBI5ANAHAT%2F2ESh5xH5yFbvhDQkZvgywoc7aUcOMmx6EfkBBlgAtGLdZo7n6OPPFJiHQq0T6xjnVm6ajP16plK7XVADv6Yrh%2FecY4xbYMpQnsfxWyCTRt1vFXmcI6D08X%2Ff70XNQwTC90kePg7oyOOqvGsys42CHLg7gjMLDdVEkYK%2F5lJ3rpA%3D%3D&isUsingEagerSSO=true&openid.claimed%5Fid=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fap%2Fid%2Famzn1.account.42TIMLJXP7BG2HC5L7S5PXXXYQ&openid.response%5Fnonce=2026-01-05T01%3A18%3A06Z2955020289834651257&openid.ns=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Then I started looking for my less extravagant staples — a pound of chicken thighs was $9.99 at the CTown, while the same exact brand goes for [$6.79 at Wegmans](https://www.wegmans.com/shop/categories/5598035?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); bananas that are [$0.79 a pound at Wegmans](https://www.wegmans.com/shop/categories/2957468?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are $1.29 at the CTown.

Mamdani rode to the mayorship thanks to a relentless focus on affordability, promising to freeze the rent in stabilized units and make the buses free. And so it went with groceries too: “As mayor, I will create a network for city-owned grocery stores,” [he said in a TikTok video](https://www.tiktok.com/@zohran%5Fk%5Fmamdani/video/7447528235836902686?lang=en&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) posted after launching his primary campaign in 2024, “whose mission is lower prices, not price gouging.” He proposed to start with a pilot program of [one city-owned grocery store per borough](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/nyregion/grocery-stores-city-owned.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

Mamdani has identified a real issue, but his proposed solution is unresponsive to the problem. There are [few examples of government-run grocery stores](https://www.modernretail.co/operations/unpacked-the-history-of-city-owned-grocery-stores-and-how-public-private-partnerships-have-worked-in-other-markets/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the U.S., and the skills that it would take to even act as a landlord to one are not ones that New York City is known for. Libraries routinely [clock](https://www.bklynlibrary.org/themes/custom/bklyn/April-2024-Canarsie-Library-Community-Meeting.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [in](https://www.bklynlibrary.org/locations/pacific/future?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [at](https://databook.wegov.nyc/p/LQQ122-RG%5Frego-park-library---replacement-facility?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) $2,000 or more per square foot to build or renovate, and the New York City Housing Authority’s buildings are [full of empty storefronts](https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2021/06/01/nychas-vacant-retail-spaces-leave-experts-confused/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The City would struggle to resist pressure by unions to agree to less productive practices and to pay higher wages than in most of the private sector, as it has even in its current role simply permitting grocery stores.

Other politicians have proposed to tackle the problem of high costs at independent grocers through local antitrust policy. Operating on the theory that when big chains get cheaper wholesale food prices, they place smaller, locally owned supermarkets at a disadvantage not justified by their scale, a [bill in the state legislature](https://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default%5Ffld=&leg%5Fvideo=&bn=A09212&term=&Summary=Y&Memo=Y&Text=Y&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) would force wholesalers to disclose the terms they offer large grocery chains, and have the state judge whether those terms are fair. The attorney general and ultimately judges would then be able to determine whether decisions to not do business with a specific retailer have a “commercially reasonable justification,” whether sales to one retailer would lead to “unreasonably diminished availability” for another and whether there are “genuine efficiencies” in vertical integration. The pro-mom-and-pop politics are appealing, but New York often struggles with even the core competencies of government, so it remains to be seen how well it would regulate competition in the low-margin, opaque wholesale market for groceries.

A better solution would be to work with the private sector to make it easier to open new grocery stores, stimulating competition in the sector the traditional way — by increasing supply. To bring better produce at lower prices to New Yorkers, Mamdani should apply an abundance mindset to grocery stores. The same logic that’s led him to come around to embrace a housing agenda that seeks to enable the private sector to build many more apartments should inform his approach to food.

Doing this makes great economic sense, but it would involve challenging ingrained political attitudes about protecting small businesses from national competition. 

Before going further, we should stop, step back and look at the city’s supermarket landscape through clear eyes — to understand what makes owning and operating a store different here than just about anywhere else in America. New York City used to have a thriving ecosystem of local mom-and-pop greengrocers offering quality produce at reasonable prices, but these are shutting down as [aging owners retire](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/nyregion/korean-grocers-a-new-york-fixture-are-on-the-decline.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and their kids find better career prospects elsewhere. Of the larger remaining supermarkets, many are cooperatives with common branding and suppliers — CTown, Foodtown, Associated and Key Food, chief among them — but different owners depending on their location. The local chains left cannot match the passion and work ethic of the old greengrocers. The cooperative brands were formed in the 20th century to create economies of scale in purchasing across the region, but they cannot match the buying power or technology of 21st century national chains. Chains like Gristedes and Morton Williams specialized in managing the difficult logistics of Manhattan, but Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s cracked that code years ago. Cost-saving innovations like self-checkout — or even consolidated lines for registers — elude the local chains, some of which have also [signed union contracts](https://www.ufcw1500.org/your-rights/frequently-asked-questions/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=q.%20which%20food%20stores%20in%20new%20york%20are%20unionized?).

> The same logic that’s led Mayor Mamdani to come around to embrace a housing agenda that seeks to enable the private sector to build many more apartments should inform his approach to food.

The grocery business has become heavily consolidated not only [in the U.S.](https://farmaction.us/grocery-retail-the-last-link-in-the-monopoly-chain/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but throughout the developed world — in Switzerland, the top two grocers [control 80% of the market](https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/agribusiness/coop-overtakes-migros-in-core-business/90267923?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Many of the chains now growing in the U.S. are now not just national, but international. The owner of Germany’s Aldi Nord bought Trader Joe’s decades ago, while Aldi Süd is opening stores across the United States and New York City under the Aldi brand. The Aldis’ major German competitor, Lidl, is now opening stores in New York City as well.

It is simply not realistic for New York City to fight the trend toward more consolidated chains, and consumers will keep suffering as long as we keep trying. National and international chains are making inroads into the city already, and if New York politicians can accept the benefits of welcoming in all grocers rather than trying to exclude those they deem unworthy, there are many available policy levers to further stimulate competition in the sector.

The lowest-hanging fruit is to simply legalize selling groceries in more of the city. The most egregious planning barrier is that grocery stores over 10,000 square feet are [not generally allowed as-of-right](https://zr.planning.nyc.gov/article-iv/chapter-2/42-162?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in so-called “M” districts, which are the easiest places to find sites large enough to accommodate the large stores that national grocers are used to. Many of these districts are mapped in places that are not what people have in mind when they think “industrial” — mixed-use neighborhoods with lots of housing like stretches of Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue and almost all of Gowanus, even post-rezoning, are in fact mapped as industrial districts.

To open a full-sized grocery store in these areas, a developer must seek a “special permit,” which requires the full City Council to get together and vote for an exception to the rules. This is a long, uncertain process, and has in the past even been an invitation to corruption.

Most famously, the City Council uses this power to [keep out Walmart](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/nyregion/walmart-opts-out-of-city-mall-after-facing-labor-opposition.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at the behest of unions and community groups. Thwarted in its plans to open a store in East New York — a low-income Brooklyn neighborhood that could desperately use more grocery options — the nation’s largest grocer instead serves New Yorkers with a store just beyond the Queens/Nassau line in Valley Stream, [rumored to be](https://www.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/aga6jg/busiest%5Fwalmart/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the busiest Walmart in the country. New Yorkers with a car and the willingness to schlep beyond city limits — or pay the Instacart premium — get access to cheaper groceries; the rest get locked out.

When politicians are willing to approve a grocery store, the price can be high. My beloved Brooklyn Navy Yard Wegmans was part of a [tortuous public-private partnership](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiral%27s%5FRow?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#Redevelopment) that involved preserving an old mansion and building lots of questionable non-grocery retail and office space that remains mostly vacant to this day. Whole Foods cut a deal to open the store in Gowanus, at Third Avenue and Third Street, in exchange for preserving a similar historic building (which also still sits vacant), along with installing solar panels over the parking lot (which at the time were more expensive than they are today) and wind turbines that [can’t even power a microwave on a windy day](https://www.visionairwind.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/HoYi-Brochure-May-2020.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — shiny, spinning objects intended to lull politicians into a “yes” vote like a baby’s crib mobile.

As for corruption, in 2003, Brooklyn Councilman Angel Rodriguez was sentenced to [prison](https://www.ourmidland.com/news/article/Ex-NYC-Councilman-Gets-Prison-Term-7180702.php?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for trying to extort over $1.5 million in cash and benefits from a developer in exchange for voting to allow the Red Hook Fairway (now a Food Bazaar) to open.

Fascinatingly, the special permit requirement can be avoided entirely by building underground, where space doesn’t legally count toward the 10,000-square foot limit. Subterranean construction is an expensive proposition, but it’s how the Whole Foods managed to open up a store in a cellar on Bedford Avenue, which would otherwise require a full City Council vote. Trader Joe’s resorted to the same underground zoning hack on nearby Kent Ave. These national chains spare Williamsburg residents the [much higher prices](https://www.reddit.com/r/williamsburg/comments/1pzwwa5/brooklyn%5Fharvest%5Fmarket%5Fprices%5Fversus%5Fwhole%5Ffoods/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the aboveground Brooklyn Harvest nearby, in a commercial district where a Council vote was not required.

> National and international chains are making inroads into the city already, and if New York politicians can accept the benefits of welcoming in all grocers rather than trying to exclude those they deem unworthy, there are many available policy levers to further stimulate competition in the sector.

Grocers with deep pockets, a premium reputation and hardcore fanbases may occasionally jump through these hoops — managing mercurial councilmembers, building expensive underground stores, maybe even playing along to pay a bribe — to win permission to open stores near well-heeled residential neighborhoods like Park Slope and Fort Greene. But most grocers in most neighborhoods won’t even try.

Beyond all these barriers to opening grocery stores in industrial districts, the city has simply not zoned enough land for development in residential and commercial districts. Most existing buildings in New York City are small, and modern grocery stores require large, clear spaces that are easiest to provide in new buildings. When neighborhoods don’t allow new buildings — either for traditional not-in-my-backyard reasons, or more “progressive” justifications like trying to hold off growth that they don’t feel serves existing residents — they also don’t get new supermarkets that serve all of their residents. Even outside of mapped industrial districts, developers often shove grocery stores underground (Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn especially are full of them), due simply to the general shortage of zoned capacity in a city ridden with NIMBYs. Building underground is more expensive than building above ground, but at least it doesn’t count toward zoning limits.

The City also has a program called [FRESH](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/our-work/plans/citywide/food-retail-expansion-support-health-fresh?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#fresh%5Fexpansion) that gives incentives to open new grocery stores, but the program does not apply citywide, and in many of the places where the program does apply, it [only offers financial incentives](https://zola.planning.nyc.gov/about?layer-groups=%5B%22building-footprints%22%2C%22fresh%22%2C%22street-centerlines%22%2C%22subway%22%5D&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — not the zoning bonuses available elsewhere. Even in neighborhoods where they do apply, they are useless if politicians won’t agree to zoning for new buildings at all.

There are additional zoning obstacles. While the City has mostly removed parking requirements for housing, off-street parking is [still required for grocery stores](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/21/upshot/parking-mandates.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in much of the city. The zoning code contains a number of waivers for parking requirements for smaller uses, but grocery stores are often too large to qualify. Food is as critical as housing, and parking should not be a barrier to building grocery stores any more than it should be for housing. Many grocers, especially national chains, would still demand it, but that should be their choice.

Beyond zoning barriers to opening new grocery stores, New York City’s grocery supply chain is aging. Fresh meat and produce must be purchased daily, and the Bronx’s Hunts Point Produce Market, the city’s traditional wholesale market, is physically obsolete. The market’s organization as a co-op on City-owned land adds multiple layers of complexity to any effort to invest in proper warehouses to replace the diesel-powered refrigerated trailers that have proliferated. Subsidized efforts like [using congestion pricing money to upgrade the facility](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/01/23/new-fridge-units-planned-for-hunts-point/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) may show some results, but the private sector should also be allowed to play more of a role. The city should zone more of its private land for denser warehouses and cold storage facilities.

> When neighborhoods don’t allow new buildings, they also don’t get new supermarkets that serve all of their residents.

Mayor de Blasio’s Department of City Planning tried to fix the problem of restrictions on warehouse development in northern Brooklyn, but planners were [stymied by now-Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso](https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2019/04/22/north-brooklyn-rezoning-plan-dead-in-the-water-982378?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), then a city councilmember. He felt the plan to allow [denser non-residential development](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/our-work/plans/brooklyn/north-brooklyn-industry-plan?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the industrial parts of Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick did not include enough restrictions on non-industrial uses. His fear turned out to be largely unwarranted given the subsequent outerborough retail and office crash and the boom in industrial demand during the pandemic, but markets change faster than politics can react, and the plan died. Councilmembers should learn from Reynoso’s blunder and accept planners’ expertise, and Mamdani should make another push on this front.

There are other levers, too. Grocery stores are complex logistical operations, and road and curbside congestion slows deliveries, driving up costs and leaving perishables to rot. Congestion pricing was a good start, but charging the full $15 fee, expanding the program beyond the Manhattan core, and cracking down on box-blocking and creating more loading zones could make deliveries easier.

Another ingredient is slow city bureaucracy. Even after an operator leases a storefront, it often sits empty for months as agencies must grant approvals and carry out inspections. Agencies like the Department of Buildings and the Fire Department should streamline the code requirements to renovate space to meet grocers’ needs, and approve new facilities more quickly.

A last idea is making better use of the humble elevator — and reducing the high price of electricity here. In other countries, freight elevators are an important tool for moving food around and into storage, with one grocery store developer in Germany saying he would [always install one](https://admin.centerforbuilding.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Elevators.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#page=108) in a store in a place as dense as New York City. Here, though, elevators [cost three times as much to build](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/opinion/elevator-construction-regulation-labor-immigration.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and even more to operate as in Western Europe, so workers often move food into grocery basements by hand or with janky conveyor belt-like devices. The mayor could drag the elevator industry into the 21st century by adopting globally harmonized standards for devices, spurring competition in an oligopolistic market. Grocery stores are also [electricity-intensive businesses](https://rkenergygroup.com/case-study-nyc-supermarket/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with high demand for refrigeration, so anything the governor can do to bring more generation and transmission online would be helpful. Gov. Cuomo closed the Indian Point nuclear reactors, a big step back for the state and city.

The New York City grocery market stands out nationally in a number of ways, and will never look exactly like the rest of the country. The city is dense and customers are more likely to arrive on foot than by car, making it a proving ground for national retailers to [try out](https://www.grocerydive.com/news/whole-foods-daily-shop-convenience-prepared-foods-small-format-new-york-city/727172/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) more urban, small-footprint concepts that can later be rolled out to other dense U.S. cities. And New York’s ethnic diversity means there will always be demand for foods that national retailers don’t stock — H Mart started selling Asian groceries in Woodside in Queens before expanding across the United States and then abroad, and NetCost Market has spread the Eastern European concept it started in southern Brooklyn to [Pennsylvania and Florida](https://www.netcostmarket.com/locations/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But grocery abundance can only be achieved by balancing what makes the city unique with the scale that national retailers can bring. Local chains that have something special to offer should be allowed to thrive, and those that New Yorkers resent having as their only options should be allowed to fail. To do that, policymakers need to focus on breaking down barriers to competition, letting New Yorkers vote with their wallets and sort the rest out.
### Mamdani’s Affordability Dilemma: The Challenge of Making New York City Housing Less Expensive
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-housing-affordability-new-york/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:31.000Z
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is being roundly and appropriately praised for the affordability focus of his campaign. Household budgets across the country are being squeezed as rents, home prices and the cost of other critical consumption goods rise faster than incomes. These affordability pressures are particularly acute in high-cost cities like New York. But what can Mamdani actually do to make the city more affordable?

There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that many of the drivers of affordability are largely beyond the scope of any mayor's power, from rising insurance and utility costs to increased tariffs and a weakening labor market. Meanwhile, mayors have limited ability to raise revenues, and volatile federal funding streams undermine policy responses.

It's fundamentally difficult for policymakers at any level of government to make housing — the largest component of household spending — more affordable in the short- or medium-run. Markets typically address affordability through increased supply. If the demand for bagels increases, and prices start to rise, producers can quickly make more bagels, which should lower prices. But it's not so easy to increase the supply of homes. Most obviously, there is a limited supply of land within a city, and zoning limits the amount of new housing that can be created on each site. Even when land is available, regulations make it extremely difficult and time-consuming to secure appropriate permits.

Further, even the most aggressive supply policies can only increase the supply of housing by a few percentage points. Austin, Texas, which now leads the nation in the rate of new construction, [is on track to build about 15,000 units in 2025](https://www.credaily.com/briefs/apartment-construction-surges-in-south-2025/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). That's a stunning accomplishment, but it only amounts to about 3% of the city's existing housing stock. In New York, the number of new units completed reached 34,000 in 2024, the highest annual total in decades, but this was less than 1% of the existing housing stock. And of course, some units fall out of the stock too, so the total housing stock in Austin and New York grew by even less than these amounts. At this pace, it's difficult to make visible progress in increasing supply during a mayor's term.

A second challenge is the rising costs of construction. While this increase is happening throughout the country, it's happening off of a higher base in New York City. Mamdani's housing plan assumes the creation of new affordable housing at a cost of $500,000 per unit, *with* union labor. This is an admirable goal, but it won't be easy. Affordable housing developers say that per unit costs in the city now run considerably higher than this. The lengthy, complex and risky process of securing approvals to build housing, along with the significant regulatory requirements, design requirements and approval processes all add significantly to construction costs in New York.

The costs of construction labor and materials — so-called "hard costs" — are also higher in New York City than in other cities. According to an annual survey conducted by the construction management company [Turner and Townsend, the hard costs of high-rise construction in New York are higher than in any other city in the world, and the hard costs for low-rise construction are among the highest in the world](https://cbcny.org/advocacy/why-it-costs-so-much-build-new-york-city-0?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). High labor costs are a key reason, as are strict licensing rules and building code requirements that call for more expensive materials, which are even more expensive today given the Trump Administration's tariffs. Liability and workers' compensation insurance also tend to be higher in New York City, partly due to the state's unique [scaffolding law](https://nycosh.org/initiatives/scaffold-safety-law/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which holds contractors and building owners strictly liable for any injury occurring on the job. Any reduction in construction costs will involve some difficult trade-offs.

Another obstacle to creating more affordable housing is the limited supply of funding to create dedicated affordable units. [The City relies heavily on federal funds to support its affordable housing initiatives,](https://furmancenter.org/stateofthecity/view/ii-federal-programs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) but that funding is now uncertain. Tax credits for the construction of new affordable homes are also limited in number. The tax-exempt bonds that are needed to use most tax credits are also limited, and housing must compete with other priorities for their use. Furthermore, these funds cover only a fraction of the total development costs. Moreover, federal funding for rental assistance is limited, with only about one in four eligible households across the country receiving assistance. Cities are constrained in their ability to raise these additional dollars through local taxes by both legal and political limits. They must balance their budgets, and spending a lot more than other cities on redistributive programs like affordable housing can be risky as affluent households may seek to avoid the taxes by moving to other states and localities.

Even if the City could build housing more cheaply, another challenge is the rising cost of operating and maintaining that housing, especially given New York's very old stock of housing. [Close to 40% of housing units in New York City were built before 1940](https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov/explorer/selection/106f9a16111bb5c091e4c7c251fe63fd9ed5b365?acsTopics=hou-housingOccupancy%2Chou-unitsInStructure%2Chou-yearStructureBuilt%2Chou-rooms%2Chou-housingTenure%2Chou-yearHouseholderMovedIntoUnit%2Chou-vehiclesAvailable%2Chou-occupantsPerRoom%2Chou-value%2Chou-mortgageStatus%2Chou-selectedMonthlyOwnerCostsAsAPercentageOfHouseholdIncomeSmocapi%2Chou-grossRent%2Chou-grossRentAsAPercentageOfHouseholdIncomeGrapi&source=acs-current), and as buildings age, they inevitably need more repairs.

Some owners, perhaps especially owners of rent-stabilized buildings, have deferred maintenance due to thin operating margins, which makes the costs of upkeep all the more challenging. Meanwhile, utility costs are rising, and property insurance costs continue to escalate, driven by climate threats, liability lawsuits, and higher construction costs. Even landlords just trying to break even may need to increase rents to cover these rising costs. Mamdani has limited tools to address these macro challenges.

Finally, the mayor is also limited in what he can do to address demand pressures. Much of housing demand is driven by macro factors like interest rates, demographic shifts, rising income inequality and the postpandemic increase in demand for space and privacy. Of course, the ultimate Catch-22 for any mayor is that making a city more livable also generally means making it more desirable and expensive.

All that said, the good news is that there are some things that Mamdani can do to help drive down the cost of living.

First, he can and should do more to facilitate the creation of housing. City of Yes and the recent ballot proposals are welcome steps forward, but there is more that the new administration can do to reduce regulatory barriers to new housing. The mayor can use targeted neighborhood rezonings to upzone near transit stations, where new homes will not bring as many cars. There is also room for new homes in the city's low-density neighborhoods through adding "gentle density" — duplexes, triplexes and small apartment buildings that would not fundamentally change the look and feel of the neighborhoods. Housing added near transit should not be subject to minimum parking requirements. [In other parts of the city, developers are required to provide off-street parking when they create new housing, which adds significantly to the cost of construction.](https://furmancenter.org/files/publications/furman%5Fparking%5Frequirements%5Fpolicy%5Fbrief%5F3%5F21%5F12%5Ffinal%5F2.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Relatedly, the mayor can also help to boost the number of new, affordable housing units created by working to make the large number of acres in the city owned by the city, state or federal government; faith-based institutions and other nonprofits easier to develop. And Mamdani's administration can help to reduce construction costs by scrutinizing the building code to identify opportunities for reforms that would lower costs without sacrificing much safety, [such as allowing plastic water pipes](https://cbcny.org/advocacy/why-it-costs-so-much-build-new-york-city-0?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), moving the city's building code requirements closer to those of other large cities in the U.S. The city might also look for ways to harness AI to improve coordination and avoid duplication over the myriad inspections and approvals required.

Facilitating the creation of different types of housing is valuable too. The City of Yes rezoning made it possible to convert buildings to single-room occupancy housing, and to allow accessory dwelling units in some areas. Both those types of housing could help provide housing for smaller, low-income households, but it will require creativity and determination to bring the finance, insurance, construction, utility and other industries together, along with the permitting agencies, to actually spur significant construction, conversion and operation of these housing types.

The mayor can also do more to preserve the existing stock of affordable housing. Every administration must balance the need for preservation against the need for new supply. Preservation can be both cheaper and more climate-friendly than demolition and new construction. This includes the critical task of preserving the city's public housing units, which need about $80 billion in capital repairs, according to New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) estimates. The mayor should ask his deputy mayor of housing and planning to focus on improving the capacity of the housing agencies to monitor the conditions and management of subsidized buildings, and reviewing the balance between requiring adequate reserves and avoiding unnecessary financing costs. The mayor should also firmly support NYCHA's plans to renovate its buildings using a variety of different approaches and reassure residents [that they will still be protected from higher rents and arbitrary evictions](https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications/Impact-Of-The-RAD-on-Childrens-Residential-Mobility-Health-and-Well-Being-in-New-York-State.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Given [the dilapidated condition of many of NYCHA's buildings](https://www.ibo.nyc.gov/assets/ibo/downloads/pdf/housing-and-buildings/2025/2025-september-how-federal-budget-changes-could-reshape-nycha.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=1%20NYCHA%20carries%20out%20federal%20housing%20programs,day%2Dto%2Dday%20operations%20and%20for%20longer%2Dterm%20capital%20improvements.), the alternative is simply not tenable.

The high cost of housing is driven not just by construction costs but also by the cost of maintaining and operating housing. The mayor can prioritize in his Albany agenda legislation and budget appropriations to enact reforms and provide subsidies to help stabilize finances for the subset of rent-stabilized buildings for which operating costs exceed rental revenues while at the same time maintaining the affordability of the rents for existing tenants. That would require reimagining the hardship exception process, which promises to give relief (but rarely, if ever, does) to building owners facing particular challenges. The Mayor should work with both the state legislature and the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal to make the process less time-consuming and costly, less rigid and more attuned to the different challenges that various types of rent-regulated buildings face.

Even buildings that require exceptions, however, must remain affordable to existing tenants, so adopting a government subsidy, especially for low-income tenants, may be necessary. Mamdani will need to work with the governor and his former colleagues in the state legislature to make those reforms and to reconsider some of the most restrictive features of the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act in order to allow for modest increases in rents when a tenant moves out, and when owners make investments in their buildings, without incentivizing harassment of existing tenants.

As for reducing operating costs, the mayor could advocate for some of the sensible property tax reforms that have been proposed over the years to reduce the disproportionate burden on rental buildings (such as ending the under-valuation of high-end co-ops and condos by [valuing them in the same way as 1-3 family homes and small rental buildings and adjusting the share of total taxes paid by rental buildings](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/propertytaxreform/downloads/pdf/final-report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)). But the mayor would have to spend political capital to make such reform a priority in Albany. The mayor also could work with his former state colleagues to create a property insurance fund specific to affordable housing. As for utility costs, the mayor could support energy retrofits and critical home repairs and modifications, including for moderate- and middle-income homeowners, to allow them to reduce their utility bills, keep their homes and age in their communities.

Finally, the mayor could push to reform the systems and processes to place people into affordable homes. It takes far too long for families in need to work their way through the City's Housing Connect matching system — [over the past four fiscal years, the median time it took to approve an applicant for an income-restricted apartment ranged from 142 to 192 days](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/operations/downloads/pdf/mmr2025/hpd.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Unfortunately, affordable homes may sit empty while the eligibility and matching processes drag on. The City should scrutinize eligibility rules and documentation requirements to find ways to reduce administrative burden and streamline approvals. For households that are lucky enough to receive a housing voucher, it can take months to find a suitable unit and a willing landlord. Many fail and have to return their voucher to the city. Some of this reflects the tough housing market in New York, but the city could do more to experiment with different approaches to landlord outreach and inspections. It's not enough to design new tools to promote affordability; the City must do everything it can to ensure that residents can actually take advantage of the resources the city has to offer and can access them during their most acute times of need.

None of this is easy, and none of this is quick. It may take years to accomplish these reforms, and it may take more years for them to visibly improve affordability. But to live up to the promise of his campaign, Mamdani needs to continue to stay focused on affordability — not just while campaigning, but also while governing.

════════════════════════════════════════

*Vital City launched in 2022 as an experiment. Our first "meeting" was me and Greg Berman sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan sketching out the* [*first issue*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-1)*. We were betting that in a time of hyperpartisanship, New Yorkers might be yearning for a calm voice, compelling evidence and engaging writing on how to make cities better.*

*Our readers answered with a resounding yes, and helped us grow into a trusted civic home for practical solutions.*

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*To do that, we need your help. We're directly asking readers to support Vital City. Your tax-deductible gift will help us expand our capacity and ensure our ideas reach the decisionmakers who need them.*

***If you value rigorous, solutions-focused policy work, we hope you'll join us.*** [***Become a supporter***](https://bit.ly/vc-eoy-sitetop?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) ***today.***

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### Revealing Hidden Signals in City Hotline Data
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/revealing-hidden-signals-in-city-hotline-data/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:29.000Z
Could a surge in 911 and 311 calls actually be a sign that things are getting better? That's the provocative question raised by researchers affiliated with the [Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard](https://cities.harvard.edu/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in a [recent study published in Justice Quarterly](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07418825.2025.2557333?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Analyzing years of hotline data from Buffalo, the research team found that rising call volumes were not necessarily a signal of worsening conditions, but an indicator that residents were becoming more willing to engage with their community and with city government.

Their case study centers on Buffalo's long-running [Clean Sweep](https://www.buffalony.gov/849/Clean-Sweep?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) program, which began primarily as a block-by-block code-enforcement effort and has since evolved into a more comprehensive model combining outreach, repair and service coordination. Since the mid-2000s, Clean Sweep teams — consisting of city staff and police officers — have been deployed to historically underserved neighborhoods. Teams go door to door, speak directly with residents, and then carry out a coordinated set of actions within a concentrated area over the course of a week: repairing sidewalks, boarding vacant properties, clearing lots, removing trash and connecting residents to social services.

When researchers examined 911 and 311 calls before and after these interventions, striking patterns emerged. In the six months *following* a Clean Sweep intervention, residents were 42% more likely to call 911 about drug-related crimes compared to residents near similar properties that did not receive the intervention. They were also 9% more likely to submit 311 service requests related to issues such as trash or graffiti.

These findings are revealed in the recent [report](https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/effects-place-based-intervention-resident-reporting-crime-and-service-needs-frontier?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), "The Effects of a Place-Based Intervention on Resident Reporting of Crime and Service Needs" — challenging the assumption that an uptick of distress calls is a sign of escalating problems. Instead, the findings suggest that changes in reporting behavior may be an indicator of evolving trust, access and community-government relationships.

A companion qualitative [study](https://www.cities.harvard.edu/research/the-impact-of-city-led-neighborhood-action-on-the-coproduction-of-neighborhood-quality-and-safety-in-buffalo-ny/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) digs into why the Clean Sweep approach appears to shift reporting behavior. Bloomberg Center for Cities researchers identified three interlocking insights: responsiveness, trust and self-efficacy.

## What data can conceal

Residents in underserved neighborhoods described feeling ignored by city services for years. But the visibility of consistent, place-based engagement changed that dynamic. As one resident put it, "It brings the message that we're important … that our place is important to the city."

The program's structured outreach includes city staff and community-oriented police officers walking door to door, introducing themselves and listening. These interpersonal interactions helped rebuild trust. One police officer noted, "I've found \[with\] the more positive interactions … the more there's a sense of safety and people's bravery \[to report crime\] increases."

Once residents began to see tangible results, many reported a growing sense of agency. "We know what we need to do, but sometimes we need a push — the Clean Sweep is a little push," one resident said. Others described forming block clubs, calling 311 themselves or simply feeling more empowered to take care of their street or neighborhood.

Together, these place-based dynamics help explain how a focused intervention can shift not only residents' willingness to report problems, but also their inclination to take collective action.

The research also makes clear, however, that certain conditions are necessary for this shift to occur.

An increase in call volume, on its own, is an incomplete signal. The Bloomberg Center for Cities researchers emphasize the importance of pairing quantitative data with qualitative insight — combining hotline records with community interviews, field observations and neighborhood context to understand what the numbers actually reflect.

The findings also highlight the value of longitudinal data and interagency coordination. The Buffalo analysis was possible in part because the city invested in open data systems that allowed 911 and 311 calls to be linked to property-level information. That transparency not only enabled rigorous evaluation; it also reinforced residents' sense that government was paying attention and responding.

## What can Mayor Mamdani do with these findings?

Rather than launching an entirely new initiative, the Mamdani administration could build on existing programs and stitch them together into something more resident-centered and consistent.

Citywide sanitation efforts such as [CleaNYC](https://edc.nyc/program/cleanyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Get Stuff Clean](https://www.nyc.gov/content/getstuffdone/pages/get-stuff-clean?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) already operate at scale, but they primarily measure success through outputs — bags of trash collected, baskets emptied — rather than through resident engagement or responsiveness. Pairing cleanup operations with structured door-to-door outreach, modeled on Buffalo's Clean Sweep, could make city presence more visible and meaningful in historically underserved neighborhoods.

Two other initiatives launched under Mayor Adams could also be better coordinated to approximate a Clean Sweep-style approach. [Community Link](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/bureaus/patrol/community-link.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) brings multiple agencies together to address persistent quality-of-life issues involving sanitation, mental health, housing code enforcement and infrastructure. Meanwhile, the NYPD's [Q-Teams](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/08/mayor-adams-and-nypd-commissioner-tisch-expand-quality-of-life-t0?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Q%2DTeams%20are%20comprised%20of,alternative%20to%20using%20enforcement%20tools.) program — spearheaded under Commissioner Jessica Tisch — focuses on responding to 911/311 calls related to low-level quality-of-life complaints at the precinct level, such as noise, illegal parking and public drug-use. There is also the [Mayor's Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety](https://map.cityofnewyork.us/learn-about-map?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a place-based initiative launched in 2014 aimed at improving public safety and quality of life in historically disinvested public housing developments operated by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).

Aligning these efforts — through predictable schedules, shared geographic focus and clear interagency roles — could transform episodic cleanups into sustained, trust-building neighborhood interventions.

Finally, New York City already has one of the country's most robust 311 and increasingly accessible 911 data systems. That infrastructure is critical to understanding when rising call volumes reflect worsening conditions versus growing civic engagement. Given the potential for misinterpretation as well as reporting biases, as documented by New York's [City Council](https://council.nyc.gov/data/311-agency/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), qualitative research is critical to understanding what the numbers are really saying.

For urban leaders and data analysts alike, the lesson is clear: Combining data with interpersonal engagement is a viable pathway to improving block-level conditions, strengthening trust in government and increasing social cohesion. As the Harvard researchers show, these efforts change not just what gets reported — but who feels empowered to speak up and act.

*This article draws on research from the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative and its partner institutions, including Robb et al. 2025; Dickens et al. 2025.*

════════════════════════════════════════

*Vital City launched in 2022 as an experiment. Our first "meeting" was me and Greg Berman sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan sketching out the* [*first issue*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-1)*. We were betting that in a time of hyperpartisanship, New Yorkers might be yearning for a calm voice, compelling evidence and engaging writing on how to make cities better.*

*Our readers answered with a resounding yes, and helped us grow into a trusted civic home for practical solutions.*

*We have ambitious plans for the months ahead: boosting our operational capacity, expanding our "What to Do (And Not to Do)" series, making academic research usable for decision-makers, strengthening our data analysis and building a more robust community of urban policy practitioners.*

*To do that, we need your help. We're directly asking readers to support Vital City. Your tax-deductible gift will help us expand our capacity and ensure our ideas reach the decisionmakers who need them.*

***If you value rigorous, solutions-focused policy work, we hope you'll join us.*** [***Become a supporter***](https://bit.ly/vc-eoy-sitetop?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) ***today.***

*— Liz Glazer, Founder*
### Mamdani, Like Mayors Before Him, Can Have a Foreign Policy
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/zohran-mamdani-trump-maduro-nyc/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:29.000Z
Mayor Zohran Mamdani's vocal criticism of the U.S. attack on Venezuela reminds us that New York City mayors have their own foreign policy. The city's global economy and its ever-changing but always huge immigrant population give millions of its residents a personal stake in things that happen in other parts of the world. Though of course there are times when far-away events can be a distraction from the job of running municipal government, in this town, it typically comes with the territory.

Over the weekend, Mamdani[ called President Trump](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/world/americas/mamdani-trump-venezuela-maduro.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to register his disagreement with the dramatic, possibly illegal United States military operation that arrested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The recent influx of tens of thousands of Venezuelans to New York makes the matter relevant here. So does the Manhattan location of Maduro's indictment and arraignment. Since most Venezuelans seem pleased that Maduro has been removed from power, the mayor's posture appears a matter of principle, not politics.

Mamdani ran and was just sworn in on a platform of affordability. A case can be made that he would do well to keep his eye on the ball. Yet when international events awaken the conscience of a large segment of the population the mayor represents and challenge his own beliefs, leadership requires that he voice his opinion.

It has happened many times before. On Oct. 15, 1969, Mayor John Lindsay (1966-1973) ordered flags on municipal buildings flown at half-staff to protest the Vietnam War and in remembrance of those who died in it. He also objected to the cost in national treasure at a time when New York needed federal support to address domestic problems — a liberal version of America First. He was praised by the war's opponents and condemned by its supporters.

Lindsay's focus on problems beyond America's borders was not an anomaly for the modern mayor. Since New York has long been home to the nation's largest Jewish population, matters affecting Jews and the sole Jewish state have often featured prominently in mayoral politics.

Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (1934-1945) straddled principle and politics in the 1930s. He was quick to condemn Adolf Hitler's antisemitism but slower to denounce fellow fascist Benito Mussolini, who was more popular with Italian voters.

William O'Dwyer (1946-1950) was mayor when the United Nations voted at the organization's temporary headquarters in Flushing, Queens, to create two states in Palestine — one Jewish and one Arab. As May 15, 1948, approached — a date Israelis now celebrate as Independence Day and Arabs mourn as a catastrophe — war loomed between Jewish Zionists and Arab opponents. During World War II, O'Dwyer had been a brigadier general who served as executive director of the War Refugee Board, charged with saving Jews from annihilation in Nazi-controlled countries.

Not quite half a century later, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat — freedom fighter to some, irredeemable terrorist to New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and many others — was in town in 1995 during the 50th anniversary of the creation of the United Nations. Giuliani ordered him removed from a city-sponsored concert at Lincoln Center celebrating the event. The U.S. Department of State and others denounced the breach of diplomatic protocol. Many New Yorkers applauded the bold act.

Now, considerable controversy surrounds Mamdani's [decision to revoke many executive orders](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/04/nyregion/mamdani-revoke-israel-orders.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) issued by his predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, including one that expanded the definition of antisemitism and another that barred city employees and agencies from boycotting or divesting from Israel. Mamdani, who canceled every order signed by Adams after he was indicted on federal corruption charges, declared it a matter of "good government" to reject unilateral decisions made by a mayor with compromised credibility — not a statement about Israel.

Now, Israel and New York watch and wait to see[ whether Mamdani will try to take additional steps](https://www.timesofisrael.com/what-are-mamdanis-policy-proposals-that-could-directly-impact-jewish-new-yorkers/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — including potentially severing some New York [investments](https://forward.com/opinion/771562/zohran-mamdani-israel-investments-nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in and [partnerships](https://www.ynetnews.com/article/ak1rq4x30?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with Israel or even [ordering the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu](https://x.com/jacobkornbluh/status/1925719752040697933?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a move that would test state, federal and international law.

Mamdani's posture reflects his personal beliefs and a dramatic change in the sentiment of many New Yorkers, including many Jews, towards Israeli actions. Once-reflexive support for the Jewish state has become conditional for many. The grotesque attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023 prompted an Israeli military response that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and caused a humanitarian crisis affecting millions. Many New Yorkers find the Israeli actions too harsh to condone.

Israel may well be a special case when it comes to foreign policy, but it is far from a category of one.

In 1988, Mayor Edward Koch (1978-1989) traveled to Northern Ireland. While there among British hosts, he declared its troops should not be considered an occupying army. This was an about-face from his longstanding position on "the Troubles." He returned home to a streets-of-New-York earful from his Irish American constituents and reverted to his earlier stand. The episode earned him criticism in Britain, Ireland and the United States.

Respect for ancestral homelands is a tradition for New York City mayors that moves with the times. When Irish, Italians and Jews dominated the electoral landscape, candidates for mayor routinely made a point of visiting Ireland, Italy and Israel. David Dinkins, New York's first Black mayor, welcomed South Africa's moral leader and later president, Nelson Mandela, to New York in an inspiring celebration of the end of that nation's racist Apartheid system and later traveled to South Africa himself. Adams visited Ghana out of respect for his ancestral roots. Mamdani, an immigrant like O'Dwyer and Mayor Abraham Beame (1974-1977), visited his native Uganda during his recent campaign and publicly cherishes his South Asian heritage.

Symbolism matters in politics. New York has long been America's most important Catholic city and its most important Jewish city. Mamdani's extraordinary political rise and our large Muslim population, perhaps as many as 1 million people by some estimates, makes New York the nation's most important Muslim city as well. Emotions surrounding ethnic identity and religious conviction have caused conflict for thousands of years and New York is hardly immune.

By simultaneously engaging in foreign policy debates and advancing pluralism within the city, a mayor like Mamdani can demonstrate how engagement need not be fundamentally divisive. During the 20th century, the many nations of Europe living side by side in a territory the size of a continent led to two world wars. When people from all of those same nations, plus Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, found themselves living side by side on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the result was New York City. We are counting on Mayor Mamdani's statesmanship and he is counting on the rest of us to keep the faith that makes New York the great city it is.
### Congestion Pricing, One Year In: A Qualified Success
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/one-year-into-congestion-pricing-in-new-york-city/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:31.000Z
A full year on, let's call New York congestion pricing — the much-beloved and much-reviled policy to charge automobiles $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street — what it is: a successful work in progress.

Before the first-in-the-nation plan went into effect on Jan. 5, 2025, proponents promised that the policy would bring entrenched Manhattan gridlock to heel, while foes predicted far-reaching economic and environmental harm. Gov. Kathy Hochul, fearing electoral consequences, [delayed its implementation](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-congestion-pricing-meltdown-and-its-aftermath). The [then-incoming Trump administration](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/why-trumps-attempt-to-kill-congestion-pricing-must-fail) promised to kill the program in the crib.

The benefits have proven to be robust, though perhaps a bit less than advertised and not yet transformational. Although they will expand as the toll revenues transmute into long-lasting improvements in citywide transit service, making them transformational *now* will require implementing a suite of ancillary measures designed to allow more efficient use of the city center's street grid.

Happily, any costs incurred so far have been difficult to discern. Yes, some $700 million has been paid in vehicle tolls (one-quarter of them as new taxi and Uber surcharges paid by customers); and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which designed and operates the vehicle entry fees into Manhattan's central business district, probably expended a similar amount designing and constructing the tolling system.

But, contra the sky-will-fall predictions, congestion pricing is producing no noticeable social injury. [Manhattan businesses haven't fled](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/real-estate/manhattans-financial-district-transforms-fleeing-tenants-thriving-offices?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). [The city's economy hasn't contracted](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-22/nyc-congestion-pricing-is-the-controversial-program-working?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Putative spillover areas like the South Bronx [aren't seeing more trucks and dirtier air](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/09/19/komanoff-data-show-fewer-trucks-in-the-so-bronx-after-congestion-pricing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). *Mirabile dictu*: the birth of a major public policy initiative has been attended by little if any disruption.

The absence of palpable costs isn't surprising to congestion pricing advocates like me. The theory underlying congestion charging is as close as economics ever comes to axiomatic: *Society is made better off when the negatives (sometimes called externalities) of goods or activities are covered — that is, included — in their price*.

That is true with taxing cigarette purchases and pricing emissions from coal-fired power plants. And it is proving particularly true in the case of Manhattan driving, where each minute of using a car in the eight-square-mile district south of 61st Street subjects the other vehicles in the vicinity to [a collective two-minute time loss](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/city-traffic-congestion-pricing-costs/675923/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (to say nothing of obstructions and worse to people on foot or bicycling) — an unpriced harm that, until a year ago, had never been systematically priced in any U.S. city.

The toll and taxi levies have been set at [a small fraction](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/01/27/opinion-the-congestion-pricing-toll-really-should-be-80?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of what a cold calculation of New York City driving's costs would dictate. That is fine. Also fine, I venture to say, is that the toll was pared back by 40% when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul postponed its start-up from June 2024 to this past January. While a $15 toll may have been closer to a transportation sweet spot, the actual $9 charge during most hours hews closer to governing reality.

Here are what I consider the key metrics from tolling's inaugural year (some figures necessarily extrapolated to all of 2025 from the first three quarters), followed by a look at ways New York City and State can extend congestion pricing's reach and expand its bounty.

## Key metrics

Any policy as far-reaching and innovative as congestion pricing will manifest in diverse ways. *Net toll revenues* and *faster vehicle travel speeds* are especially salient politically as well as substantively. The statutory pledging of toll revenues to transit investments guaranteed the full-throated backing of New York's vocal transit-advocacy community. While the promise of faster car and truck trips wasn't enough to secure similar support from motorist interests, it served as an important public and political talking point during the nearly six-year span from legislative enactment to the start of toll collection.

Shortly after the tolls launched a year ago, I expected them to net $60 million or more a month and boost traffic speeds by 4 to 5% in the congestion zone and 1 to 2% outside. Those figures came from [my Excel traffic model](http://www.nnyn.org/kheelplan/BTA%5F1.1.xls?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which I continually update, that state officials used in writing the 2019 authorizing legislation.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27009151?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Results thus far are more humdrum. According to [MTA figures](https://metrics.mta.info/?cbdtp/revenueexpenses&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), monthly revenues minus expenses are struggling to reach $50 million. As for traffic flow, the early euphoria of freer-flowing streets has dissipated. While some rebound in traffic [was expected](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/01/15/komanoff-why-im-not-scrutinizing-traffic-data-yet-its-the-rebound-effect-stupid?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), data culled from Ubers and yellow cabs in motion suggest that travel speeds within the zone today are barely surpassing those from a year earlier.

Nevertheless, transit trips [are up](https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/transit/2025/12/18/mta-celebrates-ridership-gains--lower-crime-as-congestion-pricing-pays-off?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as are [broader economic indicators](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-22/nyc-congestion-pricing-is-the-controversial-program-working?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from foot traffic to storefront leasing rates. Bonds secured by the toll revenues are [enabling the MTA](https://www.amny.com/news/mta-subway-signal-upgrades-accessibility-congestion-pricing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to install subway station elevators and speed its system-wide overhaul of track signals, promising faster and more-accessible transit which in turn portends further ridership gains and car reductions.

## Countering the traffic current

Traffic's seeming imperviousness to the congestion toll hasn't happened in isolation, but in a very car-centric society at a particular point in time. America is chronically awash in traffic, and driving's post-COVID "recovery" has been relentless. Thanks to cheaper gas, bulkier vehicles, housing shortages in city centers and burgeoning next- or same-day delivery, [gridlock is worsening](https://www.npr.org/2025/12/05/nx-s1-5611164/traffic-congestion-record-high?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in most U.S. metro areas. New York's Manhattan core is additionally seeing surging e-commerce trucking, more bicycle-borne food deliveries over ever-longer distances and even what looks to the naked eye to be a rise in obstructive driving behaviors abetted by slackened enforcement. And even as the combined number of fare trips in taxis and Ubers [hasn't budged](https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiMzlhMzA3NTItM2VkZS00NGM4LTgxYTQtNjRlMDc3MTkxMDkzIiwidCI6IjMyZjU2ZmM3LTVmODEtNGUyMi1hOTViLTE1ZGE2NjUxM2JlZiJ9&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), taxi cruising for fares has grown, along with the number of waiting Ubers taking up road space.

For a decade now, New York has required GPS devices in taxis and Ubers to upload each fare trip's coordinates to municipal computers. From crunching some 200 million trip records, I determined that during the three years from the start of 2022 to the end of 2024, travel speeds in the Manhattan congestion zone (south of 60th Street) *fell at an average rate of 5% a year*.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/27009024?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Had that pattern continued unabated, *speeds in the zone would have fallen another 5% in 2025*. Thanks to the new toll, Manhattan defied the trend, even as congestion pricing's power to combat gridlock was obscured by the moving baseline built on the new traffic stressors.

## Is there a shortfall in congestion revenues?

Yet those traffic forces can't explain a seeming shortfall in the toll revenues: the $10 million or more gap between my projection of $60 million a month in net revenue and the $50 million monthly net that the MTA is reporting.

More data sharing by the MTA could shed some light. To its credit, the authority maintains a [web dashboard](https://metrics.mta.info/?cbdtp/vehicleentries&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of digital revenue collection at each toll "portal." What the authority hasn't made available is *uncollected* revenue as well as toll expenses, such as:

- *The number of car entries to the zone that qualify as same-day "repeats," which are exempt from a second toll.* I modeled these at just 1%. If the true number is much higher, say 10%, that would trim the congestion revenues by $3 million a month.
- *The number of vehicles avoiding the congestion toll altogether* by virtue of official status, license plate tampering or detection failure. I assumed a 4% rate, consistent with [established non-toll-paying rates](https://www.mta.info/document/138551?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at MTA bridges and tunnels. [Recent reporting](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/12/24/hey-insurance-companies-heres-some-driver-fraud-in-plain-sight?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on insurance and registration fraud suggests the rate may be much higher. Tripling my figure to 12% would translate to $6 million less revenue each month.
- *How are tolling expenses being booked, and how big a cut is going to the tolling contractor?* Are the toll system's nine-figure capital costs being front-loaded? Same question for MTA's planning costs during the tortuous approval process. Ditto the mitigations promised to low-income drivers and South Bronx residents facing potential traffic spillover (which evidently [has not materialized](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/09/19/komanoff-data-show-fewer-trucks-in-the-so-bronx-after-congestion-pricing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)).

Some of this data may already be public. But until the MTA assembles it, no one on the outside can fully validate the extent to which congestion pricing is hitting or missing its revenue targets.

## Juicing up congestion pricing

Some help on the twin fronts of traffic and revenue will come via the [$3 increases](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/transportation/congestion-pricing-begins-what-know?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the congestion charge planned for the start of 2028 and 2031\. By my modeling, each upward bump will immediately add one to two percentage points to the travel speed gain and also bring in $20 million more in monthly tolls.

Also on the horizon is the congestion charge "carrot" of better subways paid for by the congestion revenues. The prospective impact is immense: a doubling or even tripling of the single-digit speed gains from the toll "stick" alone.

But the timeframe for transit improvements is often more generational than overnight. To improve traffic flow sooner and help congestion pricing live up to its full promise, New York needs to get more creative — and assertive — in imposing price discipline on use of its streets and roads. Here are four ways to do that:

**1\. Reconfigure the taxi and Uber surcharges as a per-minute charge:** The same in-vehicle GPS that demonstrated the pre-2025 Manhattan traffic slowdown makes it child's play to peg the taxi and Uber congestion surcharges to trips' in-zone minutes. Replacing the flat-rate $0.75 charge on yellows and $1.50 on Ubers with a nickel-a-minute zone charge for yellows and a dime for Ubers would boost vehicle travel speeds in the congestion zone by almost a full percentage point while keeping the total take the same.

**2\. Uber stockpiling fee:** Yellow cabs still largely "cruise" for fares, but Ubers trawl — sitting while waiting to be pinged. [Charging Ubers](https://www.komanoff.net/cars%5FII/FHV%5FStockpiling%5FQ&A.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) an additional 5 cents for each non-fare minute spent within the zone would free up enough curb and road space to trigger another one percentage point rise in speeds. (Self-driving Waymos, if they're ever allowed in the city, should be subject to a similar charge, with revenues going to transit.)

**3\. Charge e-commerce delivery vehicles for occupying zone space:** The e-commerce industry is largely immune to congestion pricing: its vans and trucks enter (and pay) just once but take up space all day. [Charging e-commerce vehicles](http://www.komanoff.net/cars%5FII/Taming%5FNYC's%5FE-Delivery%5FGridlock.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for each minute they are inside the zone would close that loophole. The inevitable changes in truck logistics would also tilt some consumers back toward brick-and-mortar retail.

**4\. Per-mile food-delivery fee:** [Charging app companies](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2024/11/05/komanoff-reining-in-deliverista-distances-is-the-key-to-safety?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) like DoorDash and Uber Eats for each mile their food orders must be delivered (beyond an initial free mile) would incentivize customers not just to order from nearby but also to pick up or even make their own dinner. The *deliverista* sector might shrink, but everyone's safety and sanity — the cyclists' included — would get a lift.

These are just starters. Our governor and mayor could also: tie the congestion charge more closely to vehicle size, as [Paris does](https://urban-mobility-observatory.transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/paris-introduces-triple-parking-fees-suvs-2024-02-12%5Fen?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with parking fees; institute curb pricing, beginning in the congestion zone, where space is most dear; and finally do away with parking placards — as New York State's "Fix NYC" report [recommended](https://www.komanoff.net/cars%5FII/Fix-NYC-Panel-Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 2018.

A year in, congestion pricing is a work in progress. Its supporters can bemoan Gov. Hochul's downscaling the toll to $9 from the intended $15, but without that concession, the toll might not have come to pass at all. The apparent disappearance of the ballyhooed initial traffic gains, though disappointing, need not spell stasis over the long haul. Slightly lackluster revenue is a concern, but transparency, tweaks and the $3 toll bumps will help mightily on that score.

That the groundbreaking congestion toll exists at all in the face of such intense opposition is no small miracle. Transit advocates met the dark moment in June 2024 with [uproarious rallies](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/01/05/strangers-not-strangers-how-i-greeted-the-start-of-congestion-pricing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) demanding the governor "flip the switch." She did, and both congestion pricing and New York transit are now moving fully into the light.

*You can download the author's congestion pricing spreadsheet at* [*http://www.nnyn.org/kheelplan/BTA\_1.1.xls*](http://www.nnyn.org/kheelplan/BTA%5F1.1.xls?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). *The spreadsheet tab "Run-up to CP" derives many of the figures in this post. The author acknowledges the analytical contributions of Todd Schneider and Jeffrey Zupan.*
### Remembering a Talented, Troubled Knick
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/remembering-michael-ray-richardson/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:30.000Z
*This week on After Hours, Jamie takes a detour from New York politics to explore a deeply personal piece of the city's basketball history: the life and legacy of Michael Ray Richardson, the electrifying Knicks guard whose career was derailed by cocaine addiction in the 1980s. Jamie sits down with writer Jake Uitti, who co-authored Richardson's autobiography "Banned: How I Squandered an All-Star NBA Career Before Finding My Redemption," to discuss what made "Sugar Ray" such a distinctive talent and how Richardson rebuilt his life after his ban from the league.*
### 2025: A Look Back
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/2025-a-look-back-most-read/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:32.000Z
The year just passed was a busy one for New York City: We elected a new mayor, said a long goodbye to the current one, implemented congestion pricing, obsessed over housing affordability, saw a federal judge call for a receiver to oversee the city’s jails, fended off Trump administration provocations, and more.

Here's what our readers read the most — and some selections our editors found especially compelling. ‎ ‎

# Your favorites

[**Zohran Mamdani’s Real-World Constraints**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/zohran-mamdanis-real-world-constraints) **by Carl Weisbrod**

The incoming mayor has grand plans — and serious logistical obstacles.

[**State of the City on Crime 2024**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/vital-signs-state-of-the-city-on-crime-2024) **by Vital City and Paul Reeping**

New York City may be getting safer, but it lags prepandemic conditions in many categories.

[**Just the Facts on New York City Subway Crime**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/just-the-facts-on-new-york-city-subway-crime) **by Aaron Chalfin, John Hall and Paul Reeping**

The city’s subway system is far safer than many people think, though stubborn problems remain.

[**How Zohran Mamdani Could Succeed as Mayor**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-zohran-mamdani-could-succeed-as-mayor) **by Bradley Tusk and Jamie Rubin**

Two pragmatic political veterans chart the course for the young, ideologically ambitious mayor to serve the city well.

[**The State of Crime in New York City at Midyear 2025**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-state-of-crime-in-new-york-city-at-midyear-2025) **by Vital City**

Despite major declines in shootings and murders, felony assaults remain at 20-year highs.

[**Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo Aren’t as Different as You Might Think**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/zohran-mamdani-and-andrew-cuomo-arent-as-different-as-you-might-think) **by Josh Greenman**

The two leading contenders for mayor made unions and others big promises that will be very hard to keep when reality comes calling.

[**Guess What? Government Is Already in the Grocery Business**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/government-is-already-in-the-grocery-business) **by Nevin Cohen**

Many have made Mamdani’s proposal to create a few low-cost, publicly owned supermarkets into a punchline — but is the idea really that radical?

[**New York Is Not Broken**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/is-new-york-broken) **by Greg Berman**

Federal leaders and even some local aspirants speak as though the city needs an urgent rescue. That’s at odds with basic indicators, and of the enduring feel of city life.

[**My First Adult Apartment**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/my-first-adult-apartment) **A Survey**

Our [housing issue](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-14) presented a range of concrete solutions to the city’s most pressing crisis. Here, a range of New Yorkers shared their experience paying the rent for the first time.

[**New York’s Housing Crisis: Self-Inflicted and Solvable**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/new-yorks-housing-crisis-self-inflicted-and-solvable) **by Annemarie Gray**

How did New York get so unaffordable, and how do we get out of the bind? A sweeping overview of the problem. ‎ 

# Our favorites

[**What To Do (and Not To Do) About People in Crisis on Streets and Subways**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-to-do-about-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways) **by Vital City**

Pragmatic recommendations for the incoming administration for how to address one of thorniest problems in New York City life.

[**Jane Jacobs 2.0: Training AI to Make Cities More Humane**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/training-ai-to-make-cities-more-humane) **By Edward Glaeser and Carlo Ratti**

Two leading academics explain how they used AI to analyze historical film footage, revealing that modern pedestrians walk faster and linger less than they did in William Whyte’s era.

[**What Mamdani Can Learn from a de Blasio Administration Safety Innovation**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/nstat-should-be-key-to-mamdani-public-safety-plan) **by Renita Francois and Abdul Nasser Rad**

Two public policy practitioners argue that the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Safety and NeighborhoodStat, if built up, could serve as foundational blueprints for the incoming mayor

[**A Department of Community Safety: Theory Meets Practice**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/mamdani-department-of-community-safety-where-theory-meets-practice) **by Gloria Gong**

A leading government practitioner diagnoses some of the operational hurdles of shifting public safety responsibilities from the NYPD to an alternative civilian agency.

[**Percy Sutton, Eric Adams and the State of Black Political Power in New York**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/percy-sutton-eric-adams-and-the-state-of-black-political-power-in-new-york) **by Basil Smikle Jr.**

A political veteran compares Percy Sutton’s mastery of "inside-outside" politics with Eric Adams’s struggles, warning that Adams’s decline creates a vacuum in Black political power.

[**Reality Check: Who’s the Guard Really Guarding in U.S. Cities?**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/reality-check-whos-the-guard-really-guarding-in-us-cities) **By Vital City**

President Trump sent the National Guard to a number of U.S. cities — and blustered about sending them to more. Are these really the most dangerous places in America, in desperate need of federal help?

[**New York City’s Catholic Church at a Crossroads**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-catholic-church-at-a-crossroads) **by Eileen Markey**

The first American pope arrives at a time when New York’s parishes are on the defensive, protecting their increasingly immigrant congregations from federal hostility.

[**A Tale of Two New Yorkers: Didarul Islam and Zohran Mamdani**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/a-tale-of-two-new-yorkers-didarul-islam-and-zohran-mamdani) **by Brandon Del Pozo**

What a fallen police officer taught a political aspirant about the changing face of the much-pilloried NYPD.

[**Mamdani’s Facilitators, Frenemies or Foes**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/mamdanis-facilitators-frenemiesor-foes) **by David Schleicher**

Mamdani’s success will hinge not only on his political acumen, but on allies, friends and political opponents with their own incentive structures.

[**Andrew Cuomo Sees a City in Crisis. Do Voters?**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/andrew-cuomo-sees-a-city-in-crisis-do-new-york-voters) **by Harry Siegel**

The former governor ran on a message that New York City, teetering on the brink, needed a strong hand to bring it back to safety. Was the city he sought to lead the same city New Yorkers are living in?

‎ ‎ ‎

# Charts that defined our year

**How government helps — and fails to help — people in crisis on streets and subways**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/atw_z3nyclf9ohtj_bridgestonowhere-12-8-png-auto-format-compress-1776259660443.jpg)

**The progress made — and yet to go — on serious crime**

**An overstretched NYPD?**

**Where Trump sent (or wanted to send) the cavalry**

**The truth about youth crime**
### From Crisis Response to System Coordination
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/system-coordination-in-crisis-response-to-high-acuity-homelessness/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:30.000Z
In her recent Vital City essay, ["A Department of Community Safety: Theory Meets Practice,"](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/mamdani-department-of-community-safety-where-theory-meets-practice) Gloria Gong captures a hard truth about New York's homelessness and mental health crisis: "Compassionate crisis response is essential, but without relentless follow-up, people spiral right back into the same subway stations and emergency rooms." This is exactly the missing layer of coordination and accountability that the Collaborative on Housing for Health (CH4H) aims to address.

This Collaborative, which we help lead, is a coalition of some of New York's largest health, housing and human-services providers working in partnership with the Department of Social Services (DSS) to better understand a specific challenge we call "high-acuity" homelessness. This term describes a cycle that can occur when people without stable housing experience significant behavioral health issues and move between streets, shelters, hospitals and jails. When someone experiencing homelessness gets caught in this cycle, it can worsen their preexisting health problems and make it all the more difficult to reach stable housing. Our newly released [roadmap](http://www.housingforhealthnyc.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) effectively writes the next chapter to Gong's argument: how New York can move from reactive crisis response to sustained system coordination that serves New Yorkers with the most complex needs.

In a city with vast resources and decades of investment in homelessness services, many New Yorkers understandably ask why so many people are still visibly struggling and unhoused. One key reason is that, over the past several decades, the nature of homelessness has changed. While 97% of New Yorkers experiencing homelessness are stably connected to shelter or transitional housing, a small subset of single adults in the system face far more complex behavioral health needs that can drive cycles of crisis.

The system designed to support people has not kept pace with this changing demand. Much of New York's supportive housing and behavioral health infrastructure was built to address psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. Today, however, a significant share of adults experiencing homelessness live with co-occurring complex challenges — layering health-related conditions brought on by deep histories of chronic trauma and homelessness, compounded by behavioral health conditions such as personality disorders and substance use disorders.

These conditions require very specialized kinds of care. Whereas individuals with psychotic disorders often respond well to medication paired with therapy, many increasingly common behavioral health conditions can cause rapid shifts in mood and difficulty maintaining stable relationships with care teams, making them more challenging to serve with traditional supportive housing models. What they often need instead is specialized psychotherapy as the primary treatment, combined with steady, long-term support. This requires sustained engagement to help individuals move along a long, nonlinear path toward stability. Without that, they are more likely to cycle between public systems not designed to serve them.

The City's data shows this pattern playing out. About 1% of individuals in the shelter system — or about 1,000 individuals over a recent two-year period — account for a vastly disproportionate share of crisis system use, cycling repeatedly through shelters, emergency rooms and short jail stays — at immense human, health and financial cost. This finding comes from a novel DSS analysis linking data across hospitals, shelters and jails. The insight is crucial: There is a finite, knowable population, not an abstract or unbounded challenge.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/aurrlhnyclf9ocws_acuity-desktop-auto-format-compress-1776259660508.png)

Credit: NYC Department of Social Services

In interviews with more than 60 people who have experienced homelessness, the Collaborative heard stories that bring the data to life. Many described being discharged from hospitals or jails directly back to the streets, with no continuity of care and no clear pathway to stability. "It was so frustrating and exhausting to go from the hospital to the streets or from the hospital to a traumatic shelter because I would always end up right back in the hospital," one participant told us.

Again and again, people described seeing not the continuous, coordinated care they needed, but a series of program hand-offs, "discontinuations" for noncompliance and long stretches of falling through the gaps between criminal justice, health and housing systems.

The analysis also reveals system gaps that keep people stuck in crisis. Many people leaving jail get almost no support reconnecting to housing or treatment. The city lacks sufficient psychiatric beds and step-down programs, so people who need ongoing care cycle back through emergency rooms.

All of this is happening despite the best efforts of thousands of skilled, dedicated City and nonprofit provider staff. The problem isn't a lack of commitment or that existing programs don't help people. It's that the system doesn't give providers what they need to succeed with the highest-acuity New Yorkers, and most programs were never designed to offer the kind of tailored, continuous support this population requires.

Making matters worse, providers face real disincentives: It is hard work to serve people with high-acuity health needs in programs lacking the structures to do so successfully. This work can lead to staff burnout, and the system rewards programs for delivering a service, sometimes regardless of whether someone actually achieves long-term stability. These barriers stem from how the system is structured, not primarily from lack of resources — and, in some ways, *in spite of* increased public resources.

In recent years, significant investments — particularly the state's [historic commitment to expanded mental health services](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-signs-legislation-improve-mental-health-care-and-strengthen-treatment-serious?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — have added important new programs and resources to the system. These investments represent real progress and have brought much-needed capacity to areas in need of support. At the same time, the growth in programs has not yet been matched with stronger coordination among them, as no single entity is responsible for helping people move from crisis settings to treatment and housing. Improving handoffs between programs is essential to maximizing the impact of these investments.

At the city level, New York has also made significant strides toward creating the kind of continuity this population needs. For example, the City has expanded Intensive Mobile Treatment (IMT), a model that stays with a person across settings, providing long-term, flexible care through hospitalizations, incarceration or street homelessness. Major providers, including one of our organizations, the Institute for Community Living, have developed [step-down programs](https://iclinc.org/institute-for-community-living-report-shows-new-program-increased-capacity-to-serve-new-yorkers-with-the-most-significant-mental-health-challenges-including-individuals-living-on-streets-and-subways/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that bridge people from IMT to community-based services. These models show what's possible when care is continuous and coordinated, but they only reach a fraction of the New Yorkers who need that level of support.

Together, our quantitative and qualitative insights point to the same conclusion that Gong articulated: The fundamental challenge is that there is an absence of any single accountable actor responsible for follow-through in the hardest cases. The solution is to realign existing programs and funding streams so providers have the accountability, flexibility and incentives they need to succeed. The Collaborative on Housing for Health has developed and will test a model designed to do that, right now, using the tools we already have. We call it a "service pathway."

The service pathway is the Collaborative's signature innovation: a practical but ambitious way to knit together the city's existing programs and services to meet people where they are and support them long enough for recovery to take hold. Under the model, one qualified nonprofit provider, known as a "pathway lead," will take full responsibility for serving a defined group of high-acuity New Yorkers from the moment they're identified through stabilization in permanent housing. For example, when someone is discharged from the hospital, the pathway lead will immediately connect them to housing, schedule mental health appointments and support them so they actually attend — rather than handing them off to another agency.

Crucially, the same team will stay with that person through crisis, transitional housing and into permanent supportive housing, filling the gaps people currently fall through. Cross-agency contracts will make those responsibilities clear and trackable, with the goal that no one slips back into crisis. And most importantly, organizations will be held accountable for outcomes, rewarding prompt responses, reduced crisis use and stable housing rather than simply counting services delivered. This is a major shift: For the first time, there will be a single point of accountability to own the most complex cases and support someone's full journey out of crisis.

The service pathway model will also give providers the tools and shared criteria they need to recognize when someone is experiencing high-acuity homelessness and connect them to the right level of care. Today, frontline staff lack both a common definition and practical ways to identify these cases. Every time a person experiencing high-acuity homelessness walks into an emergency room or is discharged from a jail, this is an opportunity to intervene with a connection to robust support before the next crisis. Under the service pathway model, high-acuity cases are defined consistently across common crisis points. Data can then be linked and surfaced through existing systems to help route people to specialized services more quickly and effectively.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/aurrcxnyclf9ocxm_pathways-desktop-auto-format-compress-1776259660705.png)

Credit: CH4H, "Service Pathways: The System Change NYC Needs Now" report

The service pathway approach will soon be piloted through a partnership between DSS, the Collaborative and leading nonprofit providers, with support from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust. The pilot will test how service pathways can integrate funding streams, align accountability and demonstrate measurable results for the people most visible — and most let down — by our current system. To inform future policy changes and public investments, we will also map the supply of housing and services against the needs of individuals in acute crises, making bottlenecks visible and quantifiable. By bringing together major housing and service providers with the resources to address a challenge that cannot be solved by any single agency, this pilot will serve as an incubator for system innovation. Over the long term, its successes could be replicated across broader populations.

Now is a rare moment of opportunity for New York to tackle high-acuity homelessness: Federal budget cuts and fiscal constraints are placing increased focus on cost-effective solutions, momentum is building across the field to close long-standing gaps in care for this population, and political attention to behavioral health and public safety is intensifying just as a new mayoral administration prepares to take office. This is the moment for transformation.

The infrastructure is already in place: The data systems, the provider network and the funding streams all exist. What's needed now is alignment — a shared expectation that the highest-need New Yorkers are not "too hard to serve," but too important to leave to chance.

Compassionate crisis response, [as Gong wrote](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/mamdani-department-of-community-safety-where-theory-meets-practice), must be matched by persistent follow-up. The service pathway model delivers exactly that: one accountable provider, coordinated care from crisis to housing and the realignment of existing resources around outcomes rather than activity. And it speaks to something all New Yorkers share — a belief that no one should be left to struggle alone in a moment of crisis, and our support system should give our neighbors with the greatest needs a real chance at recovery.

*The article you just read took weeks of research, interviews with experts, and careful analysis. It's the kind of rigorous, solutions-focused work that takes time, and support from readers like you makes it possible.*

*Vital City launched three years ago on a bet: that New Yorkers craved calm, evidence-based ideas in a hyperpartisan moment. You proved us right. And together, we've built something rare: a civic institution that influences policy without ideology.*

*To meet this moment, we need to grow, and we need your help to do it.*

*Your gift will help us expand our operational capacity, and publish more of the practical policy ideas that are cited by decisionmakers, used in college classrooms, and referenced on the campaign trail.*

*Will you join us?*

[***Become an inaugural supporter →***](https://bit.ly/vc-eoy-article?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)
### 11 Governance Improvements The Mamdani Administration Can Tackle in the First 100 Days
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/government-improvements-mamdani-can-tackle-in-the-first-100-days/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T14:58:27.000Z
*Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor on a platform of big, transformative ideas,* [*many of them dependent on other layers and levels of government*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/zohran-mamdanis-real-world-constraints)*. But as every New Yorker knows, day-to-day life is shaped less by grand visions than by the basic machinery of city government — and too often, that machinery is stuck. While Mamdani's mayoralty will be a test of his ambitious proposals, it will also be a test of small- and medium-bore management. *Just Fix It* is Vital City's contribution to helping him pass that test: a running list of concrete, doable ways to unstick the gears of city government and make it work better for all New Yorkers.*

*This installment was prepared with the help of Sarah Feinberg. Cara Eckholm and many others provided essential guidance and will continue to inform our work on this project going forward. In the weeks and months ahead, we will continue to surface practical suggestions from people who know the system best — current and former agency staff, nonprofit partners and the everyday New Yorkers who routinely deal with, and often trip up trying to navigate, New York's bureaucracy.*

*Send your ideas to* [*justfixit@vitalcitynyc.org*](mailto:justfixit@vitalcitynyc.org)*; if you wish to remain anonymous, we will honor your request.*

## 1\. Know when to (scaf)fold 'em

**The problem:**

Sidewalk sheds are unsightly and a nuisance in neighborhoods.

**The Mamdani administration should:**

Ratchet up enforcement and offer new incentives for building owners to complete repairs faster to remove sidewalk sheds.

**The fine print:**

There are currently [more than 8,200 sidewalk sheds](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/sidewalk-shed-map.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) covering more than 350 miles of New York City streets; nearly 4,000 have been active for more than a year, nearly 2,000 for more than two years and more than 1,100 for more than three years. While scaffolding has a role to play — assisting in active renovation projects and protecting pedestrians from the possibility of falling construction debris — it's egregiously overused, and stays up far too long. When so many sidewalks are cast in shadow, it's ugly, dangerous and dispiriting.

There's been notable progress of late. The Adams administration's[ Get Sheds Down](https://www.nyc.gov/content/getstuffdone/pages/sidewalk-sheds?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) initiative began to address this blight. [New local](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2025/03/26/2824/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) laws will elongate the facade inspection period for some buildings, allow netting in place of sheds and make other important changes. [Attractive new shed designs](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/11/mayor-adams-unveils-new-designs-for-sidewalk-sheds-and-scaffoldi?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are coming online.

All these are welcome, but the incoming administration must go further. In the first 100 days of his administration, Mayor Mamdani's team should deploy inspectors to the longest-standing sites — like the 1,120 sheds that have been active for more than three years — and put a plan into place with building owners to remove these structures. Agencies should assist building owners in navigating permitting and exploring technologies such as drone inspections, and the Department of Buildings must aggressively enforce deadlines.

## 2\. Rein in placard abuse

**The problem:**

Parking placards are routinely abused, creating dangerous situations and effectively announcing that government employees think the rules don't apply to them.

**The Mamdani administration should:**

Rationalize the process for granting placards, and deem all unofficial parking placards moot. Declare a no-tolerance policy for placard and parking abuses.

**The fine print:**

Abuse of parking rules by official vehicles remains rampant. Corridors like Schermerhorn and Tillary Streets in Brooklyn have essentially become illegal parking lots for placard-bearing vehicles, often those associated with [the NYPD](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/illegal-parking-and-failed-governance-ai-study-of-nypd-enforcement). Meanwhile, [countless placards](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/press-releases/2024/April/17LL6.Rpt.Release.04.03.2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are used and abused by a range of other officials who may have no good reason to need them. This [sends a pernicious signal that people on public payroll can break the law with impunity](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/parking-placard-and-license-plate-arrogance).

The City should conduct an exhaustive review of all of the placards issued, starting from scratch on justifications and reducing the total number allowed, granting them only for necessary purposes.

Technology can pave the way forward: by transitioning all physical placards to a digital, barcode-based system scannable by any traffic agent. Currently, thousands of unofficial placards, such as easily photocopied laminates, are in circulation. A digital registry would instantly identify invalid permits, allowing the City to tow violators and reclaim the curb for the public.

To address rampant parking abuse by NYPD vehicles, the incoming administration should also [take initial steps to move all parking enforcement back to the Department of Transportation](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/11/17/streetscape-bike-bus-lanes-parking-enforcement-trafficzohran-mamdani-eric-adams/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

## 3\. Shed some light on crime

**The problem:**

New York City's public spaces are defined by their vibrancy, but after dark, many neighborhoods are marred by "dark zones" where inadequate infrastructure actively discourages civic life and invites criminal activity.

**The Mamdani administration should:**

Scan the city's dark places with high crime rates and, working with residents who understand the local landscape, install permanent, high-quality street lighting to foster public activity and deter serious offenses.

**The fine print:**

Public safety is often viewed through the lens of enforcement, but enhancing the physical environment offers a powerful, non-punitive alternative. Rigorous [randomized controlled trials (RCTs)](https://www.nber.org/papers/w25798?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) conducted in New York City public housing found that increasing street lighting led to a 36% reduction in serious crimes such as murder, robbery and aggravated assault. Effective lighting does more than illuminate a sidewalk; it serves as a catalyst for civic life by making residents feel safe enough to occupy public spaces, creating natural surveillance that discourages criminal behavior.

The City has historically relied on [tower lights](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/the-controversial-floodlights-illuminating-new-york-citys-public-housing-developments?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that signal a haphazard, reactionary response. A smarter and more sustainable approach involves strategically investing in permanent fixtures that integrate into the neighborhood fabric. By focusing on these low-cost infrastructure improvements, the administration can reclaim the night for New Yorkers and drive down crime rates by strengthening the bonds of community life on the ground.

## 4\. Appoint a single commander for people in crisis

**The problem:**

Responsibility for the estimated 4,000 New Yorkers living on the streets and subways — many of whom suffer from serious mental illness or addiction — is currently scattered across a dozen siloed agencies. But because no one "owns" responsibility for this specific population, vulnerable people cycle through a never-ending churn of ERs, jails and shelters, compromising those people and the public space more broadly.

**The Mamdani administration should:**

Designate a single, high-level authority within City Hall to engage this population, coordinating budgets, data and operations across agencies to ensure every person in crisis is tracked to a stable outcome.

**The fine print:**

New York City spends billions annually on street homelessness, yet the results are often diffuse and inconsistent because agencies prioritize their own administrative mandates rather than the journey of the individual. A person may be removed from a subway station by the NYPD only to be discharged from a hospital hours later without any connection to the housing or treatment they actually need. This fragmentation creates "cliffs" where the city's most vulnerable residents are routinely lost in the bureaucratic shuffle.

To break this cycle, the new mayor must establish a [unified management hub](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-to-do-about-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways) in City Hall that uses an integrated, by-name data platform to monitor progress for each of these individuals, by name, in real time. This would go a long way not just to coordinating city agencies but also having a single point of contact for the state, which plays a large role in this issue. This leader's success should be measured by results: housing placements, stabilized health and reduced justice-system involvement. By centering accountability in one office, the administration can ensure that every encounter with a person in distress serves as a gateway to permanent stability.

## 5\. Curb curbside chaos

**The problem:**

Cars and trucks blocking the bus lane and the curb lane with double parking and deliveries cause congestion throughout the city and create dangerous situations for drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians.

**The Mamdani administration should:**

Expand on the MTA's Automated Camera Enforcement program, which uses cameras and on-the-ground enforcement to stop double parking and free up the curb lane for traffic.

**The fine print:**

Congestion in New York is often driven by minor disruptions such as double-parking and blocked lanes that ripple outward to gridlock the entire grid.[ The incoming administration wants to speed up buses while continuing to drive down traffic fatalities. To meet these goals, ](https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/mta-bus-route-segment-speeds-beginning-2023?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)the City [should prioritize clearing the curb lane through a data-driven approach](https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/11/30/gridlock-sams-transportation-list-for-mamdanis-first-100-days/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

The administration can begin by expanding automated enforcement against the most corrosive violations.[ Recent state legislation](https://www.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/automated-camera-enforcement?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has authorized graduated fines for repeat offenders, providing a powerful tool for deterrence. By combining specific neighborhood toolkits with rigorous enforcement of bus and bike lanes, the City can ensure traffic flows for all New Yorkers.

The expansion of the MTA's Automated Camera Enforcement (ACE) program on buses offers real promise. These cameras don't just ticket for bus lane violations; they can now penalize cars double-parked in the lane next to the bus, which often cause the bottleneck. Working with the MTA to roll these cameras out to every bus route in the city could speed the flow of buses and all traffic.

## 6\. Reform city hiring and civil service

**The problem:**

The outdated NYC civil service program that governs much of city hiring is broken: As of November 2025, there were more than 14,000 vacancies and it can take months to grade civil service entry exams.

**The Mamdani administration should:**

Dramatically overhaul and streamline the City hiring and civil service system to make it more efficient, which will allow the administration to be better able to attract high-quality talent.

**The fine print:**

New York City government faces a staffing crisis, with the[ City Comptroller's dashboard](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/services/for-the-public/nyc-agency-staffing-dashboard/historical-vacancy-rate/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) showing a vacancy rate more than double its pre-pandemic level. The good news is there is enthusiasm to serve; when Mayor-elect Mamdani's transition team stood up an[ informal application portal](https://www.transition2025.com/apply?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) it attracted more than 70,000 resumes in a matter of days.

The bad news? It's harder than it should be to become a public servant in New York. For civil-service-exempt employees — which describes many of those seeking positions with Mamdani — the process is weighed down by a bureaucratic and budgetary morass.

Even more difficult to navigate are the rules that govern thousands of rank-and-file government employees who get their jobs through [New York's civil service system](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/new-yorks-mamdani-ny-civil-service-system): an outdated, arcane set of rules, [codified in state law](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/CVS?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), that advantages insiders and effectively disincentivizes talented candidates. To even participate in this system, an applicant must sit for a test (typically offered less than once a year), then wait months for results, then sit on a hiring list for months or even years. Not surprisingly, by the time promising candidates receive a job offer, they have long since moved on to other opportunities.

Even though the system is written into law, the city administration can take strong steps to modernize it. The new mayor should issue an executive order directing immediate fixes. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) should move to offer every exam more frequently and significantly reduce the seven-month average wait time for exam results. Simultaneously, the administration must deploy immediate administrative fixes supported by[ reports from the comptroller](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/documents/Understaffed-Underserved.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the[ 5Boro Institute](https://fiveboro.nyc/staffing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), plan to add exempt titles, and modernize the technology for civil service exams and recruitment. And the mayor should set the stage for a long-term fix by convening a panel of experts to publish findings and recommendations for legislative overhaul within 100 days.

## 7\. Harness the potential of AI

**The problem:**

AI is underused by City government. Bureaucratic rules remain a maze, and government service delivery is far too inefficient. Emerging tools can answer questions — and help government find solutions.

**The Mamdani administration should:**

Invite the private sector to compete to build an AI tool that delivers clear, government-verified answers to a wide range of questions, while aggressively exploring ways to use AI (with human oversight) to do the work of government more efficiently.

**The fine print:**

Over the last few years, the use of AI has exploded. While this technology is still in its infancy, it is clear that it is here to stay. [Private citizens](https://www.hugema.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [have repeatedly shown](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-lawless-state-of-new-yorks-streets) [how to harness](https://statescoop.com/citizenlab-community-planning-technology-government/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [existing data streams](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/realestate/affordable-housing-rent-stabilized-website.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to serve the public better. New York City government needs to catch up.

The Mamdani administration should move rapidly on two fronts. First, use AI to answer questions. Whether a tenant is checking building requirements ("What kind of lighting is my landlord required to provide in my building lobby?") or a citizen is looking for the latest city-subsidized affordable apartments in their area, they should be able to easily and swiftly get accurate, actionable responses in plain language. In 2023, the Adams administration launched a[ chatbot](https://nyc-business.nyc.gov/nycbusiness/contactus?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that often gave bad or even illegal guidance — a clear misfire. It's time for a well-thought-out take two.

Simultaneously, the Mamdani administration should pioneer uses of AI within city government to improve government efficiency and service delivery. This might include aggregating complaint data to pinpoint and address citywide and neighborhood-specific trends, analyzing city-run CCTV feeds to better manage streets and [using big data to flag potential corruption](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/government-should-harness-the-power-of-ai-to-combat-corruption-while-preserving-managerial-discretion) in agency spending as early as possible. Combining, mining and analyzing city data, AI can help design better bus routes, plan street work and more.

The City could further this work by beginning to digitize millions of documents that aren't currently digitized — but it need not wait. There is ample electronic data to crunch in order to make human decision-making more rapid and precise.

## 8\. Retool the budget office

**The problem:**

The Office of Management and Budget plays an outsized role in city government, but it's usually as the penny counter and the Bureau of No. It needs to be a more proactive partner in efficient service delivery.

**The Mamdani administration should:**

Put the M back in OMB, directing the office to modernize and advance its analytical capabilities to improve efficiency of government service delivery.

**The fine print:**

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in City Hall exerts immense influence over the City's ability to function. OMB not only oversees the City's budget, creates the City's economic forecast and predicts the impact of tax policies; it also has the power to decide which projects get funded and why. However, it often operates siloed in its role as a fiscal gatekeeper — as the Bureau of No — rather than a strategic partner.

At a time when the next mayor brings big ambitions to expand the role of government with limited resources, the office will need to be much more operations- and execution-minded, moving to find efficiencies and savings that actually improve service delivery.

OMB has access to a vast amount of financial and performance data. It should embrace technological tools and data analytics, including those nested in the City's Office of Technology and Innovation, to develop new strategies and publish their findings for agencies and New Yorkers alike to learn from.

And understanding whether city priorities were smartly and sufficiently funded shouldn't require an accounting degree or a translation service. OMB should democratize its reporting, allowing both insiders and the public to understand where all the dollars really go. A simple question like "How much does DSNY spend on new garbage bins annually?" should have a simple, findable answer. A reformed OMB would publish this data in an interactive, searchable dashboard, empowering the public, City Council and journalists. Such transparency and data sharing would signal a fundamental culture shift.

## 9\. Clean the clutter

**The problem:**

Year after year, executives and legislators create their own smattering of new offices, boards, working groups and reports. Administrations rarely do the hard work of decluttering the bureaucracy — leading to inevitable redundancies, inefficiency and waste.

**The Mamdani administration should:**

Rationalize the many interagencies and offices and streamline their functions. Then continue the work to eliminate unnecessary reports, boards and redundant staffing.

**The fine print:**

Over the generations, New York City's government has grown by accretion, with successive administrations adding offices, staff and mandates that now clutter the organizational chart with overlapping functions. All told, government has more than 120 agencies and offices. To name one recent, ironic example: The Adams administration [named a Chief Efficiency Officer](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2023/08/mayor-adams-appoints-denise-c-clay-city-s-chief-efficiency-officer?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with a small staff. The office ran into other competing management offices and ultimately never presented any findings to the public. In the end, it appears it did little more than add a new box on an org chart.

It's not that nobody's tried to streamline government. Every administration reorganizes the government in their image, and Mamdani will do the same. But he should pair this with an intelligent reexamination of the new offices created under previous administrations.

As a part of the initial executive order organizing the government, the incoming administration should announce a 100-day process to identify redundant, overlapping and vestigial boards, commissions and reporting requirements — and then lay out a process to rationalize them. This may mean, for starters, collapsing the stray commissions, boards and offices into the most relevant related agency.

## 10\. Let the sunshine in

**The problem:**

The public has the right to know how the mayor and his team are conducting the city's business — and transparency is a tonic for creeping cynicism in government.

**The Mamdani administration should:**

Set a new bar by becoming the most transparent mayoral administration in history. Release a comprehensive daily schedule, push out information quickly, turn around FOIL requests in days not weeks and make leaders available for regular engagement and questions — on any and all topics.

**The fine print:**

The mayor-elect has promised a new day for transparency and public service in New York. To demonstrate to the public that the administration has nothing to hide, his administration should land on the side of transparency over secrecy on all issues.

Schedules for the mayor and deputy mayors should be released on a routine basis. Lists of all visitors invited to City Hall or to the mayor's residence — including lobbyists, government officials and members of the public — should be released as well. The mayor should hold frequent press conferences in which members of the media are allowed to ask questions about whatever topic they choose.

The administration should also take a hard look at improving the[ NYC Open Data portal](https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). While thousands of datasets are available, they are often difficult to find or search. By centering Open Data in its tech platform — and helping guide the public and researchers to better access this information — the administration can broaden accountability and improve the workings of government.

The administration should proactively release datasets that are frequently sought under Freedom of Information Law — such as police disciplinary records or detailed budget modification codes — treating the press as a partner in accountability.

## 11\. Open more doors to affordable housing

**The problem:**

The process to help move New Yorkers into permanent housing is time-consuming, confusing and redundant, keeping people in shelter longer than necessary and costing the city money.

**The Mamdani administration should:**

Streamline the process to obtain CityFHEPS vouchers.

**The fine print:**

CityFHEPS vouchers — which stands for City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement — are one of the primary tools the City uses to help pay for people to move out of homeless shelters and into permanent housing, covering a substantial portion of monthly rent. These payments — which [go as high as $2,600 per month](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hra/downloads/pdf/FHEPS/HRA%5F146z%5FE.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for a family of one or $3,000 for a family of four — are sizable, but they are more cost-effective and lead to better social outcomes than prolonging stays in shelter.

Yet today, obtaining and making use of such a voucher requires navigating a bureaucratic labyrinth of [more than 100 distinct steps](https://winnyc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Win-REBNY-Voucher-Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a crushing administrative burden detailed in [Council reports](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2025/06/10/2899/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and[ City Comptroller audits](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-report-on-the-department-of-homeless-services-determination-of-temporary-housing-benefits-for-families-with-children/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This forces homeless New Yorkers to navigate a maze of "shopping letters," unit searches and redundant "pre-clearance" reviews, often requiring the same documents to be submitted multiple times. Compounding this friction, the nonprofit providers tasked with helping these clients lack access to shelter censuses and have no authority to approve leases, effectively acting as powerless intermediaries.

The mayor can torpedo this administrative blockade through executive action. The administration should immediately abolish the separate "pre-clearance" review in favor of a concurrent timeline and enforce a strict 48-hour rule for apartment inspections to ensure the City operates at market speed. Crucially, the City should grant trusted nonprofits the power of "presumptive eligibility" — allowing them to sign leases and house tenants immediately while verification happens in the background — and direct the Office of Technology and Innovation to launch a unified digital portal to finally end the era of lost PDFs.

*The article you just read took weeks of research, interviews with experts, and careful analysis. It's the kind of rigorous, solutions-focused work that takes time, and support from readers like you makes it possible.*

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### What is the Future of ‘Renewable Rikers’ Island?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-future-of-renewable-rikers/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:30.000Z
The election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City's 111th mayor is expected to usher in significant policy shifts at City Hall. One area certain to receive fresh attention is the fate of Rikers Island — the 415-acre land mass situated in the East River between the Bronx and Queens and home to one of the nation's largest and most notorious jail complexes.

For decades, human rights advocates have sounded the alarm regarding the violence, cruelty and inhumane conditions facing detainees (the vast majority of whom are awaiting trial), the dangers to Correction Department officers, the enormous cost of running this complex (hundreds of thousands of dollars per detainee per year) and the failure of the corrections system to prepare those confined there to successfully re-enter society. This year alone, [14 people have died](https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/12/07/rikers-island-detainee-dies-14th-death-in-nyc-jails-this-year/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Department of Correction's custody.

Rikers as we know it rightly remains on the path to closure.

In 2017, in the [first](https://urldefense.com/v3/%5F%5Fhttps://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b6de4731aef1de914f43628/t/5b96c6f81ae6cf5e9c5f186d/1536607993842/Lippman%2A2BCommission%2A2BReport%2A2BFINAL%2A2BSingles.pdf%5F%5F;JSUlJQ!!NO21cQ!DechEb%5Fu0C5tBXwyXaDtzbJQtyqDmzKe0ex4Hwh%5FXDjj-9r-gcSDu7aN%5FFv338s40jz9OKJYiWGFzOD78GGSCJNi$?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of [more than a dozen authoritative reports](https://urldefense.com/v3/%5F%5Fhttps://www.morejustnyc.org/reports%5F%5F;!!NO21cQ!DechEb%5Fu0C5tBXwyXaDtzbJQtyqDmzKe0ex4Hwh%5FXDjj-9r-gcSDu7aN%5FFv338s40jz9OKJYiWGFzOD78MgN7aRX$?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice Reform — chaired by former Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, Jonathan Lippman — branded the Rikers Island jail system "an international symbol of despair and damage" and concluded that ending incarceration there was "a moral imperative."

In 2021, the City Council [enacted historic legislation](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2021/02/11/2069/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) mandating an end to incarceration on Rikers Island by August 2027 — and charting a better course for the island's future.

Significantly, this ["Renewable Rikers" legislation](https://intro.nyc/local-laws/2021-16?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — spearheaded by then-Councilmember Costa Constantinides — directed planning for post-incarceration land uses on Rikers Island for "sustainability and resiliency purposes."

The administration of outgoing Mayor Eric Adams missed intermediate implementation deadlines and wobbled in its dedication to achieving the Renewable Rikers statutorily mandated August 2027 closure date.

Progress in constructing the borough-based jailhouses, where detainees are supposed to be housed when Rikers is shuttered, has proceeded slowly. At this point, they're not scheduled to be completed until 2029, 2031 or 2032.

Even though it is likely that efforts to scale up community-based mental health resources, invest in supportive housing, speed pre-trial processing and accelerate completion of the borough-based jails will pick up steam under the Mamdani administration, meeting the August 2027 end-to-incarceration date for Rikers looks somewhere between implausible and impossible.

While attention has been focused on whether incarceration at Rikers will end in August 2027 or sometime thereafter, the question of what Rikers Island's post-incarceration future will look like — whenever that future formally begins — has been largely ignored as of late by the city's policy-debaters and decision-makers.

That should change. The transformation of Rikers Island into a world-class example of sustainable redevelopment, green jobs and reparative justice would be a legacy accomplishment for Mayor-elect Mamdani.

In case anyone was wondering, Rikers Island is ill-suited for residential development. It is largely constructed out of landfill composed of garbage and coal and incinerator ash. The result is an unstable foundation and frequent releases of methane, a highly flammable greenhouse gas. The island is also poorly served by public transportation and lies within a stone's throw of LaGuardia airport; height restrictions are imposing; disruptive noise and jet fumes are unavoidable.

As the sponsors of the Renewable Rikers legislation understood, the island — because of its size and separation from populated neighborhoods — is a unique in-city location for erecting environmentally beneficial infrastructure, once the physical structures of its ignominious past are demolished.

To that end, the 2021 Renewable Rikers legislation directed city agencies to prepare feasibility studies analyzing the potential for such innovation.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection ("DEP") released [one of these little-noticed studies](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/about/rikers-island-wrrf-feasibility-study-march-2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in March 2024\. It concluded that constructing a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant on Rikers Island would offer "a multitude of benefits that are not possible with the existing" system. According to the study, a modern wastewater treatment plant on Rikers would improve water quality in New York harbor; produce renewable green energy; capture stormwater and lessen in-city flooding; improve the Department's operations and efficiency; and reduce the impact of the Department's existing sewage plants on adjacent neighborhoods in the South Bronx and northern and eastern Queens.

DEP Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala, in the study's introduction, wrote that a new Rikers Island wastewater treatment plant could "transform DEP's operations…," "would be technically feasible…," and could well be "similar in cost" to rebuilding and upgrading the nearby aging sewage plants (which will be necessary as those decades-old plants reach the end of their useful lives).

A [second study](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/climate/downloads/pdfs/Rikers-Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was released by the Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice in February 2024\. This one focused on the feasibility of building renewable energy infrastructure on Rikers Island. Its conclusions were similarly upbeat. It found that constructing a major solar installation, a large-scale battery storage facility (that could release clean energy into the grid during periods of peak demand), and an offshore wind converter station presents a "feasible" and "compelling alternative" to the city's "current antiquated energy …infrastructure."

Another promising land use that could slide in alongside these energy and wastewater treatment operations would be a contemporary organic materials composting facility. An NRDC analysis prepared by former Sanitation Commissioner Brendan Sexton concluded that establishing a major food scraps and yard waste composting plant on Rikers — on the scale of the Department's Staten Island composting operation at Fresh Kills — would be feasible, cost-effective and necessary to achieve the city's ambitious climate and waste reduction goals.

Since the release of the two feasibility studies in 2024, however, nothing has happened. The Eric Adams administration [has failed to move things forward](https://queenseagle.com/all/2023/8/25/adams-administration-continues-to-miss-rikers-closure-deadlines?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

It hasn't transferred land or buildings on the island that are no longer being used for incarceration purposes out of Department of Correction control, as the Renewable Rikers statute requires. And it has only sporadically convened the Rikers Island Advisory Committee, which by law was directed to advise City Hall on future uses of the island "for sustainability and resiliency purposes."

An immediate next step is for City Hall to build upon the feasibility studies and map out a detailed master plan for a re-imagined Rikers Island. Fortunately, [legislation advanced by Councilmember Sandy Nurse and her colleagues](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=6860227&GUID=0F9E83C3-E45B-4E90-815A-DF3F1B1A2B5A&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to direct exactly that has already been prepared and vetted and is awaiting a vote in the City Council.

The closure of Rikers Island may be delayed — but the brighter future of this piece of land should not be indefinitely put on hold. Imaginative thinking. Smart development. Improved public services. Renewable Rikers offers it all. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani can turn an island of shame into a showplace of sustainability. Under his leadership, a new Rikers Island can become part of his legacy of advancing not only social justice, but also savvy job-producing, green infrastructure redevelopment on a grand scale in the nation's largest city.

*The article you just read took weeks of research, interviews with experts, and careful analysis. It's the kind of rigorous, solutions-focused work that takes time, and support from readers like you makes it possible.*

*Vital City launched three years ago on a bet: that New Yorkers craved calm, evidence-based ideas in a hyperpartisan moment. You proved us right. And together, we've built something rare: a civic institution that influences policy without ideology.*

*To meet this moment, we need to grow, and we need your help to do it.*

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### The Other Side of Affordability
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/job-creation-and-upward-mobility-for-affordability-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:34.000Z
Solving New York City's affordability crisis will require more than tackling the soaring cost of living. The next mayor also needs a plan for the other side of the equation: raising incomes and building wealth.

Throughout the mayoral campaign, the next mayor understandably focused on the immediate pressures New Yorkers feel every day — rising rents, childcare costs, transit fares and the price of groceries. What received far less attention was why and how the next administration might improve economic mobility: helping more New Yorkers move out of poverty, achieve economic stability and reach the middle class.

Lowering costs is important, but it can only take New Yorkers so far. Since the pandemic, New York City's median rent has risen at twice the rate of median incomes, according to the Center for an Urban Future's analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Policymakers can't make the city more affordable for all if paychecks continue to fall behind.

Mamdani has proposed one significant idea to bolster incomes: raising the city's minimum wage to $30 by 2030\. Boosting the minimum wage beyond the current $16.50 is an important step. Indeed, the increases from $7.25 in 2013 were arguably the leading factor in [reducing poverty](https://povertycenter.columbia.edu/sites/povertycenter.columbia.edu/files/content/Publications/PT%20reports/NYC-Poverty-Tracker-Minimum-Wage-Increase-2023.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) prior to the pandemic. But it's not enough just to boost the number of New Yorkers who can get by in this high-cost city; a lot more New Yorkers need options that will help them get ahead. That requires more than just increasing the base wage, but also setting up individuals to access the well-paying jobs that are growing in the city's economy and build wealth.

The consequences of limited economic mobility are visible everywhere. Last year, [76%](https://robinhood.org/reports/poverty-tracker-data-snapshot-inflation-nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of New Yorkers said they cut back on basic necessities or savings. Poverty is [rising again](https://robinhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/PT%5FAnnual24%5Ffinal%5Fdigital.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and many households earning well above the poverty line face [intensifying financial strain](https://unitedwaynyc.org/true-cost-of-living/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Beneath those trends is a deeper challenge: While there are now more high-wage jobs in the city than before the pandemic, more than one million working-age New Yorkers are unemployed, underemployed or stuck in low-wage jobs, according to the Center for an Urban Future's analysis of Census data, including 556,696 full-time workers earning minimum wage, 252,500 unemployed New Yorkers, 208,454 part-time workers who want full-time jobs and 111,171 college graduates working in low-paying jobs that don't require a degree. Unless city leaders make expanding economic mobility a priority on par with lowering costs, the city will attempt to solve a two-sided problem with a one-sided strategy, and too many New Yorkers will still struggle to get ahead.

Economic mobility, however, has almost no conventional political constituency. There are no rallies for higher college attainment rates or expanded apprenticeships. No daily headlines demanding a stronger role for nonprofit small-business lenders or more on-ramps to high-wage careers. That's why mayoral leadership is so important: While the work rarely garners headlines, the impact can be transformative.

And while subsidizing life in the nation's most expensive city will come at a significant public cost, major action to expand economic mobility will generate revenue over time, as more New Yorkers move into decent jobs, stable careers and home or business ownership — strengthening the tax base and the city's economy for the long term. As of today, the next mayor proposes funding most of his biggest policy proposals by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations. But a rising tide for all would broaden the fiscal base for more robust economic mobility programs and a stronger safety net, while giving the next mayor effective options that do not require state action.

New York already has many building blocks in place: CUNY programs that dramatically improve completion rates, employer partnerships that open pathways to good jobs, community lenders that help small businesses grow and job training models that lead to careers. What's missing is focus and scale, along with a commitment from City Hall to champion what works and move on from what doesn't.

Taken together, these efforts can form the backbone of a serious economic mobility strategy for New York — one that matches the scale of the affordability challenge. Here are five concrete, achievable steps the new administration can take to jumpstart an economic mobility agenda.

1. **Help thousands more low-income New Yorkers earn a degree.** In most of the city's best-paying industries, 75-90% of workers hold a bachelor's degree. Yet only 24% of Hispanic New Yorkers and 32% of Black New Yorkers have one — a [gap](https://nycfuture.org/research/closing-nycs-college-attainment-gap?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that sharply limits access to good jobs. Expanding CUNY ACE — one of the most effective tools for boosting bachelor's completion — should be a top priority. ACE combines personalized advising, financial support and structured pathways that increase graduation rates by as much as 40%, but it currently serves just 3% of eligible students. Scaling ACE to reach 30% of full-time students over five years, and launching a CUNY Flex model for part-time students, would enable thousands more New Yorkers to move into family-sustaining careers and [generate billions](https://nycfuture.org/research/playing-new-york-citys-ace-card?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of dollars in additional lifetime earnings. As a first step, the next mayor should double ACE funding to about $22 million per year and seed CUNY Flex with an initial $10 million pilot.
2. **Scale up more of the city's micro-businesses.** Entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful pathways to intergenerational wealth, yet too few of the city's 20,000 Black- and Latino-owned firms ever grow from very small businesses into medium-sized or large businesses. Minority-owned employer businesses generate just 45% of the revenue of white-owned counterparts, in part because they struggle to access capital, navigate procurement or break into major supply chains. The City Council [funded](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2025/06/30/2915/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a small pilot last year to begin addressing this gap, but the next mayor should take this seed investment to the next level. Launching a full-scale [NYC Minority Business Accelerator](https://nycfuture.org/research/scaling-minority-owned-businesses?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — modeled on [Cincinnati's successful program](https://minoritybusinessaccelerator.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/MBA%5FAnnualReport-2022%5F2023.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — would help hundreds more small firms tap into private-sector procurement and supply chains and reach a whole new echelon of growth.
3. **Launch an NYC AI Service Corps.** Thousands of young New Yorkers have earned computer science degrees or completed high-quality tech training programs, yet still can't secure that critical first job. Employers increasingly want work experience, not just credentials, leaving many talented graduates sidelined. There is now an oversupply of recent tech graduates for the first time on record, according to analysis by the Center for an Urban Future, and monthly job postings for software developers plunged by nearly 50 percent from 2021-2022 to 2023-2024, according to NYCEDC. An NYC AI Service Corps — a paid, six-month fellowship placing recent grads in small businesses, nonprofits and city agencies — would give participants hands-on experience building AI tools, improving data systems and solving real operational challenges. Fellows would gain the networks and confidence needed to enter a fast-changing industry, while helping organizations across the city modernize and compete. The initiative could launch with $10 million in city funding and a private-sector match, and later expand into a [pay-it-forward](https://nycfuture.org/research/5-ideas-to-advance-economic-mobility-in-nyc-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) model in which organizations that hire their fellows repay a portion of wages into a pool that funds future cohorts.
4. **Enlist 100 of New York's largest employers in creating middle-class pathways.** The New York Jobs CEO Council — launched by Jamie Dimon and other CEOs to create clear, skills-based pathways into good jobs for CUNY students and graduates of nonprofit training programs — has already helped spark more than 40,000 hires of low-income New Yorkers into family-sustaining roles. But while this ambitious intermediary is succeeding in bridging the gaps between employers and education and training providers, only about 30 of the city's largest employers are currently involved. The next mayor should build on this success by recruiting the [next 100](https://nycfuture.org/research/5-ideas-to-advance-economic-mobility-in-nyc-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) large and mid-sized employers to open well-defined, skills-based hiring pathways for CUNY students and graduates of career training programs, with the goal of hiring another 100,000 lower-income New Yorkers into well-paying jobs over the next 10 years.
5. **Create a citywide youth entrepreneurship initiative.** Young New Yorkers are entering one of the toughest job markets in years, with very few entry-level openings and limited opportunities to earn beyond a shrinking number of minimum-wage jobs. In this difficult economic landscape, the mayor should help more young people start and scale entrepreneurial ventures. Entrepreneurship isn't easy, and it isn't for everyone, but it will need to become a viable pathway for more young New Yorkers to achieve economic self-sufficiency — building on the homegrown successes of entrepreneurs such as [Hamid Cruz](https://build.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/BUILD.org-Annual-Report-2020-2021.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), who launched a successful business in high school before going on to become the first in his family to graduate college. Moreover, research suggests that entrepreneurial education is linked to higher earnings even for those who don't ultimately launch businesses. The mayor should launch the city's first major youth entrepreneurship initiative, featuring start-up competitions in schools, libraries and CUNY campuses; mentorship programs that pair the city's top entrepreneurs with cohorts of young founders; and technical assistance geared toward turning ideas into viable ventures.

While each of these ideas can generate meaningful results on its own, expanding mobility also requires an economy that's creating far more good jobs. That will mean reducing some of the bureaucratic hurdles that slow business growth, building a massive amount of new housing, taking an evidence-based approach to public safety and continuing to invest in the things that make New York livable and competitive — culture, parks, transit and the public realm.

The next mayor is right to do everything he can to make New York more affordable. But if the goal is to help more residents actually afford to live here, he'll need to focus just as much on boosting incomes and building wealth as on keeping costs down.

*The article you just read took weeks of research, interviews with experts, and careful analysis. It's the kind of rigorous, solutions-focused work that takes time, and support from readers like you makes it possible.*

*Vital City launched three years ago on a bet: that New Yorkers craved calm, evidence-based ideas in a hyperpartisan moment. You proved us right. And together, we've built something rare: a civic institution that influences policy without ideology.*

*To meet this moment, we need to grow, and we need your help to do it.*

*Your gift will help us expand our operational capacity, and publish more of the practical policy ideas that are cited by decisionmakers, used in college classrooms, and referenced on the campaign trail.*

*Will you join us?*

[***Become an inaugural supporter →***](https://bit.ly/vc-eoy-article?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)
### John Catsimatidis on Donald Trump, Immigration, and New York Republicans
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/john-catsimatidis-on-donald-trump/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:09.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/john-catsimatidis-on-donald-trump) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on December 17, 2025 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

John Catsimatidis — a businessman, Republican, political donor, radio host and station owner, 2013 candidate for New York City mayor, Donald Trump ally, and (former) Curtis Sliwa employer — spoke with The New York Editorial Board on the morning of December 11, 2025\. *(photo via Red Apple Group)*

*Participating journalists: Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Alyssa Katz, Ben Smith, Liena Zagare.*

Catsimatidis was joined by Richard Weinberg, a former judge and current radio commentator on 77 WABC, the station owned by Catsimatidis’ Red Apple Media.

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Smith**  
Thank you guys for taking the time to do this. \[Introductions, concluding with Nicole Gelinas of Manhattan Institute and the New York Times.\]

**John Catsimatidis**  
Are things getting any better there \[at the New York Times\]?

**Ben Smith**  
We’re on the record.

**John Catsimatidis**  
I don’t wanna get you in trouble. I mean, look, I was very good friends with Arthur Sulzberger. And we always used to get together, and I thought there was more common sense those days.

**Josh Greenman**  
What do you think about the role \[The New York Times Editorial Board\] played or didn’t play in the mayoral race?

**John Catsimatidis**  
The truth? We weren’t paying attention to them. I mean, did they finally say — where’d they go? Cuomo?

**Josh Greenman**  
They kinda went anti-Mamdani, I think, right? In the primary they were anti-Mamdani.

**Richard Weinberg**  
In the primary, they were anti-Mamdani. They said he wasn’t experienced and qualified to do the job. November, I don’t remember them saying anything. I think they started saying they weren’t gonna have anything to do with local politics.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Everybody was looking towards me on that mayoral race with Curtis \[Sliwa\]. We had zero control over Curtis. Curtis was off on his own.

**Josh Greenman**  
Did you try?

**John Catsimatidis**  
He doesn’t talk to us. You know, Sid \[Rosenberg\] and me, which are the big political guys, I guess, and let alone… Greg Kelly’s a big political guy and Dominic Carter — I mean, we got everybody.

The president originally said he thought that was the best way to go. He told me.

**Josh Greenman**  
What was the best way to go?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Go with Cuomo.

**Josh Greenman**  
When was that?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Months ago. One or two months before it happened. And I took the position of “Anybody but Mamdani.” You know? And I said to Curtis, “If you’re showing progress, we’re gonna be with you.” You know? Show that you have the ability to win. And I said the same thing to Andrew.

The anatomy of what the heck happened, right?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Do you think there should’ve been a Republican primary?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I think, if you go back long enough, if I thought this mess would’ve happened, I would’ve run. But everybody thought Eric Adams was a sure thing. In a traditional Democratic city, where did Mamdani come from? You know — lots of rumors around that a lot of foreign money was involved. Probably was.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you have some evidence of that? That’s quite a thing to say.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Are you saying there’s no doubt about it or are you saying you don’t think so?

**Josh Greenman**  
Well, you made the assertion.

**John Catsimatidis**  
How naïve are you?

**Josh Greenman**  
You made the assertion, so what’s the evidence?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I apologize for saying that, but, you know, this is a truth room. And I’m giving you my opinion.

**Alyssa Katz**  
I will say the New York Post attempted to make the case, and I think came up extremely short. I think that covered it.

**John Catsimatidis**  
The case was that if there’s foreign money involved, and he didn’t know about it, or it couldn’t be proven, there was no case. OK? I’m just telling you facts..

**Alyssa Katz**  
By that standard, Eric Adams had significant foreign money in his campaign.

**John Catsimatidis**  
But that’s nickels and dimes compared to this guy.

**Alyssa Katz**  
I don’t think there’s evidence of that.

**John Catsimatidis**  
I’m telling you reality, all right? In my opinion.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Cuomo raised a lot of money and the money didn’t help Cuomo. So Mamdani had a connection to the voters.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Cuomo ran a terrible campaign. He felt at the beginning of the primary — So that was one of the reasons I didn’t run because I’m not gonna run against Eric Adams. You know? He was gonna win in the normal course of business. Mamdani came out of nowhere. He went from 1% to 40%.

**Ben Smith**  
Just to go back, how close did you come to running? Did you cut ads? Did you think about details?

**John Catsimatidis**  
No, no, no, no.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Yeah, and you just said that you would’ve run. How would you have beat Mamdani?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Well, no, no, this is pre-Mamdani.

**Josh Greenman**  
What’s the profile of a Republican message that could beat him and keep Cuomo out?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Well, don’t forget — I’m not necessarily a Republican. I was a Bill Clinton Democrat. Bill Clinton couldn’t get a nomination right now. You know? I believe in common sense. I believe in common sense, no matter what you do in life. Whether you wanna put a Democratic word on your head, or a Republican word on your head, and that’s what it comes down to.

**Ben Smith**  
This is a city that elects Republican mayors, that elected Rudy, elected Bloomberg.

**John Catsimatidis**  
I ran last time \[in 2013\] as a Republican/Liberal. And I had the Liberal Party nomination. And my mistake, I was urged — the Republicans were pushing me to pull out because of Lhota. The Liberals were telling me, “Stay in, stay in, stay in.” And in retrospect, you never know. Maybe I should have stayed in.

**Ben Smith**  
But do you think there’s something wrong with the Republican Party that there aren’t a bunch of good candidates?

**John Catsimatidis**  
No, they don’t have the ability to raise enough money. I would say, the decent Republican candidates, unless they put up their own money like Bloomberg — he looked at it as an alternative to the Democratic line….

**Josh Greenman**  
But there were millions in Super PAC dollars supporting Cuomo’s campaign, so why wouldn’t some of those millions follow along —

**John Catsimatidis**  
But if you don’t spend it wisely, if you let the consultant spend it for you, then you’re in deep crap, you know? A lot of the people that gave Cuomo money felt it wasn’t spent wisely.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So who is responsible for building a Republican Party infrastructure in New York State and New York City, where we would have a bigger field of potential candidates and raise money?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Well, the last decent governor we had for Republicans was George Pataki. And he was a very, very decent person, liked by both sides. And he’s still a decent person. I jokingly said to him, “Let’s run one more time.”

But New York has changed. In the last five years, however you want to say, we’ve been migrated, invaded, or whatever you wanna say. Of the all the migrants that came in that voted in the last election—

**Josh Greenman**  
How did migrants vote in the last election?

**John Catsimatidis**  
You ask, you tell, you find out. What do you think?

**Josh Greenman**  
Put something behind that —

**John Catsimatidis**  
What do you think?

**Josh Greenman**  
I’m asking you.

**John Catsimatidis**  
What do I think? I think more people voted than should be voting.

**Alyssa Katz**  
What’s your evidence of that?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Listen, I grew up on the streets. I’m a street guy. I get the buzz.

You wanna know the truth? That’s the truth. You wanna say, “Where’s the evidence?” You’re not gonna find evidence, OK?

**Richard Weinberg**  
The demographics in this town totally changed. You have about a million people of Asian or Muslim background, OK? So that changed it. So the old days where you had a balanced ticket of an Irishman, an Italian, and a Jew — those days are gone, OK? So the demographics have changed. So yes, why you’re not getting a Republican Party. It’s a different demographic.

**Josh Greenman**  
Different demographics I understand. So it’s a different assertion then.

**John Catsimatidis**  
I think there’s gotta be Voter ID. You want a fair and square election? I think there has to be Voter ID.

**Alyssa Katz**  
The Board of Elections is equally divided between Democratic and Republican leadership and administration. The Republican Party is very hands-on with registration, with the polls, with supervising the polls. At what point would there be a point of failure in which you had somebody who is not a citizen, not eligible to vote, suddenly able to vote in that position?

**John Catsimatidis**  
At the voting booth. At the voting booth.

**Josh Greenman**  
Can I ask you, if somebody went on the air at 770 WABC—

**John Catsimatidis**  
My hobby. My smallest company and my hobby.

**Ben Smith**  
I thought supermarkets were your hobby?

**John Catsimatidis**  
It’s on the way out.

**Josh Greenman**  
….would you have no qualms about them going on and saying, “Migrants voted and that’s what swayed the election?”

**John Catsimatidis**  
I have no qualms about saying that I think that, in my opinion, a lot of people voted that shouldn’t have voted.

**Ben Smith**  
But maybe to get back, like Judge, you were saying there’s a lot of Asian immigrants in New York. A lot of Asian immigrants to New York, for instance, many of whom voted for Trump. And I guess, I think the question Nicole was trying to get at is, why can’t the Republican Party on a local level seem to be competitive with voters who I think are pretty open to voting for the Republicans?

**John Catsimatidis**  
What is the registration between Republicans and Democrats?

**Ben Smith**  
That’s like 6 to 1, right? It’s overwhelmingly Democratic.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Well, and a lot of people are registering with neither party.

**John Catsimatidis**  
A lot of business people that want influence, they give to where the influence counts. Business people try to be smart, and they’re not gonna — you know, if you go back and check the rolls of how many checks Donald Trump gave to Democrats — you know, a lot.

**Richard Weinberg**  
Why don’t you take a look at the City Council. Look at the demographic of the City Council. That’ll tell you a lot where the city is going.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
But isn’t the Republican Party responsible for reaching out to the new demographics just as they did with the Irish, Italian, and Jewish—

**Richard Weinberg**  
Absolutely correct, but to John’s point, this is overwhelmingly a Democratic state. You have pockets where you have Republican strength. That’s Nassau and that’s Suffolk and maybe a few places upstate. It’s still true that if you wanna win the governorship you have to win somewhere between 30% to 34% in the city, OK, if you’re gonna be a Republican. That’s why Zeldin failed to do that. So the demographics are against you, you have a changing demographic. Look who’s getting elected to the state legislature, the Assembly, the Senate, certainly the City Council.

Not only you’re looking at the demographics but you’re looking at the ideology. The ideology is far left, and remember, John always introduced me on the show, I’m the house Democrat. David Paterson and I are house Democrats. I’m still a Democrat.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Common-sense Democrats.

**Richard Weinberg**  
But the point is, the Democratic Party’s under siege. It’s being taken over by the DSA types and the Working Families Party. They drive the agenda, they win the primary, they’re better organized, they’re better funded? So the fight, frankly, in my humble opinion, for survival of the city, is you either have to win in the Democratic Party — the Republican Party’s not gonna be the savior of New York City.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So just give up on the Republican Party?

**Richard Weinberg**  
I didn’t say that. But don’t count on them being the savior of the American election.

**Josh Greenman**  
I’d like to bring this back to Mr. Catsimatidis.

If the theory is that the Democratic Party’s been taken over by the far left…So the idea is then, that theoretically creates a big opening for Republicans.

**John Catsimatidis**  
I was a common-sense Democrat.

**Josh Greenman**  
So what I’m trying to ask is: Sketch your profile of the Republican candidate who, if it’s a one-on-one race, can beat Zohran Mamdani. Who is that person? What does that person say? What is that message?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Quality of life in New York. What do New Yorkers care about? They care about the quality of life.

**Josh Greenman**  
And so that’s basically what Cuomo runs on, but he can’t win simply because Curtis was there?

**John Catsimatidis**  
When I ran in 2013, what did I say? We want more affordable housing, but intelligent affordable housing. You wanna build the transit-oriented development, remember those words? You want build that affordable housing near subway stations where people can go to work. Right? You don’t wanna build it on Central Park South just to stick it up people’s behinds. And maybe not everybody should be in Manhattan. Maybe affordable housing should be in the outer boroughs, next to subway stations, next to train stations. And I really believe that. Uh, I believe that if Mamdani was smart — I mean, the art of the con, who was conning who at that press conference with President Trump and Mamdani?

**Ben Smith**  
What do you think? Who was conning who?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Well, I think that President Trump wanted something positive. He didn’t want to show that he’s gonna be negative, because cause he doesn’t wanna be negative. He loves New York. President Trump would give him $5 billion for affordable housing — like this. In my opinion. Like this! And you know what five billion means to the federal government? Chump change.

**Ben Smith**  
Have you talked to Trump since that? Have you talked to him about that?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Not specifically that. But Trump loves New York. And right now, if you check out my last [interview with Jay Clayton](https://wabcradio.com/episode/us-attorney-for-the-southern-district-of-ny-jay-clayton-11-30-25/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the U.S. Attorney, a couple of Sundays ago — Jay Clayton is Trump’s person here. And he wants to use whatever is necessary to maintain the quality of life.

And number two, my recommendation to President Trump — only a recommendation, it’s his decisions — is, let’s not cut off money from New York. Put in a monitor to give them money too so the money is not — how do you say it? — pissed away. The way that Manhattan Institute would spend it, you know what I mean? In a common sense way or whatever.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And how would the monitor be different from the normal checks and balances of government or Congress?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Hopefully he’s not a crook! Look what happened in Minnesota. How does a billion dollars disappear? Let me ask you a question, the question I asked to somebody on the 5:00 show the other day — I want you all to do some soul searching and think about the amount of money that has been stolen or just gone nowhere. No proof! But the proof is getting developed. How much of the $2 trillion deficit went…. Just do some soul-searching guys. That’s all I ask.

**Ben Smith**  
How are you thinking about the governor’s race — about Blakeman and Stefanik?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I said to President Trump that you need a common-sense Republican to be able to beat Governor Hochul. And look, Governor Hochul still has a good chance only if she proves that she has the courage to have checks and balances on Mamdani. You know, you have three checks and balances here. You have the Speaker of the City Council, you have the Governor in Albany, and you have President Trump. Three different checks and balances. The socialists have created a terrorism campaign, where common-sense Democrats are scared of their own shadow. They’re scared to challenge them or come up with commonsense solutions, because if they challenge them, 10 seconds later, they have a primary with unlimited money from the Left.

**Josh Greenman**  
So who, in your view, is a common-sense Republican candidate for governor?

**John Catsimatidis**  
George Pataki. But he’s 80 years old.

**Josh Greenman**  
Anyone who’s currently running or considering?

**Ben Smith**  
When I hear you say that, I think you’re talking about Bruce.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Bruce is a decent person. He would have a chance if he raises enough money. Stefanik is a very smart lady. As Trump would say, “Number one in her class in Harvard.” But she’s sometimes too tough. You need somebody with a little bit of love. A little bit of sympathy.

**Ben Smith**  
During the Trump-Mamdani press conference, a reporter asked about things that Stefanik had said, and he said, “Well, I disagree with that, but she’s running for office.” I was curious what you made of that.

**John Catsimatidis**  
I think she’d make a better, possibly, \[House\] speaker than take a chance on running for governor. Just my opinion.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Do you think we should have a primary, or do you think the party should get behind one candidate early?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I think primaries are always good. Getting the truth out.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Do you expect anyone else to join the race?

**John Catsimatidis**  
You never know. You might have a common-sense businessperson join the race.

**Ben Smith**  
Are you thinking about it yourself?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I wish I was 10 years younger. If I was 10 years younger, for sure.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Well, you were just saying that someone with a little bit of love, a little bit of sympathy—

**John Catsimatidis**  
I love people.

**Alyssa Katz**  
I understand, but you’re in a party, and Stefanik is very much a face of the party. Where one of the big challenges with voters right now, who are not part of the base — the Republican brand itself right now is associated, for one thing, with not just aggressive immigration enforcement, but enforcement that is doing things like separating children and parents, and then sending them into detention where no one can even reach them. You have hundreds of *habeas corpus* petitions on people who’ve just been snatched off the streets and so on.

**Richard Weinberg**  
Obama and Biden did do it.

**Alyssa Katz**  
We had armored vehicles on Canal Street and raids on vendors. The promise was to target criminals, and the stats are showing that that’s not the focus.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Let’s go back a year. It was in the newspapers. It was on our radio station. There’s a reason our radio station became number one. We tell the truth. The only way to get fired on our radio station is not tell the truth.

And I had that dinner just before the New York Economic lunch in New York, where Trump was there. And it was 20 of us in the room. It was at whatshisname’s home. Bridgehampton. The guy who’s commerce secretary.

**Ben Smith**  
Lutnick.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Lutnick. And, you know, and I know Trump for a long time, 45 years. And he knows I have no axe to grind about anything. I really don’t. I just want the best for our city and our country. And he’s saying, “And we’re gonna deport 20 million people.”

Well, I had the balls to stand up….Because a lot of people are yes men around him. I said, “Mr. President” — and I always call him Mr. President because I respect his position and I respect him — “We’re not gonna do that.”

He looks at me, “What do you mean we’re not gonna do that?”

“We’re not gonna do that. Why don’t we just get rid of all the criminals first and make a determination afterwards?”

It was in the papers. And two weeks later, when he had the New York Economic lunch, what did he say? “…We’re gonna get rid of all the criminals.”

**Josh Greenman**  
So what do you think of what’s happened on the ground?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I think ICE and whoever have exceeded their authority.

**Alyssa Katz**  
So what should change?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I think the bad criminals, not the people that jaywalked, not the people that hustled pocketbooks on the sidewalk. the bad criminals — do not pass go, do not collect $200, get them the hell out of here.

**Josh Greenman**  
So what should the mayor’s posture be with respect to them?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Cooperation with common-sense federal authorities.

**Alyssa Katz**  
The law right now does not allow for cooperation—

**John Catsimatidis**  
What law? Tell me.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Sanctuary City law prohibits—

**John Catsimatidis**  
Yeah, but Sanctuary City— I’ll let the judge answer that.

**Richard Weinberg**  
That’s the biggest fraud in the world. There’s no such thing as a Sanctuary City. It’s totally unconstitutional. The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution is very, very clear, federal government immigration policy prevails. That they get away with this nonsense of Sanctuary Cities, counties or states, pure nonsense. It should be taken down. There’s an oath of office to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. So if you’re not cooperating with federal law enforcement, you should be removed from office.

**Josh Greenman**  
But you just had Mr. Catsimatidis say they should cooperate in the case of serious criminals. You’re suggesting they should also cooperate in the case of the jaywalker, or no?

**Richard Weinberg**  
He didn’t say that. He just said to you, “Serious criminals.” That’s what John just said.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Right, serious criminals. You know, murderers, rapists.

**Josh Greenman**  
Right. What I’m asking is suppose the federal government wants to go far beyond that.

**John Catsimatidis**  
You know what Venezuela did, by the way? Do you know? They emptied out their hospitals and sent us all the sick and the kids — the kids were sitting next to our kids in schools. They emptied out their jails, sent them to us. I mean, why didn’t you attack Biden during that period of time? You guys didn’t. It’s a two-way conversation, OK?

**Josh Greenman**  
But I’m trying to draw out what you just said, because suppose the federal government and ICE say, “Give us all of your rolls of every department because we want to go after all of the jaywalking undocumented immigrants.” You just said it’s not good to deport the jaywalkers. What should the posture of the city be then?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Well, then I think that what I would do if I was mayor, or if I was whatever — I would expose that. I’d go to all the newspapers and say, “Look, we’re going to cooperate with the federal government on violent, violent, violent criminals.”

**Josh Greenman**  
And you would not cooperate in the other cases?

**John Catsimatidis**  
No, I’m not gonna cooperate on jaywalkers. I’m not gonna cooperate on nannies.

**Josh Greenman**  
What about the Supremacy Clause?

**John Catsimatidis**  
You want your nanny taken away? How many nannies are legally in New York?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Does that mean people who have been convicted of a violent felony, or also people accused of a violent felony?

**John Catsimatidis**  
That means people that you have strong belief they’re violent killers.

**Liena Zagare**  
I have a question about the incoming administration. Is there anything on Mr. Mamdani’s agenda that you think would be good for New York City?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Well, if he would be smart and cooperate with Trump, affordable housing in the outer boroughs near the transportation. Transport-oriented affordable housing. But these people have to go to work. Now let me ask you another silly question that was asked of me on NY1\. Because I’ve gone on with Errol \[Louis\] a few times. And I also had the Secretary of HUD on my show. Very nice guy. How many people in NYCHA are paying rent? Do you know?

**Josh Greenman**  
I mean, I know that there’s a big problem with people not paying.

**John Catsimatidis**  
How many? I think it’s 60% don’t pay. You think I’m close?

**Josh Greenman**  
Yeah, probably.

**John Catsimatidis**  
What do you do when 60% don’t pay? And you know — it makes them homeless. What do you do? At what point do you reach, pardon my language, the fuck-you level?

**Alyssa Katz**  
NYCHA does frequently — they have a whole procedure and they do take tenants to housing court—

**John Catsimatidis**  
60% don’t pay. OK, face reality.

**Josh Greenman**  
So what would be the answer to that? It’s a good point. What’s the answer to that?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I don’t know. OK? I’m not gonna lie to you. There’s got to be an answer. I mean are these people that are migrants that just came here to eat our lunch? I made this speech in Europe last week, or not last week — on European television. I mean, Europe was on the edge of destruction. Tell them what our discussion was.

**Richard Weinberg**  
The EU just announced they’re gonna start fining member countries who don’t take in migrants. OK? And the numbers are staggering. And what you have is you have a cultural invasion. And you have people coming into Europe who don’t want to assimilate, who don’t want to take the common shared values of the countries. They want to change the host countries. You have the same phenomenon coming on in the United States of America. You have the tribalism, you have the cultism. That’s a big threat to us.

**John Catsimatidis**  
That’s what Biden did to us.

**Richard Weinberg**  
That’s the national unity problem. And that’s going to be the future of America, and maybe the loss of Europe. Let me ask you a question, since you’re pretty good at depositions.

You have Mamdani, and he’s a declared democratic socialist. He’s an Islamist sympathizer. He wants to get rid of the \[NYPD’s\] Critical Response Team. He wants to get rid of the gang database. He’s made it very, very clear that he doesn’t want to cooperate with federal authorities. He announces that he wants to not do the homeless sweeps for the tent cities.

Now, you take all of that together, and don’t you believe that serious people who love this city, this state and this country, want to sit back and ask the question, “Where are we going?” What happens when you have tent cities? You have an increase in public health crises. You have diseases that you haven’t known for decades resurrect themselves. You have the human wealth being destroyed. You have human waste on the streets.

**Josh Greenman**  
So, if you’re asking him a question, the answer is yes—

**Richard Weinberg**  
But I’m saying, so, what would you do about that when you have an upcoming mayor who says that?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I was vice chairman of Ellis Island. OK? Bill Fugazy was chairman, Lee Iacocca was honorary chairman. Immigration, yes. Invasion, no.

I mean, all we want— Let me tell you something. My father came in 1949\. My two grandfathers came in 1930.

**Josh Greenman**  
What percentage of New York City was foreign-born back then, do you know?

**John Catsimatidis**  
OK. A lot. A large percentage. But it was the American way of life. Not coming here to change it. They came here to work 80 hours a week and have a better life for their children.

**Richard Weinberg**  
And to be Americans.

**John Catsimatidis**  
These people are coming here to change our way of life.

**Alyssa Katz**  
How do you know that? Again, I keep coming back to: what is the evidence?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Listen, you could sit there and give me that discussion all day long. But you know what the end of the day is? The end of the day your kids and grandkids are gonna be in deep shit. OK?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
But doesn’t your argument come back to how do you beat Mamdani at the ballot box?

**John Catsimatidis**  
You wanna hear Joe Biden? Hold on.

\[Plays audio recording of Joe Biden\]: *The trouble is that the president’s proposals are not big enough to deal with the problem. We think we should do more to stem the flow of drugs across our borders, and we think we should go one step further. Let’s go after the drug lords where they live with an international strike force. There must be no safe haven for these narco-terrorists, and they must know it….*

**John Catsimatidis**  
If you want a copy of it.

**Ben Smith**  
This isn’t a Mamdani campaign spokesperson — we’re really interested in how you’re seeing the city.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Me, I can take care of myself. You know what I used to say on the radio? I’ll take a Rocky Colavito bat, which was like six feet big, and whack them over the head. I came from 135th street. But I worry about my kids and grandkids.

And I support the president 100, 110%, on knocking out those stupid boats coming with drugs to kill our kids. OK? A hundred thousand kids and people died in 2024\. If it wasn’t a hundred, it was 88,000.

**Richard Weinberg**  
You’re not including the people who haven’t died who are zombies.

**John Catsimatidis**  
And China is feeding the Mexican cartels. OK? And Venezuela, who’s feeding them? Maybe Iran. My intelligence sources — because we have intelligence sources that drop dimes in my ear, OK? How do you become number one? There was Iranian terrorists on some of those boats. OK? Do I prove it? No. I’m just telling you…

All I care about is the security of the United States of America and the security of our state and the security of our city. That’s all I care about.

**Ben Smith**  
Just because we have limited time—

**John Catsimatidis**  
When we run out of coffee we have limited time.

**Ben Smith**  
I realize this is a hard pivot, but can you talk to us about the grocery business in New York? What you’re seeing? Just like you’re in so much contact with regular people in that space. What are you learning? What are you seeing?

**John Catsimatidis**  
We’re gonna be out of it sooner or later. Because our supermarket businesses is being subsidized by our other companies.

**Ben Smith**  
Why?

**John Catsimatidis**  
We’re not making any money. The rents are too high. The shoplifting is too high. Nobody gets arrested.

**Ben Smith**  
It sounds like the Mamdani Plan — government subsidized supermarkets.

**John Catsimatidis**  
People get arrested — the joke sometimes is they get arrested 150 times, and while the cops are still filling out the paperwork, the crooks get to go home. The crooks from New Jersey come to New York to commit their crime.

**Ben Smith**  
What do they steal?

**John Catsimatidis**  
They steal whatever they steal. Listen, they steal whatever they steal. If they get caught, they still go home for dinner.

**Josh Greenman**  
Right near me, a Lidl just opened. Very low prices. There are bunch of Aldi’s opening around there.

**John Catsimatidis**  
We’ll teach those foreigners a lesson. We’ll show them what happens!

**Josh Greenman**  
No, no, but as someone who’s in the grocery business — do you think Gristedes is as high-quality and as low-cost as it could and should be?

**John Catsimatidis**  
You wanna know reality? And I’ll tell you my yelling and screaming at the staff meetings at Gristedes. All I wanna do is break even. We’re fully unionized. The unions in the grocery area have done zero to protect their members. Zero. We’re fully unionized, and I respect our people. We’ve always been fully unionized. And they’ve done zero to protect us against the other ones. And everybody has come in. Every drugstore has groceries. Amazon, FreshDirect, the competition has just gone crazy. You can’t be cheap enough in New York and Manhattan. We sell convenience right now.

You know what the rents are for these stores? Between the rent cost, between the highest electricity in the country, OK? The vendors, they don’t wanna come in and deliver. Why? They’re either gonna get tickets…. The cost of delivery to Manhattan stores is unbelievable. So when I laugh about Lidl or other national chains, is they haven’t learned their lesson in Manhattan.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
What would your advice be to Mamdani?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Buy Gristedes.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Can he lower grocery costs though?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Somebody’s gonna pay. It’s either the taxpayer pays, and it gets lost in action.

**Ben Smith**  
Right now it’s coming out of your pocket more or less?

I’m trying to think about the scheme where you sell Mamdani Gristedes. This is, like, a great story.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Absolutely. You can see me and Mamdani shaking hands.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Can he lower grocery costs though?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Yeah, if you don’t charge — if you can get the stuff delivered to the stores without getting 11 tickets on the wholesaler’s truck, you know?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So how do you do that? You need a delivery bay on the street, and you would pay for the delivery bay? I mean, how would that work?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Maybe there should be some exemption hours, or that truckers could come in from 5:00 in the morning to 8:00 in the morning without getting abused or something. Look, Randy Mastro, first deputy mayor, he has common sense. But there’s nobody else with common sense.

**Josh Greenman**  
If you say Gristedes is losing money right now. What is Gristedes worth if you tried to sell?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Well, it’s making money— Our overhead is tremendous.

**Josh Greenman**  
But, I mean, if you were on the market trying to get someone to buy it?

**John Catsimatidis**  
You know, it’s close to breaking even, but not— You know, nickels and dimes. The overhead that we have to run — so if a big chain bought it or independents bought it, then they know how to make their living.

**Ben Smith**  
I’m looking at the photos over your head of gas stations and obviously you’re in the energy business in a really big way. But better business than the grocery store?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Country Fair makes a lot of money in Western New York. These are convenience stores. Convenience stores, gas stations. Red Apple, Kwik Fill.

**Ben Smith**  
What did you make of Kathy Hochul — You saw she approved this natural gas pipeline and some Democrats are upset about it.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Well, there was a deal made with Trump. I don’t know if you know about it? On the windmill, which is the biggest fraud.

Hey, I’m not a Republican that doesn’t believe in environment. I’m an environmentalist too. We’re destroying our shorelines. Those windmills are good for five to ten years, then they fall apart. And when they fall, we’re dealing with the government of Norway. It’s the government of Norway that’s sucking us out.

**Richard Weinberg**  
You know the impact on the environment by the way of these windmills?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Tremendous impact on the environment. And besides killing the whales, they killed our ostriches up in Canada, because they’re mean-spirited people. I hate mean-spirited bureaucrats.

**Josh Greenman**  
So, solar’s growing really fast in Texas, and other forms of energy are growing real fast.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Sure. But it shouldn’t be government subsidized. You own a home and you could spend $2, and you think you’re gonna save money?

**Josh Greenman**  
Should any energy be government subsidized?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I think nuclear going forward in the future, to get it started, because I think that’s the only substitute over the next 10, 20 years. As a getting it started situation. My son was in SMRs — small modular reactors. The same nuclear reactors that are reliable in submarines and aircraft carriers. You take them and recreate them for land use. They’re safe, they’re efficient, and they’re operating for 60 years, safely.

**Ben Smith**  
Are you investing in that? Is that a business you’re going to get in?

**John Catsimatidis**  
It’s a subsidiary of our oil company. My son, besides being president, is chief investment officer. And my son has convinced me: the early settlers get shot.

In other words, the first guys in that business will go bankrupt, so we go in and buy in bankruptcy.

**Ben Smith**  
That’s a really interesting investment thesis.

**John Catsimatidis**  
How did I get the oil company? In bankruptcy. How did I get United Metro, our oil distribution business in Long Island? Bankruptcy. We saved the jobs, we redid the company, and we saved a lot of jobs.

**Josh Greenman**  
Are you seeing effects of Trump’s tariffs in any of your businesses?

**John Catsimatidis**  
No. I think the United States will have the best economy ever in 2026\. I think Chairman Powell is playing politics and not lowering interest rates.

We’re in the real estate business. It’s one of our businesses, so many buildings we built. *\[Points to a picture on the wall.\]* That one in Florida we just opened.

That’s Coney Island. The first two buildings are built. We can build the other three, but I’m not sure I want to spend a billion dollars in New York right now. Until we know which way New York is going.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Are you worried about climate effects? I mean, that area flooded terribly during Hurricane Sandy. How are these resilient?

**John Catsimatidis**  
We built them to withstand winds of up to 175 miles an hour. The windows and things like that. We went down so far down we’re seeing 200 mile an hour winds, OK? And it’s right on the beach. New York is a beautiful climate nine months of the year, 10 months. You know, I walk along Coney Island, and the city’s spending a billion dollars on Coney Island to redo the boardwalks.

**Josh Greenman**  
Do you like what’s happening to the casinos?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Listen, let’s see what happens. I mean, how much blood do you wanna suck out of people’s blood. The old expression my parents used to use — I forget. Look, I guess the people that are gamblers, they’re either going to gamble with the people on the streets or they’re going to gamble in casinos.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Can New York be a more affordable city?

**John Catsimatidis**  
If we do it right, yes. If I was mayor I would do a great job. And by the way, when I ran for mayor, I didn’t tell everybody how bad everybody else was. I just told them what I’m going to do instead of attacking everybody. I don’t believe in attack ads.

**Josh Greenman**  
So what’s the way to make the city more affordable?

**John Catsimatidis**  
You create affordable housing and work with the federal government that has an unlimited amount of money, and be able to do it. You’ve got to come up with a game plan. What do you do with the people that don’t wanna work and not pay rent? What do you do with them?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So Mamdani wants to raise taxes, both individuals and corporations.

**John Catsimatidis**  
You know what the song we play at five o’clock? The Exodus.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Would you leave to avoid the tax?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Well, eventually I would leave, but then I’m not leaving right now.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
And where would you go?

**John Catsimatidis**  
The Promised Land. Florida.

Let me give you some numbers so you guys know, in case you don’t know. 19,500,000 people in New York State. 23,700,000 people in Florida. Fifteen years ago, ten years, it was opposite.  
You’re sitting here in New York City, between New York State and New York City, your budget right now is 360, 370 billion. The budget in Florida is 120 \[billion\]. Three to one. Pardon my language. Where’s the fucking money?

**Ben Smith**  
They got a Republican candidate for governor of Florida who wants to stop New Yorkers from immigrating.

**John Catsimatidis**  
He doesn’t want stupid people to come down.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So what would be your threshold for leaving? At what point would you say—

**John Catsimatidis**  
I’ll tell you something. If I’m thinking I’m gonna die — I feel good right now. You know, my father lived to 94\. How old did your father live to?

**Richard Weinberg**  
My father was 95, 96\. My mother lived to 104\. I’m very careful with the bike lanes.

**John Catsimatidis**  
You have to be very careful with those bike lanes.

If I think I’m gonna die in five years, or three years, or whatever, I’m gonna move to Florida. Why? Look at your estate tax. They suck your blood. And you know how much estate taxing they have in other states?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So, you’re more concerned about the estate tax than the real estate or earned income.

**John Catsimatidis**  
And the quality of life. Look, I can take care of myself, but if I’m 87 years old, can I take care of myself? Maybe not.

**Ben Smith**  
How old are you now?

**John Catsimatidis**  
How old do you think I am?

**Ben Smith**  
That’s a dangerous question.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Pick a number, I don’t give a shit.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
You were born in 1948.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Class of ’48\. Seventy-seven. Do I look OK for 77?

**Josh Greenman**  
There was talk about you being part of maybe a group that might purchase some news property in New York, like the Daily News or something like that. Instead you’re in the radio business. What do you think of the information ecosystem in the city?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Well, President Trump last night said CNN should be sold.

**Ben Smith**  
Do you want to buy CNN?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I would buy it if it’s the right deal, yes. I only buy right deals. I don’t pay retail.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So crime, we haven’t talked much about crime. Murders and shootings are near record lows.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Well, there’s two things you have to look at. On crime, how much are they reporting and how much is actual?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
When you have shoplifting, do you report every shoplifting incident to the police?

**John Catsimatidis**  
We try, but nobody but I don’t think the police even takes it.

**Josh Greenman**  
But murders is not a reporting issue. Murders are real, right?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Yeah. Murders are real.

Listen, he was 15 years chief counsel for Peter Vallone as Speaker of the City Council.

**Richard Weinberg**  
Nicole knows. We did Safe Streets, Safe City.

**John Catsimatidis**  
And then 15 years on the \[State\] Supreme Court.

**Richard Weinberg**  
We made the city safe. David \[Dinkins\] didn’t want to do it, Peter \[Vallone\] got it. We put together the deal with the City Council, which Peter ran. We got the legislature and the government to go along with it. He had a smart guy who was his deputy mayor, Judge Milt Mollen. And the fact is, we cut the deal, we made the city safe. So when Rudy came in as mayor, he had his army.

So the problem is you fight every day. And I’m telling you as a former assistant attorney general, as a former law clerk to a federal judge, as a judge myself, City Hall — you have to fight to keep the city safe every day. You have to call it out, you have to challenge it.

I’m a big fan, even though John doesn’t like the expression, I’m a big fan of the broken window theory. I think it absolutely works, it has historically worked. You go after small stuff so you don’t create a climate of lawlessness. What I’m desperately afraid of, when Mamdani talks nonsense, like not going after the tent cities. You’re gonna start having tent cities. You want to have a tent city right in front of Rockefeller Center, in front of the Christmas tree? You want to have it on the grounds of the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Is that what you wanna do? You want to have it on Sutton Place?

You need to get serious about protecting quality of life and public safety. If you don’t do that, there’s no moral authority of government to govern. The first obligation of government is to keep people safe. I’m not campaigning for a job at the Manhattan Institute, I’m just telling you it’s something I believe in. I’ve always believed in it. Empirical experience having been in this field for years. I ran the Midtown Community Court. I ran the Special Narcotics Court for the entire city. I know all about this quality of life stuff.

I’m desperately afraid that this guy is going to \[inaudible\] because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s a kid, he’s inexperienced, he’s an ideologue. He’s surrounding himself with very dangerous people. And I hope Jessica Tisch can bring him back to the center. Now, do I believe she can do that? I have my doubts because I don’t believe this kid is transactional the way usual politicians are. I think he’s an ideologue. He’s transactional to the extent that you will go along with what he wants to accomplish.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So why is he keeping Tisch?

**Richard Weinberg**  
For cover. It’s the most obvious game.

**John Catsimatidis**  
That’s the nicest way to say it. For cover.

**Ben Smith**  
How long do you think she’s gonna stay in that job, John?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I don’t know. I think, if he disbands — Tell them about the strategic task force. He’s going to tell you the truth, guys.

**Richard Weinberg**  
So, this is your problem, you have a population of approximately one million Jews in this town. And historically, the Jewish community, whether they’re secular like me—you know, my view is for sects of Judaism, there’s Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed, Ralph Lauren Polo. I’m Ralph Lauren Polo, OK? And that is part of the culture that we were born with, is giving back, trying to make the world a better place.

So if you look around the cultural institutions, the hospitals, the charities, the universities. They give back, the Jewish community gives back. When the New York Jewish community starts being afraid that they can’t walk the streets, they can’t go to their synagogues, they can’t wear yarmulkes, they can’t identify—

**John Catsimatidis**  
Exodus.

**Richard Weinberg**  
When that happens and they start fleeing, the demographics are gonna change radically. And the people who support all of the social programs, all the welfare programs, all the good deeds, they’re gonna flee. And they’re gonna be replaced by whom and by what? By takers not givers.

**John Catsimatidis**  
You know, with Ellis Island, they made my father’s brother sign that if he can’t pay the rent, they’re gonna pay it. Here, we can’t take care of the whole world.

**Richard Weinberg**  
Part of the immigration law is that when you come in here, you’re not supposed to be a public charge. People forget that. You’re not supposed to be a public charge. So if you bring in the free lunch crowd and you lose the economic base and tax paying base — the people who create jobs, provide the services, give all this money to these great causes — what’s going to happen? Everybody assume that New York will be just fine. I’m much more pessimistic about that, ’cause I lived through the headlines in the papers, “Dave Do Something” and Dinkins did nothing. And Peter created Safe Street, Safe Cities and David ran for re-election saying it was his program.

**Ben Smith**  
Final words, John: Long-term New York: optimistic, pessimistic?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Right now, pessimistic until you bring some common sense back. Immigration, yes. Invasion, no. Bring in people that wanna work 80 hours a week. Don’t bring people that wanna live off the American citizens. Is that a good comment?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
That’s a concrete immigration reform that you would support. What would that look like in practice? Interview people in their home countries and make sure they can support this?

**John Catsimatidis**  
This was traditional, except it ran too slow. There was a waiting list of God knows how long. So, we want immigration. And remember back in the Ellis Island days or whatever, they said, “You know, we need 20,000 more carpenters in the United States. Bring in 20,000 carpenters.”

**Josh Greenman**  
I have a question, though. I was in Sunset Park a month ago, which is heavily Muslim. You go to Jackson Heights—

**John Catsimatidis**  
By the way, I don’t give a crap about Muslim or whatever. I’m the head of the Greek Orthodox Church of North America, the highest layperson—

**Josh Greenman**  
What I’m asking you— If you go to these neighborhoods, do you think you’re surrounded by takers in these neighborhoods? This is my personal experience, I see people working quite hard in these neighborhoods.

**John Catsimatidis**  
That’s fine. I like people that work hard.

**Josh Greenman**  
Do you believe that the immigrants in New York these days are mostly takers?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I believe in the people that are coming into New York that want to be takers, we shouldn’t take them.

**Richard Weinberg**  
Do you know how it is by the way in Minneapolis in the state of Minnesota, in terms of welfare rolls and those who are self-sufficient? Take a look at that. Do some research on it. Look at the demographics. Everybody says, “Oh, the Somalian community is contributing a great deal.” No.

**John Catsimatidis**  
You know the current investigation going on? You know the problem in Minnesota? It’s just as bad as New York.

**Richard Weinberg**  
The problem is going to be everywhere. The problem is gonna be in California. The problem is gonna be in Maine. They’re all across the country.

**John Catsimatidis**  
A lot of the blue states. Tell them what the problem is on these food stamps. SNAP.

**Richard Weinberg**  
Food stamps are fraud. Medicare is a fraud. They have organized — The money’s flown out of Minneapolis, you know, overseas.

**John Catsimatidis**  
And Albany is refusing to give the federal government information on the food stamp program.

**Alyssa Katz**  
But right now, the USDA has threatened to cut off state governments from the food stamps, like imminently if they’re not handing over information. Are you in favor of that?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I am in favor of food stamps in a legal procedure. In other words, people that really need it, not people that are defrauding.

**Alyssa Katz**  
I’m sure you get food stamps at your grocery business. But what happens now if New York state gets cut off from food stamps?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Let me ask you something. You know Donald Trump. You think if the federal government sat across the table from the state government and they cooperated with each other, Donald Trump would cut them off? No. It’s when the state government tells you, “Fuck you, we’re not gonna give you anything”—

**Alyssa Katz**  
But why is it necessary to give this level of detailed information?

**John Catsimatidis**  
Why not? It’s their money, the federal government’s money. If I was the federal government, I’m not going to give you money unless you show me how you’re going to spend it.

**Alyssa Katz**  
There’s no regulation that demands this information.

**John Catsimatidis**  
You grew up too rich. You know that? I grew up on 135th Street.

**Josh Grenman**  
Nobody knows how anyone grew up here.

**Alyssa Katz**  
My mom was a Holocaust refugee and my dad was an immigrant from Israel. He had very little money.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Good. My mother was born in Constantinople, where when my mother was born there was three million Greeks and Orthodox in Constantinople. Now, there’s zero. 3,000\. My mother went through the same thing.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Do you see a difference between immigrants and refugees? I mean, what should we do about it?

**John Catsimatidis**  
I believe in immigration. I’m an immigrant. I believe in immigration. But I believe in immigration that they want to come in, work hard and be Americanized. What’s the other expression we use? Immigration without assimilation is called invasion.

**Richard Weinberg**  
Otherwise, you’re gonna have warring tribes. You’re gonna have cults. Just look at it. It’s a nationwide phenomenon. It’s gone all over Europe. It’s a big threat.

**John Catsimatidis**  
The Jews came in, they worked 90 hours a week. Like the Greeks worked 90 hours a week. Like the Italians worked 90 hours a week. We all worked hard.

**Alyssa Katz**  
People now are also working hard and are also fleeing terrible situations.

**Richard Weinberg**  
Well, but we can’t take everybody.

**John Catsimatidis**  
We can’t take everybody. That’s what Ellis Island is for. We can’t take everybody.

**Alyssa Katz**  
I know we’re prolonging things, but I do have to say, the Republican party for years blocked immigration reform.

**John Catsimatidis**  
Don’t tie me to being a Republican. I’m a middle of the road, common-sense person, OK?

**Alyssa Katz**  
We do not have common-sense immigration policy because Washington did not act.

**Richard Weinberg**  
Obama had both houses of Congress, he had the presidency, what did he do about the immigration reform? As we say in my business, I rest my case.

**Josh Greenman**  
And now Trump’s got it.

All right. Thank you.

**John Catsimatidis**  
No, listen. I enjoyed this discussion.

**Ben Smith**  
Thank you guys so much. This has been great.
### What To Do (and Not To Do) About People in Crisis on Streets and Subways
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-to-do-about-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:33.000Z
How can the toughest problems of urban life be addressed in a serious, sustained way? The purpose of this series, which began with [“What To Do (and Not To Do) About Subway Safety”](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-to-do-about-subway-safety-nyc-policy-recommendations) and will continue with installments on disorder, policing and other topics, is to deliver to policymakers the best ideas distilled into steps that can be taken now and longterm changes that must undergird sustained achievement.

We assembled prominent practitioners and researchers to discuss the complicated problem of individuals who are unhoused and living with serious mental illness (SMI) and drug addiction on New York City’s streets and subways. In this issue, more than any other we have examined, the data are sparse and atomized, and the evidence of “what works” is frail. But policymakers have no choice but to act even when there is no randomized controlled trial to guide them. Here, we relied on the deep experience of those addressing these issues to fashion practical recommendations — the repeating theme is that for a solution to endure, the City must steel itself to synthesize data and test results.

This document contains our chief recommendations. It is supplemented by three companion papers: [a look at what the data tell us and fail to tell us about this population](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-the-data-show-people-in-crisis-on-the-streets-and-subways), [a detailed description of the way the system currently works](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-the-system-works-for-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways) and [a look at how other large cities handle these problems](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/case-studies-from-large-cities-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways).

Our deep gratitude goes to the many people who helped shape these recommendations. Many of them are listed at the end of this document. We also extend special thanks to the Achelis and Bodman Foundation, Arnold Ventures, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, the Charles H. Revson Foundation, the Teagle Foundation and the Tow Foundation, who are helping to support Vital City. We appreciate the work others throughout the city are doing to assemble and advance similar recommendations, including [The Collaborative on Housing for Health,](https://www.housingforhealthnyc.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and consider our work complementary to theirs. While we make recommendations here, they are in part based on and honor the hard work of public servants who grapple with these enormously complex problems every day.

## The Problem To Be Solved

Of all the hard urban problems, none tests New York’s capacity for effective governance quite like this one: people occupying public places while living with SMI, addiction and other maladies. It is a problem that touches first principles — how government cares for vulnerable people in distress and how to ensure public spaces remain safe and accessible for the public’s use. And it exposes the limits of government knowledge, coordination and intervention. New York lacks a reliable, citywide picture of who these New Yorkers are, what conditions they live with, who connects with them for support and which interventions actually change their life course for the better. Policymakers, advocates and the broader public argue about whether this is a public health problem or a public safety problem — when, in truth, it is both.

Layered atop that is a hard question of agency: When illness and addiction distort a person’s judgment, obscure their insight or diminish their ability to acknowledge the problems they face, how should the City balance a person’s autonomy with its obligation to protect life and the shared use of public space? Unlike challenges that respond to standardized playbooks, these individuals’ needs shift quickly. Progress is nonlinear, and durable results hinge on sustained work that, to be effective, must be bespoke to the particular condition of each person. All of those uncertainties are further aggravated by the loose relationship that government and other entities often have to the evidence — such as it is — that might guide government actions.

People who are homeless have a right to occupy public space, like anyone else. But as with every person, there are limits on how public space is shared. They do not have a right to create encampments, to use drugs in public view or to harass others. Nor do they have the right to violate the rules of the subway system, which is primarily for transit. When public places become places where crises routinely play out, other New Yorkers can feel uneasy or unsafe, and in some cases, there is genuine danger — to these vulnerable individuals themselves and to the wider public.

The City, including in this last administration, has tried many things over several decades. New York City, with support from New York State and federal partners, spends billions annually across a sprawling range of programs: street outreach and mobile intervention; 911 and 311 crisis response; inpatient and step-down care; a vast, specialized shelter system; low-barrier options, including Safe Havens and stabilization beds; jail and hospital reentry services; and supportive and affordable housing. A glossary of many of these terms is part of our companion document, [“How the System Works (and Doesn’t).”](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-the-system-works-for-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways) Recently passed legislation codifies the criteria for involuntary removal from the street, and both the City and the State have expanded the use of outreach teams comprising police and clinicians.

Still, New Yorkers, City agencies, nonprofits and the myriad who work every day on this issue report a common frustration: The same individuals cycle through subways, ERs, courts, incarceration, shelters and streets, in a seemingly never-ending churn. New Yorkers seem to be paying too much for motion and not enough for durable results.

Two problems, in particular, plague the efforts to address these hard problems. First, no one “owns” the issue — so no one is held accountable when an individual isn’t successfully linked with stable housing and care. Second, the fragmentation of the efforts — data, accountability, goals — means that it is oriented toward crisis, not durable solutions. There are many committed individuals and groups serving and interacting with unhoused people, including those living with mental illness, but coordination and accountability are diffuse or nonexistent. But the system is organized mainly by agency, geography and category of service rather than by individuals in need, and is most often mobilized in response to crisis. Successful follow-through focused on the needs of a particular person from day to day, much less month to month, is rare.

Mayor-elect Mamdani plans to establish a Department of Community Safety to coordinate outreach and response to this vulnerable population. Our experience suggests that the success or failure of the City’s engagement with unstable homeless New Yorkers will not hinge on whether a new department is added to the current mix of many agencies working in this space. Rather, the next mayor’s broader management strategy will be crucial to whether a new department adds value or becomes yet another layer and level of siloed bureaucracy.

To ensure operations and implementation are successful, Mamdani will need to establish, for all City government, a clear goal and focus to achieve measurable progress in this space. One place within the government — we recommend the Mayor’s Office for having the authority and span sufficient to coordinate multiple entities — must have the mandate, accountability, data and resources to ensure that each person who is in crisis has the support through and beyond crisis to get to treatment and housing placement. The shorthand for this accountability is: “Who is ultimately responsible to the mayor for real and enduring progress in ensuring housing and treatment for this vulnerable population?” As we detail below, this will require a major effort by the City to assemble information about people and how they are served and to steel itself to learn relentlessly what works and what doesn’t.

Based on our analysis of successful programs from other states and lessons learned from past administrations in New York City, the following recommendations focus on addressing the needs of the relatively small group of unsheltered individuals who present a danger to themselves or others, either through mental instability or debilitating addiction. By staying focused and filling the service gaps for this most complicated population, the City will necessarily strengthen and improve the system for all homeless people living with mental illness and/or a substance use disorder.

To ensure this goal is met, services must no longer be siloed by agency and geography, but rather structured such that government and nonprofits are assigned to individuals and tasked with addressing their complex needs, across bureaucratic barriers and over time. Providers should be measured by their results, and, undergirding everything, the City should be fiercely committed to continually evaluating effectiveness. This is necessary for making nimble operational decisions regarding what to replicate and what to correct. And, for the long haul, the City must also commit to put in place a stable and durable policy to change conditions for the better. There must be a common agreement both that public places are for public use, and that the aim is ultimately to ensure each unsheltered person is housed and supported with the services that will make their lives stable and safe.

## How the System Works (or Doesn’t)

On any given night, [about 4,000 people](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/safer-for-all/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are living on the streets and subways in New York City. Perhaps half of them — there is no perfect estimate — live with SMI, addiction and other profound problems. Over decades, the City has built a vast web of public and nonprofit providers to reach, house and treat this population.

An incomplete catalog: Teams of outreach workers from organizations like the Bowery Residents’ Committee and the Center for Urban Community Services fan out daily. Police officers are often the first to encounter people in desperation or outright crisis; under the law, they are empowered to take individuals to hospitals, where doctors and nurses determine if they need psychiatric care and judges may order involuntary commitment.

A relatively new innovation, the co-response team, which consists of police and clinicians, seeks to make informed judgments about people’s needs and connect them to appropriate services. In the past few years, there has been additional focus on “alternative response,” in which civilians engage with people in need on the street without the police. Intensive Mobile Treatment (IMT) teams work with the highest-need people who have substantial criminal justice involvement. Temporary shelter placements and supportive housing — apartments with a wide array of wraparound help to address needs — are coordinated through the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) and other agencies.

Prosecutors and courts get involved when people are accused and convicted of crimes. Court-ordered evaluations, known as 730 exams, provide an early opportunity to examine an individual for fitness to proceed and to route a person to treatment if they are found incapacitated. While in custody, those living with SMI — about a [fifth of the jail population](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/safer-for-all/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at any given time — can be housed in specialized units. Upon release, reentry programs are available to connect individuals to treatment, housing and other services. If convicted of a crime and transferred to State custody, there is a range of treatment, specialized beds and units for individuals with SMI.

The result is an elaborate and poorly coordinated ecosystem that costs taxpayers billions each year. For policymakers and the public alike, keeping track of the panoply of programs and acronyms can be dizzying. Those wishing to understand how these programs fit together can start with Vital City’s crash course [here](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-the-system-works-for-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways).

For every attempt to engage, for every handoff from one nonprofit or government agency to another, there is a potential cliff — where people in need fail to get the help they need, further aggravating the likelihood of crisis.

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## Principles for Action

- **Affirm and enforce that public spaces are for public purposes.** Streets, subways and parks are shared civic resources. When they are used in ways that block access, compromise safety or depart from their intended function, the City has an obligation to ensure their fair, cooperative use.
- **Set a citywide goal of providing stable housing and care for each person in distress, recognizing that attention must be sustained beyond crisis.** People who are unhoused and suffering from mental illness and other maladies should have access to permanent housing and care suited to their needs for as long as necessary to achieve stability.
- **Ensure clear responsibility for meeting goals and relentlessly focus on learning what works and what doesn't.** Today, accountability regarding this population is diffuse and in some cases nonexistent. Responsibility for results must be the hallmark of the system.
- **Coordinate across systems with contracts oriented around results, not activity.** All activity should be oriented toward common goals with publicly available metrics that measure results, not simply activity.
- **Lead with health, support with safety.** When a person is in psychiatric distress, the response should be guided by health professionals, with police ready to ensure safety and legitimacy when needed. Success depends on effective coordination and cooperation.

## Summary of Recommendations

### 1\. Affirm and enforce public space norms while unifying all City action around stable housing and care.

The City should consistently enforce rules that keep public spaces usable while ensuring every removal is paired with concrete offers of treatment, shelter and a pathway to permanent housing.

### 2\. Put one accountable City Hall leader in charge of the entire system.

A single mayoral authority should coordinate all agencies, data, contracts and actions across health, housing, transit, police and courts to focus on outcomes rather than activity.

### 3\. Treat housing as the essential foundation of stabilization.

The City must rapidly scale and streamline direct placements into supportive or hybrid housing-with-services, removing bureaucratic barriers and prioritizing people with the highest needs.

### 4\. Focus outreach, treatment and enforcement on the small group driving the most instability.

Using integrated justice, health and homelessness data, the City should concentrate intensive treatment, housing and supervision on the highest-risk individuals and locations.

### 5\. Use involuntary removals strategically and always as a gateway to sustained care.

When danger is clear, involuntary transport and psychiatric treatment should be used more consistently and should always be connected to continuous outreach, treatment and housing rather than cycling people back to the street.

### 6\. Reform contracts and rationalize hundreds of millions of dollars in spending around outcomes, not activities.

The City should pay providers on time, consolidate fragmented funding, track costs per person across systems and shift to outcome-based contracting tied to durable stability.

### 7\. Follow the evidence and rigorously evaluate every strategy.

The City should fast-track pilots, measure outcomes across systems, fund independent evaluations and stop or scale programs based strictly on demonstrated results.

### What not to do

Avoid punitive or symbolic actions — like police-only strategies or encampment sweeps without housing — and stop expanding unevaluated programs or treating all cases the same. Instead, tailor interventions and measure outcomes.

## Recommendations in detail

### 1\. Affirm and enforce that public spaces are for public purposes while unifying City action under a common goal of providing stable housing with necessary supports.

The City must not stand by while people in active psychiatric or substance use crisis, or those who are teetering on the verge of crisis, unravel in public view. This is both because of the well-being of the person in crisis and because of the threat or perceived threat presented, both of which are corrosive to the fabric of the city. The numerous agencies and entities involved in this issue must operate in unison under a common goal that will orient and direct action and provide for sustained attention for those in need. That common goal is to provide stable housing for each person along with the tailored services needed to maintain stability. Specifically, the City should:

- **Codify the principle in agency protocols.** City and State agencies like the NYPD, DHS, Department of Parks and Recreation and Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) should make clear in their training and operating guidelines that public spaces are not to be used as encampments, sites of open-air drug use or places where people remain in active psychiatric distress. Frontline staff should be directed that behavior cannot be ignored when it violates the law.
- **Effect removals from the subways and other public spaces and ensure consistent, coordinated outreach connecting people to services.** The first set of recommendations in Vital City's "What To Do (and Not To Do) About" series [focused on subway safety](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-to-do-and-not-to-do-about-subway-safety) and made clear that police and outreach workers should "remove from the system those who violate the rules or present risks." We second that here. The subway's rules are designed to ensure New Yorkers can travel efficiently and safely. Aboveground, the rules for removal may vary by location. But in all cases, the goal should be to prevent deterioration in public and connect people with necessary treatment and housing.
- **Set clear expectations through public messaging.** The City should mount a campaign to reinforce that streets and especially subways are not acceptable living spaces and to highlight the help available. This can acknowledge and reinforce these important norms and invite the public to report serious safety or health concerns via 311, helping to identify locations where conditions are deteriorating and outreach is urgently needed.
- **Pair removals with advance notice whenever feasible, and with concrete offers of care aimed at permanent housing and services.** Enforcement alone is insufficient if it simply displaces the person. Every removal should lead to services oriented toward securing housing, treatment and other help. This is a tall order. But beginning with the relatively small number of highest-acuity individuals can help the City build the staffing, coordination and operational pathways needed for a more organized system.

### 2\. Organize people, programs, access to data and focus on results under a single City Hall lead.

New York needs a single accountable leader at City Hall with the power, authority and means to oversee the response to people living on the streets beset with SMI and drug addiction. Diffuse accountability produces inconsistent standards and misaligned incentives as agencies optimize their own workloads instead of outcomes for the person or the community block. This leader must control budgets and contracts and have the authority to compel privacy-compliant data sharing. They should also oversee an operational hub that assigns a lead agency to each person and formalizes State-City coordination. With that mandate, the City can measure what matters and own results rather than activities.

We recognize that this reorganization is no small task, but the current arrangement has not worked. As structured, it cannot succeed. Much work has been done by those involved in these issues every day, and informal working groups with deep knowledge of the system abound. Specifically, the City should:

- **Designate one Mayor's Office official as the chief City official responsible for this population.** This office should convene all relevant entities, set goals and expectations and ensure coordination. It should also map the web of interactions across systems and set clear accountability standards for outreach, follow-up, housing and treatment. This coordinating authority must sit in the Mayor's Office so it can direct agencies, ensure goals are met, mobilize resources to support implementation and have the authority to coordinate effectively with state agencies (e.g. the MTA, the New York State Office of Mental Health and the New York State Office of Addiction Services and Supports, among others). Mayor-elect Mamdani's proposed Department of Community Safety would house some (perhaps all) of the outreach and response teams, but it does not solve the coordination and direction problem — which will remain multiagency by definition, necessarily involving the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), NYC Health + Hospitals (H+H), DHS, the NYPD and other City departments, as well as offices, departments and agencies at the State and federal levels.
- **Integrate justice, health and homelessness data under the City's Center for Innovation through Data Intelligence as the backbone.** The City should build a single, privacy-compliant, by-name picture that matches arrests, hospitalizations, involuntary transports, Medicaid claims and outreach contacts to flag high-risk individuals in real time. Incorporating justice data streams, this can help close the well-documented divide between public health and criminal justice systems, much of it driven by tradition and mistrust rather than law. Such a platform can vastly improve and inform outreach and intervention efforts.
- **Hold regular multiagency "case conferences."** The individual in charge of coordination should convene daily or weekly meetings where frontline teams and supervisors discuss the highest-priority individuals and assign tasks. No two individuals present precisely the same challenge. This tight feedback loop mirrors successful models such as veteran homelessness case conferencing, New York City's gun violence reduction strategy, the "Top 50" lists and [multidisciplinary task forces](https://www.nysemdt.org/faqs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) elsewhere in the state. Public safety risk should be included in considering the highest-priority individuals.
- **Aggregate and analyze knowledge.** While individual cases must be managed better, the City simultaneously needs a much clearer, 35,000-foot view of the population as a whole. It should build a single, integrated picture of the problem across agencies. It should establish a comprehensive assessment of the correct alignment of resources needed to achieve the vision of overcoming street homelessness by mapping the churn and flow of individuals and their needs. And for public consumption, it should publish the "known unknowns" and a plan to close system gaps.
- **Reorient contracts to ensure their specifications are based on individuals and outcomes.** The City's current contracting with nonprofits is siloed by agency and geography, creating a tangled web of bureaucracies. Dozens of nonprofits contract across City agencies, spending many hundreds of millions of dollars annually. These organizations can hold multiple contracts with single agencies and often contract with several agencies simultaneously. Contracting should be restructured and sufficiently funded so that [payments are based on outcomes, not inputs](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/homelessness-services-redesign?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and so that organizations are assigned to individuals and not arbitrary geographic or bureaucratic realms. These outcomes should include but not be limited to: longitudinal health outcomes, justice-system involvement and housing placements.
- **Explore other contracting reforms to improve coordination and accountability.** Contracts with providers should require shared data systems and standardized consent processes to enable responsible information exchange among providers. Outreach areas should be aligned geographically to reduce overlap and strengthen accountability and follow-up.
- **Compel privacy-compliant data sharing.** Building on existing platforms such as the "Top 50" lists of especially troubled individuals and DHS' StreetSmart, intended to be a coordinated tracking system, the City must compel more privacy-compliant data sharing. City Hall should identify gaps in data sharing and clarify whether they stem from legal, policy or technical barriers. Where information is incomplete or siloed, agencies should execute new data-sharing agreements or pursue legislative remedies as needed to ensure that outreach, hospital and housing systems operate from a shared picture of each person's status and needs. For example, the Times Square Alliance has proposed reforms that let multidisciplinary teams share information across health, housing and safety systems while maintaining confidentiality. Modeled on [California's AB 210](https://homeless.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/AB-210-Fact-Sheet-6.20.2018.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), such legislation would authorize controlled data sharing among qualified providers and create the foundation for a unified outreach and care system.
- **Focus on the highest-need people first in a tightly scoped 100-day pilot.** Some have suggested that such a pilot should initially be constrained geographically to a single precinct or community district — plus nearby transit hubs. Others note the limitations of a geographically bounded pilot because the issues cross borders. The City should choose whichever model they can use best to test a fully coordinated, data-driven approach to address unsheltered homelessness. Empower a City Hall lead and on-the-ground operations manager to unify all outreach, clinical, housing and enforcement efforts within clear geographic boundaries. Establish daily field briefings, weekly interagency case conferences and monthly strategic reviews to align actions and remove system barriers. Use a shared, secure data platform to track every individual by name, assign a single accountable lead agency per person and monitor progress from first contact through placement in housing or treatment. Treat the pilot as a learning lab — capturing real-time lessons about staffing, legal and policy obstacles; data integration; and cost per successful outcome — to produce by Day 100 a detailed, public plan for scaling citywide, including resource, workforce and policy requirements. The Times Square Alliance is working toward a [version of this in West Midtown](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/66026f9a23bc03c74d23035a/691e2e60914f0603a75cff91%5FTimes%20Square%20Street%20Crisis%20Pilot%20Proposal.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

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### 3\. Make housing a central piece of the solution

For the unstable, unsheltered homeless population, providing housing without treatment is woefully insufficient, and treatment without housing leaves them vulnerable to a vicious cycle of circumstances that can reverse improvements in their mental health.

The value of “housing first” has been studied in multiple cities across the nation and the globe. Within the United States, Community Solutions has shown in [15 cities](https://community.solutions/built-for-zero/the-movement/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) how setting a goal of “functional zero” street homelessness and holding relevant agencies accountable can significantly improve the lives of street homeless people. Evidence from other cities, and New York City’s own past successes, proves its value. [Houston moved more](https://www.cfthhouston.org/houston-facts-info?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) than 32,000 homeless people directly into apartments over the last decade, cutting its homelessness by 63%. New York City itself reduced veteran homelessness [by nearly 90% since 2011](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/housing-first/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by rapidly housing every veteran in need.

For people struggling with SMI and related problems, housing must be accompanied with services — meaning it must be supportive. But today, there is a combination of problems: either not enough units, a mismatch between the type of units available and the types of units needed, or [bedeviling bureaucratic barriers](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/01/06/homeless-supportive-housing-eric-adams-statistics/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that keep existing and appropriate units vacant even when there are individuals in need of them. In June 2025, [officials reported](https://gothamist.com/news/to-fill-empty-apartments-for-homeless-people-nyc-will-first-start-tracking-them?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 5,092 vacant apartments — about 2,200 of which were offline for repairs — prompting new City Council legislation to track vacancies, underscoring that filling existing stock is a fixable management problem. The City’s coordinated entry system is not universally used, so many placements never reach the shared pipeline. The landscape is fragmented across dozens of programs, agencies and categories, leaving specialty beds vacant. On the front end, the application process is slow and paperwork-heavy — creating an especially high hurdle for people living unsheltered.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/atyak3nyclf9oibh_casestudiesinendingchronichomelessness-12-12-png-auto-format-compress-1776259661845.jpg)

Specifically, the City should:

- **Scale up direct street-to-home placements.** The City must immediately expand its successful Street-to-Housing pilot, which moves individuals from welcome centers directly into vacant single-room occupancy units with on-site support staff. The pilot [successfully housed 130 people](https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/01/30/successful-program-to-battle-street-homelessness-in-nyc-undermined-by-bureaucratic-barriers/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in units that had been sitting vacant for an average of 568 days, proving the model's efficacy and its ability to utilize existing, underused housing stock. This expansion should directly address the paradox of vacant supportive housing units by targeting them for the highest-need population. Whenever possible, individuals should be routed around the shelter system and directly into permanent or semipermanent housing with services. Programs like Volunteers of America's ["Street-to-Housing"](https://www.voa-gny.org/mayor-announces-launch-of-street-to-housing-pilot-with-voa-gny/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) should be scaled up.
- **Streamline eligibility and remove bureaucratic barriers.** The City should override, reduce or overcome onerous documentation requirements that delay housing placements. For example, City Council [Intro 1100-2024](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=6902534&GUID=6B40A9F7-E838-4C16-98C5-97BF6F32F036&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which would allow time spent incarcerated to count toward chronic homelessness for City-funded housing, should be enacted to overcome the hurdle that current regulations pose to people who would otherwise qualify for housing. The City should simultaneously accept existing clinical evaluations, eliminating redundant paperwork, and devise a single placement packet that follows a person through the process instead of restarting files at every step.
- **Expand the supply of supportive housing.** The City must [continue](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hra/downloads/pdf/news/press%5Freleases/2025/pr-hope-7-2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to increase the number of permanent supportive housing units earmarked for people coming from chronic street homelessness. This includes exploring innovative models that expand housing alternatives including shared housing options and single-room occupancy units with private baths and shared living spaces.
- **Establish a real-time "flow desk" and make CAPS the single front door.** CAPS is the City's internal database for matching people to supportive housing and other placements. It should serve as the unified entry point for all referrals. Every provider and funder should be required to list vacancies and status updates in CAPS, with automatic escalation for any unit vacant more than 30 days. A public dashboard should display vacancies, number of days vacant and next actions, and future contract compliance should depend on full participation in CAPS. [San Francisco's Housing Vacancy Dashboard](https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiNmYyZDgzYjctNmVlNi00MDdlLThkMGUtY2ZlNWI1NjI4OGVjIiwidCI6IjIyZDVjMmNmLWNlM2UtNDQzZC05YTdmLWRmY2MwMjMxZjczZiJ9&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is a model worth learning from.
- **Pay for speed and staying power.** The City should link funding to faster lease-up times and require daily vacancy reporting. It should also fund mobile clinical teams to stabilize high-need tenancies and enforce prompt-pay standards so providers can keep units filled.

### 4\. Concentrate outreach, treatment and enforcement on the small group whose instability most endangers themselves or others.

While many unsheltered New Yorkers obey the law, when offenses occur they unsettle the public, making New Yorkers wary of the trains, sidewalks and parks that define public life. Arrests involving this population have risen 38% since 2022\. Charges skew toward low-level property and drug offenses, both of which take a toll on our public spaces. Assaults are common as well. Most people are arrested only once. But a small subset is picked up repeatedly and accounts for a disproportionate share of bookings. These incidents concentrate in a limited set of locations, and there is substantial overlap between homelessness, SMI and jail admissions. This suggests the City should triage the small number of individuals and locations that drive most harm. Then it should integrate outreach, treatment, shelter and enforcement in a system designed for repeated contacts rather than one-off interventions. Doing this well requires breaking down data silos across the areas of health, human services and justice so these systems work together rather than at cross-purposes. Specifically, the City should:

- **Use routine police encounters to open doors to care.** Police are a constant presence in the places where unsheltered New Yorkers live, and it is neither realistic nor desirable to separate them from this work. The City should [strengthen existing NYPD-to-DHS referral protocols](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/public%5Finformation/public-pguide3.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) so that any meaningful contact, even a low-level enforcement like a summons, can trigger a handoff to outreach and care. Referral outcomes should be tracked to ensure these connections are timely, consistent and effective.
- **Scale up models proven effective in the most acute cases by building on the symbiotic relationship between IMT and the Step-Down Treatment Ensures Personal Success (STEPS) model.** [IMT](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/nyregion/mental-health-intensive-mobile-treatment.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — which deploys multidisciplinary teams that blend public safety with behavioral health — is uniquely effective for the highest-acuity individuals, those with histories of violence and criminal justice involvement. The City should also clear the current waitlist while simultaneously implementing STEPS, a transitional model that allows stable clients to "graduate" from IMT. An [evaluation](https://iclprd.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/ICL-STEPS-Bi-Annual-Report-FINAL-2.5.25.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by NYU's McSilver Institute on Poverty shows STEPS’ significant effects in achieving housing stability and avoiding criminal justice involvement while reducing costs and freeing up scarce, high-intensity IMT slots for those currently languishing without care.
- **Deploy Forensic Assertive Community Treatment as the default clinical response for the high-frequency / high-harm few.** These intensive teams — made up of clinicians, peers and justice-system liaisons — should coordinate closely with outreach workers and, when needed, police. The aim is to ensure that when someone in this highest-need group is encountered, they can move directly from the street into housing with treatment and sustained support.
- **Make justice-involved supportive housing (JISH) a far more common discharge pathway from Rikers Island jails for individuals with SMI or repeated homelessness.** [JISH](https://shnny.org/uploads/CSH-FUSE-Evaluation.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a promising model, can enable sharp declines in jail, shelter and crisis-care use, so the City should build on what already works at scale. Officials should use integrated data to trigger more routine JISH referrals before release and reserve units for those cycling through jail, hospitals and the streets. It should hold DOHMH, H+H and the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice jointly accountable for placements, housing retention and reductions in jail readmissions.
- **Use involuntary removals strategically for the small subset of people at clear and imminent risk.** The City should ensure each involuntary removal is tied to a clear stabilization plan, with a bed and clinical follow-up arranged prior to discharge. It should treat police, hospital and court encounters as opportunities to interrupt dangerous deterioration, not as routine returns to the street.

### 5\. Escalate outreach and use involuntary removals strategically

For individuals who present a danger to themselves or others who will not accept help voluntarily, the City needs to employ involuntary mechanisms in a way that improves results for the people affected, instead of cycling them through shelter, hospital and jail. The goal must be removal with treatment and housing. The law permits involuntary transport to a hospital when a person is a danger to themselves or others, a definition of danger that includes one’s inability to care for their own basic needs. It further allows an individual to be held for treatment if they continue to meet the statutory criteria for involuntary admission. Both authorities should be used more fully and assertively for those who repeatedly cycle through crises. At the same time, every instance of involuntary transport or commitment should be viewed not as an end, but as the beginning of a sustained intervention. Specifically, the City should:

- **Improve the productivity of street outreach and clinical capacity, and assess where police are a necessary part of the process.** The City should first assess whether there are enough outreach teams with the kinds of skills that can connect people in need to stable housing. The relevant data to assess capacity are not currently public. But discussions with nonprofits and government strongly suggest the need for a more organized, person-oriented and sustained approach. Alongside this assessment, the City should determine what mix of skills — from clinicians to social workers to police — is required.
- **Empower more responders to initiate emergency removals.** Practically and legally, police are needed to effect most removals where a person is believed to be a danger to themselves or others. To increase timely intervention, the State should consider [learning from Durham, North Carolina](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/homelessness-services-redesign?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and expand the authority to involuntarily transport someone to other trained professionals such as paramedics or outreach-team supervisors. This would reduce delays and overreliance on police, who don't always have the clinical training to know what they are seeing.
- **Pair involuntary removal with continuous outreach and placement support.** When someone is taken involuntarily to a hospital, an assigned outreach team should remain responsible through treatment, discharge and housing placement. The protocol should automatically alert housing and care coordinators at admission so planning begins on Day One. Each involuntary intervention must trigger a full-cycle response, ensuring that every person enters a sustained pipeline of treatment, housing and follow-up rather than cycling back to the street.
- **Track and evaluate outcomes of involuntary interventions.** Because coercive measures demand heightened scrutiny, the City should rigorously monitor what happens after involuntary removal or court-ordered treatment, tracking outcomes such as housing stability, ER visits and arrests to assess effectiveness and refine the approach.
- **Build comprehensive case files for hospital referrals.** The City should ensure that when people are brought to hospitals through involuntary removal or referral, clinicians receive a full history of prior contacts, interventions and risks. Equipping doctors with this context enables better-informed decisions and reduces the risk of revolving-door discharges.
- **Reform Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) to broaden its impact.** AOT under Kendra's Law can be a powerful tool, but it should be modernized to reach more people. This includes tailoring it for diagnoses beyond schizophrenia / bipolar disorder, expanding mental health professionals who can be involved in court decisions beyond physicians (e.g., psychiatric nurses) and integrating it with priority housing placements (a proposal [the governor has advanced](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-proposes-strengthening-involuntary-commitment-laws-and-kendras-law-provide?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)).

### 6\. Reform contracting and rationalize the budget

New York spends heavily on responding to SMI and homelessness — an estimated $4.6 billion of the City’s budget, with the vast majority of that spending going to operate the city’s massive shelter network, where some 90,000 people sleep on any given night. However, the problem is complicated by fragmented funding sources and siloed agencies. The City cannot tell how much it spends on a single individual as they cycle through the streets, programs, hospitals, jail and shelter because funding is tracked by service, not by person or outcome.

This fragmentation obscures critical trade-offs. A [City comptroller report](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/housing-first/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on Housing First strategies laid bare the challenge: Supportive housing costs $68 per day per person versus $1,414 for jail or $3,609 for hospitalization. Yet agencies continue to fund expensive emergency responses because they cannot see the full picture. Simultaneously, contracts reward activity over outcomes, and chronic payment delays force nonprofits to float City services.

Rationalizing the budget means buying results, paying providers on time and publishing an honest, multiyear price tag for the full plan. It means investing in housing and clinical care today to avoid ER and jail costs tomorrow.

The City is not starting from scratch. HPD’s fiscal year 2026 capital plan calls for committing [$12 billion](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/ccp/fy26/ccp-09-25a.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in City subsidies for affordable housing over the next four years, including at least [$1.8 billion for supportive and special needs housing](https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/Capital-Commitment-Plan/2cmn-uidm/explore/query/SELECT%0A%20%20%60pub%5Fdate%60%2C%0A%20%20%60projtype%60%2C%0A%20%20%60projtype%5Fdesc%60%2C%0A%20%20%60budline%60%2C%0A%20%20%60budline%5Fdesc%60%2C%0A%20%20%60funding%60%2C%0A%20%20%60num%5Fyrs%5Fprsnt%60%2C%0A%20%20%60yr1%5Ffy%60%2C%0A%20%20%60year1%5Famt%60%2C%0A%20%20%60year2%5Famt%60%2C%0A%20%20%60year3%5Famt%60%2C%0A%20%20%60year4%5Famt%60%2C%0A%20%20%60year5%5Famt%60%0AWHERE%0A%20%20%60pub%5Fdate%60%20IN%20%28%2220250930%22%29%20AND%20caseless%5Fone%5Fof%28%60budline%60%2C%20%22HD0222%22%29/page/filter?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). That is enough to build more than [10,000 supportive units](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/services/snh-shlp-term-sheet.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — sufficient to house every unsheltered New Yorker. Additionally, social service agencies will spend nearly [$8 billion in fiscal year 2026](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/adopt25/adopt25-bfa.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on homeless shelters, rental assistance, public assistance, mental health programs, and substance abuse initiatives. Much of this agenda could be paid for simply by spending these billions more effectively to stem the inflow of people into shelter.

This efficiency extends to operations. The City and State already support multiple different kinds of outreach and response teams. Whether deploying city workers or nonprofit employees, utilizing civilians is generally less expensive than funding police officers. The cost effectiveness of this response depends on the City’s ability to steel itself to figure out what works for whom, and deploying those teams accordingly.

New York is not exceptional. Eugene, Denver, and Houston addressed their homelessness problems with fewer resources and smaller tax bases. According to the Lincoln Land Institute’s [Fiscally Standardized Cities database](https://www.lincolninst.edu/data/fiscally-standardized-cities/access-fisc-database/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), New York City collected 20% more total revenue per capita in 2022 than Denver, twice as much as Houston, and 1.7 times more than Eugene. While legitimate differences exist — those cities have lower housing costs and no right to shelter — we have the means.

To coordinate and rationalize the city’s spending on troubled unhoused people, the City should:

- **Perform an initial, rapid assessment of the degree of need for additional staffing — and of what kind — for outreach and response.** This assessment is the first step towards synthesizing the multiple different approaches from the city, the state and nonprofits and assessing what additional resources, if any, are needed. With many of the outreach and response responsibilities possibly moving over to the new proposed Department of Community Safety, this is an irreducible minimum necessary step.
- **Perform a citywide assessment of the number of potential sites for supportive housing and the allocated budget amounts.** Another irreducible minimum necessary step towards solving the issue of those living with serious mental illness on the street.
- **Reassess and renegotiate contracts to buy better outcomes, not volume.** The City should [rebid or amend agreements to align incentives with results](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/homelessness-services-redesign?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).
- **Pay providers on time and at full, transparent cost.** Late payments are a [major challenge](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/nonprofit-nonpayment/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to nonprofit operations. The City should set a strict prompt-pay standard with automatic interest, provide mobilization advances on new contracts, adopt standardized indirect/overhead rates and inflation indexing, and clear existing invoice backlogs via a centralized portal.
- **Consolidate fragmented funding into unified budget lines with transparent allocations.** The City should create a single SMI/homelessness budget dashboard that systematically tags and tracks federal, State, City and philanthropic dollars by provider, program and outcome. This would enable the City to follow funding more clearly — across DOHMH, DHS, H+H, NYPD, FDNY, the Department of Correction and other agencies — and enhance accountability.
- **Implement cross-agency individual tracking and outcome-based funding that follows the person, not the program.** To rationalize budgeting, the City should assign each individual a unique identifier across all agencies and providers to track their complete service journey and total cost. It should then pilot bundled payment models where a lead provider receives a single allocation to coordinate all services for high-utilizers — housing, clinical care, crisis response — with payment tied to stabilization outcomes (days housed, hospitalizations avoided, jail stays prevented).

### 7\. Follow the evidence

Ultimately, neither crisis nor ideology should guide New York City’s approach to dealing with the challenges of this population; results should. To that end, the City should approach these solutions with a measure of humility and demand rigorous and independent evaluations of all of its programs so that it can adapt strategies at multiple steps along the way. The next mayor should cut strategies that fail to yield results and redouble investments as soon as solid evidence of their success emerges. To do this, the City should:

- **Create a fast-track pathway for evidence-based innovations.** Establish a [mechanism for piloting](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/homelessness-services-redesign?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and scaling new approaches without waiting years for full request-for-proposal (RFP) cycles. Set aside flexible funding and preapproved contracting pathways that allow successful pilots to shift quickly into ongoing programs.
- **Identify and align key outcome metrics.** City Hall should [standardize outcome metrics](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/homelessness-services-redesign?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across systems to determine whether initiatives should continue, expand or end. This should include metrics that capture the connection or lack of connection to different programs across the system (e.g., from outreach to treatment placement). All service providers and government agencies should be onboarded and trained on their responsibilities and expectations for how they will engage with data collection and reporting.
- **Develop an evaluation framework that is aligned with system response.** The City should adopt a [standardized evaluation framework](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/safer-for-all/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) tailored to each stage of the system, allowing for meaningful comparisons across providers and models. The City should support mixed-method evaluation designs to capture a broad set of outcomes. Findings should feed directly into program and funding decisions.
- **Prioritize evaluations for programs with no rigorous evaluation.** Expanded programs that [have never undergone independent evaluation](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/safer-for-all/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) should be first in line for analysis. Evaluators should be allowed to choose the most appropriate methods — qualitative, quantitative or hybrid — to assess impact.
- **Ensure accountability mechanisms in contracting to continue or stop programs.** City contracts should include clauses requiring programs to continue, expand or end based strictly on evaluation results.

## What not to do

**DON’T abandon supportive housing or Housing First programs.** [Decades of research](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6581117/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) show housing is highly effective.

**DON’T remove police from the equation, but balance their use.** Some situations involve genuine threats where only trained police officers can ensure safety. The key is a balanced deployment where police serve in a supporting role when necessary, and their routine contacts with people in need for a wide range of reasons can serve as vital linkages to care.

**AVOID using criminal law as a pretext or default means for managing illness-related behavior.** Arresting people for minor infractions that stem from mental illness is a temporary fix for the general public and is usually counterproductive for the person with an illness. Enforcement should focus on serious or dangerous conduct and on repeated refusals to stop unlawful behavior, not on the behavioral symptoms of a person’s illness or low-level acts that pose no real threat.

**DON’T conduct encampment sweeps without offering services and housing.** Clearing a homeless encampment without providing a better alternative is a local, temporary measure that displaces the problem. Any cleanup must be paired with intensive outreach and transportation to a waiting bed.

**DON’T shuffle people between systems without continuity.** Every transition — from jail to community, hospital to shelter — should be purposeful and managed with seamless handoffs and continuous case management to break the cycle of people falling through the cracks.

**DON’T treat all cases the same.** Homeless individuals with SMI have a range of complex problems that require different responses. Interventions should be tailored to the individual, using the full range of available tools rather than a single uniform response.

**DON’T create or expand programs when evidence is lacking.** Pouring more money into fragmented or unproven efforts will not yield results. Growth must be strategic and coordinated, aimed at creating a leaner, smarter system, not just a bigger one. Providers and City officials should partner with independent researchers to evaluate not just services delivered but actual improvements in health, safety and quality of life.

## Advisors

We are grateful to a core group of people listed below who generously gave their time and wisdom, meeting as a group and individually, in writing and in conversation, as Vital City worked through these recommendations. We are particularly grateful to the many talented writers, researchers and doers who helped produce these recommendations, including Allie Meizlish, Archana Jayaram, Tamiru Mammo and Gail Nayowith.

The recommendations are Vital City’s and do not necessarily reflect the positions of any person or institution listed below. Any errors are our own.

**ALEX CROHN,** deputy commissioner of strategic initiatives, NYPD

**DENNIS CULHANE,** University of Pennsylvania

**BRANDON DEL POZO,** Brown University

**LINDA GIBBS,** Bloomberg Associates; former NYC deputy mayor for health and human services

**DAVID GREENBERG,** CFO, Vibrant Emotional Health; former deputy director, NYC Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget

**JOHN HALL,** NYPD / MTA Police Department (ret.)

**HILLARY KUNINS,** former executive deputy commissioner, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

**JONATHAN McCLEAN,** CEO, CASES

**MEG REISS,** Chief Assistant District Attorney, New York County

**CHERYL ROBERTS,** executive director, Greenburger Center for Justice

**BRENDA ROSEN,** CEO, Breaking Ground

**JODY RUDIN,** CEO, Institute for Community Living

**BRIAN STETTIN,** senior advisor on severe mental illness, NYC Office of the Mayor

**TERRI TOBIN,** Chief Advisor, NY/NJ HIDTA.

**ANNE WILLIAMS-ISOM,** former NYC deputy mayor for health and human services

There are many other people in the New York State and New York City governments as well as in the numerous nonprofits who work tirelessly on this issue and who shared their knowledge of how things actually work, not just as they appear on paper. A partial list of the agencies and offices include: the New York City Mayor’s Office, the Office of the Comptroller of New York City, the New York CIty Police Department, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the New York City Department of Homeless Services, Fountain House, Times Square Alliance, among others. We are deeply grateful for their time and advice, and for their service to the people of New York City.

════════════════════════════════════════

*New York is entering an historic and pivotal transition. Mayor-elect Mamdani faces big problems on housing, safety, mental health, transit, and more.*

*Vital City is uniquely positioned to offer clear, practical guidance rooted in evidence. Ideas that could actually be implemented and work.*

*But to meet this moment, we need to grow.*

*That’s why, this year, for the first time, we’re asking our readers to support Vital City directly. We’re aiming for 700 inaugural supporters by December 31.*

*Your support will help us expand our editorial capacity, strengthen our operational support, and continue delivering thoughtful, relevant and informative work in 2026.*

*If this article informed your thinking, challenged you, or helped you understand the city more clearly, please consider supporting the work behind it.*

[***Make your tax-deductible gift and help us reach 700 supporters.***](https://bit.ly/vc-eoy-article?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Vital City
### What To Do (and Not To Do) About Subway Safety
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-to-do-about-subway-safety-nyc-policy-recommendations/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:37:41.000Z
*The research and analysis on which many of these recommendations are based follows here. It was produced by* [*Aaron Chalfin*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/contributors/aaron-chalfin)*, associate professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania;* [*Paul Reeping*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/contributors/paul-reeping)*, director of research at Vital City; and* [*John Hall*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/contributors/john-hall)*, a retired police professional and a National Institute of Justice Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science scholar.*

[Download PDF](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Key2uUWGYJXNJYZMJLs4EMM7dZt3xtYJ?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

How can the hardest problems of urban life get solved in a sustained way?

The line from problem to solution is never a straight one. It is bent by the demands of the moment, the vagaries of politics, the availability of money and people, and more. But there is “smart money.” It comes from the long experience of people working inside government and in other institutions that shape government policy, as well as from researchers who have painstakingly examined what works and what doesn’t, and the public who have experienced it. This project aims to deliver to policymakers the best ideas, distilled into steps that can be taken now and the long-term changes that must undergird sustained achievement.

We assembled prominent researchers and practitioners to produce actionable advice on reducing subway crime and disorder in New York. Sometimes the recommendations are backed by deep data. Sometimes there is little or no uncertain data to help untangle what to do. But policymakers have no choice but to act even if there’s no randomized controlled trial to guide them. Here we relied on what we know about the basic principles of why crime happens and how disorder can be tamed to provide some guidance. What follows is the “smart money” on what to do.

The data that underlie these recommendations can be found in our companion document, [**“Subway Safety: What the Data Show,”**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1phQOWGcFVkbIb2YNzil8EwYTC8HqNBZH/view?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and where not in that document, we provide links. We offer these ideas, honoring the hard work of public servants who grapple with these enormously complex problems every day. Our deep gratitude goes to the many people who helped shape these recommendations through in-person convenings, one-on-one conversations, writing and analysis. Many of them are listed at the end of this document.

We also extend special thanks to Arnold Ventures and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, who are helping to support this effort.

## The problem to be solved: Violent crime and disorder in the subways

While violent crime in New York City’s subways is an exceedingly rare event, each crime reverberates due to the central importance of this shared public space, its close quarters and the high likelihood that witnesses will see and cameras will capture any given offense. Although rare, the incidence of violent crime has increased significantly over the past few years, and its nature has changed. Felony and misdemeanor assaults — the shove, the punch and the life-altering attack — too frequently committed by seriously mentally ill individuals, have tripled since 2009\. Over the same period, “instrumental” violence motivated by the desire for money or property has been declining.

New Yorkers’ underground jitteriness is not just caused by crime. It is amplified by a sense of disorder: erratic behavior and other conduct not necessarily rising to the level of criminal offenses, such as the unkempt and troubled panhandling or sleeping on subway cars. The dilapidation of some subway infrastructure also contributes to unease: dark and untended stations with peeling paint, dripping pipes, bad lighting and poor sightlines.

Despite the decay of some stations, these are warm and sheltered places that have often become the dwellings of people who are suffering from untold physical and mental problems. This use of the subway system for something other than transit also [diminishes the sense of safety](https://www.mta.info/document/131806?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for the general commuting population.

What are the solutions? The data and expertise Vital City has synthesized point to a mix of approaches. We start with some key ideas and caveats while acknowledging how much good work is already underway by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the City and many others:

- **The nature of criminal activity — rare, diffuse and hard to predict — makes it hard to address with precision policing or precision outreach.** The subway system, with 4.2% of the city’s violent crime, already uses 8% of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) manpower. And it is likely that, whether they take the form of enforcement, outreach or improving the physical environment, efforts will always be overbroad because of the rarity and diffusion of the issues.
- **Although subway violence is relatively rare, that does not mean that it feels rare to the traveling public.** Just one violent crime has a magnifying effect [**as news of it travels**](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-rare-is-crime-on-the-subway).
- **Many of the issues driving violence and fear stem from mental health and substance use challenges that people may face their entire lives.** Even if the effect of an initial approach to address intersecting issues of crime and serious mental illness or homelessness — whether arrest, commitment, supportive housing, respite or something else — is temporary, the solutions must be sustained and will be expensive.
- **Police, while important, will have limited effect on their own because of the layered aspects of the problems.** For that effect to last, they need to be deployed according to a sustainable plan rooted in where and how crime happens — not performative surges.
- **Police must be complemented by calibrated use of clinicians, social service workers and civilian outreach workers playing their part.** And who plays what part and whether there exist enough people to play those parts are pieces of the puzzle.
- **How people feel and how they act can be influenced by the design, look and feel of the built environment.** The research is compelling that the nature of our physical surroundings and the learning from the world of behavioral science can have outsize effects on ensuring civility and compliance with rules underground.
- **Success requires unified governance and coordination.** Those participating in the unified command must be in constant communication, sharing data and analysis built into program design from the start, relentlessly focused on results, with clear leadership structures linking agencies, service providers, law enforcement and community organizations. Leadership and partnership among the agencies must be built into government structures, not subject to changes in political leadership over the years or fleeting reactions to spikes in crime.
- **The City and the State are already investing about $700 million a year in day-to-day efforts to make the subways safe, and billions in capital improvements**, according to an analysis conducted for Vital City. Our recommendations seek to use what exists with the maximum effect possible, reshape where necessary and, when part of a sustained plan with clear goals and accountability, make recommendations for investments.

## The most important recommendations, summarized

**1.) Make clear that the subways are for transit**

**2.) Establish a unified governance system**

**3.) Use police more effectively**

• Recalibrate staffing

• Integrate station responsibility with precinct commanders

• Provide clear guidance on quality-of-life enforcement

• Improve officer engagement and accountability

• Ensure police rapidly attend to customer complaints

• Use technology to improve response

**4.) Improve response to those suffering from serious mental illness, those who are unhoused and others**

• Consider establishing diversion intake hubs

• Remove from the system those who violate the rules or present risks

• Systematically track interactions

• Strengthen co-response and other outreach efforts

• Facilitate involuntary removals

• Ensure that a case, whether involving services or a crime or both, does not end at removal

**5.) Incorporate both physical fixes and behavioral change campaigns into station management**

• Implement design strategies that enhance rider experience and safety

• Implement behavioral interventions to increase compliance with the law

• Enhance station management and maintenance

## What not to do

• Massively increase police presence underground at the expense of aboveground policing

• Invest in firearm-scanning technology for subway stations

• Rely on fare evasion enforcement as a violent-crime reduction measure

## Recommendations in detail

### 1.) Make clear that the subways are for transit

Too often, the public views the subway system merely as a place to tolerate between points A and B. Making clear that rules of conduct exist for a reason — and building a new culture of stewardship that includes all who use the system — is imperative.

All those who run the subways and ride the trains must be committed to the common understanding that the subways are for transit. The system’s purpose is to move people safely, swiftly and efficiently from one place to another. Other socially sanctioned purposes can be allowed, but nothing that interferes with safe, pleasant and efficient public transport should be tolerated.

This is a message that the MTA has championed. But it must be embraced by riders, subway operations, law enforcement and outreach workers. It won’t happen spontaneously, at least at first. Here, the City and the State must lead with clarity, vigor and purpose to:

– **Ensure the express adoption of this philosophy to orient how police, outreach workers, clinicians, tollbooth operators, conductors and the many other people who work in the subway system do their jobs.** Doing this would also promote a spirit of cooperation and participation in riders.

- **For police and outreach workers:** Remove people who violate rules, sleep, urinate, panhandle, use drugs or use the subway as a dwelling or for something other than transit.
- **For riders:** Begin with basics — awareness campaigns and announcements by public officials, public service announcements and signs to make clear to all the rules of ridership and their consequences. This approach and more will help to build a culture of involved bystanders.
- **For transit workers:** Be in more regular contact with riders to promote compliance with the rules and maintain clear lines of reporting issues. When transit workers observe an individual or a condition that the rules require to be addressed, that worker must report through a clear chain of command. Transit workers cannot be asked to be law enforcement, but reporting issues to law enforcement should be immediate.
- **For everyone:** Complement this with a concerted public education campaign through statements by public officials, citywide advertising and more.

– **Initiate a coordinated campaign to reestablish the clear rule that subways are for transportation.**

– **Launch a new citizen reporting mechanism to flag violations of the rules.** All platforms and cars should be equipped with QR codes enabling riders and officials to easily identify and track the precise location of problems, flagging violations with the MTA or NYPD, as appropriate. The MTA and NYPD should share this data regularly so the public can hold the agencies accountable for addressing key issues. If there are multiple and unused routes to report problems, they must be streamlined or bundled into existing mechanisms like 311.

– **Formally and consistently ban people from the system who have been serially convicted of harming MTA employees or committing sex crimes against riders, in accordance with** [**current law**](https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/penal-law/pen-sect-65-10/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=%28k%2D2%29%20%28i,facility%20or%20conveyance%20of%20the), and support [legislative efforts to expand bans](https://www.governor.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2024-03/gpb%5F17-transit%5Fbans-memo.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to cover assaults on riders and MTA contractors.

– **Give local companies and civic organizations the opportunity to take more ownership of stations to contribute to their beautification and maintenance.**

### 2.) Establish a unified governance system

The MTA, a creature of the State, runs the New York City Transit system. But they do not control all the resources that are necessary to ensure a safe and efficient ride. Though MTA Police patrol a few major station hubs, the NYPD remains almost entirely responsible for policing the system’s 472 stations and thousands of platforms and trains. Various City departments, from the Department of Homeless Services to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to the NYPD, have roles in tracking, treating and, if necessary, removing unstable people with serious mental illness, drug addiction and other overlapping maladies from the system. Nonprofit providers under various contracts with the government provide key services to unsheltered or ill individuals in the transit system, with various levels of accountability for performance.

**While there is much effort devoted to connecting the complicated work of all these agencies, ensuring that there is a permanent, stable and streamlined system of governance and accountability — that lives at the operational, not political level — is key to progress. The MTA and the City should establish an interconnected governance system organized around a single repository of shared data, such as daily metrics of law enforcement incidents, social service interactions and customer complaints. This governance system must also be relentless in determining the results of each effort so that the initiatives can be continued, corrected, replicated or replaced.**

Because this effort will bring together many different agencies and entities, each reporting to different bosses, the governance will have to operate more as a federation with a facilitator than in a traditional command-and-control model. This approach has been enormously successful in the [Gun Violence Strategy Partnership](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/six-ways-new-york-can-spare-more-people-from-shootings) meetings which have taken place every weekday for the past three years, bringing together prosecutors, police, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Department of Correction and others to track the cases of shooters, to enhance evidence and to strengthen prosecutions.

The facilitator of this new federation should be a career public servant, or, if a political appointee, a person agreed upon by both the City and the State who is broadly respected among the different participants and considered immune from political pressure. It must be the work of career public servants to embed the discipline of accountability into governmental structures and avoid the problem of data sharing, analysis, follow-up and continuity being subject to political fortunes. Specifically, a unified command would:

– **Provide a single source of data and analytics support — collected and disseminated in as near to real time as the data sources permit — to direct deployment of resources and ensure** [**effectiveness**](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07418825.2023.2264362?scroll=top&needAccess=true&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#abstract)**.**

– **Have a laserlike focus on the** [**few thousand individuals**](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dhs/downloads/pdf/hope/hope-2024-results.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **in the system who most need assistance and whose removal will have the greatest impact in improving safety and quality of life for riders and improving life conditions for the individuals.**

– **Ensure that social workers, psychiatrists, police, MTA personnel and others tasked with helping those with needs related to mental illness or housing all have integrated and up-to-date data** on their case histories and criminal arrest histories while adhering to privacy concerns and other legal restrictions.

– **Receive regular reports from MTA employees** charged with monitoring and improving station and train conditions.

– **Publish regular public reports knitting together trends on safety and disorder** from police, transit, mental health personnel and other relevant agencies — and identifying areas in need of attention.

**– Provide regular public assessments of the success or failure of the various initiatives.**

### 3.) Use police more effectively

The rarity, randomness and mobility of subway crime mean that the usual police strategies that have found success on the surface — for example, hot-spot policing — will not work with the same precision underground. While a small number of hub stations that serve the largest number of customers account for an outsize share of violence in the system on a per-rider basis, the risk of violence is very diffuse. And while on the surface, offenders tend to commit crimes near where they live or spend time, people who commit crimes on the subway are by definition highly mobile.

On the surface, the majority of the most serious violence is committed by a small number of individuals. On the subways, a large share of the frequent offenders are homeless or severely mentally ill. This population is less likely to be deterred through traditional means and thus pose a unique challenge for law enforcement and others.

In the NYPD Transit Bureau today, unlike with patrol precincts, the Department doesn’t rely on a data-driven staffing model. This leads to an overreliance on temporary deployments and overtime. As a result, transit frequently operates in crisis mode, perennially running up big bills in overtime, pulling manpower from above ground and often depending on temporary staff not trained in the particulars of patrolling underground. What the “right” number of NYPD transit officers is or where they should be deployed appears very much up in the air.

We do not address here other important components of enforcement, such as effective prosecution. But with a doubling in recidivism rates, this is an important area to understand. Modernizing transit police staffing comprises a series of components:

**Recalibrate staffing to ensure a properly trained, supervised and deployed force**

Currently budgeted with [2,583 officers](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/056-NYPD.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the Bureau routinely pulls in non-transit-trained personnel to meet basic coverage needs, while racking up $150 million in [overtime](https://nypost.com/2023/12/22/metro/nypd-cops-received-more-than-150k-in-overtime-for-subway-patrols-as-data-shows-decline-in-crime/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) expenses. These surges have ranged from [200](https://gothamist.com/news/gov-hochul-wants-a-cop-on-every-overnight-nyc-subway-train?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to [1,000](https://www.amny.com/nyc-transit/nypd-another-surge-cops-subway-system/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) officers, pulled from administrative assignments, patrol and detective squads.

The unique policing environment in the subway system requires specialized safety training, including knowledge of the third rail and other train operations.

A staffing plan should not be boom-and-bust. Most needs are knowable. Just as the police anticipate summer spikes in shootings above ground and adjust deployments accordingly, the police should also plan for increased underground activity in winter, ensuring adequate presence. Working together with the unified command, this approach would also permit effective staffing of co-response teams as well.

To build a more effective and less reactive transit staffing plan, the NYPD should:

- **Undertake a zero-based staffing analysis to build a personnel plan based on needs and crime levels.**
- **Build a data-driven, seasonally sensitive staffing model.** Rather than continuing to rely on historical staffing levels or arbitrary percentages of total Department strength, a new model should follow the proven success of the Police Department’s summer deployment strategy for gun violence, tailored to the subways’ seasonal needs: anticipating increased underground activity in colder months and adjusting resources accordingly, including boosting academy recruit allocations to meet seasonal demands.
- **Convert excessive overtime costs into additional permanent positions** filled by properly trained transit officers.
- **Base deployment decisions first on violent crime patterns, then on disorder and quality-of-life complaints.** Since violent crime is relatively rare, its concentration drops off sharply after the highest-risk stations. Quality-of-life complaints are numerous enough to guide additional station deployments.
- **Dedicate personnel to address specific problems in specific places**, with focused coverage of hub stations based on violent crime data, complemented by quality-of-life enforcement informed by MTA customer complaints in other locations.
- **Enhance de-escalation training.** Given transit officers’ frequent encounters with special populations in confined spaces, they should be prioritized for comprehensive de-escalation training.

**Integrate responsibility for stations with the local precinct commander**

- **Make aboveground precinct commanders operationally responsible for nonhub stations**, enabling them to tailor crime reduction strategies to each station’s specific crime conditions and to ensure seamless integration in combating neighborhood crime.

**Provide officers with clear guidance to address quality-of-life issues and appropriate training to effect the guidance**

Transit officers need precise, actionable guidance for addressing quality-of-life violations

in the subway system.

- **Police should implement a graduated response model, not a zero tolerance model.** This should begin with first evaluating an individual’s need for medical intervention, move to removing disruptive individuals from the system when necessary and reserve arrest for cases of persistent or egregious violations.
- **For certain predetermined transit-disruptive violations, officers must, at a minimum, remove the individual from the system.** Examples of New York City Transit rules and regulations that, if violated, can be highly disruptive include: unauthorized access to tracks; lying on floors, platforms, stairways or conveyances; and interfering with train operations. If officers recognize signs of behavioral health issues, they should follow specialized protocols. This ensures that while maintaining subway safety and order, officers respond appropriately to individuals who may need mental health support rather than enforcement action.
- **The NYPD and MTA must establish and communicate to officers, riders and others the list of “must-engage” offenses that mandate officer response, particularly targeting behavior that disrupts transit operations or poses risks to users.** Training must minimize ambiguity in decision-making, ensuring officers understand exactly when and how to engage with transit rule violators based on these defined priorities.

**Improve officer engagement and accountability**

The heavy reliance on overtime to staff police deployments brings officers to the subway who are often unfamiliar with the environment, assigned to temporary posts, not directly accountable to transit bureau leadership and otherwise distracted. Effective rule enforcement and strategic engagement require officers to be actively involved in their work, with a clear sense of purpose and well-defined deployment directives when not responding to quality-of-life complaints. To foster this level of engagement:

- **Assign specific responsibilities to transit posts**, as designated by the commanding officer, including Transit Order Maintenance Sweeps, platform patrols, train rides and addressing persistent quality-of-life conditions.
- **Conduct regular oversight of assignments through frontline supervision** to ensure compliance with directives and NYPD policies, including regulations on cellphone use and professional conduct while in uniform.

**Ensure police swiftly attend to customer complaints, whether the complaints relate to conditions or crime**

Current data reveal [a troubling trend](https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/311-Service-Requests-from-2010-to-Present/erm2-nwe9/data%5Fpreview?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): In 2024, officers dismissed two-thirds of all 311 complaints in the subway system as unfounded, unnecessary or “condition gone on arrival,” reflecting a broader pattern seen across other 311 response categories. The Police Department must prioritize responding to quality-of-life complaints in the subway, with supervisors regularly auditing response times, follow-up actions and officer conduct to ensure accountability. Specifically:

- **Installing QR codes in every subway car**, with information uniquely identifying the car, would create an accessible, direct channel for riders to report issues, complementing the existing 311 and customer complaint systems and demonstrating the MTA’s commitment to passenger engagement and system improvement.
- **Regular audits, real-time performance monitoring and transparent reporting mechanisms** can strengthen accountability and reinforce best practices.

**Use technology to improve police response**

Stations are spread across the city, many desolate at night and lacking the natural observation present at street level. Tunnels are not internet-connected, further complicating communications. Technology can alleviate these problems. While we recognize this is a longer-term goal, achieving it would further rationalize resources and boost efficiency and effectiveness:

– **The NYPD and MTA should work to establish a dedicated** [**real-time crime center**](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07418825.2023.2264362?scroll=top&needAccess=true&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#abstract) building on the MTA’s existing camera network and enhanced by AI-powered behavior-detection technology.

- The center would serve as a force multiplier for the distributed transit police force, providing continuous monitoring for unusual behavior patterns across the system and enabling rapid response coordination for in-progress incidents. The technology would expand response capabilities, particularly in remote or isolated areas where maintaining consistent police presence is challenging.
- The center should be staffed for 24/7 monitoring, with clear protocols for coordinating with transit officers and regular evaluations of the technology’s effectiveness. This investment would significantly enhance the Department’s ability to prevent and solve transit crimes.

### 4.) Improve the response to those suffering from serious mental illness, those who are unhoused and others

Of all the hard problems that policymakers want to solve, one stands out for its humbling complexity: People with often-overlapping behavioral health concerns such as serious mental illness and substance use, who may also be unhoused, comprise the most persistent and high-profile challenges to order and safety on the subway. According to an NYPD analysis, two-thirds of individuals with the most subway arrests in 2022-2023 had documented histories of homelessness or mental illness. This percentage increased to 89% among those also arrested for subway violence.

Of course, a tiny percentage of those who struggle with serious maladies commit crimes or present a threat to others. Indeed, those suffering with serious mental illness and substance abuse and who lack housing are often themselves victims of crimes.

Because of the complexity of these issues, Vital City is working with a second group of expert practitioners and researchers to forge practical and humane solutions to the challenges that many of this population present with respect both to crime and disorder.

Here, we sketch a direction and some principles — and will return in the late spring with more detailed recommendations.

Here are the principles we are focusing on:

- The subway’s fundamental purpose is to provide safe and efficient transportation, and any behaviors compromising this purpose require focused **action and adequate resources**.
- The State, the City and nonprofits must **coordinate across systems** to ensure the subways are for transit, share data and results, and recalibrate as results are understood. This is what the recommendation for a unified command would produce.
- Any wholesale strategy to address those living underground must **find the balance between policing and services**. This means enforcement should not happen without concrete offers for help appropriate to the individual, including transport to that service.
- If and when a service is refused, then **enforcement must proceed**. Much here could be learned from the intensive efforts by the City in joint response and at the end of subway lines, where many who are both without shelter and suffering from severe mental illness congregate in the evenings.
- Any sustainable approach must seek to **address behavioral health needs through effective treatment, services and interventions** when conditions lead to disruptive behaviors, implementing evidence-based approaches that reduce future disruptions by meeting these underlying needs. The “intervention” cannot end at “removal,” but rather must continue with a sustained commitment of City services for the duration of the person’s needs.
- Where a person suffering from severe mental illness commits a crime, **a different track through the criminal justice system** must be similarly sustained and must care for the person’s illness.

With these principles in mind, we are exploring the following policy steps, noting again how much focus and creativity the MTA and the City are bringing to this issue:

**Consider establishing diversion intake hubs**

- Many cities have had success in creating all-in-one centers where police and outreach workers can routinely bring individuals either to follow through with enforcement actions or connect them with mental health help, substance-use treatment, housing and other services. New York City should explore this model as a means of diverting individuals from the criminal justice system toward appropriate treatment and support.

**Remove from the system those who violate the rules or present risks**

- Those who break MTA rules in ways that interfere with the operations of the subway system and inhibit the ability of commuters to travel should at a bare minimum be removed from the system. If in the course of executing such a removal they can be connected with services, this should be a parallel priority.

**Systematically track interactions**

- Contacts between people with serious mental illness, people with substance use issues and unhoused people and social service providers, police officers or MTA employees are not seamlessly shared in real time. They must be.

**Strengthen co-response and other outreach efforts**

- Innovative teams created by the City and MTA that combine police with nurses and other social service practitioners, like the Subway Co-Response Outreach Teams (SCOUT) and Partnership Assistance for Transit Homelessness (PATH), are an essential tool for engaging individuals in crisis and connecting them to the services they need to stabilize, including hospital treatment. But New York City must attend relentlessly to what is effective and what is not. Here there is much to learn from the City’s own experience, as well as other cities, as to deployment: when and where to deploy, what kinds of teams and at what level of clinical expertise, and how the service-offer and the enforcement are coordinated. Before expansion, some of these basic questions about efficacy must be answered, then tracked in real time.

**Facilitate involuntary removals**

- State law currently lacks clear guidelines for involuntary removal from the subway system, leaving too much room for interpretation. The law should be amended to give police and others clearer authority to intervene and remove individuals when they are at substantial risk of harm due to their inability to meet basic needs like food, shelter or medical care.

**Ensure that a case, whether involving services or a crime or both, does not end at removal.**

- Attention must continue to be paid to the person and their welfare.

### 5.) Incorporate both physical fixes and behavioral change campaigns into station management

The subway system’s physical environment and rider behavior significantly influence both actual safety and perceptions of safety. [Research](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-020-09490-6?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) shows that environmental design and behavioral interventions can effectively reduce crime and disorder without relying solely on enforcement. Among the many attractions of this approach is that it has a [“neighborhood effect”](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691195216/changing-places?srsltid=AfmBOor%5FXN-QpISzk%5FI3hse6fqmDCO3maEuVzA5xdVhfCt4-6zXcebh%5F&ref=vitalcitynyc.org); that is, physical changes have a wholesale impact on the behavior of all the individuals within their ambit, while enforcement proceeds person by person. Evidence from transit systems worldwide demonstrates that thoughtful modifications to physical spaces and targeted behavioral strategies can create lasting improvements in safety and compliance. International examples offer valuable lessons, as do standout domestic cases. [The Metro system](https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles/166372.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Washington, D.C., for instance, maintained significantly lower crime rates than peer systems through integrated design features like resistant materials, controlled access points and enhanced sightlines. Studies in European transit systems suggest that [strategic deployment of staff](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1477370809337881?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [targeted behavioral interventions](https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/8/4/98?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) can reduce fare evasion and improve compliance with system rules. The MTA has been particularly active and innovative in thinking about both physical design and behavior change. These recommendations build on those ideas.

**Implement design strategies that enhance rider experience and safety**

Incorporating good design principles into planned renovations can improve security without requiring stand-alone security-focused capital projects. Natural surveillance should be the foundation of this approach. Specifically:

- Integrated into the MTA’s organized analysis of the physical condition of subway stations, platforms, mezzanines and passageways should be **an assessment of the role that physical changes might play in reducing crime and disorder**. Different stations may be attracting different types of crimes, and doing a more thorough analysis — one that makes note of various design characteristics that may be facilitating crime — would be helpful in informing station-specific changes.
- Station layouts should be designed or modified to **maximize open sightlines and minimize visual obstructions** on platforms and in corridors.
- **Eliminate shadows and dark areas** with improved lighting systems, and position station booths and customer service areas to **maximize staff visibility**.
- The MTA should **create consistent design standards** across new and renovated stations to establish system identity, installing clear and well-placed wayfinding signage to reduce passenger confusion. Clear boundaries between public and restricted areas help define appropriate uses of space.
- **Physical infrastructure improvements should focus on durability and security.** This means installing vandalism-resistant materials for surfaces and fixtures, designing seating and waiting areas that discourage extended loitering, creating sufficient space around fare barriers to prevent crowding and positioning emergency exits to be visible but not vulnerable to misuse.
- **Station management facilities should be integrated into these designs**, with staff areas positioned to maximize natural surveillance of high-risk areas and clear sightlines between station booths and critical areas.

**Implement behavioral interventions to increase compliance with the law**

The MTA has taken a promising step with its current solicitation seeking behavioral science expertise to address fare evasion. It is an important issue not only because of hundreds of millions in lost revenue but because of the signal it sends about the toleration of lower-level disorder. Enforcement alone cannot reverse what has become a significant shift in social norms around fare payment. The solicitation focuses on developing detailed rider personas and testing multiple intervention strategies. Going forward, the MTA should:

- Ensure the selected behavioral interventions are tested through rigorous pilot programs
- Develop clear metrics for evaluating both compliance improvements and cost-effectiveness using validated measures of fare evasion
- Create a framework for rapidly scaling successful interventions systemwide
- Integrate behavioral strategies with physical improvements to fare-control areas
- Maintain complementary enforcement strategies while behavioral interventions are implemented

**Enhance station management and maintenance**

The MTA’s recently launched Re-NEW-Vation Program, enhanced by Gov. Hochul’s commitment to systemwide LED lighting upgrades, provides a foundation for improving station conditions. Improved lighting has been shown to reduce crime above ground. Early customer feedback suggests promising results; this momentum should be leveraged to create a comprehensive approach to station management that recognizes the connection between maintenance, disorder and crime. Building on this, the MTA should:

- Establish clear metrics that evaluate both maintenance standards and security outcomes
- Create rapid-response policies for graffiti and vandalism removal
- Develop regular auditing procedures that assess physical conditions alongside quality-of-life concerns
- Coordinate existing [LED lighting installation](https://www.mta.info/press-release/mta-announces-plan-system-wide-safety-upgrade-brighter-led-lighting-every-subway?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with other station improvements to enhance overall effectiveness
- Rigorously evaluate the Re-NEW-Vation Program’s impact on both station conditions and security outcomes, including specific assessments of how improved lighting affects crime and disorder. Lessons learned from this assessment can inform the expansion of successful elements systemwide, creating a sustainable model for integrated station management that enhances both the passenger experience and system security.

## What not to do

**DO NOT reactively surge nontransit police officers on the subways.** If the subways accounted for the biggest crime hot spots in the city, concentrating more police in the subway system might make sense — but this is not the case. Approximately 4% of the city’s violent crime occurs in the subway system, and the [data suggest that on a per person-hour basis](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/underground-safer-than-the-surface), the streets are still probably more dangerous than the subways. Taking patrol officers off their regular beats in high-crime neighborhoods and taking highly trained detectives away from criminal investigations to patrol the subway likely yields some problematic trade-offs.

**DO NOT invest in new technology that allows law enforcement to scan for individuals who are carrying firearms into a subway station.** While such technology may have its uses in certain situations, very few subway crimes are committed using a firearm. Investments in gun-scanning technology are costly and logistically difficult; those resources are better spent on police manpower or mental health services.

**DO NOT rely on fare evasion enforcement as a violent-crime reduction measure.** Fare beating is a real problem to be solved, and we support the rollout of new turnstiles that are more impervious to cheating. But one recurring suggestion for how to promote safety within the subway system is to concentrate significantly more police enforcement at the turnstiles. While this idea fades in and out of fashion (now out), it is persistent and worth underscoring that it is an inefficient way to promote safety:

- Individuals arrested for fare beating represent only 7% of all fare beaters identified by law enforcement — a highly selected subset. These individuals typically have less serious criminal histories than those arrested for violent or disorderly conduct in the transit system, and even less serious criminal backgrounds than the average citywide arrestee.
- Moreover, [the MTA estimates](https://metrics.mta.info/?subway/fareevasion&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that approximately 10%-14% of riders fare beat, amounting to around 150 million fare-beaten rides each year. This underscores that even the 7% of identified fare beaters who are arrested represent an extremely small fraction of all those who evade fares.
- Deploying police to monitor turnstiles wastes valuable resources, as most violence occurs on trains and platforms. Reassigning officers to these higher-risk areas would significantly improve public safety and security effectiveness.

## Advisors

We are grateful to a core group of people, some of whom are listed below, who generously gave their time and wisdom in meeting as a group and individually, in writing and in conversation as Vital City worked through the recommendations.

The recommendations are Vital City’s and do not necessarily reflect the positions of any person or institution listed below. Any errors are our own.

**Bridget G. Brennan**, New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor

**Ken Corey**, University of Chicago Crime Lab; former chief of department, New York City Police Department

**Aaron Chalfin**, associate professor of criminology, University of Pennsylvania

**Vishaan Chakrabarti**, architect, urbanist and author based in New York City

**Jeremy Feigelson**, special counsel, Metropolitan Transportation Authority

**Sarah Feinberg**, founder, Feinberg Strategies LLC; former president and CEO, New York City Transit

**Linda Gibbs**, former deputy mayor of health and human services, City of New York

**Francia Henry**, president, MION Consulting; former deputy chief of plans and programs for police, security and safety, Metropolitan Transportation Authority

**Nancy La Vigne**, dean, Rutgers School of Criminal Justice; former director, National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice

**John Macdonald**, professor of criminology and sociology, University of Pennsylvania

**Brandon del Pozo**, assistant professor, Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University

**Jerry Ratcliffe**, professor, Department of Criminal Justice, Temple University

**Meg Reiss**, first assistant district attorney, New York County

**Marcos Soler**, deputy secretary for public safety, New York State

**Claire Weisz**, founding partner, WXY architecture + urban design

There are many other people in New York State and New York City government who shared their knowledge of how things actually work, not just on paper. A partial list of the agencies and offices they represent includes the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the New York City Mayor’s Office, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, the New York City Police Department, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and NYC Health + Hospitals. We are deeply grateful for their time and advice, and their service to New York City.
### What the Data Show
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-the-data-show-people-in-crisis-on-the-streets-and-subways/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:31.000Z
*This is one of three supporting documents connected to Vital City's recommendations on serious mental illness and homelessness,* [*"What To Do (and Not To Do) About People in Crisis on Streets and Subways."*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-to-do-about-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways) *Find* [*"How the System Works (or Doesn't)"*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-the-system-works-for-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways) *here and* [*"Case Studies from Other Large Cities"*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/case-studies-from-large-cities-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways) *here.*

New York City's homelessness, mental illness and crime challenges cannot be understood — or solved — without reliable, integrated information. We compiled every publicly available dataset we could locate, from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's point-in-time counts and the New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelter censuses to NYPD arrest and complaint files. Instead of a coherent archive, we found a patchwork: Critical fields are redacted or never collected, time frames rarely align and comparable metrics live in agencies that seldom share records. When the City's own practitioners must fly blind, it is no surprise that residents, advocates and policymakers struggle to agree on the scale or nature of the problem.

Fragmentation is most acute at the fault line between criminal justice agencies and the social service providers who manage shelters, street outreach and behavioral health care. Legal and technical barriers to data exchange — like federal health privacy law (HIPAA) worries, state confidentiality statutes, incompatible software and simple mistrust — meaning police, courts and jails see only the "public safety" slice of a person's history, while clinicians and case managers remain unaware of justice involvement that shapes housing and treatment options. This siloed architecture contributes to the predictable "revolving door" — street to emergency room to shelter to precinct to jail to street — each stop adding trauma and cost without resolving the underlying need.

These structural blind spots make public accountability nearly impossible. Program outcomes cannot be tracked, duplication of effort goes unnoticed, and evidence-based budgeting becomes guesswork. The analysis that follows therefore serves a dual purpose: It distills what the existing numbers do reveal about the intersection of homelessness, mental illness and crime, and it maps the yawning gaps that must be closed if the City hopes to manage the problem rather than merely react to its most visible symptoms.

Although the data are fragmented, it still allows us to sketch a picture of this population.

## New York City's unsheltered population has grown over the past decade.

- January 2024's HOPE count, the annual tally of unsheltered homeless individuals, was 2.4% higher than 2023.
- The 2024 count is 7.3% above the 2020 prepandemic level.
- The count of unsheltered homeless individuals is up 23.3% since 2014.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/23327699?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## The point-in-time counts likely only represent a fraction of the total population.

- Point-in-time counts provide only a one-night snapshot and miss the many people who cycle in and out of unsheltered homelessness over the year.
- [Other U.S. cities](https://escholarship.org/content/qt46n649n0/qt46n649n0.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) find annual unique counts run two to four times higher than their point-in-time snapshots.
- In New York City, [outreach data](https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/how-many-total-people-are-homeless-in-nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=For%20example%2C%20between%20May%205%2C,unsheltered%20in%20that%20time%20frame) suggest that the number of people living in the subway system is at least three times the official point-in-time count. According to the Coalition for the Homeless, 9,231 individuals accepted transport to shelter between May 2020 and January 2022 — an average of roughly 5,300 people per year, several times the 2021 subway HOPE count of 1,280\. The true figure is likely higher, since these outreach totals reflect only successful engagements at end-of-line stations.
- Applying conservative multipliers of 2 to 4 to the City's 2024 HOPE count (4,140) yields an annual range of roughly 8,000 to 16,000 unsheltered individuals over the course of a year, with a midpoint near 12,000.

## New York City has a very low unsheltered population compared to other large U.S. cities.

- Even using these 8,000-16,000 estimates of the total, distinct annual unsheltered population, New York City's street homeless count as a percentage of population is low compared to many other cities.
- With 97% of New Yorkers experiencing homelessness indoors, only 3% remain on the street — by far the smallest unsheltered share of any large U.S. city. New York City's unsheltered PIT share hovered around 5% for most of the past decade, dipping below that mark just twice — first in 2019 and again in 2024.
- The 2024 record low stems not from fewer people outdoors but from a surge in shelter capacity for newly arrived asylum seekers, which swelled the overall census and drove the unsheltered percentage down.
- West Coast hubs such as San Jose (25%), Los Angeles (30%) and San Diego/San Francisco (42%) leave the majority of their unhoused residents outside.
- Midwestern and Sunbelt cities occupy the middle ground. Houston shelters 61%, Phoenix 57% and Dallas 71% — highlighting the wide national spread between New York City's right-to-shelter model and the West Coast's street-dominant reality.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/23328307?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

- In other colder-weather peer cities, about 1 in 5 people experiencing homelessness live outside: Roughly [17.7% of Chicago's homeless population](https://news.wttw.com/sites/default/files/article/file-attachments/2025%20Annual%20Report%20on%20Homelessness.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was unsheltered in January 2025 and [18.8% in Philadelphia](https://www.phila.gov/media/20240923121315/OHS-PIT-Count-Summary-Report-2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in January 2024, according to official point-in-time counts from each city's homelessness agency.
- Only four large cities have 1.5% or more of their total population in homelessness: Seattle (2.2%), Denver (2.0%), Los Angeles (1.8%) and New York (1.7%). New York is the sole member of that group that keeps the vast majority of this population indoors.
- Los Angeles and New York City host a similar share of residents experiencing homelessness (about 1 in 55), but LA's street population count is 11 times larger (49,509 vs. 4,397) because 70% of its unhoused residents sleep outside, while New York City limits that figure to 3%.
- **Because New York's right-to-shelter mandate keeps street homelessness near 3%, the remaining unsheltered population likely differs markedly from those in cities without such guarantees,** a distinction that may complicate the easy adoption of some evidence-based interventions tested elsewhere.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/23327990?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/23327037?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## 311 homelessness complaints in New York have risen faster than the underlying growth in the homeless population, reflecting both increased public concern and evolving protocols.

- The number of 311 calls for homelessness-related issues tripled from 2019 to 2024.
- New York City government received more than 82,000 homelessness-related 311 calls in 2024.
- Several administrative changes — including enabling people to submit 311 complaints about subway-related issues, expanding which problems could be reported and adjusting how complaints were routed — contributed to the increase, complicating year-to-year comparisons.
- In 2024, DHS handled about two-thirds (67%) of these calls — typically those that did not involve perceived or potential danger — and the NYPD handled the remaining 33%.
- The two agencies moved at very different speeds: The median closure time was 45 minutes for NYPD versus 269 minutes for DHS.
- There were also variable outcomes depending on agency.
- NYPD reported that, in 58% of cases, they could not locate the person involved and referred the remaining 42% to DHS. Out of more than 30,000 cases, they documented resolving the underlying condition only about a dozen times.
- DHS similarly could not find the individual in 45% of its cases, reported refusals of assistance in 12%, referred 6% back to NYPD and closed 18% for technical or administrative reasons.

## 311 calls for homelessness are very concentrated in specific parts of the city.

- 50% of the 311 calls occur in 0.7% of the city's surface area as measured by census blocks.
- Twenty-three distinct census blocks ranked among the top 100 locations for calls in 2022, 2023 and 2024\. All but one were in Manhattan, south of 57th Street; the exception was the block containing Moore Homestead Playground in Elmhurst, Queens.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/23327717?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## The number and percentage of total arrests of street homelessness have been increasing over the past several years.

- Total arrests of unhoused individuals on the street — on any charges — climbed 17.3% in 2024, rising from 13,017 to 15,274, and now stand 38.4% above their 2022 level.
- Arrests of all other individuals increased 14.8% in 2024 and are 36.0% higher than in 2022.
- A striking share of people living on the street interact with law enforcement in a single year. Using the rough rule of thumb that the January point-in-time count may reflect only one-fourth to one-half of the true unsheltered population, the 15,274 arrests of street-homeless people recorded in 2024 would touch somewhere between 42% and 82% of the unsheltered population. For context, the NYPD arrested about 1.7% of all city residents, meaning unsheltered New Yorkers were booked at roughly 24 to 48 times the per capita rate of the general population. This doesn't necessarily mean that this population is committing crimes at a dramatically higher rate; it may mean that police enforcement tends to be more focused on these individuals, or both.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/23712142?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## One-time arrests dominate, but a tiny core of street-homeless New Yorkers is booked again and again.

- Of the 6,942 unsheltered people arrested on any charge in 2024, 58.1% (4,033 people) were taken into custody just once.
- A significant 22.9% (1,587 people) of this population was arrested three or more times.
- A small number of people in this population are frequent offenders: 9.4% (653 people) logged five or more arrests, while 2.3% (157 people) hit double-digit arrests within a single year. Forty-three people, or just 0.6% of the street homeless population, were booked 16 or more times.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/23713072?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## Most of the arrests among this population, as with the general population, are for property crimes.

- Analysis of the 2024 National Crime Information Center (NCIC) charge data for the 6,942 street-homeless arrestees reveal that larceny is the leading charge among street homeless individuals. More than a quarter of all unsheltered arrestees, 27.5% (1,907 people), were picked up for larceny at least once, generating 4,715 bookings, averaging 2.5 arrests per person.
- Low-level drug cases are the second most common charge. One-fifth of arrestees (1,400 people) were charged with drug-related offenses (usually simple drug possession), producing 1,752 arrests — about 1.3 arrests per person.
- Assault rounds out the top three, but at a much lower volume. Physical-force charges reached 18.5% of the cohort (1,285 people), responsible for 1,555 arrests (1.2 each). In 2024, New Yorkers overall had about 550 assault arrests per 100,000 people, while the unsheltered homeless population, roughly 12,000 people, had an estimated 13,000 per 100,000, about 20 to 25 times higher.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/23713131?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## Low-level property and drug charges drive arrests of unsheltered New Yorkers

- Among unsheltered individuals arrested in 2024, petit larceny is by far the most common charge, accounting for 26% of cases — 3,940 arrests in total — which is more than three times the number for the next most common charge, simple drug possession, with 1,004 arrests.
- Theft of services makes up 3.2% of arrests among unsheltered individuals, totaling 486 cases, the majority of which involve farebeating — highlighting how fare enforcement often functions as a point of entry into the justice system for people without stable housing.
- Of the 1,200 assault arrests logged against street-homeless New Yorkers in 2024, 543 cases (45%) were misdemeanor assault in the third degree, 460 cases (38%) were felony assaults and 197 cases (16%) specifically involved assaults on police or peace officers (PL 120.08 or 120.05-3).
- Around 16% of arrests for minor administrative or code violations in 2024 fell on unhoused individuals, indicating that routine ordinance enforcement disproportionately affects people living on the streets. This was before a sharp escalation in low-level enforcement, as subway violation arrests surged to 823 in the first quarter of 2025 — up 331% from the same period in 2019 and 146% in that period in 2024.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/23713205?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/23713268?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## Housing instability and serious mental illness are disproportionately common among New Yorkers [cycling through Rikers Island](https://hhinternet.blob.core.windows.net/uploads/2025/05/correctional-health-services-patient-profile-metrics-april-2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

- 26% of people in City jails are homeless or likely to be homeless when entering or leaving custody.
- 56% are enrolled in jail mental health services and 21% meet the definition of serious mental illness.
- These metrics demonstrate a strong overlap between homelessness, serious mental illness and jail admissions.

════════════════════════════════════════

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### How the System Works (or Doesn’t)
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-the-system-works-for-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:38.000Z
*This is one of three supporting documents connected to Vital City’s recommendations on serious mental illness and homelessness.*

## A profile of the population

On any given night, about [4,000 people](https://files.hudexchange.info/reports/published/CoC%5FPopSub%5FCoC%5FNY-600-2024%5FNY%5F2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are living on the street in New York City. That figure, drawn from a point-in-time count, understates the scale of the problem: Because people cycle in and out of unsheltered homelessness, the number of unique individuals affected over the course of a year is likely much higher.

New York isn’t alone among American cities in facing this issue: In fact, the scale of the problem is not especially bad by some measures. Unlike most large U.S. cities, which have larger unsheltered populations as a portion of all homeless individuals, New York guarantees a temporary bed to anyone who needs one. This legal [right to shelter](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/shelter/resources/resources.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the network of facilities that go with it keep roughly 95% of homeless people indoors, leaving a concentrated group with acute needs and a demonstrated reluctance to accept a shelter bed (or sometimes even a nonshelter bed) on the street. In a dense city, the visibility of this troubled population can fuel perceptions of disorder and personal risk that exceed the problem’s actual scale.

Within this population, needs and circumstances vary widely. [Many people grapple](https://files.hudexchange.info/reports/published/CoC%5FPopSub%5FCoC%5FNY-600-2024%5FNY%5F2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with serious mental illness and/or substance use disorders. Some have conditions such as [schizophrenia](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6880407/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or [bipolar disorder](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7282102/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that respond to sustained treatment and support; others live with [personality disorders](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11110170/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that require long-term psychosocial care. [Co-occurring substance use](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4833089/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is common and complicates engagement; to the untrained eye, a seeming mental illness crisis may in fact be drug-induced psychosis that wears off when the drug’s effects subside. Another complicating factor is traumatic brain injuries (TBI), which is estimated to affect [more than half of people experiencing homelessness](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7859891/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=People%20experiencing%20homelessness%20are%20at,to%20severe%20TBI%20%5B10%5D).

While it’s true that a person who is homeless is more likely to be a victim than a perpetrator, unstable people living on the street can indeed pose serious safety risks. In 2024, 1,285 street-homeless people were arrested for assault, a rate more than 20 times that of the total city population. Yet criminal offending isn’t a factor in prioritizing who gets the most focused attention, even on the City’s [“Top 50” lists](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/13/nyregion/jordan-neely-top-50-mental-illness.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — the informal name for the internal rosters used to coordinate work on the most serious subway and street cases.

Particular crimes committed by these individuals loom large and heighten public fear. There was the fatal 2022 [subway shoving](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/05/nyregion/martial-simon-michelle-go.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of Michelle Go in the Times Square-42nd Street station and, more recently, the 2024 [stabbing spree](https://abc7ny.com/post/ramon-rivera-indicted-fatal-stabbing-3-people-manhattan-grand-jury/15677086/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across Manhattan that left three people dead. Untreated illness and addiction also often manifest as erratic behavior that many experience as threatening. For the individuals themselves, surviving in public without effective care means worsening health, criminal justice involvement, vulnerability to victimization and repeated emergencies, often resulting in an unbroken cycle through the street, shelter, ER and jail akin to [those Dr. Ross MacDonald identified](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29176106/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in his analysis of Rikers Island “hot spotters.”

## What government currently does about the challenge

[Billions of public dollars](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/071-DHS.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are spent each year on both homelessness and behavioral health, yet this specific cohort remains too disconnected from sustained attention, typically cycling through brief and redundant contacts with police, hospitals and shelters before returning to the street. The visible churn convinces the public that government cannot care for the most vulnerable people or maintain order in common spaces.

Of course, even if everything ran like clockwork, there would be crises and failures. These are bedevilingly difficult cases to manage. Government and nonprofit providers put an enormous amount of thought and commitment into addressing difficult circumstances. But far too much effort, money and time are squandered because multiple systems operate in parallel — the police, 911 and 311, EMS, homeless-services outreach teams, public hospitals and nonprofit providers. Each has different mandates, funding sources, data systems and protocols. Handoffs are inconsistent; information is siloed; continuous case management and accountability are absent. Outreach teams often [lose track](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/safer-for-all/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of clients once cases move outside their geography or specialty. Hospitals frequently discharge psychiatric patients back to the street after [brief observation](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/planning/docs/comprehensive-psychiatric-emergency-program-annual-summary.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) because longer-stay treatment beds and step-down options are scarce. Judges who see mentally ill or drug-addicted defendants have few viable pathways to secure treatment instead of jail because effective programs [have limited slots](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/safer-for-all/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). At Rikers Island, [an estimated one-third of people](https://citylimits.org/opinion-enhancing-access-to-supportive-housing-is-key-to-criminal-justice-reform/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) admitted in 2023 were homeless before arrest; upon release, [only about 3% of detainees](https://mhp.urbanjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/07/Brad-H-53rd-report-final-2024%5F06%5F28-email.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with serious mental illness were connected to supportive housing, with most returning to shelters or the street.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/atw_ihnyclf9ohtm_homelessnessspending-12-8-png-auto-format-compress-1776259663235.jpg)

### 1\. Contact with individuals in crisis and what follows

It’s not easy to get one’s arms around all the opportunities for official intervention — the many ways in which a seriously mentally ill or otherwise unstable homeless person living on the street encounters police, mental health professionals, social workers and others — but it’s important to try to see the current tangled system in all its complexity.

There are two primary ways unsheltered individuals in public spaces with serious mental illness will make contact with the system: police dispatch (i.e., 911) in response to a crisis, and outreach teams (sometimes civilian, sometimes a mix of police and civilian) that initiate contact with individuals even when there is no reported emergency.

After an encounter, police (usually) can transport an individual involuntarily to a hospital for a psychiatric assessment if they’re in psychiatric distress and qualify for transport, which under the law is defined as presenting a danger to themselves or others, a definition that includes the inability to take care of their own basic needs. If the person does not qualify for involuntary transport, then they could either be arrested if alleged to engage in criminal activity, or offered to be connected to different services (e.g., housing).

Not all people who live on the street are in the throes of crisis, but crises happen with some level of frequency. New York City’s behavioral health crisis response still defaults to 911, with police and EMS as the primary responders. The NYPD fields more than [150,000 calls](https://citymeetings.nyc/meetings/new-york-city-council/2024-09-23-1000-am-committee-on-mental-health-disabilities-and-addiction/chapter/designation-of-individuals-as-emotionally-disturbed-persons-edps/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Both%20NYPD%20and%20FDNY%20categorize,responded%20to%20118%2C387%20EDP%20calls) each year involving psychiatric distress (a number that includes people who are housed). Police are usually present for three reasons: the possibility of violence, social workers’ preference for backup in unpredictable situations and the legal requirement that only police can carry out involuntary transports.

Alongside 911, 311 serves as the City’s [nonemergency intake](https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/311-Service-Requests-from-2010-to-Present/erm2-nwe9/about%5Fdata?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and routing line for homeless-related concerns. In 2024, the [DHS](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/outreach/street-outreach.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Department of Homeless Services) handled about two-thirds of these calls, and the NYPD handled the remaining third. Among the City’s outreach efforts, co-response teams — the MTA’s [clinician-led SCOUT](https://www.mta.info/document/135741?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Subway Co-Response Outreach Teams), a daytime program conducted in partnership with DHS, and [PATH](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2024/10/mayor-adams-new-co-response-operation-focused-serving-more-new-yorkers-need-on?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Partnership Assistance for Transit Homelessness), an overnight program led by the NYPD, DHS and the City’s public hospital system — are among the most recently conceived initiatives. These teams work to actively find and engage people in distress instead of waiting for a call to come in. Their models pair mental health clinicians with police officers to handle crises together, combining treatment expertise with public safety backup. (Though they are expanding, they remain small: SCOUT began with two pilot teams and is [slated to reach roughly 10](https://www.mta.info/document/135741?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by year’s end. PATH does not publish similar numbers.)

There is growing interest, including by Mayor-elect Mamdani, in the City’s [B-HEARD](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/b-heard?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division) pilot — unarmed teams of clinicians and EMTs dispatched to eligible mental health 911 calls instead of police — as an alternative. The program’s current footprint in 31 precincts (of 78) and roughly 15,000 calls handled in 2024 remains a small amount relative to need. And, as with many if not all of the programs and approaches, there has been no reliable (or publicly available) assessment of what kinds of problems B-HEARD is effective at addressing and what it is not.

B-HEARD was [modeled](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/pressrelease/new-york-city-announces-new-mental-health-teams-to-respond-to-mental-health-crises/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon, pairing health professionals with responders for behavioral health crises, but it does not fulfill the same role. CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) combines crisis response with sustained, proactive outreach in the community, while in New York City that outreach is handled by separate street outreach teams rather than B-HEARD. B-HEARD focuses on reacting to selected 911 calls during limited hours instead of serving as a default, community-based alternative. The result is often trading one type of responder for another rather than changing how and when help reaches people.

Both strategies, B-HEARD and involuntary transports, suffer from an [absence](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-of-the-behavioral-health-emergency-assistance-response-divisions-effectiveness-in-responding-to-individuals-with-mental-health-crises-and-meeting-its-goals/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of sufficient publicly reported outcome measures to tell policymakers whether these responses actually improve stability, reduce repeat crises and connect people to care. This makes it difficult to evaluate their effects and determine whether they’re as effective as other nonpolice alternative response programs (e.g., [Denver’s STAR](https://www.urban.org/research/publication/evaluating-alternative-crisis-response-denvers-support-team-assisted-response?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Support Team Assisted Response)).

**This raises a crucial recurring theme: The orientation of the current system — to deal mainly with point-in-time crises instead of sustained attention to a particular person throughout their life course — means that neither government nor anyone else with responsibility has a panoramic view of how any one individual is doing after the crisis.**

Much of the [public reporting](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/03/mayor-adams-keeps-mental-health-week-moving-announcing-11-000-engagements-3-000-services?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on these efforts remains focused on activity — contacts, referrals and transports. But there is little known about durable results such as housing retention, reduced crisis recurrence or diversion from the justice system. Without those measures, it is difficult to know whether scaling up is translating into lasting impact.

By contrast, several civilian outreach models have expanded in recent years. State OMH’s (Office of Mental Health’s) [SOS](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/adults/sos/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Safe Options Support) teams [grew from four to 20](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/resources/newsltr/docs/omhnewsfall2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) between 2022 and 2025, with press coverage citing State data showing [800 people placed into permanent housing](https://cbcare.org/wp-content/uploads/Safe-Options-Support-Newsletter-4-28-25.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in New York City from April 2022 to April 2025 after 58,000 engagements. SOS teams are multidisciplinary groups (clinicians, peers and care managers) who do persistent, field-based outreach both topside and underground, stay with people to help navigate paperwork and appointments, and broker placements into Safe Haven / stabilization beds and supportive or permanent housing.

The City has made numerous concerted efforts to knit together the fragmented system and focus on those in greatest need. One example is the [StreetSmart](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/opportunity/pdf/evidence/dhs-integrated-case-management-overview.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) application. StreetSmart, a project of the Department of Homeless Services, is a digital by-name list — a shared, person-specific roster used by City-contracted outreach providers to track individuals living unsheltered and to record engagements and progress over time. This is a real innovation. Unfortunately, it excludes many nonprofits that are not under City contract and therefore are not bound by the City’s privacy rules. Health, housing and police data are not integrated, and health-privacy rules restrict certain types of data sharing. These gaps make it difficult to measure outcomes or coordinate care effectively.

### 2\. Involuntary Transport & Hospitalization

After a response or outreach team makes contact with an unsheltered individual, the next step is assessing whether the individual is in psychiatric distress. If an individual is in crisis, both police and clinicians have the power of involuntary removal to a hospital (under New York State Mental Hygiene Law Sections 9.41 and 9.58). The current administration has [leaned into](https://www.qchron.com/editions/queenswide/adams-makes-push-for-involuntary-commitment/article%5F053e4a1b-e727-483f-b7ff-57a41f78febf.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) involuntary transport to hospitals under the Mental Hygiene Law as part of its strategy. It’s unclear whether expanded use of involuntary transport will break existing cycles or worsen them — an uncertainty the City should resolve through rigorous evaluation. It is critical that the City learn what the results are so that it can determine how most effectively to implement the law. In 2024, police initiated about [7,000 involuntary transports](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/issue-briefs-and-reports?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) ([Section 9.41](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.41?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)), roughly two-thirds of which originated from 911 calls. Clinicians accounted for another 661 ([Section 9.58](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.58?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)). There is no public accounting of whether the removals in 2024 are more or fewer than in the past. Also, while [57% of individuals](https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiOTRjZDNlZWYtZTdjZi00ZDNmLTkxODItNDc3NDFjZmMzNTBmIiwidCI6IjM1YzgyODE2LTZjNTYtNDQzYi1iYWY2LTgzMTIxNjNjYWRjMSJ9&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) transported pursuant to an order issued by a clinician (9.58) are admitted, there is no public reporting on how many individuals are admitted into psychiatric care after a police transport (9.41).

Once at the hospital, a person can be held for a short evaluation under [Section 9.40](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.40?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), typically lasting up to 72 hours. This evaluation typically occurs in a [CPEP (Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program)](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/queens/services/behavioral-health/psychiatry/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) unit, the designated psychiatric emergency department. If doctors determine that the person still needs inpatient care, they may be admitted under [Section 9.39](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.39?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which allows up to 15 days of emergency hospitalization. For people who continue to need treatment, the hospital can extend the stay under [Sections 9.27](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.27?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or [9.37](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.37?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), based on certification by doctors and a psychiatrist, for up to 60 days. If more time is required, the hospital must seek a court order under [Section 9.33](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.33?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to keep the person longer. A small number of [extended-care units](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/pressrelease/innovative-new-unit-for-patients-with-severe-mental-illness-opens-at-nyc-health-hospitals-elmhurst/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) provide about 90 to 120 days of treatment, and there are also [medical respite beds](https://www.health.ny.gov/health%5Fcare/medicaid/redesign/sdh/respite.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for patients with physical health needs.

If an individual is not admitted or discharged, options are extremely limited. Even if admitted to psychiatric care, individuals [may face prolonged waits](https://www.osc.ny.gov/press/releases/2024/03/dinapoli-percentage-new-yorkers-mental-illness-rose-available-psychiatric-beds-declined?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in emergency departments due to psychiatric boarding — when patients remain in the ER for extended periods because no inpatient psychiatric beds are available. There are few alternatives for those not admitted and difficulty accessing long-term or supportive housing options to ensure stability after discharge.

It is also worth noting that some constraints concerning long-term psychiatric care stem from State and federal financing and regulatory rules that limit what care is available and for how long, notably Medicaid’s [IMD exclusion](https://www.nami.org/advocacy/policy-priorities/improving-health/medicaid-imd-exclusion/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which generally prevents federal funding for adults aged 21 to 64 receiving care in psychiatric facilities with more than 16 beds.

### 3\. Treatment and other services

While improving the initial response to individuals in crisis is often presented as central to solving the problem, changing who initially responds when a crisis happens is not enough. If an individual is not admitted to a hospital or arrested, what happens next is typically what matters most. Same-day clinical access? [Intensive Mobile Treatment](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/program/intensive-mobile-treatment-imt?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (IMT), which provides support and treatment in streets, shelters and public spaces? Detox and [step-down care](https://iclinc.org/institute-for-community-living-report-shows-new-program-increased-capacity-to-serve-new-yorkers-with-the-most-significant-mental-health-challenges-including-individuals-living-on-streets-and-subways/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)? Supportive housing with services? And is there a smooth transition to this help?

Without the right resources at the right moment, most encounters eventually result in the person cycling back to emergency rooms, shelters or the street. B-HEARD can reduce police call volume, and it might reduce the risk of a given incident escalating, but it does not address the underlying problem of “What next?” or necessarily address the underlying problem motivating the report.

Again, the “What next?” question rears its head. The City does not publish systemwide data on how many of the police-initiated transports result in admission or for how long or what happened to the person upon release.

Treatment following inpatient hospitalization is crucial. [Assisted Outpatient Treatment](https://my.omh.ny.gov/analytics/saw.dll?dashboard&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which is court-ordered under Kendra’s Law, gives individuals psychiatric treatment plans to follow once they’ve been stabilized. It is an important piece of the puzzle, especially given evaluations both [within](https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ps.2010.61.10.976?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [outside](https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.prcp.20240162?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of New York that have found it to be effective in reducing psychiatric episodes and improved outcomes.

OMH’s [Assertive Community Treatment](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/act/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (ACT) shows [promising evidence](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17329462/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Results%3A%20%20Of%20the%2052,studies%2C%20assertive%20community%20treatment%20subjects) of stabilizing housing and reducing psychiatric crises. ACT serves adults with the highest, ongoing psychiatric needs; multidisciplinary teams provide community-based care with small caseloads, 24/7 crisis coverage and time-unlimited support for as long as the person benefits. Similar to ACT, the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health has implemented IMT teams that serve adults with serious mental illness who are often street- or shelter-based, recently incarcerated or repeatedly hospitalized. IMTs meet people in the field at points of crisis or transition (street, ER or jail/prison discharge) and remain engaged as long as clinically needed, often many months, until a step-down is appropriate. For IMT, however, a 2024 [City comptroller audit](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nyc-comptroller-audit-exposes-major-management-gaps-in-intensive-mobile-treatment-imt-for-new-yorkers-with-severe-mental-health-challenges/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found issues with tracking outcomes and program management. Incarceration data were not regularly tracked and treatment engagement was inconsistently measured. Reviews of providers varied in quality, follow-up on corrective actions lagged and the program still lacks transparent, system-level reporting to demonstrate durable outcomes — a gap also highlighted by a [New York Times investigation](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/nyregion/nyc-mental-illness-breakdowns.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) into the City’s fragmented mental health response. However, mobile treatment capacity is constrained: The City funds [31 IMT teams](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-report-on-intensive-mobile-treatment-initiative-carried-out-by-department-of-health-and-mental-hygiene/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) serving fewer than 1,000 clients, with similar pressure on State-funded ACT teams.

It is also worth noting that some constraints concerning long-term psychiatric care stem from State and federal financing and regulatory rules that limit what care is available and for how long, notably Medicaid’s IMD exclusion, which generally prevents federal funding for adults aged 21 to 64 receiving care in psychiatric facilities with more than 16 beds.

### 4\. Shelter and housing placements

Housing must be a central part of the approach to stabilizing people who lack it and are on the verge of psychiatric crisis. But even when the City can identify and reach people with the highest needs, individuals are typically routed to places that are, by design, temporary, including ERs; [crisis respite centers](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/crisis-emergency-services-respite-centers.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); [Safe Havens](https://www.nyc.gov/html/hhsaccelerator/downloads/pdf/DHS%20Safe%20Havens.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which are low-barrier, small-scale programs that provide private rooms and flexible rules for people coming directly from the street, who often resist traditional shelters due to their safety records, strict curfews, sobriety requirements and other rules; [stabilization beds](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/outreach/street-outreach.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which are low-threshold beds for a high-functioning population; general shelters; or short jail stays.

Some of these placement failures could be addressed by increasing Safe Haven and stabilization beds, speeding documentation, expanding mobile treatment capacity and improving handoffs.

Supportive housing — permanent affordable apartments with on-site services — is by far the most crucial component of any system to help this population. Yet today, approvals do not reliably translate into placements for unsheltered individuals. Despite the [strong evidence base](https://shnny.org/images/uploads/NY-NY-III-Interim-Report.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) concerning the effectiveness of supportive-housing programs, outreach programs have struggled to secure housing placements. [In 2024](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/01/06/homeless-supportive-housing-eric-adams-statistics/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), outreach teams secured supportive-housing approvals for 955 unsheltered people, but only 175 (18%) obtained a unit, often due to process barriers; at the same time, more than 4,100 supportive-housing units sat vacant. Unsheltered homeless people don’t just suffer from mental illness and addiction; they lack, and need, some community. Here, clubhouses like those run by [Fountain House](https://www.fountainhouse.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have helpfully expanded in recent years, giving individuals a psychologically healthy place to go during the day and a connection with related services. A person who is connected with others is more likely to get the help they need when they need it.

### 5\. Criminal justice interactions and what follow

In some instances, the initial interaction with police stems from criminal behavior. In 2024, NYPD recorded 15,274 arrests of unsheltered New Yorkers. Most commonly, these arrests are for petit larceny, misdemeanor drug offenses or assault charges.

When a police officer makes an arrest, the defendant is charged and brought before a judge for arraignment. At arraignment, the judge has the option to release the individual on their own recognizance pending the resolution of the case, release with certain conditions or set bail and hold the individual in detention. In the case of homeless individuals, lack of stable housing is sometimes considered by judges in determining risk of flight, and any amount of bail could effectively result in being held in jail pending trial if they are unable to afford it.

For individuals who appear to have a serious mental illness, judges will sometimes order an exam under Criminal Procedure Law 730 (”730 exam”), to determine whether the individual is an [incapacitated person](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/CPL/730.10?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a defendant who “as a result of mental disease or defect lacks capacity to understand the proceedings against him or to assist in his own defense.” For underlying misdemeanor charges, a finding of incapacitation results in the [dismissal of the underlying misdemeanor case](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/CPL/730.40?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as well as care and treatment in an appropriate institution for up to 90 days. For felony cases, longer orders of commitment are possible, and the status of the underlying criminal case will depend on whether or not it is ultimately indicted by the prosecutor. In cases of an indicted felony, the individual can be held in a State forensic psychiatric facility for up to [two-thirds of the maximum sentence](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/CPL/730.50?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) if the patient had been found guilty of the underlying felony. It is also worth noting that the process of 730 exams can often lead to many case delays and a much lengthier stay of incarceration or time in a psychiatric facility for individuals with serious mental illness.

In the absence of a 730 exam, prosecutors still have many tools at their disposal for individuals living with serious mental illness and/or substance use disorder. Included in these options are [mental health](https://ww2.nycourts.gov/mental-health-courts-overview-27066?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [drug-treatment courts](https://ww2.nycourts.gov/courts/problem%5Fsolving/drugcourts/overview.shtml?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as well as the possibility for treatment as a condition of a plea deal or as part of a final sentence.

For those who are living with serious mental illness who are held in jail, there are specialized units called [CAPS](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doc/media/caps.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Clinical Alternative to Punitive Segregation) units, as well as therapeutic beds, which provide treatment for individuals with serious mental illness while incarcerated. If convicted of a crime and transferred to State custody, there is a [continuum of care](https://doccs.ny.gov/medical-services?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for incarcerated individuals offered by OMH, including the [Central New York Psychiatric Center](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/facilities/cnpc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as well a statewide network of clinics, crisis beds and intermediate care program beds.

Upon release, reentry services are available through nonprofits, NYC Health + Hospitals programs and other City programs, such as the [Community Justice Reentry Network](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/programs/community-justice-reentry-network/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), that provide a variety of connections to treatment, care, housing and employment resources.

These are hard cases. Providing services to people living with mental illness is much more complex than providing food to the hungry. Many people of greatest concern do not realize they are ill, a condition known as [anosognosia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Anosognosia%20results%20from%20physiological%20damage%20to%20brain,hemisphere%2C%20and%20is%20thus%20a%20neuropsychiatric%20disorder.). Others carry trauma or deep distrust of systems and may refuse help repeatedly. Even a well-functioning system is likely to fail more often than it succeeds. But today, batting averages are dangerously low. The system’s flaws are clear: Information is siloed, coordination across agencies is thin, services are poorly matched to need and unevenly distributed, connections are not sustained as symptoms change over time and there is little culture of disciplined self-assessment or course correction. As with every other aspect of engagement with those living with serious mental illness and/or homelessness, the description of the system process does not always align perfectly with delivery. Often there are [not enough services, treatment programs, beds or housing options](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/documents/Safer-for-All.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to meet the needs of the individuals these were created to help.

## **Appendices**

# NYC homelessness & mental health budget (2024)

| Agency                                                                                                                                   | Line Items                                        | Amounts (2024) |
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------- | -------------- |
| [DHS](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2023/03/DHS.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com)                               | Outreach, Drop-In, Reception                      | $303.7M        |
| [DHS](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2023/03/DHS.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com)                               | Family Shelter Operations, Intake, Administration | $1.1B          |
| [DHS](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2023/03/DHS.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com)                               | Adult Shelter Operations, Intake, Administration  | $969.16M       |
| [DOHMH](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/816-DOHMH-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                         | Mental Health Services                            | $601.56M       |
| [DOHMH](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/816-DOHMH-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                         | Alcohol and Drug Prevention, Care and Treatment   | $153M          |
| [DOHMH](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/816-DOHMH-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                         | Developmental Disabilities                        | $10M           |
| [DOHMH](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/816-DOHMH-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                         | Administration                                    | $52M           |
| [H+H](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/819-H-H-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | Correctional Health Services                      | $285M          |
| [H+H](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/819-H-H-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | B-HEARD                                           | $13M           |
| [H+H](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/819-H-H-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | Mental Health Service Corps                       | $12M           |
| [H+H](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/819-H-H-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | Just Home                                         | $1M            |
| [H+H](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/819-H-H-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | DOHMH (Transfer)                                  | $37M           |
| [FDNY](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/057-FDNY.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | B-HEARD                                           | \-             |
| [FDNY](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/057-FDNY.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | Emergency Medical Services                        | $427M          |
| [OTI/311](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2025/03/Office-of-Technology-Innovation-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) | 311                                               | $61M           |
| [OTI/311](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2025/03/Office-of-Technology-Innovation-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) | 911                                               | $101M          |
| [OTI/311](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2025/03/Office-of-Technology-Innovation-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) | Administration, Operations                        | $66M           |
| [NYPD](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/056-NYPD.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | Transit                                           | $291M          |
| [NYPD](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/056-NYPD.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | Training                                          | $136M          |
|                                                                                                                                          | TOTAL                                             | $4.62B         |
| TOTAL                                                                                                                                    | $10.4B                                            |                |

## The evidence backing various policy approaches

The evidence table below does not attempt to rate the level of evidence for the programs indicated. Instead, it aims to be illustrative and provide an overview of what data and research are available for the programs.

# NYC programs: evidence and evaluation

| Category                                    | Program Name                                                                                                                                                                                                              | Description                                                                                                                                                                                                                         | Size and Stats                                                                | Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   |
| ------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Crisis Response and First Response Programs |                                                                                                                                                                                                                           |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     |                                                                               |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              |
|                                             | [B-HEARD](https://nychealthandhospitals.org/pressrelease/nyc-health-hospitals-launches-the-largest-mental-health-alternative-response-system-in-the-nation/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                         | Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division: health and mental health-only response to 911 calls; operated by FDNY EMS and H+H                                                                                         | 33,000 responses citywide (2024)                                              | NYC EvaluationCity Council [evaluation found](https://council.nyc.gov/data/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/B-HEARD-Evaluation-One-Pager-September-2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 88% of calls were resolved without police, EMS or hospital transport, with higher success in non-housing conditions.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |
|                                             | [Subway Safety](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/14/opinion/nyc-subway-homeless-mental-health.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Subway Safety Unit)                                                                              | Operation to clear the subway of homeless people, involving NYPD and social workers (initially a temporary NYPD pilot); homeless people relocated to shelters and/or hospitalized; program has been the subject of legal challenges | 1800 outreaches1150 subway removals (2024-to-date)                            | NYC EvaluationNo city evaluation has been performed; [advocacy groups](https://accountablepolicies.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Case-Review-3.22.23.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have raised concerns about quality of outreach.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              |
|                                             | [Directive 25](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/nyregion/eric-adams-involuntary-hospitalization-mentally-ill.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (NYPD Directive 25)                                                             | Directed "street homeless" individuals with mental illness to be involuntarily hospitalized.                                                                                                                                        | Unknown citywideAt least 2000 interactions (2023-to-date)                     | NYC EvaluationNo city evaluation has been performed; [advocacy groups](https://accountablepolicies.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Case-Review-3.22.23.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have raised concerns about implementation quality and protections against involuntary care.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  |
|                                             | [MCTs](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/crisis-emergency-services-mobile-crisis-teams.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Mobile Crisis Teams)                                                                   | Nonpolice mental health response for individuals in crisis; may be accessed via 311/988                                                                                                                                             | 200,000 responses citywide (2023)                                             | NYC EvaluationAn [evaluation of a different city effort](https://jmhsprograms.com/content/dam/web/jmhsprograms/documents/press-release/MobilecrisisExpansion.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) resulted in reductions of arrests, psychiatric hospitalizations and emergency room visits.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            |
|                                             | [CPEPs](https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/crisis-emergency-services-cpep.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Programs)                                                       | State-regulated 24/7 psychiatric emergency programs; recent State capital expansion initiative                                                                                                                                      | 11 programs through H+H (2024), additional programs through private hospitals | No NYC EvaluationAn evaluation of a similar program in the[ Midwest](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acem.14374?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)[finds effective results](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acem.14374?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     |
|                                             | [AOT](https://my.omh.ny.gov/analytics/saw.dll?dashboard&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Assisted Outpatient Treatment)                                                                                                             | Court-ordered outpatient treatment administered via OMH/localities                                                                                                                                                                  | 47,000 investigations, 96% petitions granted                                  | NYC[](https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ps.2010.61.10.976?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)a href="https://static.prisonpolicy.org/scans/NYDPH-report.pdf?utm\_source=chatgpt.com" target="\_blank">and State EvaluationsIndependent [statewide evaluation](https://static.prisonpolicy.org/scans/NYDPH-report.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) (2009) found reductions in hospitalization, homelessness, arrests and incarceration for AOT recipients. [City evaluation](https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ps.2010.61.10.976?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) also found the program effective.                                                                                                         |
|                                             | Medical Respite                                                                                                                                                                                                           | State-funded and H+H-run short-term medical respite beds for people exiting hospitals who are homeless                                                                                                                              | 75 beds                                                                       | No NYC Evaluation[A systematic review](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23728025/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that similar programs reduce hospital readmissions, inpatient days and admissions, and improve housing outcomes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                |
|                                             | [TIL](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dycd/services/runaway-homeless-youth/transitional-independent-living.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Transitional Independent Living)                                                          | Department of Youth and Community Development residential programs for youth (short-term crisis and long-term)                                                                                                                      | Unknown                                                                       | No NYC Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            |
|                                             | [ECUs](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/pressrelease/innovative-new-unit-for-patients-with-severe-mental-illness-opens-at-nyc-health-hospitals-kings-county/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Extended Care Units)             | H+H hospital-based psychiatric extended-care units.                                                                                                                                                                                 | 60 beds (2024)                                                                | No[](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7838487/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)NYC EvaluationA [systematic review](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7838487/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of rehab / extended-stay settings found that the most consistent outcome was reduced subsequent inpatient service use after discharge.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               |
|                                             | [Fountain House Clubhouses](https://www.fountainhouse.org/about/clubhouse-model?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                     | Free, voluntary, member-led clubhouse serving \~2,000 adults with serious mental illness                                                                                                                                            | \~2,000 members (2023)                                                        | NYC Evaluation An [NYU study](https://www.fountainhouse.org/assets/05201?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) showed 21% Medicaid cost savings from reduced hospitalizations.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               |
|                                             | Bridge to Home                                                                                                                                                                                                            | H+H program providing noncongregate medical respite / step-down beds                                                                                                                                                                | 46 beds (2024)                                                                | No NYC Evaluation[A systematic review](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23728025/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that these programs reduce hospital readmissions, inpatient days and admissions, and improve housing outcomes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  |
| Housing                                     |                                                                                                                                                                                                                           |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     |                                                                               |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              |
|                                             | [Safe Havens](https://www.nyc.gov/html/hhsaccelerator/downloads/pdf/DHS%20Safe%20Havens.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                         | Low-barrier, service-rich beds for street-homeless people; placements coordinated via DHS Joint Command Center                                                                                                                      | \~4,000 beds (2025)City combines this count with stabilization beds.          | No NYC EvaluationA [Ward Family Foundation evaluation](https://www.va.gov/HOMELESS/docs/GPD/providers/EvidenceBaseSupportingLowDemandHousing.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) found in another jurisdiction that from 2011-2013, 55% of veteran participants were moved into stable housing                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     |
|                                             | [Supportive Housing](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/supportive-housing.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                  | Permanent housing with on-site services; mixed funding (City/State/federal); includes scattered-site and congregate                                                                                                                 | 40,472 units, 94% occupancy (2025)                                            | NYC[](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/28351/412024-The-Corporation-for-Supportive-Housing-s-Returning-Home-Initiative-System-Change-Accomplishments-after-Three-Years.PDF?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com)Evaluation[Evaluation found](https://shnny.org/images/uploads/NY-NY-III-Interim-Report.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) net public cost savings and reduced service use vs. eligible non-tenants; [Urban Institute](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/28351/412024-The-Corporation-for-Supportive-Housing-s-Returning-Home-Initiative-System-Change-Accomplishments-after-Three-Years.PDF?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) study showed similar findings. |
|                                             | [Stabilization Beds](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/outreach/street-outreach.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                     | Short-term, low-barrier stabilization sites for unsheltered individuals                                                                                                                                                             | City combines this count with Safe Havens.                                    | No NYC Evaluation[A systematic review](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8427990/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) of homelessness interventions, including stabilization beds, was found to outperform other services to improve residential stability.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     |
|                                             | [Drop-in Centers](https://www.nyep.uscourts.gov/reentry/NYC%20Homeless%20Shelters.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                               | DHS-contracted centers offering basic services and case management                                                                                                                                                                  | 9 centers (2025)                                                              | No NYC Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            |
|                                             | [RHY](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dycd/services/runaway-homeless-youth.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Runaway and Homeless Youth)                                                                                               | Department of Youth and Community Development shelters for youth / young adults experiencing homelessness                                                                                                                           | 60 beds (2025)                                                                | No NYC EvaluationA Los Angeles, California, [study of a similar youth drop center](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6450788/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) found a positive impact for participants.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     |
| Justice Involved                            |                                                                                                                                                                                                                           |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     |                                                                               |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              |
|                                             | [JISH](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2025/08/04/2935/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Last%20year%2C%20the%20Council%20succeeded,held%20in%20pre%2Dtrial%20detention.) (Justice-involved / jail in-reach supportive housing) | Justice-involved / jail in-reach supportive housing (program naming varies)                                                                                                                                                         | 120 units (2025)                                                              | NYC[](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282107665%5FNYC%5FFrequent%5FUsers%5FFUSE%5FInitiative%5FEvaluation%5Fof%5Fa%5FSupportive%5FHousing%5FIntervention?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)Evaluation [Evaluation found](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282107665%5FNYC%5FFrequent%5FUsers%5FFUSE%5FInitiative%5FEvaluation%5Fof%5Fa%5FSupportive%5FHousing%5FIntervention?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that justice-involved supportive housing significantly reduced cycling between public systems, days spent in jail and shelter, and use of crisis care health services.                                                                                                                |
|                                             | [Transitional Housing](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/programs/transitional-housing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                      | MOCJ-funded short-term housing options for justice-involved individuals (various sponsors)                                                                                                                                          | 1000 beds (2023)                                                              | NYC Evaluation[Descriptive data](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/programs/transitional-housing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) provided by MOCJ show that participants had a lower rearrest rate.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            |
|                                             | [Just Home](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/036-22/nyc-health-hospitals-department-housing-preservation-development-new-housing-for?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/0)                                                            | Supportive housing initiative for medically vulnerable people leaving custody; funded by H+H and working with HPD and service providers                                                                                             | 83 units                                                                      | No NYC EvaluationAn evaluation of [a similar program in Ohio](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/25716/412632-Supportive-Housing-for-Returning-Prisoners-Outcomes-and-Impacts-of-the-Returning-Home-Ohio-Pilot-Project.PDF?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that participants had greater housing stability and were significantly less likely to be rearrested, convicted or reincarcerated.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  |
|                                             | Drug Treatment Courts                                                                                                                                                                                                     | Statewide problem-solving courts focusing on substance use                                                                                                                                                                          | Unknown                                                                       | NYC Evaluation[Center for Court Innovation evaluation](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/23826/412867-A-Statewide-Evaluation-of-New-York-s-Adult-Drug-Courts.PDF?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that participants were less likely to be arrested.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          |
|                                             | [HOPE](https://knowledgebank.criminaljustice.ny.gov/heroin-overdose-prevention-and-education-hope-program?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Heroin Overdose Prevention and Education)                                                | Prearraignment diversion program run by the Richmond County District Attorney's Office (Staten Island)                                                                                                                              | Unknown                                                                       | NYC EvaluationAn [MOCJ evaluation](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/HOPE-Report-2.19.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that a Richmond County HOPE pilot reduced recidivism.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                |

## National models and programs

Programs from across the U.S. that have been referenced as potential models to introduce in New York City.

# Case studies from other large cities

| Category                                        | Program Name                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          | Description                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     | City / Jurisdiction                          | Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        |
| ----------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Crisis Response and First Response Programs     |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |                                              |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   |
|                                                 | [STAR](https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Offices/Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory/Public-Health-Environment/Community-Behavioral-Health/Behavioral-Health-Solutions/STAR-Program?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Support Team Assisted Response) | Embedded in 911 and coordinated by Denver Public Health and Denver 911; staffed by mental-health clinicians and paramedics (not police or fire)                                                                                                                                                                                                 | Denver, CO                                   | Denver Evaluation [Descriptive data](https://cdphe.colorado.gov/star-program?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) find no police calls, no arrests and no injuries. A [CEBP evaluation](https://behavioralpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Piza-et-al%5FSTAR-Evaluation%5F5.3.21.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found no significant impact on nearby serious or violent crimes. |
|                                                 | [HEART](https://www.durhamcountync.gov/4687/HEART-Program?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams)                                                                                                                                       | Civilian clinicians and peer responders dispatched through 911 or 311 for nonviolent crises. Data are tracked under the City's racial-equity framework.                                                                                                                                                                                         | Durham, NC                                   | Pilot Evaluation Descriptive data of pilot year [show promise](https://www.durhamnc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/54631/RTI%5FDurham-HEART-Pilot-Program-Report-May-2023?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and is planned for evaluation.                                                                                                                                           |
|                                                 | [Albuquerque Community Safety](https://www.cabq.gov/acs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                                                                                         | A stand-alone 911-response department staffed by behavioral-health clinicians, peer support workers and outreach specialists who respond to calls for mental-health, homelessness and substance-use concerns; no police dispatch                                                                                                                | Albuquerque, NM                              | No Formal Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              |
|                                                 | [SCRT](https://www.sf.gov/street-crisis-response-team?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Street Crisis Response Team)                                                                                                                                                             | Part of the City's "crisis response continuum." Each team includes a paramedic, behavioral-health clinician and peer specialist responding to behavioral-health 911 calls.                                                                                                                                                                      | San Francisco, CA                            | San Francisco Evaluation Evaluation is [in process](https://prise.ucsf.edu/project/evaluating-san-franciscos-street-crisis-response-team-as-a-model-for-mental-health-and-substance-use-treatment-for-adults-experiencing-homelessness/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).                                                                                                    |
|                                                 | [CIRCLE](https://mayor.lacity.gov/sites/g/files/wph2066/files/2023-10/CIRCLE%5FFAQ%5FEnglish%5FSpanish%5F10.2023.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Crisis and Incident Response through Community-Led Engagement)                                                            | Civilian outreach teams staffed by community-based organizations that respond to nonemergency 911 calls involving unhoused people and behavioral crises; integrated through 311 and coordinated by the Mayor's Office of Public Safety                                                                                                          | Los Angeles, CA                              | No Formal Evaluation Program data show [14,000 incidents diverted and 1,000](https://mayor.lacity.gov/news/confronting-mental-health-crisis-mayor-bass-announces-circle-program-expansion-westside?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) individuals were referred to mental and behavioral services.                                                                             |
|                                                 | [Street Response Team](https://www.portland.gov/streetresponse?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                                                                                  | Civilian alternative response program for responding to mental health emergencies                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               | Portland, OR                                 | Portland Evaluation[Descriptive evaluation findings](https://www.pdx.edu/homelessness/PSR-Evaluation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found a 3.5% reduction in total calls responded to by police and a 19% reduction in police response.                                                                                                                                   |
| Behavioral Health Treatment and Hospitalization |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |                                              |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   |
|                                                 | [CMHP](https://www.jud11.flcourts.org/Criminal-Mental-Health-Project?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Criminal Mental Health Project) / Miami Model                                                                                                                             | A comprehensive mental health diversion program built to eliminate the criminalization of mental illness; utilizes prebooking and postbooking jail diversion; employs the SOAR model to expedite access to federal benefits                                                                                                                     | Miami-Dade County, FL                        | No Formal Evaluation[Descriptive program data](https://www.jud11.flcourts.org/docs/Jail%5Fdiversion%5Fthe%5FMiami%5Fmodel%20CNS%202020.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) find CMHP to provide an effective and cost-efficient solution for individuals with serious mental illness and co-occurring serious mental illness.                                               |
|                                                 | [Judge Ed Emmett Mental Health Diversion Center](https://www.theharriscenter.org/location/judge-ed-emmett-mental-health-diversion-center?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                        | Law enforcement transports individuals identified with mental health needs directly to the Diversion Center instead of jail, based on voluntary participation. The process takes an officer 11 minutes compared to 4 hours for jail booking. 24/7 diversion drop-off for police transporting people in behavioral crisis instead of jail or ER. | Houston / Harris County, TX                  | Houston EvaluationEvaluation found that program participants who were homeless experienced [reductions in psychiatric hospitalizations](https://mhneedscouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Harris-Center-Jail-Diversion-Evaluation-2022-09-30-Final.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the long term, but not short term.                                            |
|                                                 | [CBH](https://cbhphilly.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Community Behavioral Health)                                                                                                                                                                                      | A City-controlled managed-care organization integrating Medicaid behavioral-health dollars into a unified delivery system focused on recovery, housing and harm reduction                                                                                                                                                                       | Philadelphia, PA                             | Philadelphia Evaluation[External quality review](https://www.pa.gov/content/dam/copapwp-pagov/en/dhs/documents/healthchoices/hc-services/documents/CBH-2023-MY-2022-ATR-Final.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of descriptive data finds improvements in reducing psychiatric hospitalizations.                                                                          |
|                                                 | [Crisis Now Framework](https://crisisnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/CrisisNow-BusinessCase.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                                              | 24/7 crisis system with regional crisis call centers, mobile teams and short-term stabilization facilities                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      | Arizona, statewide (Maricopa County pioneer) | No Formal Evaluation An [exploratory process evaluation](https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.202000114?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is in progress.                                                                                                                                                                                                         |
|                                                 | [Crisis Response Center (Sequential Intercept Model)](https://www.samhsa.gov/communities/criminal-juvenile-justice/sequential-intercept-model?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                   | Diversion by law enforcement that uses a "no wrong door" policy, meaning no exclusions based on payer status, intoxication or involuntary status; features a dedicated entrance to expedite law enforcement drop-off, taking officers about 10 minutes                                                                                          | Tucson, AZ                                   | No Formal Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              |
|                                                 | [CM](https://www.recoveryanswers.org/resource/contingency-management/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Contingency Management)                                                                                                                                                  | An evidence-based treatment primarily for stimulant use disorders (like cocaine or methamphetamine); uses incentives, often cash payments, for specific positive behaviors such as providing clean drug tests                                                                                                                                   | General practice (e.g., San Francisco pilot) | Systematic Review Review finds CM to be [an effective treatment](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2782768?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) for individuals with opioid use disorder.                                                                                                                                                          |
|                                                 | [MAT](https://americanaddictioncenters.org/addiction-medications?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Medication-Assisted Treatment)                                                                                                                                                | Utilizes medications like methadone or buprenorphine (Suboxone) to treat opioid use disorder; can include flexible take-home policies and delivery services to increase access and stability                                                                                                                                                    | General practice (e.g., San Francisco)       | San Francisco Evaluation [Evaluation finds](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.10.21267477v1.full.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) that MAT reduces hospitalizations and improves stability.                                                                                                                                                            |
|                                                 | [MAP](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3726334/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Managed Alcohol Use Program)                                                                                                                                                           | Stabilization and harm-reduction intervention for people with alcohol use disorder, sometimes involving managed alcohol programs where clients are given small amounts of alcohol; also known as "wet housing"                                                                                                                                  | General practice (e.g., San Francisco)       | Systematic Review[Review finds](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9311344/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) MAPs a promising harm reduction intervention.                                                                                                                                                                                                             |
| Housing                                         |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |                                              |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   |
|                                                 | [HRH](https://heller.brandeis.edu/opioid-policy/community-resources/harm-reduction-housing/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Harm Reduction Housing)                                                                                                                  | Provides stable living environments without sobriety mandates; offers 24/7 harm reduction supplies, counseling and medical oversight on-site to reduce the risks associated with drug use, such as using alone                                                                                                                                  | Boston, MA                                   | No Formal Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              |
|                                                 | [Temporary Shelter Provision (Winter Shelter Beds)](https://www.lahsa.org/winter-shelter?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                                                        | Provision of additional temporary shelter capacity during the winter months                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     | Los Angeles County, CA                       | Los Angeles Evaluation [A study finds](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VXFef56O8z5ltzTfvJzeQXXfsCfZiy6i/view?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) these programs reduce unsheltered homelessness as well as crime and ER visits.                                                                                                                                                |
|                                                 | [Tiny Cabins / Tiny Homes](https://dignitymoves.org/san-francisco/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                                                                              | Noncongregate, cost-effective interim housing options; San Francisco's first cabin community was established quickly on borrowed private land for temporary use                                                                                                                                                                                 | San Francisco, CA                            | No Formal Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              |
| Justice Involved                                |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |                                              |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   |
|                                                 | [LEAD](https://leadbureau.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Let Everyone Advance with Dignity)                                                                                                                                                                              | Case management diversion for low-level offenses, replacing arrest with community-based care                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    | Seattle, WA (replicated nationally)          | North Carolina Evaluation [Participants are less likely](https://psychiatry.duke.edu/sites/default/files/2023-01/Duke%20LEAD%20Evaluation%20Full%20Report%5FUpdated%201-24-23.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to have arrests and outpatient behavioral visits as well as higher utilization of medication.                                                             |

## **Glossary of terms**

### Systems, agencies and programs

**311/911 Systems**

311/911 are the City’s call systems consisting of nonemergency (311) and emergency (911) dispatch lines, routing homeless concerns through 311 and psychiatric crises through 911.

[**988**](https://nyc988.cityofnewyork.us/en/crisis-services/mobile-crisis-teams/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

988 is the City’s suicide and crisis call system, which can also dispatch DOHMH operated MCT teams to individuals in crisis.

[**AOT**](https://my.omh.ny.gov/analytics/saw.dll?dashboard&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Assisted Outpatient Treatment (Kendra’s Law)**

AOT is authorized by a 1999 State law (Kendra’s Law), consists of court-ordered treatment plans and mandates medication, therapy and case management for individuals with severe illness and treatment noncompliance history. The petition can be filed by a range of individuals including a hospital director, psychiatrist, psychologist, probation officer or family members.

[**CIDI**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/cidi/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Center for Innovation through Data Intelligence**

CIDI is the Mayor’s Office data hub. It consists of integrated databases linking City systems and coordinates cross-agency data integration.

[**DHS**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— NYC Department of Homeless Services**

DHS is the City agency that funds and operates shelter systems, street outreach providers and street outreach nurses, and manages temporary living (e.g., Safe Havens).

[**DOHMH**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene**

DOHMH is the City agency that operates behavioral health programs, deploys mobile crisis teams and coordinates mental health strategy with H+H and nonprofits.

[**H+H**](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— NYC Health + Hospitals**

H+H is the City’s public hospital system, which operates emergency departments, CPEPs, Correctional Health Services at Rikers and different treatment and transition programs (e.g., Just Home).

[**HUD**](https://www.hud.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development**

HUD is the federal agency that funds housing vouchers and homelessness assistance programs including Continuum of Care and HUD-VASH.

[**MOCJ**](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice**

MOCJ is the mayor’s coordinating office for criminal justice policy. It manages diversion and reentry initiatives and oversees supportive housing programs for justice-involved individuals.

[**OASAS**](https://oasas.ny.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Office of Addiction Services and Supports**

OASAS is the New York State agency that funds and operates substance use treatment programs, funds harm reduction and recovery services and oversees addiction treatment policy statewide.

[**OMH**](https://omh.ny.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— New York State Office of Mental Health**

OMH is the New York State agency that funds and operates psychiatric programs and institutions and oversees mental health policy statewide.

[**OTDA**](https://otda.ny.gov/hearings/request/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance**

OTDA is the State agency that administers emergency aid programs, funds supportive housing grants and oversees temporary assistance policy.

[**SAMHSA**](https://www.samhsa.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration**

SAMHSA is the federal agency that funds behavioral health block grants, supports State and local programs and sets national behavioral health policy.

[**VA**](https://www.va.gov/resources/helpful-va-phone-numbers/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs**

VA is the federal agency that operates veteran health facilities, runs HUD-VASH housing programs, and provides mental health services for veterans.

### Crisis outreach and treatment programs

[**ACT**](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/act/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Assertive Community Treatment**

ACT teams are operated by the New York State Office of Mental Health. They consist of psychiatrists, nurses, social workers and peer specialists, and provide 24/7 field-based treatment for adults with severe mental illness.

[**B-HEARD**](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/b-heard?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division**

B-HEARD is a City pilot program staffed by FDNY and H+H. It consists of unarmed clinician-EMT teams and responds to mental health 911 calls in select precincts.

[**CPEP**](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/services/mental-health-services/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program**

CPEP are 24/7 psychiatric emergency programs funded by the State and operated by City hospitals, providing critical crisis and evaluation services to individuals with serious mental illness.

[**CTI**](https://www.criticaltime.org/cti-model/background/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **\- Critical Time Intervention**

CTI, founded in New York City, is a time-limited, evidence-based case management model employed by SOS teams that provides intensive support during periods of transition for individuals in crisis and cycling between systems.

[**EOL**](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/home/downloads/pdf/press-releases/2022/the-subway-safety-plan.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— End of Line**

EOL are multiagency teams working at end-of-line stations as part of the Subway Safety Plan, connecting individuals to services.

[**FACT**](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/act/forensic-act-program-addendum.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Forensic Assertive Community Treatment**

FACT teams are a specialized ACT model. They consist of behavioral health clinicians and criminal justice liaisons and provide integrated treatment and supervision for people with serious mental illness involved in the justice system.

[**Fountain House Clubhouses**](https://www.fountainhouse.org/about/clubhouse-model?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Free, voluntary, member-led spaces administered and run by Fountain House, serving adults with serious mental illness in New York City.

[**IMT**](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/program/intensive-mobile-treatment-imt?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Intensive Mobile Treatment**

IMT teams are operated by DOHMH. They consist of clinical staff similar to ACT composition and treat people with serious mental illness who are homeless, recently incarcerated or repeatedly hospitalized.

[**MCTs**](https://nyc988.cityofnewyork.us/en/crisis-services/mobile-crisis-teams/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Mobile Crisis Teams**

MCTs are operated by DOHMH. They consist of clinician-led rapid-response units and respond to psychiatric crises dispatched through 988 or hospital networks.

[**Medical Respite**](https://www.health.ny.gov/health%5Fcare/medicaid/redesign/sdh/respite.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Medical respite is funded by the State and operated by H+H, offering short-term medical respite beds for people exiting hospitals who are homeless.

[**PATH**](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/10/mayor-adams-celebrates-one-year-anniversary-of-path-co-response-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Police and Transit Homelessness Co-response Program**

PATH operates primarily overnight; consists of joint teams from NYPD, DHS and H+H; and responds to homelessness in subway and transit systems.

[**SCOUT**](https://www.mta.info/document/135741?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Subway Clinician Outreach Unit Teams**

SCOUT operates primarily during daytime hours, consists of clinician-led teams partnered with MTA and DHS, and provides outreach in the subway system.

**Situation Tables**

Cross-agency meetings (police, clinicians, outreach, housing) reviewing the highest-risk individuals and coordinating targeted interventions.

[**SOS**](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/adults/sos/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **Teams — Safe Options Support**

SOS teams are funded by OMH, consist of multidisciplinary outreach workers and conduct street outreach to connect unsheltered individuals to housing and other services.

### Housing and shelter programs

[**JISH**](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2025/08/04/2935/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Last%20year%2C%20the%20Council%20succeeded,held%20in%20pre%2Dtrial%20detention.) **— Justice-Involved Supportive Housing**

JISH is a housing model that consists of apartments with intensive supervision and clinical services both for justice-involved individuals with serious mental illness exiting jail or prison.

[**Safe Haven Beds**](https://www.nyc.gov/html/hhsaccelerator/downloads/pdf/DHS%20Safe%20Havens.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Safe Havens, funded and operated by DHS, are low-threshold residential housing for street homeless individuals. They consist of single rooms with reduced rules (pets allowed, no curfews, couples permitted) and serve a high-need population who decline traditional shelters.

[**Stabilization Beds**](https://arc.net/l/quote/wcwofbuo?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Stabilization beds, funded and operated by DHS, are short-term, low-threshold beds for individuals transitioning from the street to more permanent housing. They are typically less service-intensive than Safe Havens.

[**Supportive Housing**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/supportive-housing.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Supportive housing is permanent affordable housing consisting of independent units with on-site case management and clinical services, and serving people with mental illness, disabilities or chronic homelessness.

[**Street-to-Housing Pilot**](https://www.voa-gny.org/services/street-to-home-pilot-program/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Street-to-Housing is a pilot run by the Volunteers of America, consisting of single-room units with on-site supports to place individuals directly from the street into housing without shelter system entry.

### Legal frameworks and mental hygiene laws

[**MHL 9.41**](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.41?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **(Police Removal)**

MHL 9.41 is a State mental hygiene law provision authorizing NYPD officers to transport individuals for psychiatric evaluation. It applies when someone poses danger to themselves or others or cannot meet basic needs.

[**MHL 9.58**](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.58?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **(Clinical Removal)**

MHL 9.58 is a State mental hygiene law provision authorizing licensed mental health professionals to order transport to hospitals. It applies under similar danger criteria as 9.41.

[**MHL 9.40 / 9.39 / 9.27 / 9.33**](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/TBA9?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

These are State psychiatric hospitalization statutes consisting of progressive commitment periods. They require escalating levels of clinical and judicial authorization:

- 9.40: Up to 72-hour evaluation
- 9.39: Up to 15-day emergency hospitalization
- 9.27 / 9.37: 60-day commitment with physician certification
- 9.33: Court-ordered extended hospitalization

[**Kendra’s Law**](https://my.omh.ny.gov/analytics/saw.dll?dashboard&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Kendra’s Law is a 1999 State statute. It established AOT following a homicide by a person with untreated schizophrenia and authorizes court-ordered outpatient treatment.

[**AB 210**](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill%5Fid=202120220AB210&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **(California)**

AB 210 is California legislation. It authorizes data sharing across health, housing and safety providers with confidentiality protections; it is cited as a model for cross-system coordination.

### Data and coordination initiatives

[**CAPS**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycccoc/caps/caps.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Coordinated Assessment and Placement System**

CAPS, operated by New York City’s Continuum of Care (CoC), is the City’s internal database for matching individuals to supportive housing and other placements.

[**CoC**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycccoc/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Continuum of Care**

New York City’s CoC is the HUD-mandated coordination system that consists of City agencies and nonprofit providers. It allocates federal homelessness funding and organizes service delivery.

[**StreetSmart**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/outreach/street-outreach.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

StreetSmart is DHS’ digital platform. It consists of a database tracking outreach contacts by name and records engagement and progress of unsheltered individuals.

[**SPOA**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/providers/resources/mental-illness-single-point-of-access.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Single Point of Access**

SPOA, operated by DOHMH, helps connect people with serious mental illness to the appropriate providers.

[**Top 50 Lists**](https://arc.net/l/quote/elhioega?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Top 50 lists are internal by-name rosters that identify the most vulnerable or frequently encountered individuals. They are used to prioritize interventions in subways and on streets.

### Funding and contracting

[**Outcome-Based Contracting**](https://golab.bsg.ox.ac.uk/the-basics/outcomes-based-contracting/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Outcome-based contracting is a proposed payment model for New York City nonprofits. It ties funding to results like housing stability or reduced crisis recurrence and shifts from activity-based to results-based reimbursement.

[**Bundled Payments**](https://www.cms.gov/priorities/innovation/key-concepts/bundled-payments?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Bundled payments are a proposed funding structure. They consist of single-payment streams covering all services for an individual (housing, care, outreach) and make one provider accountable for coordination.

**Prompt Pay Standard**

The prompt pay standard is a proposed contracting reform that requires timely payments to nonprofit providers and aims to prevent cash-flow crises that delay service delivery.

### Clinical and behavioral concepts

[**SMI**](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Serious Mental Illness**

SMI is a diagnosable mental, behavioral or emotional disorder — such as bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and schizophrenia — that substantially interferes with a person’s life and ability to function.

[**Co-Occurring Disorders / Dual Diagnosis**](https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/co-occurring-disorders-health-conditions?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

“Co-occurring disorders” refers to concurrent mental illness and substance use disorder. Common among street homeless populations, co-occurring disorders require integrated treatment approaches.

[**Anosognosia**](https://www.nami.org/about-mental-illness/common-with-mental-illness/anosognosia/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Anosognosia is a psychiatric symptom consisting of lack of awareness of one’s own mental illness. It contributes to treatment refusal in disorders like schizophrenia.

[**Psychosis**](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/understanding-psychosis?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **/ Drug-Induced Psychosis**

Psychosis is a mental state involving loss of contact with reality. It can be triggered or worsened by substance use and includes symptoms like hallucinations and delusions.

[**TBI**](https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/disorders/traumatic-brain-injury-tbi?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Traumatic Brain Injury**

TBI is a neurological injury caused by external physical trauma to the head due to assault, falls and accidents, ranging from mild concussions to severe brain damage.

════════════════════════════════════════

New York is entering an historic and pivotal transition. Mayor-elect Mamdani faces big problems on housing, safety, mental health, transit, and more.

Vital City is uniquely positioned to offer clear, practical guidance rooted in evidence. Ideas that could actually be implemented and work.

But to meet this moment, we need to grow.

That’s why, this year, for the first time, we’re asking our readers to support Vital City directly. We’re aiming for 700 inaugural supporters by December 31.

Your support will help us expand our editorial capacity, strengthen our operational support, and continue delivering thoughtful, relevant and informative work in 2026.

If this article informed your thinking, challenged you, or helped you understand the city more clearly, please consider supporting the work behind it.

[**Make your tax-deductible gift and help us reach 700 supporters.**](https://bit.ly/vc-eoy-article?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Vital City. This is one of three supporting documents connected to Vital City’s recommendations on serious mental illness and homelessness, [“What To Do (and Not To Do) About People in Crisis on Streets and Subways.”](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-to-do-about-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways) Find ["What the Data Show"](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-the-data-show-people-in-crisis-on-the-streets-and-subways) here and ["Case Studies from Other Large Cities"](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/case-studies-from-large-cities-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways) here.

[Download PDF](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tc0vOUB5vkV6ekkac-0%5FFw5trNJQeAds/view?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Print PDF

## A profile of the population

On any given night, about [4,000 people](https://files.hudexchange.info/reports/published/CoC%5FPopSub%5FCoC%5FNY-600-2024%5FNY%5F2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are living on the street in New York City. That figure, drawn from a point-in-time count, understates the scale of the problem: Because people cycle in and out of unsheltered homelessness, the number of unique individuals affected over the course of a year is likely much higher.

New York isn’t alone among American cities in facing this issue: In fact, the scale of the problem is not especially bad by some measures. Unlike most large U.S. cities, which have larger unsheltered populations as a portion of all homeless individuals, New York guarantees a temporary bed to anyone who needs one. This legal [right to shelter](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/shelter/resources/resources.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the network of facilities that go with it keep roughly 95% of homeless people indoors, leaving a concentrated group with acute needs and a demonstrated reluctance to accept a shelter bed (or sometimes even a nonshelter bed) on the street. In a dense city, the visibility of this troubled population can fuel perceptions of disorder and personal risk that exceed the problem’s actual scale.

Within this population, needs and circumstances vary widely. [Many people grapple](https://files.hudexchange.info/reports/published/CoC%5FPopSub%5FCoC%5FNY-600-2024%5FNY%5F2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with serious mental illness and/or substance use disorders. Some have conditions such as [schizophrenia](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6880407/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or [bipolar disorder](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7282102/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that respond to sustained treatment and support; others live with [personality disorders](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11110170/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that require long-term psychosocial care. [Co-occurring substance use](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4833089/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is common and complicates engagement; to the untrained eye, a seeming mental illness crisis may in fact be drug-induced psychosis that wears off when the drug’s effects subside. Another complicating factor is traumatic brain injuries (TBI), which is estimated to affect [more than half of people experiencing homelessness](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7859891/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=People%20experiencing%20homelessness%20are%20at,to%20severe%20TBI%20%5B10%5D).

While it’s true that a person who is homeless is more likely to be a victim than a perpetrator, unstable people living on the street can indeed pose serious safety risks. In 2024, 1,285 street-homeless people were arrested for assault, a rate more than 20 times that of the total city population. Yet criminal offending isn’t a factor in prioritizing who gets the most focused attention, even on the City’s [“Top 50” lists](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/13/nyregion/jordan-neely-top-50-mental-illness.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — the informal name for the internal rosters used to coordinate work on the most serious subway and street cases.

Particular crimes committed by these individuals loom large and heighten public fear. There was the fatal 2022 [subway shoving](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/05/nyregion/martial-simon-michelle-go.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of Michelle Go in the Times Square-42nd Street station and, more recently, the 2024 [stabbing spree](https://abc7ny.com/post/ramon-rivera-indicted-fatal-stabbing-3-people-manhattan-grand-jury/15677086/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across Manhattan that left three people dead. Untreated illness and addiction also often manifest as erratic behavior that many experience as threatening. For the individuals themselves, surviving in public without effective care means worsening health, criminal justice involvement, vulnerability to victimization and repeated emergencies, often resulting in an unbroken cycle through the street, shelter, ER and jail akin to [those Dr. Ross MacDonald identified](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29176106/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in his analysis of Rikers Island “hot spotters.”

## What government currently does about the challenge

[Billions of public dollars](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/071-DHS.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are spent each year on both homelessness and behavioral health, yet this specific cohort remains too disconnected from sustained attention, typically cycling through brief and redundant contacts with police, hospitals and shelters before returning to the street. The visible churn convinces the public that government cannot care for the most vulnerable people or maintain order in common spaces.

Of course, even if everything ran like clockwork, there would be crises and failures. These are bedevilingly difficult cases to manage. Government and nonprofit providers put an enormous amount of thought and commitment into addressing difficult circumstances. But far too much effort, money and time are squandered because multiple systems operate in parallel — the police, 911 and 311, EMS, homeless-services outreach teams, public hospitals and nonprofit providers. Each has different mandates, funding sources, data systems and protocols. Handoffs are inconsistent; information is siloed; continuous case management and accountability are absent. Outreach teams often [lose track](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/safer-for-all/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of clients once cases move outside their geography or specialty. Hospitals frequently discharge psychiatric patients back to the street after [brief observation](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/planning/docs/comprehensive-psychiatric-emergency-program-annual-summary.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) because longer-stay treatment beds and step-down options are scarce. Judges who see mentally ill or drug-addicted defendants have few viable pathways to secure treatment instead of jail because effective programs [have limited slots](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/safer-for-all/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). At Rikers Island, [an estimated one-third of people](https://citylimits.org/opinion-enhancing-access-to-supportive-housing-is-key-to-criminal-justice-reform/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) admitted in 2023 were homeless before arrest; upon release, [only about 3% of detainees](https://mhp.urbanjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/07/Brad-H-53rd-report-final-2024%5F06%5F28-email.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with serious mental illness were connected to supportive housing, with most returning to shelters or the street.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/atw_ihnyclf9ohtm_homelessnessspending-12-8-png-auto-format-compress-1-1776259663294.jpg)

### 1\. Contact with individuals in crisis and what follows

It’s not easy to get one’s arms around all the opportunities for official intervention — the many ways in which a seriously mentally ill or otherwise unstable homeless person living on the street encounters police, mental health professionals, social workers and others — but it’s important to try to see the current tangled system in all its complexity.

There are two primary ways unsheltered individuals in public spaces with serious mental illness will make contact with the system: police dispatch (i.e., 911) in response to a crisis, and outreach teams (sometimes civilian, sometimes a mix of police and civilian) that initiate contact with individuals even when there is no reported emergency.

After an encounter, police (usually) can transport an individual involuntarily to a hospital for a psychiatric assessment if they’re in psychiatric distress and qualify for transport, which under the law is defined as presenting a danger to themselves or others, a definition that includes the inability to take care of their own basic needs. If the person does not qualify for involuntary transport, then they could either be arrested if alleged to engage in criminal activity, or offered to be connected to different services (e.g., housing).

Not all people who live on the street are in the throes of crisis, but crises happen with some level of frequency. New York City’s behavioral health crisis response still defaults to 911, with police and EMS as the primary responders. The NYPD fields more than [150,000 calls](https://citymeetings.nyc/meetings/new-york-city-council/2024-09-23-1000-am-committee-on-mental-health-disabilities-and-addiction/chapter/designation-of-individuals-as-emotionally-disturbed-persons-edps/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Both%20NYPD%20and%20FDNY%20categorize,responded%20to%20118%2C387%20EDP%20calls) each year involving psychiatric distress (a number that includes people who are housed). Police are usually present for three reasons: the possibility of violence, social workers’ preference for backup in unpredictable situations and the legal requirement that only police can carry out involuntary transports.

Alongside 911, 311 serves as the City’s [nonemergency intake](https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/311-Service-Requests-from-2010-to-Present/erm2-nwe9/about%5Fdata?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and routing line for homeless-related concerns. In 2024, the [DHS](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/outreach/street-outreach.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Department of Homeless Services) handled about two-thirds of these calls, and the NYPD handled the remaining third. Among the City’s outreach efforts, co-response teams — the MTA’s [clinician-led SCOUT](https://www.mta.info/document/135741?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Subway Co-Response Outreach Teams), a daytime program conducted in partnership with DHS, and [PATH](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2024/10/mayor-adams-new-co-response-operation-focused-serving-more-new-yorkers-need-on?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Partnership Assistance for Transit Homelessness), an overnight program led by the NYPD, DHS and the City’s public hospital system — are among the most recently conceived initiatives. These teams work to actively find and engage people in distress instead of waiting for a call to come in. Their models pair mental health clinicians with police officers to handle crises together, combining treatment expertise with public safety backup. (Though they are expanding, they remain small: SCOUT began with two pilot teams and is [slated to reach roughly 10](https://www.mta.info/document/135741?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by year’s end. PATH does not publish similar numbers.)

There is growing interest, including by Mayor-elect Mamdani, in the City’s [B-HEARD](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/b-heard?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division) pilot — unarmed teams of clinicians and EMTs dispatched to eligible mental health 911 calls instead of police — as an alternative. The program’s current footprint in 31 precincts (of 78) and roughly 15,000 calls handled in 2024 remains a small amount relative to need. And, as with many if not all of the programs and approaches, there has been no reliable (or publicly available) assessment of what kinds of problems B-HEARD is effective at addressing and what it is not.

B-HEARD was [modeled](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/pressrelease/new-york-city-announces-new-mental-health-teams-to-respond-to-mental-health-crises/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon, pairing health professionals with responders for behavioral health crises, but it does not fulfill the same role. CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) combines crisis response with sustained, proactive outreach in the community, while in New York City that outreach is handled by separate street outreach teams rather than B-HEARD. B-HEARD focuses on reacting to selected 911 calls during limited hours instead of serving as a default, community-based alternative. The result is often trading one type of responder for another rather than changing how and when help reaches people.

Both strategies, B-HEARD and involuntary transports, suffer from an [absence](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-of-the-behavioral-health-emergency-assistance-response-divisions-effectiveness-in-responding-to-individuals-with-mental-health-crises-and-meeting-its-goals/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of sufficient publicly reported outcome measures to tell policymakers whether these responses actually improve stability, reduce repeat crises and connect people to care. This makes it difficult to evaluate their effects and determine whether they’re as effective as other nonpolice alternative response programs (e.g., [Denver’s STAR](https://www.urban.org/research/publication/evaluating-alternative-crisis-response-denvers-support-team-assisted-response?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Support Team Assisted Response)).

**This raises a crucial recurring theme: The orientation of the current system — to deal mainly with point-in-time crises instead of sustained attention to a particular person throughout their life course — means that neither government nor anyone else with responsibility has a panoramic view of how any one individual is doing after the crisis.**

Much of the [public reporting](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/03/mayor-adams-keeps-mental-health-week-moving-announcing-11-000-engagements-3-000-services?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on these efforts remains focused on activity — contacts, referrals and transports. But there is little known about durable results such as housing retention, reduced crisis recurrence or diversion from the justice system. Without those measures, it is difficult to know whether scaling up is translating into lasting impact.

By contrast, several civilian outreach models have expanded in recent years. State OMH’s (Office of Mental Health’s) [SOS](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/adults/sos/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Safe Options Support) teams [grew from four to 20](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/resources/newsltr/docs/omhnewsfall2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) between 2022 and 2025, with press coverage citing State data showing [800 people placed into permanent housing](https://cbcare.org/wp-content/uploads/Safe-Options-Support-Newsletter-4-28-25.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in New York City from April 2022 to April 2025 after 58,000 engagements. SOS teams are multidisciplinary groups (clinicians, peers and care managers) who do persistent, field-based outreach both topside and underground, stay with people to help navigate paperwork and appointments, and broker placements into Safe Haven / stabilization beds and supportive or permanent housing.

The City has made numerous concerted efforts to knit together the fragmented system and focus on those in greatest need. One example is the [StreetSmart](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/opportunity/pdf/evidence/dhs-integrated-case-management-overview.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) application. StreetSmart, a project of the Department of Homeless Services, is a digital by-name list — a shared, person-specific roster used by City-contracted outreach providers to track individuals living unsheltered and to record engagements and progress over time. This is a real innovation. Unfortunately, it excludes many nonprofits that are not under City contract and therefore are not bound by the City’s privacy rules. Health, housing and police data are not integrated, and health-privacy rules restrict certain types of data sharing. These gaps make it difficult to measure outcomes or coordinate care effectively.

### 2\. Involuntary Transport & Hospitalization

After a response or outreach team makes contact with an unsheltered individual, the next step is assessing whether the individual is in psychiatric distress. If an individual is in crisis, both police and clinicians have the power of involuntary removal to a hospital (under New York State Mental Hygiene Law Sections 9.41 and 9.58). The current administration has [leaned into](https://www.qchron.com/editions/queenswide/adams-makes-push-for-involuntary-commitment/article%5F053e4a1b-e727-483f-b7ff-57a41f78febf.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) involuntary transport to hospitals under the Mental Hygiene Law as part of its strategy. It’s unclear whether expanded use of involuntary transport will break existing cycles or worsen them — an uncertainty the City should resolve through rigorous evaluation. It is critical that the City learn what the results are so that it can determine how most effectively to implement the law. In 2024, police initiated about [7,000 involuntary transports](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/issue-briefs-and-reports?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) ([Section 9.41](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.41?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)), roughly two-thirds of which originated from 911 calls. Clinicians accounted for another 661 ([Section 9.58](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.58?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)). There is no public accounting of whether the removals in 2024 are more or fewer than in the past. Also, while [57% of individuals](https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiOTRjZDNlZWYtZTdjZi00ZDNmLTkxODItNDc3NDFjZmMzNTBmIiwidCI6IjM1YzgyODE2LTZjNTYtNDQzYi1iYWY2LTgzMTIxNjNjYWRjMSJ9&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) transported pursuant to an order issued by a clinician (9.58) are admitted, there is no public reporting on how many individuals are admitted into psychiatric care after a police transport (9.41).

Once at the hospital, a person can be held for a short evaluation under [Section 9.40](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.40?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), typically lasting up to 72 hours. This evaluation typically occurs in a [CPEP (Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program)](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/queens/services/behavioral-health/psychiatry/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) unit, the designated psychiatric emergency department. If doctors determine that the person still needs inpatient care, they may be admitted under [Section 9.39](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.39?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which allows up to 15 days of emergency hospitalization. For people who continue to need treatment, the hospital can extend the stay under [Sections 9.27](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.27?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or [9.37](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.37?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), based on certification by doctors and a psychiatrist, for up to 60 days. If more time is required, the hospital must seek a court order under [Section 9.33](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.33?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to keep the person longer. A small number of [extended-care units](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/pressrelease/innovative-new-unit-for-patients-with-severe-mental-illness-opens-at-nyc-health-hospitals-elmhurst/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) provide about 90 to 120 days of treatment, and there are also [medical respite beds](https://www.health.ny.gov/health%5Fcare/medicaid/redesign/sdh/respite.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for patients with physical health needs.

If an individual is not admitted or discharged, options are extremely limited. Even if admitted to psychiatric care, individuals [may face prolonged waits](https://www.osc.ny.gov/press/releases/2024/03/dinapoli-percentage-new-yorkers-mental-illness-rose-available-psychiatric-beds-declined?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in emergency departments due to psychiatric boarding — when patients remain in the ER for extended periods because no inpatient psychiatric beds are available. There are few alternatives for those not admitted and difficulty accessing long-term or supportive housing options to ensure stability after discharge.

It is also worth noting that some constraints concerning long-term psychiatric care stem from State and federal financing and regulatory rules that limit what care is available and for how long, notably Medicaid’s [IMD exclusion](https://www.nami.org/advocacy/policy-priorities/improving-health/medicaid-imd-exclusion/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which generally prevents federal funding for adults aged 21 to 64 receiving care in psychiatric facilities with more than 16 beds.

### 3\. Treatment and other services

While improving the initial response to individuals in crisis is often presented as central to solving the problem, changing who initially responds when a crisis happens is not enough. If an individual is not admitted to a hospital or arrested, what happens next is typically what matters most. Same-day clinical access? [Intensive Mobile Treatment](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/program/intensive-mobile-treatment-imt?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (IMT), which provides support and treatment in streets, shelters and public spaces? Detox and [step-down care](https://iclinc.org/institute-for-community-living-report-shows-new-program-increased-capacity-to-serve-new-yorkers-with-the-most-significant-mental-health-challenges-including-individuals-living-on-streets-and-subways/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)? Supportive housing with services? And is there a smooth transition to this help?

Without the right resources at the right moment, most encounters eventually result in the person cycling back to emergency rooms, shelters or the street. B-HEARD can reduce police call volume, and it might reduce the risk of a given incident escalating, but it does not address the underlying problem of “What next?” or necessarily address the underlying problem motivating the report.

Again, the “What next?” question rears its head. The City does not publish systemwide data on how many of the police-initiated transports result in admission or for how long or what happened to the person upon release.

Treatment following inpatient hospitalization is crucial. [Assisted Outpatient Treatment](https://my.omh.ny.gov/analytics/saw.dll?dashboard&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which is court-ordered under Kendra’s Law, gives individuals psychiatric treatment plans to follow once they’ve been stabilized. It is an important piece of the puzzle, especially given evaluations both [within](https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ps.2010.61.10.976?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [outside](https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.prcp.20240162?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of New York that have found it to be effective in reducing psychiatric episodes and improved outcomes.

OMH’s [Assertive Community Treatment](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/act/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (ACT) shows [promising evidence](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17329462/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Results%3A%20%20Of%20the%2052,studies%2C%20assertive%20community%20treatment%20subjects) of stabilizing housing and reducing psychiatric crises. ACT serves adults with the highest, ongoing psychiatric needs; multidisciplinary teams provide community-based care with small caseloads, 24/7 crisis coverage and time-unlimited support for as long as the person benefits. Similar to ACT, the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health has implemented IMT teams that serve adults with serious mental illness who are often street- or shelter-based, recently incarcerated or repeatedly hospitalized. IMTs meet people in the field at points of crisis or transition (street, ER or jail/prison discharge) and remain engaged as long as clinically needed, often many months, until a step-down is appropriate. For IMT, however, a 2024 [City comptroller audit](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nyc-comptroller-audit-exposes-major-management-gaps-in-intensive-mobile-treatment-imt-for-new-yorkers-with-severe-mental-health-challenges/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found issues with tracking outcomes and program management. Incarceration data were not regularly tracked and treatment engagement was inconsistently measured. Reviews of providers varied in quality, follow-up on corrective actions lagged and the program still lacks transparent, system-level reporting to demonstrate durable outcomes — a gap also highlighted by a [New York Times investigation](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/nyregion/nyc-mental-illness-breakdowns.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) into the City’s fragmented mental health response. However, mobile treatment capacity is constrained: The City funds [31 IMT teams](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-report-on-intensive-mobile-treatment-initiative-carried-out-by-department-of-health-and-mental-hygiene/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) serving fewer than 1,000 clients, with similar pressure on State-funded ACT teams.

It is also worth noting that some constraints concerning long-term psychiatric care stem from State and federal financing and regulatory rules that limit what care is available and for how long, notably Medicaid’s IMD exclusion, which generally prevents federal funding for adults aged 21 to 64 receiving care in psychiatric facilities with more than 16 beds.

### 4\. Shelter and housing placements

Housing must be a central part of the approach to stabilizing people who lack it and are on the verge of psychiatric crisis. But even when the City can identify and reach people with the highest needs, individuals are typically routed to places that are, by design, temporary, including ERs; [crisis respite centers](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/crisis-emergency-services-respite-centers.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); [Safe Havens](https://www.nyc.gov/html/hhsaccelerator/downloads/pdf/DHS%20Safe%20Havens.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which are low-barrier, small-scale programs that provide private rooms and flexible rules for people coming directly from the street, who often resist traditional shelters due to their safety records, strict curfews, sobriety requirements and other rules; [stabilization beds](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/outreach/street-outreach.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which are low-threshold beds for a high-functioning population; general shelters; or short jail stays.

Some of these placement failures could be addressed by increasing Safe Haven and stabilization beds, speeding documentation, expanding mobile treatment capacity and improving handoffs.

Supportive housing — permanent affordable apartments with on-site services — is by far the most crucial component of any system to help this population. Yet today, approvals do not reliably translate into placements for unsheltered individuals. Despite the [strong evidence base](https://shnny.org/images/uploads/NY-NY-III-Interim-Report.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) concerning the effectiveness of supportive-housing programs, outreach programs have struggled to secure housing placements. [In 2024](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/01/06/homeless-supportive-housing-eric-adams-statistics/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), outreach teams secured supportive-housing approvals for 955 unsheltered people, but only 175 (18%) obtained a unit, often due to process barriers; at the same time, more than 4,100 supportive-housing units sat vacant. Unsheltered homeless people don’t just suffer from mental illness and addiction; they lack, and need, some community. Here, clubhouses like those run by [Fountain House](https://www.fountainhouse.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have helpfully expanded in recent years, giving individuals a psychologically healthy place to go during the day and a connection with related services. A person who is connected with others is more likely to get the help they need when they need it.

### 5\. Criminal justice interactions and what follow

In some instances, the initial interaction with police stems from criminal behavior. In 2024, NYPD recorded 15,274 arrests of unsheltered New Yorkers. Most commonly, these arrests are for petit larceny, misdemeanor drug offenses or assault charges.

When a police officer makes an arrest, the defendant is charged and brought before a judge for arraignment. At arraignment, the judge has the option to release the individual on their own recognizance pending the resolution of the case, release with certain conditions or set bail and hold the individual in detention. In the case of homeless individuals, lack of stable housing is sometimes considered by judges in determining risk of flight, and any amount of bail could effectively result in being held in jail pending trial if they are unable to afford it.

For individuals who appear to have a serious mental illness, judges will sometimes order an exam under Criminal Procedure Law 730 (”730 exam”), to determine whether the individual is an [incapacitated person](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/CPL/730.10?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a defendant who “as a result of mental disease or defect lacks capacity to understand the proceedings against him or to assist in his own defense.” For underlying misdemeanor charges, a finding of incapacitation results in the [dismissal of the underlying misdemeanor case](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/CPL/730.40?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as well as care and treatment in an appropriate institution for up to 90 days. For felony cases, longer orders of commitment are possible, and the status of the underlying criminal case will depend on whether or not it is ultimately indicted by the prosecutor. In cases of an indicted felony, the individual can be held in a State forensic psychiatric facility for up to [two-thirds of the maximum sentence](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/CPL/730.50?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) if the patient had been found guilty of the underlying felony. It is also worth noting that the process of 730 exams can often lead to many case delays and a much lengthier stay of incarceration or time in a psychiatric facility for individuals with serious mental illness.

In the absence of a 730 exam, prosecutors still have many tools at their disposal for individuals living with serious mental illness and/or substance use disorder. Included in these options are [mental health](https://ww2.nycourts.gov/mental-health-courts-overview-27066?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [drug-treatment courts](https://ww2.nycourts.gov/courts/problem%5Fsolving/drugcourts/overview.shtml?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as well as the possibility for treatment as a condition of a plea deal or as part of a final sentence.

For those who are living with serious mental illness who are held in jail, there are specialized units called [CAPS](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doc/media/caps.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Clinical Alternative to Punitive Segregation) units, as well as therapeutic beds, which provide treatment for individuals with serious mental illness while incarcerated. If convicted of a crime and transferred to State custody, there is a [continuum of care](https://doccs.ny.gov/medical-services?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for incarcerated individuals offered by OMH, including the [Central New York Psychiatric Center](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/facilities/cnpc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as well a statewide network of clinics, crisis beds and intermediate care program beds.

Upon release, reentry services are available through nonprofits, NYC Health + Hospitals programs and other City programs, such as the [Community Justice Reentry Network](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/programs/community-justice-reentry-network/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), that provide a variety of connections to treatment, care, housing and employment resources.

These are hard cases. Providing services to people living with mental illness is much more complex than providing food to the hungry. Many people of greatest concern do not realize they are ill, a condition known as [anosognosia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Anosognosia%20results%20from%20physiological%20damage%20to%20brain,hemisphere%2C%20and%20is%20thus%20a%20neuropsychiatric%20disorder.). Others carry trauma or deep distrust of systems and may refuse help repeatedly. Even a well-functioning system is likely to fail more often than it succeeds. But today, batting averages are dangerously low. The system’s flaws are clear: Information is siloed, coordination across agencies is thin, services are poorly matched to need and unevenly distributed, connections are not sustained as symptoms change over time and there is little culture of disciplined self-assessment or course correction. As with every other aspect of engagement with those living with serious mental illness and/or homelessness, the description of the system process does not always align perfectly with delivery. Often there are [not enough services, treatment programs, beds or housing options](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/documents/Safer-for-All.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to meet the needs of the individuals these were created to help.

## **Appendices**

# NYC homelessness & mental health budget (2024)

| Agency                                                                                                                                   | Line Items                                        | Amounts (2024) |
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------- | -------------- |
| [DHS](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2023/03/DHS.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com)                               | Outreach, Drop-In, Reception                      | $303.7M        |
| [DHS](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2023/03/DHS.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com)                               | Family Shelter Operations, Intake, Administration | $1.1B          |
| [DHS](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2023/03/DHS.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com)                               | Adult Shelter Operations, Intake, Administration  | $969.16M       |
| [DOHMH](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/816-DOHMH-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                         | Mental Health Services                            | $601.56M       |
| [DOHMH](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/816-DOHMH-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                         | Alcohol and Drug Prevention, Care and Treatment   | $153M          |
| [DOHMH](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/816-DOHMH-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                         | Developmental Disabilities                        | $10M           |
| [DOHMH](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/816-DOHMH-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                         | Administration                                    | $52M           |
| [H+H](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/819-H-H-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | Correctional Health Services                      | $285M          |
| [H+H](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/819-H-H-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | B-HEARD                                           | $13M           |
| [H+H](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/819-H-H-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | Mental Health Service Corps                       | $12M           |
| [H+H](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/819-H-H-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | Just Home                                         | $1M            |
| [H+H](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/819-H-H-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | DOHMH (Transfer)                                  | $37M           |
| [FDNY](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/057-FDNY.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | B-HEARD                                           | \-             |
| [FDNY](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/057-FDNY.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | Emergency Medical Services                        | $427M          |
| [OTI/311](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2025/03/Office-of-Technology-Innovation-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) | 311                                               | $61M           |
| [OTI/311](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2025/03/Office-of-Technology-Innovation-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) | 911                                               | $101M          |
| [OTI/311](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2025/03/Office-of-Technology-Innovation-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) | Administration, Operations                        | $66M           |
| [NYPD](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/056-NYPD.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | Transit                                           | $291M          |
| [NYPD](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/056-NYPD.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                             | Training                                          | $136M          |
|                                                                                                                                          | TOTAL                                             | $4.62B         |
| TOTAL                                                                                                                                    | $10.4B                                            |                |

## The evidence backing various policy approaches

*The evidence table below does not attempt to rate the level of evidence for the programs indicated. Instead, it aims to be illustrative and provide an overview of what data and research are available for the programs.*

# NYC programs: evidence and evaluation

| Category                                    | Program Name                                                                                                                                                                                                              | Description                                                                                                                                                                                                                         | Size and Stats                                                                | Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    |
| ------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Crisis Response and First Response Programs |                                                                                                                                                                                                                           |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     |                                                                               |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               |
|                                             | [B-HEARD](https://nychealthandhospitals.org/pressrelease/nyc-health-hospitals-launches-the-largest-mental-health-alternative-response-system-in-the-nation/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                         | Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division: health and mental health-only response to 911 calls; operated by FDNY EMS and H+H                                                                                         | 33,000 responses citywide (2024)                                              | NYC EvaluationCity Council [evaluation found](https://council.nyc.gov/data/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/B-HEARD-Evaluation-One-Pager-September-2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 88% of calls were resolved without police, EMS or hospital transport, with higher success in non-housing conditions.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              |
|                                             | [Subway Safety](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/14/opinion/nyc-subway-homeless-mental-health.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Subway Safety Unit)                                                                              | Operation to clear the subway of homeless people, involving NYPD and social workers (initially a temporary NYPD pilot); homeless people relocated to shelters and/or hospitalized; program has been the subject of legal challenges | 1800 outreaches1150 subway removals (2024-to-date)                            | NYC EvaluationNo city evaluation has been performed; [advocacy groups](https://accountablepolicies.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Case-Review-3.22.23.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have raised concerns about quality of outreach.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               |
|                                             | [Directive 25](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/nyregion/eric-adams-involuntary-hospitalization-mentally-ill.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (NYPD Directive 25)                                                             | Directed "street homeless" individuals with mental illness to be involuntarily hospitalized.                                                                                                                                        | Unknown citywideAt least 2000 interactions (2023-to-date)                     | NYC EvaluationNo city evaluation has been performed; [advocacy groups](https://accountablepolicies.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Case-Review-3.22.23.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have raised concerns about implementation quality and protections against involuntary care.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   |
|                                             | [MCTs](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/crisis-emergency-services-mobile-crisis-teams.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Mobile Crisis Teams)                                                                   | Nonpolice mental health response for individuals in crisis; may be accessed via 311/988                                                                                                                                             | 200,000 responses citywide (2023)                                             | NYC EvaluationAn [evaluation of a different city effort](https://jmhsprograms.com/content/dam/web/jmhsprograms/documents/press-release/MobilecrisisExpansion.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) resulted in reductions of arrests, psychiatric hospitalizations and emergency room visits.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |
|                                             | [CPEPs](https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/crisis-emergency-services-cpep.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Programs)                                                       | State-regulated 24/7 psychiatric emergency programs; recent State capital expansion initiative                                                                                                                                      | 11 programs through H+H (2024), additional programs through private hospitals | No NYC EvaluationAn evaluation of a similar program in the[ Midwest](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acem.14374?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [finds effective results](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acem.14374?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     |
|                                             | [AOT](https://my.omh.ny.gov/analytics/saw.dll?dashboard&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Assisted Outpatient Treatment)                                                                                                             | Court-ordered outpatient treatment administered via OMH/localities                                                                                                                                                                  | 47,000 investigations, 96% petitions granted                                  | NYC[ ](https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ps.2010.61.10.976?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)a href="https://static.prisonpolicy.org/scans/NYDPH-report.pdf?utm\_source=chatgpt.com" target="\_blank"> and State EvaluationsIndependent [statewide evaluation](https://static.prisonpolicy.org/scans/NYDPH-report.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) (2009) found reductions in hospitalization, homelessness, arrests and incarceration for AOT recipients. [City evaluation](https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ps.2010.61.10.976?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) also found the program effective.                                                                                                        |
|                                             | Medical Respite                                                                                                                                                                                                           | State-funded and H+H-run short-term medical respite beds for people exiting hospitals who are homeless                                                                                                                              | 75 beds                                                                       | No NYC Evaluation[A systematic review](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23728025/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that similar programs reduce hospital readmissions, inpatient days and admissions, and improve housing outcomes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |
|                                             | [TIL](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dycd/services/runaway-homeless-youth/transitional-independent-living.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Transitional Independent Living)                                                          | Department of Youth and Community Development residential programs for youth (short-term crisis and long-term)                                                                                                                      | Unknown                                                                       | No NYC Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |
|                                             | [ECUs](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/pressrelease/innovative-new-unit-for-patients-with-severe-mental-illness-opens-at-nyc-health-hospitals-kings-county/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Extended Care Units)             | H+H hospital-based psychiatric extended-care units.                                                                                                                                                                                 | 60 beds (2024)                                                                | No[ ](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7838487/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)NYC EvaluationA [systematic review](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7838487/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of rehab / extended-stay settings found that the most consistent outcome was reduced subsequent inpatient service use after discharge.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               |
|                                             | [Fountain House Clubhouses](https://www.fountainhouse.org/about/clubhouse-model?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                     | Free, voluntary, member-led clubhouse serving \~2,000 adults with serious mental illness                                                                                                                                            | \~2,000 members (2023)                                                        | NYC EvaluationAn [NYU study](https://www.fountainhouse.org/assets/05201?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) showed 21% Medicaid cost savings from reduced hospitalizations.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |
|                                             | Bridge to Home                                                                                                                                                                                                            | H+H program providing noncongregate medical respite / step-down beds                                                                                                                                                                | 46 beds (2024)                                                                | No NYC Evaluation[A systematic review](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23728025/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that these programs reduce hospital readmissions, inpatient days and admissions, and improve housing outcomes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   |
| Housing                                     |                                                                                                                                                                                                                           |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     |                                                                               |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               |
|                                             | [Safe Havens](https://www.nyc.gov/html/hhsaccelerator/downloads/pdf/DHS%20Safe%20Havens.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                         | Low-barrier, service-rich beds for street-homeless people; placements coordinated via DHS Joint Command Center                                                                                                                      | \~4,000 beds (2025)City combines this count with stabilization beds.          | No NYC EvaluationA [Ward Family Foundation evaluation](https://www.va.gov/HOMELESS/docs/GPD/providers/EvidenceBaseSupportingLowDemandHousing.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) found in another jurisdiction that from 2011-2013, 55% of veteran participants were moved into stable housing                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      |
|                                             | [Supportive Housing](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/supportive-housing.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                  | Permanent housing with on-site services; mixed funding (City/State/federal); includes scattered-site and congregate                                                                                                                 | 40,472 units, 94% occupancy (2025)                                            | NYC[ ](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/28351/412024-The-Corporation-for-Supportive-Housing-s-Returning-Home-Initiative-System-Change-Accomplishments-after-Three-Years.PDF?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com)Evaluation[Evaluation found](https://shnny.org/images/uploads/NY-NY-III-Interim-Report.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) net public cost savings and reduced service use vs. eligible non-tenants; [Urban Institute](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/28351/412024-The-Corporation-for-Supportive-Housing-s-Returning-Home-Initiative-System-Change-Accomplishments-after-Three-Years.PDF?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) study showed similar findings. |
|                                             | [Stabilization Beds](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/outreach/street-outreach.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                     | Short-term, low-barrier stabilization sites for unsheltered individuals                                                                                                                                                             | City combines this count with Safe Havens.                                    | No NYC Evaluation[A systematic review](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8427990/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) of homelessness interventions, including stabilization beds, was found to outperform other services to improve residential stability.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      |
|                                             | [Drop-in Centers](https://www.nyep.uscourts.gov/reentry/NYC%20Homeless%20Shelters.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                               | DHS-contracted centers offering basic services and case management                                                                                                                                                                  | 9 centers (2025)                                                              | No NYC Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |
|                                             | [RHY](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dycd/services/runaway-homeless-youth.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Runaway and Homeless Youth)                                                                                               | Department of Youth and Community Development shelters for youth / young adults experiencing homelessness                                                                                                                           | 60 beds (2025)                                                                | No NYC EvaluationA Los Angeles, California, [study of a similar youth drop center](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6450788/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) found a positive impact for participants.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      |
| Justice Involved                            |                                                                                                                                                                                                                           |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     |                                                                               |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               |
|                                             | [JISH](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2025/08/04/2935/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Last%20year%2C%20the%20Council%20succeeded,held%20in%20pre%2Dtrial%20detention.) (Justice-involved / jail in-reach supportive housing) | Justice-involved / jail in-reach supportive housing (program naming varies)                                                                                                                                                         | 120 units (2025)                                                              | NYC[ ](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282107665%5FNYC%5FFrequent%5FUsers%5FFUSE%5FInitiative%5FEvaluation%5Fof%5Fa%5FSupportive%5FHousing%5FIntervention?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)Evaluation[Evaluation found](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282107665%5FNYC%5FFrequent%5FUsers%5FFUSE%5FInitiative%5FEvaluation%5Fof%5Fa%5FSupportive%5FHousing%5FIntervention?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that justice-involved supportive housing significantly reduced cycling between public systems, days spent in jail and shelter, and use of crisis care health services.                                                                                                                 |
|                                             | [Transitional Housing](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/programs/transitional-housing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                      | MOCJ-funded short-term housing options for justice-involved individuals (various sponsors)                                                                                                                                          | 1000 beds (2023)                                                              | NYC Evaluation[Descriptive data](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/programs/transitional-housing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) provided by MOCJ show that participants had a lower rearrest rate.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |
|                                             | [Just Home](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/036-22/nyc-health-hospitals-department-housing-preservation-development-new-housing-for?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/0)                                                            | Supportive housing initiative for medically vulnerable people leaving custody; funded by H+H and working with HPD and service providers                                                                                             | 83 units                                                                      | No NYC EvaluationAn evaluation of [a similar program in Ohio](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/25716/412632-Supportive-Housing-for-Returning-Prisoners-Outcomes-and-Impacts-of-the-Returning-Home-Ohio-Pilot-Project.PDF?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that participants had greater housing stability and were significantly less likely to be rearrested, convicted or reincarcerated.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   |
|                                             | Drug Treatment Courts                                                                                                                                                                                                     | Statewide problem-solving courts focusing on substance use                                                                                                                                                                          | Unknown                                                                       | NYC Evaluation[Center for Court Innovation evaluation](https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/23826/412867-A-Statewide-Evaluation-of-New-York-s-Adult-Drug-Courts.PDF?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that participants were less likely to be arrested.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           |
|                                             | [HOPE](https://knowledgebank.criminaljustice.ny.gov/heroin-overdose-prevention-and-education-hope-program?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Heroin Overdose Prevention and Education)                                                | Prearraignment diversion program run by the Richmond County District Attorney's Office (Staten Island)                                                                                                                              | Unknown                                                                       | NYC EvaluationAn [MOCJ evaluation](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/HOPE-Report-2.19.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that a Richmond County HOPE pilot reduced recidivism.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |

## National models and programs

*Programs from across the U.S. that have been referenced as potential models to introduce in New York City.*

# Case studies from other large cities

| Category                                        | Program Name                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          | Description                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     | City / Jurisdiction                          | Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       |
| ----------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Crisis Response and First Response Programs     |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |                                              |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  |
|                                                 | [STAR](https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Offices/Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory/Public-Health-Environment/Community-Behavioral-Health/Behavioral-Health-Solutions/STAR-Program?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Support Team Assisted Response) | Embedded in 911 and coordinated by Denver Public Health and Denver 911; staffed by mental-health clinicians and paramedics (not police or fire)                                                                                                                                                                                                 | Denver, CO                                   | Denver Evaluation[Descriptive data](https://cdphe.colorado.gov/star-program?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) find no police calls, no arrests and no injuries. A [CEBP evaluation](https://behavioralpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Piza-et-al%5FSTAR-Evaluation%5F5.3.21.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found no significant impact on nearby serious or violent crimes. |
|                                                 | [HEART](https://www.durhamcountync.gov/4687/HEART-Program?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams)                                                                                                                                       | Civilian clinicians and peer responders dispatched through 911 or 311 for nonviolent crises. Data are tracked under the City's racial-equity framework.                                                                                                                                                                                         | Durham, NC                                   | Pilot EvaluationDescriptive data of pilot year [show promise](https://www.durhamnc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/54631/RTI%5FDurham-HEART-Pilot-Program-Report-May-2023?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and is planned for evaluation.                                                                                                                                           |
|                                                 | [Albuquerque Community Safety](https://www.cabq.gov/acs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                                                                                         | A stand-alone 911-response department staffed by behavioral-health clinicians, peer support workers and outreach specialists who respond to calls for mental-health, homelessness and substance-use concerns; no police dispatch                                                                                                                | Albuquerque, NM                              | No Formal Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |
|                                                 | [SCRT](https://www.sf.gov/street-crisis-response-team?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Street Crisis Response Team)                                                                                                                                                             | Part of the City's "crisis response continuum." Each team includes a paramedic, behavioral-health clinician and peer specialist responding to behavioral-health 911 calls.                                                                                                                                                                      | San Francisco, CA                            | San Francisco EvaluationEvaluation is [in process](https://prise.ucsf.edu/project/evaluating-san-franciscos-street-crisis-response-team-as-a-model-for-mental-health-and-substance-use-treatment-for-adults-experiencing-homelessness/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).                                                                                                    |
|                                                 | [CIRCLE](https://mayor.lacity.gov/sites/g/files/wph2066/files/2023-10/CIRCLE%5FFAQ%5FEnglish%5FSpanish%5F10.2023.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Crisis and Incident Response through Community-Led Engagement)                                                            | Civilian outreach teams staffed by community-based organizations that respond to nonemergency 911 calls involving unhoused people and behavioral crises; integrated through 311 and coordinated by the Mayor's Office of Public Safety                                                                                                          | Los Angeles, CA                              | No Formal EvaluationProgram data show [14,000 incidents diverted and 1,000](https://mayor.lacity.gov/news/confronting-mental-health-crisis-mayor-bass-announces-circle-program-expansion-westside?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) individuals were referred to mental and behavioral services.                                                                             |
|                                                 | [Street Response Team](https://www.portland.gov/streetresponse?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                                                                                  | Civilian alternative response program for responding to mental health emergencies                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               | Portland, OR                                 | Portland Evaluation[Descriptive evaluation findings](https://www.pdx.edu/homelessness/PSR-Evaluation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found a 3.5% reduction in total calls responded to by police and a 19% reduction in police response.                                                                                                                                  |
| Behavioral Health Treatment and Hospitalization |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |                                              |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  |
|                                                 | [CMHP](https://www.jud11.flcourts.org/Criminal-Mental-Health-Project?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Criminal Mental Health Project) / Miami Model                                                                                                                             | A comprehensive mental health diversion program built to eliminate the criminalization of mental illness; utilizes prebooking and postbooking jail diversion; employs the SOAR model to expedite access to federal benefits                                                                                                                     | Miami-Dade County, FL                        | No Formal Evaluation[Descriptive program data](https://www.jud11.flcourts.org/docs/Jail%5Fdiversion%5Fthe%5FMiami%5Fmodel%20CNS%202020.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) find CMHP to provide an effective and cost-efficient solution for individuals with serious mental illness and co-occurring serious mental illness.                                              |
|                                                 | [Judge Ed Emmett Mental Health Diversion Center](https://www.theharriscenter.org/location/judge-ed-emmett-mental-health-diversion-center?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                        | Law enforcement transports individuals identified with mental health needs directly to the Diversion Center instead of jail, based on voluntary participation. The process takes an officer 11 minutes compared to 4 hours for jail booking. 24/7 diversion drop-off for police transporting people in behavioral crisis instead of jail or ER. | Houston / Harris County, TX                  | Houston EvaluationEvaluation found that program participants who were homeless experienced [reductions in psychiatric hospitalizations](https://mhneedscouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Harris-Center-Jail-Diversion-Evaluation-2022-09-30-Final.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the long term, but not short term.                                           |
|                                                 | [CBH](https://cbhphilly.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Community Behavioral Health)                                                                                                                                                                                      | A City-controlled managed-care organization integrating Medicaid behavioral-health dollars into a unified delivery system focused on recovery, housing and harm reduction                                                                                                                                                                       | Philadelphia, PA                             | Philadelphia Evaluation[External quality review](https://www.pa.gov/content/dam/copapwp-pagov/en/dhs/documents/healthchoices/hc-services/documents/CBH-2023-MY-2022-ATR-Final.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of descriptive data finds improvements in reducing psychiatric hospitalizations.                                                                         |
|                                                 | [Crisis Now Framework](https://crisisnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/CrisisNow-BusinessCase.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                                              | 24/7 crisis system with regional crisis call centers, mobile teams and short-term stabilization facilities                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      | Arizona, statewide (Maricopa County pioneer) | No Formal EvaluationAn [exploratory process evaluation](https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.202000114?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is in progress.                                                                                                                                                                                                         |
|                                                 | [Crisis Response Center (Sequential Intercept Model)](https://www.samhsa.gov/communities/criminal-juvenile-justice/sequential-intercept-model?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                   | Diversion by law enforcement that uses a "no wrong door" policy, meaning no exclusions based on payer status, intoxication or involuntary status; features a dedicated entrance to expedite law enforcement drop-off, taking officers about 10 minutes                                                                                          | Tucson, AZ                                   | No Formal Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |
|                                                 | [CM](https://www.recoveryanswers.org/resource/contingency-management/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Contingency Management)                                                                                                                                                  | An evidence-based treatment primarily for stimulant use disorders (like cocaine or methamphetamine); uses incentives, often cash payments, for specific positive behaviors such as providing clean drug tests                                                                                                                                   | General practice (e.g., San Francisco pilot) | Systematic ReviewReview finds CM to be [an effective treatment](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2782768?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) for individuals with opioid use disorder.                                                                                                                                                          |
|                                                 | [MAT](https://americanaddictioncenters.org/addiction-medications?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Medication-Assisted Treatment)                                                                                                                                                | Utilizes medications like methadone or buprenorphine (Suboxone) to treat opioid use disorder; can include flexible take-home policies and delivery services to increase access and stability                                                                                                                                                    | General practice (e.g., San Francisco)       | San Francisco Evaluation [Evaluation finds](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.10.21267477v1.full.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) that MAT reduces hospitalizations and improves stability.                                                                                                                                                           |
|                                                 | [MAP](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3726334/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Managed Alcohol Use Program)                                                                                                                                                           | Stabilization and harm-reduction intervention for people with alcohol use disorder, sometimes involving managed alcohol programs where clients are given small amounts of alcohol; also known as "wet housing"                                                                                                                                  | General practice (e.g., San Francisco)       | Systematic Review[Review finds](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9311344/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) MAPs a promising harm reduction intervention.                                                                                                                                                                                                            |
| Housing                                         |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |                                              |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  |
|                                                 | [HRH](https://heller.brandeis.edu/opioid-policy/community-resources/harm-reduction-housing/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Harm Reduction Housing)                                                                                                                  | Provides stable living environments without sobriety mandates; offers 24/7 harm reduction supplies, counseling and medical oversight on-site to reduce the risks associated with drug use, such as using alone                                                                                                                                  | Boston, MA                                   | No Formal Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |
|                                                 | [Temporary Shelter Provision (Winter Shelter Beds)](https://www.lahsa.org/winter-shelter?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                                                        | Provision of additional temporary shelter capacity during the winter months                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     | Los Angeles County, CA                       | Los Angeles Evaluation[A study finds](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VXFef56O8z5ltzTfvJzeQXXfsCfZiy6i/view?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) these programs reduce unsheltered homelessness as well as crime and ER visits.                                                                                                                                                |
|                                                 | [Tiny Cabins / Tiny Homes](https://dignitymoves.org/san-francisco/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)                                                                                                                                                                              | Noncongregate, cost-effective interim housing options; San Francisco's first cabin community was established quickly on borrowed private land for temporary use                                                                                                                                                                                 | San Francisco, CA                            | No Formal Evaluation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |
| Justice Involved                                |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 |                                              |                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  |
|                                                 | [LEAD](https://leadbureau.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Let Everyone Advance with Dignity)                                                                                                                                                                              | Case management diversion for low-level offenses, replacing arrest with community-based care                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    | Seattle, WA (replicated nationally)          | North Carolina Evaluation [Participants are less likely](https://psychiatry.duke.edu/sites/default/files/2023-01/Duke%20LEAD%20Evaluation%20Full%20Report%5FUpdated%201-24-23.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to have arrests and outpatient behavioral visits as well as higher utilization of medication.                                                            |

## **Glossary of terms**

### Systems, agencies and programs

**311/911 Systems**

311/911 are the City’s call systems consisting of nonemergency (311) and emergency (911) dispatch lines, routing homeless concerns through 311 and psychiatric crises through 911.

[**988**](https://nyc988.cityofnewyork.us/en/crisis-services/mobile-crisis-teams/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

988 is the City’s suicide and crisis call system, which can also dispatch DOHMH operated MCT teams to individuals in crisis.

[**AOT**](https://my.omh.ny.gov/analytics/saw.dll?dashboard&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Assisted Outpatient Treatment (Kendra’s Law)**

AOT is authorized by a 1999 State law (Kendra’s Law), consists of court-ordered treatment plans and mandates medication, therapy and case management for individuals with severe illness and treatment noncompliance history. The petition can be filed by a range of individuals including a hospital director, psychiatrist, psychologist, probation officer or family members.

[**CIDI**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/cidi/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Center for Innovation through Data Intelligence**

CIDI is the Mayor’s Office data hub. It consists of integrated databases linking City systems and coordinates cross-agency data integration.

[**DHS**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— NYC Department of Homeless Services**

DHS is the City agency that funds and operates shelter systems, street outreach providers and street outreach nurses, and manages temporary living (e.g., Safe Havens).

[**DOHMH**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene**

DOHMH is the City agency that operates behavioral health programs, deploys mobile crisis teams and coordinates mental health strategy with H+H and nonprofits.

[**H+H**](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— NYC Health + Hospitals**

H+H is the City’s public hospital system, which operates emergency departments, CPEPs, Correctional Health Services at Rikers and different treatment and transition programs (e.g., Just Home).

[**HUD**](https://www.hud.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development**

HUD is the federal agency that funds housing vouchers and homelessness assistance programs including Continuum of Care and HUD-VASH.

[**MOCJ**](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice**

MOCJ is the mayor’s coordinating office for criminal justice policy. It manages diversion and reentry initiatives and oversees supportive housing programs for justice-involved individuals.

[**OASAS**](https://oasas.ny.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Office of Addiction Services and Supports**

OASAS is the New York State agency that funds and operates substance use treatment programs, funds harm reduction and recovery services and oversees addiction treatment policy statewide.

[**OMH**](https://omh.ny.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— New York State Office of Mental Health**

OMH is the New York State agency that funds and operates psychiatric programs and institutions and oversees mental health policy statewide.

[**OTDA**](https://otda.ny.gov/hearings/request/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance**

OTDA is the State agency that administers emergency aid programs, funds supportive housing grants and oversees temporary assistance policy.

[**SAMHSA**](https://www.samhsa.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration**

SAMHSA is the federal agency that funds behavioral health block grants, supports State and local programs and sets national behavioral health policy.

[**VA**](https://www.va.gov/resources/helpful-va-phone-numbers/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs**

VA is the federal agency that operates veteran health facilities, runs HUD-VASH housing programs, and provides mental health services for veterans.

### Crisis outreach and treatment programs

[**ACT**](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/act/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Assertive Community Treatment**

ACT teams are operated by the New York State Office of Mental Health. They consist of psychiatrists, nurses, social workers and peer specialists, and provide 24/7 field-based treatment for adults with severe mental illness. 

[**B-HEARD**](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/b-heard?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division**

B-HEARD is a City pilot program staffed by FDNY and H+H. It consists of unarmed clinician-EMT teams and responds to mental health 911 calls in select precincts.

[**CPEP**](https://www.nychealthandhospitals.org/services/mental-health-services/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program**

CPEP are 24/7 psychiatric emergency programs funded by the State and operated by City hospitals, providing critical crisis and evaluation services to individuals with serious mental illness. 

[**CTI**](https://www.criticaltime.org/cti-model/background/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **\- Critical Time Intervention**

CTI, founded in New York City, is a time-limited, evidence-based case management model employed by SOS teams that provides intensive support during periods of transition for individuals in crisis and cycling between systems. 

[**EOL**](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/home/downloads/pdf/press-releases/2022/the-subway-safety-plan.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— End of Line**

EOL are multiagency teams working at end-of-line stations as part of the Subway Safety Plan, connecting individuals to services. 

[**FACT**](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/act/forensic-act-program-addendum.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Forensic Assertive Community Treatment**

FACT teams are a specialized ACT model. They consist of behavioral health clinicians and criminal justice liaisons and provide integrated treatment and supervision for people with serious mental illness involved in the justice system. 

[**Fountain House Clubhouses**](https://www.fountainhouse.org/about/clubhouse-model?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Free, voluntary, member-led spaces administered and run by Fountain House, serving adults with serious mental illness in New York City.

[**IMT**](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/program/intensive-mobile-treatment-imt?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Intensive Mobile Treatment**

IMT teams are operated by DOHMH. They consist of clinical staff similar to ACT composition and treat people with serious mental illness who are homeless, recently incarcerated or repeatedly hospitalized. 

[**MCTs**](https://nyc988.cityofnewyork.us/en/crisis-services/mobile-crisis-teams/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Mobile Crisis Teams** 

MCTs are operated by DOHMH. They consist of clinician-led rapid-response units and respond to psychiatric crises dispatched through 988 or hospital networks.

[**Medical Respite** ](https://www.health.ny.gov/health%5Fcare/medicaid/redesign/sdh/respite.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Medical respite is funded by the State and operated by H+H, offering short-term medical respite beds for people exiting hospitals who are homeless.

[**PATH**](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/10/mayor-adams-celebrates-one-year-anniversary-of-path-co-response-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Police and Transit Homelessness Co-response Program**

PATH operates primarily overnight; consists of joint teams from NYPD, DHS and H+H; and responds to homelessness in subway and transit systems.

[**SCOUT**](https://www.mta.info/document/135741?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Subway Clinician Outreach Unit Teams**

SCOUT operates primarily during daytime hours, consists of clinician-led teams partnered with MTA and DHS, and provides outreach in the subway system.

**Situation Tables**

Cross-agency meetings (police, clinicians, outreach, housing) reviewing the highest-risk individuals and coordinating targeted interventions.

[**SOS**](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/adults/sos/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **Teams — Safe Options Support**

SOS teams are funded by OMH, consist of multidisciplinary outreach workers and conduct street outreach to connect unsheltered individuals to housing and other services.

### Housing and shelter programs

[**JISH**](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2025/08/04/2935/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Last%20year%2C%20the%20Council%20succeeded,held%20in%20pre%2Dtrial%20detention.) **— Justice-Involved Supportive Housing**

JISH is a housing model that consists of apartments with intensive supervision and clinical services both for justice-involved individuals with serious mental illness exiting jail or prison.

[**Safe Haven Beds**](https://www.nyc.gov/html/hhsaccelerator/downloads/pdf/DHS%20Safe%20Havens.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Safe Havens, funded and operated by DHS, are low-threshold residential housing for street homeless individuals. They consist of single rooms with reduced rules (pets allowed, no curfews, couples permitted) and serve a high-need population who decline traditional shelters.

[**Stabilization Beds**](https://arc.net/l/quote/wcwofbuo?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Stabilization beds, funded and operated by DHS, are short-term, low-threshold beds for individuals transitioning from the street to more permanent housing. They are typically less service-intensive than Safe Havens.

[**Supportive Housing**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/supportive-housing.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Supportive housing is permanent affordable housing consisting of independent units with on-site case management and clinical services, and serving people with mental illness, disabilities or chronic homelessness.

[**Street-to-Housing Pilot**](https://www.voa-gny.org/services/street-to-home-pilot-program/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Street-to-Housing is a pilot run by the Volunteers of America, consisting of single-room units with on-site supports to place individuals directly from the street into housing without shelter system entry.

### Legal frameworks and mental hygiene laws

[**MHL 9.41**](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.41?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **(Police Removal)**

MHL 9.41 is a State mental hygiene law provision authorizing NYPD officers to transport individuals for psychiatric evaluation. It applies when someone poses danger to themselves or others or cannot meet basic needs.

[**MHL 9.58**](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.58?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **(Clinical Removal)**

MHL 9.58 is a State mental hygiene law provision authorizing licensed mental health professionals to order transport to hospitals. It applies under similar danger criteria as 9.41.

[**MHL 9.40 / 9.39 / 9.27 / 9.33**](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/TBA9?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

These are State psychiatric hospitalization statutes consisting of progressive commitment periods. They require escalating levels of clinical and judicial authorization:

- 9.40: Up to 72-hour evaluation
- 9.39: Up to 15-day emergency hospitalization
- 9.27 / 9.37: 60-day commitment with physician certification
- 9.33: Court-ordered extended hospitalization

[**Kendra’s Law**](https://my.omh.ny.gov/analytics/saw.dll?dashboard&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Kendra’s Law is a 1999 State statute. It established AOT following a homicide by a person with untreated schizophrenia and authorizes court-ordered outpatient treatment.

[**AB 210**](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill%5Fid=202120220AB210&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **(California)**

AB 210 is California legislation. It authorizes data sharing across health, housing and safety providers with confidentiality protections; it is cited as a model for cross-system coordination.

### Data and coordination initiatives

[**CAPS**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycccoc/caps/caps.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Coordinated Assessment and Placement System**

CAPS, operated by New York City’s Continuum of Care (CoC), is the City’s internal database for matching individuals to supportive housing and other placements.

[**CoC**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycccoc/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Continuum of Care**

New York City’s CoC is the HUD-mandated coordination system that consists of City agencies and nonprofit providers. It allocates federal homelessness funding and organizes service delivery.

[**StreetSmart**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/outreach/street-outreach.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

StreetSmart is DHS’ digital platform. It consists of a database tracking outreach contacts by name and records engagement and progress of unsheltered individuals.

[**SPOA**](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/providers/resources/mental-illness-single-point-of-access.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Single Point of Access**

SPOA, operated by DOHMH, helps connect people with serious mental illness to the appropriate providers. 

[**Top 50 Lists**](https://arc.net/l/quote/elhioega?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Top 50 lists are internal by-name rosters that identify the most vulnerable or frequently encountered individuals. They are used to prioritize interventions in subways and on streets.

### Funding and contracting

[**Outcome-Based Contracting**](https://golab.bsg.ox.ac.uk/the-basics/outcomes-based-contracting/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Outcome-based contracting is a proposed payment model for New York City nonprofits. It ties funding to results like housing stability or reduced crisis recurrence and shifts from activity-based to results-based reimbursement.

[**Bundled Payments**](https://www.cms.gov/priorities/innovation/key-concepts/bundled-payments?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Bundled payments are a proposed funding structure. They consist of single-payment streams covering all services for an individual (housing, care, outreach) and make one provider accountable for coordination.

**Prompt Pay Standard**

The prompt pay standard is a proposed contracting reform that requires timely payments to nonprofit providers and aims to prevent cash-flow crises that delay service delivery.

### Clinical and behavioral concepts

[**SMI**](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Serious Mental Illness**

SMI is a diagnosable mental, behavioral or emotional disorder — such as bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and schizophrenia — that substantially interferes with a person’s life and ability to function.

[**Co-Occurring Disorders / Dual Diagnosis**](https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/co-occurring-disorders-health-conditions?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

“Co-occurring disorders” refers to concurrent mental illness and substance use disorder. Common among street homeless populations, co-occurring disorders require integrated treatment approaches.

[**Anosognosia**](https://www.nami.org/about-mental-illness/common-with-mental-illness/anosognosia/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Anosognosia is a psychiatric symptom consisting of lack of awareness of one’s own mental illness. It contributes to treatment refusal in disorders like schizophrenia.

[**Psychosis**](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/understanding-psychosis?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **/ Drug-Induced Psychosis**

Psychosis is a mental state involving loss of contact with reality. It can be triggered or worsened by substance use and includes symptoms like hallucinations and delusions.

[**TBI**](https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/disorders/traumatic-brain-injury-tbi?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) **— Traumatic Brain Injury** 

TBI is a neurological injury caused by external physical trauma to the head due to assault, falls and accidents, ranging from mild concussions to severe brain damage.

════════════════════════════════════════

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### Subway Safety: What the Data Show
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-the-data-show-about-subway-safety/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:47.000Z
What do we know about crime on New York City's subway system? A lot and a little.

A lot, in that crimes that happen there tend to be covered intensely in the media — especially pushings and homicides, including notorious incidents such as the arson homicide at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station late last year. It's been widely reported that there were 10 homicides underground in 2024, which, while statistically rare for a system that serves nearly 2 billion passengers per year, is unusually high compared to other recent years. Similarly, violence on the subways, while also statistically rare by many measures — there's a little under one violent crime per million rides — has risen substantially since the COVID-19 pandemic as well as over the longer span of time, including on a per-rider basis.

But beyond data that compare the subway system to itself and that compare New York City's subways (generally unfavorably) to large transit systems in other global cities, there's little empirical research about crimes committed underground. As a result, researchers haven't learned much about its prevalence, where crimes concentrate, who the offenders are or what might be done to stop subway crime from happening.

Based on decades of research, we do know quite a bit about where, why and how crime happens, at least above ground. Those basic principles — which establish, for instance, the tendency of crime to concentrate in a small number of places, the small number of people responsible for the largest proportion of serious crimes and the effect of the physical environment on behavior — are important, because they point us toward the most effective approaches to preventing and deterring crime, such as hot-spot policing, focused deterrence and place-based interventions such as remediating blighted properties, cleaning up vacant lots and improving street lighting.

Is it the same underground, where quarters are close and people are especially mobile?

We analyzed public data on crimes, arrests and subway usage to understand trends in subway crime, what drives crime in the subway system and thus what the most effective approaches would be to stem it. Here are the most telling facts we discovered:

## Crime trends

**Subway violence, accounting for 4.2% of the total violent crimes in New York City, has increased since the pandemic but was increasing even before March 2020.**

Despite declining ridership, subway violence increased markedly — by about 15% — from 2019 to 2024 and by 96% from 2014 to 2024\. The early months of 2025 have seen a notable decrease in subway violence. (Throughout this report, the term "violent crimes" refers to the following offenses: murder, robbery, rape, and felony and misdemeanor assault.)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21360754?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**The increase in subway violence over the last decade — as well as violence in the city's public spaces on the surface — is driven by noninstrumental violence, meaning motivated by animus rather than by monetary motives.** While robberies were nearly 1 in 3 violent subway crimes a decade ago, today they represent only 1 in 6 violent subway crimes. Felony assaults on the subway have more than tripled since 2009 even as robberies and grand larcenies are down by 18%. This tracks broader national trends as well as trends on New York City's surface, showing that violence is increasingly less likely to be due to instrumental or pecuniary motives and more likely to be due to personal animus. The rise in assaults could partly explain the recent uptick in murders which, while still rare, are up by an alarming amount.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21508866?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21485886?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**The increase in felony assaults on the subway in 2024 is partially driven by increases in assaults on police officers.** Assaults on police officers on the subway rose from 98 (17% of all felony assaults) in 2023 to 179 (31% of all felony assaults) in 2024\. There has been a steady increase in the number of assaults on police officers since the pandemic.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21691583?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**While subway violence has increased, so has violence in public spaces on the surface.** Subway violence is up by about 15% since 2019; street violence has risen by 16% over the same period. This suggests that whatever is happening on the subways reflects a broader phenomenon that has affected public spaces throughout the city.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21359910?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Gun violence on the subway system remains very rare.** Typically there are fewer than five shootings on the system per year among over 2 billion rides, which means that the risk of a shooting in the subway is likely to be substantially lower than it is on the street. This also suggests that large investments to keep guns out of the system may not ultimately yield correspondingly large improvements in safety.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21453382?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Since 2019, violent recidivism — defined here as the share of individuals who were arrested for a given type of crime in two consecutive years — has risen among subway offenders, doubling from 3% to 6% over this period.** While recidivism rose among all arrestees in New York City during this time period, in percentage terms, the increase is far larger for subway violence than among violent crimes in general.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21360870?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## Concentration of risk

**While most crimes occur during peak hours of ridership, on a per-person or per-ride basis, the subways are safest during peak hours of use and are considerably more dangerous at night.** While the risk of a rider being victimized is about 1 per million during rush hour, it is more than 20 times higher during the late night and early morning hours when fewer people are using the subway. This empirical regularity helps to explain the City's recent decision to deploy police officers on trains during the overnight hours.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21361207?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Similar to the surface, crimes are heavily concentrated within the system. Of the city's 472 stations, the 30 stations with the largest number of violent incidents account for 50% of violent crimes.** An important caveat here is that, in NYPD data, crimes are assigned to the nearest station even when they happen on trains, making it difficult to understand exactly where the crimes are happening — in the stations themselves, on mezzanines, or on trains pulling into a given station. Many of these stations are the major transit hubs which serve the largest number of passengers. However, the stations where the risk per passenger is greatest are quite different. These stations tend to be used less frequently than the major hubs and to be located in the outer boroughs. The amount of violence at these stations, year to year, is not easy to predict.

**The most vulnerable New Yorkers, the elderly in general and elderly women in particular, represent a very small share of the victims — between 1% and 3%, depending on how the vulnerable group is defined.** Two-thirds of the victims of subway violence are male, and people between the ages of 25 and 44 are most likely to be the victims of subway crime.

## Subway offenders

**Subway crimes, like other crimes in New York City, are being committed by individuals who are older than many people might suspect.** Just 36% of arrestees for subway violence are under the age of 25, and only 14% are juveniles under the age of 18\. Half of arrestees are between the ages of 25 and 44, and 13% are over the age of 45.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21453836?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Violent subway offenders are getting older, not younger, which suggests that recent Raise the Age legislation is unlikely to be a major driver of the recent increase in violence.** Today, individuals arrested for violent crimes in public spaces are, on average, eight years older than they were 18 years ago. Violent subway arrestees are still slightly younger than violent street arrestees, but the difference in ages has diminished rapidly.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21361636?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Individuals with a violent subway arrest have more extensive criminal histories than those arrested for a violent street crime.** Violent subway arrestees are, for example, 6 times more likely to have other arrests for a violent subway crime than other arrestees. Likewise, while fare beating arrests are, in general, not very predictive of future subway violence, when compared to other arrestees, there is a greater propensity for violent subway arrestees to have a prior arrest for fare beating — potentially indicating that this is a population that spends more time in the subway system.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21453877?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Individuals with the largest number of arrests for subway crimes and subway violence are more likely than other arrestees to be homeless and mentally ill.** One NYPD analysis of high-volume subway offenders found that 41% were homeless at the time of their most recent arrest. Nearly two-thirds of those with the largest number of subway arrests in 2022 and 2023 had a documented history of homelessness or mental illness. Among those who also had an arrest for subway violence, 89% had a documented history of homelessness, mental illness or both.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21453965?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## Disorderly conduct, fare beating and subway violence

**Since 2019, citizen calls about disorderly conduct and arrests for disorderly conduct have more than doubled on the subway.** However, less than 1% of 911 calls reporting disorderly conduct on trains result in an arrest. In 2024, for example, only 221 arrests were made on the subway for disorderly conduct, aggravated harassment, criminal mischief, criminal nuisance and unnecessary noise combined, out of 28,329 calls concerning disorderly behavior among individuals or groups.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21635886?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Although many violent subway offenders do have a history of skipping fares, the vast majority of people caught fare beating are not actually arrested but instead receive a summons. Of the small group who do get arrested for fare evasion—around 7% of those caught—statistics show they are less likely to commit violent offenses later on than other arrestees, and overall pose a lower criminal risk.** For example, fewer than 1 in 100 of those arrested for fare beating from 2016 to 2021 were subsequently arrested for a violent subway crime over the next two years. While this is a higher risk than violent crime arrestees on the surface, it is a far lower risk than among individuals who are arrested for disorderly conduct on the subways. Interestingly, a drug or disorderly conduct arrest below ground is more predictive of future subway violence than an arrest for a violent crime committed above ground.
### Case Studies from Other Large Cities
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/case-studies-from-large-cities-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:31.000Z
*This is one of three supporting documents connected to Vital City's recommendations on serious mental illness and homelessness,* [*"What To Do (and Not To Do) About People in Crisis on Streets and Subways."*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-to-do-about-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways) *Find* [*"How the System Works (or Doesn't)"*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-the-system-works-for-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways) *here and* [*"What the Data Show"*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-the-data-show-people-in-crisis-on-the-streets-and-subways) *here.*

A primary recommendation of the [Vital City report](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-to-do-about-people-in-crisis-on-streets-and-subways) relating to people living on the street with serious mental illness and other afflictions is rooted in a housing-led approach. The evidence that such an approach can work is strong.

But this kind of proposal has met strong skepticism, focused on the city's extreme housing shortage, the severity of needs and government's limited agility in executing complex operations. We looked at three global cities that have more successfully addressed homelessness to understand whether the conditions that enabled progress there could be replicated in New York City. Each of these cities has starkly different cultures, programs, laws and governance structures. Yet they all arrived at successful solutions toward ending street homelessness. There are some important lessons that can be applied to New York City.

## Helsinki

Finland is a strong social welfare state with a broad commitment to a high standard of living for all its residents. That includes benefits that support families with children, universal health care, education and basic income security. In fact, the [Finnish Constitution](https://fra.europa.eu/en/law-reference/constitution-finland-22?utm&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) includes the duty of the government to support each person's right to attain housing of their own choice.

Despite these offerings, Finland experienced a significant surge in homelessness toward the end of the 20th century, driven by an urban housing squeeze that failed single adults, an economic crash and the rapid downsizing of psychiatric institutions without enough community housing and support to absorb people. Helsinki, the capital, with a population of 650,000, initially addressed the need through opening significant new shelter capacity and a progressive staircase approach to moving people from the streets to shelter, then working on housing from there. This initially cut street and shelter homelessness in half (from roughly 4,000 to under 2,000), but saw far less progress in reducing the number of people staying in shelter. Fifteen years in, even the decline in street homelessness stalled.

In 2008, the national government abandoned the shelter-centric approach and pivoted to a housing-led solution, including a [commitment to bypass shelter and convert those resources and facilities to housing](https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscpe/vol22num2/ch4.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Many people experiencing long-term homelessness have co-occurring serious mental illness and substance use disorders. Helsinki paired a normal lease with on-site or mobile mental health and substance use disorder interventions, tenancy sustainment and harm reduction practices. Research shows that the stability of housing improves the likelihood that these kinds of services would help a person succeed. [Finland's Y-Foundation found](https://ysaatio.fi/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/A%5FHome%5Fof%5FYour%5FOwn%5Flowres%5Fspreads.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that the basics of stable housing — a fixed address, privacy and "domestic peace" — reduce crisis and make it more feasible to manage medications, keep appointments and build routines, making health and social problems easier to address. A [frequently cited Finnish estimate](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4679128/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) finds up to about €15,000 saved per person per year in reduced emergency health, social services and justice costs.

Civic health improved as neighbor-relations teams mediated conflicts and prevented disturbances with landlords by applying casework services that were available on call, around-the-clock before crises spilled into the streets. This further contributes to reducing visible street homelessness and helps make public spaces feel calmer.

As shelters and hostels in Helsinki were phased out or converted into permanent housing, the city went from roughly 600 shelter beds in 2008 to one permanent emergency center with just 52 beds by 2019\. Between 2008 and 2022, there was a [68% reduction](https://ysaatio.fi/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Kotiin-Kaakinen-2023-en-final.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the total number of people experiencing homelessness in the capital, with street homelessness becoming a rare occurrence.

## Tokyo

Japan's welfare culture is rooted in moral obligation rather than in individual rights or entitlement. It reflects traditions that emphasize family and community responsibility over state dependency. Social-service programs are generally rooted in work requirements, and the stigma of receiving public benefits remains an enduring challenge to connecting to people in need. Japan's welfare state is often described as "productivist" — designed to support economic participation rather than to provide universal coverage.

Within this context, Tokyo also experienced a rapid increase in street homelessness in the late 1990s, primarily driven by unemployed single men brought about by Japan's economic collapse. The number of people living rough in Tokyo (a city of 14 million) [peaked at 5,798 in 1999](https://www.fukushi.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/documents/d/fukushi/homeless202401?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=%E7%B5%8C%E9%81%8E%E8%AA%AC%E6%98%8E%20%20%EF%BC%91%20%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%AC23%E5%8C%BA%E5%86%85%E3%81%A7%E3%81%AF%E3%80%81%E5%B9%B3%E6%88%9011%E5%B9%B4%E5%BA%A6%E3%81%AE5%2C798%E4%BA%BA%E3%81%8C%E3%83%94%E3%83%BC%E3%82%AF%E3%81%A7%E3%81%82%E3%81%A3%E3%81%9F%E3%80%82%20%EF%BC%92,%E6%B8%9B%E5%B0%91%E3%81%AE%E8%A6%81%E5%9B%A0%E3%81%AF%E8%87%AA%E7%AB%8B%E6%94%AF%E6%8F%B4%E3%82%B7%E3%82%B9%E3%83%86%E3%83%A0%E3%81%AE%E5%8A%B9%E6%9E%9C%E3%80%81%E5%9C%B0%E5%9F%9F%E7%94%9F%E6%B4%BB%E7%A7%BB%E8%A1%8C%E6%94%AF%E6%8F%B4%E4%BA%8B%E6%A5%AD%E3%81%AE%E5%8A%B9%E6%9E%9C%E3%80%81%E7%94%9F%E6%B4%BB%E4%BF%9D%E8%AD%B7%E3%81%AE%E9%81%A9%E7%94%A8%E3%81%AA%E3%81%A9%E3%81%8C%E8%80%83%E3%81%88%E3%82%89%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B%E3%80%82%20%E4%BB%A4%E5%92%8C%EF%BC%96%E5%B9%B4%EF%BC%91%E6%9C%88%20%E3%83%9B%E3%83%BC%E3%83%A0%E3%83%AC%E3%82%B9%E5%AF%BE%E7%AD%96%E3%81%AE%E7%8F%BE%E7%8A%B6%E3%81%AB%E3%81%A4%E3%81%84%E3%81%A6%20%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%AC%E9%83%BD%E7%A6%8F%E7%A5%89%E5%B1%80). Since then, street homelessness has declined dramatically. [Official counts](https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h02407/government-survey-finds-japanese-homeless-population-continues-to-decrease.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Image%3A%20Number%20of%20Homeless%20People,in%20Japan%20According%20to%20Surveys) (conducted by visual daytime surveys) found 565 people living on the street in January 2025.

In 2002, Japan passed its first [Homelessness Act](https://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/acd/cg/law/lex/rlr21/legi.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), defining homelessness simultaneously as a human rights concern and a public-space challenge, with a high degree of expectation on those who are unhoused to take actions to overcome their own homelessness. In the years that followed the release of the Act, authorities cleared encampments from parks and riverbanks, motivated by a wide public demand for public access to shared spaces. These actions, however, were paired with a strong sense that public welfare should be deployed to support people through housing and services as essential to solving street homelessness.

Like New York City, Tokyo government policy focuses on shelter for street homeless individuals. However, once a person has completed intake, there is great urgency to ensure national benefits and housing assistance are achieved quickly. This is enabled by a broad definition of eligibility. A person identified as unhoused is deemed automatically eligible for a comprehensive package of rental support, cash assistance and case management. Decisions about public assistance are generally made within 14 days; under the law, they must be completed within 30 days.

Tokyo [treats housing as the first intervention](https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/addressing-homelessness-u-s-sweeps-versus-japans-public-assistance?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); rent is paid as an automatic part of assistance to cover time-limited rent and stabilize people in ordinary apartments through local welfare offices. Behavioral and medical health help complement housing, but getting them is not a prerequisite to accessing housing resources.

It is important to note that, simultaneously, Tokyo continues to rely on institutionalization of the mentally ill; Japan has a national capacity of [324,000 beds](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385730853%5FMental%5Fhealth%5Fand%5Fpsychiatry%5Fin%5FJapan?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (a rate of 258 per 100,000 people, compared with 35 per 100,000 in the United States). This likely means the street homeless population there has less acute needs than we experience in New York, and accessing care when a severe level of need arises is comparatively easier.

## Houston

The social welfare culture in Houston (population 2.4 million) — and more broadly in Texas — reflects a market-oriented, individualistic and charity-driven ethos, rooted more in local initiative and private responsibility than in strong government provision. In January 2011, [Houston's point-in-time count](https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/2d521d2c/files/uploaded/2011%5FPIT%5FExecutive%5Fsummary.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found 8,538 people homeless with over half unsheltered (4,440). This was a 25% increase from 2010.

In response, the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston, the local entity responsible for receiving and dispersing federal homeless funding, began a coordinated effort to address the crisis. In 2012, they created a community plan that became the backbone of [The Way Home](https://www.thewayhomehouston.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), with a focus on ending homelessness through permanent housing with supportive services.

The Way Home was made up of more than 100 partners — including homeless service agencies, local governments, public housing authorities, the local Veterans Affairs office and other nonprofits and community stakeholders. The plan itself is driven by a desire to spend any available funds on housing rather than shelter.

In 2014, then-Mayor Annise Parker publicly backed the effort, committing her political capital to reducing homelessness despite having little role in service delivery, which was provided through an independent nonprofit and the charitable sector. By addressing homelessness as a priority and invoking shared community responsibility, the mayor set the foundation for coordinated business and philanthropy investment in homelessness solutions.

To achieve its [coordinated approach](https://www.usich.gov/news-events/news/coordinating-your-way-home-houston?utm&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Houston stood up a single point of coordinated access, adopted a common assessment tool, worked from a single by-name list and clarified who was accountable for outcomes across dozens of providers, with the Coalition as lead agency.

Coordination with police and the behavioral health system was also instrumental in its success. Harris County's [Judge Ed Emmett Mental Health Diversion Center](https://www.texasjcmh.gov/media/mdddqwwd/starting-mh-court-harris-county-diversion-center-final-report-10092020.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) steers low-level cases to treatment. Clinicians are embedded in Houston's 911 call center through the [Harris Center's Crisis Call Diversion](https://www.theharriscenter.org/services/crisis-services?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). They route these calls to a mix of clinician-only and clinician-with-police-officer teams for on-scene crises, depending on the severity of the conditions reported by the caller. In 2024, the system diverted 5,033 calls from police/EMS, and rapid response teams resolved 84% of these calls without law enforcement. The Harris Center's [Crisis Intervention Response Teams](https://www.theharriscenter.org/services/crisis-services?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) co-respond with the Houston Police Department or Harris County Sheriff's Office for behavioral health calls, doing assessment, safety planning and transport to treatment, not jail, whenever public safety considerations allow. An [independent evaluation](https://www.texasjcmh.gov/media/mdddqwwd/starting-mh-court-harris-county-diversion-center-final-report-10092020.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found participants were significantly less likely to be rebooked, and the county avoided about $5.54 in jail costs for every $1 invested.

The Houston Recovery Center's [Sobering Center](https://houstonrecoverycenter.org/public-intoxication-substance-abuse-jail-diversion-sobering-center/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is a standing alternative to address public intoxication. It has saved roughly 37,000 officer hours, letting police focus on priority crime while people sober safely and get connected to treatment.

This same broad coalition of partners was able to quickly step up to meet needs during the COVID-19 pandemic, which further reinforced the strength of the coordinated response. The City of Houston and Harris County, together with the Coalition, launched a two-year, $65 million Community COVID Housing Program that accelerated permanent placements and paired them with encampment "decommissioning through housing," not enforcement alone. The partners later extended the effort with additional funding and [formalized a playbook](https://www.cfthhouston.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Texas adopted a statewide public-camping ban in 2021\. Since then, the city has decommissioned more than 90 encampments, with about [90% of these individuals moving into housing](https://www.governing.com/housing/how-houston-cut-its-homeless-population-by-nearly-two-thirds?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Fewer encampments have meant less police involvement and fewer criminal citations. The city pointed to a coordinated, housing-first pipeline that reduced visible encampments and delivered durable results.

The results are visible and sustained: [More than 32,000 people have been housed since 2012, roughly 9 in 10 still stably housed two years later](https://www.thewayhomehouston.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and a sustained drop in overall street homelessness ([down 75% to 1,100 in 2024](https://www.cfthhouston.org/data-and-research-archive?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) has made Houston a national reference point even through storms and leadership changes. This happened because the region centralized decisions, shared data and stuck to one objective across City Hall, the county, providers and the business community.

## Translating these successful models to New York City

Given the policy, legal and cultural differences, this multicity review shows that cities do not need a single set of preconditions to overcome street homelessness. It has been achieved in places with different social welfare philosophies and benefits, and different motivations for their actions. What is common among them is the commitment to collective action through an approach that moves away from shelter-centric strategies and prioritizes, wherever possible, the swift movement of people from the street into stable housing with necessary supports.

════════════════════════════════════════

*New York is entering an historic and pivotal transition. Mayor-elect Mamdani faces big problems on housing, safety, mental health, transit, and more.*

*Vital City is uniquely positioned to offer clear, practical guidance rooted in evidence. Ideas that could actually be implemented and work.*

*But to meet this moment, we need to grow.*

*That's why, this year, for the first time, we're asking our readers to support Vital City directly. We're aiming for 700 inaugural supporters by December 31.*

*Your support will help us expand our editorial capacity, strengthen our operational support, and continue delivering thoughtful, relevant and informative work in 2026.*

*If this article informed your thinking, challenged you, or helped you understand the city more clearly, please consider supporting the work behind it.*

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### What Mamdani Can Learn from a de Blasio Administration Safety Innovation
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/nstat-should-be-key-to-mamdani-public-safety-plan/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:37:44.000Z
Despite [decreases in murders and shootings to prepandemic levels,](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-state-of-crime-in-new-york-city-at-midyear-2025) public polling and sentiment data suggest that New Yorkers still [don't feel safe](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/crime-perceptions-and-reality-in-new-york). This may be because, despite reductions in some crimes, [many city crime rates — especially assaults — remain stubbornly high](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-state-of-crime-in-new-york-city-at-midyear-2025). It may reflect a [disconnect between reality and sensationalist news reports](https://arc.net/l/quote/vqnibnij?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But a large part of the disconnect may be a measurement problem: The way we view safety varies widely depending on several factors ranging from the condition of the physical space we occupy to the levels of economic opportunity in a given neighborhood.

For instance, a female New Yorker may consider catcalling and comments on the subway, something that isn't necessarily a crime and isn't captured in crime data, a violation of her sense of safety. Illegal commercial dumping near public housing units creates serious concerns for families and residents. Or, poorly lit areas in neighborhoods can significantly erode a tenant's feeling of security.

Police, whose core job is to respond to and investigate crime, are and should remain an essential part of the safety apparatus. But in order to build a sustainable sense of security and well-being, there has to be a larger investment in a community's ability to stop crime before it has a chance to manifest. We already know things like addressing the [physical infrastructure of long-ignored neighborhoods](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8055100/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), promoting economic vitality through [job readiness](https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2024/12/02/jhr.1122-12629R4?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [job-creation](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25477459/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), providing access to [treatment services,](https://www.nber.org/papers/w22610?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) improving [housing stability](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8496894/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and investing in our [young people and their development](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6094549/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are in fact the ounces of prevention that are worth pounds of cures — we just have to orient our policy priorities accordingly.

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's plan to create a Department of Community Safety is an important step to tackle the variety of public safety issues facing the city. But any policy has to be successfully implemented to make a real difference. In this case, the implementation plan has to include a solid approach to tracking results and communicating them back to the public — and as the old adage goes, you can't track what you don't measure.

Fortunately, a foundation for coordinating and tracking safety approaches that are not just about crimes and arrests was laid during the de Blasio administration by the Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS) in the Mayor's Office, prior to it being moved from City Hall to the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD). As part of ONS, the team responsible for creating the Mayor's Action Plan developed NeighborhoodStat (NStat) — a management system that brings New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents together with all relevant city agencies to identify problems, coordinate solutions and track outcomes at both hyperlocal and systemic levels. When MAP was used as initially envisioned, it [not only improved safety](https://map.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/JJREC-MAP-Eval-Update-5-.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) but also worked together with residents, with NStat at the center of the program's operations.

## **So how does NStat work?**

[NeighborhoodStat](https://map.cityofnewyork.us/neighborhood-stat/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) brings together neighbors, community organizations and city agencies to convene in a series of local meetings where participants share, analyze and use data to identify public safety priorities and what they deem to be responsive [solutions.](http://solutions.in/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) MAP staff then track progress over time and report out regularly to ensure government accountability and responsiveness.

In its early years, NStat was used in the NYCHA developments MAP focuses on to reclaim and activate [greenspace in East Harlem](https://patch.com/new-york/harlem/east-harlem-public-housing-residents-design-safety-improvements?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that had been a hotbed for illegal activity; to [secure capital investments](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/press-release/city-opens-new-teen-lounge-community-center-at-brownsville-houses/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to reopen a community center in Brownsville Houses that had been closed for 20 years, limiting safe space for young people in the development, despite the constant demand of residents to reopen; and to address [open air substance abuse in the Bronx](https://www.motthavenherald.com/2018/11/09/patterson-houses-anti-crime-initiative-puts-faith-in-green-spaces/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) through a combination of physical space, mental health and stewardship interventions.

That's not all NStat does. Each NStat identifies, tracks and monitors metrics relevant to site priorities to inform future NStat meetings. Better collection of on-the-ground data and insights helps identify chronic issues that often transcend a single neighborhood, giving city executives timely insights so they can develop more systemic, sustainable solutions to these challenges.

When it works, NStat can extend ownership and accountability for a more comprehensive definition of safety, making more agencies answerable to the public for results on shared problems. For example, Brownsville's community center being closed on its own was problematic, but showed that the deeper issue was the territoriality in the neighborhood that prevented the youth of that development from venturing the short distance to a neighboring development to use their facilities and benefit from their programming. DYCD reopening a community center alone wouldn't solve the underlying issue. It would be an expensive band-aid that wouldn't address the underlying issue, which affects more neighborhoods than just Brownsville, and would require the support of several city agencies and nonprofit partners.

Or consider what happened at Castle Hill Houses a few years ago. Residents [were grappling with a surge in illegal dumping](https://www.bxtimes.com/illegal-dumping-in-the-bronx/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): furniture and construction debris piled in courtyards, cracked sidewalks and poorly lit areas that felt unsafe, particularly for families with children. This wasn't a problem any single agency could solve. Through [MAP's NStat process](https://map.cityofnewyork.us/neighborhood-stat/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), MAP staff facilitated a series of meetings with residents, NYCHA, Sanitation, Parks, NYPD and other NYC agency partners to share information, analyze data and problem-solve collaboratively. The result [was a coordinated response](https://youtu.be/xRYNB5eO4vY?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

While much can be said about the very insular way the NYPD deals with accountability, there's no disputing that the department has both internal (i.e., Compstat) and external accountability mechanisms (i.e., CCRB). Over the years, the department has created structures and systems that support the NYPD in mobilizing its workforce to achieve certain outcomes while also creating space for some form of civilian feedback. We'd be hard-pressed to find another agency that is required to withstand anywhere near the level of public scrutiny or engagement with the public on how they could be better.

Indeed, many agencies have not shown they have the structure or systems necessary to be responsive to the needs of New Yorkers. Pushing the NYPD out front as the sole solution to crime and disorder lets other agencies off the hook. Rather than each agency responding separately or pointing fingers about who owns a given problem, NStat creates shared ownership and accountability for problems that cross jurisdictional lines.

Outside of NStat, which is currently focused on a select number of NYCHA developments that are part of the MAP initiative, there's no citywide mechanism that routinely brings together agencies with residents to address safety concerns. While residents report issues constantly — via 311, to council members, at community board meetings — there's no formal framework for sustained problem-solving. The result? Trash [piles up](https://apnews.com/article/nyc-trash-garbage-bins-694694360479c6c31a75d55b4c784755?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), unsheltered people [struggle in public spaces](https://www.osc.ny.gov/press/releases/2025/01/dinapoli-numbers-homeless-population-doubled-new-york?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and disinvested [infrastructure eventually collapses.](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/11/04/mitchel-houses-boiler-explosion-permits-expired/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) The problem isn't always the lack of resources or policy innovation — it's the lack of political will, exclusion of the public from problem-solving and no shared organizational framework to ensure results across partners.

## **The case for NStat**

MAP's core tenets — treating safety as a public health, place-based, community-driven challenge — are echoed in other cities and [lauded nationally](https://www.americanprogress.org/article/neighborhoodstat-strengthening-public-safety-community-empowerment/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Some of MAP’s tenets are visible in Mayor Brandon Scott's [Public Safety Action Plan](https://mayor.baltimorecity.gov/sites/default/files/ActionPlan.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Johnson's [Neighborhood Safety Strateg](https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/community-safety/home/PeoplesPlanforCommunitySafety.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)y in Chicago and former mayor [Tishaura Jones' Plan](https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/mayor/news/state-of-public-safety-2025.cfm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for St. Louis, all of which have seen results.

Unfortunately, MAP, a signature initiative of the de Blasio administration and part of the Office of Neighborhood Safety, has been deprioritized under the Adams Administration with the move from the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice to [the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD),](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dycd/services/office-of-neighborhood-safety.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) which lacks the political muscle necessary to effect change citywide. MAP's Nstat model requires those leading it to have the authority and visibility to get things done swiftly and efficiently. Quick wins, being able to honor commitments in a reasonable amount of time, can make the difference between having the trust and partnership of residents or not.

There is a deep need for a leader who is empowered to facilitate and manage across agencies on safety priorities. One agency simply does not possess the authority to secure the commitments, resources and prioritized attention over another in the same way a mayoral unit does. Public safety requires innovation, rapid response and cross-cutting solutions that are not always in line with how our more bureaucratic, legacy agencies operate. Despite these changes, MAP remains a force on the ground in NYCHA communities across NYC, thanks to its network of community and resident partners, its wildly popular community engagement ethos and its innovative solutions to physical space and place-based challenges. Its proven success in the [original 15](https://map.cityofnewyork.us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and now [30 developments](https://www.innovatingjustice.org/program/neighborhood-safety-initiatives/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) makes it ripe for the City to be able to translate the learnings to a citywide context.

## **Mamdani's next steps**

The Office of Neighborhood Safety — where MAP, the Office to Prevent Gun Violence and the Atlas program sit — should be considered the foundation for Mamdani's future Department of Community Safety. And NStat can chart the way forward. There's no need to start from scratch when you have a significant knowledge base, evaluated strategies, existing resources and 10 years of lessons at your disposal.

Also, there needs to be a concerted effort to better understand, measure and track safety beyond traditional administrative data. Between 2020-2022, the NYC Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ) funded something called the [NYC Neighborhood Navigator](https://map.cityofnewyork.us/ons-neighborhood-navigator/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which we were fortunate enough to have helped design, to support ONS' work. The objective of the tool was to create a neighborhood-level platform to support ONS programming which could be used by residents to track and measure safety and well-being as defined by MAP residents during NSTAT meetings — rather than relying solely on crime data or program utilization. While the transition out of MOCJ occurred before the tool could be implemented, and ONS was separated from the research infrastructure needed to sustain it, the Navigator illustrates what such a platform *could* offer: a community-grounded, multidimensional way to monitor safety and well-being that aligns with residents' lived definitions, not just police or administrative metrics. Today, the tool remains dormant, but its original vision points to what is still possible.

Public safety cannot be improved or sustained by any one agency. The infrastructure to support the coordination and collaboration needed for agencies to work together to solve our most pressing and complex challenges does not yet exist at scale. But it can be built if the Department of Community Safety, leveraging the NStat model, creates it.

════════════════════════════════════════

*Vital City launched three years ago as an experiment. Our first "meeting" was me and Greg Berman, sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan sketching out the* [*first issue*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-1)*, betting that in a time of such hyperpartisanship, New Yorkers might be yearning for a calm voice, compelling evidence and angelic writing on how to make cities better.*

*You helped us grow into a trusted civic home for practical solutions.*

*Now, as Mayor Mamdani prepares to take office, Vital City is uniquely positioned to offer practical guidance to the new administration. We have ambitious plans for 2026: boosting our operational capacity, expanding our "What to Do (And Not to Do)" series, making academic research usable for decisionmakers, strengthening our data analysis, and building a more robust community of urban policy practitioners.*

*To do that, we need your help.*

*For the first time ever, we're directly asking readers to support Vital City. Our goal is to add 700 inaugural supporters by December 31\. Your tax-deductible gift will help us expand our capacity, and ensure our ideas reach the decisionmakers who need them.*

*If you value rigorous, solutions-focused policy work, we hope you'll join us.*[***Become an inaugural supporter today.***](https://bit.ly/vc-eoy-article?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

*— Liz Glazer, Founder*
### Reality Check: Has Youth Crime in New York Risen After Raise the Age?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/youth-crime-in-new-york-after-raise-the-age/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:45.000Z
*This is part of Vital City's ongoing series dissecting the data on matters of public controversy, especially in the realm of public safety. Read previous installments* [*about the National Guard and cities*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/reality-check-whos-the-guard-really-guarding-in-us-cities)*,* [*NYPD staffing levels*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-new-yorkers-should-know-about-nypd-staffing) *and* [*crime levels in Manhattan and Brooklyn*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/reality-check-how-safe-are-manhattan-and-brooklyn)*.*

In April 2017, New York passed "Raise the Age," a law designed to stop automatically prosecuting 16- and 17-year-olds as adults, making it the last state in the nation to raise the age of criminal responsibility over the age of 16\. The law, phased in over two years, aimed to move teenagers out of adult jails and into facilities focused on rehabilitation. While critics frequently argue that Raise the Age precipitated a spike in youth crime, the data — with one significant caveat — generally does not support this claim.

[Under the new system](https://www.nycourts.gov/courthelp/pdfs/RTA%5Fflowchart.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), 16- and 17-year-olds charged with misdemeanor offenses (other than traffic violations) are now classified as Juvenile Delinquents (JDs). Their cases are heard in Family Court, where proceedings are confidential. While they cannot be sent to adult jail or prison, they may still face placement in youth facilities.

Those in the same age group charged with felonies fall into a new category called Adolescent Offenders (AOs). These cases begin in the Youth Part of the state Supreme Court, a newly created court part designed to adjudicate these types of cases, rather than in Family Court. However, more than 80% of these felony cases are eventually transferred to Family Court. Once transferred, the youth is treated as a Juvenile Delinquent rather than an adult criminal.

Thirteen- to 15-year-olds accused of serious or violent felonies are classified Juvenile Offenders (JOs), a category that also existed before the passage of RTA. They are also tried in the Youth Part of the Supreme Court. While they receive lighter sentences than adults, they can still end up with a permanent criminal record unless a judge grants them a special status or transfers the case to Family Court.

## Youth crime trends before and after the reforms

Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has called for reforms to the law. "When the age of criminal responsibility went up, the age of criminal suspects went down," [she said in June](https://nypost.com/2025/06/03/us-news/youth-violence-has-skyrocketed-in-nyc-top-cop-jessica-tisch-reveals-as-she-blames-contentious-raise-the-age-law/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), adding: "Seriously bad things come from a consequence-free environment, and right now juveniles who commit crimes in New York City are living in a virtually consequence-free environment."

Tisch is incorrect that the age of criminal suspects is declining. There is one serious area of concern: more youth are carrying illegal weapons and shooting those weapons. But that is a small fraction of criminal behavior in which young people are involved. Overall, the post-Raise the Age picture is one of declining youth crime as a percentage of overall crime.

This week, the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice issued a report on ["NYC Youth Crime in Context,"](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/reports/nyc-youth-crime-in-context-arrest-recidivism/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) concluding that "in 2024, the youth share of citywide felony and violent felony arrests was the same as it was in 2018," and that "a small proportion of youth felony arrests (\~5%) are for the most serious violent felony crimes, where 16-17s have seen an uptick as a share of citywide crime, mostly in the past year." Further, it states: "Youth recidivism rates for all felony, violent, and serious violent offenses are stable or decreasing. Most youth are reoffending at or below 2018 levels."

Vital City's data analysis provides additional context and insight.

To begin, there is no evidence to date that the overall proportion of crime committed by youth — either property crime or violent crime — has risen in the wake of Raise the Age. In fact, as a percentage of crime, youth crime is lower today than it was in 2017, before RTA was implemented.

Prior to RTA, the percentage of all crimes (the combined tally of felonies, misdemeanors and violations) committed by youth was already trending down. Since the passage of the law, the percentage of crime by youth is down further. The share of crimes committed by youth ticked upward in 2021, but the rate today remains below what it was before the law took effect.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26584528?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Looking specifically at felonies, the percentage committed by youth is also down. The percentages rose modestly in 2021 — but remain below pre-RTA levels.

What about the seven major felony offenses that are often used as bellwethers of crime in New York (murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny auto)? Before passage of RTA, the percentage of these crimes committed by youth was trending down. Since the law's passage, the percentage of major felony crimes committed by youth has continued declining. The share of seven major felony offenses committed by youth increased after 2021, but it too remains below what it was before the law took effect.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26585377?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Violent felony offenses show the same pattern.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26585608?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Some critics of RTA argue that, in absolute numbers, total youth crime is up when compared to 2017\. This is true — but lacks crucial context.

In New York City, felony offenses by people under the age of 18 have risen 13% over the pre-RTA period, and seven major felony offenses have increased 19%. In contrast over the same period, overall incidence of felony offenses has increased by 32%, and the seven major felony offenses have increased by 26%. Youth are a shrinking share of the serious crime problem.

Furthermore, Raise the Age applies across the state, and [youth crime rates in other parts of New York are trending downward even in absolute terms](https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/juvenilearrests/index.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); New York City is an exception to the rule.

Similarly, youth felony re-arrests — defined as a new arrest within one year of the original arrest — have stayed flat from 2018 to 2024, while adult re-arrests, particularly those 25 and older, have increased. The data [just released from the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice](https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/reports/nyc-youth-crime-in-context-arrest-recidivism/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) shows that the rearrest rate for people under 18 years old charged with a felony was unchanged, from 33% in 2018 to 32% in 2024\. The rate was also unchanged for people 18 to 24 years old, from 30% in 2018 to 30% in 2024\. Meanwhile, it increased for people over 25 years old, from 24% in 2018 to 32% in 2024.

The same trend applies to rearrests for people arrested for an initial violent felony offense. The rearrest rate for people under 18 years old went from 33% in 2018 to 32% in 2024, and the rate for people 18 to 24 years old went from 25% in 2018 to 26% in 2024 — while it increased significantly for people over 25 years of age from 18% in 2018 to 24% in 2024.

Taken together, this strongly suggests that a change in state law is not responsible for an increase in youth crime or the increase in overall crime in New York City since 2022.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26586297?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## An exception to the rule

That's not the whole story, however. Critics highlight the link between the implementation of Raise the Age and gun violence dynamics — asserting that the law led to more kids with guns. Evidence does support this claim.

The share of shooting suspects under 18 has risen since before Raise the Age took effect, even as shootings overall in New York City have fallen to historic lows.

Before parsing the data, it's important to put shooting totals in a broader context: There have been 652 shootings so far this year and 111,878 major felonies overall, which is to say shootings are fortunately a small fraction of New York City's current crime problem. Related to this fact: any increase or decrease in shootings, even if large on a percentage basis, is a relatively small number.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26587176?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Still, New York City shootings in which the suspect is a youth have more than doubled as a percentage of all shootings, from 8% in 2017 to 18% in 2024 and 17% YTD 2025\. Given that the rise in youth-involved shootings clashes so dramatically with the overall decline in shootings and substantially outpaces overall youth crime increases, something very specific seems to be happening.

Underscoring this is the fact that the share of shootings by youth is also increasing outside New York City.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26587564?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

What's going on? Youth arrests for felony criminal possession of a firearm are up from 7% in 2017 to 14% of all gun possession arrests in 2024.

Why might more young people be carrying firearms? A specific provision in the law offers a plausible explanation.

The most common gun charge in New York is criminal possession of a weapon, which applies simply for having a gun, even if it is never shown or used. Under the current law, however, a teenager charged with this felony will have their case automatically transferred to Family Court unless the prosecutor can prove that the youth either caused significant physical injury or explicitly displayed the firearm.

Since gun possession charges rarely involve injuries or open displays of the weapon, these cases most often move to the Family Court. Consequently, young people may feel emboldened to carry guns, knowing that possession typically results in Family Court intervention rather than adult criminal consequences. More gun possessions by youth result in more shootings by youth. A breakdown shows the phenomenon affecting those under 16, as well as 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26618289?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## How the new justice processes are playing out

What is happening in court to cases handled differently under Raise the Age? In 2024, 388 Juvenile Offenders (13-15-year-olds accused of certain serious felony crimes) and Adolescent Offenders (16- or 17-year-olds) were criminally convicted, up from 183 in 2019.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26588605?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

With more serious cases, juvenile justice detention admissions have risen above pre-Raise the Age levels. In New York City, nearly 70% of admissions are for Juvenile Delinquents, with an average length of stay of 15 days. Adolescent Offenders account for approximately 20% of all admissions. Most Adolescent Offender admissions are for pre-trial detention, and the average length of stay for this group is more than 100 days. From 2015 to the present, the average daily population in juvenile detention has more than doubled, with more than 350 people each day in these facilities.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26588686?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## A changing landscape

Crime trends since Raise the Age are inseparable from a broader shift in criminal activity in recent decades. New York City's age-crime curve no longer shows a sharp spike in criminal activity during the teenage years, peaking in the late teens, and then dropping off in the early 20s. Today, [people in their 30s are more likely to commit crimes than juveniles and adolescents](https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/pages/home). The world has changed, and any changes to Raise the Age should take that into account.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26588772?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

════════════════════════════════════════

*Vital City launched three years ago as an experiment. Our first "meeting" was me and Greg Berman, sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan sketching out the* [*first issue*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-1)*, betting that in a time of such hyperpartisanship, New Yorkers might be yearning for a calm voice, compelling evidence and angelic writing on how to make cities better.*

*You helped us grow into a trusted civic home for practical solutions.*

*Now, as Mayor Mamdani prepares to take office, Vital City is uniquely positioned to offer practical guidance to the new administration. We have ambitious plans for 2026: boosting our operational capacity, expanding our "What to Do (And Not to Do)" series, making academic research usable for decisionmakers, strengthening our data analysis, and building a more robust community of urban policy practitioners.*

*To do that, we need your help.*

*For the first time ever, we're directly asking readers to support Vital City. Our goal is to add 700 inaugural supporters by December 31\. Your tax-deductible gift will help us expand our capacity, and ensure our ideas reach the decisionmakers who need them.*

*If you value rigorous, solutions-focused policy work, we hope you'll join us.*[***Become an inaugural supporter today.***](https://bit.ly/vc-eoy-article?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

*— Liz Glazer, Founder*
### A New Manhattan Project
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/why-the-future-of-ai-should-be-shaped-in-new-york-city/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:46.000Z
Would you rather have the handful of individuals who design and control the world's artificial intelligence apparatus reside in Manhattan or Mountain View? Some might say it doesn't matter — isn't this, after all, a placeless technology? Isn't it a repository of deepfakes and bad takes, disconnected from the fleeting realities we treasure? Like watching "Oppenheimer,"we feel the relentless march of history again bringing us to the supposed brink of disaster for the many, all to benefit the few. But if the advent of artificial intelligence is indeed inevitable, shouldn't the thrall of New York City rather than the sprawl of Silicon Valley be its epicenter? Shouldn't Mayor Zohran Mamdani fight to make this so, and in so doing not only create a bigger source for our tax base, but better odds for the human race?

What if the origination point of new technologies influenced their societal impact and outcome? A decade ago, I got a taste of this question as a design consultant for a Google subsidiary called Sidewalk Labs, which no longer exists despite some successful spin-offs and laudable thought experiments. [Famously](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/world/americas/google-toronto-sidewalk-labs-abandoned.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), surveillance concerns derailed Sidewalk's grand plan to build a new high-tech district on Toronto's waterfront.

Meetings at Sidewalk were often like a game of coastal bumper cars with East Coast urbanites crashing into West Coast suburbanites. The New Yorkers would talk about the limitations on autonomous vehicles due to a finite number of urban traffic lanes — which today's debates about whether Waymo should operate in Gotham make all the more pertinent — while the Californians would talk about flying cars. In one clarifying moment, a Stanford engineer spoke, without irony, of a future implant in his head that would seamlessly guide him as he drove to customized sightseeing locations. In yet another, a West Coast "architect" spoke of a housing solution that fully violated wheelchair and fire codes, about which he shrugged and said "we can override all that."

Technology is never culturally neutral. It is a mirror and window into the society that creates it, including where that society lives. More than one tech exec has told me that most of the people who run our tech companies today are geographically isolated social misfits who want to create a different world in part because the one the rest of us inhabit eludes them. You might dislike tech billionaire Michael Bloomberg, but even as he flew in private planes he sometimes rode the subway as mayor, creating at least the semblance of eyeball-to-eyeball interaction among people of different means and miens. It's the difference between the friction that tech companies want to eliminate and the friction we want to celebrate. That positive social friction is not only the hallmark of New York City, but the building block of an emotional intelligence that could build more humane artificial intelligence.

It is precisely that eyeball-to-eyeball urban energy that aspiring tech talent, like most young adults, want from their lives. Mayor Bloomberg helped diversify the economy by making New York an epicenter for technology companies, breaking the singular grip Wall Street had on the city's economy for decades prior. Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island wouldn't exist if not for his administration; NYU Tandon and other institutions of innovation would be far weaker. Entire New York neighborhoods have been remade, for good and bad, by the influx of major tech companies into buildings new and old, from piers and historic structures to new skyscrapers. Technology company leaders may be reclusive suburbanites, but increasingly their lieutenants have sought out urbanity. That influx helped to transform a municipal budget of about $43 billion at the time of 9/11 to over $116 billion today, funds that helped pay for de Blasio's signature universal pre-K program, among other public goods.

What a difference a decade makes.

In 2019 Amazon's HQ2 was scared away from Long Island City by New York's left flank, who among other concerns loathed the tech giant's labor record and its threat to small businesses. But wouldn't we have been better off shaping Amazon's future here in America's organized labor capital — where it would've had to play by New York rules and acclimate to New York culture? That's what the late union stalwart [Hector Figueroa](https://www.nydailynews.com/2019/02/15/cutting-off-our-nose-to-spite-our-face-amazons-pullout-will-be-bad-for-the-very-workers-that-opponents-of-the-deal-claim-to-care-about/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [sanely argued](https://www.nydailynews.com/2019/02/15/cutting-off-our-nose-to-spite-our-face-amazons-pullout-will-be-bad-for-the-very-workers-that-opponents-of-the-deal-claim-to-care-about/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as [did](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/amazon-hq2-new-york.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) I.

However repugnant you may find these technology giants, you must ask yourself whether "an out of sight out of mind" strategy that pushes them to suburban locations serves either our city or society better than locating them here, where our politics can influence them while we benefit from their economic activity.

Mayor-elect Mamdani won on an ambitious affordability agenda, including free buses, expanded child care and new housing production, all of which will require public funding. It's unlikely that will all come from new taxes, particularly with the governor entering an election year. Perhaps our energetic new mayor can focus on targeted but expansive growth for the city's economy — thinking about how, if the inexorable wave of new A.I. technologies were to locate here in addition to the Bay Area, it could help us pay for our most dire social needs.

Perhaps critical questions, like the voracious electricity demands of the A.I. industry, could help focus minds on helping us create a cleaner electrical grid, including new transmission capacity. Perhaps these new companies could locate along our beautiful but vulnerable waterfronts, helping us to meet our resilience goals in the face of sea-level rise.

But most significantly, perhaps the collective culture of New York City, rather than the individualistic nature of California, could influence the purpose and performance of artificial intelligence and our common tech future because the people who create it would live in neighborhoods, ride mass transit and understand the glorious friction of our common bonds. Perhaps the camaraderie that our sidewalks and subways imbue could create empathy alongside efficiency, could create a world in which technology serves us, instead of perpetuating the nagging sense that it is we who will serve it.

════════════════════════════════════════

*Vital City launched three years ago as an experiment. Our first "meeting" was me and Greg Berman, sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan sketching out the* [*first issue*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-1)*, betting that in a time of such hyperpartisanship, New Yorkers might be yearning for a calm voice, compelling evidence and angelic writing on how to make cities better.*

*You helped us grow into a trusted civic home for practical solutions.*

*Now, as Mayor Mamdani prepares to take office, Vital City is uniquely positioned to offer practical guidance to the new administration. We have ambitious plans for 2026: boosting our operational capacity, expanding our "What to Do (And Not to Do)" series, making academic research usable for decisionmakers, strengthening our data analysis, and building a more robust community of urban policy practitioners.*

*To do that, we need your help.*

*For the first time ever, we're directly asking readers to support Vital City. Our goal is to add 700 inaugural supporters by December 31\. Your tax-deductible gift will help us expand our capacity, and ensure our ideas reach the decisionmakers who need them.*

*If you value rigorous, solutions-focused policy work, we hope you'll join us.*[***Become an inaugural supporter today.***](https://bit.ly/vc-eoy-article?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

*— Liz Glazer, Founder*
### How Mamdani Can Deliver Free Buses — and Subways, Too
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-mamdani-can-delivery-free-buses-and-subways-too/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:35.000Z
Of all the "far left" policies promoted by Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, the promise to make buses free has gotten some of the most attention. This is true even though some of his other policies would be significantly more expensive or far less workable.

For example, his own campaign estimates that universal free child care will cost [approximately $6 billion a year](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/06/nyregion/zohran-mamdani-nyc-policy-proposals.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), roughly equal to the entire budget of the New York Police Department. His affordable housing program calls for the city to spend approximately $10 billion a year. He has also proposed spending $1 billion for a new department focused on mental health outreach. Free buses are estimated to [reduce the MTA's revenue by $600 million to $800 million annually](https://www.ibo.nyc.gov/assets/ibo/downloads/pdf/infrastructure/2023/2023-february-estimating-the-cost-of-fare-free-local-bus-service.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a loss that would have to be made up somewhere.

Supporters say the additional spending Mamdani's proposals would necessitate can easily be financed by raising taxes on higher-income New Yorkers and corporations. But for better or worse, the city has no authority to change its tax on incomes in any way. That ability rests with the state Legislature and governor, and Gov. Hochul has shown little interest in raising taxes to finance Mamdani's proposals. Her position on this matter is not likely to change as her race for reelection against a serious challenger from the Republican Party heats up.

But there is an untapped funding source that could pay not just for free buses, but for free subways as well: parking fees.

There are approximately [3 million parking spots in New York City](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/opinion/a-fix-for-new-yorks-parking-problems.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that allow people to store their vehicles overnight for absolutely no cost. Add them up, and those spaces occupy around 11,000 acres of land, or 5.6% of the city's total area. Mini-storage is a massive business in this space-starved city, but it's completely free for people to store one type of private good. This begs the question of why we are charging people to use environmentally friendly buses and subways, thereby discouraging their use, while providing free car storage for polluting, traffic-inducing, pedestrian-harming vehicles, thereby encouraging their use.

It wasn't always this way. Free overnight parking [only began in 1954](https://www.city-journal.org/article/parking-madness?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). At the time, the City rejected a parking tax of $60 per year (more than $500 in today's dollars).

Why should we reconsider a decision that was made over 70 years ago? Because if the City metered all of its parking spots, it could collect $3.8 billion annually by charging just $3.47 per spot per day. The City could then transfer that revenue to the MTA to completely cover the approximately [$3.8 billion per year](https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2024/03/MTA.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Operating%20Revenue/Expense%20Projections.%20The%20NYCT%20projects%20$5.8,depreciation%2C%20and%20other%20post%2Demployment%20benefits%2C%20in%202024.) the MTA would give up by ending fares on both buses and subways, making the city's mass transit system totally free.

That $3.47 charge per day is an average. The charge could be higher in more dense and affluent areas and lower or nonexistent in poorer areas and for low-income or disabled people who need cars.

Such a shift of expenses from transit riders to car owners should appeal to a mayor focused on affordability. Not only do many more lower-income New Yorkers rely on mass transit rather than private cars to navigate the city, but many more New Yorkers in general rely on mass transit rather than private cars. Making all public transit free would also encourage more trips to see friends and family, participate in the city's cultural offerings, attend work or classes, and, in general, participate in all that the city has to offer, thereby benefiting not only transit riders, but the city itself. Free subways could supercharge Mamdani's affordability agenda as they carry significantly more than twice as many riders as the city's buses and are heavily used by people commuting to jobs.

Striking this deal — charging for parking in exchange for making transit free — would more than just enable the new mayor to live up to one of his key campaign promises. It would enable him to overdeliver on one of his promises, something that almost never happens in politics and could really excite New Yorkers.

My back-of-the-envelope estimate doesn't even factor in all of the benefits. For example, the MTA plans to spend [$1.1 billion over the next five years just to upgrade fare gates at 150 subway stations](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/nyregion/nyc-subway-fare-evasion-mta.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), about a third of the system. This is an expense that will completely disappear along with the crime of fare beating, and the associated social and penal system costs. Although such savings would not directly inure the MTA, they could easily be used to further subsidize the MTA or provide other services for the city. Car owners would also benefit to some extent: They would waste less time looking for parking spots and driving around in traffic as more people choose mass transit to get around.

The current policy of providing free storage for car owners was a mistake in the 1950s and it's a mistake now. After three-quarters of a century, the policy of charging for mass transit while providing free storage for car owners is overdue for some fresh thinking.

════════════════════════════════════════

*Vital City launched three years ago as an experiment. Our first "meeting" was me and Greg Berman, sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan sketching out the* [*first issue*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-1)*, betting that in a time of such hyperpartisanship, New Yorkers might be yearning for a calm voice, compelling evidence and angelic writing on how to make cities better.*

*You helped us grow into a trusted civic home for practical solutions.*

*Now, as Mayor Mamdani prepares to take office, Vital City is uniquely positioned to offer practical guidance to the new administration. We have ambitious plans for 2026: boosting our operational capacity, expanding our "What to Do (And Not to Do)" series, making academic research usable for decisionmakers, strengthening our data analysis, and building a more robust community of urban policy practitioners.*

*To do that, we need your help.*

*For the first time ever, we're directly asking readers to support Vital City. Our goal is to add 700 inaugural supporters by December 31\. Your tax-deductible gift will help us expand our capacity, and ensure our ideas reach the decisionmakers who need them.*

*If you value rigorous, solutions-focused policy work, we hope you'll join us.*[***Become an inaugural supporter today.***](https://bit.ly/vc-eoy-article?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

*— Liz Glazer, Founder*
### The Rikers Receivership Risk — and Opportunity
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-rikers-receivership-risk-and-opportunity/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:48.000Z
*Rikers Island is unsafe for its officers, inhumane for its inmates and a risk to the security of the people of the city.*

*—*[Board of Correction Chair Peter Tufo, 1975](https://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/15/archives/a-plea-to-prevent-rikers-island-jail-conditions-from-exploding-into.html?searchResultPosition=1&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

*\[W\]e find that a deep-seated culture of violence is pervasive throughout the adolescent facilities at Rikers, and DOC staff routinely utilize force not as a last resort, but instead as a means to control the adolescent population and punish disorderly or disrespectful behavior…our investigation suggests that the systemic deficiencies identified in this report may exist in equal measure at the other jails on Rikers.*

*—*[United States Attorney Preet Bharara, 2014](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1240461-department-of-justice-letter-about-rikers-island/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

*The use of force rate and other rates of violence, self-harm, and deaths in custody*

*are demonstrably worse than when the Consent Judgment went into effect in 2015… the current rates of use of force, stabbings and slashings, fights, assaults on staff, and in-custody deaths remain extraordinarily high…Worse still, the unsafe and dangerous conditions in the jails…have become normalized despite the fact that they are clearly abnormal and unacceptable.*

*—*[U.S. District Judge Laura Swain, 2024](https://ecbawm.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Nunez-Dkt-803-Contempt-Order.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

I begin with this disturbing trip down memory lane not to engage in "adoration of the problem," to [paraphrase](https://burnsinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Adoration-Of-The-Question.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) my friend the late James Bell, but as a reminder of how, in the entire tenure of everyone employed or confined at Rikers, it has been a dangerous, demoralizing place. With federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain on the brink of appointing a "remediation manager" — a receiver in all but name — to run city jails, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani about to take the reins at City Hall, and the city's official position to[ terminate the era of Rikers Island jails](https://rikers.cityofnewyork.us/information/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=In%20October%202019%2C%20the%20former%20New%20York,permanently%20close%20the%20jails%20on%20Rikers%20Island.) arriving just around the corner in 2027, this[ half-century of pain and dysfunction](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/fifty-years-of-injustice-at-rikers) has a better chance of ending than, literally, ever.

It will be beyond terrible if we blow it.

## History repeating itself

From 2018 to 2022, I was an expert witness in a [Florida death penalty case](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/03/02/death-penalty-mitigation-specialists-rare-look?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of a man who had been incarcerated at Rikers in the 1970s when he was 16\. He was the same age as me and we grew up a few neighborhoods apart.

In this capacity, I investigated conditions at Rikers during that period — and then saw recent conditions up close during my brief 2021 stint as Correction Commissioner, affording me a unique opportunity to compare the state of the jails nearly five decades apart.

The lack of progress was stunning.

I interviewed several former corrections officials as well as five men who had been locked up at Rikers as teenagers in the '70s. Although these men were all now in positions of responsibility ranging from nonprofit executive director to foundation president to reentry counselor, the trauma they experienced was as fresh as if it had happened a week earlier, often entering their thoughts and dreams. Three of them cried during their interviews; many said they had never told anyone what they shared. William vanden Heuvel, who served as Board of Correction chair in the 1970s, summarized the conditions they endured: "If we treated dogs the way we were treating these humans, there would be a march down Fifth Avenue protesting it. But it was hidden from view, not for security reasons, but because no one wanted to see what was going on."

The same could be said about the Rikers I witnessed during my seven months as commissioner, despite all the legal attention, all the money the city was spending on it and the 2015 consent decree in Nunez vs. the City of New York. The only constant has been misery.

## Carpe diem

That's why it is so important to seize this unprecedented moment, not only to close Rikers Island, but to make sure that the culture of violence doesn't migrate to new borough-based jails. Yet despite best intentions, I worry we're about to drop the ball — yet again.

Federal law surrounding jail reform litigation deliberately holds receivership as a remedy of last resort, ordered by courts only after other less drastic steps have been taken. That's why it took a decade of escalating violence and [112 deaths](https://tillidgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/2025-05-22-Monitors-Report.pdf?inline=1&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) before Judge Swain ordered the court takeover. Meanwhile, doing what I suspect they believed was their job, City lawyers fought receivership tooth and nail, arguing against it, suggesting they might [appeal ](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/whats-next-federal-court-takeover-rikers-island?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)the court's order, and asking Swain to review her order after she issued it (a request she roundly rejected). They even suggested that the commissioner Mayor Eric Adams had appointed serve as both the receiver and commissioner simultaneously for a five-year period, which would've hamstrung the incoming mayor from replacing her during his entire first term.

While these efforts failed to block a court takeover, they may have watered down the ultimate order. Instead of a "clean" receivership like the one that succeeded in [turning around](https://justicelab.columbia.edu/news/Pros-Cons-Receiverships?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the Cook County (Chicago) juvenile detention facility, the judge has put a triumvirate of cooks in Rikers' kitchen. Under the current edict, there will be: (1) a court-appointed receiver with control over jail functions related to the lawsuit (in other words, almost everything); (2) a mayorally-appointed commissioner in charge of all other jail functions (details to be worked out between the receiver and commissioner and approved by the judge) and (3) a court-appointed monitor overseeing the court-appointed receiver.

Even with crystal-clear lines of authority, Rikers is a bear to fix. This tripartite set of leaders is a recipe for disaster. Giuliani-era Commissioner Michael Jacobson [called](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/05/20/rikers-remediation-manager-laura-taylor-swain-receiver/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the structure "unbelievably confusing and unclear." Mayor Bloomberg's jails chief, Martin Horn, [agreed,](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/05/20/rikers-remediation-manager-laura-taylor-swain-receiver/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) saying, "I think the judge tried to split the baby." Former Cook County receiver Earl Dunlap wrote plainly, "the Receiver has no chance of succeeding unless he/she is the SINGLE ADMINISTRATIVE AUTHORITY subject to the Court's lawful orders."

## A "clean" receivership

It doesn't have to be this way. When I was commissioner, I [raised the possibility of the City acquiescing to a receivership](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/fixing-new-york-citys-jails-a-federal-receiver-opening), prioritizing the creation of a robust package of powers to get the job done. If incoming Mayor Mamdani's team could withdraw the City's opposition to the receivership, they could work with plaintiffs and the court to design a structure that has a real chance of working. This would include a *lone receiver* (i.e. no commissioner, no monitor) who runs the jails exclusively, like they did in [Chicago](https://justicelab.columbia.edu/news/Pros-Cons-Receiverships?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and also [Hinds County](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/10/01/mississippi-hinds-county-jail-receivership?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Rare%20Oversight%20Begins%20at%20Hinds,Central%20Booking%20and%20Intake%20Center.) (Jackson), Miss.

Under this setup, the current federal monitor would stay in place only long enough to transfer his functions to the receiver, as happened in Hinds County, where a federal judge [wrote](https://www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/10517067151.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that, after 30 days, "the Court will be prepared to discharge…\[the\] Monitor unless the Receiver determines her services remain necessary." This would comport with the U.S. Justice Department's [guidance on monitorships](https://www.justice.gov/jm/1-20000-civil-settlement-agreements-and-consent-decrees-involving-state-and-local-governmental?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#1-20.100), which states that they "should be designed to minimize the cost to jurisdictions" and "must be accountable to the court, the parties, and the public," further recommending "monitorship term limits of two or three years." After 10 years at a cost of [$26.1](https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/07/07/nyc-prisoners-suit-led-to-jail-reform-but-left-him-little-cost-taxpayers/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) million, it's hard to argue that current federal monitor Steve Martin and his team should long coexist with the incoming receiver.

The receiver should not only have unobstructed lines of authority but should also have what amounts to emergency powers over personnel to swiftly put a team in place to begin making changes. They should be able to procure fairly but quickly, without being stymied by the City's glacial procurement process; that would enable them to launch or expand programs to productively occupy people's time and to make repairs to Rikers' debilitating physical plant, where homemade shanks can be fashioned out of crumbling infrastructure. And the receiver should have the maximum budget authority permitted under federal law.

Finally, the receiver should have the ability to petition the court to abrogate state and local laws, regulations and contracts when they stand in the way of fixing unconstitutional conditions, as the Cook County, Hinds County, and [California](https://clearinghouse.net/doc/24747/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) receivers were granted. For example, under federal law, judges can, as a last resort, suspend measures permitting staff to abuse sick leave as well as state laws preventing the hiring of highly qualified supervisory staff.

Unlimited sick leave was [abused so heavily](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/nyregion/rikers-island-jail.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) during my tenure that more than a third of my staff were out "sick" some days — especially on long summer weekends when staff seemed to fall "ill" more frequently. That kind of obvious abuse creates a cynical atmosphere inside the jails, with staff who actually do their jobs getting "stuck" on mandated double or triple shifts while "sick" staff [post pictures](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/nyregion/rikers-guards-sick-leave.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of themselves on Caribbean islands.

Just because contracts *can* be abrogated doesn't mean they *should* be. City police have unlimited sick leave and face nowhere near the "sick out" problems that the Correction Department encountered. A smart receiver will sit down with labor to negotiate similar approaches to those at the NYPD, where sick staff must see departmental doctors to affirm their illness, but generous sick leave policies remain in recognition of their difficult jobs.

Since violence is concentrated by person and place, a powerful receiver should launch a highly focused approach to make things safer at jails experiencing the most serious problems — those housing adolescents, people with long jail stays or mentally ill people, to name a few.

When we did this in 2021 with the adolescent unit, where violence then was three times higher than in the remainder of Rikers, we engaged front-line staff and young people in a collaborative planning effort. We then trained staff and youth in those co-designed units in restorative practices, teaching them to "use their words" — instead of fists and knives — to resolve problems. This resulted in [no assaults on staff or fights among the young people](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/nyregion/rikers-island-vincent-schiraldi.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from fall of 2021 until the unit was dissolved by Adams' first commissioner, Louis Molina, early in his tenure in 2022\. Importantly, when staff on these units participated in this turnabout, absenteeism plummeted and they became proselytizers of the new approach among their peers. Vital City's [excellent series of articles](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/improving-conditions-on-rikers-island) offers many other hopeful approaches that have been shown to dramatically improve jail conditions.

## Hope floats

Given the persistence of the problems that plague them, it's understandable that many New Yorkers think that the city's jails are beyond repair. This is not the case. I have witnessed several jails, prisons and juvenile facilities transform themselves from miserable, violent places into something far better, from San Quentin Prison to the San Francisco Jail to the Missouri Division of Youth Services to D.C.'s Oak Hill Youth Facility.

Hopelessness is contagious, but so is hope. City jails may very well be on the brink of a new era. This is no time for half-measures. The court, city leaders and plaintiffs counsel should move forward boldly and deliberately to get the job done now.

════════════════════════════════════════

*Vital City launched three years ago as an experiment. Our first "meeting" was me and Greg Berman, sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan sketching out the* [*first issue*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-1)*, betting that in a time of such hyperpartisanship, New Yorkers might be yearning for a calm voice, compelling evidence and angelic writing on how to make cities better.*

*You answered with a resounding yes, and helped us grow into a trusted civic home for practical solutions.*

*Now, as Mayor Mamdani prepares to take office, Vital City is uniquely positioned to offer practical guidance to the new administration. We have ambitious plans for 2026: boosting our operational capacity, expanding our "What to Do (And Not to Do)" series, making academic research usable for decisionmakers, strengthening our data analysis, and building a more robust community of urban policy practitioners.*

*To do that, we need your help.*

*For the first time ever, we're directly asking readers to support Vital City. Our goal is to add 700 inaugural supporters by December 31\. Your tax-deductible gift will help us expand our capacity, and ensure our ideas reach the decisionmakers who need them.*

*If you value rigorous, solutions-focused policy work, we hope you'll join us. *Become an inaugural supporter today.**

*— Liz Glazer, Founder*

════════════════════════════════════════

*Vital City launched three years ago as an experiment. Our first "meeting" was me and Greg Berman, sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan sketching out the* [*first issue*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-1)*, betting that in a time of such hyperpartisanship, New Yorkers might be yearning for a calm voice, compelling evidence and angelic writing on how to make cities better.*

*You helped us grow into a trusted civic home for practical solutions.*

*Now, as Mayor Mamdani prepares to take office, Vital City is uniquely positioned to offer practical guidance to the new administration. We have ambitious plans for 2026: boosting our operational capacity, expanding our "What to Do (And Not to Do)" series, making academic research usable for decisionmakers, strengthening our data analysis, and building a more robust community of urban policy practitioners.*

*To do that, we need your help.*

*For the first time ever, we're directly asking readers to support Vital City. Our goal is to add 700 inaugural supporters by December 31\. Your tax-deductible gift will help us expand our capacity, and ensure our ideas reach the decisionmakers who need them.*

*If you value rigorous, solutions-focused policy work, we hope you'll join us.*[***Become an inaugural supporter today.***](https://bit.ly/vc-eoy-article?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

*— Liz Glazer, Founder*
### Patrick Gaspard on Barack Obama, Zohran Mamdani, and Political Capital
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/patrick-gaspard-on-barack-obama-zohran/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:08.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/patrick-gaspard-on-barack-obama-zohran) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on December 8, 2025 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

Patrick Gaspard — a longtime political strategist; former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa and top Barack Obama advisor; nonprofit, philanthropic, and labor leader; former advisor to Bill de Blasio and current advisor to Zohran Mamdani — spoke with The New York Editorial Board on the morning of December 4, 2025\. *(photo by Juan Manuel Benítez)*

*Participating journalists: Juan Manuel Benítez, Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Myles Miller, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Zagare.*

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Smith**  
Thanks for coming. I always say this, but it’s true: We live in this moment when it’s optional to talk to journalists. So we always appreciate public figures who do, and it encourages the others. And thank you for—

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I appreciate what all of you do, and I’m impressed that you would invite a hack like me because you’ve had some pretty serious people in these conversations, so...

**Ben Smith**  
You know you’re a serious person. But in fact, actually that may be a good place to kick it off. Patrick, Ambassador, can you tell us, because I think it is useful to frame this conversation: what was your role with the Mamdani campaign? What is your role with the transition? And what do you expect your sort of relationship with Mamdani to be like when he’s in office?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I think I only have one talent, Ben, which is I’m a pretty good casting director, I’ve discovered over the course of my career…When I met Ben \[Smith\], he was a [reporter ](https://www.nydailynews.com/author/ben-smith/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)for the *Daily News* and I knew that, you know, this is a guy who maybe someday could be running a breakfast meeting.

Let me just give you a little quick background on me and the mayor-elect. So I first met him when I was [ambassador](https://2009-2017.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/218437.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to South Africa. I was really close with somebody named [Margo Lion](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/theater/margo-lion-dead.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), who was a legendary Broadway producer—*Angels in America*, *Jelly’s Last Jam*. I could go on and on. She was an extraordinary person who unfortunately passed away too early a few years ago.

Mira Nair had directed a movie that she shot in Uganda called the[*Queen of Katwe*](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/movies/queen-of-katwe-review.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). They wanted to give it its release in Sub-Saharan Africa. They couldn’t do it in Uganda—some complications there. And Margo called and said they’re thinking about Johannesburg. “If they do it there, will you co-host something for them? Will you participate?” I love Mira Nair. I love her films. Absolutely. I agreed to do it.

She came with Lupita \[Nyong’o\] and everybody that’s in the film. It was really extraordinary. And she also came with the then 22-year-old music-content producer for the film, who turned out to be Zohran Mamdani. He’s just one of those people who, after five minutes of meeting him, you just think, “Hmm, there’s something about this person that I think is special, unique, different.”

Just that he was really special and he just left a mark. Fast-forward years later, he of course decides that he’s going to run for office in New York. I followed that closely. Then he decides he’s going to run for mayor of New York. And he asked me for a conversation early in the contest, sometime after Kamala Harris lost, and before anyone was paying attention to Zohran Mamdani.

I was impressed with just how serious he was about this. It was clear to me that it was not going to be a symbolic run, that he had a strategy, and that his strategy would take advantage of all the tools that are available to us to communicate broadly to the public on social media, et cetera. But that he would also rely on old shoe-leather organizing as well. He had this goal of hitting a million doors knocked in this city. He had a vision for how he could grow a volunteer base.

And most importantly for me, he had a clarity of narrative on what he thought really mattered and what impacted New Yorkers most now, and what he thought would animate the contest. As I listened to him, it occurred to me that there was this false security framework that many of the candidates had adopted about where we were in the city. If you listened to Andrew Cuomo even before he announced his candidacy, there was a kind of dystopian description of New York that didn’t jive with the New York that I experienced across the five boroughs. I thought it was not dissimilar to how Donald Trump described the city. That there’s something a little off about this.

I think that Zohran may be right that cost of living is the thing that will matter the most, despite what the polls are telling us. So I was just impressed with his tactile sense of where the city was at and his clarity.

I’ll also add, and then I’ll answer your question. I’ll also add that I thought that too many of my friends in the Democratic Party did not appreciate the way that a growing majority of Democratic primary base voters were not aligned with their description of the US responsibility in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Too many were feeling complicit in the imagery that they saw of dying civilians, starving kids. And that they had moved from where the Democratic Party leadership was.

It was interesting to hear in that early phase of the campaign that Eric Adams was flirting with the idea of starting a third party that would be called the Antisemitism Party, and that Andrew Cuomo was racing to volunteer his services to be Benjamin Netanyahu’s attorney in front of the ICC. And I thought, you know, there’s some misalignment here from where folks are at, and I think it’s going to catch up with them. And this young leader has a clarity around this issue that I think will be resonant even with people who don’t completely agree with his position.

So I just thought all of that was really important to understand about the environment. My role during the course of the primary and then general election was to give a lot of free advice to the candidate about what I thought the opportunities were for coalition-building. What it would mean to kind of expand the coalition beyond those who were obviously aligned and in agreement with his point of view about America in the world, et cetera.

I also tried my level best—and this was the hardest thing for me—I tried my level best to help him think through the tenor of public presentation in ways that could be more and more inviting and less strident. And here’s the difficult part for me: when you’re a baseball coach and you see somebody coming to the plate who’s just crushing it over the wall time and time again, you don’t really wanna tweak that person’s swing all that much. And I thought that, it was clear that this was somebody who had the ability to just land the thing across all three modes of communication that we have right now. He was somebody who was excellent at delivering punchy narrative in an affirmative way in a 90-second video. He could also carry a 20-minute speech with some real fervor. And he could sit and have a two-hour conversation on a podcast in a way that would come across as relaxed, authentic, intimate even. You just don’t see that that often, or at all. And I didn’t wanna mess with that, but I thought there was an opportunity to find the middle ground between that extraordinary moment that went viral when candidate Mamdani confronted Donald Trump’s border czar. There was a muscular way that he did that. There was a lot of anger there. Thought that there was a great middle ground between that and some of the video content that he produced that was all about personality and less about some of the policies that he was advancing. And I just tried to help as much as I could to help steer around that middle ground.

I also tried my best to be a credible validator for him with people who were perhaps discomforted by some of his positions or just didn’t know him well enough. I’ve been at this for more than a minute. The very first time I was involved in New York politics at all, I was a kid volunteering to hand out flyers for [Frank Barbaro](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/nyregion/frank-barbaro-dead.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in his campaign against Ed Koch.

My first official foray into doing anything around the campaign was around the nascent stuff around Percy Sutton at some point. And then of course, I was involved with David Dinkins’s campaign in 1989\. And I thought that the more elites in New York would have access to Zohran Mamdani, they would appreciate that he was somebody who was nimble enough and thoughtful enough to make up for what they saw as his lack of executive experience or what they saw as stridency on particular issues.

I also, much to the consternation of my friends in other campaigns, told him freely and openly that he could use my name as a validator, which he decided to do on the debate stage during the primary. That got me a lot of WhatsApp, Signal, and text messages from other candidates.

Since the primary through the general election, I felt responsible for helping to make a series of public, very public introductions and to prepare him for conversations with business leaders, faith leaders, older civil-rights community leaders, who again, were unfamiliar with him, who I thought needed to give him a fighting chance. And I’ve continued to give whatever thoughtful, or unthoughtful, advice and counsel I could in the construction of the transition team, those appointments, and thinking through the elements of delivery on an agenda that’s going to be overly dependent on outcomes in Albany.

**Josh Greenman**  
And what are your plans for the actual administration?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
What are my plans for the administration?

**Josh Greenman**  
Yeah. I mean, what do you want your relationship with him to be? What does he want your relationship with him to be? Has that been worked out yet?

**Ben Max**  
Are you going to be an “[agent of the city](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/nyregion/de-blasio-pressed-to-clarify-new-adviser-role-agent-of-the-city.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)“ again is the question.

\[Laughter\]

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I’m happy to re-litigate the whole “agent of the city” thing—

**Ben Max**  
No, no, no.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
—and the bizarre designation from legal counsel at the time, who was my good friend, Maya Wiley, and the determinations that they made. That was an interesting moment. I’ll just take two seconds about it because what was at stake in the “agents of the city” framing—they were trying to make a decision about whether or not the mayor of the City of New York could have private emails or private communications with anybody, and how to classify those emails, whether or not they should be subject to Freedom of Information requests.

I will tell you that, as I told the mayor then and his counsel, I had no problem whatsoever with any of my emails to Bill \[de Blasio\] coming out in the world. Some of them eventually leaked out, including one where I wrote a detailed memo to my good friend, the mayor, telling him why I thought it was a god-awful insane decision to go to Iowa, to start flirting with running for president. And there was another email prior to that, about his decision to support Hillary \[Clinton\] or Bernie Sanders. And again, I just thought that the decisions that were being made were not the ones that I would have made. So I had no problem with those emails coming out. But apparently, there were people who were on the payroll of his PAC who were concerned about their emails. And I was serving as U.S. Ambassador to South Africa, not lobbying, not benefiting from any of his decisions. So I had no discomfort with that. So that was the agents of the city thing.

Look, when you are in that seat in City Hall, it is a very lonely place. There are very few people who understand the conditions under which you are making decisions. Very few people who understand that things only get to your desk when they are problems beyond easy solution. Sometimes you need voices that you can turn to who are not in your cabinet in City Hall, who are not proximate to how power is being leveraged in that building, who you hope might be able to give you fair and balanced assessments of a thing. Who maybe could push back with an aggressive “no” to you on a thing.

I suspect that the mayor-elect expects me to continue to play that kind of role. He’s made it very clear to me and a number of other people who are in his orbit that he’s worried about the bubble. He’s worried about the capture of all of it, and he wants to be able to maintain conversations that push him to interrogate his assumptions. So I’m happy to continue to play that kind of role.

**Harry Siegel**  
So can you talk about what’s changed and the continuity between now and 1989 when DSA member David Dinkins set a record for mayoral primary votes I believe that Mamdani’s now shattered?

And just to throw in there, in 1989, the bad old days, the apocalypse was here. As you were saying, you met Mamdani right after Kamala’s loss. So that backdrop, I think, is also an interesting difference.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I spent a couple of hours being interviewed by Jonathan Mahler for the [outstanding new book ](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/books/review/the-gods-of-new-york-jonathan-mahler.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)that he’s got out right now. So I feel like you’re making me kind of revisit all of that. And I had some PTSD in the conversations with Jonathan, remembering all that.

So interesting point on David Dinkins. And as you noted, an early DSA member, which some people were kind of surprised by. Some people didn’t believe it when Zohran Mamdani would say that *I’ll be the second DSA-aligned mayor*. I remember getting a message from another old Dinkins hand who was supporting Andrew Cuomo. And this person said to me, *How dare he make this thing up about my mayor? David Dinkins was not a Democratic Socialist*.

And I had to say, *You know, I met Michael Harrington*, who was a DSA [co-founder](https://www.dsausa.org/blog/michael%5Fharrington%5Fremembered%5Fdl/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). I had met Michael Harrington when I was a kid in the Manhattan Borough President’s office back in 1987, 1988\. I was like 20 years old in the borough president’s office. And I met Michael Harrington for the first of three times in my life. And it was all in the company of David Norman Dinkins, right? There’s a different way that we used to think about these things some decades ago. You had people like Dinkins who had emerged from movements that a lot of folks were still proximate to.

People who were covering the mayoralty, right? There were a lot of journalists then who were familiar with and part of the student democracy movements, the anti-war movement. Who appreciated the relationship between the civil-rights movement and some of these other streams and threads. So it wasn’t shocking and strange at all back then, anything that would be politically problematic for David Dinkins to have welcomed the Socialist International to New York City when I was with him, when he gave a speech in 1990 doing that. It just was not seen as anything eyebrow-raising at the time.

But we have a different lens on it all now. It was extraordinary to see that in the primary and then in the general election, candidate Mamdani was able to break and bust our 1989 mark. The biggest difference is, while David Dinkins was a historic first, first Black mayor of New York City—there are ways that David Dinkins came out of a regular Democratic Party movement, right? Like there isn’t anybody in any Democratic club in New York or whether it was the Village Independent Democrats or the Ben Franklin Club in the Bronx that didn’t know David Dinkins when he was City Clerk, when he was Manhattan Borough President. He just worked every corner of the regular Democratic Party in this city. And he was seen as somebody who had paid his dues, come up in the ranks, had deferred appropriately to other leadership when they were running for Congress, when they were running for mayor or other offices. He had deferred appropriately and his time had finally come. And so it was fine and appropriate for him to just rock up and ask for their support.

Zohran Mamdani is an insurgent. From the beginning of his campaign to even now, through his transition, this is an insurgency through and through. He did inspire the kind of volunteer mobilization in this city that I had personally not seen or experienced, the city hasn’t experienced since 1989\. But it’s always been this kind of outsider versus insider sentiment that he’s been able to carry and project and organize through.

David Dinkins was very much not an outsider. His movement was not an outsider movement, with the exception of African-American activists who had always felt like they were on the outside looking in on the Donald Manes, Stanley Friedman, et cetera, mafia that dominated the politics in every borough of this city. So I think that’s an important difference between them.

And on the volunteer base, I think that— We had a trial run for the David Dinkins campaign, it was the Jesse Jackson campaign, right? There wasn’t anybody who was in the senior ranks of the Dinkins campaign, or even the junior ranks of the Dinkins campaign, who had not been involved in some meaningful way in Jesse ‘88\. That was the first time that I did any national campaigning and traveling across the country with a candidate.

And then Ed Koch famously said that New Yorkers, particularly Jewish New Yorkers, would have to be crazy to vote for Jesse Jackson. And we overperformed projections in the city, which told us, *Oh, we can actually beat this. We can finally beat this guy, and we’re gonna find the candidate and do the thing*. So there was a trial run. We had proof points. There were reasons for the church crowd to have confidence early on that David Dinkins and this movement could do that.

There was no reason at all to think that Zohran Mamdani could emerge in this field and that he could beat a name, a historic, dynastic figure like Andrew Cuomo, despite Andrew Cuomo’s considerable challenges, let’s just say. So very, very different dynamic then.

And we also had a city now that I thought had the space to be more aspirational than we had in 1989\. The tagline from the Dinkins campaign was *vote your hopes and not your fears*. We had to work really hard to overcome people’s fears. And it wasn’t just fears about race, but you know, this was a town that was still recovering from the fiscal crisis and surging crime and all these challenges that we had to allay in order to get the people to a place of affirmation. That was not a challenge this many years removed from the pandemic for Zohran in narrative building in this campaign.

**Josh Greenman**  
So this is pretty directly close to that, which is, he has excited a lot of young people that came out. That canvassed for him, etc. etc.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
104,000 to be exact.

**Josh Greenman**  
So what should he do with them now? You know, there’s the famous Kennedy “ask not” speech. It doesn’t seem like he’s necessarily channeling them yet for any action within his administration. Should there be some volunteer movement?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
He will.

**Josh Greenman**  
What should he point them to do?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
There needs to be— He’s very cognizant of the responsibility that he feels to not just those who voted for him, and his responsibility for the eight million people, many of whom didn’t vote for him. But he feels an acute responsibility of kinship, mentorship even, for people who were feeling the diminishment of community and civic engagement in this city and in this country. And they came out and they did a thing that is historical. And he believes that the victory belongs at least as much, if not more to them than it does to him and those who were part of his core team.

It was interesting, I thought, and really powerful to see him make the decision based on accountability and transparency to go before the DSA part of his base a number of weeks ago. And not just make phone calls behind closed doors recommending that they not support New York City Councilman Chi Ossé and his challenge against Congressman Hakeem Jeffries.

Very few politicians, absent that animated base that he had that went out and door knocking, did all those things—I don’t think that you’re gonna see the habit of any politician where they go out in a very transparent way in an open meeting and say, *Yeah, this young person who supported part of this journey should not have your political endorsement and here’s why. And here’s why I think you should go with this other person who you see as maybe not completely aligned with your views.* I thought that was a bold thing that was really about the responsibility, the accountability he feels that’s owed to the movement that he’s steeped in, that he grew out of. And that made such a meaningful contribution.

You know that he’s had several conversations with former President Barack Obama, my old boss. I won’t tell you the readout from those conversations, but I will say that I personally pressed him to have a dialogue with the president about what his evolving views have been about the decisions that we made coming out of the 2008 campaign to fold Obama for America, our movement that was independent of the traditional Democratic Party—because Barack Obama was not the choice, if you recall, in the primary, of the unions, of the elected officials, of their institutions.

We made a decision to fold OFA into the DNC. It’s a decision that I disagreed with strongly and I didn’t voice. I didn’t have the courage and the ability to voice my strongly held views about that. I’m not proud of the way that I held my views in that moment. And I pressed Zohran to have a conversation with the president about his evolving sense of how he managed or didn’t manage that movement coming into his presidency, and whether or not there were ways to deploy that energy that could have accrued to our benefit as we tried to pass major legislation and tried to shift the tenor of the politics in the Democratic Party and beyond the Democratic Party. And I know that he’s had that conversation, he’s thinking clearly about what it means to hold that together as he litigates his—

**Josh Greenman**  
And you’re talking about them doing things on the ground too, in addition to — I know Alyssa has a question — in addition to calling legislators?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
No, no, no. This is not about calling legislators. These are people who have skin in the game, and who are ready to go out and knock on doors again and do the thing on street corners, in front of supermarkets. And so they’re ready to be called to a purpose, and he’s ready to organize that to a constructive purpose in all the essential parts of his agenda, but also the crisis du jour that will invariably come up.

**Alyssa Katz**  
So, you know, you talked about this example of transparency where Mamdani has been transparent with DSA and his organizing base around this very difficult decision that he disagreed with. You also have another decision where he’s committed to keep Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, and she said she will stay on.

And he’s also getting pushback, of course, from many people who went out and knocked those doors and so on. And he hasn’t necessarily yet at least been as clear about the reasons for his decision or even just—

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I would disagree.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Yeah.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I think he’s been very, very, very clear. I’m happy to go through—

**Alyssa Katz**  
No, no, it’s fine. But I do want to ask, he’s going to continue to have to make very difficult decisions of this nature that are gonna be controversial with the base. What do you think is his path to bring them along as he’s making deals with the business community, working with Tisch on very unpopular enforcement and so forth?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Yeah. Hard things are hard. So I think that one of the things that I found to be amusing the last several weeks during transition, there is a group that’s circulating a petition with the argument that Zohran Mamdani is already breaking his campaign promise because he’s decided to rehire Jessica Tisch for this role.

And I thought, oh, the same Zohran Mamdani who during the primary campaign said out loud on a debate stage that he would consider retaining Jessica Tisch? The same Zohran Mamdani who during the general election campaign said multiple times, *I think that Jessica Tisch is deserving of another term, because she’s managed to confront the question of corruption in the police department in a fulsome way, and she did it despite the fact that City Hall was still trying to keep their thumb on the scale on how the police department is managed.* Crime has come down significantly under her watch in this city. And she’s been incredibly thoughtful and directly engaged at the intersection of the physical threat that many New Yorkers feel in the subways and elsewhere, and the reality that we have many people who are suffering from mental health, who need different kinds of intervention.

And Jessica Tisch has been engaged in these questions in ways that Zohran Mamdani believes are impactful and are moving us in the right direction. He said that multiple times during the primary, said that multiple times during the general election. People hear what they want to hear. And of course, he made the ultimate pledge that he would keep her on, not during transition, but during the campaign. So, he promised that he would do that in the campaign, and he’s fulfilled that promise in transition.

And I thought he could not have been any clearer on the reasons why he kept her. I remember when I joined him during the general for his first meeting with New York City [Partnership](https://pfnyc.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and while he was on stage, he said, *Look, let me be very clear that my police commissioner, my director of DCAS, whoever’s running HPD—they don’t have to agree with the nuances of my position on Gaza. They don’t have to agree with me on my tax policies. But they have to be damn excellent at the job that I’m asking them to perform, and their excellence has to come with some broad values alignment about what it is to build a city as inclusive as it can possibly be, where we need to have a more broadly shared prosperity. That’s all I would ask of them, and I need their excellence.*

And for him, Commissioner Tisch fulfills that. Now, on this other question about how we make these tough decisions and manage to keep a coalition together. I think that—and it’s interesting, I listened to some of the outtakes of your [conversation](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/bill-de-blasio-interview-transcript) with my friend Bill de Blasio. And it was powerful to hear Bill say to all of you that he thought that he had too much of a chip on his shoulder. That he didn’t engage in the work of continuous outreach in the way that he should have. Both with those who disagreed with him, but even those who were allied with him, just felt that he just was not communicating enough. And that there was a sharpness to his communication.

I remember at the time, and this would have come out in the FOIL-ed emails. At the time I used to say to him, *You sound too sanctimonious about this stuff, and you are using progressive as a noun, a verb, an adjective, in a way that can’t be heard and felt by people who don’t describe themselves that way but may share a point of view with you about certain aspects of policy making in this city. And you gotta figure that out.*

I think that Zohran has a capaciousness in how he organizes, in the language that he uses, in his ability to be a kinetic listener, even with people who are offering a sharp critique. And I think that he is really well-positioned to translate the movement to elites, and the elite back to movements, in ways that enable us to find the Venn diagram space of enough consensus to move an agenda forward, keep a politics together, and ultimately win—put points on the board for the city.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Yeah, I think you’re talking about clarity kind-of pivoting into persuasion, right?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Yeah.

**Alyssa Katz**  
He’s been clear about why he’s keeping Tisch, but is he going to persuade people? And we shall see, but you’re saying he has time to do that.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
So when you run a campaign, you acquire a kind of currency when you win that you then have to draw down on. You gotta draw down on that currency. And drawing down on that currency means that by day 200 you might not be as popular as you were on day number two. And you have to accept that going in. But you have to think, *All right, here are the ways that I think it’s worth it to draw down on that deep reservoir of goodwill that I’ve built with this part of the community. And I think that over time it will help them understand and see why it’s worth it to stick with me on this journey because they’re gonna get the outcomes that they want.*

**Josh Greenman**  
You make choices what to prioritize and what to maybe not prioritize.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
100%. 100%.

**Myles Miller**  
Can I just follow up on what you’re saying?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Governance leads to dissatisfaction in some camps. And that’s OK as long as you’re seen to be true to the core values and true to the things that you promised to fight for and champion, and you got to achieve some of them!

**Myles Miller**  
Well, I want to talk about hard truths because you’ve got a person who’s an idealist, who’s coming in with a very broad progressive and populist pitch that a good amount of New Yorkers bought into. What are some of the things you have to say, *Listen, this is something that you’re focused on but may not be able to get done.* Or, *city government works in this way and therefore it’s going to be difficult to navigate*. Hard truths are always—

**Patrick Gaspard**  
That’s a great question. So here’s one of the things that I found most impressive about Zohran, [Elle Bisgaard-Church](https://www.cityandstateny.com/personality/2025/10/how-elle-bisgaard-church-became-zohran-mamdanis-most-trusted-adviser/408769/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)—his chief of staff in the Assembly, then campaign manager for the primary, and then leader of the transition, and gonna be chief of staff in City Hall. What I found interesting about them is they reminded me so much of the old-school grizzled organizers who trained me when I joined my union as a kid.

They were clear all along about what the North Star goals were. But those young people who went out across the city to knock on doors—it was powerful for me to see how well-versed they were in the challenges of governance, right? They were clear on what the mayor-elect wanted to accomplish in mass transit, with housing, food insecurity even. But they were also clear on the relationship between the powerful exec in City Hall and the powerful exec in Albany and the state legislature, and the challenges inherent in that and how the movement that elects a mayor has to stick together for delivery.

I would, at times, go up to some of the canvassers for the Mamdani campaign and I’d pretend to be an undecided voter. And I would like, have some tough conversations with them about free buses, about the rent freeze, and all the things. And I was just impressed with the sophistication that they had, where they would be preaching patience to me. So I just think that there’s a way that many, many, many people who were active in that campaign were able to gain a purchase on how a bill becomes a law, and how the budget is made. So that’s a part of the soft landing, that’s one thing.

The other thing is that I don’t wanna overstate this, but I also don’t wanna underestimate it. We have a figure who is preternaturally gifted as a communicator, and who has the example of failed narratives and governance in front of him and he understands what it means to take people along on the journey in ways that are clear, evident, and even vulnerable every step of the way with him as he confronts a challenge in the City Council, as he confronts a challenge with Andrea Stewart-Cousins or Carl Heastie or Kathy Hochul. I think that that story’s gonna get told in real time. I know it’s gonna get told in real time, and on the ground in ways that I think will benefit the politics and benefit the ultimate outcome that he’s aiming towards. I’m confident about it.

**Myles Miller**  
I’m missing the hard — is the hard like that these people stood with you and said, *Oh, free and fair buses,* or, *tax the rich*, and he stood outside the [Edenwald](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nycha/downloads/pdf/Edenwald.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) projects and said, to *Carl Heastie,* but then that may not actually happen in the time and space in which you think it would.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I love a reporter who knows his political geography.

**Myles Miller**  
I was up in the Bronx.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Hey man. It’s an important historic place. I think that the hard thing is when you’re in these seats, you find out in a hurry that you don’t get to control the agenda — in a hurry. Right? I remember being in the White House and we had just gotten healthcare done. Finally, we land the thing, and the president’s like, *Now we’re gonna talk about the economy; here are the things that we’re gonna do*. And we wake up and there’s like an oil spill in the Gulf. And every day it’s like, *Mr. President, plug that damn hole. And* he’s like, *What? I got no scuba gear. What am I supposed to do?* But this is the thing that’s dominating everything for weeks at a time.

So, when you’re in these roles, you discover in a hurry, you don’t get to control the agenda, you don’t get to always set the agenda, you gotta be clear about what you’re putting in the center of the table and prioritizing and rallying around. And you’ve got to tell the story about that. But you also have to be clear that you may not get everything in that agenda.

De Blasio, I remember when he was running for mayor and talking about universal pre-K. And of course, many of your publications editorialized about how absolutely ridiculous that was. I’ll never forget *The* *New York Times* [editorial about how preposterous this notion was](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/opinion/universal-pre-k-takes-off.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Mr.%20de%20Blasio%20pressed%20on%20despite%20predictions,the%20graveyard%20of%20good%20ideas.%20When%20Gov.). And was that even a needed thing? Wow, talk about bubbles. And the then-governor during that election came out against de Blasio’s position. And now, it was interesting listening to Andrew Cuomo claim credit for universal pre-K in New York. But everyone was against it until de Blasio got the damn thing done. But he didn’t get it done to the full extent that he wanted. He didn’t get the “pay fors” that he wanted. But he was clear about what this meant in the lives of working people. I thought that was one of the few instances where he and his administration told the story well and it bled through. And they were willing to eat some compromises on that and a number of other issues that were necessary, were hard and difficult, but that made change possible.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
You brought up *The New York Times*. Do you see the traditional media as hopelessly irrelevant? And if so, is there a way that they can make themselves relevant again?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
*The New York Times* is a wonderful lifestyle publication that occasionally has some interesting news in it. I was thinking the other day... Look, all of our institutions are struggling and are really, really, really challenged. And this is a moment where no one trusts any of us for nothing. Right? That’s just the reality of where we live. But it does not help that reality when we’re in the middle of an ethical crisis in journalism that’s actually gotten the attention of some average folk, and you’re gonna write [a story](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/style/olivia-nuzzi-rfk-book-american-canto.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) about the *Vanity Fair*[](https://nypost.com/2025/12/05/media/vanity-fair-olivia-nuzzi-part-ways-after-explosive-news-allegations-about-alleged-rfk-jr-affair-emerge/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)[reporter](https://nypost.com/2025/12/05/media/vanity-fair-olivia-nuzzi-part-ways-after-explosive-news-allegations-about-alleged-rfk-jr-affair-emerge/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) \[and former *New York* magazine correspondent, Olivia Nuzzi\] who has compromised the integrity of [her coverage](https://nymag.com/tags/olivia-nuzzi/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and many– and the coverage of many other people. But instead of reporting about this journalistically, instead you give this person a profile filled with photographs of them walking under a romantic glowing moon on a beach. And you’ve got video of their hair blowing in the wind like they’re in that scene in *Kill Bill* where they’re driving to finish somebody off. I thought *The New York Times* managed to really do all of journalism a disservice in that moment.

And I have not recovered from *The New York Times* announcing to the world that they are above making endorsements now in New York mayoral primaries. *And we just don’t do that. That’s just—*

**Josh Greenman**  
That’s why we’re here today.

**Ben Smith**  
That’s the spur for the creation of this \[New York Editorial Board\].

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I know.

*We won’t mingle with the unwashed*. And yet they managed immediately after Michael Bloomberg dropped $8 million in the primary, immediately after, somehow it occurred to *The New York Times* that they had to[ weigh in and at least say](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/opinion/new-york-mayor-election-advice.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), *That Zohran Mamdani kid, like anybody but that*.

Deeply fascinating. I think that there’s a way that so many of our institutions have become, are seen as corrupted or seen as lacking integrity or seen not to meet the values that they have historically projected in the world. They’re seen as hypocritical, and I think that all of them and all of us have to work against that and have to close the daylight that folks are feeling between stated goals and actual actions in the world.

I love your field. When I was 10 years old, I wanted to be either Andrew Young, who had then become the US Ambassador to the United Nations. I remember I was 10 years old, I either wanted to be Andrew Young or I wanted to be Peter Jennings. Those were like the only jobs that I thought had any merit to them. And I was obsessed with [Anthony Lewis’s column](https://www.nytimes.com/by/anthony-lewis?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in *The New York Times*. And I thought, you know, journalists do this important interrogation and this important business of accountability. And there’s a way that I think I overly romanticize the industry as being beyond the influence of powerful actors in society that had their hooks into just about everything else.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Will Mamdani just ignore traditional media—

**Patrick Gaspard**  
No, no, no. I’m gonna get to your actual question, but I just wanted to do a little bit of editorializing first.

Now, I think it would be a mistake for Mayor Mamdani to ignore traditional media. I think that part of his success is that he had an all-of-the-above approach to this work. Yes, he had ways to kind of build his own media system and get messages directly to the electorate, but he also didn’t hesitate to go and have conversations with [Carl Campanile](https://nypost.com/author/carl-campanile/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at the *New York Post* or show up for editorial board meetings, even though he knew they would go against him.

He has kind of inculcated into everybody around him that part of the responsibility of democracy is to be subject to this conversation and the back and forth and the give and take. And that’s only gonna make you stronger as a public official, stronger as somebody who can deliver an argument and land it well.

I think that in the conversations that I’ve had with the mayor-elect, it’s clear to me that even when he has misgivings about some of the publications or the institutions or their leadership, he has a tremendous amount of respect and reverence for all of your readers, your listenership, right? And he’s not looking to go around that. And he really wants to be able to have the conversation and be subject to being made accountable. But I needed to just kind of editorialize a bit, ‘cause I do worry about where we are and I worry about an industry that continues to not have the ability to see itself in the way that average people sees it.

**Ben Max**  
On that front, and going back to some of the lessons of—

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Oh, can I just say one more thing? I’m sorry. And then I’ll answer your question, Ben \[Max\]. One of the interesting experiments that I’m excited about is the work in Vital City.

**Josh Greenman**  
Managing editor \[of Vital City\] here.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Ah-ha, OK, I did not know that. So one of the things I love about [Vital City](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/) is its ability to give space to sharp, well-articulated argument that’s backed up with data that can even move a hack like me on an issue. There’s a [good column](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-mamdani-gets-wrong-about-severe-mental-illness-and-crisis-response) right now written by ... I forget his name, the gentleman who runs mental-health services.

**Josh Greenman and Nicole Gelinas**  
Brian Stettin.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Yes. It’s a fantastic—

**Josh Greenman**  
He got his job with Mayor Adams because of an [op-ed ](https://www.nydailynews.com/2022/01/23/new-york-city-needs-a-sanity-check-simon-martial-michelle-go-and-all-of-us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)he published in the *Daily News*. Adams then reached out to us and said, *Who is this guy? Can you connect me?*

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I’m so impressed to hear that, because I think that too many people who are around Mayor Adams got their job because they hung out in a nightclub with Mayor Adams. So I’m really excited to hear that.

I think that piece—there are things in that piece that I disagree with. There are things in that piece that I think are overexpressed, like disagreements with Mamdani or misrepresentation of his view of the role of policing that I think are overexpressed. But I think there’s really some smart stuff in there that pushes hard against the trajectory that the mayor-elect has articulated during the campaign and during transition for mental-health services and how that corresponds with the role of the police department and where we’ve gotta find the sweet spot and the reality between what’s actually happened with 311, what actually happened in Oregon and stats that are like out there in social media that are wrong.

I thought it a fantastic piece, and I thought immediately, *This is the kind of person who the mayor-elect needs to be in an active convincing session with. Like, let’s figure out how we have that conversation and many, many others like that.* One of the things that impresses me in this moment of transition is, there are people who have been invited to the 400-person transition committee that have some strong disagreements with the mayor-elect. And I thought that that *Vital City* column was a way that ... is the kind of thing that we wanna be able to incubate in government. Sorry, Ben.

**Ben Max**  
Building off what you said: It’s easy in campaign time to talk about, to go and talk to almost everybody, or easier than when you’re in government, right? To talk about, *I’m gonna be held accountable and I want everybody to hold me accountable,* and we’ve heard mayor-elect after mayor-elect talk about running the most transparent administration you’re ever gonna see and you’re gonna love when I’m mayor — and then ultimately, there’s conflict, there’s crisis, there’s failure. What’s the best way going forward to handle those things? It can be instinct to go into a bunker, it can be instinct to fight. What are the sort-of modern lessons on doing that where you don’t repeat the mistakes that we’ve seen from other leaders?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I think here’s a place where I’m gonna commend Michael Bloomberg. I actually think that with the exception of his personal travel, and the very, very, very big exception of how he used some of his personal resources to invest in institutions that then accrued to his benefit when he ran for re-election not once but twice—with those exceptions, I think there was a hyper-transparency in how he governed, outcomes in agencies, what their goals were, where they thought they were falling short. And I thought that was kind of a real-time practice of laying that out, that the bullpen setup was illustrative of, right?

**Myles Miller**  
The tortured [Mayor’s Management Report](https://www.nyc.gov/site/operations/performance/mmr.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) \[MMR\] that is horrible to put together.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Yes. But for the first time you could actually trust the MMR in ways that you couldn’t before. So I would really commend Mayor Bloomberg for that. And Dan Doctoroff and Patti Harris, bunch of people who were involved in that. I would hold that up as a model that the mayor-elect should look to.

I also think that I worked for a White House that was much more transparent than previous White Houses and the White House since, where we disclosed anybody who came in for any meeting with us on anything. We were clear about the lobbying interest and we talked openly about potential conflicts. And I thought that we enacted a set of policies about the revolving door that I thought were a good thing for the system, for America, et cetera. So I think that there are some lessons to be learned, to be kind of taken from many of these places.

I also think that, you know, you describe something that hangs on personality trait, insecurity, the ability to be vulnerable and say, *I was wrong about a thing*, or *I used to think this way, but now I’m moving in this direction on this*. I’ve appreciated the maturity from candidate Mamdani who was able to come out pretty early on and say, *You know what? I think I got it wrong on affordable housing in this city. I used to have this kind of position that I think is not sustainable about the role of the private sector and the market in development of affordable housing in the city. I got that wrong. And I’m willing to admit that now in ways that I think are important if I’m gonna move forward and if we’re gonna move forward as a city.*

I have a sneaking suspicion that there are things in— One of the big failings of our politics and our journalism in the city is the under-examination of a system that is intended to deliver outcomes every single day for 900,000 school kids. We don’t talk about public education in our campaigns. We don’t examine it. Politicians don’t get asked questions about this. In the 2021 campaign, I think there were more questions to Andrew Yang about why he was skating on the boardwalk in Coney Island, than there were about his education policy, which I thought was problematic policy. It was like an astonishing thing to watch from the press corps.

I think that there are things that were discussed during the course of this mayoral campaign, barely discussed, on mayoral control of the schools.

**Myles Miller**  
Well, he wouldn’t answer on mayoral control of schools.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I think that there were things that were barely discussed and barely interrogated on what’s the program — the gifted \[and talented\] program?

**Josh Greenman**  
And the [SHSAT](https://www.schools.nyc.gov/enrollment/enroll-grade-by-grade/specialized-high-schools?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) schools...

**Patrick Gaspard**  
All of that and mayoral control that I thought were underexamined and that there weren’t enough questions about. And I suspect that as folks interrogate and push into that stuff, now that he’s actually gonna be in charge of 900,000 school kids, that it’s gonna have to lead to a more nuanced understanding of how the system works. How power moves through it. How procurement needs to be reformed. A number of things that I think will make him a stronger mayor for the school kids of the city.

**Liena Zagara**  
Given how excellent a communicator he’s been on everything else, why do you think education is the exception to that?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I just don’t think that this is a fault of Zohran Mamdani. I just don’t think, you know, look, there are very few things that there’s a bandwidth to actually properly unpack and interrogate during a campaign. I think that there are things that a mayor is actually in charge of that got a lot of attention, like the rent controlled unit and the decisions that that board is going to have to make. The relationship with Albany on public transit, law enforcement issues, things a mayor actually controls, that got a lot of attention. And things that a mayor has absolutely no control over, like foreign policy, that got outsized attention during this campaign. And even when the candidates were not talking about Israel and Gaza, it invariably came up in just about every interview in a way that kind of choked out the space and didn’t give us enough space to go further and further into things like public education.

**Liena Zagare**  
So was it a choice not to talk about education? Because every time, it seems that he’s struggled with answering questions, whether it’s special education—

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I don’t know. Was it a choice for reporters to ask him 20 times more questions about—

\[Crosstalk\]

**Myles Miller**  
He was not interested in talking about it.

\[Crosstalk\]

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Oh my God, this is fun.

**Josh Greenman**  
I think it’s fair to say he didn’t have a school plan, I think it’s fair to say he didn’t have a public education plan that he ever released.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I think it’s fair to say– And by the way, I was hoping for two things in this conversation: I wanted there to be enough instances where I could be humble enough to say, *I don’t know*, and that there’d be this moment of provocation where you all would yell at me. So, I’m glad that we at least got one of those things done.

So, I think it’s fair to say that unfortunately, in our politics, public education polls poorly. Like, it is not a thing that surfaces as a leading priority during campaigns. It’s not... It’s true during mayoral campaigns, it’s true during local elections. It is not the leading edge of the thing that people say they are most concerned about that will drive the decisions that they make on how they cast their ballots. When was the last time public education was a serious, like, *the* thing in a mayoral campaign?

\[Crosstalk\]

**Ben Max**  
It was pretty big in 2013.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
No, I think that universal pre-K became an issue.

**Ben Max**  
There was a huge amount on charter schools and—

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Charter schools, which is a thing that’s driven in elite discourse that affects a very, very, very small percentage of the 900,000 kids in the school system.

**Liena Zagare**  
15%.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
It’s grown since then, and the charter school movement I think has become so much more diverse now than it used to be. But in 2013, I remember this really well, it was driven by a very small percentage of folk who had outsized influence on donor concern in that cycle, and that surfaced a lot of questions about charters in the campaign. But it is not a thing that was driving voter preference and voter choices in the 2013 election. I know the 2013 data really well.

**Myles Miller**  
You’re talking about Success \[Academy\] and they were the loudest voice—

**Ben Smith**  
But substantively, what should we know about Mamdani’s education agenda that we don’t?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I think to your point about how he had an education platform, I would say across the board, probably with the exception I think of [Zellnor Myrie](https://projects.thecity.nyc/meet-your-mayor-2025-election-quiz-candidates/zellnor-myrie/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); if I think through, I think Zellnor probably had the most detailed public education plan in the campaign. I think that’s a fair thing, if I think through what folks put forward. I think for the most part, the candidates in general were thin in their education platforms. I think there were a number of what I saw, this is my personal view, issues that are peripheral to broad outcomes in public education that got way too much attention in the debate and what was being put forward by most of the campaigns — and I include the Mamdani campaign in this. And I think at a time when a large percentage of our children are two grades behind in literacy, two grades behind on math outcomes, where we have not figured out how to focus effectively, I think, on the learning loss that’s persistent coming out of the pandemic. When we have some powerful examples like the Mississippi model that I think are really interesting and instructive in ways that need to be more socialized through the system, I think that there are some important opportunities for the mayor-elect in that space.

**Josh Greenman**  
I don’t disagree, and I don’t want to get into a long fight about it, but we asked him about [New York City Reads](https://www.schools.nyc.gov/learning/subjects/literacy/nyc-reads?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), about the literacy program, and he was kind of non-committal. That’s a perfect example of a thing that’s about broad learning outcomes, and actually improving literacy.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Yeah, I agree with...I think that my response just now would indicate that I have some agreement with you on this.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
You mentioned this earlier, because the Israel-Gaza conversation took a lot of space in the race. As a former ambassador to South Africa, when people make that comparison about Israel and apartheid South Africa, do you think that’s a valid comparison?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
So, a couple of things. I’m glad you raised South Africa right now. I think it’s astonishing and not getting enough attention that the President of the United States still every day continues to propagate this horrific racist lie about this white genocide in South Africa and is using it as an excuse to apparently block South Africa from the G20\. That’s a shocking thing to experience in our politics and our foreign policy.

So, I have spent time in Israel. I’ve spent time in the West Bank. I had never been in Gaza. But during the conflict, I think it was about eight months into the current conflict, I was at the Gaza border. And I went to a kibbutz that had been overrun on October 7th \[2023\], and I could see just how proximate folks were living to just this everyday tension. I will tell you that in my past as I’ve gone through checkpoints in the West Bank, and as I’ve been asked—despite what Ritchie Torres had to say, as I’ve been asked what my religion is—I understand why many people, including leading human rights scholars like my old mentor, [Aryeh Neier](https://www.american.edu/wcl/impact/initiatives-programs/warcrimes/advisory-board/aryeh-neier.cfm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), who I think is unassailable in his credentials here; I understand why they would term it apartheid.

I think it is very, very, very, very different than the circumstances that existed in South Africa from 1950 through 1990\. I could go through a number of reasons why I think it’s a very, very, very different set of circumstances — where in South Africa there was no ability for any advocacy around these issues, that you didn’t have Black South Africans who were sitting in the South African Parliament at that time who were able to take up these questions in meaningful ways, in the way that you do with Palestinians in Parliament. And there are a number of things that I could point to as differences. But I understand and respect those who use– I have not used the term apartheid to describe what I’ve experienced there, but I understand why others use the term.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
You started this conversation saying that you’re a really good casting director. Who do you think the Democratic Party should start casting for the next presidential election? But you see people already making moves, right? You see some elected officials getting married, and you know, like...

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Oh, my God. That was so cynical.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Who do you think the Democratic Party should be casting?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I’m not...It’s gonna take me a while to recover from that.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
For the next presidential election?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Well, first of all, I can’t let that pass. You know, all this stuff plays out. Elements of this conversation will pop up on social media. And I wanna say for the record here that the elected official I think you’re referencing who recently was married was Senator Cory Booker, who I consider to be a good dear friend. And I have been around the senator through his romantic journey over time. And I’m really pleased for him that he has found this level of partnership and deep love.

I think that if you want to run for the presidency of the United States, that you ought to be encouraged to do that. I will not forget the sensation that I had in 2012 immediately after we received the results that Barack Obama was defeating Mitt Romney and he’d be reelected. Shortly thereafter, and I mean hours after the result, I found myself in a small huddle about how Hillary Clinton needed to be next. And I remember at the time thinking, *You know, I think that all of us will be stronger and that Hillary Clinton herself will be stronger if there is a robust, dynamic, well-litigated primary where every corner of the big tent that we have can feel as if their issues were aired and they had an opportunity to organize it. We’ll be stronger for it.* Just like in 2008, Barack Obama was a stronger general-election candidate, I think ultimately a better president, because he had that tough contest and had to go hard and deep on these issues. So I hope that we’re going to have a field where many, many flowers are blooming.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Now, who are you watching right now?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
If history repeats itself as it is wont to do, there will be a figure, at least one figure, who we are not talking about right now, who’s not popping up in *Politico*, who will somehow manage to break through on these little devices that we carry around. It’s not gonna be anybody we’re talking about now, but it’s going to be somebody who complicates the question of what the outcome should be. And that’s the moment that I’m excited about.

I think it’s a mistake for us to have early coronations, and a mistake to make big bets early in the contest, and you will not see me do that. I think that there are some good people that are running. And then at the same time, I think that it’s problematic that we’re still in a place where people are deciding how they enter, how they have a conversation, where they’re having a conversation based on the latest poll that they read.

You know, I can say I was disappointed and exasperated when I saw leading Democrats say things like, “You know, we really shouldn’t be talking about this person who has disappeared into the gulag in El Salvador. That’s a distraction from the things that matter right now.” And then, of course, when some of us got in the streets and we made the case and the poll numbers that Donald Trump has on immigration and all of these activities started shifting, then suddenly, politicians who had described all of what we were doing as a distraction were suddenly champions of democracy and this work. So, I am very, very, very cautious about an early closing around anyone that forecloses opportunities in the future.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So one area of tension within the Democratic Party, which you see in New York City, is traditional union-dependent Democrats where the unions rightly, from their perspective, advocate for better pay and better benefits for their own members, versus the DSA philosophy—Medicare for all, childcare for all, a basic level of benefits for everybody—where New York City public employees, they would cringe at Medicare for all, they would not deign to accept that lower level of benefits for themselves. Is there a way that Mamdani and/or others can bridge this tension?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
You’re asking this question of a former officer of Local 1199 SEIU, and I was responsible for politics and public-policy making for that union. And every single day, we had to negotiate the tension between what we necessarily had to drive as outcomes at the collective bargaining table, in the conversations that we would have in Albany around hospital benefits and the wages of nursing home workers and at the city over the outcomes that we were trying to drive for low wage home care workers.

And I will tell you that for the 350,000 workers, mostly women, mostly pretty low wage that I was privileged to represent, they didn’t struggle with that in the way that I struggled with it and the way that our leadership struggled with it. They had a different sense of community unionism and they wanted us to figure out a way to lift the boat, not just for them but for their neighbors as well, for the person who was in the church pew with them. And they didn’t make the neat distinction that gets made by a lot of union leadership on this issue.

I think that nationally, the union movement has grown. And for the first time in decades, first time in two generations I’d say, we have a majority of Americans who are expressing favorable views about unions. And I think that’s partly owed to the reality that many unions have been able to break out of their own comfort spaces, and they’re driving a lot of organizing around the fight for a higher minimum wage floors for everyone, more inclusive, portable healthcare plans for people who are not in their union. So I think that you’re seeing a maturation of that movement that’s creating greater and more communion with non-associated, non-aligned, people who are not in collective bargaining unions.

I think that at some point– It was interesting to see how unions in this town were– Hmm. I want to be careful about the language I use. So there are a lot of institutions in this town that were exposed during the primary because of their limited reach, and an exaggeration of the power and influence that they have over voters in communities. I think that that exposure makes them more solicitous of folks who have grown movements based on some of the ideas that you laid out. And I think that we’ll see a closing of that policymaking space between union leadership and movement leadership on some of these questions. But at the end of the day, if you’re the head of DC37, if you’re the head of 32BJ, if you’re the head of the hotel workers, you are being paid based on the outcomes that you’re gonna be able to drive for your membership. But at the same time, your ability to drive those outcomes is also dependent on a sense of the mobilizing and organizing and political strength that you have beyond your membership, and so managing that politics is something they’re gonna be compelled to do.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
You didn’t mention the UFT, but would you think that there’s a tension between UFT advocating to represent childcare workers potentially and the scope of benefits that Mamdani can offer? If he does this through contracting, he can get more flexibility and get to universal childcare more quickly than he can if he keeps his promise to pay them at parity with UFT—

**Alyssa Katz**  
And actually just to add to that, he’s also made promises to use union labor for affordable housing construction. There’s sort-of an across-the-board proposition here, not just in child care.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
So I think that’s a great question that only somebody from the Manhattan Institute might be able to pose. I think that this is the moment where I get to accomplish the second part of my drinking game and say I don’t know. I honestly just don’t know how that gets reconciled for the mayor-elect. I am clear about one thing about him which is: he knows the outcomes that he wants, but he does not have a religiosity about the path to that outcome. And I think that’s an important thing to understand and appreciate about him as he has to work and negotiate with other elected officials, with union leadership, and with constituencies to land the plane.

**Ben Smith**  
But before you go, two sort of running–

**Patrick Gaspard**  
You’re kicking me out. Oh my God. I barely touched my eggs…

**Ben Smith**  
…We haven’t talked about the Donald Trump meeting. We all watched it in awe of some sort, or however we watched it. And you were, I know, talking to \[Mamdani\] before and after. I guess I’m curious, like, everybody knows the story. What should people understand about that moment? How do you understand it?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
How do I understand that moment? OK, I’ll make one joke, which is, you know, Donald Trump has always wanted to be seated at the popular kid’s table in the lunchroom. That’s one thing that was clear about a young Donald Trump when he was obviously really well off, but he was that outer borough Queens kid who was trying to fit in with the Studio 54 crowd. He’s still very much, I think, that guy who really, really wants to be seated. He’s never gonna be the quarterback on the football team, but he wants to be able to party with the quarterback on the football team. That’s something we should continue to appreciate about Donald Trump, and it’s probably why Kash Patel’s gonna lose his job soon ‘cause, you know, he clearly is not at the popular kid’s table.

There are a couple of things I’d say meaningfully about that meeting. I thought the most revealing moment and the most important moment politically was when Donald Trump kind of sat up tall in his seat when he said, *You know, when we had our private meeting, Zohran Mamdani showed me data that said that one out of every 10 of his voters had voted for me. He showed me all the places that I did well in the city and I performed really well in 2024, got more votes than any of you thought I was gonna get in New York. And he showed me that in all those places, he did really well as well.*

And then Trump said the thing that I’ve been kind of consumed with since 2016 when I watched focus groups of people going into New Hampshire and they couldn’t decide if they were gonna primary for Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. And I was trying to understand what is it these two figures share, and it’s this notion that *the game is rigged against me*. And *I’m not interested in supporting anyone who’s just gonna be doing the small bore work of reforming some things at the margins. I want somebody who’s gonna shake the system up*.

And Donald Trump said out loud in the Oval Office that day, *I think Bernie Sanders got a bad hand from the Democratic Party and that there are a lot of folks who support Bernie Sanders, who support me too, because they think this game is rigged*. And it was really interesting to hear Donald Trump [say that out loud.](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/22/nyregion/trump-mamdani-meeting-press-conference-transcript.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Then of course, all the reporting and all the coverage was focused on this love fest between them. But Donald Trump said a powerful political thing out loud in that conversation that I think at the end of the day speaks volumes about why he felt enough alignment with this young Democratic Muslim socialist that he was telling folks, *Yeah, I’m a New York guy and I want everything to go well in New York, and I have some confidence that this person who is looking for the right outcomes for people who voted for me in New York as well, that I can work with him for some period of time*. So, that was an important thing that gets lost in our politics.

I think one of the most important things that’s happened politically in the last 10 years in this country was the shocking response to the execution of the health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan.

**Myles Miller**  
Horrible, horrible response. A year ago today.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
It was a year ago today. The horrific response to that was not a left or right response. It was an outsider versus insider response that I think we are inattentive to and not appreciating who’s driving a lot of the zeitgeist in the politics.

**Ben Smith**  
On that question, you worked for a guy who was sort-of seen in one light as kind of an outsider movement candidate who built a big base, and on the other is a guy whose parents were very successful academics, went to elite institutions, and when he became president, I think really turned out to be somebody with quite establishmentarian instincts who was part of a kind of continualist elite governing structure. And I wonder, you know, Mamdani also, through one lens, he’s deep cadre of the Democratic Socialists. And through the other, he’s an Upper West Side kid who came up in through these elite institutions. And I think, *which way is this gonna break?* Like, it seems like it could go either way.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I think that you just described so many people who’ve been elected to office in America over the last 250 years. I mean, I think you just described just about every Republican president for the last— in our lifetimes, by the way. Including the current one and the previous one. There’s nothing unique. Like the dynamic you just described is nothing unique to these figures at all, Ben.

That is important to understand. I think that Franklin Roosevelt, who was…I would— You said that Barack Obama’s the product of elite spaces; he’s not at all. He grew up without his father. And let’s not describe his mother as a successful academic. This was somebody who struggled economically, socially throughout her life.

I think that Barack Obama is an institutionalist. I wouldn’t describe him as an elitist. He’s an institutionalist, and he believes in the bedrock promise that we’re gonna work towards dignified outcomes for all through the work of these institutions that have a particular bent, orientation, and mandate. That’s who he was before he ran. He took up the promise of that.

**Josh Greenman**  
Is Mamdani institutionalist?

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I think that Mamdani I would describe as more of an insurgent than Barack Obama was — I think instinctively more of an insurgent. But I do think that he does not run for mayor in New York if he doesn’t have faith in institutions. Though he thinks that those institutions are in need of significant reform, significant transformation in the moment we find ourselves in. Where there is a crisis of economic dislocation in this country. He feels that really strongly.

And Zohran Mamdani probably had a different point of view on the set of policies that we needed to enact coming out of the financial crisis in 2008, 2009, than Barack Obama had. Like very, very different orientation on those issues. So I think Franklin Roosevelt was the ultimate elitist. Not an institutionalist. Franklin Roosevelt was an elitist. And I think that Franklin Roosevelt appreciated the pressures that the system, the institutions were under at that time. They would not be able to sustain themselves under that pressure with the economic polarization that we had, with hollowed out communities, with a dust bowl that existed in the heart of the country, without transformation, without reform, without the ability of elites to partner effectively to change the public compact.

I think that in many ways, we are still living in the shadow of that compromise and negotiation between elites and what adds up to the public good that started on, didn’t exist before the Roosevelt presidency. I think folks don’t understand how America was governed more by powerful interests before the Roosevelt presidency than it is even in this moment that we live in now. Folks, they don’t understand history at all. But we’re still in the shadow of that compromise that was litigated then, that we’re still making some sense of now.

And Zohran holds up Fiorello La Guardia as the embodiment of that and Vito Marcantonio and that whole history.

**Harry Siegel**  
Touching on a lot of that, I see what Mamdani and Trump had in common, going back to Trump’s 2016 run, is gesturing across the table like this, and saying, *How much worse could I be?* And I think a lot of people who voted for him but weren’t totally on board with all of his ideas looked at the moment and the alternatives and said, *Let’s give the kid a chance*, are also concerned that he may well end up as the dog who caught the car, so to speak.

That as with Dinkins, in fact, that he’s gonna be taking power at a moment when the pressurizing forces hitting New York are gonna be extremely intense. And people aren’t fully aware of those pressures in part because his appeal has been so successful. I mean, [he met with us](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/zohran-mamdani-interview-transcript) when he was at 1% in the polls maybe. He said— Ben \[Max\] I think asked, *What’s the number one function of a mayor*? And he said, *I’m gonna be a messenger*. And I understand that, partly it’s, you’re running for mayor, that’s a campaign-phase thing to say. But for people who are hopeful for him but deeply concerned about the moment New York is at, how should they be gauging the next year? As he’s spending down his political capital and all that in this point.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I feel as if you just got five questions for the price of one in there, Harry, which is really impressive.

**Ben Max**  
He always does.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
I gotta take you bargain shopping with me during this Christmas season.

**Harry Siegel**  
It’s a $12 Goodwill suit.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
See? I’m impressed, brother. Look, a couple of things. Huge difference between the decisions that voters made around Donald Trump in 2016 versus the decisions that I think voters made in New York right now, in 2025, whatever year we’re in. I think that there was more affirmation here in this contest and in the votes that were cast than a kind of negative mobilization that existed in the 2016 campaign. Like Donald Trump was decidedly the anti-Hillary, somehow strangely the anti-elite candidate in that election as well. But there was something else at play that I’m not gonna let anybody ever, ever forget, and I’m gonna compare it to 1989 since you raised the Dinkins point.

So when…Donald Trump runs in 2016, he starts running in 2014 with the birth certificate. The Kenya stuff. Barack Obama’s not really one of us. He’s not really a citizen. All of that stuff starts first. He’s fomenting all of that stuff in the public. And it’s also a time when Donald Trump is making an argument against Reince Priebus and the Republican establishment. We forget that before Donald Trump started beating Democrats, he had to first bring the institution of the Republican Party to heel. We quickly forget that for a lot of convenient reasons.

A lot of that was around race. Reince Priebus and the Republican Party said, *We just got our asses handed to us yet again in an election where unemployment’s at almost double digits. How did we lose to this guy again? We’re gonna have to do something to attract women. We’re gonna have to do something to attract Latino voters. We’re gonna have to use rhetoric that will make us more inviting to African-American voters*. Reince Priebus put that in a memo. And Donald Trump looked at the memo and he flushed it down the toilet. He said, *You’re wrong. There are a lot of disaffected white voters in this country who are open to a very different kind of message, who are gonna rally around that message. And I’m going to articulate it for them and to them and I’m gonna do that in a way that’s gonna grow the pie for us. We don’t have to be involved in the work of persuasion of those voters. We have to get our voters who feel a kind of cultural and a demographic existentialism in Ohio and Iowa, a lot of other places, to come and understand the value proposition that we’re offering as their last best chance to end an American carnage*.

That’s what his argument was. It’s a very different thing than what just happened here in New York. And I’d also say that in 1989 and in 1993, I’d remind some of you who are old enough, that there were neighborhoods in New York then that people like me could not go to. Which is an astonishing thing when I say that to some of the inspiring young people who I talked to in Zohran’s campaign and in his transition. They have a hard time wrapping their brain around the reality that there were places, like Bensonhurst, I could give a long list, where I would not be caught in the daytime, let alone in the evening. And there was a price to be paid for it.

David Dinkins won an election by a little less than two percentage points in that environment. He lost an election by a little less than two percentage points in that environment at a time when all of that racial hostility was being stoked by his opposition and by a person who led a police riot and led a plan for Staten Island secession. All these things. So there’s a different proposition and equation that you had to account for in those instances and in governing in those moments.

I think that there’s something else that’s available to Zohran Mamdani that is a good deal more of an openness in this city right now. And that there are people who disagreed with him on a set of policies, who may have some ideological discomfort with where he stands, but who are proud New York nationalists, who are coming to the table right now and who are saying, *You know what? I didn’t agree with you. I didn’t vote for you. I wrote a million dollar check for a Super PAC that then superimposed your face over 9/11 in a pretty horrific way, in a pretty racist way. But you know what? You won. And so now I’m prepared to come to the table to have a conversation about housing and affordability and what we do about it. And you are right in your critique that people like me have not paid enough attention to this issue and we want to do something about it now. I think there’s a thing that we can do to help on improving outcomes in the public education system. Maybe there are ways that we integrate AI effectively. All the things that we want to be part of innovating on with you for the betterment of this city.*

I just think that the environment is so very different than what I experienced as a 22-year-old when I walked into City Hall with David Dinkins and Bill Lynch and that whole crew back then. Where people were not prepared to work with him and were just kind of like sharpening their knives for the next toxic campaign three or four years later. I’m not feeling that in this moment.

Now, on how he responded to you, that he was gonna be, what was the word that he used?

**Harry Siegel**  
The dog who caught the car.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
No, no, no.

**Others**  
Messenger.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
The messenger.

**Harry Siegel**  
Oh, the messenger. I’m sorry, go on.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
Look, I don’t know, I have not listened to that moment. I’ll go back and listen to his interview with you. I don’t know how he meant that and I don’t know what else he said, but I think that somebody who reappoints Jessica Tisch, appoints Dean Fuleihan as his first deputy mayor, attracts into his transition team people who have had public disagreements with him on policies across the board, and who’s saying clearly that I’m gonna build a team that is leaning hard into delivery and excellence and I’m gonna be a progressive that’s focused on outcomes and not sound bites. I think that makes it clear that yes, he’s an effective messenger, but that’s not why he ran for the job and it’s not what he sees as the superpower that he has now that he’s gonna have all this executive authority vested in him.

**Ben Smith**  
Thank you, Patrick.

**Patrick Gaspard**  
No, thank you.
### New York City Needs a Smarter Way to Control Rents
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-york-needs-a-smarter-way-to-control-rents/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T21:06:37.000Z
[](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?display=page&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vitalcitynyc.org%2Farticles%2Fnew-york-needs-a-smarter-way-to-control-rents)[](http://www.twitter.com/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vitalcitynyc.org%2Farticles%2Fnew-york-needs-a-smarter-way-to-control-rents&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vitalcitynyc.org%2Farticles%2Fnew-york-needs-a-smarter-way-to-control-rents&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

New York City's rent stabilization system is caught in an impossible bind. Every year, the Rent Guidelines Board studies the economic data and, consistent with [state laws](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), votes on a single percentage increase to apply to roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments across all five boroughs. In 2025, they approved [increases of 3% for one-year leases and 4.5% for two-year leases](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/2025-26-apartment-loft-order-57/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and as always, both sides of the debate claim victory and defeat simultaneously.

Tenant advocates — and Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who wants to freeze rent increases on these units for the next four years, regardless of what the data show — point to legitimate hardships. [Over half of New York's renters](https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/articles/2025/cordell-cleare/letter-sent-rent-guidelines-board-regarding-unacceptable?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are cost-burdened by their rent, according to the State Comptroller's Office. They're not making this up.

But property owners also tell a true story: [The RGB's own reports showed a 6.3% surge in building operating costs](https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-rent-guidelines-board-vote/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), yet increases didn't match that growth. [Financial records from thousands of rent-stabilized apartments](https://www.bisnow.com/new-york/news/affordable-housing/the-crisis-has-already-started-inside-the-finances-of-4300-rent-stabilized-nyc-apartments-129459?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) show dwindling cash, rising expenses and projections of deeper pain ahead. Many landlords are genuinely struggling to keep buildings maintained and financially viable.

How can both sides be right? Because we're trying to solve a complex, varied problem with a single number. It's time to change the law.

## Three buildings, three realities

Consider three rent-stabilized buildings across the city, all subject to the same 3% rent increase:

[In one building in Crown Heights](https://patch.com/new-york/prospectheights/flippers-playbook-how-nyc-slumlords-terrorize-tenants-get-away-it?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), longtime tenants have lived in their apartments for decades, paying rents well below market rate. In recent years, these tenants have [filed a sudden surge of 311 complaints](https://prismreports.org/2025/04/03/nyc-rent-stabilization-tenants-landlords/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (ranging from heat and hot water problems, broken boilers, water leaks, crumbling ceilings and construction dust) which housing advocates recognize as a result of deliberate neglect by landlords; conditions designed to drive people out so the building can be emptied and enter the open market. Those practices have been substantially curbed by [2019's Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act](https://nlihc.org/resource/field-new-york-state-legislators-pass-housing-stability-and-tenant-protection-act-2019?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which eliminated vacancy decontrol, and by[ a 2024 law that closed the "Frankensteining" loophole, where landlords would combine two previously rent-stabilized units into one open-market unit.](https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/in-the-news/2024/brian-kavanagh/what-end-frankenstein-loophole-means-nyc-renters?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Those laws are substantial steps in the right direction, but they also underscore the need for strong laws to curb those seeking to exploit the system for profit at the expense of residents. Meanwhile, in the Bronx, a family owns two small buildings that have been in their family for generations. They're not wealthy; they're struggling. [With cash running low, they recently had to patch one building's roof as a short-term fix rather than undergo the major repair it actually needs](https://www.bisnow.com/new-york/news/affordable-housing/the-crisis-has-already-started-inside-the-finances-of-4300-rent-stabilized-nyc-apartments-129459?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). They're not trying to empty their buildings or flip them to luxury; they're just trying to keep them standing. The same modest rent increase that does nothing to discourage the negligent landlord in Crown Heights also doesn't give this family enough to replace a failing roof.

[And then there are gleaming new developments in Gowanus, built by a large real estate firm with dozens of properties across the city.](https://www.brownstoner.com/development/gowanus-rezoning-impact-new-construction-affordable-housing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) These buildings might have 200 units, including 20% designated as "affordable" under the city's Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) program, meaning they're rent-stabilized. These buildings typically have a 24-hour concierge, a fitness center, a roof deck, and professional management that responds to maintenance requests within hours. The developer has economies of scale, favorable financing and diversified holdings that cushion any individual property's performance. For these buildings, the 3% increase is merely one line item in a sophisticated financial model.

This is the fundamental flaw of our current system: It treats these three radically different situations identically. The same percentage increase applies to a well-maintained building in excellent financial health and to one teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

## The problem with uniformity

A one-increase-or-freeze-fits-all approach creates perverse outcomes. Responsible landlords who've invested in their properties and maintained quality housing get the same modest increases as slumlords who've racked up hundreds of violations while extracting maximum profit. Some of the city's most notorious landlords [have accumulated hundreds of violations at individual buildings](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/017-24/nyc-s-infamous-worst-landlord-surrenders-is-en-route-rikers-hpd-nyc-sheriff-s-office?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and even served jail time for their neglect. Yet, while neglecting their properties, they still collected the same rent increases as responsible owners.

The system rewards the worst actors and penalizes (or at least fails to reward) the best ones. And it provides the same increases to deep-pocketed institutional developers as it does to mom-and-pop landlords operating on razor-thin margins.

Meanwhile, tenants in poorly maintained buildings see their rents rise even as their living conditions deteriorate, while tenants in well-run buildings, whether a small family property or a professionally managed new development, may pay increases that exceed what's actually needed to maintain their homes.

The numbers confirm what tenants and responsible landlords both know: Something is badly broken. Pre-1974 rent-stabilized units [now have an average of 1.76 maintenance deficiencies](https://cbcny.org/advocacy/how-nyc-can-better-track-condition-rent-stabilized-housing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — 75% more than newer stabilized units and 79% more than market-rate units. As of late 2020, [between 65% and 85% of open Housing Code violations in rent-stabilized buildings](https://www.centernyc.org/urban-matters-2/new-yorks-housing-is-falling-apart-heres-how-to-stop-that?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across the five boroughs had remained unresolved for a year or more, totaling over 550,000 violations.

Yet the city already knows which buildings are the worst offenders. The Alternative Enforcement Program identifies [250 of the city's most distressed buildings each year](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/010-25/hpd-sharpens-enforcement-against-nyc-s-worst-apartment-buildings?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). These properties have nearly 40,000 open housing violations, including over 9,000 immediately hazardous conditions like mold, rodents, lead paint and lack of heat or hot water. These represent roughly 3-5% of the regulated stock where conditions are so egregious there's no ambiguity about neglect.

## A smarter framework

The solution isn't to abandon rent regulation (though many economists and editorial boards have been saying for decades that that's a better way). Affordable housing is too scarce and too critical to New Yorkers' survival. But we need to move toward a system that recognizes differences in both building quality and financial circumstances.

The framework is straightforward: Tie rent increases to building conditions. Buildings in the Alternative Enforcement Program — the worst 3-5% with conditions beyond dispute — would receive zero rent increases until they come into compliance. Meanwhile, buildings meeting quality standards would receive adjustments that reasonably reflect operating cost increases.

This [isn't a radical concept](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/a-housing-roadmap-for-new-yorks-next-mayor). It's basic market logic: You get paid for delivering a quality product. Right now, rent stabilization severs that connection entirely. Landlords get paid the same whether they respond to repairs in 24 hours or 24 months, whether their heating systems work reliably or break down every winter.

Creating differential rent guidelines would restore accountability. The RGB [already](https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/03/27/rent-hike-price-board-apartment-lease-guide/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) establishes different rates for lofts versus apartments, and for different lease terms. Alex Armlovich, a member of the RGB, has made a good argument that this [authority extends to creating distinctions based on building quality and maintenance records.](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/a-housing-roadmap-for-new-yorks-next-mayor) The board could use its rulemaking process to establish tiers: Buildings in the Alternative Enforcement Program receive zero increases until compliance is achieved, while buildings meeting quality standards receive varied adjustments that reasonably reflect operating cost increases.

For the struggling family owners, this would mean the increases they receive actually help them afford the roof replacement their building desperately needs. For the tenants in Crown Heights, it would mean their negligent landlord stops profiting from deliberate deterioration. And for the well-capitalized Gowanus developer already maintaining a high-quality building, it would mean continuing to receive reasonable returns on a well-managed property while knowing that if standards ever slipped, so would their revenue.

## Building a coalition

[Incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary and the mayoralty in part on promises to freeze rents for all four years of his administration](https://www.brickunderground.com/rent/rent-board-approves-increases-final-vote-stabilized-apartments-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It remains to be seen whether such freezes, assuming he can get them through the Rent Guidelines Board, will hold up against court challenges; by law, increases or freezes are supposed to be driven by data, not preemptive political pronouncements.

But assuming they do, a citywide freeze applied to all buildings also creates real risks. It could undermine housing quality and potentially force some smaller landlords into distress or sale.

[Many owners took out loans assuming they'd eventually raise rents, but 2019's Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act closed those loopholes, leaving thousands of properties financially underwater as loans come due](https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2025/10/unable-raise-rents-owners-rent-stabilized-buildings-face-financial-trouble/409245/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). A blanket freeze could accelerate this crisis.

[Mayor-elect Mamdani has pointed to data showing that net operating income for rent-stabilized buildings increased by approximately 12% in recent years.](https://gothamist.com/news/amid-mamdanis-call-for-rent-freeze-nyc-board-approves-45-hike?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) But this aggregate figure obscures the reality: it lumps together all three types of buildings; the Crown Heights slumlord collecting rent while providing minimal maintenance, the struggling Bronx family owners and the well-capitalized Gowanus developer. It ignores that many buildings containing only rent-stabilized units are struggling financially even as others thrive. A targeted approach delivers on the promise without the collateral damage. Freeze rents for the worst landlords and those whose revenues are beyond healthy. Let responsible owners cover their costs. The message would be clear: We're standing up for tenants by holding landlords accountable, not by pretending that every building faces the same circumstances.

[As one housing industry observer noted](https://www.brickunderground.com/rent/rent-board-approves-increases-final-vote-stabilized-apartments-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), applying the same rate to every rent-stabilized unit "doesn't make sense anymore." We need rent increases "based on data and context."

This also speaks to the economic diversity among property owners that's often ignored in housing debates. Some landlords are institutional investors with deep pockets and professional management teams. Others are families who own a single building and depend on rental income for their own housing security. A system that distinguishes between operators who maintain their buildings and those who don't is fairer to all groups than our current blunt instrument.

## The path forward

The state can always change the law to allow such distinctions to be made, but we don't have to wait on Albany. The Rent Guidelines Board can use its rulemaking authority to establish differential guidelines based on building quality and other criteria related to financial health. The enforcement data already exists: The Alternative Enforcement Program (AEP) maintains a publicly updated list of the city's 250 most distressed buildings, refreshed annually based on violation records, making it straightforward to identify which properties should face rent freezes until they achieve compliance. The list could also easily be expanded as needed, if 250 buildings is deemed insufficient. The legal framework also exists. The RGB can set different rates for different categories. What's needed is political will.

Yes, there are details to work out, but they are solvable. What's not solvable is the fundamental contradiction of our current system: trying to regulate a million diverse apartments, in thousands of different buildings, owned by landlords with vastly different resources and motivations, with a single annual percentage.

Our city deserves a rent stabilization system sophisticated enough to match the complexity of the problem it's trying to solve.

════════════════════════════════════════

*Vital City launched three years ago as an experiment. Our first "meeting" was me and Greg Berman, sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan sketching out the* [*first issue*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-1)*, betting that in a time of such hyperpartisanship, New Yorkers might be yearning for a calm voice, compelling evidence and angelic writing on how to make cities better.*

*You answered with a resounding yes, and helped us grow into a trusted civic home for practical solutions.*

*Now, as Mayor-elect Mamdani prepares to take office, Vital City is uniquely positioned to offer practical guidance to the new administration. We have ambitious plans for 2026: boosting our operational capacity, expanding our "What to Do (And Not to Do)" series, making academic research usable for decision-makers, strengthening our data analysis, and building a more robust community of urban policy practitioners.*

*To do that, we need your help.*

*For the first time ever, we're directly asking readers to support Vital City. Our goal is to add 700 inaugural supporters by December 31\. Your tax-deductible gift will help us expand our capacity, and ensure our ideas reach the decision-makers who need them.*

***If you value rigorous, solutions-focused policy work, we hope you'll join us.*** [***Become an inaugural supporter***](https://bit.ly/vc-eoy-sitetop?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) ***today.***

*— Liz Glazer, Founder*
### Daylight Savings: A Safer, Cheaper and Quicker Way to Design Intersections
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/a-safer-cheaper-quicker-way-of-daylighting-intersections/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:49.000Z
Across the country, cities are rethinking how they use streets. In New York City, one of the most fiercely contested issues is the design of intersections, largely focused on whether to keep corners clear of parked vehicles in order to make it easier for pedestrians and drivers alike to see around the corner, a change that's referred to as "daylighting."

Safe-street advocates are rallying for universal daylighting at all intersections; a bill currently before the City Council would do just that. On the other hand, the city's [Department of Transportation](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/daylighting-and-street-safety.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) released an analysis earlier this year, which was criticized by councilmembers and safe-street advocates for faulty use of data, claiming that daylighting does not necessarily make intersections safer. Many drivers and their representatives also argue that the [estimated](https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/transit/2025/04/22/council-pushes-bill-to-remove-parking-within-20-feet-of-crosswalks-at-all-intersections?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (though [disputed](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/08/08/we-told-you-so-dots-anti-daylighting-scare-tactic-now-fuels-pro-car-pols?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) cost of over $3 billion could be better used elsewhere.

The current debate focuses on providing clear curb space on both sides of all four corners of an intersection, with advocates saying this is required for better sight lines. DOT and others opposing a change claim that daylighting would take up too much curb space currently used for parking, and that daylighting in fact [encourages speeding](https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/09/29/daylighting-bill-adds-street-danger/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), making streets more dangerous.

Both sides are missing the real issue: there are different safety considerations at different areas of an intersection, and we need different design strategies to address each.

Specifically, conditions are very different when drivers are entering an intersection than when they are exiting it. When drivers are entering, we want to optimize visibility. When drivers are exiting, improving cones of vision is no longer the issue; we just want to ensure that drivers stay far away from the curb, and slow down. Who amongst us has not almost had our toes run over by a driver making a right turn too close to the curb? This difference between vehicles entering and exiting has not been addressed in the discussion to date, or even by other[ design standards](https://nacto.org/publication/urban-street-design-guide/intersection-design-elements/visibility-sight-distance/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

What is needed now is an informed design standard that prioritizes clear lines of sight when drivers are approaching an intersection, and provides a barrier in the curb lane for when they exit. Call it Daylight Savings. Developing this standard will save lives by improving upon the aspects of universal daylighting that actually contribute to public safety, and, as a bonus, it has significantly less impact on existing curb uses.

A dispassionate geometric analysis of how intersections work would lead us to such a standard, which isn't political or ideological — just practical.

## A deeper dive into what's really going on at intersections

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/atgqhhnyclf9n1kc_image1-png-auto-format-compress-1776259665541.jpg)

Credit: Jonathan James Cohn | Four corner conditions = eight paths of travel.

At a typical intersection, there are two primary causes of crashes: restricted visibility, and vehicle speed. We can design for both, but the optimum design solution is different at each side of a corner. Here's why.

Each corner has two paths of travel for pedestrians, one crossing each street. With four corners, that makes eight paths of travel. Four of them involve drivers entering the intersection, and four involve drivers exiting it. In the diagram below of one corner, the top side has drivers entering the intersection, and the right side has drivers leaving the intersection. There are, of course, variations depending on one-way streets, bike paths and other issues. But let's keep it simple, and typical, for now.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/atgqihnyclf9n1ks_image2-png-auto-format-compress-1776259665739.jpg)

Credit: Jonathan James Cohn | With a vehicle parked near intersection: entering side.

When drivers approach the intersection, vehicles parked close to the crosswalk can block sight lines for both drivers and pedestrians. Here's what it looks like in real life. The white truck on the left blocks sight lines for both pedestrians and drivers entering the intersection, creating an unsafe condition.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/atgnx3nyclf9n1ho_photo1-jpeg-auto-format-compress-1776259666474.jpg)

Credit: Jonathan James Cohn | Vehicle parked near intersection; entering side.

Clearly, if there were no vehicle parked there, there would be a safety benefit due to the wider cones of vision for both the driver and the pedestrian.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/atgqvxnyclf9n1kx_image3-png-auto-format-compress-1776259666040.jpg)

Credit: Jonathan James Cohn | Without vehicle parked near intersection: entering side.

However, for a driver exiting the intersection, the situation is different. Visibility for pedestrians of a moving vehicle exiting the intersection is already barrier-free. Removing parked vehicles at that (top) location doesn't improve sightlines or safety — instead, it allows drivers to make a wider, faster turn.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/atgq_hnyclf9n1kg_image4-png-auto-format-compress-1776259666298.jpg)

Credit: Jonathan James Cohn | Without vehicle parked near intersection: exiting side.

This is the condition that the DOT correctly identifies as encouraging higher speeds. Not because of more or less visibility, but because of the well-understood and documented fact that cars travel faster on wider turning radii than on narrower ones.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/atgrl3nyclf9n1km_image5-png-auto-format-compress-1776259666428.jpg)

Credit: Jonathan James Cohn | With vehicle parked near intersection: exiting side.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/atgrannyclf9n1ks_image6-png-auto-format-compress-1776259666566.jpg)

Credit: Jonathan James Cohn | With planter or other barrier near intersection: exiting side.

Conversely, a car or other obstacle in the curb lane here requires a driver to make a tighter turn, which naturally slows them down. Here's what this looks like in real life.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/atgo8hnyclf9n1jw_photo2-jpeg-auto-format-compress-1776259667095.jpg)

Credit: Jonathan James Cohn | Vehicle parked near intersection; exiting side.

The white truck on the left does not impede views of vehicles exiting the intersection, and in fact slows traffic turning right onto this street, providing a safer condition.

Unfortunately, the DOT's January 1 [Analysis Of Daylighting And Street Safety](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/daylighting-and-street-safety.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) fails to recognize the key differences between approach and exit sides of intersections, and thereby misses key differences. Instead, they suggest, counterintuitively, that increased visibility in general can in fact encourage faster vehicle speeds and actually contribute to driver/pedestrian crashes. In a recent [editorial](https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/09/29/daylighting-bill-adds-street-danger/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the City's transportation commissioner and safe-streets advocate Ydanis Rodriguez argues that only "hardened" daylighting — meaning replacing a parked car with a physical barrier — can have safety benefits, while calling for more rigorous analysis. If the January 1 report is an indication, that rigor, beginning with a recognition that the issues are different at different areas, remains to be put into place.

## A better way

Understanding the key differences in conditions at even the simplest of intersections suggests that a finer approach to the design of intersections is warranted. It's pretty simple, really: Intersection design should ensure better cones of vision on the *approach* side of an intersection and discourage high speeds at the *exiting* side.

Of the eight start points for pedestrians, only the four "driver-entry" points would benefit from better sight lines. In contrast to the idea that full daylighting is always safer, the other four paths of travel would actually benefit from an object located near the crosswalk, be it a parked car, raised planter, bike rack or other public amenity. Since we can't guarantee that a car will always be parked there, it makes sense to place some sort of barrier that requires moving vehicles to make a tighter, and therefore slower, turn.

Some advocates for universal daylighting have made the case that taking parking space away is, in and of itself, a good thing, and that daylighting also provides the opportunity to create [rain gardens](https://citylimits.org/opinion-how-daylighting-can-allow-nycs-streets-to-fight-flooding/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). These are separate concerns from the safety issue, which is my focus here.

A "Daylight Savings" approach, with no parking on the approach side but with a barrier at the curb lane on the exit side, whether it's 2 feet wide or 20, would result in a reduction of the effective turning radius for vehicles making right turns, thereby calming turning speeds at the moment pedestrians are most vulnerable, while still improving all relevant sight lines. This does not preclude parking at 50% of the locations.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/atgrqhnyclf9n1k4_image7-png-auto-format-compress-1776259666659.jpg)

Credit: Jonathan James Cohn | Daylight Savings: No parking at entry, barrier at exit. Saving half the curbside space while providing a safer intersection.

In short, if what we care about most is pedestrian safety, the debate shouldn't be over whether to allow or disallow automobiles at all eight locations of an intersection. There's good reason to bar cars from parking in four of those spots — while keeping them and even placing other smallish, turn-slowing objects in the other four.

A Daylight Savings approach improves upon the true safety benefits of daylighting, while reducing construction and saving curb space. It's a lighter, quicker, cheaper — and maybe more politically palatable — way to achieve safer streets.

════════════════════════════════════════

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### Taking Mamdani’s Revolution to the Streets
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/taking-mamdanis-revolution-to-the-streets/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:35.000Z
New York City's streets have always been gritty. "A person upon arriving at home, after a day's business, finds himself rich in landed property clinging tenaciously to his clothing, boots, and sometimes to his hands and face," the New York Timeseuphemistically [observed](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1874/02/14/79217172.html?pageNumber=3&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 1874.

New Yorkers no longer have to wade through horse manure to get where they're going (with the exception of those traveling through parts of [Central Park](https://www.npr.org/2025/10/21/nx-s1-5558376/new-yorks-city-council-looks-to-ban-central-park-horse-drawn-carriages?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)). But they face a slew of other dangers and unpleasantries, from reckless drivers to slow buses to double-parked cars and trucks. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will come into office with a unique opportunity to address those challenges with bold transformations of the streetscape.

Some of the streets policies Mamdani has [endorsed](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/07/04/beach-reading-zohran-mamdanis-answers-to-streetsblogs-mayoral-candidate-survey?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), like neighborhood-scale pedestrianizations and a massive expansion of bus lanes, may at first blush seem like radical changes. And in the current climate, they're likely to fuel no shortage of headlines about pedestrian-vs.-bike-vs.-vehicle culture wars, as previous streetscape changes have done. Anything that's viewed as a further "attack" on cars will be framed as indulgent and elitist.

But the history of the city's streets reveals an ever-evolving urban circulatory system. New technologies and shifting political priorities have previously led to completely new uses of the public rights of way. Today, city streets are long overdue for redesigns that better reflect the needs and wants of contemporary New Yorkers.It would be difficult to cast a more fitting leader for this project than the Citi Bike-riding, bus-taking, halal-cart-dining avatar of New York City street life himself.

## The changing role of the street

19th-century streets could be nasty places. Still, they had other things going for them, as historian Christopher Wells vividly describes in the book ["Car Country."](https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295994291/car-country/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Before cars, streets were public spaces akin to what we would today call plazas. [Photographs](https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/images/pedestrians-and-peddlers-in-new-york-city-1915/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [films](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=768Cm3WJY6I&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of city life from this era show streets filled with vendors, kids playing stickball games and a whole lot of milling about in the middle of the road. There were no lane markers or traffic signals for horse-drawn vehicles and streetcars, which could travel only as fast as the pedestrian throngs would allow. Studying a 10-hour period in 1915 at the corner of Fulton and Broadway, researchers counted approximately 220,000 pedestrians and 10,000 vehicles of all types.

As car ownership increased, the role of the street in city life fundamentally changed. The auto industry understood that cars would never become the dominant mode of transportation if city streets retained their raucous mixture of activity. The industry launched an all-out public relations campaign, buying positive press coverage in newspapers, providing educational material to Boy Scout troops and schools and aggressively lobbying public officials. Their goal: to re-cast streets not as public spaces shared by diverse users and uses, but as thoroughfares for high-speed automotive transportation. Gradually, government and media latched on to the auto industry narrative.

The transformation of New York City into a more car-friendly metropolis is often laid at the feet of Robert Moses. That's a terrible oversimplification. By the 1930s, in New York and cities across the country, streets were legally and culturally enshrined as the near-exclusive domain of cars, historian Peter Norton recounts in ["Fighting Traffic."](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Traffic signals, crosswalks and one-way streets were instituted to allow for the more efficient flow of vehicles, consigning pedestrians to ever-narrower slices of the public right-of-way. Newly deputized traffic cops were unleashed to fight the novel crime of jaywalking, derived from the derogatory term "jay," a country bumpkin who arrives in the city and does foolish things like wandering into the middle of the road. Peddlers were banished from city streets, too, forced to abandon their trades or crowd into indoor facilities like Essex Market in the Lower East Side.

Where they could, planners widened city streets to make more room for automobiles. On Midtown avenues like [Second](https://www.nytimes.com/1911/10/01/archives/sharp-contrasts-in-lower-second-avenue-now-called-the-east-side.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and Fifth, officials created new vehicle lanes by shrinking the sidewalks. On [Park Avenue](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2024/08/27/city-will-put-the-park-back-in-park-ave-but-details-bike-lane-road-diet-are-left-out?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the generous median went from a walkable promenade to a purely ornamental strip of green separating the speeding bidirectional traffic.

The car-oriented consensus on street design held for decades, with a few notable exceptions. Greenwich Village activists led by Shirley Hayes successfully fought to [liberate](https://www.villagepreservation.org/2024/04/05/the-last-hurrah-for-traffic-in-the-square/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Washington Square Park from cars in the 1950s. Mayor Ed Koch established some of the city's first bus lanes in the 1980s, which speed trips for riders to this day. He also [built](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2013/02/01/ed-koch-1973-the-bicycle-must-be-included-in-nyc-transpo-system?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a handful of protected bike lanes, only to rip them out a few weeks later after they were mocked by Governor Hugh Carey.

## Restoring the balance

It wasn't until the new millennium that city leaders began to test out a new approach to street design. As transportation commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg from 2007 to 2013, Janette Sadik-Khan resolved "to restore the balance of the street and replace the vestiges of last century's planning dogma, which ignored the human experience on that street," she writes in her memoir, ["Streetfight."](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/318945/streetfight-by-janette-sadik-khan-and-seth-solomonow/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Times Square was a particularly egregious example. About 90% of the Crossroads of the World was dedicated to cars and just 10% to pedestrians, despite cars and pedestrians populating the intersection in roughly opposite proportions.

One morning in 2009, Sadik-Khan and her team rolled construction barrels onto the asphalt, marking off a stretch of Broadway as a pedestrian plaza. Instantly, the intersection was transformed. Even as the New York Post howled, commuters had room to breathe, and tourists could gawk at the digital screens overhead unperturbed.

Nor were automobiles the "losers": Collisions fell dramatically, and [traffic moved](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/broadway%5Freport%5Ffinal2010%5Fweb2.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) slightly faster down Seventh Avenue after the closure as drivers no longer had to deal with a confusing oblique intersection.

Sadik-Khan went on to create new pedestrian plazas at dozens of less famous crossroads, reclaiming 180 acres of city streets for pedestrians and bicyclists. She added hundreds of miles of bike lanes, using parked cars to protect them from traffic. She also redesigned hundreds of intersections to force drivers to make sharper, slower turns and to shorten the distance pedestrians had to cross.

Many of Sadik-Khan's interventions began as "tactical urbanism" pilot projects using cheap, temporary materials. This way, she was able to sidestep arduous approval and review processes that surely would have doomed her ambitions. (Sometimes, as [with a planned bike lane on Prospect Park West](https://gothamist.com/news/prospect-park-west-bike-lane-lawsuit-will-never-die?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), approval was exceedingly slow nevertheless, thanks to a lawsuit.) Instead, she found that "the transformation of the street itself was the best example and catalyst for its approval."

In other words, people voted with their feet. Business [boomed](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/2013-dot-sustainable-streets.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Times Square after Sadik-Khan banished cars. During her tenure, traffic fatalities declined to their [lowest level](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/dot-making-safer-streets.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) since 1910\. By 2013, bike ridership was four times higher than it was a decade earlier. By 2023, the latest year for which citywide [data](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bikestats.shtml?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is available, bike ridership in the city had doubled again, to more than 600,000 daily trips.

Much of that growth has come from riders on Citi Bike, which Sadik-Khan helped establish in 2013\. Here, again, the transformation of the streets with bike racks and bright blue two-wheelers, deeply contentious at first, initiated a virtuous cycle. "More riders create demand for more biking infrastructure and invite more people to ride and to walk on increasingly safer streets," Sadik-Khan wrote.

## After Sadik-Khan

Something fundamental shifted in the city's conception of its streets following Sadik-Khan's tenure. Elected officials and the public could no longer view streets as the presumptive domain of cars alone. Subsequent mayoral administrations and transportation commissioners continued the general trend that Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan had set in motion. In fact, [bike lane installation](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/11/05/agenda-2026-the-new-mayor-must-sustain-the-citys-bike-boom?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) accelerated under Mayor Bill de Blasio — whose Vision Zero plan set out to slash pedestrian and traffic fatalities — before declining again during Eric Adams' term.

The human-centric street transformations that New York City has undergone have moved the city closer to the original understanding of urban streets as shared public spaces. Yet the transformation has only been partial. Most streets, in most neighborhoods, retain their car-centric character from the middle of the last century.

Dozens of miles of promised bike lanes and bus lanes remain unbuilt. Adams has [cast aside](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2024/08/26/anatomy-of-a-debacle-how-adams-put-safety-last-on-mcguinness-blvd?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) street redesign plans. Anxiety over a dwindling supply of street parking quashed the city's wildly successful outdoor dining experiment. So much excess road capacity produced by congestion pricing has yet to be reclaimed for people, bikes and transit**.**

Mamdani has a chance to swing the pendulum back in the right direction.

## All eyes on Mamdani

It would be a fitting mission for our mayor-elect to embrace. As much as any political or pop cultural figure in recent memory, Mamdani is a creature of New York City's streets. He launched his campaign doing man-on-the-street interviews in the Bronx. Since then, he built his brand by speed-walking, Citi-biking and sampling street food across the five boroughs. The Friday before the primary, he walked the length of Manhattan in his suit and tie.

He's proposed some boundary-pushing policy proposals in this realm. In his [candidate Q&A with Streetsblog](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/07/04/beach-reading-zohran-mamdanis-answers-to-streetsblogs-mayoral-candidate-survey?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), he signaled his support for new pedestrianized neighborhoods, new bus lanes and an expansion of outdoor dining and open streets.

It's difficult to predict how much political capital he will devote to these ideas while simultaneously seeking to make progress on his signature campaign promises. But his voter base should be a significant factor in his calculus. Mamdani won [majority public transit commuter precincts by 29 percentage points](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/04/us/elections/nyc-mayor-results-precinct-map.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), one of the biggest demographic cleavages in his victory over former Governor Andrew Cuomo. He has a historic mandate to prioritize alternatives to the car, should he choose to pursue it.

There are three general areas that Mamdani has shown an interest in that could cumulatively represent a revolutionary leap in the city's conception of its streets.

1\. **Car-free or "low-traffic" neighborhoods**. It's not as wild as it sounds. Advocacy groups, business improvement districts and local electeds have been calling for such plans for [years](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/07/11/opinion-pedestrianize-the-financial-district-now?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Generally, the city's oldest neighborhoods, with narrow streets and lots of foot traffic, make the most sense for these kinds of schemes. With congestion pricing creating a little bit of breathing room in Manhattan, there's never been a better time to reimagine some of that space.

The latest leader to echo the call is Lower Manhattan Council Member Chris Marte, who recently endorsed the [pedestrianization of the Financial District](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/08/29/pedestrianize-the-financial-district-lower-manhattan-council-member-says?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Similar plans have been floated for [SoHo/Nolita](https://sohobroadway.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/SoHo-Broadway-Public-Realm-Framework-and-Vision-Plan-Final-Small-2021.10.12.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Downtown Brooklyn](https://www.downtownbrooklyn.com/public-realm-action-plan/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and elsewhere. The Times Square Theater District, the Lower East Side nightlife district, the Williamsburg shopping district, and the West Village brunch district are all logical places for at least part-time pedestrianizations, when crowds are at their peak.

These concepts come with fraught logistical challenges, including access for delivery vehicles and people with disabilities. But these are challenges that cities in other countries have solved in their own pedestrian districts. There's also a wide continuum of people-centric street plans ranging from larger-scale neighborhood pedestrianizations, to "[low-traffic neighborhood](https://www.openplans.org/low-traffic-neighborhoods?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)" concepts that eliminate through traffic from narrow side streets.

In the middle of that continuum is the "[pedestrian priority district](https://www.fastcompany.com/91378463/meatpacking-district-nyc-most-walkable-neighborhood?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)" taking shape in the Meatpacking District. The neighborhood now features a mix of Sadik-Khanian pedestrian plazas at oblique intersections, temporary shared streets protected by elegant movable planters, and extensive landscaping in the style of the nearby High Line. One could imagine more populist pedestrian streets filled with independent vendors and food carts, or free concerts and events.

**2\. World-class bus rapid transit**. Making buses free might marginally help improve bus speeds as boarding times shrink, though this is not guaranteed. (On routes in the city's 2023 fare-free buses pilot, travel times [increased](https://www.mta.info/document/147096?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as a surge in riders led to longer boarding times. As MTA chair Janno Lieber [points out](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/janno-lieber-on-free-buses-the-state), if people shift from subways to buses to save money, bus service could easily become strained.) The much more effective method of speeding buses is through infrastructure in and on the street. New York City has made some progress with bus lanes and busways in recent years. But the reality is that these lanes go disrespected far too often.

The best bus rapid transit systems around the world have physically separated rights-of-way, protected by concrete curbs or other barriers. They have dedicated boarding platforms, all-door boarding, limited stopping patterns, and transit priority traffic signals. Many even have level boarding for subway-style, wheelchair-accessible service.

Mamdani has [committed](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/07/04/beach-reading-zohran-mamdanis-answers-to-streetsblogs-mayoral-candidate-survey?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to bringing "true bus rapid transit" to New York, though his campaign [platform](https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is relatively light on the details.

He'll have a solid template with the [Flatbush Avenue](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/08/04/dot-reveals-transformational-plan-for-flatbush-ave-but-needs-to-get-the-details-right?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) bus improvement project, which includes some of the attributes described above. In addition to offering better transit service than typical Select Bus Service routes, it should also work wonders on the streetscape, making the public realm much safer and more pleasant for pedestrians. After shepherding this plan to fruition, Mamdani could tout it as a demonstration project as he rolls out world-class bus service to wider thoroughfares across the five boroughs. Transportation researchers Annie Weinstock and Walter Hook already have a handy [list](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/08/01/heres-a-bus-rapid-transit-plan-for-new-york-if-the-city-cares?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the most promising corridors.

**3\. Comprehensive curb management.** Car-free streets and widespread rapid bus transit will inevitably necessitate better curb management. To see why, consider how the Flatbush Avenue redesign will mean that a single double-parked delivery truck will block the sole traffic lane. Or consider the potential demand for ride-hail pickups just outside the future FiDi pedestrian zone. To use road space more efficiently, curb space needs to be used more efficiently, too.

The Adams administration has taken some initial steps in this direction by creating new [loading zones](https://www.amny.com/news/nyc-dot-adds-new-loading-zones-for-deliveries/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), starting a [trash containerization](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dsny/collection/containerization/m9-bins.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) pilot and encouraging companies like Amazon to use [electric cargo bikes](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2024/e-cargo-bike-on-city-streets.shtml?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for deliveries. What's missing is a comprehensive citywide curb management strategy that accounts for the many users and uses of the curb.

Such a strategy could include providing dedicated curb space for taxis, ride-hail cars and delivery companies on every block, while also making them pay their fair share for that valuable resource. It would consider other uses of the curb, including [year-round outdoor dining](https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-lawmakers-and-businesses-plan-to-rally-for-year-round-outdoor-dining?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), electric vehicle charging, and secure bike parking. Paid curb parking outside of metered commercial districts, and residential parking permit programs would need to be part of that discussion as well.

## Back to the future

Making a revolutionary leap in streets policy — akin to the automobilization of city streets a century ago — will be a difficult political fight, to be sure. But once plans are agreed upon, they can be accomplished [cheaper and faster](https://benjaminschneider.substack.com/p/the-fastest-cheapest-way-to-transform) than many of Mamdani's other priorities.

Mamdani also has a chance to reset the political conversation around streets policy. Of course, safety is a central motivation, but it's not the only one. Redesigned streets can better reflect the technological, economic, political and cultural realities of the contemporary city.

E-commerce and ride-hailing (including robotaxis, which will probably arrive in New York sooner or later) are facts of city life that the transportation system [needs to accommodate](https://www.slowboring.com/p/robotaxis-should-be-a-wakeup-call?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) through both pricing and design. Those ride-hail vehicles have gummed up traffic, while also giving more people a compelling alternative to transit. To compete, buses need to be much faster, which can be accomplished through rapid bus transit.

Bike ridership is already at historic highs, due in large part to the emergence of e-bikes and bikeshare. Those ridership figures can easily rise much higher, if people have [safe places to ride](https://medium.com/@patrickdaviscleary/bedford-avenue-protected-bike-lane-sees-65-increase-in-cycling-traffic-15a5a5689ab2?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in every neighborhood.

In the age of online shopping, restaurants and bars are increasingly the [lifeblood](https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/commercial/nyc-restaurants-retail-property-market-cdb22445?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of commercial neighborhoods. Giving them some extra room to spread out by way of outdoor dining can help drive more foot traffic to corridors that otherwise would feel desolate.

Meanwhile, gathering in public has taken on a heightened significance in an era characterized by so much loneliness and mediation. Better street design can take us back to the future, when streets were true public spaces. We need more places to commune, to protest and just to hang out. Surely, that's a vision Mamdani could rally the people behind.

*This essay is adapted from chapter 4 of "*[*The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution*](https://www.amazon.com/Unfinished-Metropolis-Igniting-City-Building-Revolution/dp/1642833533?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*," copyright © 2025, by Benjamin Schneider by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.*

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### The Urban Optimist’s Holiday Gift Guide
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-urban-optimist-holiday-gift-guide/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:39.000Z
## Shelf improvement

**Recent and forthcoming books by Vital City authors and urban policy thinkers we admire.**

[**Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop**](https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/book/9780197797778?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *Peter Moskos (2025)* A nuanced oral history of the people and policies behind New York City's drastic reduction in violent crime during the 1990s.

[**Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car**](https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/book/9781531508210?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *Nicole Gelinas (2024)* Jane Jacobs' victorious fight against the development of the Lower Manhattan Expressway is a totemic moment in New York City history, but it's not the first or the last time New Yorkers mobilized to fight for a city designed for people, not cars. Gelinas' book walks us through the history of urban transit — good, bad and ugly. Read an excerpt [here](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/movement-new-yorks-long-war-to-take-back-its-streets-from-the-car-excerpt).

[**The Nonprofit Crisis: Leadership Through the Culture Wars**](https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/book/9780197786307?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *Greg Berman (2025)* Vital City's co-editor draws from decades of experience in nonprofit leadership to offer a sharp look at why nonprofits — especially those based in cities — are being strained by polarization, internal identity debates and resource pressures, and what genuine leadership now requires.

[**The Lost Subways of North America**](https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/book/9780226829791?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *Jake Berman (2023)* A richly illustrated atlas of the subway systems we built, dismantled or never completed — including New York's forgotten lines and unbuilt alternates. For a taste, read Berman's [review of the new MTA subway map](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/new-yorks-new-subway-map) and [his vision of how the system can evolve](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/expand-the-reach-of-the-subway-system-a-2125-map).

[**The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy**](https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/book/9780691208435?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *Vishaan Chakrabarti (2024)* The Vital City contributing writer and architect makes an argument for humane, dense, connected cities, presenting a vision of architecture as a force for addressing our biggest social challenges and fostering joy.

[**The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice**](https://www.booksaremagic.net/item/3Czr8TaWU98OrYRlyyKUOg?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *Jennifer Doleac (Forthcoming Feb. 2026)* An economist's rigorous, evidence-first examination of what actually works in rehabilitation and reentry. Doleac cuts through political slogans to identify the specific interventions that reduce recidivism and improve public safety.

[**Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence**](https://www.booksaremagic.net/item/9ZxRdsPjgutfOGU0M2k9wg?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*Jens Ludwig (2025)* A groundbreaking work on what really drives firearm-related crime in cities. Genuinely eye-opening, even for those who thought they truly understood public safety.

[**Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation**](https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/book/9780593297704?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *Edward Glaeser and David Cutler (2022)* The COVID-19 pandemic brought cities to a crossroads, and in this book, Glaeser and Cutler consider how our metropolises can stave off a "doom loop" and make the most of the new normal.

[**Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World**](https://booksaremagic.net/item/zroBIQl5na8wALQ%5FSVJrjQ?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *Henry Grabar (2024)* The best recent book on a too-little-scrutinized need that's shaped and distorted contemporary cities.

[**Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans**](https://www.booksaremagic.net/item/5j6LaHiWPZekzLcXLzhQSg?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *Robert J. Sampson (Forthcoming Feb. 2026)* A landmark work from the Harvard sociologist that reframes the crime debate, arguing that the "when" of a person's birth — and the generational zeitgeist they inhabit — shapes their life course as much as their neighborhood or background.

[**Unequal Cities: Overcoming Anti-Urban Bias to Reduce Inequality in the United States**](https://booksaremagic.net/item/E%5FyaYonK-A-piA79xtDJiw?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *Richard McGahey (2023)* A structural, historical, evidence-rich examination of why urban America struggles against inequality and how policy can shift the terrain.

[**Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, An Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History**](https://www.amazon.com/Captains-Dinner-Shipwreck-Cannibalism-Changed/dp/B0DXD5K14B?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*Adam Cohen (2025)* A riveting true story of shipwreck, cannibalism and legal ethics by a Vital City friend and contributor.

[**Candid New York: The Pioneering Photography of George Bradford Brainerd**](https://www.booksaremagic.net/item/e2TjfB8fybtbApWMHi44NA?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*Erik Hesselberg (2025)* A collection of vibrant Gilded Age snapshots by the city's first-ever street photographer.

[**The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910**](https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/book/9780316353663?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*Esther Crain (2016)* And speaking of the Gilded Age — this book by the founder of Ephemeral New York chronicles it all.

## **The very New York objects section**

**Almost everyone likes things.**

[**Transit Museum Subway Map Coasters**](https://www.nytransitmuseumstore.com/coaster-setmap-hertz.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Functional and nostalgic.

[**1807 Commissioners' Plan Map**](https://historicpictoric.com/products/historic-map-bridges-new-york-city-1871-reissue-1807-vintage-wall?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

An artifact of New York's foundational act of urban imagination, the grid.

[**"A Century of The New Yorker" Tote**](https://shop.nypl.org/products/nypl-a-century-of-the-new-yorker-tote-bag?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

The classic New Yorker tote bag has come to be a ubiquitous accessory on New York City's streets and subway platforms. This limited edition design celebrates the magazine's centennial.

[**Miniature New York City Fire Escape Models**](https://www.etsy.com/market/miniature%5Ffire%5Fescape?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Some think they're eyesores. We think they're architecture.

[**"I Finished the Power Broker" Mug**](https://shop.nyhistory.org/products/mug-power-broker?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Get it for them especially if they didn't (and you know they didn't).

[**Just about anything from the Tenement Museum Shop**](https://shop.tenement.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)[](https://shop.tenement.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Historically-inspired gifts with Lower East Side soul.

[**Just about anything from the Queens Museum Shop**](https://queensmuseum.org/shop/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

One of the city's great cultural institutions deserves its place in the sun.

[**Just about anything from the NYC CityStore**](https://a856-citystore.nyc.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Official store of the City of New York — magnets, memorabilia and municipal charm.

[**Just about anything from the Hall of Science's CityWorks exhibit**](https://shop.nysci.org/collections/city-works?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

No infrastructure, no New York.

[**Prints from the New York City Municipal Archives**](https://nycrecords.access.preservica.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

A treasure trove of historical photographs, drawings and maps, all available to order as prints.

[**A vintage NYC bond**](https://newyorkarchivalsociety.org/bonds?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) A redeemed NYC bond (1920s–1980s), each signed by a former Mayor.

## **Big Apple-arrel**

**Wear your civic pride on your sleeve.**

[**Antique New York Ball Cap**](https://onlyny.com/products/antique-new-york-ball-cap?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Classic typography, understated city pride.

[**Big Apple Parade T-Shirt**](https://onlyny.com/products/big-apple-parade-t-shirt?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Playful civic iconography; very New York.

[**The Five Boroughs T-Shirt**](https://www.etsy.com/listing/4404309134/new-york-manhattan-brooklyn-queens-the?gpla=1&gao=1&&utm%5Fsource=google&utm%5Fmedium=cpc&utm%5Fcampaign=shopping%5Fus%5F-clothing&utm%5Fcustom1=%5Fk%5FCj0KCQiAubrJBhCbARIsAHIdxD9rTGhSX88smqJ6adD5IO3vtnhJBy8XE9IXNs2ZDOXCXuGqHwDvJdgaAiO6EALw%5FwcB%5Fk%5F&utm%5Fcontent=go%5F22607281367%5F181599613913%5F754746897786%5Fpla-360912201277%5Fc%5F%5F4404309134%5F12768591&utm%5Fcustom2=22607281367&gad%5Fsource=1&gad%5Fcampaignid=22607281367&gbraid=0AAAAADtcfRLmlui1Xs7Do6RTpPpQtxMMU&gclid=Cj0KCQiAubrJBhCbARIsAHIdxD9rTGhSX88smqJ6adD5IO3vtnhJBy8XE9IXNs2ZDOXCXuGqHwDvJdgaAiO6EALw%5FwcB)

Manhattan and Brooklyn typically get most of the ink. Celebrate all five legs of the stool.

[**Central Park Foliage T-Shirt**](https://onlyny.com/products/central-park-folliage-t-shirt?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Graphic homage to the city's green heart.

[**NYC Parks Logo Hoodie**](https://onlyny.com/products/nyc-parks-logo-hoodie?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Soft, durable, municipal-chic.

[**"Report: 'It's Not Okay To Just Start Talking to People You Don't Know'" T-Shirt**](https://store.theonion.com/products/report-its-not-okay-headline-t-shirt?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

We disagree with the sentiment but respect The Onion's right to be wrong.

[**DSNY Home Waste Basket**](https://onlyny.com/products/dsny-home-waste-basket?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Design-forward sanitation culture — the perfect oddball NYC apartment accessory.

[**Only NY × MoMA Community Wall Clock**](https://onlyny.com/products/only-ny-x-moma-community-of-new-york-wall-clock?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Functional, graphic, instantly "New York."

## **New York City experiences**

**For people who prefer their urbanism in motion.**

[**New York Transit Museum Membership**](https://www.nytransitmuseum.org/join/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Events, nostalgia rides and a quiet underground home for transit lovers.

[**Municipal Art Society – Jane's Walk**](https://www.mas.org/janes-walk-nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Give the experience of exploring neighborhoods through community-led storytelling.

[**Big Onion Walking Tours**](https://bigonion.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

PhD-led neighborhood history walks — for the nerd in you.

[**Essex Market Cooking Classes**](https://www.essexmarket.nyc/events?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Local, delicious and neighborhood-driven.

[**Firehouse Cinema**](https://www.dctvny.org/s/firehousecinema?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

A fantastic new home for documentaries.

[**Open House New York (OHNY) Membership**](https://ohny.org/support/membership/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Annual access to normally closed buildings, infrastructure and architectural gems.

## **Stocking stuffers for urbanites**

**Little things that can do a lot**

[**Pocket Decibel Meter**](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=pocket+decibel+meter&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

For recreational noise measurement.

[**Muji Notebook Set**](https://www.muji.us/collections/notebook/products/planted-tree-paper-bleed-proof-notebook-5-pack?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

To jot down or sketch what you see on the sidewalk, subway or bus.

[**Lux Meter**](https://www.homedepot.com/pep/TRIPLETT-Digital-Light-Meter-Lux-Fc-LT75/318390022?mtc=SHOPPING-BF-CDP-BNG-D27E-027%5F011%5FELECTRICAL%5FACCESSORIES-NA-NA-NA-PLALIA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NBR-NA-NA-NEW-NA-2024&cm%5Fmmc=SHOPPING-BF-CDP-BNG-D27E-027%5F011%5FELECTRICAL%5FACCESSORIES-NA-NA-NA-PLALIA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NBR-NA-NA-NEW-NA-2024-21871116195-178489370548-2448456200545&msclkid=e8f40e41abb614565696676f5ed9d685&gclid=e8f40e41abb614565696676f5ed9d685&gclsrc=3p.ds&gad%5Fsource=7&gad%5Fcampaignid=21871116195&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

For the person who has opinions about street lighting.

[**A real digital SLR**](https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/used/1076400/?smpm=bu%5Fuar&gad%5Fsource=1&gad%5Fcampaignid=17597921968&gbraid=0AAAAAD7yMh3DrykFgrSNnrgPjRcBUSHU7&gclid=Cj0KCQiAubrJBhCbARIsAHIdxD-ZGlnl4JXP5KDZTS7PAY4Jz5y1qXLzmg-48Xm82kYwN4OFLCVn1joaAgGdEALw%5FwcB&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

For those who are tired of getting lost in their phones rather than looking around, get a device that encourages active watching — and takes better pictures. New York's own B&H Photo has hundreds of options.

## **A taste of the city**

**Sweet or savory, sitting down or standing up.**

[**Chocolate from Li-Lac Chocolates**](https://www.li-lacchocolates.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Eating confections from New York City's oldest chocolate house is almost as enjoyable as seeing them get made.

[**Small Axe Peppers Hot Sauce Three Pack**](https://smallaxepeppers.com/product/buy-new-york-city-hot-sauce-three-pack/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

All three of the hot sauces in this set are made from peppers grown in community gardens in the Bronx and Queens.

[**Coffee from Brooklyn Roasting Company**](https://www.brooklynroasting.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Small-batch roasting, subscriptions available.

[**Whiskey from Kings County Distillery**](https://www.kingscountydistillery.com/collections/whiskey?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Whether it's straight bourbon or grapefruit jalapeno moonshine you're looking for, the offerings from New York City's oldest distillery since the prohibition make a great addition to any bar cart.

**A nice dinner somewhere**

Just pick a restaurant and give it a call.

## **Subscriptions or donations to independent media**

**We're proud to be part of a thriving nonprofit media ecosystem. Just as** [**we need your support**](https://donorbox.org/support-vital-city-2?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)**, so do our cousins. Give a subscription or donation in a loved one's name.**

[**THE CITY**](https://www.thecity.nyc/support?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

New York's flagship nonprofit newsroom covering housing, transit, governance and accountability.

[**Hell Gate**](https://hellgatenyc.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Worker-owned, sharp, funny, deeply reported coverage of NYC politics, arts, labor and absurdities.

[**Gothamist / WNYC Member Support**](https://www.wnyc.org/support/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Local reporting + public radio + indispensable urban coverage.

[**Streetsblog NYC**](https://nyc.streetsblog.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

The daily must-read for anyone who cares about biking, transit, parking and street design.

[**Untapped New York**](https://www.untappedcities.com/join/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Through online articles and tour guides, Untapped New York sheds light on the city's hidden gems.

## **For the person who has everything**

[**A $128 million Manhattan penthouse**](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/217-W-57th-St-127-128-New-York-NY-10019/2068952873%5Fzpid/?utm%5Fcampaign=iosappmessage&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=txtshare)

Now on sale for $22 million off!

════════════════════════════════════════

*Vital City launched three years ago as an experiment. Our first "meeting" was me and Greg Berman, sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan sketching out the* [*first issue*](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-1)*, betting that in a time of such hyperpartisanship, New Yorkers might be yearning for a calm voice, compelling evidence and angelic writing on how to make cities better.*

*You answered with a resounding yes, and helped us grow into a trusted civic home for practical solutions.*

*Now, as Mayor-elect Mamdani prepares to take office, Vital City is uniquely positioned to offer practical guidance to the new administration. We have ambitious plans for 2026: boosting our operational capacity, expanding our "What to Do (And Not to Do)" series, making academic research usable for decision-makers, strengthening our data analysis, and building a more robust community of urban policy practitioners.*

*To do that, we need your help.*

*For the first time ever, we're directly asking readers to support Vital City. Our goal is to add 700 inaugural supporters by December 31\. Your tax-deductible gift will help us expand our capacity, and ensure our ideas reach the decision-makers who need them.*

***If you value rigorous, solutions-focused policy work, we hope you'll join us.*** [***Become an inaugural supporter***](https://bit.ly/vc-eoy-sitetop?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) ***today.***

*— Liz Glazer, Founder*
### Rolling the Dice? How New York City Came to Approve Three Vegas-Style Casinos
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-new-york-city-got-to-the-brink-of-hosting-vegas-style-casinos/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:38.000Z
At first blush, casinos and New York seem like a strange marriage. New Yorkers like to be on the go. Nights out in the Big Apple can mean dinner and a Broadway show, seeing a concert at an underground venue, dancing at a downtown nightclub or any of the thousands of other options. Do we really need casinos on top of all that? Casinos lure people indoors, plying them with free drinks to keep them gambling for hours or until they run out of money.

Yet three resorts are now [poised to open here by the end of the decade](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/12/01/casinos-queens-bronx-gambling-board-decision/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — as New York comes to the end of a long and winding approval process.

How'd we get here?

In 2022, legislators [voted](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/02/nyregion/casino-manhattan-nyc.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to allow state officials to award as many as three new casino licenses in the New York metropolitan area, the most lucrative market in the region if not the nation.

An intense campaign that rivaled an electoral primary soon followed. Many of the city's most prominent developers partnered with multinational gaming companies, renowned architects and high-priced political consultants to prepare their resort proposals and convince New Yorkers to support them.

Some proposals withered under scrutiny and were never presented publicly. Others were rejected by community leaders appointed by state and local elected officials. At the start of December, the state's Gaming Facility Location Board decided to dispense new licenses in the five boroughs to the remaining bidders: Bally's Corporation in The Bronx, and Metropolitan Park and Resorts World in Queens. They now move to the state Gaming Commission, which is expected to have the final say at the end of the year.

Contentious as it has been, it has not been an easy process to follow. But with billions of dollars in future profits (and losses) at stake, it's worth taking a closer look at why the city's political, real estate and consultant class has had gambling fever.

## Why are we building casinos at all?

Developers have wanted to open more casinos in New York for [many years](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/nyregion/casino-referendum-led-gambling-industry-to-spend-richly-in-albany.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In 2013, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo drafted a ballot referendum to amend the state Constitution to allow seven new full-scale casinos, arguing they would create jobs and revitalize the state's economically depressed areas.

Voters passed the amendment with [57%](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/nyregion/referendum-to-expand-casino-gambling-in-new-york-is-approved.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the vote. But the law only authorized the state to award four licenses for sites upstate — while establishing a 10-year moratorium for resorts in New York City, Long Island and Westchester County.

By 2022, state legislators included a measure in the state budget that ended the downstate moratorium, allowing the state to begin awarding new licenses a year early.

## Don't we already have casinos?

Before 2013, the state had five Native American-run casinos, which are allowed under a completely different legal regime, and nine slot machine parlors at racetracks, known as "racinos."

These aren't casinos, but they look a lot like them. Under a quirk of New York law, the state has [sponsored and subsidized horse races](https://www.nyrainc.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — on which spectators can bet — since 1899\. Those included Yonkers Raceway just to the north of the city and Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens.

On their properties, developers bent but didn't break the law by opening up gambling halls that look and feel a lot like casinos.

The gaming hall at a racino features the same games at a casino, such as blackjack, craps and poker, but on video screens rather than run by human dealers. Thus, the law technically allows them as being tantamount to the fully-by-chance lottery — not gambling as defined in the state Constitution. [The distinction](https://www.gamblingandthelaw.com/column/are-new-yorks-slots-and-vlts-constitutional/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) may not make much sense, but it has held up in court.

## Is there any demand for more casinos in New York?

Developers and gaming companies certainly think there is, but it's complicated.

The nation's casino gambling market is expected to rise from $76 billion in 2024 to $126 billion by 2033 due to the expansion of sports betting, new resorts and online casinos, according to a 2025 [report](https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/6169622/united-states-casino-gambling-market-report?utm%5Fsource=GNE&utm%5Fmedium=PressRelease&utm%5Fcode=35mgxb&utm%5Fcampaign=2097915+-+United+States+Casino+Gambling+Market+Forecast+and+Company+Analysis+Report+2025-2033+Featuring+Las+Vegas+Sands%2c+MGM%2c+Caesars%2c+SJM%2c+Wynn+Resorts%2c+Galaxy+Entertainment%2c+Hard+Rock%2c+Palms%2c+Boyd+Gaming&utm%5Fexec=chdomspi).

Much of that growth has been due to mobile sports betting, a market New York leads the nation on by a [wide margin](https://nysfocus.com/2025/01/16/what-is-sports-betting-new-york?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The state brought in $1.7 billion in mobile sports revenue in the 2024 fiscal year, comprising [15%](https://nysba.org/the-state-of-new-york-gambling/?srsltid=AfmBOorJEBsynh6C8PJNAnLAFSdlBRh67vUIAjf02veTBdaOxBOvzE9%5F&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the nation's total sports revenue. Last month, the state recorded [$2.6 billion](https://www.igamingtoday.com/new-york-sets-new-u-s-record-with-2-64-billion-in-mobile-sports-wagers/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in online sports wagers, the highest monthly total ever recorded in the country.

But it's unclear whether the demand for online betting will transfer to a physical resort, much less three, in New York City.

Some industry leaders believe the northeast's casino market is [already saturated](https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/03/18/northeast-casino-market-saturated-catskills-resort-offers-cautionary-tale/ESutL6sxiGz3hFltbX3FHO/story.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the presence of new attractions downstate could threaten those upstate and in suburban New Jersey and Connecticut. Only one of New York's upstate casinos has surpassed its annual revenue projections, while taxes paid by New York's casinos and racinos have fallen by 9% since 2019, the New York Times [reported](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/nyregion/nyc-casinos-revenue-taxes.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). On the other hand, it's possible that there are more than enough high-rollers and tourists — and [lower-income problem gamblers](https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2024/09/04/long-term-gambling-consequences/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), who tend to make casinos most of their money — to make this a winning bet.

## Who awards casino licenses and how do they determine who will win?

Once the Legislature approved the expansion of casinos, it set off a complicated approval process.

The New York State Gaming Commission started the process of awarding new licenses.

The commission — whose members are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the State Senate — appointed five board members to something called the Gaming Facility Location Board, which has the responsibility of issuing the request for new casino applicants, leading hearings, setting license fees and assessing the winners. Its chair is former New York City deputy mayor and NYU Law Professor Vicki Been.

Under the law, each application gets a point-based score across multiple criteria. The most weight is placed on a proposal's "economic activity," which includes capital investment, revenue projections, job creation, and how fast it can open (adding up to 70% of its score), followed by its impact on the community, workforce enhancements and diversity goals (each 10% of its score).

That's not the only level of approval. Some bidders may need to get the City Council to [approve a rezoning](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/home/downloads/pdf/press-releases/2025/Casting%20the%20Dice%202025%5FVF.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or a street demapping or the state legislature to allow public parkland to be [alienated](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2025/05/parkland-alienation-bill-passes-senate-potentially-paving-way-cohens-casino/405615/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for their site to become a gaming resort.

Once casino bidders submitted their proposals on June 27, 2025, the state convened local panels called Community Advisory Committees (CAC), comprising six members appointed by the mayor, the governor, and state and city elected officials from the neighborhood where the proposed casino would be located.

If and when an applicant receives four or more votes from the CAC, they advanced to be evaluated by the Gaming Facility Location Board.

## Who are the leading contenders and where do they want to build?

There were 11 publicly announced proposals to develop casinos, but only eight were submitted to the state and just four advanced past the local CAC round.

Three won approval of the Gaming Facility Location Board:

\-Metropolitan Park, a joint venture between Mets owner Steve Cohen and Hard Rock Entertainment, would convert a 50-acre Citi Field parking lot in Corona, Queens, into a $8 billion resort district with hotel, food hall, 3,000 parking spaces, and 25 acres of parkland.

\-Bally's Bronx, owned by Bally's Corp, hopes to turn part of the city-owned golf course at Ferry Point Park in Throggs Neck, the Bronx, into a $4 billion entertainment complex with a 500-room hotel, a new event center, and 4,660 parking spaces.

\-The Genting Group is seeking a $5 billion expansion of its Resorts World facility, which will include a new gaming floor, hotel and conference space, while also converting the now-defunct Aqueduct Race Track into a 50-acre park.

These three likely casinos are within 15 miles of each other along the Van Wyck Expressway.

## Which sites have been ruled out?

All five Manhattan-based proposals as well as bids in Brooklyn and Nassau County have already been scratched from contention.

The most prominent Manhattan sites included SL Green's Caesars Palace Times Square, a $4 billion skyscraper at 1515 Broadway in Midtown, The Soloviev Group's Freedom Plaza in Murray Hill, and Related Companies's Hudson Yards West on the Far West Side.

All were splashy, high-profile concepts, but they didn't pass muster.

Both the Caesars Palace and Freedom Plaza proposals were rejected by their CACs this fall, while Hudson Yards West was pulled before the vote could occur. Thor Equities' The Coney in Coney Island was also voted down by its CAC this fall. Resistance hinged on [concerns](https://www.brooklynpaper.com/locals-largely-condemn-coney-casino-hearing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) about increased traffic, rising rents and competition for neighborhood small businesses.

## How much tax revenue could the remaining bids raise for the state?

Casino economics are famously dicey, with owners promising a boon but often failing to consider the very real downsides. Resorts World is promising [$4 billion](https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2025/10/14/mgm-yonkers-withdraws-application-for-casino-license?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in gaming revenue annually after proposing a 56% tax rate for its slot machines and a 30% rate for its table games (each bidder must include their proposed tax rates in their application).

Hard Rock estimates it would generate $3.9 billion in revenue each year while proposing the state's minimum 25% tax rate for its slots and 10% for its table games.

Bally's believes it will raise $1 billion in tax revenue for the state. The company did not make its proposed tax rates public.

## What happens now that the bids have been submitted?

On or around Dec. 31, the State Gaming Commission is likely to ratify the decision of the Gaming Facility Location Board by determining the criteria for earning a license are met.

## How quickly could these casinos potentially open?

Resorts World promised to add 250 live table games and 4,000 slot machines into its existing gaming hall by the [middle of 2026](https://casinobeats.com/2025/07/22/resorts-world-queens-casino-expansion-cac-meeting/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Casino%20Could%20Open%20by%20Mid,slot%20machines%20and%20800%20tables.). Then it would embark on the second phase of its expansion, with 6,000 slot machines and 800 table games — which it says it would complete by 2030.

Hard Rock anticipates starting construction on Metropolitan Park in January and expects to open in June 2030\. Bally's also hopes to open by 2030.

## What do the city's current and future leaders think of casinos?

The governor and mayor don't have any direct say in the process at this point, but their opinions matter. Gov. Hochul has been strongly involved in the casino expansion effort; she pushed legislators to lift the moratorium a year early in 2022\. Her appointees on local CACs have [supported](https://gothamist.com/news/as-manhattan-casino-projects-fold-a-new-york-lawmaker-takes-credit?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) casino proposals. She also [vetoed](https://nypost.com/2024/11/25/us-news/kathy-hochul-vetoes-bill-to-force-nyc-casino-bidders-to-move-fast-or-lose-their-chance/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a bill last year that would have pushed up the deadline to submit proposals by a year.

Mayor Adams, who [got caught up in a scandal to help bring gambling to Aqueduct Racetrack when he was in the state Senate](https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/12/eric-adams-gambling-deal-487684?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), enthusiastically supported all of the casino bids and his appointees on the CACs have voted in favor of advancing them. His office released an [analysis](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/09/mayor-adams-issues-report-analyzing-billions-in-economic-impact-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the economic benefits of seven applications this fall. And he helped Bally's by [vetoing](https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025/07/adams-vetoes-councils-rejection-of-ballys-casino-bid-00484957?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a City Council vote that had blocked zoning changes to the area, preventing the Bronx bid from moving forward.

"Casinos can bring jobs. It can bring stability, tourism," Adams [said](https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/mornings-on-1/2025/09/22/adams-touts-economic-benefits-of-casinos-ahead-of-freedom-plaza-vote?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in September after the Freedom Plaza bid was rejected. "So I was surprised at some of the negative votes. Let the final process make the decision. We should not be stopping them at this local level."

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has been skeptical of the value that casinos bring to their communities — but he said he would not try to stop their expansion.

"I've been open about my personal skepticism, and yet I also know this is the law," he [told](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/nyregion/mamdani-casinos-nyc-mayor.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the New York Times in August. "The siting and the choices of which casinos will open, that pertains to the state."

## Has there been any corruption in the bidding process?

That's been harder to detect. Casinos are famously linked to ethical shenanigans — just look at the history of mafia involvement and other bad business practices in [Las Vegas](https://sports.yahoo.com/how-las-vegas-went-from-mobbed-up-town-to-the-center-of-the-entertainment-universe-135349918.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Atlantic City](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/casinos-bring-the-rot-why-gambling-is-fertile-ground-for-corruption).

How about here and now? Yonkers officials called for a [state investigation](https://abc7ny.com/post/yonkers-mayor-mike-spano-calls-investigation-mgm-abruptly-withdraws-casino-bid/18014015/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) into why MGM abruptly rescinded its casino expansion bid. But the company may have made its decision based on its evaluation of the [potential costs](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4832673-mgm-sudden-withdrawal-from-nyc-casino-race-saturation-fears-gripping-gaming-developers?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the high level of competition.

Bally's arrangement with the Trump Organization, brokered by Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, has certainly raised eyebrows. The president's company [sold](https://nypost.com/2023/09/08/donald-trump-unloads-bronx-golf-course-to-ballys-casino-chain-sources/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) its contract to operate the Bronx golf course to Bally's in 2023 for $60 million. But the deal included a provision that the Trump Organization would collect another [$115 million](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/nyregion/trump-casino-ballys-bronx.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) if Bally's ultimately won a casino license.

Several people close to Mayor Adams, whose Council veto this summer kept the proposal alive, including his former chief of staff Frank Carone and campaign attorney Vito Pitta, worked on the Bally's bid (Bally's [told](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-ballys-casino-payday-eric-adams.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) New York Magazine they did not influence the mayor's veto decision).

Perhaps the lasting image of the casino process is from SL Green CEO Marc Holliday, who would have earned a [$10 million](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/real-estate/sl-green-ceo-marc-holliday-would-get-10m-bonus-times-square-casino?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) bonus if his Times Square casino opened. Instead, the Midtown CAC denied his bid in a 4-2 vote.

"Go run and hide! Because what you did, the benefits you denied this community, and this city and state, you have to live with that history forever," he [said](https://x.com/nick%5Fgarber/status/1968317854169890954?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).
### What Mamdani Gets Wrong About Severe Mental Illness & Crisis Response
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-mamdani-gets-wrong-about-severe-mental-illness-and-crisis-response/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:39.000Z
In [his plan](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a7ejjSZWWIAcxfcWnkYaqvnjihTb0LAOQkj8g10-npg/edit?tab=t.0&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#heading=h.2gazcsgmxkub) to heal a public mental health system ravaged by decades of neglect, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani seeks worthy and achievable goals: shifting more of the burden of crisis response from police to mental health professionals, streamlining a hopelessly complex and often redundant array of community-based services, and removing the barriers that everyday New Yorkers face in accessing basic mental health care.

It is immaterial whether these are precisely the goals I would prioritize in an alternate universe where Mayor Eric Adams won a second term. The voters chose a different vision, and we should all hope it succeeds.

For that to happen, the mayor-elect will need to demonstrate adaptability. Informed by what I have learned over three-plus years in City Hall and two decades in mental health advocacy, I believe the shiny new vehicle Mamdani has designed to deliver on his ambitions — a $1.1 billion city agency to be known as the Department of Community Safety (DCS) — should not make it out of prototype.

In support of creating DCS, the Mamdani platform promises to revolutionize crisis response and fill the gaps in community-based care, rightly bemoaning the "patchwork of programs" presently targeted to the city's severely mentally ill.

But as details emerge, it becomes clear that DCS as envisioned would add *even more* illogic to our maze of community-based services, pull us *off* the path to progress on crisis response and *re-open* a pernicious service gap we have only just begun to fill.

## Piling on the patchwork

From press coverage, one might have the impression that DCS would be laser-focused on crisis response — shouldering the burden of answering mental health-related 911 calls that now falls mainly on the city's police department. While that is certainly part of what Mamdani has in mind for the new agency (and more on that below), it represents just one of many major assignments to be stuffed into DCS' portfolio.

DCS would also become the central command for efforts to conduct outreach to people who appear to be unsheltered and/or under the influence of substances in public areas. Unlike crisis response, outreach work is largely about building rapport and trust with familiar faces over time and learning as much as possible about what led each person to the street in hopes of eventually persuading them to accept shelter and services. These efforts are currently overseen primarily by the city's Department of Homeless Services (with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene pitching in on substance use outreach), mostly through contracts with community-based nonprofits.

DCS' authority would not end there. The Mamdani platform positions the new agency at the forefront of "preventative and ongoing care" for mental illness of all kinds, with oversight over a massive new ["Community Mental Health Navigator"](https://www.rethink.org/media/5473/mental-health-navigation-guide.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) program, an expanded network of [peer-run "clubhouses,"](https://clubhouse-intl.org/what-we-do/what-clubhouses-do/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) an initiative to establish new ["crisis residences,"](https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/crisis-emergency-services-respite-centers.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) various mental health services for youth and a plan to scale up important outpatient support programs like [Intensive Mobile Treatment (IMT)](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/program/intensive-mobile-treatment-imt?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Assertive Community Treatment (ACT)](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/act/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Regardless of the merits of each of these proposed new programs and expansions of existing ones, there is no question that they currently fall within the purview of the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), which is tasked under state law with developing and managing the city's ["local services plan."](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/planning/docs/nyc-combined-lsp.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Far from streamlining all these functions and services, adding DCS to the mix would make the patchwork exponentially patchier.

So long as we have a Department of Homeless Services, it remains the only logical agency to oversee street outreach. Many clients shuttle frequently between the shelters and [safe havens](https://www.nyc.gov/site/dhs/outreach/street-outreach.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=DICs%20can%20refer%20clients%20into,unsheltered%20individuals%20directly%20for%20placement.) overseen by DHS and the street. It makes no sense for the tracking of their cases to be passed back and forth constantly between two agencies.

Similarly, unless the mayor-elect intends to pull oversight of *all* mental health services away from DOHMH (essentially, slicing it down to a mere "DOH"), it would add unprecedented layers of complexity and [probably flout state law](https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/planning/local-services-plans.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to splinter accountability for the city's local services plan, leaving some major mental health initiatives at DOHMH with others, such as clubhouses and crisis residences, overseen elsewhere. The interconnectedness of these programs runs deep.

## Answering crisis calls without police

One program that *does* need an organizational shakeup is [B-HEARD](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/b-heard?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), created by former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2021 to provide a fully clinical alternative to police dispatch for lower-acuity 911 mental health crisis calls. But a DCS takeover of B-HEARD would achieve nothing, except to derail a much more sensible reorganization already underway.

Here is what Mamdani gets right: He is correct to argue that sending cops to crisis calls presenting little or no public safety risk needlessly diverts them from fighting crime, and that many such calls would have better outcomes if we sent caregivers alone. He has good cause to be frustrated that after nearly five years, B-HEARD has not come close to fulfilling its promise, [failing](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-of-the-behavioral-health-emergency-assistance-response-divisions-effectiveness-in-responding-to-individuals-with-mental-health-crises-and-meeting-its-goals/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) both to expand citywide and to respond to all appropriate calls within its current footprint.

The question is how best to set B-HEARD on a course to succeed and grow. To date, the program has operated as a partnership between the City's public hospital network, Health + Hospitals (H+H), which provides mental health counselors and clinicians, and the Fire Department's EMS Division, which supplies emergency medical personnel and ambulances. Sometimes it proves to be a very good thing that the B-HEARD response includes EMS, but more often than not, the person they respond to does not need transport to a hospital or emergency medical services.

In light of a [severe workforce shortage](https://nycremsco.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/workforcedocument.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and other challenges to EMS' capacity to respond to the full range of medical emergencies occurring every minute across the city, this partnership was destined from the outset to be uneasy. It is unreasonable to ask an EMS system already stretched thin and working under the kind of pressure few of us can imagine to contribute even more of its limited resources to support B-HEARD expansion. A better idea is to let EMS get back to its critical core mission and consolidate B-HEARD under one agency equipped to supply everything it needs.

That agency is H+H, which already operates its own diverse vehicle fleet, including ambulettes, and employs medical professionals of all kinds. Indeed, earlier this month, Mayor Adams and H+H CEO Mitchell Katz [announced plans](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/11/mayor-adams-announces-new-model-to-have-new-york-city-s-911-ment?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to give H+H full responsibility for B-HEARD by next spring. This should be the breakthrough the program needs to start expanding its reach.

The incoming administration would be ill-advised to scuttle those plans out of blind determination to make B-HEARD the centerpiece program of its new agency. Unless DCS were to establish its own ambulance fleet and emergency medical staff, potentially adding years of delay to its launch with additional political and regulatory hurdles, B-HEARD under DCS would be just as reliant on EMS as it is now. The Mamdani platform's pledge to expand B-HEARD "so that every neighborhood has a team and the 20 neighborhoods with the greatest need have two to three" is utter fantasy with a structure based on keeping EMS in a forced marriage.

I must add a word of caution on B-HEARD: There are significant limits to how much of the total mental health crisis call volume can be handled without police. Before a 911 call can be diverted to B-HEARD, the dispatcher must determine that the person of concern presents no imminent risk of harm to self or others, is not clearly in urgent need of hospital transport, is not immediately suicidal or violent, does not have a weapon and does not require tactical expertise or resources (e.g., a person standing in traffic). These are all situations that require police to ensure safety, and they encompass at least half of all crisis calls. There is a world of difference between striving to maximize the use of a non-police response within the bounds of public safety and believing that police can be mostly erased from the picture.

The mayor-elect's platform gives reason to worry that he sits in the latter camp. As an example of what is possible in New York City, the platform cites the highly misleading example of Eugene, Oregon's [now-shuttered](https://www.opb.org/article/2025/04/08/cahoots-service-ending-in-eugene-effective-immediately/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [CAHOOTS program](https://www.npr.org/2020/06/10/874339977/cahoots-how-social-workers-and-police-share-responsibilities-in-eugene-oregon?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a forerunner of B-HEARD. It notes that "CAHOOTS teams have resolved almost 20% of all calls coming through Eugene's police department," with 99% of calls resolved without a need for police backup.

Reading that casually, one might have the impression that Eugene diverted 20% of its *911 calls* to CAHOOTS, which would be astonishing, since the great majority of 911 calls in any city have nothing to do with a mental health crisis. The implication is that nearly *all* mental health emergencies had been diverted successfully.

But there is a key piece of information omitted from this widely reported claim. In Eugene at the time of this finding, "calls coming through the police department" did not only mean 911 calls. The Eugene Police Department had established a separate hotline for CAHOOTS and encouraged citizens to use it for *non-emergency* concerns about their own or another's mental health. This meant that the "calls coming through police" included a great many calls that no responsible citizen would ever have made to 911 in the absence of CAHOOTS. When I asked a Eugene PD data analyst about this a few years ago, he reported that the rate of 911 calls diverted to CAHOOTS, using diversion criteria essentially identical to B-HEARD's, was in the range of 3% to 8% each year.

## The vital role of "co-response"

We must also beware here of a false choice between police-only and police-free crisis response. There is no question that even many crisis calls presenting a risk of violence would benefit from the inclusion of a clinician and/or peer counselor who is skilled in the art of calming a person down and gently steering them into treatment. There are many situations where police can secure a scene and safely pass the baton to a clinical partner to engage with the person in crisis. This model is known as ["co-response,"](https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/co-response-models-in-policing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and many experts consider it [the gold standard](https://www.williamjames.edu/news/doubling-down-on-education-co-response-model.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in responding to situations too dangerous to handle without police.

We do not practice co-response nearly enough in New York City. And yet we may be on the verge of shutting it down entirely. The single most disturbing sentence in the Mamdani mental health platform is this bullet in a summary of DCS's goals:

"*End co-response teams to hand calls off to crisis and outreach teams that are better positioned to address people's needs."*

Let's consider what it really means to "end co-response." The NYPD will (as it must) always insist on sending police to a scene where a person is brandishing a weapon or screaming aggressively at passersby. If we "end co-response," we foreclose the possibility that police will have the benefit of clinical assistance in these situations.

To keep this in perspective, the NYPD (lamentably) does not currently dispatch co-response teams in response to 911 calls. The department's small ["Co-response Unit"](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/program/co-response-teams?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is deployed only in response to certain calls received through 988 or 311 requesting a wellness check for a housed person. These calls are always answered by nurses dispatched by DOHMH. Co-response Unit officers will join the nurse if a record search on the person reveals a history of violence. Is this really what the mayor-elect hopes to end? I imagine the DOHMH nurses dispatched to these calls (and their union) might have thoughts on that.

In the context of *outreach* — the practice of responding not to calls for help, but to unsheltered folks encountered in the course of canvassing public spaces — New York City under Mayor Adams has made major commitments to co-response. The state-funded [SCOUT](https://www.mta.info/document/135741?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) program, launched as a pilot in the Fall of 2023, teams DHS nurses with officers from the MTA's internal police department. The subway system is also covered by the city's own [PATH](https://www.wnyc.org/story/the-adams-administration-is-marking-one-year-of-partnership-assistance-for-transit-homelessness-we-talk-to-the-man-behind-the-program/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) program, launched in the Summer of 2024, teaming DHS' nurses and outreach specialists with NYPD officers.

Together, SCOUT and PATH typically deploy 17 co-response teams in the subways over a 24-hour cycle. Their mission is to patrol stations and trains in search of people who appear to be unsheltered, engage those they encounter in conversation, assess their needs and endeavor to connect each person with the appropriate level of care. In most cases, it will ultimately be up to the person to accept what the team offers (usually a bed in one of DHS' low-barrier "safe havens" or a trip to the hospital to address a purely medical need).

Sometimes, the SCOUT or PATH nurse comes across a person who exhibits symptoms of mental illness, presents a danger to themselves or others, and is unwilling to accept voluntary transport for a full psychiatric evaluation. When this happens, the nurses have [authority under state law](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.58?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to direct that the person be involuntarily transported by police and EMS to a hospital, which could lead to an involuntary admission for inpatient care if hospital doctors concur with the nurse's assessment. Under city policy, these individuals are always taken to hospitals operated by H+H and closely tracked to ensure quality of care and adequate discharge planning. If the person is not already connected to an intensive outpatient treatment team, every effort is made to enroll them with one.

These co-response teams do [extraordinary work](https://wapo.st/49ltK4M?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). They find people in the most appalling conditions and give them a fighting chance to gain a foothold on treatment, housing and stability. For a myriad of frustrating reasons, it doesn't usually turn out like a Hollywood redemption story, but the benefits of whatever medical and psychiatric treatment people receive are surely better than the old policy of benign neglect under the excuse of respecting their "rights" to self-direction. Over two years, the SCOUT and PATH teams have brought nearly 800 people for involuntary hospital evaluation, resulting in over 10,000 nights of hospital care.

It bears repeating here that the troubling bullet point in the mayor-elect's platform resolves to "end co-response" not just in the crisis call context, but in outreach as well. This suggests that the subway-roaming teams of SCOUT and PATH are directly in the crosshairs. (As a state-funded program using a state-run police agency, SCOUT may be in less peril than PATH. But if the next administration truly wants no part of co-response, it could withdraw DHS and H+H from the collaboration.)

Before doing anything so rash, the mayor-elect should spend some time on a shift with each of these two programs. He should see for himself their [compassion and professionalism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkQBy9d6qec&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), take note of how bonded the clinical and law-enforcement members of the teams become through daily partnership, and hear directly from the nurses and outreach workers (most of whom have prior experience with police-free outreach) why officers are so essential to the work they do. It boils down to two irreplaceable police functions.

First, police accompaniment enables the DHS staff to engage with every person in apparent need with a sense of safety, ensuring that no one gets passed by. Without police, it can be scary to start a conversation with someone who appears unstable and unpredictable. Not infrequently, the person whom the outreach worker would reluctantly allow to stumble past them in Penn Station at 3 a.m. is the person most in need of psychiatric assessment.

The second function is logistical. A nurse with mobile crisis certification has authority under state law to direct an involuntary removal, but obviously, the nurse cannot be expected to keep the person on scene until an ambulance arrives, nor force the person onto the ambulance and into the hospital. For the nurse's authority to have any practical meaning, there must be a police officer on hand at the time the decision is made. Co-response not only ensures that; it ensures that the necessary police work will be handled by officers who have done this many times before and have developed expertise in completing the task with as little physical force and distress to the individual as possible.

## Involuntary removal as a form of care

Perhaps the effect of making involuntary removal much more difficult to accomplish is a feature, not a bug, of the mayor-elect's plan to "end co-response." Understandably, involuntary removal makes many progressives uncomfortable. In the wrong hands, there is a potential for abuse. And even a perfectly appropriate involuntary removal can be upsetting to witness if the person becomes agitated, as often happens. Progressives are not wrong to prefer that people be brought into treatment voluntarily. *Everyone* prefers that, and [studies confirm](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK76143/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that psychiatric treatment is most effective when there is patient buy-in.

Here's the problem: For many with untreated severe mental illness, the prospects for coming around to accept voluntary treatment are slim to none. The choice isn't between voluntary and involuntary treatment, but between involuntary treatment and no treatment at all. Their cruel disease renders them too disconnected from reality to understand their own plight. This is not "denial." As a corollary of their illness, many suffer from [anosognosia](https://www.nami.org/about-mental-illness/common-with-mental-illness/anosognosia/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a neurological deficit that makes it impossible for them to recognize that they *have* an illness.

Once anosognosia is understood, the question of individual rights is flipped on its head. Is a person unable to perceive reality truly exercising "choice" when they refuse treatment? Are we really respecting that person's dignity when we leave them to suffer the horrific consequences of that refusal? Or are we letting ourselves off the hook for failing to do the hard stuff it takes to ensure sustained care?

At [a recent Vital City forum](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/zohran-mamdani-talks-public-safety), then-candidate Mamdani expressed a general skepticism of involuntary removal, conceding a willingness to use it only as "a last resort." While I doubt he had fully thought through the implications of that framing, it sounded to me like a retreat to the failed policy of past administrations.

Among the ways we have tried under Mayor Adams to repair the culture of the city's mental health system is by making a sustained effort to broaden the understanding of what it means to be "dangerous to self" within the meaning of the state's involuntary removal and hospitalization laws. For decades, a pervasive myth had taken root among community-based providers, police and hospital doctors that a person had to appear *imminently* dangerous to meet this standard, despite the absence of any such language in the relevant statutes and [clear New York case law](https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914c180add7b049347b9e31?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to the contrary. This led to a wrong-headed consensus that finding danger-to-self required that the person be suicidal, or engaging in outrageously dangerous conduct like running into traffic, or neglecting a medical need that presented a true emergency.

In [revised protocols](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/home/downloads/pdf/press-releases/2022/Mental-Health-Involuntary-Removals.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and training materials, we have stressed that "danger-to-self" also applies to those whose mental illness has led to [extreme self-neglect](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/25/nyregion/mentally-ill-homeless-nyc.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.2E8.ZdrY.hEo8SXQDMIx-&smid=url-share&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) creating a risk of serious physical harm in the future, even if such harm is not yet imminent. (Mayor Adams also lobbied Albany over three years for a change in state law to make this explicit, which [was achieved in 2025](https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-budget-mental-health-reform-involuntary-commitment-law?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) thanks to Governor Hochul getting behind it.)

This fuller understanding of danger-to-self has been baked into the culture of the SCOUT and PATH programs. In the training of the nurses serving on these teams, we have emphasized the need to look for signs of extreme self-neglect in assessing whether a person displaying mental illness presents a danger, and the nurses have taken it to heart. In most of the removals SCOUT and PATH have conducted, extreme self-neglect, rather than violence, suicidality or outrageous conduct, has been the basis for finding danger. Some of these individuals, who would have been left in the subway if SCOUT and PATH were sticking with the old narrow interpretation of the legal standard, are today in or on track for permanent supportive housing.

And that is why I am so troubled by the mayor-elect setting the boundary at the point of "last resort." It justifies the old practice of declining a removal if the risk of harm is not imminent, because tomorrow just might be the day this person in acute psychosis agrees to voluntary care. That mindset, however well-intentioned, has been calamitous for New Yorkers with severe mental illness. It has led to needlessly prolonged periods of untreated psychosis, a condition which is toxic to the brain and [lowers prospects for recovery](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7801839/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It rests on hope that a clinician and police officers will be on scene at the moment *just before* disaster strikes. In the real world, that rarely happens. Much more often, the person or someone else is harmed, and/or the person commits a criminal act that lands them in the clutches of the criminal justice system, and we can all agree on the danger they presented in useless retrospect.

It is my fervent hope that Mayor-elect Mamdani will not take us back to the days of involuntary removal only as a "last resort." I might even dare to hope that he will continue the work in progress to make the system more proactive in rescuing those in obvious psychiatric decline. I would argue that a progressive outlook requires nothing less.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/astbf2gnmrmgqoah_screenshot2025-11-24at3-33-06pm-png-auto-format-compress-1776259667621.jpg)

Credit: Ray Raimundi / MTA

No doubt the Mamdani team has some serious thinking ahead about how to translate their full slate of exuberant campaign pledges into viable policy. That should include a hard look at whether establishing a Department of Community Safety is truly essential to achieving their larger goals for mental health reform. Four years goes by fast. Do they really want to spend a big chunk of it seeking revision of the City Charter and working through all the heavy lifting of creating a major new agency, when they *could* just get straight to work on enhancing and augmenting mental health services within the existing infrastructure of city government? If they decide that creating DCS is just too important to abandon, they should at least tell us why — something their campaign platform never gets around to.

They should also consider which mental health policy battles are worth fighting, and which are distractions. Does the administration want to spend its limited political capital on "ending co-response" and changing protocols to make involuntary removal a "last resort" — policy shifts likely to be highly unpopular with both [the public](https://abny.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/ABNY-Mental-Health-Policy-Polling-Memo.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [the mental health professionals](https://gothamist.com/news/mamdani-wants-transit-ambassadors-not-nypd-to-get-homeless-people-out-of-subways?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) already doing the work? If so, they should explain how they plan to convince those lacking awareness of their severe mental illness to volunteer for treatment, and how they plan to keep clinicians and outreach workers safe in their engagements.

Whatever choices they make, the Mamdani team should see no shame in pivoting away from hastily hatched campaign promises as they come into power and learn more about a deeply complicated issue. I hope I can help them do that during this period of transition.

*This is the first in an occasional series of Vital City reflections by current and former public officials on lessons they have learned from their time serving the city.*
### New Mexico: Surprising Proving Ground for Two Big Mamdani Ideas?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/department-of-community-safety-and-universal-childcare-albequerque-new-york/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:39.000Z
Zohran Mamdani's imminent arrival in City Hall has been greeted, in conservative circles, with all the warmth owed an incoming asteroid. Many detractors say his policies are [alien and untested](https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mamdanis-top-incoming-aide-chief-architect-radical-proposal-overhauling-nypd?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and will take New York City into uncharted territory.

But two of his signature proposals — universal childcare and a new Department of Community Safety — are already being implemented in, of all places, New Mexico and its most populous city, Albuquerque.

New Mexico is not typically considered a hotbed of policy innovation, but necessity is the mother of invention. For years, the state has [experienced among the highest rates of law-enforcement-involved killings](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6391295/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and Albuquerque's police department recently spent a decade under a federal consent decree for engaging in ["a pattern or practice of excessive force."](https://www.justice.gov/usao-nm/pr/summary-department-justices-findings-albuquerque-police-department-investigation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) So in June 2020, at the height of protests following the murder of George Floyd, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller launched what he described as the country's first cabinet-level community safety department. This third branch of emergency response would "deliver a civilian public health approach to public safety," said [the initial announcement](https://www.cabq.gov/mayor/news/mayor-tim-keller-to-refocus-millions-in-public-safety-resources-with-first-of-its-kind-civilian-response-department?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Similarly, New Mexico has [long ranked last in the country for child wellbeing](https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/11617-kids-count-overall-rank?loc=1&loct=2&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#ranking/2/any/true/2545/any/22864), so upon taking office in 2019, Gov. Michelle Lujan-Grisham immediately set about expanding childcare. First she created an Early Childhood Education & Care Department (ECECD), and in 2022 expanded child care assistance to families earning up to 400% of the Federal Poverty Level. [This month](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-first-new-mexico-launches-free-child-care-all-2025-11-01/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), she eliminated the income cap entirely, making it the first state to provide child care as a universal benefit.

New York City's scale means no other locality's problems — or solutions — can entirely compare in scope. New Mexico's statewide population of 2.1 million is dwarfed by Brooklyn's (2.7 million), or Queens' (2.4 million). Albuquerque's Community Safety department has a budget of [$17 million](https://csgjusticecenter.org/publications/expanding-first-response/program-highlights/albuquerque-nm/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com); Mamdani's proposal has a price tag of [over $1 billion](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a7ejjSZWWIAcxfcWnkYaqvnjihTb0LAOQkj8g10-npg/edit?tab=t.0&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#heading=h.2gazcsgmxkub). To make childcare universal, New Mexico is adding 12,000 children to its rolls; New York City would have to add hundreds of thousands. (The Mamdani transition did not respond to a request to comment.)

Still, New Mexico's experiences implementing these policies highlight some challenges New York City and any other emulators should anticipate.

As in the community safety department proposed by Mamdani, Albuquerque's took ownership of the city's violence prevention outreach workers and support services for victims, but the biggest lift was building out a new alternative first response system — or as its founding director Mariela Ruiz-Angel put it in an interview, "to not send cops to calls that they didn't really need to be at anymore."

> New Mexico's experiments show how far bold ideas can go — and how quickly the hard limits of housing, staffing and services come into view.

The department rapidly expanded its reach from [9,000 calls in the 2022 fiscal year to 45,000 in 2025](https://www.cabq.gov/acs/documents/quarterly-report-q4-2025fy-final.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), far exceeding the number of calls receiving a non-police response from well-known programs in [Seattle](https://www.seattle.gov/care/research-and-data?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Denver](https://www.denvergov.org/files/assets/public/v/1/public-health-and-environment/documents/cbh/star/evaluating%5Falternative%5Fcrisis%5Fresponse%5Fin%5Fdenvers%5Fsupport%5Fteam%5Fassisted%5Fresponse%5Fprogram-interim%5Ffindings.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), as well as New York City's B-HEARD pilot, which responded to [14,951 calls in 2024](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-of-the-behavioral-health-emergency-assistance-response-divisions-effectiveness-in-responding-to-individuals-with-mental-health-crises-and-meeting-its-goals/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

A non-police response is a needed service Mamdani [often spoke](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/zohran-mamdani-talks-public-safety) about during the campaign, citing hundreds of thousands of mental health calls the New York Police Department responds to each year that other professionals would arguably be better equipped to handle.

But it's one thing to show up for a call, and another to be able to provide the complex, often long-term services people in crisis require. Despite the growing reach of its crisis responders, Albuquerque still lacks sufficient detox facilities and housing to make those transitions successfully, said Ruiz-Angel.

That has disillusioned some Albuquerque residents, who thought the new department was going to reduce the number of people living on the streets. Instead, [annual counts](https://www.nmceh.org/%5Ffiles/ugd/2e9419%5Fb4f165dd991a4b7aada59938d8488dbe.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) show the number of unsheltered people in Albuquerque rose to new heights in 2023 and 2024\. "We were never going to be able to fix homelessness," said Ruiz-Angel, but "we are being held accountable for it."

Ruiz-Angel, who now directs a program on alternative first response at Georgetown Law School, said that the Mamdani campaign consulted with her in the run-up to the election. In those conversations, she emphasized the importance of thinking downstream and ensuring there was funding for building out those services.

She also stressed the difficulty of staffing an entirely new agency. Mamdani's platform calls for peer-support workers in the transit system and a 150% increase in funding for the city's existing B-HEARD program, which deploys health professionals to 911 calls in some neighborhoods. "One of the pieces of advice I gave them was: Don't be so narrow on who you're hiring. Focus on your training," she said. Community health workers, nurses and EMTs might all be feeder professions. "What we care about is people who know people."

As for New Mexico's expansion of childcare, the state expects [12,000 infants and toddlers](https://fiscalpolicy.org/how-new-mexico-will-pay-for-universal-childcare?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) to newly enroll, but there are only enough openings for [one in three babies under age 2](https://www.nmlegis.gov/handouts/LHHS%20091025%20Item%2010%20Accountability%20Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), with the most serious shortage in rural counties.

To grow the childcare workforce, the state has raised its wages. ECECD Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky said New Mexico is the first to use [a cost-estimation model](https://www.nmececd.org/new-mexico-child-care-cost-model/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), updated every three years, to ensure pay is sufficient to support stable child care businesses that provide quality care. She said that's driven [an uptick in the number of students in local training programs](https://www.pbs.org/video/elizabeth-groginsky-nykd3w/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). "Our workforce has grown 64% and we have the fastest-growing wages" in the country, she said.

> The real lesson from Albuquerque isn't novelty but stamina: Transformative policy depends less on invention than on the grinding work of building institutions that can carry it.

Mamdani's platform indicates he wants to raise wages of childcare workers, too, "to be at parity with public school teachers." That would add to the price-tag, however. And the average cost per enrolled child in New York City ($20,100) is already 68% higher than New Mexico's ($12,000), according to [the Fiscal Policy Institute](https://fiscalpolicy.org/how-new-mexico-will-pay-for-universal-childcare?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Another bottleneck is the number of facilities providing childcare in any given locality. "Access to capital is key for the sector," Groginsky said. New Mexico created [a $13 million fund](https://www.nmececd.org/childcareloan/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to provide low-interest loans to build or renovate childcare centers, and is seeking an additional $20 million from the legislature.

The state is also trying to recruit more people to run child care in their homes, since such providers are also [more likely to offer care at night or in a family's native language](https://sourcenm.com/2025/10/26/capacity-issues-may-limit-new-mexicos-universal-child-care-program/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Groginsky said this would be important in New York City, too, since families there would have a diversity of needs. "That families have choice is a key component of a good child care sector, because we can't pretend to know at the state-level what a family wants."

During the rollout of former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio's universal pre-K program, home-based providers [said they were left out](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/11/06/mamdani-universal-child-care-plans-balance-speed-and-stability/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and lost students to public schools and institutional programs, which paid staff better.

Mindful of how the sudden influx of kids newly enrolled could affect the most vulnerable residents, Groginsky said New Mexico is also holding 2,000 slots for families at the lower end of the income spectrum, "making sure they're not getting squeezed out of the market."

For New Yorkers awaiting their new mayoral administration, New Mexico's experiences offer inspiration and caution. Its leaders have shown that bold ideas can be translated into real programs.

They've also demonstrated that these programs aren't won and done: the challenges of implementation are real, and perpetual. Transformative policy is less about invention than persistence — the long, unglamorous work of building institutions that can bear the weight of vision.
### A Department of Community Safety: Theory Meets Practice
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-department-of-community-safety-where-theory-meets-practice/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:47.000Z
Walking through Penn Station last year with my kids, I had an experience that captured exactly what Mamdani's proposed Department of Community Safety could address — and what it could easily miss.

A disheveled man who had been sitting near a pile of dirty belongings and empty White Claw bottles stood and began weaving unsteadily down the concourse, then collapsed onto the floor. As fast as a school of fish, the commuters and tourists opened a wide circle around him. Many stopped to watch, uncertain of what to do, looking towards a nearby MTA employee in a vest who managed with admirable economy of gesture to convey the twin messages "I'll call someone" and "this is not my job." I felt that uneasy mix of recoil and concern that so often haunts you in New York, followed by a sense of relief, because I did have something I could do. We happened to be at Penn Station with Ben, a family member who is a psychiatrist with emergency medicine training who specializes in working with very high need patients at a mental health hospital. He was farther down the platform, so I called him and asked him to come back. He cut quickly through the circle of onlookers, knelt down at the man's side, and began gently asking him questions. Ben had helped him into a seated position by the time the police arrived.

The moment I remember most clearly is when the police began questioning the man: Where had he been last? Had he had treatment somewhere? Stayed somewhere? Blurrily, the man began unclasping his pack. *Stop*, the officers snapped, voices hardening. *Put your hands up NOW. Don't touch your bag.* Confused, he mumbled and tugged at the clasp. The officers' hands went to their belts, and the circle of tourists tensed and shuffled back.

Then Ben said very calmly, "Can I get it for him?" An officer nodded tersely. Ben leaned over, voice steady and warm. "Sir, can I get something from your bag for you? I'm going to open it, ok? I'm going to reach in — is it this piece of paper? Yes? Ok, I'm showing it to them. I'm putting your bag down over here."

The crumpled paper had the name of a clinic scrawled on it — the answer to one of the officer's earlier questions. Then the encounter diffused into routine and the tourists drifted away. Ben stayed until the EMTs arrived with a stretcher, said goodbye to the man, and handed a brief synopsis of his observations over to the medical team. *(Heavily intoxicated. Notice the scars and wounds on the back of his head. He's fallen many times before. Possibly seizures that he's self-medicating for or that the alcohol use is triggering, a deadly cycle to be caught in.)*

This type of interaction — where someone with training in mental health and substance use disorders resolves a situation where the traditional tools of policing are not the right fit — is the heart of the vision for alternative emergency response, which sends teams of unarmed civilian responders to a subset of 911 calls in lieu of police. Mamdani has [proposed](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/zohran-mamdani-talks-public-safety) creating a new Department of Community Safety that would house a set of new and expanded services, including a citywide expansion of the city's alternative response B-HEARD program, mobile response teams and service provision in subways. He has argued that it would make it so that "no longer must police respond to every single failure of the social safety net." This will be better for the cops, he says, who are now burdened with problems far beyond their remit — and it'll be better for mentally unstable individuals, who need the help of clinicians and social workers, not people who carry guns.

He's not wrong, but if these programs are going to be more than another add-on to an already fragmented service array, he'll need to design a department that provides something existing ones don't.

My organization, the [Government Performance Lab](https://govlab.hks.harvard.edu/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at Harvard, works with dozens of cities across the U.S. that are [establishing or expanding alternative response programs](https://govlab.hks.harvard.edu/focus-area/alternative-911-emergency-response/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and runs a community of practice with over 400 government practitioners across the country, from 911 call center directors to fire chiefs, police chiefs and alternative response team leads. We have helped cities design and launch alternative response programs from Texas to Pennsylvania to Los Angeles. Mamdani is right that these programs can divert thousands of calls, that the calls can be [safely answered by community responder teams](https://govlab.hks.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/CRT-Landscape-Analysis.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and that the best evidence we currently have suggests that civilian response can [decrease criminal legal system contact](https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.abm2106?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), possibly by [replacing arrests with pathways to mental health and substance use treatment](https://www.nber.org/papers/w33761?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

But alternative response programs like the ones that the mayor-elect is describing are not a *stand-alone solution* to mental health and homelessness. They are simply a type of emergency response, one that ideally provides compassionate, trained care to help ensure that a moment of urgent need is less likely to escalate further. In Vital City's [public safety mayoral candidate event](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/zohran-mamdani-talks-public-safety) and in his debates, Mamdani has focused his descriptions of a new Department of Community Safety "that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crises head on" on alternative response programs such as CAHOOTS (Eugene, Ore.) and B-HEARD (in New York). But community responder teams do not provide long-term treatment for mental health and homelessness any more than EMTs provide ongoing care for cardiac health after responding to a heart attack. To address deeper underlying concerns, crisis responders must be able to bridge folks in crisis through to intensive case management and ultimately to services — benefits, housing with supports for people with acute needs, inpatient or outpatient care, supports for obtaining and staying on medication.

> A Department of Community Safety only works if it claims real ownership of the hardest cases — not just the easy wins at the front door.

The "mental health" section of Mamdani's [Department of Community Safety proposal ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a7ejjSZWWIAcxfcWnkYaqvnjihTb0LAOQkj8g10-npg/edit?tab=t.0&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#heading=h.2gazcsgmxkub)also name checks expanding the city's network of community mental health workers, mobile crisis units and some voluntary programs, including peer clubhouses and respite centers. But the City already spends billions of dollars a year on mental health and homelessness services that are administered by large, established agencies. In order to justify the monetary and bureaucratic costs of adding another agency, a newly formed Department of Community Safety would need to offer more than duplication of existing efforts under a new name. It would need to bridge three siloed domains — criminal justice, housing and homelessness, and mental health — and provide consistent cross-agency accountability for outcomes for individuals experiencing severe mental illness and homelessness. A Department of Community Safety would offer something new and needed only if it could take responsibility for the highest-need individuals in the city, create stronger accountability for outcomes using frontline data from 911 and other sources and create a unified pathway across currently disconnected systems.

For one example of how a new community safety department could align its programs to address mental health and homelessness, look to Durham, N.C. Durham is, of course, much smaller than New York City, but is one of the few jurisdictions in the country that has established a Community Safety Department that functions as a peer to its law enforcement agency and is funded through general funds rather than short-term grants. What can New York City learn from its experience?

In most jurisdictions, there are three types of emergency response: for fires, the fire department; for medical emergencies and transport to the hospital, EMS (and sometimes fire); and for all else, police. Alternative response takes the "for all else" category and breaks it down more granularly, saving police for calls that have a closer nexus to public safety, calls that involve violence or high risk of violence, weapons and so on. In July 2021, Durham created its Community Safety Department (DCSD) as a distinct municipal entity designed to rethink how the city responds to public safety and wellness needs that fall outside the traditional "police/fire/EMS" buckets. Structurally, DCSD sits alongside the city's police and fire departments as a co-equal part of the city's safety infrastructure that reports directly to city leadership. Its 911 response, stabilization programs and housing resources work in concert to provide both an immediate safety net and a feedback loop to inform broader system reform. Deep investment in data gathering and continuous learning enable DCSD to track patterns in emergency service utilization, recurring crises and unmet behavioral health needs.

DCSD's core program is called Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams (HEART). Launched in 2022, HEART comprises multiple units: a Crisis Call Diversion unit placing mental health clinicians in the 911 call center; unarmed Community Response Teams dispatched to nonviolent behavioral health and quality-of-life calls (similar to B-HEARD); and co-response teams pairing clinicians with specially trained police officers for higher-risk situations. These solutions are seen as different tools in the city's toolkit, allowing the city more nuanced and tailored responses to crises. 911 call dispatchers are trained to differentiate whether a call merits hand-off to a clinician over the phone, a co-response team (officer and behavioral health specialist) or the Community Responder Team. Critically, these crisis teams then hand off to in-house follow up teams that help connect residents to longer-term help.

Over time, DCSD began to notice that a disproportionate number of 911 calls were about a small subset of especially acute individuals in the city. These are residents struggling with chronic homelessness and severe mental illness or substance use disorders. Ryan Smith, the founder and director of Durham's Community Safety Department, says that working with this group of residents in need has revealed how [fragmented traditional care systems](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/homelessness-services-redesign?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are and how the current system of services can fail the most vulnerable residents. "Because we take the 911 calls, we know what's actually happening on the street and we take responsibility. A lot of these systems of care and support — they have an out. If someone is too hard to work with, they kick them out of their program, discontinue them for being non-compliant. A community safety department is a structure that realizes that government shouldn't do that, can't do that. We're going to keep showing up. We're not going to give up on you." The hardest people to serve bounce in and out of city services, showing up in jails, shelters and emergency rooms. These are the individuals most likely to be dropped in the complex coordination and handoffs between existing city services, or to be discontinued by a provider for failing to show up or comply with program requirements.

Mamdani shouldn't lose sight of this. A Department of Community Safety can reorient government to better address the problems of people who are struggling on the streets and subways only if it has a relentless ownership for the individuals it serves and has the mandate and ability to improve the way criminal justice interventions, homelessness and housing services and mental health resources are dispensed.

> Compassionate crisis response is essential, but without relentless follow-up, people spiral right back into the same subway stations and emergency rooms.

Rather than simply creating another layer of navigators whose job was to conduct hand-offs to other program, DCSD built Familiar Neighbors, a team responsible for seeing these high-needs individuals through their entire journey from street contact to placement in housing and care. With caseloads as low as three to four clients per caseworker, the Familiar Neighbors team takes a persistent, relational approach, meeting people daily or even multiple times per day, accompanying them to appointments, securing IDs or benefits, working to build the trust to move towards housing and treatment. They do not disconnect once they enroll them with a social services provider, ensuring continuity across multiple handoffs. This relentless (and time-intensive) engagement, while still small in scope, has helped some of Durham's most troubled residents move from years of homelessness in the downtown business district into permanent supportive housing. But the persistent focus and ownership of the problem has also revealed structural gaps that prevent people from moving from the streets into housing and care — document processes that take over 50 days, missing referral pathways into housing or hospital services. Ryan notes that because DCSD is on the frontline of responding to 911 calls and then trying to move neighbors from crisis through stabilization and into treatment and housing, its work generates insights that can reshape how an entire city organizes care for its most vulnerable residents.

This shows up in the way that DCSD designed a new involuntary committal team that can do involuntary committal assessments in the field. In North Carolina, any individual, including family members and clinicians, can petition a magistrate to initiate an involuntary commitment if someone appears to be at risk due to mental illness. Typically, the police are tasked with finding the individual and transporting them to the hospital, often in restraints, where they will be examined. However, these examinations often result in denials of involuntary committal, meaning that the transport was a waste of police officer and medical specialist time as well as traumatizing to the resident. To improve the process and experience with involuntary committals, DCSD created an in-house Involuntary Commitment Response Team. The DCSD involuntary committal team is staffed with certified first examiners who can conduct the initial steps of the assessment in the field. This approach has allowed the city to reduce the use of restraints and police transport when unnecessary and provide a more specialized, compassionate approach when a committal is merited. While Mamdani's goals to minimize the use of involuntary committals are laudable, he still needs a plan for how to support and integrate those types of intensive interventions alongside crisis response and long-term supports.

Ryan told me, "One of the most touching things I've received in this role has been emails from parents who are in the heartbreaking position of having to make multiple involuntary commitment calls on their child. They've told me, 'This is always a devastating thing to do, but this was the best experience we've ever had. The way your team responded, their knowledge and compassion made a huge difference in an experience that is usually terrifying and traumatic. One mother wrote to us recently, saying, 'This is the seventh IVC experience for my son and myself and it was, by leaps and bounds, the best IVC experience I have had. This program has been so needed for so very long (my son and I have been navigating the system for 15 years) and I am so appreciative of your presence in our community! You all fill a vital need in this community.'"

DCSD leaders saw this shift in perspectives not only from residents but also from officers. When I asked what he'd want a mayor building a new department to know, Ryan said, "People are going to talk about resistance and skepticism from law enforcement, But I'd want a mayor to know that can change, even faster than you think possible. We partnered with law enforcement from the beginning. There was a *lot* of skepticism. One of our sergeants described the feeling in the police department as 'darn close to 100% that this was a bad idea.' We did surveys of our law enforcement partners. Just 37% of officers thought HEART would be helpful on mental health calls initially. But that number had risen to 67% after one year. I thought that kind of mindset shift would have taken longer, but we saw significant shifts in just a year. We were on the radios together, they saw our teams going out, taking work off of them, being active in the community. Increasingly, officers are asking for us to go to more calls. They see it's something that's making their job better." Is the program perfect? Of course not. But when launching an ambitious new department, New York should learn from others who have done similar work. Much of Durham's success in establishing and expanding its Community Safety Department has come from creating a strong through-line between its crisis response teams, follow up care navigators and intensive case managers for its highest acuity individuals; working in close collaboration with its community, law enforcement and 911 call dispatchers; and building in real-time data-driven improvement.

One vision for better crisis response could be what I experienced in Penn Station: a responder with training in mental and behavioral health averting a potentially disastrous encounter with law enforcement and enabling a smooth handoff to care. But unless that man we met in Penn Station was connected to intensive follow-up, he may have ended up right back in Penn Station the next day. Mamdani should invest not only in the front door of compassionate crisis response, but, more importantly, in the clear ownership and accountability to stick with someone after crisis through stabilization, treatment and housing placement.
### A Pipeline to Somewhere
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/kathy-hochul-nese-pipeline-empire-wind/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:47.000Z
Only the timing was uncertain. Otherwise, it was plain as day that sometime this fall, Gov. Kathy Hochul would lift New York State's hold on a new 24-mile pipeline intended to augment natural gas supplies in New York City and Long Island. Sure enough, the [permits dropped on Nov. 7](https://dec.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2025-11/nesepermitcoverletter20251107.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), while city and state lawmakers were in Puerto Rico at their annual post-Election Day huddle, pondering Zohran Mamdani's mayoral bid.

The die was cast six months ago, in May, when President Trump [told Hochul](https://www.enr.com/articles/60774-trump-reverses-shutdown-of-5b-ny-empire-wind-construction?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) he would spare New York's first big offshore wind power array, the 54-turbine Empire Wind 1 project in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Beach. The price? Hochul would reverse earlier rulings blocking the new gas pipeline on account of potential harms to the seabed beneath Lower New York Bay and the Rockaways.

Politics demanded the governor disclaim any quid pro quo. Despite knowing the tradeoff, New York climate activists torched her announcement. "Hochul hasn't kept her promises to fight against skyrocketing energy bills or the climate crisis," [declared Food & Water Watch](https://nysfocus.com/2025/11/07/nese-gas-pipeline-approval-hochul-trump-new-york?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). "Hochul just did Trump's bidding by approving the massive . . . fracked gas pipeline \[that\] will jack up our utility bills, pollute our air & water, and cook the climate," [thundered NY Communities for Change](https://bsky.app/profile/nychange.bsky.social/post/3m52lqphyrs22?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In more measured terms, the Jewish Climate Action Network [called](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#inbox/FMfcgzQcqlBMjbMSFgJrwqzLvrRnvlSF) the permitting "a major setback to our work on climate."

But should a deal that recoups Empire Wind be deemed a setback? Those turbines will usher in a green energy hub on the Brooklyn waterfront and create well-paying jobs, while the extra gas provides a cushion against freezing winter weather. Just as importantly, the nascent offshore wind industry, unloosed from Trump's detention, will, before long, offset much and perhaps all of the gas pipeline's climate emissions.

In short, for New York, Hochul's deal with Trump could be more of a save than a cave.

## **NESE Pipeline and Empire Wind: Dimensions**

The Northeast Supply Enhancement project, orNESE,is the 24-mile final segment of a new 130-mile pipeline from Pennsylvania gas-fracking country to a gas distribution node at Floyd Bennett Field in southern Brooklyn. The pipeline company, Williams/Transco, and the local gas utility, National Grid, [maintain](https://dec.ny.gov/environmental-protection/facilities-in-your-neighborhood/northeast-supply-enhancement-project-nese?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that NESE will help households and businesses withstand prolonged freezes and ensure that gas-fired electricity-generating plants — the mainstay of downstate power supply — have ample fuel year-round. In the company's telling, NESE will also help New York City and Long Island retain and attract industry.

Empire Wind is a wind turbine array designed by Equinor, a unit of Norway's state oil company, awaiting installation on the Atlantic Ocean seabed 15 to 30 miles south of the Nassau County city of Long Beach, just east of Far Rockaway. It has two stages. Empire Wind 1, the phase that Trump greenlit, comprises 54 turbines capable of generating 810 megawatts. Empire Wind 2, with an additional 84 turbines totaling 1,260 MW, will bring the entire venture to 138 turbines and 2,070 MW.

Coincidentally, that megawatt total is roughly identical to that of Indian Point, the now-shuttered twin-unit 2,028-MW nuclear power plant tucked into Westchester County's northwest corner, although wind variability will limit Empire Wind's annual electricity output to around 45% of what Indian Point generated each year. That plant was closed in 2020-2021 in a [deal](https://www.gothamgazette.com/130-opinion/9430-drones-hacksaws-climate-consequences-of-shutting-indian-point-cant-brushed-aside?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) engineered by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Hudson River advocacy organization Riverkeeper.

Indian Point is germane because the premature retirement of this zero-emission power source [blew up](https://www.carbontax.org/blog/2025/04/30/5-years-on-the-indian-point-disaster-is-its-shutdown/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the effort to decarbonize the New York grid, especially downstate, where, as recently as last year, electricity produced by renewable solar and wind facilities was dwarfed 15 to 1 by gas-fired generating plants. There's an additional reason: Indian Point's carbon benefit *—* the carbon dioxide that the plant previously forestalled by letting the grid ease up on power plants burning natural gas — provides a benchmark for evaluating the relative climate impacts of NESE, which will increase gas burning, and Empire Wind, which will reduce it.

## **Quantifying key NY State carbon emissions and reductions**

To fairly evaluate the trade Hochul made, we need to carefully think through not only the additional energy that'll be delivered (and the cost of that delivery), but the carbon emissions that NESE and Empire Wind will variously cause or prevent. Carbon emissions, of course, are the prime accelerant of global heating, and rapidly reducing them has long been the central objective of virtually every environmental actor in New York, from Gov. Hochul to the hundred or more NGOs that pushed through landmark state climate legislation in 2019.

The respective sources' carbon implications are also easily compared thanks to their interchangeability with natural gas. (That commonality lets us set aside NESE permitting's impacts on emissions of methane, the number two greenhouse gas, since there's no clear-cut difference between NESE and Empire Wind on that score; permitting NESE will necessarily add methane to our atmosphere, but building Empire Wind will curb it by substituting for gas-fired power.)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26290374?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Indian Point:**Over their final two decades, the two Indian Point reactors jointly generated nearly 16.5 billion kWh's a year, equivalent to a phenomenal 92% capacity factor. In Indian Point's absence, essentially every one of those kilowatt-hours must be generated by burning natural gas, mostly in relatively efficient but still carbon-emitting combined cycle power plants. Applying the customary emission factor (CO2 per kWh) for such plants, **Indian Point's closure is causing additional emissions of 6.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.**

**Empire Wind:** I lump EW 2 together with EW 1, on the premise that the visible success of the project's first phase will enable the developer along with business and labor allies to fend off any attempt by the Trump administration to block the second. Assuming a 40% annual capacity factor — a figure reflecting seasonal and diurnal fluctuations in wind strength — the project is projected to generate 7.25 billion kWh's a year, which otherwise would have to be produced in combined cycle plants burning natural gas. Using the CO2/kWh factor I employed above, I calculate that **Empire Wind will avoid 2.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year** — a substantial amount, though not half as great as the carbon benefit Indian Point was providing.

**NESE:** Assessing pipeline-caused emissions isn't as straightforward as calculating emissions avoided by offshore wind or Indian Point. The issue isn't the emission factor for each unit of gas conveyed by the pipeline, which is known, but getting a read on how much additional fuel NESE will cause to be burned.

Two parameters are in play, and neither has been fully studied and reported. One is how the amount of gas NESE will deliver over the course of the year stacks up against its peak-day deliverability. The other is the extent to which NESE gas will constitute "new" (incremental) fuel resulting in additional emissions, rather than substituting for carbon fuels now being burned (for example, home heating oil, propane and gas from other sources), which would make seemingly new NESE emissions a "wash."

Astoundingly, despite their numerical weight, neither parameter seems to have been quantified or even mentioned by state agencies. (An [evaluation](https://t.co/7R8aiStrPF?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) commissioned by the Department of Public Service addressed only trivial emission matters such as averted diesel truck trips delivering compressed natural gas.) Absent serious inquiry, I've had to draw on my utility economics background and intuition to make "guesstimates."

*The first variable is* NESE's annual utilization rate. Virtually all gas pipelines are sized for the coldest winter days and weeks, when heating needs spike not just in homes and apartments but also in stores, offices, factories and institutional buildings such as schools and hospitals. Absent hard, contrary information, I've defaulted to a 50% annual utilization rate.

*The second is NESE additivity vs. substitutability:* I've selected 40% for this parameter after digesting the definitive [scholarly article](https://www.rff.org/publications/working-papers/estimating-the-emissions-reductions-from-supply-side-fossil-fuel-interventions/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on "supply-side fossil fuel interventions," by a team at Resources for the Future led by economist Brian Prest.

That paper concluded that stopping a fossil-fuel expansion project such as NESE typically reduces fuel use and consequent emissions by only 40% to 50% of the theoretical, calculated amount. The remainder, they concluded, would have been extracted from somewhere else, delivered and burned anyway to satisfy ongoing demand. Conversely — or symmetrically — *permitting* an oil or gas expansion project will *increase* net usage by the same 40% to 50%.

The percentage is greater than zero — meaning, some NESE gas will be additional — because the pipeline will tend to lower the price of natural gas by bolstering its availability. While that will aid household and business budgets, the economics get complicated — because lower prices also tend to deter some conservation steps (e.g., lower thermostats) and efficiency measures (e.g., heat pumps) and switches to renewable energy (e.g., solar) by making them less profitable. I settled on the lower end of the range, 40%, on account of the relatively mature nature of fuel use in Long Island and New York City.

With these assumptions, the estimated CO2 emissions added by NESE pencil out to 1.6 million metric tons a year — more than will be reduced by Empire Wind 1 (1.1 million), roughly the same as will be reduced by Empire Wind 2 (1.7 million), and less than the two combined (2.7 million). (Not unimportantly, estimated NESE emissions are also a whopping 75% less than ongoing emissions each year from burning additional natural gas to make up for the lost output of Indian Point.)

## **Implications**

This quantitative exercise validates Gov. Hochul's compact with President Trump on climate grounds. If that deal's only virtue were to guarantee Empire Wind 1 in return for NESE, its net climate cost would be an increase in CO2 emissions of half a million metric tons a year — not beanbag but not a backbreaker either. And on the strong likelihood that Empire Wind 1 does reel in Empire Wind 2 as well, then permitting NESE will have yielded a net CO2-avoidance *benefit* exceeding a million metric tons a year — a result equivalent to outfitting 200,000 houses with solar panels. Other, more palpable benefits will include enhanced gas-service and electricity reliability and the advent of a new, local green-energy sector.

These findings should prompt questions about the strident state of New York climate activism. In pillorying Hochul for a deal she made with Trump — under duress — the state climate movement appears to be exaggerating its downsides ("major setback"; "cook the climate") and overlooking prospective upsides. Their sniping risks harming Hochul's re-election campaign next year, largely without cause.

Hochul isn't immune to criticism over her climate record. But many of her actions merit praise for their climate value, among them a state-led program to expand nuclear power capacity, a halt to highway expansions in the Hudson Valley and the Bronx, and successfully defending congestion pricing from Trump. With the favorable outcomes from the NESE-Empire Wind deal in mind, her critics should calm down, step back and see the larger picture.

*You can download the author's full calculations at* [*komanoff.net/fossil/NESE.xlsx*](http://komanoff.net/fossil/NESE.xlsx?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*
### Filling in the Blanks on Mamdani’s Education Agenda
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/filling-in-the-blanks-on-zohran-mamdanis-education-agenda/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:48.000Z
Although education wasn't one of the hot topics in the mayoral race, it will soon become a topic of great interest to the thousands of parents, students, teachers and staff who depend on the city's public school system. If Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani seeks to retain control of the city's public schools (and I hope he revisits his ill-considered proposal to undo the accountability reform established in 2002), he can use his office to have an impact that will benefit 900,000 students and their families.

I have been involved with New York's public schools for several decades as a researcher, an advisor to district leaders, and as a parent of two students who graduated. Although I now live in Los Angeles, I continue to follow what happens in the city and the district closely. I therefore offer these comments in the constructive spirit of one who hopes to be helpful.

Like many others, I am excited by the prospect of Mamdani's mayoralty and the possibility that he will succeed in making New York a city that works better for all of its residents. His campaign was brilliant, but as many of us know, running the City will be harder than running a successful campaign.

The challenges facing the school system are especially formidable. More than 100,000 students — more than a tenth of those enrolled — face chronic housing instability. Additionally, for a variety of reasons, enrollment is declining, and as it does, the system will lose funding that is tied to per-pupil attendance. Several schools are severely under-enrolled, and because so few children attend them, the Department of Education can no longer provide adequate educational opportunities and services to the children who remain. Several schools in the city's poorest communities face high teacher turnover, chronic absenteeism and poor academic performance. Several others are in high demand and unable to accommodate those who desperately want access. Finally, while test scores in reading and math have shown significant improvement in recent years (though they remain lower than pre-pandemic levels in 2019), the question remains: How will recent growth be sustained? Furthermore, how will New York's schools prepare students to have the skills needed in a labor market that is likely to be upended by the advent of artificial intelligence?

It is widely known that the mayor is likely to encounter fierce opposition as he implements many aspects of his affordability agenda. For this reason, it would be wise if he can avoid allowing education to become a source of conflict and controversy. He should strive to ensure that education reform is not contentious.

Here are 12 of the most important steps he can take to move the system forward while minimizing conflict:

1. **Retain mayoral control.** Although he may be tempted to shift control to elected school boards or other entities, I recommend that Mamdani seek to retain control in order to avoid the political conflict that has bogged down other large urban districts. Mayor Bloomberg used mayoral control to generate private-sector support for the public schools and promote innovation. Mamdani can go further while at the same time delegating more authority to local community boards and the PEP to ensure public accountability.
2. **Retain Melissa Aviles-Ramos as chancellor.** The current chancellor is just 43 years old — but as a former teacher, principal, superintendent and chief of staff to a previous chancellor, she has more experience than most of the individuals who have served in this role. She is well respected inside and outside the system. Mamdani would be wise to keep her in place; doing so would in no meaningful way impinge on his ability to execute his agenda.
3. **End the charter school wars.** In recent years, previous mayors have spent too much time on the question of precisely what role charter schools should play in the five boroughs. Mamdani should accept that 150,000 students are being educated in these schools because their parents have deemed them to be a good fit for their kids — and thousands more want the opportunity to attend. Some of the city's charters produce excellent results. They should be allowed to thrive and encouraged to collaborate with struggling public schools rather than being made into piñatas by the mayor. One way to demonstrate a new approach is to allow charter schools seeking to co-locate in public schools that have sufficient room to be welcomed to do so by City Hall and Tweed.
4. **Expand performance**\-**based assessments.** "Currently, only 38 public high schools are permitted to substitute long-form projects and other performance-based assessments for most of the Regents exams required for graduation. [Evidence shows](https://www.edutopia.org/blog/performance-based-assessment-reviewing-basics-patricia-hilliard?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that these schools outperform schools with similar demographics on a number of measures, [including the SAT](https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/assessing-college-readiness-authentic-student-work-report?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Performance-based standards create an opportunity for innovative teaching and learning that is attractive to students and parents and teach higher-order thinking skills that will be even more important as artificial intelligence eliminates many of the current jobs. More schools should be granted these waivers from the state Regents exams when they demonstrate the ability to implement the standards effectively.
5. **Sustain Mayor Adams' reading initiative and expand it to higher grades**. NYC Reads, the phonics-based reading initiative that began under Eric Adams and Chancellor David Banks, has demonstrated progress in the form of [significant increases in fourth-grade reading and math scores](https://infohub.nyced.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/2025-math-ela---web-deck.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). To sustain these gains and improve outcomes in the upper grades, Mamdani should avoid being drawn into curriculum wars over literacy, sustain efforts to train teachers in these strategies and ensure that literacy efforts for middle and high school focus on a broader range of skills, including writing, research and public speaking. To sustain these gains and improve outcomes in the upper grades, Mamdani should avoid being drawn into the curriculum wars that often pit phonics against other approaches — and he will need to navigate similar ideological battles in math. Recent controversies over tracking and algebra placement show how easily expectations can be lowered when curriculum debates overshadow student needs. Ensuring that middle school math instruction systematically builds the foundation required for success in ninth-grade algebra is essential.
6. **Engage other city departments in supporting schools in marginalized communities.** The Harlem Children's Zone has shown that when schools have the resources to mitigate the effects of poverty, academic outcomes can improve. The city's Parks and Recreation Department, Health Department, its Housing Authority and possibly other agencies should be required to work closely with schools to provide social support to children and families in need.
7. **Deepen partnerships.** The Children's Aid Society, Turn Around for Children, and Good Shepherd provide vital services to schools in high poverty neighborhoods. They could do more if they worked strategically with City departments. Similarly, Education Management Organizations (EMOs) such as New Vision for Public Schools, the Urban Assembly, the Internationals Network, the Young Women's Leadership Schools and others have demonstrated that they can help schools experience sustained success. Ultimately, the key to improving public schools in New York is to ensure that the vast resources of the city are enlisted to support them in the work they do — not for the government to try to micromanage the way to success.
8. **Significantly increase starting teacher salaries**. In order to attract and retain teachers, salaries must be increased substantially. Given that NY spends $42,000 per pupil, one of the highest expenditure rates in the nation, a major increase is possible if budgets are constructed from the classroom first. Auditors must ask how personnel outside of the classroom benefit the mission of the DOE which is to serve its 900,000 students. The current salary of $66K for teachers with a bachelor's degree and $75K for teachers with a master's degree, is barely enough to live on in NY. An affordability agenda must include the needs of teachers.
9. **Leave the exam schools alone.** Mamdani, who attended Bronx Science, has previously supported efforts to remake schools where entry is now determined solely by a student's score on the Specialized High School Admissions Test. Let those students who play by the rules of the game, many of whom study on weekends for years to prepare, attend those schools. Mamdani has hundreds of others to focus on and he should work to ensure that high-quality schools, both traditional publics and charters, are available in every neighborhood. Previous chancellors have gotten sidetracked by efforts aimed at diversifying enrollment at the city's eight exam schools. It would be wise to avoid this trap and focus on expanding access to more rigorous, high-quality schools.
10. **Consolidate under-enrolled schools and create new ones**. Although school closures always generate controversy, even when those targeted for closure are underperforming, if consolidation is accompanied by the creation of new schools that are able to offer a variety of attractive programs and services (e.g. dual language immersion, STEM or arts focused instruction, etc.), the effects of closures will be offset by the excitement generated by the opening of new and better schools. It might also be possible to lease the land of closed schools to build affordable housing.
11. **Conduct an audit of the DOE, starting with central and district-level administration.** Although enrollment has declined, the size of central and district administration has remained the same. A careful examination of district operations should reveal areas where cuts can be made thoughtfully and strategically. Mamdani has said there's money currently being wasted in the central bureaucracy and associated contracts — but cutting is easier said than done. He needs to be systematic in finding savings, and then redirect saved funds to schools. That will help kids and teachers, increase confidence in the system and make it easier for the DOE to cope with lower levels of funding in the future.
12. **Take a strategic approach to implementing free childcare.** Although universal pre-k was a significant accomplishment, the [rollout was rushed in many areas](https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-05-10-the-unintended-consequences-of-universal-preschool?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), resulting in uneven program quality, shortages of certified early-childhood teachers and gaps in coordination between community-based programs and DOE schools, which limited the initiative's effectiveness for some families. As Mamdani attempts to do something more complex — offer free childcare to all families with children between the ages of six months and five years old — he should target a few communities where the need is great first. That will enable Mamdani to avoid mishaps and increase the likelihood of effective implementation.

The time for clever social media videos is over. Now it's time to demonstrate that he and his team can produce tangible results to improve lives. Mamdani knows he will come under attack from the Trump administration. The administration is likely to attempt to cut big portions of the $2.5 billion in federal funding the city's schools currently receive for special education, free lunch and breakfast and other needed programs. While he should fight to retain this funding, it represents just over 6% of the DOE's budget. The mayor will need to cultivate support from the private sector to make up for lost funding and to launch new initiatives that will make the system attractive to parents who currently choose private schools.

He will be more likely to succeed in his efforts to raise these funds and get the city to rally around him if he is perceived as fair and reasonable, if he can avoid unnecessary conflicts, and if he demonstrates the ability to bring about steady improvement by working closely with Education Department leaders.

The mayor has an opportunity to use his election to make New York City a model of educational innovation and success. He can do this by ensuring that his approach to educational leadership maintains a strong commitment to ensuring that children of all backgrounds have access to quality education.
### Trump vs. Civil Society
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-should-nonprofits-and-foundations-respond-to-trump/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:37.000Z
The mood among American nonprofits these days is dark. Extremely dark.

I have spent the past 40 years working in the nonprofit sector, and I've never seen anything like this. The second Trump administration has been engaged in a sustained assault on civil society, using its fiscal and regulatory powers, as well as the bully pulpit, to try to bring advocacy organizations, charities, universities and philanthropies in line. Thousands of federal grants have been cancelled. The cost to American nonprofits is difficult to calculate, but it almost certainly amounts to billions of dollars.

The [threat of civil rights investigation](https://www.aaup.org/news/new-report-civil-rights-law-weaponized-chill-speech?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has been wielded aggressively, particularly against American universities. What institution wants to submit their internal correspondence to discovery in a court of law? Who knows what embarrassing or even self-incriminating things government lawyers might find when they sift through all those emails?

In the wake of the attempted killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the Trump administration went into overdrive, promising to ["go after"](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/15/vance-white-house-promise-to-crack-down-on-radical-left-lunatics-00564766?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) organizations that it believes are guilty of fomenting violence, including a potential criminal investigation of the Open Society Foundations (founded by George Soros). The administration has even made noises about revoking [the tax-exempt status of disfavored charities](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/us/politics/harvard-trump-irs-liberals.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including Harvard University.

In the face of this unprecedented assault, some nonprofits and foundations are taking the long view, effectively hoping that "this too shall pass." Sure, things look bad at the moment, but the courts will probably limit the administration's overreach, a corrective midterm election is likely in 2026 and the Democrats have a decent shot of winning the next presidential election. It may take a few years, but things will eventually return to normal, or close to it.

Against this line of thinking are those who believe that civil society is facing what amounts to an [existential threat](https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/how-should-funders-respond-to-an-existential-threat?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). With the wolves baying at the door, some prominent philanthropic leaders are arguing that ["complacency is complicity."](https://nonprofitquarterly.org/unite-in-advance-philanthropy-coalition-launches-solidarity-campaign/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Instead of silence or, god forbid, ["appeasement,"](https://ncrp.org/2024/12/playing-it-safe-wont-save-us/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) they believe that foundations need to show some guts and disperse even more money than they are currently granting.

## Taking stock

Anyone who was around for the first Trump administration can be forgiven for thinking that we've already seen how this movie ends.

Back in 2016, many foundations and nonprofits all but declared themselves part of the #Resistance to Trump. This was entirely appropriate for some organizations, given their preexisting missions. But the resistance to Trump also sucked in numerous agencies that had heretofore appeared apolitical or middle-of-the-road.

Some minor skirmishes were won along the way, but the war was resoundingly lost: Despite a massive expenditure of time and resources by philanthropy and nonprofits, Trump returned to the presidency triumphantly in 2024\. Significantly, Trump's victory was fueled by non-college-educated voters and improved levels of support from Blacks and Hispanics, exactly the kind of "vulnerable communities" that philanthropy and nonprofits typically aim to serve.

So if running back the Resistance isn't the answer, what is?

A good first step would be to engage in some introspection. Nonprofits and foundations should look at the current state of politics in the United States and ask some hard questions about whether they have contributed to the hyper-partisanship and polarization that currently plagues us. The honest answer, for many, will be "yes."

In recent years, many service delivery organizations have chosen to expand their remit and get involved in advocacy work. Many foundations have been responsible for underwriting ["intense policy demanders"](https://www.vanderbilt.edu/csdi/TheoryofParty.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — activist organizations that have proven enormously influential, helping to move American political parties away from the center and toward more extreme policy positions.

Some philanthropic insiders have come to recognize the downsides of this approach. For example, [Suzette Brooks Masters](https://www.philanthropy.com/article/philanthropy-needs-to-own-up-to-its-role-in-fueling-polarization?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) spent nearly a decade as a grant maker focused on immigration. With hindsight, she believes that she was so caught up in winning that she was blind to the possibility of backlash: "I didn't seek out enough evidence about the unintended negative effects immigration battles could have on a large portion of the public who might have reasonable or principled questions or concerns about demographic changes fueled by immigration."

According to [Daniel Stid](https://thefulcrum.us/democracy/daniel-stid?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), formerly a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation, "You've got these networks of media, NGO activists, foundations, think tankers and policy wonks that are effectively pulling both parties out to the hyper-partisan poles … I think philanthropy is particularly implicated in this phenomenon … Philanthropy \[is\] bankrolling most of the elements of the so-called shadow parties."

Even the [Ford Foundation](https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/learning-reflections/closing-the-divide-inside-our-global-initiative-on-polarization/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a leading funder of social justice causes, has recognized this dynamic. In a 2024 missive highlighting a global initiative to combat polarization, the foundation acknowledged that "we must be diligent to ensure we do not make polarization worse through our own actions or rhetoric … in philanthropy, we must all be aware of funding solutions-oriented and transformative work, not just doubling down on one viewpoint."

## What is to be done

Once they have fully taken stock of their own role in fueling polarization, the pillars of civil society should actively seek to shift gears. For foundations, this means recalibrating their giving so that they are funding more efforts to reduce the temperature of our politics and to build bridges across social divides. Nonprofits should actively rethink their communication strategies. Too many organizations have essentially given up on actually attempting to persuade the majority of Americans who do not vote for the Democratic Party.

These types of changes will hopefully yield long-term dividends, but they will not halt the Trump assault in the here and now. For that, foundations and nonprofits should be engaging in collective action, both in the courts and in the public square. A recent [open letter](https://medium.com/@uniteinadvance/statement-on-the-fundamental-freedom-of-speech-b98c1c6db4e2?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) signed by hundreds of foundations represents a first step. "Attempts to silence speech, criminalize opposing viewpoints, and misrepresent and limit charitable giving undermine our democracy and harm all Americans," the signatories affirmed.

While that's a good message, its effectiveness is undercut by the composition of the foundations who agreed to sign on. The headline ["**Left-Leaning Nonprofits Push Back on Trump's Crackdown Threats"** ](https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/left-nonprofits-trump-crackdown-threats-kirk-murder/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)was typical of the way that news outlets covered the open letter.

The framing of the battle between the Trump administration and civil society as just another left-right dispute plays into Trump's hands. The more that the effort to defend philanthropy and the nonprofit sector can be portrayed as a nonpartisan issue, with significant support from conservatives, the more effective it will be.

Given this reality, it was heartening to read a recent interview with [Lawson Bader](https://www.thefp.com/p/conservative-philanthropy-ceo-to?taid=68daaaebd54062000170e4fd&utm%5Fcampaign=trueanthem&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fsource=twitter), the president and CEO of DonorsTrust, a conservative philanthropic organization, in The Free Press. Bader called out the White House for engaging in "dangerous" rhetoric and creating a precedent that could be used against conservative organizations in the future."The whole conversation needs to tone down," Bader said. "I think it's going to come back to haunt us."

What civil society needs now is a chorus of Lawson Baders. Nonprofits and foundations perform tasks that are vital to the health of American society. They deliver valuable services that businesses will never take on because there is no profit to reap. They spark innovation in a way that government cannot. Most important, they are part of the connective tissue that binds us together as Americans. If civil society hopes not just to survive the current crisis but to emerge stronger, it must embrace self-examination and cross-ideological partnership, not burrowing into partisan trenches. In the process, nonprofits and foundations can embody the kind of live-and-let-live pluralism and basic decency that are essential to a thriving multi-ethnic democracy.
### Tax Revenue is Destiny
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/tax-revenue-is-destiny/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:49.000Z
I worked for Andrew Cuomo in New York State government for many years and was one of his principal policy advisors during his mayoral campaign. I thought Andrew Cuomo would be the better mayor, but I sincerely wish Zohran Mamdani well and hope he succeeds as mayor.

There is no doubt in my mind that Mamdani won both the primary and the general election far more than Cuomo lost those races. Mamdani was a brilliant campaigner. Even so, I don't believe he would have come out of nowhere to win both the primary and the general election without his core agenda on affordability, which resonated so strongly with younger voters, in particular: Strikingly, according to exit polling by NBC News, Mamdani won 70% of the vote of New Yorkers age 18-44, while Cuomo won 50% of the vote among voters older than 45.

But will Mamdani succeed in realizing his agenda? In state and local government, tax revenue is destiny. Whether Mamdani succeeds as mayor depends in large part on the fiscal condition of the city government.

To understand this better, it helps to go back to 2013, when Bill de Blasio was first elected mayor. The consensus view among the establishment at that time was that his ambitious campaign policy agenda would be severely constrained by New York City's fiscal straits.

For example, in [a profile of Mayor Michael Bloomberg](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/26/after-bloomberg?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) published in The New Yorker in August 2013, the three-time mayor argued that "\[N\]one of the Democratic candidates have addressed the one issue vital to the city's future: the budget. Although the budget has been admirably balanced for the past decade, in the next few years New York may confront its most severe budget crisis since the nineteen-seventies." The profile added that the Citizens Budget Commission "described the predicament the \[next\] mayor will confront as 'the calm before the storm.'"

The reality proved different. New York City's [Independent Budget Office](https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2013fiscaloutlook.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) wrote in December 2013:

> Through much of the summer and early fall, it was asserted with some frequency that New York's next Mayor and City Council would inherit a substantial budget shortfall for the upcoming fiscal year along with other fiscal challenges. Then in November Mayor Bloomberg released his quarterly update to the city's financial plan and a different story emerged: The Mayor projected a sizable surplus for the current year as well as a balanced budget for next year, fiscal year 2015.

Indeed, total revenues in the New York City budget in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2014, were $5.2 billion, or 7.5%, greater than had been forecast in the FY 14 Executive Budget introduced the year before. Shortly before leaving office, [Bloomberg](https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-nyc-budget/update-1-mayor-bloomberg-hands-off-balanced-new-york-budget-idUSL2N0J61MW20131121/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was able to announce, "For the first time in my memory, and perhaps for the first time in New York City's history, the budget for an incoming fiscal year has been balanced for an incoming mayor."

As was the case in 2013, none of the candidates in the 2025 mayoral primary or general election sought to make New York City's current budget challenges a major issue. The press implicitly assumed that New York City would have a balanced budget and that Mamdani's success implementing his ambitious agenda would depend simply on the level of new taxes approved by the state legislature and governor in Albany.

This willful ignorance of New York City's financial situation was also maintained by New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, a primary opponent who became arguably Mamdani's most important supporter. In mid-August, [Comptroller Lander](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/comments-on-new-york-citys-fiscal-year-2026-adopted-budget/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), commenting in his official capacity on the recently adopted New York City Executive Budget, warned that: "\[T\]he Office estimates the City will end FY 2026 with a gap of $4.2 billion (3.6% of total revenues), growing to $8.8 billion in FY 2027." The Independent Budget Office, the Citizens Budget Commission, and Mayor Adams' Office of Management and Budget issued earlier estimates that are somewhat lower but still significant.

If New York City is really facing a budget deficit of roughly $9 billion — before spending on any new programs — Mayor Mamdani's ability to implement his affordability agenda will be severely constrained. He will face a set of problems he was never asked to confront in the campaign. Unlike recent fiscal crises, such as the Great Recession in 2008 and the Covid pandemic in 2020, the federal government will not bail out New York City and New York State's ability to help will be limited (although Governor Kathy Hochul has signaled that she will support at least a phase-in of universal childcare — much as Governor Cuomo provided state funding for Universal Pre-K in lieu of allowing New York City to raise taxes to fund the program itself).

The starting point of the fiscal hole that Mamdani finds himself in will be even more important than the willingness of state government to increase taxes to benefit New York City. Notwithstanding Hochul's stated opposition, I would not be surprised if the state ends up raising the corporate income tax along the lines proposed by Mamdani. But in contrast to Mamdani's proposal that all such revenue should go to New York City to fund universal childcare, both the State and the City may need to use that increased revenue to fund current budget demands rather than new programs.

New York City's Office of Management and Budget has been criticized for routinely sandbagging its tax revenue estimates. The New York State Division of the Budget raised its estimate of tax revenue in its Mid-Year Budget Update on November 2, 2025 by approximately $1.6 billion from its estimate in the June 30, 2025 Quarterly Budget Update. New York City's tax revenues are affected by the same forces and can also be expected to be higher than the enacted budget forecasts.

It is unlikely that Eric Adams will be the second mayor in New York City history to hand off a balanced incoming-year budget to a new mayor. But if Mamdani shares the good fortune of de Blasio and the fiscal deficit is much less than current expectations, he should be able to get off to a good start as mayor. If the FY 27 budget deficit is manageable and New York City is granted some new revenue from Albany, Mamdani will be able to begin at least the phased implementation of a number of his principal campaign promises.

In this scenario, Mamdani's early momentum will put air in the sails of progressives across the country, proving the skeptics wrong by demonstrating that far-reaching proposals can in fact be implemented.

On the other hand, if the forecasts from the city comptroller and other fiscal experts prove to be close to accurate, Mamdani will be hard-pressed to advance significant new initiatives. Mamdani has laid no track to prepare New Yorkers for challenging fiscal times. A program of fiscal austerity would only reinforce the narrative of traditional Democrats that the promises of Mamdani — and progressives more generally — sound good but are merely aspirational goals incapable of being implemented in difficult economic times.

*This is an excerpt from a longer article called "The Mamdani Mayoralty" posted on the* [*Step Two Policy Project Substack*](https://steptwopolicyproject.substack.com/) *on November 10, 2025.*
### New York’s Civil Service System vs. Public Sector Progress
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-yorks-mamdani-ny-civil-service-system/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:50.000Z
> To call the system "byzantine" would be an insult to Byzantium.

Two days after his election, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani smartly sought to seize his supporters' extraordinary enthusiasm by [opening up an application portal](https://www.transition2025.com/apply?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to "identify candidates for roles across City agencies and offices." It worked. Within 24 hours, [25,000 people had submitted their resumes](https://x.com/morganfmckay/status/1986829958467989646?s=20&ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

There's plenty for them to do. Per Comptroller Brad Lander's excellent [dashboard](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/services/for-the-public/nyc-agency-staffing-dashboard/authorized-vs-actual-city-staffing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), New York city government's vacancy rate today is more than twice its level before the pandemic, with more than 13,000 positions vacant.

Some of those jobs are empty because of efficient operations or budget constraints, but many should be filled. Some of the City's highest vacancy rates — and more than 1,000 openings — are in housing-related agencies. If the mayor is going to bring down rents and make the city more livable, he probably wants more people to grant housing permits, inspect buildings, help the homeless and repair public housing. And whether or not he succeeds in raising taxes on the wealthiest, he also ought to collect levies already due. That is hard with 265 openings and a 13% vacancy rate at the city's Department of Finance. "Money is being left on the table," [says](https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2025/09/behind-all-time-high-job-growth-nyc-17k-government-positions-sit-vacant/407933/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) one city assessor.

But if the new mayor wants to use the surge of interest in joining his mayoralty to get his administration up and running fast, he will face an ugly obstacle: the City's civil service system.

To call the system "byzantine" would be an insult to Byzantium. First created by Governor Grover Cleveland in 1883, New York State's civil service system aspired to award jobs based on "merit" and "fitness" rather than connections or patronage. But the system has since become an obstructive barrier keeping many of the city's most civically engaged residents out of public service.

Even in a country rife with bureaucratic government processes, New York State's system stands apart. Governing magazine once wrote: "For decades, the king of the calcified and recalcitrant beasts has been the New York state civil service system, a monster off whose chest comprehensive reports on reform bounded like Wiffle balls." And New York City operates under the state's rules, with a special sauce layered on.

> To call the system "byzantine" would be an insult to Byzantium.

In a reform agenda released during his own mayoral campaign, Lander [laid out](https://web.archive.org/web/20250623214704/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/67a2f550954e9c463f4a2ef6/t/6839d7ba133be44eb77db810/1748621242594/Investing+in+a+World+Class+City+Workforce.docx.pdf) the painful experience of applying for a city government job:

*A noncity employee with appropriate qualifications must first wait for an exam period (which sometimes does not exist at all) to be advertised, qualify to take the exam, wait several weeks for their examination date and then again wait for a ranked list of test takers to be certified, which includes a time for a mandatory appeals process. Once the list is certified, only then can agencies begin assembling applicant pools, and they must start at the top of the list and call at least one in every three candidates, in order. The median time for releasing scores from an exam is 290 days. Including time for test development and hiring, city agencies must often wait well over a year to onboard qualified employees.*

Lander only scratched the surface. Job postings in New York City must fit into official job titles. But existing job titles — and there are [more than](https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/NYC-Civil-Service-Titles/nzjr-3966/about%5Fdata?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 3,000 of them — often bear no relationship to existing jobs as normal people understand them.

[Here](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dcas/downloads/pdf/exam-schedules/dcas-annual-examination-schedule-fy2026-alphabetical-order.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is the list of civil service exams on offer in the next year. There are 16 "administrative jobs," including "administrative horticulturalist" (!), and 13 kinds of associates.

Many of these classifications have no particular subject matter. If your life goal is to work on transportation or the environment, and you don't know exactly what job title you would need to hold, you're in trouble. For these types of "competitive" City jobs, you can't apply for a specific agency. You may need to apply for generic and often murky job descriptions ("administrative staff analyst," "associate job opportunity specialist," "legal coordinator," "special officer") that may (or may not) qualify you for the job where you want to work.

Under the standard rules, hiring managers with vacant roles are only allowed to hire the top three scorers on the exam for the job they're hiring for. Under this "Rule of Three," managers must regularly call individuals about tests they took years ago, often for jobs they never wanted. And then hiring managers can take weeks continuing one by one down the list until they find an interested candidate.

These problems are particularly bad for technology jobs. As [others have noted](https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/10/26/digital-upgrade-for-city-hall-the-next-mayors-most-urgent-task/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), city government is in dire need of a digital upgrade, and a surge of tech talent will be critical to the Mamdani administration's ability to achieve its policy vision.

But among 3,000-plus standard titles in city government today, not one is for a technology job recognizable to ordinary technologists —no "software engineer," no "web designer."

> Among 3,000-plus standard titles in city government today, not one is for a technology job recognizable to ordinary technologists — no "software engineer," no "web designer."

The city is, however, presently offering exams for three kinds of "computer associate," covering everything from allocating desktop computers to coding. To learn more about the "computer associate" role, "YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR READING [THIS ENTIRE NOTICE](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dcas/downloads/pdf/noes/20266037000.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) BEFORE YOU SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION." In that seven-page PDF, most of which is consumed with describing educational qualifications and relevant certifications, here is the entire description of what the job *is*:

*Computer Associates (Operations), under general supervision, with very considerable latitude for independent initiative and judgment: supervise the activities of subordinates in one or more computer operations units of considerable size; or serve as a technical resource person in the performance of networked, multi-tiered, or mainframe computer operations; or perform as a technical resource person in the diagnosis of and, when feasible, the correction of telecommunications hardware problems in order to maintain efficient functioning of telecommunication operations and to minimize downtime in the case of system failure. All Computer Associates (Operations) perform related work.*

That must have been written at least 10 years ago. Or so one hopes.

Hiring strong talent for technology roles now requires all kinds of creative maneuvering and workarounds – like using a precious few positions exempt from this whole rigamarole. These constraints also incentivize agencies to outsource critical technology work to more costly contractors, a boon to vendors at public expense.

What makes this especially painful is that so many talented technologists are eager to work in government. In recent years, a series of federal "Tech to Gov" virtual job fairs attracted thousands of experienced tech workers, prompting Wired Magazine to [label the U.S. government](https://www.wired.com/story/tech-jobs-government-layoffs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) "the hottest tech employer in town." People will accept a pay cut for meaningful work, but forcing them to parse jargon-filled forms, sit for a written exam, and wait a year for a job offer is a surefire way to extinguish their enthusiasm.

What's more, for many vacant mid-level and senior tech positions within the civil service system, preference is given to existing employees rather than outside applicants, who often get lower pay for the same work too. So if you're a senior software engineer at Google who is ready to jump ship, take a pay cut, and go help New Yorkers access their benefits… well, you're out of luck.

The great irony of the status quo is that a system built to honor merit now favors insiders — those who either have city jobs or know those who can negotiate the alien job titles, erratic exam schedules, and vague interview calls needed to get those jobs. It is not the welcoming city that Zohran Mamdani campaigned on creating.

Mamdani is nothing if not a man in a hurry, and he ought to bring change. The question is how.

The traditional approach, even for effective leaders, is to look for workarounds. So Mamdani can max out on using existing exempt positions, and use more "non-competitive" titles exempted from testing requirements.

But the trouble with workarounds is they only go so far. The number of exempt positions is capped, to name one example. Mamdani may be able to use exemptions to drive his affordability agenda, but what about hiring challenges in corrections? For 911 operators? Public health? A mayor can drive his priorities by exception, but he cannot govern an entire city that way.

Mamdani should seek to reform the antiquated examination system codified in the state's Civil Service Law. A better system could replace old-school exams with adaptive ones that provide real-time, situational tests of skills. It could allow candidates to be recruited even when an exam isn't offered by the city's overmatched Department of Citywide Administrative Services (vacancy rate: 15%). And it could provide more flexibility than the Rule of Three.

For far more jobs, New York could hire the way most employers do, flexibly assessing employees' abilities based on job experience, references, and interviews. Many cities — Charlotte, Denver, Seattle, Dallas, Houston, Austin — limit exams to a few departments, mostly police and fire. There's little [evidence](https://pols.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/273/2023/11/Corruption-Rpt-15-Final.11.2.23.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) these cities are more corrupt than New York. The best check on abuse is holding hiring managers accountable for their own delivery. You're less likely to hire a hack if the hack's incompetence will cost you your own job. Reforms to hiring should come with reforms to firing.

These changes will be hard, requiring changes in both city and state law. Mamdani will need to use his political capital to create a broad statewide coalition — lobbying his former colleagues in the State Legislature and seeking strong support from Governor Kathy Hochul. To her credit, Hochul temporarily suspended exams for many of the state's hard-to-fill titles through the [recent NY HELPS program](https://www.cs.ny.gov/help/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which has cleared the path for over 30,000 state hires over the past two years. In this context, Mamdani will need to tussle with his allies in the public employee unions, which opposed the extension of HELPS and are already [rallying opposition against](https://www.pef.org/articles/news/highlighting-concerns-explaining-civil-service-plans-to-modernize-system/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) rumored state-level reforms that would reduce reliance on exams and extend the flexibility granted by the HELPS program beyond its June 2026 expiration date.

In Lander's admirable campaign [white paper](https://web.archive.org/web/20250623214704/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/67a2f550954e9c463f4a2ef6/t/6839d7ba133be44eb77db810/1748621242594/Investing+in+a+World+Class+City+Workforce.docx.pdf) dedicated to hiring, his ultimate proposal was to "Convene a World Class City Workforce Blue-Ribbon Panel of Civil Service Experts," stacked with "experts from unions, academia, the private and public sectors, and key partners in Albany." That could be fine here. Listening is good, and Mamdani excels at it. But if unanimity among "experts" is what is required for change, civil service reform will fail.

In her [recent interview with Vital City](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/new-york-city-deputy-mayors-on-how-things-really-get-done), Maria Torres-Springer, former first deputy mayor and now the Mamdani Transition's co-chair, acknowledged the problem directly: "The process for becoming a City employee is not for the faint of heart. At a time when a new mayor is coming in with a huge coalition of people who want to help and want to be public servants, the stumbling block cannot be that it takes too long to get hired. You commit to fixing it. That allows you to bring in the talent you need and retain them. Maybe government can finally be an employer of choice."

We hope the new mayor will heed this advice and lay the groundwork for a New York City government that can attract the best talent the city has to offer.
### Mamdani’s Victory, and Memories of Dinkins’
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdanis-victory-and-memories-of-dinkins/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:51.000Z
When David Dinkins narrowly defeated Rudy Giuliani in 1989 to become New York City's first Black mayor, his victory was both historic and fragile. Thirty-six years later, Zohran Mamdani's triumph — the first by a democratic socialist, Muslim, and South Asian candidate — carries an entirely different tone: confident, youthful, and emblematic of a shifting political city. Yet both moments mark inflection points in how New Yorkers imagine leadership.

I was a 17-year-old Cornell University freshman in the fall of 1989, too young to vote but old enough to feel the electric current of politics. Leaving the Bronx to study four hours north of New York seemed like a welcome respite from a city teetering between possibility and despair after a spate of racial incidents and a crime epidemic that seemed out of control. But the morning after the 1989 election my friend Andy and I walked to the student union to find a news ribbon scrolling: *David Dinkins elected the first Black mayor of New York City.* Andy looked at me, grinning, and said, *"Look what we did."* The "we" didn't make literal sense — neither of us was old enough to vote — but it was a proxy for a kind of joyful ownership of a new direction for the city.

Dinkins' campaign was built on the idea of a "gorgeous mosaic," his phrase for the city's multiethnic, multigenerational population. After years of racial division punctuated by Howard Beach, the killing of Yusef Hawkins and the Central Park Five, Dinkins embodied the hope of racial healing. Just as important, his victory carried the feeling of arrival for the city's black population, which had previously been treated as invisible or dangerous.

The [Dinkins win, however, was razor-thin](https://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/09/nyregion/the-1989-elections-the-new-york-vote-almost-lost-at-the-wire.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — revealing that many white Democrats were swayed by negative campaigning over Dinkins' personal finances and, more subtly, by discomfort with a Black candidate. Nearly 9 in 10 Black voters supported him, along with roughly 7 in 10 Hispanic voters. His appeal was sharply limited among white voters — only about 30% backed him, and he lost white Catholic and Jewish neighborhoods by wide margins. Dinkins may have gained as many votes from voters prioritizing racial harmony as he lost from those resistant to a Black mayor.

Mamdani's 2025 win, by contrast, was decisive — though not a landslide. With roughly 50.4% of the vote and a nine-point margin over Andrew Cuomo, the mayor-elect built a coalition that expanded from the progressive base of his primary victory to include initially skeptical Democrats.

Ignore the shallow caricatures of the Mamdani voter as a young overeducated white transplant who can't find a real job. According to the New York Times's precinct analysis, Mamdani performed strongly across most racial groups — [winning 57% of Black votes, 52% of Latino votes, and 62% of Asian votes.](https://www.cnn.com/election/2025/exit-polls/new-york-city/general/mayor/0?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) His weakest showing was among majority-white precincts, where he yielded 45% of white voters compared to 46% for Cuomo. Unlike Dinkins, Mamdani's support was not defined primarily by race. Age, income and ideology were far more predictive: He dominated precincts where the median voter was under 45, and he won handily in low- and middle-income areas. In essence, Mamdani replaced Dinkins' racial coalition with a generational and class-based one.

## The price of victory

So what happens now? From his first day in office, Dinkins faced relentless opposition, primarily from his defeated Republican opponent, Rudy Giuliani, who refused to fade into the background. Yet through all the noise, Dinkins governed. He worked with the federal government to add thousands of police officers to the force — a move that began to bend the city's violent crime downward. He launched the Beacon Schools program, turning public schools into community centers open at night and on weekends for tutoring, recreation and family support. Conservatives mocked the idea as "midnight basketball," but for the families who used those spaces, it was a lifeline.

Still, his coalition frayed under pressure. Economic recession, racial unrest and the ever-present tabloid drumbeat about crime sapped his popularity. The infamous Crown Heights riots of 1991 became a symbolic rupture — the image of a Black mayor unable, in the eyes of many, to control racial violence. By the time he faced Giuliani again in 1993, the mood had turned. Giuliani won by nearly the same slim margin that he had lost four years earlier. Staten Island's secession vote that year brought out a surge of anti-Dinkins turnout, sealing his fate.

Zohran Mamdani's election as New York's first Muslim and first South Asian mayor carries a different kind of historical resonance, but the underlying dynamics feel eerily familiar. Once again, the city is divided — not by the crime crisis of the early 90s, but by affordability, inequality and a growing generational chasm.

The question this time isn't whether New York will survive violence, but whether it can remain livable for the many. The coalition that carried him to victory is as complex — and fragile — as Dinkins' once was. Mamdani's support skews younger and more diverse. He won big among voters under forty and among immigrant communities in Queens and Brooklyn. But in parts of Staten Island, southern Brooklyn and even among some older Black and Latino voters, his margins were thin. A record turnout — the highest since 9/11 — revealed not only enthusiasm for change but also deep resistance to it.

The final days of the campaign made that clear. A super PAC supporting Cuomo ran ads showing Mamdani eating rice with his hands, followed by footage of a Black man robbing a store. Another spot featured a racially ambiguous man in a fur coat, sneering like a caricatured "pimp." The ads were so blatantly racist and Islamophobic that Cuomo's team eventually pulled them, though the damage was done. In his concession speech, Cuomo thanked his supporters not for serving the city, but for their loyalty to him personally, calling them "New York patriots" — a phrase that sounded lifted from a Trump rally. The implication was clear: Mamdani's supporters were somehow un-New York.

It was a reminder that Dinkins, too, had faced a post-defeat antagonist in Giuliani. And just as Giuliani built a political career on defining himself against Dinkins' vision, Cuomo seems poised to play a similar role for Mamdani. The echoes are unmistakable.

Mamdani's first task is to maintain the coalition that elected him. That means showing progress early, even symbolically: freezing rents as promised, piloting fare-free bus routes, launching visible community initiatives that make people feel their vote mattered. It also means keeping the lines open to the grassroots — to the young volunteers, immigrant groups and activists who powered his campaign. If they feel ignored or sidelined, their enthusiasm could turn to disillusionment faster than City Hall can draft a budget.

The second task is to expand the coalition. Mamdani can't govern a city of 8.5 million people by leaning only on the left-most edge of his base. He'll need to reach out to moderate Democrats, to unions divided over his policies, to small-business owners wary of change. He doesn't need to win everyone over, but he does need to avoid governing against them.

And then there's the hardest part: learning to use the machinery of government. Dinkins, for all his moral clarity, was often faulted for being a poor manager. Mamdani will have to be both visionary and technocrat. The policies he champions will test not just his ideals but his administrative skill. Can he navigate Albany's budget process, balance ambitious spending with fiscal realities and deliver concrete results without alienating the very bureaucracy he needs to make it happen?

## History's echo

Dinkins left office with his moral compass intact but his coalition fractured. Yet his story didn't end there. Decades later, when Amadou Diallo was killed by police in 1999, Dinkins quietly reached out to Giuliani — the same man who had taunted him outside City Hall — urging him to meet with community leaders to ease the tension. Giuliani refused. Dinkins' offer of dialogue, rebuffed, stands as a small emblem of what real leadership looks like.

Mamdani, too, will face moments when dialogue seems impossible — when opposition hardens, when headlines turn sour, when parts of his coalition feel betrayed. How he handles those moments will define his mayoralty more than any policy paper ever could.

African-American voters represented some of Mamdani's biggest support. Ironically, his victory comes at the cost of [Eric Adams](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/percy-sutton-eric-adams-and-the-state-of-black-political-power-in-new-york), only the second Black mayor in the city's history. Some may reasonably worry that the importance of Black voices will be reduced in the city's political hierarchy once Adams leaves.

But Mamdani's win symbolizes a different kind of revolution — not one of representation alone, but of ideology. If Dinkins' election was about breaking a color barrier, Mamdani's may mark the breaking of a political one.
### How Modern Mayors Meet the Moment
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-modern-new-york-city-mayors-meet-the-moment/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:40.000Z
New Yorkers rarely cheer their mayors. It's a tradition. Moreover, we especially tire of those — even the sainted Fiorello La Guardia — who were unlucky enough to get elected to a third term in the era when they legally could.

In May 1932, the city's beloved but discredited playboy mayor Jimmy Walker was improbably booed at Yankee Stadium before being rescued when the band struck up the National Anthem. (Walker won the crowd over by declaring that if a public figure "cannot withstand the boos — and I mean boo-s, and not b-o-o-z-e — then he also should not pay attention to praise.")

This week's was the 17th municipal election I was assigned to decode as a reporter, columnist, editor or commentator for The New York Times, The Daily News, CUNY-TV, NY1 News and now City Limits. A single thread looped all those election results together. They suggest a commonsensical judgment, comparable to the way jurors reach a verdict: by sifting and often discounting much of the tangible evidence and conflicting expert testimony and going with their gut.

New Yorkers have an uncanny knack of choosing the right candidate at the right time — often in robust and unambiguous reaction to his predecessor. That's a far cry from saying that the candidate they choose in any given election lives up to his promise or potential, or eventually makes a great mayor. But arguably, the voting public has consistently selected the candidate who made sense for the moment.

In 1961, Robert F. Wagner won re-election by running against his own record in a beat-the-bosses campaign that empowered municipal labor unions and the Liberal Party.

Twelve years of that deliberative mayor were more than enough, as it turned out. In 1965, Wagner was succeeded in an upset by a charismatic Manhattan congressman, John V. Lindsay, whom the columnist Murray Kempton sagely characterized as "fresh when everyone else is tired." Four years later, Lindsay lost the Republican nomination but was reelected in a record turnout by diverting attention from his own administration's mistakes and turning the campaign into a referendum on the war in Vietnam.

Two terms of fiscal fakery, which kept the city cool and delivered services that even Lindsay's critics had sanctioned, left New Yorkers yearning for fiscal stability — and who knew the buck better than Comptroller Abe Beame? Except the voters — and the bankers from whom the city borrowed — discovered that he didn't.

Beame had, indeed, warned of budget gimmickry under Lindsay. As mayor, he couldn't even certify how many municipal employees were on the payroll. So, he was more or less sidelined by Governor Hugh Carey and state overseers and defeated after one doleful term by the irrepressible Ed Koch, a legislator with little administrative experience, but who managed to differentiate himself from his rivals with the slogan, "After eight years of charisma \[Lindsay\] and four years of the clubhouse \[Beame\], why not try competence?"

During his third term, though, Koch was doomed by a fourth "C" — corruption — and simultaneously became a symbol of racial division. He lost the Democratic primary in 1989 to David Dinkins, a balm-thrower who would become the city's first Black mayor (he won the primary and nearly lost the general election *because* he was Black) and tried fuzzily to encapsulate his persona in the mantra, "you don't have to be loud to be strong." It turned out you did, though. Which is how, after blaring bloody murder about rising crime and other self-inflicted failings of the Dinkins administration, anti-crime crusader Rudy Giuliani slipped in for two terms beginning in 1993\. Giuliani begatMike Bloomberg, who succeeded him in 2001 thanks to Giuliani's last-minute endorsement amid the lust for leadership after the 9/11 terrorist attack. Bill de Blasio naturally followed as New York looked to its liberal roots after billionaire Bloomberg had laid out the welcome mat for the fellow billionaires whose taxes disproportionately support city services.

In 2021, as the pandemic compounded the impact (if you could call it that) of a lackadaisical mayoral administration — and with the city destabilized and suddenly feeling more dangerous — voters, in what seemed like a post-racial election, chose a borough president and former cop, Eric Adams. We all know how that turned out.

"While the Presidency can elevate even average people," Wallace S. Sayre and Herbert Kaufman wrote decades ago in "Governing New York City," their seminal study, "the mayoralty is the highly vulnerable symbol of all defects in the city and its government." Mayors are ultimately measured by the baggage they inherited (like the migrant influx), the challenges they faced and the legacy they left. Self-discipline aside, historians will probably judge Eric Adams more generously on what he accomplished than his contemporaries have.

Now, Mamdani too arrives as a reaction to what came before. Like Lindsay in 1965 — and Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024 — Zohran Mamdani promises something different, if largely untested and ephemeral: an opportunity to repudiate an establishment weary of dreaming impossible dreams and afraid to fail and to validate the evolution of a metropolis founded on immigration and diversity.

By voting for Mandani, a slim majority of New Yorkers invested a great deal of faith in wishful thinking. Skeptics hope that because he is a listener, he will mitigate his seeming intransigence. Supporters hope that he'll help make the city more affordable, and quick — but they will have to temper their expectations. The good news is that, having mounted a stunning campaign that overpowered the cynicism and polarization that pervades today's politics and government, he has single-handedly revived civic engagement. His recruitment of city government veterans to his transition team suggests some regard for what he and his idealistic acolytes know that they don't know. (Don't forget that the last New York mayor elected when he was 34 years old, [John Purroy Mitchel](https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2025/11/the-boy-mayor-of-new-york-john-purroy.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), fell from the cockpit of an airplane because he neglected to buckle his seatbelt.)

Whatever New Yorkers think of Mamdani, the fact that he won says a lot about them, too. Maybe someday, Mamdani — who's about to confront the challenges of leading a restive city — will achieve the impossible: to make *us* smile, too, and, ultimately, even to cheer for him.
### A New Era in New York City Political History?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/a-new-era-in-new-york-city-political-history/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:40.000Z
> *Too often life in New York is merely a squalid succession of days; whereas in fact it can be a great, living, thrilling adventure. The reason, I think, is plain. The government of the City of New York, with unparalleled opportunities, simply has not seen its opportunities; and when it has seen them, has not been able to make use of them. We need imagination at City Hall—imagination for the other fellow….First and foremost, I want justice on the broadest scale. By this I do not mean the justice that is handed out in police courts. I mean the justice that gives to everyone some chance for the beauty and the better things of life.*

During his culminating campaign rally at Forest Hills Stadium on October 26, now-mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani laid out his broad objectives as mayor. New Yorkers, he claimed, had been "encouraged…to imagine less." He promised a city of expanded imagination and expanded possibilities: "We deserve a city government as ambitious as the working New Yorkers who make it the greatest city in the world," he declared.

Intentionally or not, Mamdani's evocation of social imagination and ambition echoed a mission statement once delivered by his favorite New York City mayor, the progressive Republican Fiorello La Guardia, who served three terms between 1934 and 1945\. Three weeks into his first administration, La Guardia wrote in the pages of the weekly magazine Liberty:

This was as good an expression as any of the social vision that underpinned La Guardia's mayoralty. That vision shaped the city in the era of the New Deal and World War II and guided its politics in the postwar decades. It strained to encompass the broader claims to justice raised by the Black and Brown freedom movements in the 1960s and then collapsed entirely amid the economic turmoil of the 1970s, to be replaced by something very different in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Mamdani is now seeking to channel the spirit of La Guardia's New York in order to reinvigorate Gotham in the 21st century. Where exactly does he stand in the city's political history, and what does that history tell us about the obstacles he might encounter as he attempts to reshape New York politics?

Fiorello La Guardia was a complex political figure, and there were aspects of his mayoralty that Mamdani's core supporters would not find cause to celebrate. He was a good-government reformer aligned with some of the city's leading financial interests, a moral traditionalist who sometimes impinged on civil liberties, a supporter of aggressive policing, a constructor of massive public works, many overseen by Robert Moses, and, during the Second World War, a rabid anti-Japanese racist. He, like practically all liberals of his era, had little grasp of the structural underpinnings of racial inequality and little appreciation for the hardships Black New Yorkers faced in the Jim Crow North.

> New parks and playgrounds; theater and opera accessible to all; decent, affordable housing; monumental new swimming pools — these were not only goods and services, but gestures to working-class New Yorkers that the city cared about the quality of urban life in the broadest sense.

But what made La Guardia so appealing to the working-class New Yorkers who resoundingly reelected him was his vision for how the government could be deployed where private markets had failed to make city life more tolerable and even more enjoyable — for what the city government, the agency of New Yorkers' collective aspirations, could do to make life in the city more than a squalid succession of days. With the help of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, La Guardia and his appointees put into practice a playbook drawn up by urban progressives and socialists over the previous few decades. New parks and playgrounds; theater and opera accessible to all; decent, affordable housing; monumental new swimming pools — these were not only goods and services, but gestures to working-class New Yorkers that the city cared about the quality of urban life in the broadest sense.

In the 1960s and 1970s, this political vision ran aground on the twin shoals of inequality and insolvency. Public institutions could not work well in a city so deeply divided by race and class. And the coming of the fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s made it clear that the city could not count on the local growth that had sustained New Deal-era ambitions through the postwar era. What arose from the fiscal crisis was a sense among the city's political class that the municipal aspirations of the mid-20th century — augmented by the movements for freedom, equality and empowerment of the 1960s — had led to a political culture in which no one was willing to say no.

Out of this passage came a new approach to city politics. The city thereafter "returned" to a focus on fundamentals — on responsible budgeting and core services, policing above all. Broadly, it turned away from the egalitarian visions of the mid-century — profoundly compromised though they were by inequalities of race, class and gender — and toward an emphasis on "making things work," which in practice meant attracting and retaining businesses and a middle-class/affluent tax-paying "public." This entailed, all sides agreed, a narrowing of horizons, evident in the shifting meaning of what became perhaps the most resonant phrase of the new era.

> What arose from the fiscal crisis was a sense among the city's political class that the municipal aspirations of the mid-20th century — augmented by the movements for freedom, equality and empowerment of the 1960s — had led to a political culture in which no one was willing to say no.

"Quality of life," a term that might otherwise have expressed something of the "great, living, thrilling adventure" of which La Guardia wrote, came to mean something quite different: not the presence of things that made urban life thrilling, but the absence of things that made it grinding and perhaps dangerous.

This approach did not go unchallenged, and it is worth examining the successes and failures of those challenges, for they suggest some possibilities and dangers for the incoming Mamdani administration. In 1989, an appealing, nattily-suited man from an underrepresented background rose up to challenge a universally-known establishment pol in the Democratic primary, confronting accusations of antisemitism while promising to give voice to forgotten New Yorkers: This was David Dinkins, who became the city's first Black mayor after beating Ed Koch in the 1989 Democratic primary and Rudy Giuliani in the general election amid voter turnout not seen in decades. Almost a quarter-century later, a former Dinkins staffer, Bill de Blasio, emerged from a crowded Democratic field pledging to address inequality head-on — promising to end New York's "tale of two cities," a phrase he had gotten from Dinkins, who had gotten it from Gov. Mario Cuomo.

Dinkins and de Blasio served at very different times, and their mayoralties defy tidy summary. Still, they illuminate some dilemmas the incoming administration will face. Both Dinkins and de Blasio faced challenges from independent power centers in the city: Both, for instance, had famously difficult relationships with the NYPD and the city press. But their insurgent candidacies also left lingering fissures within their parties. Dinkins' campaign, in particular, represented a challenge by the city's rising Black and Latino communities to the white-ethnic communities that had long been the Democratic party's center of gravity — and therefore to established leaders like Koch, Gov. Mario Cuomo and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Dinkins never managed to repair those ruptures, nor to build a coalition powerful enough to surmount them. When he ran for reelection in 1993, Cuomo and Moynihan offered tepid support, Koch actively opposed him and a key slice of white-ethnic voters went over to Giuliani. De Blasio, of course, faced similar obstacles in winning Democratic support for his agenda, particularly in the form of opposition from Governor Andrew Cuomo.

> Dinkins and de Blasio ultimately stand as cautionary examples to Mamdani and his supporters, not because they did not succeed as mayors — indeed, both performed better than is often remembered — but because they did not succeed on their own terms.

Both Dinkins and de Blasio also struggled to make permanent changes in how the city government worked. For changes in governance, if they are to be durable, require not just enacting and implementing policies, but remaking entire administrative systems. Dinkins' "community policing" plan — an approach that envisioned police officers as neighborhood problem-solvers and ombudsmen — is an illustrative case in point as Mamdani considers a different reform, creating a Department of Community Safety to help address mental health problems without the presence of police. Dinkins and his police commissioners developed sophisticated policing strategy, but they never succeeded at changing the NYPD's organizational structure and culture. Dinkins' successor, Giuliani, and his Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, were much more successful at reorganizing the NYPD and shifting its culture, and their broken windows approach took hold.

Dinkins and de Blasio ultimately stand as cautionary examples to Mamdani and his supporters, not because they did not succeed as mayors — indeed, both performed better than is often remembered — but because they did not succeed on their own terms: neither managed to turn the popular surges that had elevated them to office into durable, powerful movements. And that is what it ultimately takes to produce the kind of transformation to which Mamdani aspires.

Much will be out of Mamdani's control. La Guardia succeeded in large measure because the New Deal enabled his vision for an ambitious, imaginative government, and because the ascendant labor movement provided the organizational heft to power a new kind of politics. Mamdani's mayoralty, at least in its early days, will be defined largely by the federal government's hostility toward the city.

But much is within his control, too. Mamdani's ebullience, boundless energy and seeming ability to embody the city recall La Guardia and Koch, the men who set the template for what New Yorkers expect of their mayor. His election night remarks about governing in "prose that rhymes" suggest an appreciation of the workaday tasks in front of him, even if he has no firsthand administrative experience. He has created a genuinely new political force in the city, and while mayors always have their work cut out for them in Albany, the situation seems more favorable for Mamdani than it was for de Blasio in 2014.

Even if he plays his cards well, Mamdani will not be La Guardia; the times are not so conducive. But unlike Dinkins and de Blasio, who were essentially reactive figures, responding to the developments of the Koch and Bloomberg years, Mamdani has a chance to point a way forward. That would be an achievement in its own right.
### How Things Really Get Done
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-york-city-deputy-mayors-on-how-things-really-get-done/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:41.000Z
*New York City mayors get the most glory and the biggest headaches, but they don't govern alone. Supporting every successful mayor (and every struggling one) are deputy mayors whose job is to translate vision into reality, manage crises, negotiate with Albany, wrangle the budget and ensure the massive machinery of City government is actually accomplishing the people's business.*

*Though incredibly powerful, the job of deputy mayor is largely invisible to the public. Most New Yorkers couldn't name a single one from any administration. Yet these are the people who actually run the City, who generally decide which problems get attention and which get deferred, and who ultimately determine whether ambitious policy goals become operational realities or remain just aspirational rhetoric.*

*With New York soon to be led by a 34-year-old legislator with no direct experience in the executive branch, we gathered four veterans of City government — Stan Brezenoff (deputy mayor under Ed Koch), Marc Shaw (budget director and first deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg), Meera Joshi (deputy mayor for operations under Eric Adams) and Maria Torres-Springer (first deputy mayor under Adams) — to distill their hard-won lessons. Their advice is candid, practical and occasionally sobering.*

*Here is what they told us about how to govern New York City — not in theory, but in practice. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

**Vital City:** Imagine Zohran Mamdani comes to you. You have 10 minutes to give him your insight on the most important thing to understand about governing the city. What do you tell him?

**Marc Shaw:** To me, the most important thing is to understand Albany. Running the City, you need to understand how Albany works because it's where policy and budget decisions get made. All the things he is fighting for require cooperation and working with Albany. Having an Albany strategy is probably the most important thing for implementing the specific agenda items he's run his campaign on.

**Maria Torres-Springer:** I would remind him that personnel is policy — that an administration's success hinges not just on whether you hire and retain the right people, but whether they are in the right formation and empowered to advance an agenda. That's about agency heads and deputy commissioners. It's about relying not just on the heroics of a handful of people but on systems that allow those individuals to do their best work over a long stretch of time.

**VC:** Can you talk about the last few mayors and how that worked well and where it didn't?

**Torres-Springer:** For me, the ball game is all about reducing friction among people trying to advance the agenda. A structure, where the chain of command is clear. Everyone knows what they are accountable for because governing is not an episode of "The View." You can't just have 20 people chiming in. It all has to be about forward motion.

The Bloomberg administration set a standard for hiring the best people and then empowering them to do their work, even if sometimes that means you fail. The de Blasio administration modeled a way of structuring so that priorities are clear. It was always exceedingly clear what Bill de Blasio wanted to get done, which allowed everyone to mobilize around it.

**Meera Joshi:** The first thing is really about the money. Follow the money, because there's no policy or service that will come to fruition unless there's funding. Hiring your OMB (Office of Management and Budget) director is the most critical thing that has to happen.

Second, hire subject matter experts. They can sometimes be hard to bear because the facts and the policy don't actually align with what you want, and they're giving you the sober truth. So it takes the fortitude to listen to the truth that experts are providing you, then the fortitude to follow through on those recommendations.

## Who decides — the mayor or his minions?

**VC:** How does the mayor make clear what he wants final call on versus what he wants you to have final call on?

**Torres-Springer:** One of the most important decisions a mayor needs to make at the beginning is what the decision-making protocols are, because the volume of decisions is legendary in New York. You have to set up a system. In my mind, it's the 51-49 types of decisions that go to the mayor. Over time, you want senior leaders who can make decisions that are aligned with your values, because if you have to be the daily arbiter of conflicts and decisions, that does not lead to forward motion of your agenda.

**Stan Brezenoff:** This mayor is going to face a pretty unique world. He is entitled to a high degree of paranoia because they will be out to get him. The only thing that comes close to this is the often brutal attention that David Dinkins had on criminal justice.

Secondly, this is a mayor who has no (preexisting) team. It's hard to imagine that his years in the legislature in a small political enclave have given him even the beginnings of a large collection of steady, knowledgeable, experienced people with whom he shares values and approaches.

I think he has to strike first and early and go with his signature issues. Put together teams that will take on the mentally ill homeless, the criminal justice system, the expansion of pre-K and after-school. Hit the ground running, with clear evidence that you're pursuing these things in time frames that can demonstrate seriousness and effectiveness. Honestly, this is a mayor who may not have a honeymoon.

## Which priorities should take precedence?

**VC:** Does Mamdani stage these priorities — rent, childcare, buses, Department of Community Safety — or fire on all cylinders at once?

**Brezenoff:** On the issues you've raised, he should be firing on all cylinders at once. This is what has defined him in the campaign. They will give him no peace, and most of it will be nonrational, biased kinds of attacks. They are going to sensationalize and trivialize and divert the mayor and his key people from focusing on what's truly important.

**Shaw:** Before you even get to priorities, the first issue he has to face is: What kind of mayor does he want to be? There's the issue of being an inside mayor and an outside mayor. He's a natural communicator — that's his skill set. That's going to help define what kind of people he brings into the administration.

The most important thing is to have a structure for how you're going to run City Hall, who you're going to have in charge of that. You have to separate the issues of running the day-to-day of City government versus going out and being the mayor who runs around town.

He's going to have one good thing going for him: There's right now a governor and two legislative leaders in Albany, and all three are very supportive of him. But the governor is going into an election year, and she's already made clear her positions on taxation. So you have to start thinking about the finances of the City and the State from a multiyear perspective.

**VC:** What ought the next mayor's posture be with respect to the Trump administration?

**Torres-Springer:** There's both the art and the science. New Yorkers want to feel, hear and see that they have a leader who is protecting New York City values. Then there are the real nuts and bolts of defense — who the corporation counsel is, how you look at all the levers of government to defend the city, how the budget is going to work. You need to be able to understand how those numbers work and determine what the response is going to be, hopefully in consultation with the State.

Leave the possibility that there are areas for common cause. That might be heretical to some, but I think it's important to also operate in that gear. It's both about the defense and the offense, and they both have to be ready on Day One.

**Joshi:** We are intertwined with the federal government on so many financial aspects, especially with infrastructure. So there are two things that are important. One, who are your surrogates? Who are the businesspeople in New York who have relationships in D.C. and can advocate for New York City without Zohran Mamdani's face on those conversations? And two, we have to partner with the red states that have the same problems as us. Texas has hotter summers. There's flooding in red states. All of these things can bring us together on existential threats to work on getting more resiliency funding.

**VC:** Are there quick wins Mamdani could deliver to demonstrate that he gets the mechanics of governing?

**Joshi:** Street order is always important. He can leverage the good work that happened under the Adams administration and bring home some wins on scaffolding. That's very visual. People see that, and everybody complains about it.

**Shaw:** There are no easy wins for saving money. Saving money comes from the really hard work of figuring out efficiencies in government. That happens when you understand your labor issues and how to deal with your labor unions. Because at the end of the day, the vast majority of money spent is on people's salaries.

**Torres-Springer:** I'd like to make a case not for the quick wins, but for the hard wins. And by that, I mean fixing the plumbing of government. So many great ideas, bold ideas, crash into the machinery of government. The fixing of the plumbing — how you hire, how you procure, how you leverage technology — is the unglamorous stuff that takes a long time and a lot of painstaking work. But in my mind, it's critical over time.

For example, the process for becoming a City employee is not for the faint of heart. At a time when a new mayor is coming in with a huge coalition of people who want to help and want to be public servants, the stumbling block cannot be that it takes too long to get hired. You commit to fixing it. That allows you to bring in the talent you need and retain them. Maybe government can finally be an employer of choice.

**VC:** How flexible should a mayor be on the how, not the what? We saw de Blasio wanting to do pre-K through a particular tax hike that the governor wasn't willing to do.

**Shaw:** He needs to figure out how to move forward and show progress. But sometimes you need a multiyear mindset. I can't imagine him getting the taxes in his first year, but I can imagine structuring something so that the taxes remain on the table in his second year.

I'll give you an example from the Bloomberg administration. It was right after Sept. 11\. Michael Bloomberg came into office, and in his State of the City speech said he wasn't going to raise taxes that year. Fast forward: We raised taxes 18.5% on Jan. 1 of the second year, and it turned out to be an enormous success.

## Organizing for accountability and results

**VC:** What is good and bad about the current organizational chart at City Hall? Do we have the right number of deputy mayors?

**Joshi:** I do think we have more deputy mayor positions than we need in the current administration. I think of the deputy mayor as the person who is driving the priorities at the agency level. Often, that manifests itself in weekly meetings with deputy commissioners, getting into the nuts and bolts and seeing where there are hiccups.

Every role has to have a purpose, and nobody should have a role where they have no one reporting to them. So "senior advisors," those kinds of positions — if you can't answer what purpose that role has, then it probably doesn't need to exist. Mamdani's going to come in with an unprecedented amount of pressure, and he's following a one-term mayor. So anything that's kind of working already, my advice is to leave it alone. Keep moving. But I would certainly get rid of what I'd call accessory positions that have populated City Hall over recent years.

**Brezenoff:** The history of deputy mayors tells you a lot about the way bureaucracies can grow. In the early days of the Koch administration, there were more deputy mayors than secretaries in City Hall, culminating in a kind of Kochian night of the long knives in which many were removed through no fault of their own. Nobody could quite figure out what each one of them was doing.

It's important for Mamdani to show that he is in control and to be very careful about retention. Because he is running as a change agent, retaining people means he has to be absolutely sure that they're in accord with his vision and with his zeal to make change.

But if he's careful in his most important selections — OMB, first deputy mayor, his economic development person — those people can help fill those gaps. Just a quick anecdote: When I went back to government to improve the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, I applied a model to each of the hospitals that looked at the numbers of vice presidents. I found across the system between 75 and 100 individuals. We couldn't figure out what they were doing. And ultimately, I'm the only person who convinced de Blasio there is such a thing as a good layoff.

I think it's really important that in the transition, you press hard on the Adams people to be very restrained in hiring anyone on their way out the door and even employ a kind of hiring control board. It's a good message to send for a guy who's running on ideology to demonstrate some toughness here.

## Parting words

**VC:** You gave a lot of affirmative advice. What negative advice do you have, if you had to crystallize one "Don't do this" for Mamdani?

**Joshi:** Don't give away your power. This is a huge CEO job. The temptation to be pressured into saying yes becomes a floodgate. Whereas having the strength to say no allows you to retain that power, and at the end of the day that is your greatest tool. Externally, be prepared to disappoint. There are going to be elected officials and people who supported you on the campaign that you cannot please. And that's OK. Because if you start focusing on pleasing them, you're going to give away your power.

**Shaw:** Don't try to run City Hall. First and foremost, because you'll spend your whole day there, and that's a mistake. You need to be an outside person. This guy is a natural outside person. He should do that. When I first came to New York from Albany, Stan Brezenoff and his relationship with Paul Dickstein were my role models. Ed Koch didn't make all those decisions every day. Stan Brezenoff did, and he did it with his budget director. New York City is an enormously complex place to run, and this guy's coming in with very little experience. He needs to find somebody he's comfortable with that he can delegate to and have a strong deputy mayor structure.

**Torres-Springer:** Don't mistake activity for direction. Because the job can happen to you. If you don't have clarity of vision and you don't make sure your team has a maniacal execution of the things that are important to you, it's easy for the job to just swallow up your time, which is the most valuable currency of a mayor.

And the second thing is, don't sleep on culture. A big part of a mayor's success will be whether he can actually create what I've described as a kind of low-drama City Hall where it's very clear from Day One that what is prized is quiet, effective execution and not political theater, not game-playing, not obsession with intrigue. Set a tone from Day One about what is valuable, what is prized and what won't be tolerated.
### Putting Tech To Work for All New Yorkers
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/putting-tech-to-work-for-all-new-yorkers/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:41.000Z
As a candidate, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani seemed pretty tech savvy. His [adept use of social media](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/nyregion/zohran-mamdani-campaign-videos.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) helped him reach a new generation of young voters. But the Democratic Socialist has [studiously avoided](https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) any talk of technology's role in his government or the city's economic future. That's a mistake. Not only is tech [driving the city's post-pandemic recovery](https://nycfuture.org/pdf/CUF%5FTechNYC%5Ffinal.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), it will provide indispensable new capabilities the next mayor needs to achieve his goals.

Some progressives view Big Tech and AI as threats to the working class. That's narrow-minded. New York City's government has a long history of introducing technological innovations that deliver widespread benefits. In 1968, John Lindsay [launched the 911 emergency response system](https://www.nytimes.com/1968/07/02/archives/police-emergency-center-dedicated-by-mayor.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) midway through his first term, an innovation that helped him win a tight reelection campaign. Michael Bloomberg expanded the idea in 2003, launching the 311 nonemergency hotline. The opportunity and the need are even greater today.

To use tech aggressively and responsibly, however, the mayor-elect needs a strategy. I see three areas where he can deliver quick wins while also laying the foundations for future innovations that will empower his government to make tech work for working people. First, Mamdani should reboot promising tech programs that languished under the Adams administration. Second, he can reuse proven technology solutions pioneered in other cities. Third, he must reform how New York City's government builds, buys and uses technology. With this approach, Mamdani can turn the tension around tech into a tool for building the type of city he seems to envision.

## **Reboot: Deliver On Unfulfilled Promises**

New York City was an early leader in using digital technology to improve government. But recent administrations have poorly managed vital programs and neglected essential technology modernization efforts. Mamdani seems to understand that government has to deliver on its promises. Failing to do so undermines its credibility — and the larger project of having a robust public sector that aims to do big things. He can't simply start over.

Mayor Adams leaves behind an unusually long list of tech missteps. He touted cryptocurrency while shutting down City-led programs aimed at closing a persistent digital divide. The New York City Internet Master Plan, launched by the de Blasio administration in January 2020, made a commitment to universal connectivity and called for a City-owned open-access fiber network. That project [was canceled by Mayor Adams](https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-kills-internet-master-plan-for-universal-public-web-access?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 2022 under pressure from telecommunications providers who didn't want their broadband duopoly challenged. At the time of this writing, a [City Council bill](https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=7029043&GUID=1796A95A-4157-4070-A45C-3281D9637135&Options=&Search=&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) requiring the adoption of a new Internet Master Plan with mandatory five-year updates sits on the mayor's desk. The new mayor should work with Council leaders to reboot this essential campaign.

Other flagship Adams tech projects overspent and underdelivered. The MyCity portal was intended to be a one-stop shop for City services and benefits. It was launched in March 2023 with just a single feature — a tool for working parents to find subsidized childcare. But after more than two years of mismanagement and [$100 million](https://nysfocus.com/2025/03/19/mycity-eric-adams-child-care?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in spending, some $70 million of it going to dozens of contractors, only a handful of new services have been added. And many are simply links to existing City websites that have been online for years. The new mayor must prioritize an accelerated timetable for MyCity and direct agency leads to make the business case for it by quickly identifying ways to use it to deliver better services for less money.

What to do with MyCity's most derided app — its AI-powered chatbot? Meant to help the public quickly find answers to urgent questions, the tool instead repeatedly delivered false and misleading information, [dishing out advice to small businesses](https://themarkup.org/news/2024/03/29/nycs-ai-chatbot-tells-businesses-to-break-the-law?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on how to break the law, for instance. The mayor-elect's team might be tempted to step back here. Instead, it should double down and expand the use of chatbots for public engagement. AI technology has improved rapidly since the MyCity Chatbot's release, and AI systems are much less prone to hallucination. The City's own tech experts are also much better equipped to anticipate problems with AI systems through "red team" exercises that simulate attacks and malfunctions to identify risks before they're discovered by the public. But outside help will be essential to success. MyCity's struggles stem in no small part from the cancellation of a [master services contract for digital design, service design and communications design](https://www.nyc.gov/site/opportunity/news/022/doitt-releases-government-x-design-request-proposals?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/0) in 2019 by Jessica Tisch — then the City's tech lead, now police commissioner — which deprived the city of essential expertise in AI interaction. And drawing on intergovernmental municipal collaboratives like the [Government AI Coalition](https://www.sanjoseca.gov/your-government/departments-offices/information-technology/ai-reviews-algorithm-register/govai-coalition?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) can help New York City avoid mistakes others have already made.

## **Reuse: Copy What's Already Working in Other Cities**

Step two is to borrow technology solutions that are already working in other cities. While New York City often leads in municipal innovation, its size and complexity make it a tough place for startups and social entrepreneurs to test emerging technologies. Smaller cities and cities outside the U.S. are often able to experiment and learn what works more quickly. For instance, the New York City Civic Engagement Commission borrowed Barcelona's successful Decidim platform to [power the 2025-2027 participatory budgeting cycle](https://www.participate.nyc.gov/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which invites New Yorkers to help decide how to spend part of the City's budget. That tool grew out of the citizen assemblies of the M15 and Occupy era, making it easy for local governments to run massive participatory deliberations online.

Nowhere is the opportunity to learn from elsewhere clearer than 311, which itself was proven out in Baltimore in the late 1990s before Mike Bloomberg's administration imported it to the Big Apple in 2003\. The [mayor-elect criticized the aging service](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/07/17/mamdani-business-real-estate-meetings/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in a campaign stop with tech executives, "noting that he can track his DoorDash orders from the restaurant to his door but the public 311 service request system can't do anything similar."

Here, New York might look to Beijing's 12345 service, launched in 2019\. While clearly a part of the CCP's evolving system of social control, the service [thoughtfully employs AI features](https://www.themandarin.com.au/287678-figuring-out-china-its-still-complicated/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that help operators find relevant information for callers, automate tracking and follow-ups about resolution actions and even help call center staff keep their cool by providing instant feedback on voice stress levels when interacting with angry residents. Expanding the telephone hotline system beyond government services is another innovation that's long overdue. As the city faces more frequent weather-related crises amid the dismantlement of FEMA, we still [lack a dedicated 211 social services hotline](https://www.gothamgazette.com/130-opinion/7230-disaster-preparedness-requires-a-211-system-new-york-city-still-doesn-t-have-one?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that can provide referrals to the network of NGOs that provide the vanguard and bulk of disaster relief.

There are also quick wins that can be borrowed from elsewhere to address the quintessential New York City challenges the mayor is focused on.

Consider housing, for instance. While New York City is the global center for proptech innovation — the application of information technology to the real estate industry, which uses AI to boost bottom lines — it has trailed other cities globally in using these tools to provide affordable homes. A major challenge will be expanding the reach of pro-housing zoning beyond the Adams administration's City of Yes program into lower-density parts of the five boroughs. In Los Angeles and more than a dozen other cities, the AI-powered [Housing Policy Simulator](https://www.ternerlabs.org/blog/new-housing-supply-los-angeles?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) developed at the University of California, Berkeley, is being used to explore how changes in land use regulations and financial incentives will impact the bottom line for real estate developers. This is giving policymakers and advocates the evidence to support reforms aimed at boosting the housing supply.

AI will also be critical to helping expedite review and permitting of proposed development. Portland [built a chatbot](https://www.usdigitalresponse.org/resources/streamlining-building-permit-appointments-with-ai?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that makes it easier for contractors to schedule plan review appointments with construction officials. And [Honolulu](https://www.route-fifty.com/artificial-intelligence/2025/05/how-tech-sped-honolulus-housing-permits/405065/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Austin](https://www.constructionowners.com/news/cities-turn-to-ai-to-speed-up-permit-reviews?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have rolled out vendor-supplied AI tools that can scan submitted plans for code compliance and flag issues that need human review, reducing processing time from months to days.

Finally, technology can also be a part of solutions to keep people in homes and end homelessness. The Times Square Alliance, for instance, partnered with startup Ginkgo to develop a case management system for unhoused people that helps district managers coordinate services among the vast network of government and nongovernmental outreach programs that serve them.

Other cities are also using tech to deliver more equitable mobility, if not free buses. The [Southern California Mobility Wallet](https://www.metro.net/riding/mobilitywallet/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) provides up to $1,800 for low-income travelers that can be used to pay for transit, bike share or ridesharing services. What's more, unlike the Fair Fares discount program for New York City Transit riders, credits don't require a dedicated card but can be loaded to any qualifying payment device. Cities in Europe and Asia are starting to pilot automated buses, which have the potential to dramatically reduce the costs of operating and expanding bus services. While import restrictions bar U.S. transit systems from buying the same next-generation buses available overseas, the mayor's team can push the MTA to work with transit authorities in other U.S. cities to standardize the technology for automated buses. Led by New York, the largest buyer of buses in the nation, U.S. cities could collectively create a market big enough to entice domestic manufacturers to enter the market for autonomous buses.

## **Reform: Build the Foundations for Government Transformation**

While the mayor should focus on using tech to deliver quick wins, he also needs a plan to rebuild many of the City's core tech systems and use that as a lever to advance [his vision of an efficient and innovative public sector](https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-speaks-to-me-about-abundance?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) over the next four years.

That starts by providing the City's [more than 300,000 employees](https://cbcny.org/research/nyc-employee-headcount?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the modern tools they need to be effective. Managing hardware and software for such a huge workforce, on a shoestring, is no small feat. But City workers face too many obstacles accessing cloud services and AI tools that could boost productivity and drive innovation, and there are too few training opportunities for them to develop skills to use them effectively. Here, the City could partner with CUNY to develop AI skills curricula that can expand the supply of AI-ready workers for the public and private sectors alike. New York City Economic Development Corporation's successful [Cyber NYC](https://edc.nyc/program/cyber-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which focused on cybersecurity training, is one model. Decoded Futures, TechNYC's AI boot camp for nonprofits, which immerses teams in problem-driven AI prototyping, is another. It could easily be adapted for City government teams.

The City also needs to standardize the tech it provides to members of the public. That goes beyond the single point of access envisioned by MyCity to an entire "gov stack" of modern digital public goods like verifiable digital identities, encrypted personal data lockers and secure electronic payments. The public sector equivalent of Google or Apple's clouds, these services are the essential building blocks of 21st century government services. In the tiny, wired nation of Estonia, for instance, people can vote and pay taxes online and keep their personal information up to date instead of entering it anew every time they interact with the government. Other nations, like India and Singapore, use this approach to enable more equitable and effective distribution of public benefits, reduce costs for delivering government services and enable ongoing innovations. But no U.S. city has yet followed suit. New York City could be the first, and it would have the potential to make tech work for working people every day.

Success at either of these efforts depends on getting the City's data house in order. Much of the City's vast trove of digital records is scattered, poorly documented or low in quality. Some agencies, like the Department of Correction, still run mostly on paper records. This increases costs, slows responses and reduces the effectiveness of City agencies while also inhibiting prospects for innovation.

While the Mayor's team may be tempted to think big here, most comprehensive efforts to overhaul data practices in large government enterprises get bogged down. Costs balloon, and many such campaigns are abandoned. A better approach is to introduce modern data practices incrementally and consistently from the bottom up, across lots of small reforms to the City's business processes and governance. In Toronto, city officials have [worked with academics to analyze how data move through government](https://eil.mie.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/TCDM-Paper-v2.0.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for different purposes, like tracking school crowding or coordinating human services. From there, they developed a starter set of data standards, the [Toronto Common Data Model](https://eil.mie.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/TCDM-Paper-v2.0.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and a model interagency data-sharing agreement that together make it easy for others to copy best practices, organically expand the data modernization effort and feed back their own contributions. In the process, this work is also laying the foundations for future AI governance — as better data standards provide the precise documentation and controls City engineers need to define rules and restrictions for what data AI can scan, what the data mean and their permitted uses.

The final reform is overhauling technology procurement — the rules and processes that determine how the City builds and buys technology. Failing to fix structural obstacles here can doom the best intentions elsewhere. Originally designed to reduce graft, New York City's procurement procedures aren't well suited for sourcing innovative technologies. Technical requirements must be spelled out by the City up front, even if officials aren't aware of all the possible solutions. Long delays in decisions disincentivize risk-taking — a technology may be obsolete by the time a contract is issued. And too much emphasis on past performance favors established contractors over startups with better solutions. One promising reform, [challenge-based procurement](https://www.route-fifty.com/finance/2024/05/challenge-based-procurement-just-makes-sense/396942/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), is being rolled out in New York City. This does away with specifying solutions to be delivered by focusing instead on describing a problem to be solved and how success will be measured. Boston is using procurement reform as an excuse to experiment with AI by deploying a chatbot trained on the city's dense stack of procurement rules and procedures, helping government employees expedite their own purchase approvals.

## **Think Big, Act Small**

No New York City mayor can stake their entire agenda on technology. But Zohran Mamdani could be the first to acknowledge that his goals are unachievable, much less on time and on budget, without harnessing the power technology provides to expand government's capacity and agility. To do so, he will need to commit to the investments and reforms I've described.

But he can start small and on point. Tech has immediate potential to advance two of his "big three" pledges — promises to eliminate bus fares and freeze rents for the city's million-plus regulated apartments. Mamdani may or may not get the $600 million to $800 million needed for the MTA to make all buses free, but he can use tech to speed them up — directing the Department of Transportation to fast-track the installation of priority signaling technology to speed buses through traffic and expanding the use of [fixed bus lane enforcement cameras](https://www.nyc.gov/site/finance/vehicles/bus-lane-camera-violations.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to complement the MTA's vehicle-mounted systems. On housing, judges may thwart his demand for the Rent Guidelines Board to freeze rents for four straight years — but there's lots that City Hall's data science teams can do to keep existing tenants in their homes by analyzing records scattered across agencies to target enforcement against deadbeat landlords and [intervene before vulnerable tenants face eviction](https://www.nlc.org/article/2022/04/05/using-open-data-to-prevent-evictions/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Looking further out, the mayor will need to move deliberately but thoughtfully into the AI-heavy future. Rapid advances in "agentic" AI — software bots that can observe the real world, reason and use tools to take action to achieve designed outcomes — hold great potential for redesigning government to do more with less. Hedge funds are already deploying "virtual employees," AI bots that help teams with routine administrative and research tasks. In government, such moves will require much more careful consideration. When do such powerful laborsaving tools become anti-labor weapons? And when and how do humans need to supervise the work done by computers? These questions must be answered, probably sooner than we expect. Failing to do so will mean New York City could miss out on opportunities to improve government. But unless the foundations outlined above are in place, we won't be ready to do so.
### How About Energy Affordability?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-about-energy-affordability-for-new-york-city/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:42.000Z
For a year dominated by talk of affordability, electricity costs have not featured prominently in New York's political debate — unlike elsewhere, [like Georgia](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/us/georgia-election-utility-board-results.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), where they upended elections this week. Events may soon change that. On the day Zohran Mamdani is sworn in as mayor, Con Edison's proposed [almost $400](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/08/new-york-con-edison-disconnections-climate-crisis?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) annual rate hike will take effect. Both [he](https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/brian-kavanagh/con-ed-customers-lawmakers-slam-new-rate-hikes-demand?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Gov. Kathy Hochul](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/keeping-money-your-pockets-governor-hochul-takes-sky-high-utility-costs-and-demands?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are opposed. With nearly [2 million city residents](https://a816-dohbesp.nyc.gov/IndicatorPublic/data-stories/energy-insecurity/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) struggling to pay utility bills, and approaching [a hundred thousand shutoffs](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/08/new-york-con-edison-disconnections-climate-crisis?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) this year alone, skyrocketing electric bills are fast becoming New York's next cost-of-living crisis. Our leaders should be treating them as such.

If Mamdani and Hochul are serious about confronting a [crisis as sprawling as this](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/coming-electricity-crisis-data-brian-deese?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), they will need to join hands. They should start by shining a light onto the powerful institution that actually runs the state's electric grid — the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) — and, specifically, its lack of accountability to the communities it serves. Before rates spike again, the pair should demand reforms giving New Yorkers a real voice in its decisions, organized around a common-sense clarion call: No rate hikes without representation.

So-called grid operators play an underappreciated, behind-the-scenes role, overseeing wholesale electricity markets that determine how resources are paid and managing the power grid. Likened to[ air traffic controllers](https://www.nmppenergy.org/energy-education/rtos-air-traffic-controllers-us-electric-grid?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), they [decide which plants](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nyc-peakers-planned-2025-retirement-remain-online-reliability-must-run-nyiso/700417/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are dispatched to meet demand and run the process for connecting new energy sources as supply.

NYISO is a private, nonprofit corporation — a product of 1990s-era deregulation that [shifted grid control](https://www.ferc.gov/power-sales-and-markets/rtos-and-isos?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from utilities to nonprofits intended to be neutral market actors. In actuality, entrenched interests [maintain an outsize role](https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2024-08/01%5FMacey%5FART%5FFinal.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in NYISO's governance, despite its formal independence. NYISO's [ultimate decision-making body](https://www.nyiso.com/documents/20142/1399438/By%5FLaws%5FNYISO%5F2017.pdf/ec19049e-f8f3-f72d-6460-699f8db53251?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is [its board](https://www.nyiso.com/about-us?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and it counts as directors several former executives of utility companies in New York and across the country, as well as from other energy industry incumbents.

Directors are selected by the board itself or its external stakeholder committees. Those, too, are[ chock-full of incumbent industry members](https://www.nyiso.com/documents/20142/1408883/2025-Committee-Membership-Roster.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Public interest advocates on these committees are even given [less voting power](https://www.nyiso.com/documents/20142/1408883/NYISO-Governance-FAQ.pdf/471f13a1-5def-7358-b0a5-42221906ac0e?t=1546629718621&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) than industry. That's despite [decade-old State proposals](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ny-gov-cuomo-orders-review-of-nyiso/359193/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to reform NYISO's governance, which failed to seriously change these dynamics.

> No rate hikes without representation.

Grid operators deeply influence electricity prices and, thus, our economic security. Nearly[ 50,000 megawatts](https://www.nyiso.com/documents/20142/2223020/2025-Power-Trends.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of clean energy projects — enough to power millions of homes — are stuck in NYISO's process for connecting to the grid. Some have been [waiting](https://earthjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025.07.07-nyiso-letter-to-gov-agencies.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as long as six to seven years. [Experts have called](https://heatmap.news/podcast/shift-key-s2-e5-interconnection-queue?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) these interconnection queues "perhaps the biggest obstacle to deploying more renewables on the U.S. power grid."

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regulates most grid operators, but the Trump administration has made little secret of its disdain for robust oversight. The State's Public Service Commission has a [more limited](https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty%5Fscholarship/2848/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and[ nonvoting](https://www.nyiso.com/documents/20142/1399438/By%5FLaws%5FNYISO%5F2017.pdf/ec19049e-f8f3-f72d-6460-699f8db53251?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), role.

No New Yorker facing rate hikes in the coming years should be comforted by the idea that their interests can or will be adequately protected by today's regulators or outvoted advocates.

Instead, Mamdani and Hochul should demand reforms giving New Yorkers voting representation on NYISO's board. It behooves the next mayor to lead this cause, because the city accounts for [the majority of the state's residents](https://www.osc.ny.gov/reports/budget/fed-funding-ny/low-income-home-energy-assistance-program?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) who are having difficulty paying utility bills and [a third of electric demand](https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/Large-Scale-Renewables/Tier-Four?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Yet NYISO's governance does not reflect these stakes.

The importance of representation in addressing rising electric bills was recently demonstrated just next door. This summer, in the wake of surging prices, NYISO's mid-Atlantic counterpart, PJM Interconnection, [came under heavy criticism](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/business/energy-environment/pjm-electrical-grid.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from elected officials. Citing an "unprecedented crisis of confidence," a bipartisan coalition of nine governors [wrote to PJM](https://www.pjm.com/-/media/DotCom/about-pjm/who-we-are/public-disclosures/2025/20250717-nine-governors-letter-regarding-board-vacancies.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) demanding that two board seats be "proposed by the states" — a call they have [since reiterated](https://www.eenews.net/articles/governors-push-pjm-to-hold-down-power-costs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

> Whether and how electric bills add to New York's affordability crisis will be decided, in part, in a nonprofit's boardroom.

Other states have passed laws reforming grid operator governance. Following its massive electricity blackout in 2021, and after legislators blasted the board's ["good old boys,"](https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2021/02/26/whos-at-fault-texas-lawmakers-grill-regulators-energy-industry-over-power-crisis-but-get-few-answers/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Texas[ granted its governor and top elected officials control](https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex.%5Futils.%5Fcode%5Fsection%5F39.1513?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) over who selects its own grid operator's directors.

New York's leaders should similarly insist on a say in how NYISO is run.

Some may claim that such representation could inject politics into what should be technocratic decisions. Yet NYISO is already making value-laden choices — choices shaped by the incumbent interests privileged in its governance. Moreover, accountability [need not come](https://harvardlawreview.org/print/no-volume/presidential-administration/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at the expense of qualifications and expertise.

Many factors are driving electricity prices, including demand from AI, extreme weather and Trump's rollback of clean energy investments. Tackling this challenge will require a methodical, multipronged effort on the parts of Mamdani and Hochul, with both local and state-level reforms. But even the best policies will be [blunted by a bottlenecked grid](https://law.stanford.edu/2024/10/15/for-a-reliable-affordable-and-clean-energy-system-its-the-grid-stupid/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Accountability for our grid operator's decisions is a necessary step on any path that leads to an affordable energy future. Rather than wait for more hikes, or blackouts, to ignite the kind of accountability crises that plagued the mid-Atlantic region and Texas, the mayor and governor should demand immediately that New Yorkers' interests be represented on NYISO's board.

New Yorkers have left little doubt about an affordability crisis that cannot wait. Whether and how electric bills add to it will be decided, in part, in this nonprofit's boardroom. Leaders who take that crisis seriously should insist that New Yorkers be at the table.
### Which Way Mamdani?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/zohran-mamdani-michelle-wu-and-brandon-johnson/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:41:45.000Z
There's one mayor that Zohran Mamdani doesn't want to be compared to: the last left-wing activist who took charge of a major American city.

In 2023, Brandon Johnson ran for mayor of Chicago on an ambitious agenda that included increasing city spending, reducing the power of the Police Department and raising taxes on the wealthy. When he unexpectedly defeated his moderate opponent, his victory resonated nationally as a triumph for the urban left: A former teachers' union organizer, schooled by Chicago's activist class, had taken control of America's third-largest city.

It's obvious why Johnson is compared to Mamdani. But to anyone who follows Chicago politics, it's clear why the people making the comparison tend to be Mamdani's critics rather than his allies. That's because Johnson's tenure has been, by nearly every measure, a disaster. The migrant crisis undermined his administration from the start, but his mismanagement of it fueled public distrust and helped sink [key spending priorities](https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2024/03/27/bring-chicago-home-fails?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Chicago is not the dystopian city of President Donald Trump's imagination. By [many measures, crime is falling](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8jl969pg7o?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and the population is [starting to rise](https://greatcities.uic.edu/2025/05/15/crains-chicago-business-chicagos-population-is-growing-again/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But Johnson's unwillingness to reform spending has led to the [most severe urban debt crisis in the country](https://www.thelastward.org/p/will-jb-pritzker-side-with-brandon?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It would be one thing if current levels of government largesse produced top-notch city services. Unfortunately, few believe the city delivers competently on core responsibilities like transportation infrastructure or affordable housing, and half of city voters list taxes as a [top concern](https://www.illinoispolicy.org/poll-taxes-no-1-issue-for-over-half-of-illinois-voters-nearly-half-would-move/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). The result is a Johnson approval rating that sits between 14% and 25%.

If Johnson represents the future that critics fear Mamdani will bring to New York, Boston's Michelle Wu offers a more hopeful analogue. The former city councilor was elected in 2021 and is often grouped with Johnson as a part of the ["progressive takeover of big cities."](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/the-progressive-take-over-of-big-cities-is-nearly-complete.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) She ran on [a platform](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/us/michelle-wu-boston-progressives.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that will sound familiar to Mamdani fans: fare-free transit, rent control and climate action.

Importantly, while Wu is more left-leaning than her predecessor, she has a more varied ideological history than Johnson. When she ran for City Council, one of her top priorities was cutting red tape for businesses, and her first vote in office was for a [moderate Council president](https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2013/12/11/michelle-wu-defends-her-decision-to-support-bill-linehan-for-boston-city-council-president/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). As mayor, Wu scaled back some ambitious proposals on transit and policing, prompting criticism from the left that she abandoned her campaign promise for transformative change.

Wu can still point to victories on green infrastructure investment in schools and a major spending boost for [universal pre-K](https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/bostons-free-pre-k-program-gets-20m-boost/2765159/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but those left critics have a point. In polling and a [recent interview series](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/30/metro/boston-michelle-wu-first-term/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by The Boston Globe, most residents say they haven't seen much change in the city, aside from less crime and more expensive rent. The good news for Wu is that it isn't much of a problem; she just cruised to reelection, running unopposed after opponents [failed to galvanize sufficient support](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/boston-mayor-michelle-wu-will-now-run-unopposed-in-her-reelection-bid?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It turns out that pragmatically picking the right political fights and avoiding allegations of mismanagement was enough. The residents of Boston weren't clamoring for sweeping change.

City-to-city comparisons are difficult. Chicago is well over three times the size of Boston, and New York City is nearly three times the size of Chicago. The powers of the mayoralties vary substantially. And all three cities perform differently on key issues like education, crime and economic growth. Still, New York's new mayor can take cues from Wu's successes and Johnson's governing failures.

## Promises and pragmatism

Mamdani can start by avoiding Johnson's excessive deference to the demands made by certain unions and single-issue organizations that dominate the city's left-wing political coalition.

Take education, for example. Chicago's [public schools face rapidly declining enrollment](https://www.propublica.org/article/chicago-public-schools-enrollment-costs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and rising per-student costs. Reform has been a decades-long challenge for leaders across the political spectrum, but Johnson worsened the situation by deferring to the deeply unpopular and overtly political Chicago Teachers' Union, where he once held membership. It may have been unsurprising, but was nevertheless disappointing when Johnson declined to push for the closure of severely [underenrolled schools](https://www.chalkbeat.org/chicago/2025/06/13/chicago-public-schools-declining-enrollment-causes-small-schools-high-costs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=At%20the%20next%20school%20board,70%2C000%20from%20a%20decade%20ago.) while supporting [additional funding](https://www.illinoispolicy.org/chicago-mayor-praises-school-with-just-2-adept-readers-as-example-of-his-values/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to expand the expensive and often underperforming "Sustainable Community Schools" program. The situation turned scandalous when the [school system's CEO refused to take](https://www.chalkbeat.org/chicago/2024/08/14/public-schools-teachers-union-labor-contract-talks-deficit-morgan-park/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) a $300 million high-interest loan to cover the union's new contract demands. Johnson ordered the school board to fire him; he resigned in protest, and Johnson proceeded to appoint a board of union-friendly allies. Meanwhile, the structural problems in the school system remain unaddressed.

Having steady working relationships with the public and private sector unions is foundational to any successful mayorship. But, as David Greising of Chicago's nonpartisan Better Government Association told me, Johnson never understood the "difference between standing one's ground based on principles and having a feel for the trades that need to be made in order to effectively make progress toward those goals." While that tension was clearest with the teachers' union, it extended to other realms — such as when Johnson [refused to lay off any municipal workers](https://news.wttw.com/2025/10/16/mayor-brandon-johnson-calls-617m-new-taxes-close-budget-gap-avoid-layoffs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) despite the city badly needing to cut back on its financially unsustainable staff levels.

Wu handled [these trade-offs much more intelligently](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/04/23/metro/boston-mayor-michelle-wu-union-contracts-negotiations/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Tensions ran hot with Boston's teachers' union during contract negotiations, but she was able to deliver fair wage increases without yielding to less reasonable demands. Municipal workers pushed for increased pension payouts, but Wu wisely rejected them for being [financially untenable.](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/05/23/metro/boston-retired-city-employees-pensions-cost-of-living-increase/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) The police union — a typically less friendly interest group for progressive mayors — [even agreed to major reforms](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/12/13/metro/boston-city-council-unanimously-approves-82-million-police-patrolmens-contract/?p1=Article%5FInline%5FText%5FLink&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in its disciplinary system.

As [Wu put it herself](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/04/23/metro/boston-mayor-michelle-wu-union-contracts-negotiations/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), "We may not always agree on the positions that are taken, or the outcomes that will come from certain changes that are being suggested, but we can all agree on wanting to do our best by the residents of Boston and by our workforce."

That's a good reference point for Mamdani. Supporting working-class New Yorkers should mean siding with unions when they're right on policy or making certain pragmatic concessions to keep City services operating — but saying a firm "no" to demands that unnecessarily drive up costs and undermine [good governance](https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-stationary-bandits-of-new-york?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). For instance, Mamdani plans to build 200,000 units of affordable housing at the somewhat low cost of $500,000 per unit. But building with only union labor, as Mamdani plans to do, [yields a typical cost](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/10/28/zohran-mamdani-union-labor-affordable-housing-charter-proposals/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of $800,000 per unit. If affordability is truly his north star, will some demands from organized labor give way for the greater good?

The economist Mancur Olson coined the term "stationary bandits" to describe how roving warriors settled in early farming communities, extracting goods while maintaining certain basic government services. The writer Matt Yglesias [applies the same logic](https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-stationary-bandits-of-new-york?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to some organizations in New York City, which serve important functions in the city but advocate for certain policies that extract costs from the City.

While Mamdani has generally suggested that labor and the general public aren't in tension, in point of fact they are — in ways a smart progressive needs to address.

For another example, think of the transit union's costly attempt to prohibit [one-person train](https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-mta-subway-transit-unions-train-operation?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) operation, a standard policy in metros around the world. The [onerous crane regulations](https://www.city-journal.org/article/deconstructing-new-yorks-building-costs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that increase construction costs while protecting entrenched construction interests. Or [the recent City Council plan](https://substack.com/home/post/p-174632604?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to make New York virtually the only city in the country to mandate gas-powered appliances installation by master plumbers — a policy that will increase costs for landlords, and consequently renters. Is this the kind of thing an affordability-obsessed mayor will bless or resist?

Mamdani has the opportunity to stand against such banditry because, unlike politicians like Johnson or Cuomo, he doesn't owe his rise to these organizations' endorsements or fundraising. His support came authentically from New Yorkers who were sick of living in a city that feels so unaffordable. But time will tell which path he chooses.

He'll need to show similar flexibility in other areas where his stated principles and pragmatism clash.

The city's largest-in-the-nation public school system has middling test scores and the highest per-pupil spending just about anywhere. [Mamdani has said](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/09/05/zohran-mamdani-nyc-mayor-race-public-school-improvement-policy/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) he wants to better serve parents and students, especially low-income parents and students ill served by the current system. But if he sticks to some of his more rigid campaign pronouncements, that'll be difficult. He's positioned himself as a foe of many charter schools, which serve precisely this population. He's telegraphed resistance toward merging or closing poorly performing, underenrolled schools. And he's said he's against mayoral control of the schools in its current form, a stance that'll make it very hard to go "line by line at every single position" in the Education Department bureaucracy to ensure that they are "actually working towards the betterment of the system."

It's not just unions he needs to be prepared to disappoint — it's his uber-progressive allies with the Democratic Socialists of America. The left political organization has been pragmatic during the campaign, [refusing to denounce](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/30/mamdani-dsa-relationship-nyc-mayor-00628704?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Mamdani when he backed the construction of new jails and apologized for his past criticisms of the NYPD. Their bet is that moderation will be worth it when Mamdani makes good on certain long-standing DSA priorities.

But what happens when Mamdani isn't able to get the State approval he needs to fund the free bus program? Or, if his City-run grocery isn't able to expand and feed low-income residents at scale? Mamdani will need to think critically about which priorities can most cost-effectively improve life in the city, even if it means disappointing his long-standing ideological allies.

## Taxing and spending

So much of this comes back to budgets. Like every other major city in the country, New York City is facing a looming budget deficit that's exacerbated by impending cuts in federal assistance from a hostile Trump administration. One of Mamdani's biggest responsibilities in the coming years will be navigating that situation responsibly.

Michelle Wu has addressed Boston's [budgetary problems](https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/boston-fy-2026-budget-planning-wu/3673238/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with targeted cuts and emphasized, "We're holding steady and ensuring that we're doing things in a really disciplined and fiscally conservative way." She also dialed back some expensive campaign promises like free transit. Chicago, meanwhile, faces a far deeper budget crisis that began before Johnson even took office. The nonpartisan Civic Federation and other seasoned budget watchdogs [have urged](https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2025/08/11/five-paths-to-shrinking-chicagos-deficit?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Johnson to rein in spending before turning to new taxes. But the mayor has largely brushed aside that advice, sticking to his refrain that wealthy Chicagoans need to "put more skin in the game."

It's hard for Johnson to get beyond taxing and spending because he shares Mamdani's belief that the biggest challenge in municipal government is rampant fiscal austerity paired with a supposed tendency to let the rich get away without paying their fair share. The truth is that both Chicago and New York City are the capitals of states with some of the highest [combined state and local spending per capita](https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-local-tax-collections-per-capita/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and government expenditures have increased by [20% in New York City](https://cbcny.org/research/did-you-know?utm%5Fsource) and [58% in Chicago](https://www.illinoispolicy.org/chicago-budget-has-jumped-6b-since-before-covid-faces-1b-deficit-in-2025/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) since 2020\. Residents in New York City face among the [highest combined](https://cbcny.org/research/new-york-still-top-charts?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) income tax rates in the nation.

That doesn't mean Mamdani shouldn't seek to increase spending on certain vital services or pursue tax increases to fund that spending, but he should learn from Johnson's inability to rein in costs in the city.

Johnson's affordable housing policy offers a useful example. While it's not the biggest cost in either city's budget, it is an area where Mamdani also wants to increase spending. Johnson recently pushed for a $1.25 billion loan to support new construction. But he's expressed no interest in reforming a system that spends almost $750,000 to build a unit of [affordable housing](https://citythatworks.substack.com/p/a-better-way-to-build-affordable) — Houston, the next largest city in the country, spends $358,000\. His latest affordable housing policy is [loaded with more onerous design requirements](https://citythatworks.substack.com/p/how-to-make-social-housing-work-in-93b) that will make it worse.

Michelle Wu has increased affordable housing spending too, and Boston has seen its highest [affordable housing production](https://www.boston.gov/departments/housing/housing-initiatives-under-mayor-michelle-wu?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) since the 1990s. Still, construction costs remain high, and overall housing production in the city [has fallen](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/30/business/boston-housing-construction-policy-affordable-housing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). High interest rates and rising construction costs have undermined builders everywhere, but critics say Boston has been hit harder by new green energy codes and stricter inclusionary zoning rules. Both Wu and Johnson have implemented some other good supply-side reforms, like reforming parking mandates. Neither is a model for unleashing a housing boom.

Albany is almost certain to reject raising the debt limit to let New York City borrow the $70 billion Mamdani wants so that the public sector can build affordable housing. If he insists on this approach, he risks looking naive about fiscal constraints — the same political liability that has repeatedly undermined Brandon Johnson. Mamdani can still increase spending on affordable housing construction, but he should [reform the complex design requirements](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/why-it-costs-so-much-to-build-in-new-york-city) that are needed to build. Sean Campion, the director of housing and economic development studies at the Citizens Budget Commission, points to these regulations as a key reason why affordable housing construction is so expensive.

Much has been written about the impracticality of Mamdani's rent-freeze plan. Less covered is Mamdani's misguided desire to enhance the current affordability standards under the 485-x tax credit and zoning for Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH). The tax credit functions as a carrot, cutting taxes for developers that include affordable housing, while MIH makes additional density contingent on providing a certain percentage of affordable units. Importantly, Alex Armlovich, a housing analyst at the Niskanen Center, told me both requirements "are already among the strictest in the country and that all the city needs is more upzoning to scale them." Mamdani has talked a big game when it comes to increasing housing supply. Now, he needs to change his policies to match his rhetoric.

## Nuts-and-bolts

Regardless of whether Mamdani pursues the wisest housing policy or tackles extractive special interest groups, the biggest thing that will determine his fate in his first few years is competency. Will New Yorkers see their city getting and feeling safer? Will they sense the very basic mechanics of government working better?

Listening to Mamdani's rhetoric, he seems to understand that this is how he'll be judged. But understanding the importance of good governance and actually governing well are two very different things.

Some Bostonians criticize Michelle Wu's policy positions, while few argue that she has been incompetent. [Ford Cavallari](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/05/14/metro/michelle-wu-campaign-progressive-police-green-new-deal/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), chairman of Boston's Alliance of Downtown Civic Organizations, describes Wu as someone who "ran as an outsider-slash-reformer" and "ended up governing as an insider." This is the result of a few factors: Wu's long history of political pragmatism, background in business and private consulting and — arguably most importantly — good staff.

On the other hand, even Johnson's progressive allies admit that he struggled to staff his administration with the kind of experienced managers the City requires. [As one put it](https://www.waleed-shahid.com/p/what-mamdani-can-learn-from-chicagos?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the mayor "involved so many people who wanted to feel like they had a seat at the table." That instinct to appease so many loyal factions left his government stretched thin on expertise — contributing to the administration's faltering response to the migrant crisis and to a series of avoidable political setbacks. More than any of his aforementioned policy failures, it was this sense of chaos and mismanagement inside the administration that drove Johnson's approval so low.

To be fair, Johnson has still been able to achieve progressive victories like ending the subminimum wage for tipped workers and mandating 10 days of [paid leave](https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press%5Froom/press%5Freleases/2023/november/paid-time-off-ordinance-passes.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across the city. The left-wing political strategist Waleed Shahid believes these achievements were undermined "by a sophisticated opposition network that dictated the political narrative." Perhaps, but actual results have mattered mightily too.

Wu entered office with a far less entrenched political opposition and, in turn, faced much less negative media. Mamdani will face a more organized and better-funded opposition that is much more similar to Johnson. They will be searching for mistakes, and Mamdani needs to avoid them by not hiring too many of the ideological and inexperienced staffers he's carried on his campaign. Instead, he should follow the example of Bloomberg and even de Blasio by [appointing seasoned staff](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/mamdani-needs-a-staffing-plan) and deputy mayors who command broad respect in their fields. This could mean the administration narrows its ambition to issues like rent control or free buses. But it will result in a more competently run City.

Mamdani's opponents have spent the past year fearmongering about the possible nightmare of a socialist-led city. Mamdani's political identity doesn't mean he'll manage the city poorly. In fact, as the 20th century ["sewer socialists"](https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS428?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Milwaukee and elsewhere show, socialist mayors can preside over a growing city and establish great public works. Mamdani's fate, and that of New York City, hinges less on ideology and more on effective governance that recognizes the need to make trade-offs. Brandon Johnson shows the danger of ignoring such governing complexities, and Michelle Wu is proof that progressives can narrow their governing agenda and remain broadly popular. Millions of New Yorkers voted for a better-functioning and more affordable city. If he's willing to make some tough choices, Mamdani can deliver on that promise.
### A Housing Roadmap for New York’s Next Mayor
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/a-housing-roadmap-for-new-yorks-next-mayor/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:55.000Z
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ran on an affordability agenda. Creating more housing is the single most important way to make the city more affordable — lower rents, or at least rents that rise at a slower pace, would ease by far the largest item in every New Yorker's budget.

At the start of the campaign, Mamdani's housing approach was narrowly focused on a rent freeze for the 1 in 3 New Yorkers whose homes are under rent regulation, plus building 200,000 units of union-built subsidized housing funded by [$70 billion in new borrowing by the City.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/mamdani-seeks-70-billion-of-nyc-debt-to-fund-affordable-housing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

As Mamdani's star rose in the primary, he soft‑launched a technocratic pivot, advocating for upzoning in high‑income neighborhoods and around high‑resource transit stations*.* By the time he spoke to the Association for a Better New York in October, he elaborated that his 200,000 City‑subsidized homes would be "additive" to continued private construction. Finally, after much hemming and hawing, on Election Day, Mamdani endorsed four pro-housing ballot measures meant to reduce the [City Council's post-1989 experiment](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/02/21/eric-adams-charter-commission-development-council/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Mayor%20Ed%20Koch%20had%20warned%20against%20the%20possibility%20of%20member%20deference) with "member deference" veto power over proposed rezonings.

For housing policy nerds, the swell of pro-housing momentum throughout the campaign, one clarification or elaboration at a time, has been encouraging. But there are still pain points:

- **Big bucks:** Mamdani's housing capital proposal is so large that it will require State permission to raise the City's debt cap, potentially starving other important uses of capital funds.
- **Some rents are already too low to freeze:** Roughly 10% of the stabilized stock — an enormous portfolio of prewar outer-borough buildings — is [currently struggling](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-hangs-in-the-balance-sheets) with [costs above income](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-rent-is-too-damn-high-but-also-too-low).
- **Tax foreclosure:** If a rent freeze pushes buildings into foreclosure, the City could be forced to buy out or acquire through tax seizure as many as 100,000 distressed stabilized units. This would consume half of Mamdani's proposed $100 billion housing construction proposal before building a single new home.
- **Deep state words of warning:** Staff at the City's Housing Preservation & Development warn me anonymously that requiring city-funded housing to be built with all-union labor — which Mamdani has pledged to do — will raise housing production costs by 30% or more, [evaporating at least 23% of the city's new construction budget](https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/the-impact-of-prevailing-wage-requirement-on-affordable-housing-construction-in-new-york-city.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) overnight.
- **The "99‑unit problem":** Under state rules for the new mixed-income affordable housing production program, called 485x, costly prevailing‑wage mandates now kick in at 99 units, creating a perverse incentive for developers to [shrink or split projects](https://www.skylineprp.com/post/opinion-new-york-s-99-unit-building-boom-is-a-symptom-smart-tax-lot-structuring-is-the-cure?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to stay below the line.

These are real challenges. The good news is that, with the affordable housing ballot measures now approved by voters, there are three new fast tracks for all-affordable, mixed-income and modest market-rate projects. This should make a big difference on day one. Mamdani should not only support the Department of City Planning's existing pipeline; he should use his bully pulpit to go broader and faster. These new fast tracks also streamline opportunities to grow NYCHA's housing supply, [integrate incomes and entire neighborhoods](https://www.curbed.com/2024/01/our-radical-practical-nycha-makeover.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [build substantial volumes of mixed-income housing](https://www.bostonplans.org/projects/development-projects/bunker-hill-housing-redevelopment?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=The%20proposed%20redevelopment%20of%20the%20BHA%20Bunker,%2A%20%2A%2AGross%20floor%20area%2A%2A%202%2C841%2C000%20sq%20ft) and [directly address NYCHA's daunting $80 billion capital backlog](https://x.com/aarmlovi/status/1631404468309827586?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

That said, the new ballot measures cannot fully[ substitute](https://x.com/aarmlovi/status/1986077330201076172?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for wider ["by‑right" upzoning](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/zoning/zoning-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Most%20development%20in%20New%20York%20City%20happens%20%E2%80%9Cas%2Dof%2Dright%2C%E2%80%9D%20meaning%20it%20follows%20zoning%20rules%20and%20does%20not%20require%20significant%20approvals%20beyond%20NYC%20Buildings.). The faster approval process put in place thanks to the ballot measures — an expedited ULURP — while an improvement, is still slow and costly compared to zoning that just allows projects to be built by default. Projects that make sense, especially near subways, should not be presumptively illegal without special permission.

So what would a genuinely robust pro-housing agenda look like under Mayor Mamdani? It begins with intelligent adjustments to his rent freeze proposal and expands to a more energetic, creative housing and transit production plan.

### 1\. "Pay for" a rent freeze without breaking the system

Mamdani's signature promise — a four‑year rent freeze — tests whether his technocratic turn is real or Memorex. The critical [table 8 in the RGB's annual Income and Expense Report shows that in 2025](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/2025-IE-Study.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), 10% of rent-regulated buildings already report operating costs equal to or greater than their rental income, meaning they're already near the edge of tax foreclosure.

But this promise isn't going away; it's too central to Mamdani's agenda and even identity. So how to make it work?

The Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) is a utility-style cost regulator — essentially a rate-setting public service commission for one million rent-stabilized apartments. Its mandate is to align rent adjustments with changes in building operating costs. That's how rent stabilization was designed to protect tenants and preserve the housing stock.

Over the past decade, that link has been broken. Successive boards have approved 10 straight one-year rent increases below inflation — the [longest continuous real-dollar rent rollback in RGB history](https://x.com/aarmlovi/status/1932544183803199920?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for one-year guidelines. The result is [visible in the data](https://x.com/aarmlovi/status/1984367862560031143?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (Table 8 in the annual [Income and Expense Report](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/research/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) reflecting the RGB's dichotomous coverage of the city's healthiest buildings and the least-healthy. We set annual increases on both new towers whose "market" units are under rent stabilization because of the former 421a tax exemption, and dilapidated tenements originally under the [WWII rent control regime that haven't seen significant rent increases since 1947](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/about/an-introduction-to-the-nyc-rent-guidelines-board-and-the-rent-stabilization-system/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=World%20War%20II%20Era%20Controls). The financially distressed 10% of regulated buildings are [overwhelmingly](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/18/nyregion/nyc-landlords-rent-stabilization.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Older%20buildings%20in%20Manhattan%20that%20were%20fully%20rent%2Dstabilized%20saw%20a%203.9%20percent%20increase%20in%20N.O.I.%2C%20while%20those%20in%20the%20Bronx%20saw%20the%20figure%20decline%20by%200.1%20percent.) fully rent-stabilized prewar buildings in the outer boroughs.

That alarming figure excludes debt service entirely; it reflects only routine costs like fuel, insurance, labor and property taxes. When those outpace income, the maintenance cuts begin: deferred repairs, skipped painting cycles, late tax bills. Once properties fall behind on taxes, the city inherits the problem through what's called [*in rem*](https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/a-closer-look-at-ed-kochs-affordable-housing-legacy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=in%20rem%20housing%2C%20or%20properties%20that%20the%20city%20had%20acquired%20because%20of%20property%20tax%20foreclosure.)[ foreclosure](https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/a-closer-look-at-ed-kochs-affordable-housing-legacy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=in%20rem%20housing%2C%20or%20properties%20that%20the%20city%20had%20acquired%20because%20of%20property%20tax%20foreclosure.). Rehabilitating each building after years of neglect [costs $250,000–$500,000 per unit](https://cbcny.org/advocacy/how-nyc-can-better-track-condition-rent-stabilized-housing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (and usually takes it off the property tax rolls permanently through transfer to nonprofit ownership). Scale that to the 10% of the regulated stock now underwater, and the fiscal math becomes untenable. Without cost-flattening reforms, four consecutive rent freezes amid costs compounding at a typical 3% annual rate risk re-creating by regulatory fiat the [mass tax foreclosures of the 1980s naturally-occurring real estate bust](https://furmancenter.org/files/publications/Revitalizing%5FInner%5FCity%5FNeighborhoods.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

One of the most pernicious myths about the recent history of the Rent Guidelines Board is the claim that Mayor de Blasio ordered his board to do a rent freeze in contravention of the data, and without doing any harm. Everyone seems to forget to [actually check the RGB's historical cost data](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mainfeaturesofrs.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): our [Price Index of Operating Costs would have justified a nominal rent *rollback*](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/2016-PIOC.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), not just a freeze, in 2016 because operating costs (especially energy) fell an extraordinary 1.2% that year ([see Table IV](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mainfeaturesofrs.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)). No press or popular accounts have explained that de Blasio's freezes were within the ordinary cost-based behavior of the board, not a willful political hack job.

Assuming Mamdani insists on ordering a freeze regardless of what the data show, he should at least take pains to ensure a freeze is *paid for* in a legitimate way that will eventually show up in RGB cost data*.* That means lowering operating costs rather than pretending they don't exist or ordering the RGB to ignore them. What would this look like in practice?

- **Property taxes.** Class II multifamily properties — mostly rental buildings — face the most punitive effective tax rates in the city. Even nonprofit landlords, though tax-exempt, are struggling under the remaining operating burdens. Mamdani supports tax reform to relieve Tax Class 2 multifamily buildings of punitive rates in general, but so has every mayor in recent memory.
- **Insurance and scaffolding costs.** New York's unique combination of [Local Law 11](https://sitecompli.com/blog/big-facade-changes-are-coming-to-nyc-heres-what-we-know/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the [state's absolute-liability Scaffold Law](https://www.scaffoldlaw.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), together drive up both construction costs and insurance premiums. [Illinois was the only other state with such a rule](https://www.buildingcongress.com/uploads/research/scaffold/Scaffold%5FLaw%5FReport.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); it repealed the law in 1995\. Studying how that change reduced costs in Chicago would provide an evidence-based path for reform here. It's essential to cut fundamental costs, not just transfer property tax dollars to pay for them, because struggling regulated nonprofits already don't pay property taxes.
- **Rehabilitation incentives.** Targeted tax abatements like the former J-51 program, [now trimmed down and relaunched as the J51-R program](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-25/nyc-relaunches-j-51-new-tax-breaks-fix-aging-buildings-keep-rents-low?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), provide tax abatements for rehabilitating existing multiple dwellings. [Restoring a stronger version tied to Local Law 97 energy upgrades and code compliance](https://cbcny.org/advocacy/how-nyc-can-better-track-condition-rent-stabilized-housing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=J%2D51%20has%20since%20been%20renewed%20in%20a%20more%20limited%20form%2C%20and%20it%20is%20not%20yet%20clear%20how%20many%20owners%20will%20take%20up%20the%20new%20incentive.) would help rescue older rent-regulated buildings — at least the ones that will pay taxes ever again. J-51-R also requires rent-regulated landlords to forego the temporary 2% annual rent adjustments usually available when they make Major Capital Improvements (MCIs) if those improvements receive J-51 funding; applications for both J-51 and [MCI adjustments have both collapsed](https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2025/01/08/hcr-reports-drop-in-mci-applications-post-2019-rent-law/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) since these laws were tightened.

A rent freeze won't be supported by economic data unless we get as lucky as the 2016 board, and may not hold up in court amid tax seizures potentially on the scale of NYCHA's portfolio. But if Mamdani insists, he can credibly "pay for" at least one year by fixing cost drivers that make the system unsustainable.

### 2\. Tie rent guidelines to building quality

Another chronic flaw of rent stabilization is that RGB rent orders flow equally to responsible owners and to "slumlords." The RGB can change that through rulemaking, issuing differential guidelines based on building quality.

The simplest way is to use the existing Alternative Enforcement Program (AEP) enforcement threshold as a quality filter. Buildings with AEP-tier violations — basically the worst 3% to 5% of the regulated housing stock, with conditions so bad that the factual merits of abuse are beyond question — would receive no rent increases. All others would receive adjustments aligned with operating costs.

This approach needs no new data system, avoids subjectivity and directly ties revenue to performance. It would finally recreate a "customer-service" relationship in the regulated market: landlords who maintain their buildings would effectively be rewarded, while chronic violators face a financial penalty that stops short of expropriation.

Politically, it also offers a useful bridge. If we can find a way to pay for a single rent freeze, but not all four years, then in later years, Mamdani can still meet the intent of his promise by freezing the rents of negligent landlords without wrecking 100,000 units or risking a Supreme Court "unconstitutional takings" loss. Mamdani arguably must deliver at least one year of rent freeze, but poll breakouts show his support is highest among market-rate tenants and below 50% among rent-regulated tenants: That means voters are interpreting his promises symbolically, not literally. If he can deliver on at least one true freeze and then functionally ban slumlording with partial freezes (while keeping rent growth reasonable and growing affordable housing citywide) he will have succeeded. The point is to stand up for working people, not to paint yourself into a dangerous corner and put hundreds of thousands of people's homes into financial trouble.

### 3\. Fix the hardship program

There's one more step Mamdani should take to make his rent freeze more practical. State law nominally provides a hardship process for buildings whose operating costs exceed rent income. Roughly 10% of stabilized buildings should currently qualify, but approvals from the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal are nearly nonexistent.

Mamdani has said he supports hardship relief for insolvent buildings. The next mayor should help Albany make that true — through what might be called the [Zohran Odd Lots Law](https://x.com/aarmlovi/status/1984384954617512442?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Require the state to process applications promptly and set increases large enough to restore solvency. That could stop the bleeding for the first 100,000 units near tax distress. (The governor may also be able to share Zohran's podcast clip with DHCR leadership to inspire them to process at least some hardship applications under current law).

Longer term, consider allowing modest rent resets when tenants voluntarily vacate, keeping total revenue aligned with costs and minimizing hardship increases during tenancies.

### 4\. Upzone the subways to boost affordable housing production without City capital funding

This is the logical extension of Mamdani's late‑summer recognition that affordability also requires private construction. Upzoning transit corridors channels that realism into structural reform.

Before COVID, opponents of housing growth claimed new residents would overload the subways. That was never strictly true — and it's definitively false now. The MTA carries about 80% of pre‑pandemic ridership, but hybrid work freed up vast peak‑hour capacity.

The next mayor should use it.

Treat the subway map as a capacity map. Work with the MTA to identify which stations and branches have room to grow and upzone accordingly in high‑opportunity areas. Where trains have space, relax growth controls to match available infrastructure.

MIT researcher Vincent Rollet [estimates that if New York City allowed denser housing](https://vrollet.github.io/files/city%5Fstructure.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — about the level of an R8 zoning district — within a quarter mile of every subway or commuter rail stop, and slightly less dense (R7) zoning within a half mile, the city could increase its housing supply by about 15% and its population by 12%. That extra supply would likely lower rents by roughly 10%, even without cooperation from the suburbs.

Allowing very high density (R12) on the parcels that directly touch subway entrances would do even more — opening up more land for construction, creating more housing and directing more people into the subway system.

Every new apartment built near a half-full subway station brings riders, taxpayers and vitality back to the system. Each additional household pays into the tax base that funds the very services urban residents rely on. The MTA needs riders. The city needs residents. Workers need homes. Transit-oriented development delivers all three.

Finally: Upzoning the transit system will allow mixed-income Mandatory Inclusionary Housing production all over the city, juicing subsidized affordable housing production without HPD assistance. These projects will still face the 485x 99-unit prevailing wage problem, but only Albany can change it. In the meantime, City Hall can at least track and publish where projects are being [downsized ](https://www.credaily.com/briefs/99-unit-building-trend-grows-as-nyc-developers-avoid-wage-rule/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Critics%20say%20the%20policy%20is,buildings%20with%20exactly%2099%20apartments.)or [segmented to avoid the rule](https://www.skylineprp.com/post/opinion-new-york-s-99-unit-building-boom-is-a-symptom-smart-tax-lot-structuring-is-the-cure?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), quantifying the lost units, and using that data to press for a legislative correction.

### 5\. Build new trains using the mayor's power of the purse

We must develop more housing around transit — but also more transit to bring affordable housing within commutable range. The governor controls the MTA, but the mayor can still build subways by paying for them. Bloomberg's 7‑Train extension reached Hudson Yards without federal money, financed entirely through local value capture.

Value capture fulfills Mamdani's instinct for redistribution and preventing private capture of public gains, but in an economically literate way. An [obscure state law passed in 2016 allows the mayor to capture the billions of dollars of land value that new MTA projects create](https://x.com/aarmlovi/status/1483638031043149830?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) through a never-before-used "split-rate land value tax" district mapped around MTA capital projects. Professor Arpit Gupta at NYU Stern, a colleague of mine on the Rent Guidelines Board, has shown that the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway, [despite its $4.5 billion cost for only three stations, created over $7 billion in private land value nearby](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working%5Fpapers/w26789/w26789.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In lower-density areas, we can't expect quite that high of an uplift ratio — but by controlling costs, value capture can still fund major expansions like the Utica Avenue Subway or the Interborough Express.

The next mayor should fund new lines where city land value makes it feasible and use those projects to anchor the next generation of transit‑oriented housing. It can raise billions without a new Albany law—though the MTA must agree to accept the city's money.

## The Path Forward

Experienced policy hands don't need to dampen Mamdani's boldness; we should channel it. He can be the mayor who brings New York back from COVID on every metric: MTA ridership, tax base, jobs, population — and leads the first major city-led subway building spree in a century. The housing shortage is so dire, and the resulting economic damage to the city so profound, that reform in this one area can pay for many sins.

If Mamdani can pair his moral clarity with technocratic consistency, he can turn what began as a movement slogan for temporary rent freezes into the foundation of a durable affordability agenda. Let's help him get it done.
### Why Mayor-Elect Mamdani Should Embrace Mayoral Control of Our Schools
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/why-mamdani-should-embrace-mayoral-control-of-schools/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:54.000Z
In 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio entered office after promising to create Pre-K for All, the nation's largest free, full-day, high-quality universal prekindergarten program. There were 19,000 students in full-day pre-K when de Blasio took office. Eighteen months later, nearly 70,000 children were enrolled; every 4-year-old whose caregiver applied was offered a seat. The City hired and trained thousands of teachers, built outreach programs that reached every corner of the city, developed curricula and instructional standards, expanded bilingual programs and built systems for safety and quality. Pre-K for All is now hailed as one of the biggest wins for New York families in recent memory. And it was only possible because de Blasio had direct responsibility for the schools.

Mayor-elect Mamdani has also made an ambitious promise to our youngest New Yorkers: to provide universal childcare for all children beginning at 6 weeks old. The proposal shows he understands the power of investing in our youngest New Yorkers and their families. Quality early education programs like childcare and Pre-K offer a powerful one-two punch. First, they help children become more prepared for school and have better long-term outcomes in education, health and employment. And second, in a city where childcare can cost thousands of dollars a month, they relieve financial pressure on working parents.

Beyond universal childcare, Mamdani has not yet advanced a detailed children's agenda. But there is one exception: His [platform](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/nyregion/new-york-city-mayors-race-education-mamdani.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) calls for "an end to mayoral control." If he is going to deliver better outcomes for New York's children, he should reconsider and instead fight to retain this essential tool for educational opportunity.

## Life before mayoral control

Before 2002, when then-new Mayor Mike Bloomberg successfully lobbied the State Legislature to grant the City's chief executive ultimate responsibility for the nation's largest public school system, a seven-member Board of Education was responsible for education policy, budget-setting and hiring the chancellor. The mayor appointed two members, with the other five appointed by borough presidents. In addition, 32 locally elected Community School Boards hired 32 local district superintendents accountable to the school boards, not the chancellor. These superintendents hired principals and oversaw local budgets and curriculum decisions.

The system was designed to give agency to communities ill-served by the central bureaucracy — a goal consistent with Mamdani's own goal today — but it did not serve children well. Instead, we saw decades of stagnant student achievement, low graduation rates, racially disparate outcomes and endemic, embarrassing corruption. Chancellors lacked the tools to drive change in failing local districts. And with seven bosses appointed by six different elected officials, it was difficult for chancellors to set clear priorities and a coherent vision. Worst of all, most New Yorkers took this dysfunction for granted.

Mayoral control created a system with a clear chain of command. It rests on the idea that our children deserve the focus of an empowered leader chosen directly by voters in a relatively high-turnout election. The mayor manages the Health, Fire, Police and Sanitation Departments. Surely the same should be true of our schools.

## Mayoral control accelerates affordability and achievement

I can speak to the value of this accountability firsthand. In March 2014, Mayor de Blasio appointed me to serve as deputy mayor for strategic policy initiatives and charged me with making Pre-K for All a reality. And I can tell you that it could never have happened if Mayor de Blasio had not directly managed the school system.

To share one example of many: We needed to quickly open thousands of new Pre-K classrooms in every corner of the city. We expanded existing programs to serve more kids, converted underutilized rooms in schools, rented storefronts, constructed beautiful new buildings on parking lots and other City-owned spaces, took over closed parochial schools and brought charter and private schools into the fold. This required unprecedented coordination between an alphabet soup of agencies, including the Fire Department, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Department of Design and Construction, Department of Youth and Community Development, the School Construction Authority, Department of Buildings, the Administration for Children's Services — and, of course, the Department of Education. Our office built systems to facilitate coordination: to set collective goals, break down silos and hold agency commissioners and the chancellor accountable for results.

It was not easy. But it worked, in large part, because all of those commissioners had the same boss. It is hard enough to make substantial and rapid changes in our schools. To do so when a chancellor is accountable to multiple elected stakeholders, and doesn't even directly supervise the principals of the schools where this work will take place, is just about impossible.

The City's Community Schools Initiative offers another example. Community Schools [boost student achievement and well-being](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research%5Freports/RR3245.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by integrating social supports into schools, so that students can come to school ready to learn. In practice, that means connecting schools to community-based nonprofits that deliver services including school-based health clinics, mental health counseling, after-school and summer programs, English as a second language classes, food pantries and, in some cases, even laundry machines. The strategy is built on a simple notion: Students who come to school hungry, struggling with depression, lacking stable housing or facing similar challenges will struggle to succeed. Community Schools remove those barriers so teaching and learning can happen.

Mayoral control allowed New York City to build the nation's most comprehensive Community Schools system. As deputy mayor, I helped create the Office of Community Schools in City Hall, a central hub that ensured every district operated under a unified vision. Starting with 45 schools in 2014, the initiative has grown to 419 Community Schools serving 173,000 students across every district. The mayor-elect has [committed to supporting these schools](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/10/20/zohran-mamdani-nyc-schools-special-education-homeless-students/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and for good reason. Graduation rates are 7.2% higher than in comparison schools. Chronic absenteeism has dropped significantly, especially for students in temporary housing, whose chronic absenteeism fell 9.3%. Disciplinary incidents dropped. And these gains were concentrated in the highest-need neighborhoods.

Cross-agency choreography was essential to make these schools work, and that depended on mayoral control. For instance, the Department of Youth and Community Development ran the process to select the community-based organizations that coordinate services within each school. The Office of School Health ensured school-based health care. The Department of Homeless Services partnered with schools serving high concentrations of students in shelters. When COVID hit, Community Schools acted as neighborhood hubs for food, internet devices and health care, and as enrichment centers for the children of first responders. Companies stepped up as well. For example, Warby Parker provided free glasses to 65,000 students across all Community Schools, removing one of the most basic barriers to learning.

The benefits of mayoral control continued under Mayor Eric Adams, who launched NYC Reads under the leadership of Chancellor David Banks. Previously, schools selected their own reading curricula, and quality varied widely. Too few schools embraced the essential role phonics plays in teaching early readers. NYC Reads requires all districts to choose from among a handful of centrally vetted, phonics-aligned curricula — an approach [that extensive research has proved](https://www.teachingbyscience.com/a-meta-analysis-of-language-programs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to help kids learn to read in the early grades — and works with unions to coach principals and teachers. NYC Reads represents a fundamental change in the relationship between the central administration and its districts — change that requires empowered mayoral leadership and concentrated execution. And we are seeing results. After decades of stagnant test scores followed by declines during the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City students posted a 7-point increase in reading scores [last year](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/08/mayor-adams--chancellor-aviles-ramos-celebrate-grades-3-8-state-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), with the largest gains occurring in the earliest schools to adopt NYC Reads.

Pre-K for All, Community Schools and NYC Reads represent significant steps forward. But make no mistake, we have a long way to go. Literacy rates remain alarmingly low, with persistent achievement gaps between white and Asian students and Black and Latino students, and between students from high- and low-income families. Chronic absenteeism is rising, and the long-term effects of the pandemic are still playing out in our classrooms. The City faces substantial federal funding threats to its schools, as well as systems like health care, food and housing that students depend on. The mayoral-control era should give us confidence that we can manage these challenges: [Since 2002](https://infohub.nyced.org/reports/academics/graduation-results?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the graduation gap between Black and white students has decreased by 13.3 points, and the difference between Hispanic and white students dropped from 26.7 points to 12.6 points. Overall, the dropout rate has gone from 18.5% to 4.8%.

Without mayoral authority, the urgent work of improving achievement and reducing gaps would be subject to the whims of local political interests and hampered by the complexity of working across bureaucracies led by multiple leaders with various priorities.

## It is about accountability

Mayoral control's critics assert it locks out the voice of parents, a serious concern. After all, we cannot force change on communities. Durable reform requires deep engagement with the students, parents, teachers and administrators who are closest to the work. The [mayor-elect's platform](http://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) asserts that he would replace mayoral control with "a system instead in which parents, students, educators and administrators work together to create the school environments in which students and families will best thrive."

But while community engagement must be strengthened, it is not incompatible with mayoral control. Today, the city has thousands of avenues for parents to engage directly with their children's education — from Parent-Teacher Associations to School Leadership Teams to Community Education Councils to the Panel for Educational Policy. These bodies have driven [increased funding for special education](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2022/12/1/23488843/nyc-banks-special-education-asd-nest-horizon-path/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), support for immigrant students and [critical facilities upgrades](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2024/01/18/community-groups-help-nyc-upgrade-neglected-school-buildings/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). A smart mayor will listen to these voices not only because it is good politics, but because it makes for better policy. The mayor's authority to execute, combined with the power of parent voice, makes change possible.

Ending mayoral control would diminish the mayor's authority and distribute it among other officials. To his credit, the mayor-elect has made clear that he [does not intend to return](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/nyregion/new-york-city-mayors-race-education-mamdani.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to the system of 32 elected local school boards, though he has been less clear about what comes next. His platform speaks to ["co-governance,"](http://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) but we have seen across the country that diffusing responsibility makes progress less likely.

Indeed, elected school boards are in a very real sense less representative of community voice than the system we have today. Across the nation, school board elections are [plagued with low turnout](https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/visualizing-voter-turnout-local-school-board-elections/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), hovering around 5%-10%, and are increasingly attracting [massive amounts of special interest campaign spending](https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/chicago-school-board-election-money/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). A few activists can take hold of these bodies and use them to force inequitable financing, patchwork policies and subpar achievement.

And perhaps most importantly, weakening mayoral control weakens public accountability. Elections are, after all, the ultimate form of community engagement. If you are not satisfied, you can vote the mayor out. Under the prior system, few people knew their school board members. But everyone knows who the mayor is. In the old system, school board members would point their fingers at the mayor, who would point his fingers at the borough presidents and so on. And at the end of the day, everyone threw their hands up, lamenting that nothing could be done. Making authority more diffuse makes accountability more diffuse.

## There's time to reconsider, Mr. Mayor-elect

The public's trust in government is [historically low](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust-in-government-1958-2024/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), with devastating results for our politics. One reason for that distrust is that, so often, our elected leaders make promises without delivering. De Blasio faced broad opposition to Pre-K for All. Why? Most critics weren't really opposed to Pre-K for All. They thought it would be a waste of money; they thought the mayor couldn't deliver. Critics exploited this cynicism, with [Reason Magazine intoning](https://reason.com/2014/08/30/nyc-mayor-bill-de-blasios-universal-pre/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) "Mayor de Blasio looks out at this vast blighted terrain of waste and broken promises and thinks to himself: 'Time to expand.'"

Instead, mayoral control gave Mayor de Blasio a powerful lever to do what many thought impossible, and by doing so, gave hope to many who discount the ability of communities to come together through their government to make positive change.

Our new mayor-elect will face profound challenges; foremost among these is building systems worthy of our children. This is not the time to weaken his ability to do so. Mayoral control has proved an essential tool for change, not only for pre-K, community schools and reading instruction, but also for equitable school funding, recruiting diverse teachers and many other innovations. As Mamdani continues to develop his priorities, I am confident he will come to appreciate the benefits of the current system.

Mayoral control is not a panacea. But meaningful change can't happen unless the mayor has the authority to drive it, and voters have the authority to hold him accountable for doing so.
### No City for Old Monuments?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/no-city-for-old-monuments/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:52.000Z
Zohran Mamdani has revealed little about where culture fits into his agenda. Monuments offer one test of the Democratic Socialist's willingness to listen to moderate voices, a trait for which he was praised on the campaign trail.

Although it looms smaller in the public mind than the cost of living and public safety, art in the public realm matters in New York City. It gives our common spaces beauty and character and gives us as people a story to tell about ourselves. As such, murals and public sculpture have been priorities for mayors since Greater New York's establishment in 1898\. Mayor Robert Van Wyck oversaw their realization for new courthouses, libraries and museums. Seth Low and George B. McClellan Jr. commissioned them as symbols of honest, efficient municipal government. Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Wagner, Robert Lindsay, Ed Koch, David Dinkins and Michael Bloomberg all recognized art's role as a vehicle for community affirmation and economic development.

Things went sour under Mamdani's progressive predecessor Bill de Blasio, whom Mamdani has called his favorite living mayor. In 2020, a Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers put portrait statuary on trial for allegedly representing racial injustices. Statues of obstetrician and cancer surgeon J. Marion Sims (installed in 1894) and President Theodore Roosevelt (1940) were sacrificial lambs. The Sims was carted off from Central Park to Green-Wood Cemetery. The American Museum of Natural History, the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Public Design Commission oversaw the dismantling of the Roosevelt monument in 2022, at a cost of some $2 million. Both monuments are presently in storage.

The gargantuan Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle was also in the crosshairs, escaping removal partly because of opposition from Italian Americans, de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Iconoclastic crusades under de Blasio focused narrowly on the perceived transgressions of the subjects and on how the sight of a public monument made people feel, even though they often came to the experience with little familiarity with the intricate backstories. A broader range of historical perspectives, supplied to the Mayoral Commission from the get-go, could have provided a more nuanced and educational platform for both internal discussions and ensuing hearings.

Mamdani jumped on the negative bandwagon. [A 2020 photograph](https://nypost.com/2025/07/07/us-news/mamdani-stokes-italian-american-outrage-after-christopher-columbus-tweet-resurfaces/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of him flipping the bird at Angelo Racioppi's 1941 Columbus monument in Astoria hints at what could be in store — a return to the sanctimonious attempts to scour the city for statues that offend one constituency or another and take down those deemed out of step with current liberal mores. (Cuomo called out Mamdani for this gesture in both mayoral debates.)

Mamdani might be tempted to take a "tear it down" route to controversial statues as mayor. This tack would surely rile up a president eager to do battle over progressive cultural causes. Would a renewed battle over statuary be worth it?

Nobody is suggesting Mamdani should suddenly become the city's biggest Columbus fan, or not offer his opinions about the merits of his effigy. But disapproval need not lead naturally to erasure. A better approach would be to support the twinned ideals of education and preservation with the same fervor that some earlier mayors did.

He should start by coming to appreciate how monuments are distinctive urban artifacts with a colorful life patina. Quite apart from the subjects portrayed, and the ways in which formal and spatial aspects augment those meanings, the stories of patronage and process surrounding their realization tell us volumes about the times in which they emerged. In this regard, the art objects are historical exemplars of how officials navigate obstacles daily to make government work. They embody principles like those at the heart of Mamdani's platform. Monuments represent successful outcomes of negotiations among patrons, residents and municipal bureaucracies. The statues have significance on that basis alone.

Each and every monument represents purpose, planning and effort. Bygone New Yorkers invested emotion, time and money to honor a cause significant to them. Those motivations should be investigated dispassionately within the biographical, social and political contexts in which they unfolded. Regardless of whether a memorial meets today's standards of social acceptability, if it was officially accepted, it's part of the City's collection and heritage. The notion of removal should not be entertained lightly. In extreme cases, such as if a Confederate general is being exalted in the town square of a Southern city, a thumb in the eye of its current Black population, it might make sense to have a dialogue about relocating a statue. The vast majority of cases are not that clear-cut, however. What statues — even those that might rub some of today's New Yorkers the wrong way — can teach us overrides any harm they can do to us.

With these facts in mind, the mayor should in good conscience promote actively the work of research and preservation that agencies like the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (specifically, its Department of Arts and Antiquities), the Public Design Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs (Percent for Art Program) have done under the radar for years now, often in collaboration with private entities. These agencies have evolved strategies for outreach, edification, deflection and physical protection. They shepherd in new projects while keeping old ones intact.

The 1892 Columbus at Columbus Circle is a case in point. A hub of ethnic and planning politics since inception, its meanings extend far beyond the symbolic reputation of its subject and the objectives of its sponsors.

The Bloomberg administration understood that any assessment of the statue's vice or virtue had to address its multifaceted significance. In 2012, partnering with the nonprofit Public Art Fund, it mounted the economic development spectacle "Discovering Columbus," an elaborate installation with Columbus at its center. [The exhibition](https://www.publicartfund.org/exhibitions/view/discovering-columbus/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) explored both the checkered Columbus legacy and the New York City story of this monument. It also had a preservation component: conservation of the entire granite, bronze and marble art structure, underwritten by the Fund and implemented by the Parks Department. Long before the 2020 reckoning and removal movements, the Bloomberg people took a productive, mildly avant-garde course of action, then went back to business.

The New York City way with public art is typically laissez-faire — except when it comes to upkeep, if Art and Antiquities and the Public Design Commission have anything to do with it.

"Discovering Columbus" was atypical in its scale, if not in its ambition to protect and enlighten. More routinely, Arts and Antiquities cares for over 800 monuments and plaques, with the Public Design Commission as backup. Some of that burden is taken up by summer conservation apprentices, overseen by Parks staff. These same administrators help fundraise to pay for this work. They also fend off persistent hordes who seek to bestow statues upon parks of their choice. Central Park's typically preferred, with an assumption that the City will take on upkeep. Department gatekeepers also dispatch antigraffiti squads at the first sighting of red paint splashed a monument's way. On the side, Arts and Antiquities organizes temporary exhibitions in parks citywide and displays in its Arsenal Gallery.

In summer 2024, Parks' in-house team conserved Henry Shrady's commanding [1906 equestrian George Washington at Valley Forge](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Continental%5FArmy%5FPlaza%5FBklyn%5Ftd%5F%282019-08-15%29%5F20%5F-%5FWashington%5Fat%5FValley%5FForge.jpg?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at the Brooklyn entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge. The agency's ongoing battle to preserve the monument in the face of repeated assaults from vandals and skateboarders is a heartening example of City government's refusal to surrender to entropy.

New York City's public art cannot just fix itself. The Washington, along with Tony Smith's rotating Alamo in Astor Place and the Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial in Riverside Park (its $60 million of repairs now finally underway), are merely three cases that show the deterioration that invariably sets in. Maintenance endowments and active support from City officials are crucial to deter it.

Spawned by ignorance and neglect, the decay of City art is a palpable, demoralizing sign of municipal failure. Ask Bronx residents who witnessed [the decline of the LoreleiFountain (Heinrich Heine Memorial)](https://www.flickr.com/photos/masnyc/53359023232/in/album-72177720312579979?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the Bronx's Joyce Kilmer Park and celebrated its 1999 restoration by Parks and the "Adopt-A-Monument" program of the Municipal Art Society. Today, newlyweds pose for photos with the fountain as a backdrop. The revitalization of this and other monuments instills joy and pride in place citywide.

Mamdani should follow this inspiring lead, one consistent with his vision of an administration that will deliver on its promise to provide basic services to all. He should actively back municipal agencies that have worked extensively to preserve, through public sculpture, the city's past and present-day vitality. Rather than giving the finger to monuments, he can learn from the complex urban lessons that they have to impart. He can affirm a commitment to an established bureaucratic process for creating and reviewing civic art — not lean into the idea that this ought to be a politician's job.

By celebrating the City's vast collection of artworks, the mayor can quietly but pointedly undercut the misguided premises for the Trump administration's [National Garden of American Heroes concept](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National%5FGarden%5Fof%5FAmerican%5FHeroes?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In affirming that the biographical, local, state and national dimensions of New York City monuments' histories are part and parcel of their significance, Mamdani can beat the president at his own game. He need only declare that the Big Apple's government has cultivated hero monuments for the American people over a prolonged period of time. He can boast, in fact, that the city of Trump's birthplace did it first, did it right and did it better, aesthetically and procedurally. It's a worthy cause for this mayor to consider.
### The Devil Is in the Details (of 911 Dispatch)
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-devil-is-in-the-details-of-911-dispatch/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:39.000Z
On a sunny day in early June 2025, practitioners, policymakers and researchers from across the U.S. gathered at NYU's Kimmel Center to share insights in the growing movement to reassign low-acuity 911 calls from police to unarmed crisis response teams. In his [keynote address](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzMa0%5F9GMQI&list=PLTzHm2AAUMu8QLA-H1mHoRoQkg6IZ4lda&index=2&ab%5Fchannel=ThePolicingProject&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams didn't mince words: New York City, he said, needs to expand its [B-HEARD](https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/b-heard?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) program — which dispatches trained behavioral health teams instead of police officers to 911 calls involving people in crisis — ifit wants to better serve the 1 in 5 New Yorkers with psychiatric illness.

His words were met with applause, reflecting the growing enthusiasm for alternative response programs across the country. Some cities have even created new [Departments of Community Safety](https://www.cabq.gov/acs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to coordinate these teams and other nonpolice responders under one roof. But that enthusiasm — and the enthusiasm for alternative response expressed by Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who wants [to create such a department](https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/zohran-mamdani-social-workers-nypd-mayors-race-interview/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in New York City and send social workers to respond in cases of certain behavioral health crises — stands alongside mounting real-world evidence that cities are struggling to make these programs work.

Those who believe in the promise of alternative response to reduce the scope of policing and offer a more suitable response to a range of social problems must grapple seriously with the practical challenges it introduces to underlying systems, most specifically 911 dispatch. Otherwise, good intentions will collide with messy realities, producing less-than-ideal results.

[A recent audit](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/new-audit-comptroller-finds-over-a-third-of-eligible-mental-health-calls-did-not-get-a-b-heard-team-response-for-untracked-reasons/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by the New York City comptroller found that even in the limited pilot phase, B-HEARD teams were unable to respond to more than a third of eligible calls. [In Louisville](https://www.justice.gov/crt/media/1365351/dl?inline&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), the U.S. Department of Justice found that most 911 calls that could go to behavioral health teams still end up with police. And [in Phoenix](https://www.justice.gov/crt/media/1355866/dl?inline&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), DOJ investigators reported that the majority of behavioral health calls continue to be sent to patrol officers — even when clinical teams are available. In short, cities are building the programs — but struggling to deliver the response.

Policymakers often point to funding gaps, staffing shortages or limited hours of operation as reasons why alternative response programs are underutilized. Those are real constraints, but they overlook something more fundamental: These programs only work if the right emergency calls reach the right responders. That decision largely falls to 911 dispatchers, who are the frontline workers judging which situations are appropriate for unarmed responders and which are not. And when there's any doubt, they often default to sending the police.

Williams understands this challenge well. [In a public statement](https://advocate.nyc.gov/press/nyc-public-advocate-calls-for-expanding-nonpolice-response-to-mental-health-calls-at-hearing-on-bheard?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), he acknowledged, "It can be difficult to discern over the phone what is happening at the scene, and whether there is a risk of harm to the caller or to the responders … It is imperative to ensure that 911 dispatchers are properly trained in how to effectively determine which calls can be sent to B-HEARD."

As more jurisdictions roll out alternative response programs, they're grappling with the same concerns Williams raised. Many have turned to structured protocols — scripts, decision trees and checklists — to guide 911 dispatchers through call diversion decisions, much like physicians now go through [checklists](https://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) when assessing many medical conditions. Protocols can be useful for structuring and standardizing decision-making, but only when they're designed with care, tested against real-world practice and supported with additional forms of guidance and training — elements that largely have been missing from alternative response program implementation so far but urgently are needed.

A structured, rule-bound approach to call-taking isn't a new idea. For decades, public officials and police reformers have treated dispatch as a clerical task that can be mastered through rigid adherence to procedure. In his 1950s textbook, ["Police Administration,"](https://search.worldcat.org/title/police-administration/oclc/1028285?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) influential police chief O.W. Wilson put it plainly: The dispatcher "makes no actual decisions regarding an operation but merely classifies it and applies the routine procedures established by department regulations for this classification in the deployment and assignment of men." That conception is far removed from the practical realities of the job — yet its legacy lives on in today's call-taking protocols that treat complex judgment calls as if they can be reduced to clerical tasks.

To better understand how these protocols function in practice, [we conducted research](http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.70008?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in two cities at the forefront of alternative response: Denver and San Francisco. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork into Denver's Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) program and San Francisco's Street Crisis Response Team (SCRT) program, we found that their protocols can work reasonably well under ideal conditions: when callers provide clear, accurate information, are invested in the outcome of the call and share a mutual understanding of subjective terms like "violence" or "threat."

Most crisis calls, however, don't unfold that way. They're messy, ambiguous and full of subjectivity. In those moments, today's protocols often fall short — and can even become obstacles to sending out alternative responders altogether.

Take third-party calls. These are calls that come from passersby, business owners, neighbors — people who often lack the detailed knowledge that protocols demand. As a dispatcher in San Francisco explained: "You're asking a third-party caller, 'Is that guy who's ranting and raving and throwing stuff out of the gutter suicidal?' and they're like, 'I don't know.'" She noted that in her city, the protocol treated "I don't know" not as a neutral answer but as a risk — automatically escalating the response and ruling out a street crisis team, even when she believed it was appropriate.

Or take calls about "violence." The term sounds clear, but its interpretation often depends on context. As another dispatcher in San Francisco explained, "If someone has a weapon and seems violent, we're not going to send Street Crisis (San Francisco's unarmed behavioral health response team). But that doesn't mean yelling and screaming. That doesn't mean having a stick. As long as they're not brandishing it. So, it can be really subtle." The problem is that today's protocols rarely accommodate that kind of nuance. Most rely on rigid yes/no prompts, and dispatch leaders have largely abdicated their responsibility for helping dispatchers make sense of the wide range of responses they actually hear from callers.

In response to these protocol challenges, we observed a range of adaptations by dispatch staff. Some of the most sophisticated dispatchers developed creative workarounds — reframing questions, stretching definitions or entering responses after they'd decided who to send — to dispatch an alternative response despite the system's constraints. Others, facing similar pressures, defaulted to sending police, either by avoiding the protocol altogether or deviating from it. These varied practices point to a broader issue: The protocols, as currently designed, are not offering consistent or adequate support.

So what is the better way? Our research, and that of others, points the way.

As the police [rulemaking literature](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Police%5FDiscretion/dlgvAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) reminds us, well-crafted rules can play a critical role in guiding officials' discretion and promoting both appropriate and equitable treatment for those who call upon the government. For example, many policing agencies now use vehicle pursuit policies that [structure discretion](https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/the-new-world-of-police-accountability/book259214?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by instructing officers to consider environmental conditions and public safety risks before initiating a pursuit. Dispatch centers adopting alternative response can take a similar approach by redesigning their protocols to account for the messy realities of 911 calls and the nuanced judgments call-takers must make in real time.

First, agencies should refine the questions dispatchers ask, drawing directly from the people doing the work. How do experienced dispatchers phrase their questions to surface need rather than threat? What conversational techniques help shift the trajectory of a call toward alternative response? One dispatcher we spoke with described rephrasing her protocol questions to focus on *what the subject of the call needs* — not just what they're doing. This call-taker believed a small change like this avoided unnecessary police dispatches.

To capture and share this kind of insight, agencies need real feedback systems that help dispatchers learn from everyday calls. That means setting aside time for supervisors and peers to review calls together — not just when something goes wrong, but also when a call goes well — to talk through what worked, what didn't and why.

One promising approach to achieve this, adapted from mediation and conflict resolution settings, is the [Conversation Analytic Role-Play Method](https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal%5Fcontribution/The%5FConversation%5FAnalytic%5FRole-play%5FMethod%5FCARM%5Fa%5Fmethod%5Ffor%5Ftraining%5Fcommunication%5Fskills%5Fas%5Fan%5Falternative%5Fto%5Fsimulated%5Frole-play/9472619?file=17097068&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (CARM). This method provides agencies with a framework to review recordings of real conversations in slow motion and build an evidence base for what conversational practices are most effective. A version of this technique could help 911 centers learn from their own calls and improve the wording of their protocols accordingly. Agencies could start by analyzing their call-for-service data to flag dispatchers who are especially skilled at diverting calls to alternative responders, then listen to how those calls unfold. These kinds of structured feedback loops could help improve protocols and strengthen alternative response programs nationwide.

Second, cities should supplement protocols with more flexible forms of guidance. Rigid scripts alone won't cut it in complex situations. Dispatchers need a principled compass to follow in moments of ambiguity. Take Washington, D.C., where the police department's [use-of-force policy](https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/the-new-world-of-police-accountability/book259214?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) opens with a clear moral anchor: "to value and preserve the sanctity of human life." Dispatch centers similarly should adopt value statements — ones that pair a commitment to safety with a presumption in favor of nonpolice response. The balance between these values is delicate, but making the organization's preferences more explicit would help guide call-takers when the rules run out. Perhaps with such a value statement, the San Francisco dispatcher who struggled over how to handle the call about the man "ranting and raving and throwing stuff out of the gutter" could have leaned on a departmental preference for a nonpolice response in that moment.

This kind of framing matters. Instead of positioning diversion as a neutral sorting task ("send it to the right responder"), protocols could make clear that if a situation *can* be handled without police, *that's* the preferred outcome.

Definitions matter too. Vague terms like "violence," "threat" or "weapon" leave too much room for guesswork. Agencies should clarify what these concepts mean in practice — and ensure they're informed by the real-world experiences of alternative responders. Clearer definitions act as value statements too, helping dispatchers interpret gray areas with confidence and care.

And when a script truly falls short? Dispatchers shouldn't be left to figure it out alone. Agencies should invest in real-time support, like access to supervisors or embedded behavioral health specialists who can help dispatchers think through tough calls in the moment. There may even be a role for carefully designed [AI tools](https://www.policingproject.org/rethinking-response-articles/2025/5/8/part-two-body-worn-camera-analytics-e3zg9?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to assist dispatchers here. Denver, for example, has begun testing software from Corti AI to analyze past 911 calls and better identify ones that could be eligible for diversion in the future.

Integrating alternative response into the 911 system marks a major shift in how cities handle crisis calls — one that's still in its early stages. It's no surprise that initial forms of call diversion guidance have fallen short of what's needed to ensure alternative response reaches its full potential. For these programs to expand, they will require a more sophisticated approach to 911 rule design: one that is grounded in reflection, shaped by frontline insight and open to revision.
### Tough Budget Choices Ahead
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/tough-budget-choices-ahead-for-zohran-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:53.000Z
Out of the campaign frying pan, into the budgeting fire. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani faces the immediate challenge of preparing a Preliminary Budget for the coming fiscal year (July 2026-June 2027) and a Financial Plan for the next four fiscal years by Feb. 1\. Although that deadline may be extended by a few weeks, the new mayor has little time to get his budget team in place and specify his fiscal policies.

This is a complex and sprawling task involving more than $115 billion in annual operating expenses for more than two dozen agencies and over 350,000 employees. Mamdani has made the task even more daunting by making some pricey campaign promises — including making buses free ($600 million-$800 million a year) and providing universal childcare (around $6 billion a year). He wants to pay for these and other priorities by raising taxes on New York City's top earners and corporations, but that could well be a dead letter in Albany, which controls Gotham's taxes. So if he wants to advance his promises and keep the budget in balance, as required by law, then he's got his work cut out.

Budgeting is where, to channel Mario Cuomo, the poetry of campaigning runs smack up against the prose of governing. Our new mayor should show all the people of the city, including the one million who did not vote for him, how he will finance his ambitious priorities while continuing to provide and enhance the basic services on which residents and businesses depend. In order to find the billions he wants to fund his priorities and to convince New Yorkers, including those with high incomes (who provide almost half of the City's personal income tax revenue), that their tax dollars are well spent, the new mayor's budget must show that he is serious about making City government more efficient and effective.

Mamdani understands this, at least intellectually. He [told Derek Thompson](https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-speaks-to-me-about-abundance?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), "As someone who is very passionate about public goods, I think that we on the left have to be equally passionate about public excellence … how we can make government more effective, how we can actually deliver on the very ideas that we are so passionate about. Any example of public inefficiency is an opportunity for the argument to be made against the very existence of the public sector. And so to truly make the case time and time again that local government has a role in providing that which is necessary to live a dignified life, you have to ensure that every example of government's attempt to do so is one that is actually successful."

But theory and practice differ.

Mayor Eric Adams' latest Financial Plan projects a deficit for the next fiscal year of $5 billion, accumulating over four years to $17 billion, which means even without a single new plan, something would have to give. Making matters more complicated, these projections do not sufficiently take into account the precarious condition of the State budget and the impact of potentially draconian federal funding reductions threatened by Congress and President Donald Trump.

Which is to say, even if — and it's a big if — Mamdani is able to get the necessary State legislative and gubernatorial approval for the $10 billion in annual tax increases he seeks, City agency expenses must be revamped boldly and dramatically. Not only will this save money, but it will show that a mayor espousing a social democratic philosophy can provide practical as well as aspirational leadership. The imperative of such a revamp becomes even more pressing if Mamdani's preferred tax increases don't materialize.

Mamdani has said that he would save money by cutting contracts and consultants at the Department of Education. But this is only a drop in the bucket. There are many additional and larger savings and service improvements to be had. It requires rigorously examining the budget, setting aside ideology and being willing to be a tough negotiator with public sector unions and other vested interests.

What do they include?

**Revamping New York City Housing Authority rules and practices**, including narrow job definitions, slow work order processing and generous overtime that delay repairs and boost operating costs above those of rent-stabilized units, as well as stronger enforcement of rent and fee collection and eligibility requirements. NYCHA collects less than 70% of the rent it is owed, loses approximately $100 million a year, has more than 6,000 vacant apartments and takes more than 400 days to complete repairs.

**Changing the culture of the Department of Correction**, which, despite a daily cost of over $1,500 per inmate, leads to violence, mistreatment of inmates and the denial of medical care. The mayor should support the remediation manager, soon to be appointed by the federal court, in overhauling staff training, work practices and supervision. Civilianizing positions and cutting back on overtime could save hundreds of millions. The current plan for closing Rikers requires substantial capital investments but should lead to longer-term operational savings and more humane conditions.

**Cutting the high cost — about $750 per ton — of collecting and disposing of recycling and residential trash.** Collection costs are high due to decades-old sanitation district boundaries that determine garbage truck routes, outdated "productivity bonuses" for staff on two-man trucks that were adopted 40 years ago and excess collection frequencies in neighborhoods that generate relatively little recycling material. Disposal costs are high due to expensive contracts, totaling more than half a billion dollars a year, for the export of waste to distant landfills in other states, necessitated by the premature, politically motivated closing of the Fresh Kills landfill. Exporting should be phased out in favor of reliance on waste-to-energy plants in the region.

**Dealing with the vast bureaucracy of the Department of Education**, with more than 140,000 employees serving more than 900,000 students in more than 1,400 school buildings, plus 274 charter schools receiving public support. DOE's average cost per pupil is [about $40,000 a year](https://nypost.com/2025/08/30/us-news/nyc-doe-projected-to-spend-over-42k-per-student-this-school-year-the-most-in-the-country/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=NYC%20DOE%20projected%20to%20spend%20$42k%20per%20student%20this,year%2C%20according%20to%20DOE%20statistics.), well above national norms, but its scores on national performance tests are middling. Moreover, the schools suffer extensive de facto racial segregation. A [national academic study](https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/reports/nyc-school-segregation-report-card-still-last-action-needed-now?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found New York to have the most segregated schools in the country.

To improve student performance and revive flagging public support for the system requires strategies opposed by the city's teachers union: (1) Shifting the basis of teacher compensation from rewarding seniority to a more flexible system that rewards performance and teaching in high-need schools and fields. (2) Deploying teachers more effectively so that fewer teachers have roles outside the classroom. (3) District lines and individual school zones should be revamped, reducing segregation and allowing the DOE to better allocate students to existing schools with excess capacity.

Despite complaints about crowded schools and an unfunded State mandate to reduce class size, the DOE should already have enough space for its students. However, successive administrations have [spent billions of dollars building new schools rather than facing the political pressure associated with rezoning](https://cbcny.org/advocacy/public-comment-school-planning-and-siting-process?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Mamdani can promote integration, reallocate substantial capital resources to other needs and become a national leader of school reform by pursuing new strategies.

**Getting control over excessive overtime expenses in the uniformed agencies**, notably $1 billion or more at the NYPD alone. Protests, subway personnel surges, parades, United Nations annual meetings and many other events now covered with overtime are not unanticipated and could be built into officers' schedules. Unanticipated overtime often arises when an officer makes an arrest near the end of a shift and must spend unscheduled time processing the arrest at the station and in court. In this situation, overtime can be avoided with flexible weekly schedules that offset hours worked on one long day with fewer hours on other days to avoid exceeding 40 hours per week.

Since [half of all City expenditures are for personnel](https://cbcny.org/research/5-year-pocket-summary?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Year%20Pocket%20Summary-,Fiscal%20Year%202024%2C%2076th%20Edition,%2C%2076th%20Edition%20%28430.54%20KB%29), and since 90% of those personnel are unionized, this and many other reforms will require collective bargaining. The police officers' contract has already expired, and the largest civilian union contract expires within Mamdani's first year in office. There is an opportunity to achieve significant savings early in the new administration.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/26030793?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zj%5F-rj0kK15Y1FIaJ5OG9%5FcDQUT9jJuESsl2minZ%5FnY/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

There are also many savings to be achieved in areas that would not directly affect public employees but have their own strong constituencies. For example, ending business tax incentives like the ineffective Industrial and Commercial Abatement Program (approximately $600 million annually) and limiting property tax exemptions for universities and medical centers to exclude property such as housing that is not directly used for service delivery (approximately $150 million annually).

These reforms have been resisted in the past, but perhaps, just as it took a strongly anti-communist President Nixon to recognize Communist China, the City needs a strongly pro-union and Democratic Socialist mayor to gain cooperation from the public employee union leadership as well as the City Council to make the government upon which all New Yorkers depend perform better and at less cost.
### Mamdani’s Charter School Dilemma
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdanis-charter-school-dilemma/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:56.000Z
New York is living in a historic moment. After winning more votes in a primary contest than any Democratic candidate for New York City mayor in 30 years, Zohran Mamdani has just dealt a humiliating defeat to the once-powerful former Governor Andrew Cuomo by capturing more votes in the general election than any mayor since 1969\. The 34-year-old did so without the support of other major Democrats in his state, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand and state party chair Jay Jacobs. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries demurred until the final weeks of the campaign, as he anticipated his own Brooklyn-based reelection campaign and sensed that something new was in the air.

Mamdani has made mainstream Democrats uncomfortable by calling for an increase in the minimum wage, higher taxes on millionaires and corporations, four years of rent freezes, free childcare for all and free bus service. Having won the election pretty much on his own terms, Mamdani appears determined to chart his own way on the policy front — except, it seems, when it comes to charter schools.

Charter schools are independently run public schools of choice that have been vehemently opposed by the teachers union and Democratic Party stalwarts who rely on the union for support. After their birth on the city scene in the late 1990s, they've seen dramatic growth: There are 286 of them in New York City, educating 150,000 students — 15% of the school population. Because of limits imposed by Democratic lawmakers on the number of charter schools permitted to open statewide, the demand for seats exceeds the supply. By the end of last year, [the waiting list grew to 173,000](http://newyorkcharters.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

When Gov. Kathy Hochul encouraged her Democratic colleagues to raise the cap in 2023, they came back with a hard no. Opponents claim that charter schools are bad for public education because when students leave public schools, they take a portion of the funding with them. Lower enrollments could eventually force some public schools to close.

When Zohran Mamdani was asked whether he agreed with his fellow Democrats' refusal to raise the cap on charters, he indicated that he did. Going along with mainstream Democrats wasn't much of a problem during the election campaign. Andrew Cuomo tried to challenge Mamdani on this issue, but it got lost amid more compelling differences. When campaigning gives way to governing, however, standing against charters could become a problem for a self-identified progressive mayor.

Eighty percent of the students who attend charter schools in the city are from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. A disproportionate number are Black and brown. These children, whose families are a part of Mamdani's affordability constituency, [consistently outperform their peers in regular public schools](https://nyccharterschools.org/facts/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Sixty-six percent of the Black students at charter schools scored proficient in math on recent State tests compared to 38% of those in district schools. In reading, the difference was 58% vs. 39%. How can a progressive mayor —[ wh](https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-speaks-to-me-about-abundance?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)o claimed to be "very passionate about public goods" and said "we on the left have to be equally passionate about public excellence" — ignore such evidence and support a policy that curbs opportunities for students in need of better options?

There is the obvious fact that Randi Weingarten, former president of New York's teachers union and current president of its national parent union, was among the first labor leaders to endorse Mamdani's candidacy. But in this case, the incoming mayor's reaction goes beyond the ordinary calculations of transactional politics. There are larger issues at stake.

Weingarten was also one of the first public figures in the nation to protest the arrival of federal ICE agents at public schools, who were terrifying students and their parents with threats of being detained. In her new book, "Why Fascists Fear Teachers," she takes a forceful stand against Donald Trump's ongoing assault on democratic institutions. Soon, these will be Mamdani's battles. Beyond them, Weingarten and her fellow leaders in organized labor constitute the most significant source of support that Mamdani can rely on to advance his affordability agenda, while other Democrats succumb to pressure from deep-pocketed donors who want to keep taxes and spending down. That said, many members of these same unions have children in charter schools.

The charter school debate, like other points of contention among key political actors, needs time to ripen. As mayoral candidates travel down the campaign trail and get closer to City Hall, ambitious ideas inevitably become tempered by political realities. You can see this dynamic at work with regard to public safety: Where once Mamdani sounded the call to "defund the police," he now embraces Eric Adams' police commissioner Jessica Tisch — much as Bill de Blasio, another avid progressive, appointed Rudy Giuliani's celebrity crime fighter, Bill Bratton, to head up the NYPD.

Over the course of his campaign, Mamdani went from being an unknown assemblyman from Queens to a new voice within the national Democratic Party, which [has been losing registration](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/us/politics/democratic-party-voter-registration-crisis.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in formerly working-class strongholds throughout the country, including New York. His message of affordability obviously has resonated. Weeks before the November election, New York's avowed centrist Gov. Kathy Hochul began to preach the gospel of affordability after she broke with other top Democrats in the state to endorse the young upstart.

Both Hochul and Mamdani can be expected to support regular public schools, as they should. Neither, however, will be able to evade the school choice issue. Black and brown parents will continue to plead for alternatives to failing public schools to which their children are routinely assigned, as 15,000 of them did last September when they marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to demand that State legislators increase their support and raise the cap on charter school enrollments.

The governor and the incoming mayor's relationship will be an interesting one to watch as his inaugural year comes into focus. Mamdani has already demanded more national attention as an alternative to the status quo than any New York mayor since John Lindsay. Hochul's Republican opponent, Elise Stefanik, can be counted on to make charter school expansion a point of contention. A possible Democratic challenger, depending on who it is, could also join the chorus.

Rethinking opposition to charters would not only be good policy — it could well prove to be savvy politics as well. A proud Muslim, Mamdani showed surprising strength against Cuomo among working-class Black New Yorkers, who happen to be among the city's most pro-charter-school voices. If Mamdani wants to create a durable coalition, he needs to keep a hold on these voters.

This is a general concern for Democrats. Recent national assessments revealed that performance in 12th-grade math is the lowest in recorded history (since 1992); [performance in reading is the lowest in 20 years](http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). One-third of the nation's high school seniors do not have basic reading skills. The evidence is more dramatic when you break it down by race and class. Democrats will find it increasingly difficult to ignore the perpetuation of educational inequality and claim to be the party of the marginalized and the disadvantaged.

Charters also happen to be a compromise position when it comes to school choice, given how the movement is sweeping the country. Since 2022, some 30 states have [enacted new laws or expanded existing provisions](https://www.edchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/2025-ABCs-of-School-Choice.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that provide parents with tax support to send their children to private or religious schools. In 2027, a tax credit bill enacted by Republicans in Congress will offer states federal money to do the same for any family whose income is below 300% of their average area income, and governors will have discretion to either accept or refuse the funding. If blue-state governors and mayors insist on opposing programs that offer options for students to attend nonpublic schools at public expense, support for public charter schools may become the only choice for those who want to provide parents with alternatives.

Might New Yorkers be so bold as to imagine that district schools and charter schools could partner in a shared public endeavor for excellence rather than fight it out as competitors in an education marketplace that sorts out winners and losers? New York's progressive mayor and pragmatic governor could stand together for high-quality educational outcomes for low-income families by supporting the expansion of charter schools. If this inevitably leads to the shuttering of underperforming district schools, the resources saved from the closures could be reinvested in remedial programs within those districts while charters assume a larger share of the burden for educating the most academically challenged students.

Such a shift would give economically disadvantaged parents the real choices they deserve and enhance the future fortunes of district schools, charter schools and maybe even the Democratic Party.
### Reality Check: How Safe are Manhattan (and Brooklyn)?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/reality-check-how-safe-are-manhattan-and-brooklyn/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:57.000Z
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez are both up for reelection next week. Bragg is running against Republican Maud Maron and Independent Diana Florence. Gonzalez is running unopposed.

Both men, but Bragg especially, have faced criticism throughout the city and even around the country for allegedly prioritizing progressive principles over urgent crime-fighting imperatives. But is that really the case? What are the Bragg and Gonzalez records in the streets and in the courts these past four years?

Data helps tell the story. And as with all data, they can also mask dynamics. For example, district attorneys do not have to charge every case that the police bring to them. Their job is to assess both the strength of the evidence and the likelihood of success at trial, and this assessment can vary across boroughs depending on the evidence the police present, the nature of the jury pool and the kinds of policies that any one district attorney may have put in place to govern the use of discretion across the office.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25925561?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## The city and the boroughs in national perspective

Let's look at the big picture first. New York City continues to be one of the safest cities in the United States as measured by index crimes, a term that describes the seven most serious violent and property crimes: murder, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and grand larceny auto. Index crimes are the measure used by the FBI to compare crime across cities.

Using this same measurement, if Manhattan — the city's third most populous borough, and its commercial and tourism center — were a city, it would be the 14th safest city in the nation. If Brooklyn — New York City's most populous borough — were a city, it would be the third-safest large city in the United States.

Looking at violent crimes alone, Manhattan and Brooklyn are in the middle of the pack of the nation's 20 biggest cities.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25922287?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Measured by murder rate, Manhattan and Brooklyn are among the safest places in the United States. Manhattan's homicide rate is just 2.6 murders per 100,000, 38% lower than a year ago, and near the historic low of 2.0 in 2018\. Brooklyn suffered 3.6 murders per 100,000, 23% lower than a year ago, and the lowest rate in decades.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25922292?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

It's not only homicide that's down. The number of shootings has also gone down since 2021\. Both Manhattan and Brooklyn have reached new historic lows for shootings, as has the city as a whole.

## Borough trends since 2021

Those are wide-angle snapshots. What about trends since Bragg first won election and Gonzalez was reelected in 2021? There are many similarities among the boroughs, but some important differences between them as well.

[Assaults are at a historically high level in New York City](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-state-of-crime-in-new-york-city-at-midyear-2025), registering totals not seen in two decades. Much of their increase happened right after the city hit prepandemic lows in 2019 — but the growth since 2021 has been significant as well. Manhattan's increase over that time period has been 16.4%, which is the smallest increase among the five boroughs. Brooklyn's increase over that period was 26.3%, the second-smallest.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25922090?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

While assaults are cause for serious worry, assaults involving firearms are on the decline. Since 2021, shootings in the city have dropped by 55%, with Manhattan well outpacing that reduction, showing a 68% drop. Brooklyn's shooting rate dropped by 51% since 2021.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/story/3412846?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

## Justice system performance beyond crime rates

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/aqt-yrprevya35nx_image3-png-auto-format-compress-1776259672026.jpg)

As any viewer of "Law & Order" knows, district attorneys work with the police to control crime. The area over which they have direct influence is in prosecuting offenders. They make important judgment calls about which cases to pursue and how.

Bragg was attacked for a ["Day One" memo](https://www.manhattanda.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Day-One-Letter-Policies-1.03.2022.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (later [revised after a backlash](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/nyregion/manhattan-da-alvin-bragg-memo-prosecution.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) in which he called for greatly limiting pre-trial incarceration; suggested a shift in focus from the length of a sentence to restorative justice programs and other types of accountability; said his office would "not prosecute certain low-level misdemeanors that will not impact public safety," including trespass, fare evasion and resisting arrest for non-criminal offenses; and instructed prosecutors not to prosecute as felonies certain types of robberies.

What is the record of Bragg's office, and Gonzalez's?

**Arrest and declination**

A case begins with an arrest. To arrest a person, a police officer must have probable cause that a crime has been committed. After arrest, the district attorney reviews the evidence to determine whether there is enough to charge — either in a complaint drawn up by the district attorney working with the arresting officer and reviewed by a judge, or, in a felony case, an indictment returned by a grand jury after the district attorney has presented evidence.

A district attorney can "decline" a case because there isn't sufficient evidence to show probable cause that the person committed the crime (sometimes between arrest and presentation, for example, a witness may decide not to testify) or because of an assessment that the likelihood is low that a jury will convict on the higher standard of proof of beyond a reasonable doubt.

Declination rates are also affected by an office's policies to try to make discretion uniform, as in the effort by Bragg in the Day One memo. Manhattan has the city's second highest declination rate for both felonies and misdemeanors, after the Bronx, while Brooklyn has the second-lowest declination rate for felonies and third lowest for misdemeanors.

Manhattan has the second-highest percentage of cases declined for both felonies and misdemeanors. The percentage of misdemeanor declinations in Manhattan has skyrocketed since 2021, from 5% to 31%, a trajectory shaped by the policies set out in the Day One memo and well above the citywide average of 21%.

Brooklyn has a low felony declination rate of 6% and is in the middle of the pack for misdemeanor declinations at 13%.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25923282?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Arraignment**

If a district attorney decides to bring a case, either by filing a complaint or presenting the case to a grand jury, the person charged appears before a judge. This is called arraignment: The judge formally informs the defendant of the charge and sets terms of release or detention, and the defendant pleads guilty or not guilty.

Brooklyn and New York County account for approximately 56% of arraigned cases citywide. Declination rates and arraignment rates are related: as a district attorney declines more cases, fewer cases make it to the arraignment stage. This dynamic is reflected in the modest reduction of Manhattan's share of arraignments citywide since 2021, from 26% to 23%. Brooklyn's share modestly increased from 30% to 32%. The data also show that Brooklyn's share of the city's criminal justice workload has increased and Manhattan's has decreased.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25923175?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Bail, remand and re-arrest**

When a defendant appears before a judge at first arraignment, part of the proceeding entails the judge setting conditions of release or detention. These included being released on recognizance (RoR) — that is, the person is released with no special conditions; supervised release, which means the person is released with some conditions related to participation in the citywide supervised release program; bail, in which the person is released upon paying a sum set by the court; or remand which means the person is detained.

RoR is the most common form of release in the city, with 67% of arraigned defendants. Manhattan RoRs 59% of defendants and Brooklyn RoRs 69%.

Both Manhattan and Brooklyn use supervised release at approximately the rate of the citywide average.

Remand is extremely rarely used — in about 1% of the cases, while judges set bail on defendants about 18% of the time in Manhattan and 11% of the time in Brooklyn, compared to a citywide average of 15%.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25923581?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

In 2019, the state Legislature passed a series of laws that forbade the use of bail in almost all misdemeanor cases and further restricted its use in some other cases. Since then, there have been vigorous disputes as to whether the bail reforms affected crime rates. Comparing rearrest rates over time gives some indication of whether release conditions are affecting crime. In both Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as in the city as a whole, the percentage of people rearrested for a misdemeanor after being released on another charge has remained steady. Between 2021 and 2024, the percentage of people rearrested for a felony has declined citywide (from 22.5% to 18.2%), in Manhattan (from 22.1% to 20.5%) and in Brooklyn (from 25.3% to 22.1%).

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25923653?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Dismissal rates**

As part of the same set of reforms passed in 2019 related to bail, additional reforms were passed related to "discovery." Discovery refers to the obligation of prosecutors to provide a defendant with evidence material to their defense. The new law required that prosecutors produce these materials within a particular time frame: 90 days for a misdemeanor and 180 days for a felony (except murders). Failure to meet these deadlines would result in the dismissal of the case.

Dismissal can happen for many reasons and at any time during the life of a case from arraignment on. Before the passage of the discovery laws, Manhattan dismissed 41% of cases and Brooklyn 54%. Following the passage of the new discovery rules, dismissals in all boroughs rose sharply as prosecutors struggled to meet the time deadlines. 75% of cases in Brooklyn result in dismissal, as do 68% of cases in Manhattan.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25923535?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Conviction rates**

Conviction rates for felony and misdemeanor arrests have improved slightly in Brooklyn but have deteriorated in Manhattan. For Brooklyn, the conviction rate for felony arrests went up from 23% in 2021 to 31% in 2025\. In Manhattan, the conviction rate for felony arrests decreased from 47% to 40%. In New York City, only Staten Island has a conviction rate above 50%, while the conviction rate for felonies is above 80% in the rest of the state.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25923474?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)
### Bringing the Fun Back to Fun City: Mamdani, Mailer and Breslin
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/mamdani-mailer-and-breslin-bringing-fun-to-new-york-city/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:57.000Z
When American politics feel venomous and nearly hopeless, Zohran Mamdani's campaign and million-dollar smile are refreshing. With offbeat ads, clever videos and unconventional events, he is tapping into a lost local tradition and showing that politics, despite the best efforts of most politicians, can actually be fun. The idea might seem simple and frivolous, but it communicates something bigger: in the nation's biggest media market, a place renowned for its outsized characters and frenetic pace, politics should, like the city itself, never, ever be boring.

A recent social media video featured Mamdani musing that if voters think 33 is too young an age for a potential mayor, he was, fortunately, about to turn 34\. His citywide scavenger hunt drew thousands of participants to neighborhoods they might have otherwise never visited. And supporters of the Democratic nominee threw a Mamdani look-alike contest in Prospect Park. The tone and tenor of Mamdani's effort lie in stark contrast to the lumbering sobriety and narrow vision of former Governor Andrew Cuomo.

It's easy to dismiss events that don't look like the traditional rally or press release as "political stunts" — but they have a tried and true history in our politics.

56 years ago, two other colorful New Yorkers brought a zest and mischievousness to the campaign trail far beyond even Mamdani's. In 1969, author Norman Mailer and journalist Jimmy Breslin ran on a joint ticket in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor and City Council president.

The duo made their bid at the tail end of Mayor John Lindsay's first term, after Lindsay's hope of making New York "fun city" collapsed amid political squabbling and rising crime. Many New Yorkers considered late-1960s city life anything but fun. Mailer and Breslin looked to change that.

At the centerpiece of their half-in-jest campaign was an effort to amplify the city's political power by transforming Gotham into the nation's 51st state, with each of the five boroughs' neighborhoods becoming their own quasi-autonomous municipality. The "51st State" candidates barnstormed New York with wicked humor and relentless pugnacity, running a six-week campaign for the ages.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/aqjlarprevya3zl2_690611081-auto-format-compress-1776260480360.jpg)

Credit: Harry Harris / AP Photo. Norman Mailer campaigning.

Mamdani has, perhaps unwittingly, channeled the Mailer-Breslin campaign in both style and substance. The mayoral frontrunner recently hosted a soccer tournament in Coney Island. Mailer and Breslin, meanwhile, proposed a neighborhood World Series of stickball held every weekend on Broad Street more than half-a-century ago. The duo pledged to build zoos in every neighborhood, provide free bicycles in public parks and hold faux jousting matches for youth gang members. The 51st State campaign also suggested a "central-city farmer's markets offering ethnic foods of all varieties," an annual U.S. Grand Prix in Central Park and an attempt to "return national baseball teams to Brooklyn and Manhattan."

Mamdani, like the 51st State candidates before him, brings charm and a sense of humor to the trail. Mailer and Breslin, though, were far less diplomatic than Mamdani, and derided their opponents with piercing, often hilarious, witticisms. "The reason we got into politics is that we knew the one thing we could do better than the other politicians is to lie," Breslin sardonically told reporters. "At least that's what we thought. But we found out we were hopeless amateurs."

When asked about Democratic rival Herman Badillo, Breslin likened his opponent's tenure as housing commissioner under Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. to "being the lookout on the Titanic." The candidates sported pins that declared "the other guys are the joke." And, if elected, Mailer promised to "plead with Mario Procaccino," the paunchy, gaffe-prone comptroller and Democratic frontrunner, "to serve as city greeter." Not to worry. If victorious, Breslin insisted that he would "demand a recount."

The comparisons go beyond form to substance. More than five decades before Mamdani proposed a department of community safety to free the New York Police Department from being forced to address social issues, Mailer and Breslin bemoaned the fact that police were "asked to go out and…patch up holes made in forty years of history."

"The police get all the mistakes of all the people who are supposed to be more important and smarter than us," Breslin told cadets during a speech at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Derelict politicians had "created the problems" but "turn to…the policemen of the City of New York and say, 'you go out and handle them.'" Instead, Mailer and Breslin recommended a system of community-based policing determined on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.

While Mamdani has made free and fast bus service a key campaign plank, the proposals of Mailer and Breslin around transportation would make today's Democratic candidate blush: banning all cars from Manhattan, a monorail ringing that central borough, and a monthly holiday known as Sweet Sunday, which Mailer described as "a day of rest" when "cars will have to stop, the trains will stop, the planes will stop."

Mamdani's idea for free and accessible childcare? Mailer and Breslin promised public day care and nurseries in 1969.

At the heart of the Mailer-Breslin campaign was the candidates' adoration of New York and what Mayor David Dinkins later termed its "beautiful mosaic." Mailer praised the "extraordinary toughness, and intelligence, and wit, and savvy, and brutal cynicism," of New Yorkers, contrasting "the best people" with the "worst administration" in the country. Joe Flaherty, the Mailer-Breslin campaign manager, wrote that at the core of their campaign was "a group of men who loved their city and thought they had a set of ideas that might save that city." Mamdani, too, is clearly enamored of his city and its people, and the grist of his campaign illuminates that passion.

Mailer and Breslin, not unexpectedly, fared poorly in 1969\. Mailer finished fourth behind Procaccino, who went on to lose to Lindsay in November. Breslin also lost badly, though he earned more votes than Mailer and beat future Rep. Charlie Rangel. Despite the loss, or perhaps because of it, their candidacy remains one of the most remarkably eccentric forays into local politics in New York City history.

Mamdani has resurrected the boisterous spirit of the 51st State campaign, but unlike Mailer and Breslin, he is the favorite to win the general election next week. If victorious, his mayoralty may mark the return of something to our civic spirit that, amidst corruption, cynicism and apathy, has been absent for too long: fun. All that's missing is a pledge to make Curtis Sliwa the official city greeter.
### What Came After ‘Drop Dead’
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-came-after-1975-new-york-fiscal-crisis/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:42.000Z
In 1975, New York was a city on the brink of collapse.

[The city lost nearly 600,000 jobs from 1969 to 1976](https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/quarterly%5Freview/1977v2/v2n2article8.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Working class, middle and higher-income New Yorkers were voting with their feet — leaving for the Sunbelt or to the suburbs. By 1980, 800,000 fewer people lived in New York City than in 1970\. Population decline contributed to widespread property abandonment, resulting in increased costs for city government and lost property tax revenue.

Federal transportation and housing policy encouraged the move away from urban centers like New York. Construction of the federal interstate highway system made it easier for city residents to move to Long Island, New Jersey and Westchester and commute to jobs in the city. [At the same time, many federally funded highway projects destroyed urban neighborhoods.](https://www.vox.com/2015/5/14/8605917/highways-interstate-cities-history?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) For example, the Cross Bronx Expressway divided and devastated a series of Bronx neighborhoods. [Redlining furthered segregation and disinvestment, with impacts lasting to this day.](https://a816-dohbesp.nyc.gov/IndicatorPublic/data-stories/redlining/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=In%20New%20York%20City%2C%20many,after%20the%20maps%20were%20created.)

Between 1961 and 1973, federal aid had grown from 4.5% to 21.6% of City revenue. But the end of Great Society programs meant that the City was less able to rely on Washington for funding.

Rather than acknowledging these dramatic shifts, New York continued on its unsustainable course.

City government continued to fund a robust social safety net. New Yorkers depended on mass transit more than any other U.S. city, and the transit system was funded as a public good, with low fares and high subsidies. Free college was provided through the city's public university system.

Strikes by teachers, transit workers, sanitation workers and even the police led to increased job protection, wages and benefits. New York City was living beyond its means.

## The myth of "Drop Dead"

By 1975, when the City could no longer access short-term financing, default loomed. There were draconian budget cuts. Increased transit fares. An end to free tuition. Fewer police officers. Overcrowded public school classrooms.

The recent documentary film ["Drop Dead City"](https://www.dropdeadcitythemovie.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) appropriately credits New York business and labor leaders and Gov. Hugh Carey for their roles in forcing through these austerity measures and saving New York City. But the film's title refers to the role of the federal government. As the fiscal crisis fades in memory, many New Yorkers have come to believe that the City made it back to financial health without any help from indifferent federal policymakers.

The truth is more complicated.

After the state created the Municipal Assistance Corporation as the mechanism for refinancing City debt, New York City and State sought federal assistance to back this debt.

Initially, there was bipartisan opposition. And in late October 1975, President Gerald Ford announced that he would veto any bailout legislation for New York City saying that ["\[T\]he people of this country will not be stampeded. They will not panic when a few desperate New York officials and bankers try to scare New York's mortgage payments out of them."](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/nyregion/28veto.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) The speech prompted the infamous New York Daily News headline — "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

But President Ford never actually said "drop dead," and less than two months after the speech, Congress passed — and [President Ford signed — the New York City Seasonal Financing Act of 1975](https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/sites/default/files/pdf%5Fdocuments/library/document/0055/1669138.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), authorizing the treasury secretary to provide up to $2.3 billion in seasonal loans to the City. In other words, the feds threw us a lifeline at a critical moment.

The help didn't end there. In 1978, with financing authority coming to an end, the City sought long-term federal loan guarantees. President Jimmy Carter — whose electoral vote margin in 1976 came from his win in New York State — won Congressional passage of long-term federal loan guarantees for New York City and [signed the bill at City Hall in August 1978](https://www.nytimes.com/1978/08/09/archives/new-jersey-pages-carter-signs-aid-bill-for-new-york-at-a-gala.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). With continued federal intervention, the City could access the bond market. More importantly, the federal government had signaled its support for New York's comeback.

A half-century later, New York's fiscal and management practices are often held up as examples for other large U.S. local governments. Many of the budget reforms adopted in response to the fiscal crisis — clearer and more accurate financial reporting, multi-year financial planning, multi-year capital plans and detailed collection and reporting and analysis of operational data — are now widely acknowledged best practices.

In other words, Washington gave invaluable assistance with clear conditions to help New York nurse itself back to fiscal health. The stability of the City's finances was essential for New York's economic comeback. Population losses of the 1970s have been fully reversed and, before the pandemic, more people were living in New York than ever before. Neighborhoods that most New Yorkers had given up on in the 1970s have become desirable places to live; indeed, many of these neighborhoods are now unaffordable for middle-class New Yorkers.

## The exception, not the rule

Unfortunately, instead of becoming a model for federal intervention in support of fiscally distressed cities, the New York case has been the exception.

Carter called the 1978 loan guarantees a ["step forward toward the fulfillment of America's national urban policy. It's part of a much larger effort to strengthen the fiscal and the economic base of our communities."](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-bill-signing-ceremony-for-hr-12426-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Fifty years after the federal government helped to save New York, there is little sign of a national urban policy. [President Donald Trump's budget calls for "revitalizing federalism" by eliminating funding for Community Development Block Grants and cutting funding for the Economic Development Administration](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Even the [2024 Democratic platform](https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTER-PLATFORM.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) fails to lay out an urban agenda or a place-based strategy for economically challenged cities.

More recent federal efforts to work with economically and fiscally challenged cities pale in comparison to what was done in New York.

In 2013, Detroit became the largest U.S. municipality to ever go bankrupt. There was no New York-like response by the federal government. Instead, Detroit's state-appointed emergency manager told reporters that, ["\[W\]e have to solve these problems ourselves. The concept that someone else is going to come in and solve problems of our making isn't exactly productive."](https://money.cnn.com/2013/07/19/news/economy/detroit-bankruptcy-bailout/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

The Obama administration did work to help Detroit better utilize existing federal resources and technical assistance and deployed an interdepartmental Community Solutions Team and ["an integrated federal government to align resources, cultivate working relationships, and streamline communications."](https://kresge.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/building-and-restoring-civic-capacity.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) But there was no increase in aid or loan guarantees or short-term financing.

The Obama administration also deployed a team to work with Chester, Pennsylvania — a Philadelphia suburb where 70% of residents are Black and 30% of residents are living in poverty — on a series of initiatives, [including](https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/research-action-lab/projects/strong-cities-strong-communities/sc2-designated-cities-rounds-i-2013-15-and-ii-2014-16/chester-pennsylvania?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) development of a downtown revitalization plan, opening a local grocery store and the demolition of an abandoned hotel. [But Chester had spent nearly two decades under state fiscal oversight and had made little progress.](https://www.chesterreceivership.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[In 2021, President Joe Biden visited Chester — a half-hour drive from his Delaware home — in one of his first stops after proposing the American Rescue Plan.](https://6abc.com/president-biden-visiting-chester-pennsylvania-national-tour-stimulus-package-american-rescue-plan-act-of-2021/10422009/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Less than two years later, Chester's state-appointed receiver filed for bankruptcy. While many local governments have unfunded pension obligations, Chester simply had no money left to pay pension benefits, and the cost of retiree health care exceeded the cost of active employee health care.

There was no special federal effort to support Chester. But American Rescue Plan funding for Chester was critical to avoid deep cuts to city services. With an annual operating budget of approximately $60 million, Chester received more than $30 million in one-time federal support. While American Rescue Plan funds went to all local governments, for fiscally distressed places like Chester, it became a critical lifeline.

With the expiration of American Rescue Plan funding and the potential for an economic downturn, many cities like Chester are at risk. Yet 50 years after New York's successful fiscal recovery, there is no clear federal policy to assist fiscally challenged places.

## Feds to cities: you're on your own

Conditions like those faced in New York, Detroit and Chester are almost always the product of failure at the local level. No amount of federal intervention can substitute for a lack of local leadership.

But the experiences in New York, Detroit and Chester also highlight that the federal government has an important role to play in promoting the fiscal health of American cities.

All cities — but especially economically and fiscally challenged cities — need to tap into the technical and financial support that the federal government brought to bear in Detroit.

Federal intervention in New York and Detroit succeeded because state and local officials were already moving forward with the development and execution of effective fiscal plans. In New York, it was only because of tough fiscal planning that the federal government agreed to play its instrumental role. One-shot federal funding helped Chester, but the benefits might have been limited without a state-appointed receiver. Where states have not come forward to support fiscal planning, the federal government should support technical assistance.

Finally, the federal government must provide aid. In the case of New York, it came through short-term financing and loan guarantees. In Detroit, it was through freeing up existing resources. And in Chester, it was American Rescue Plan funding.

Ultimately, the lesson of the federal intervention in New York is that fiscal and economic comebacks are possible and that the federal government can play an important role. While New York may have been "too big to fail," cities that are collectively home to millions of people shouldn't be written off as too small to save.
### New York’s Next Mayor Must Put Heads Together
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-yorks-next-mayor-must-put-heads-together/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:58.000Z
With early voting underway and election day around the corner, New York City is at a crossroads, faced with a chasmic choice between leaders who differ by generation, ideology and vision for the future. Missing from the discourse, and the candidate platforms, are the time-tested ingredients of New York's success: a capacity for compromise and collaboration in the service of common purpose.

As we head to the polls, let's listen for and learn from the rhymes of history. This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the city's finest moments of civic cooperation: the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), the public-private partnership that rescued New York from bankruptcy.

The fiscal crisis of that era was severe; years of deficits and disinvestment eroded the tax base, drove residents and businesses out of the city and left New York teetering on default. In 1975, when the federal government largely refused to help — 50 years ago this week, the Daily News would memorialize the president's "[Ford to City: Drop Dead](https://www.nydailynews.com/2015/10/29/ford-to-city-drop-dead-in-1975/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)" snub — Gov. Hugh Carey looked to an unlikely coalition of bankers, union heads and local leaders to negotiate New York's survival. Ultimately, the banks restructured the city's short-term obligations into longer-term debt, the unions froze wages and invested their pensions in the new MAC bonds and city officials agreed to budget cuts and state oversight. By staving off collapse and restoring investor and public confidence — over 20 years, the MAC would generate $10 billion in bond proceeds for New York — these agreements stabilized the city and paved the way for decades of growth.

The spirit of '75 was about more than horse trading or financial engineering; it was a feat of civic imagination, rooted in the conviction that seemingly disparate interests — public and private, city and state — must work together towards a better future. 50 years later, New York needs that spirit — one guided by give and take, pragmatism over pieties and shared resolve in the face of shared challenges — again.

Of course, New York today is on incomparably stronger ground than it was half a century ago. It is more diverse and dynamic in every sense, from the composition of our population to a diversified economy powered by a broad set of industries — finance, technology, health care, life sciences, media, hospitality, the arts and a multi-billion nonprofit sector that employs one in five New Yorkers. That dynamism is a source of strength; it has also outpaced investments in the physical and social infrastructure needed to sustain it, driving the cost of living, especially the cost of housing, beyond the reach of many.

When the shocks of recent decades — 9/11, the financial crash, Superstorm Sandy, the pandemic — tested the city's resilience, New York rebounded. Today's exigencies recall those of the 1970s because they are simmering, stubborn and structural: Housing and childcare that are too scarce and expensive, strained infrastructure, public safety and quality-of-life concerns and looming budget gaps made worse by a hostile administration in Washington, D.C.

So what does the spirit of '75 look like in 2025? We know what it is not: claims of singular management prowess to fix the city, vertical videos suggesting that public and private interests are at odds. Unfortunately, that's what we've often heard from the leading mayoral candidates.

There are[ promising signs](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/magazine/zohran-mamdani-mayor-new-york.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in frontrunner Zohran Mamdani's quiet listening and learning tour. The Democratic Socialist has recently evidenced evolving enthusiasms: for some private sector resources for housing, for Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to remain in the job. In these and other ways, he has signaled that he may just be collaboration, if not compromise, curious.

Fortunately, when it comes to pragmatic partnerships, public officials need not look far for inspiration. New York is awash in creative constellations of every shape and size. To name a few:

**Congestion pricing.** After years of delay, New York became the first U.S. city to adopt congestion pricing — an ambitious effort to reduce traffic, improve air quality and fund mass transit. The policy emerged from lengthy negotiations between state and city leaders, the MTA, business groups, environmental advocates and community representatives. It was an important act of joint problem-solving, and a success: traffic volume and delays are down, transit ridership is up, and the program is on track to generate $500 million in its first year for system repairs and improvements. Notably, the benefits are shared across New York *and* between the city and tristate suburbs. With New York at the center of a regional economy, many future initiatives, from the Gateway tunnel (now [under imminent threat from the Trump administration](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/nyregion/gateway-hudson-river-tunnels-trump-ciattarelli-sherrill.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) and Port Authority Bus Terminal developments to the 2026 World Cup, will require similar alliances.

**The Empire Technology Prize,** launched by[ The Clean Fight](https://thecleanfight.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a nonprofit climate tech accelerator, and supported by the state's energy and research development authority department and corporate sponsors, represents another kind of partnership: one that harnesses public and private investment to catalyze outsized innovation. This relatively modest $10 million prize targets one of New York's greatest climate challenges: the tall and aging buildings that account for 70% of New York City's greenhouse gas emissions, often from inefficient heat systems using fossil fuels. Like many prizes, this one has stimulated far more value than the dollars awarded, including seven demonstration projects deploying breakthrough clean heating solutions. In 1975, "public-private" meant business and government putting their heads together. Today, New York's nonprofit sector is at the vital center. It is the backbone of the city's social safety net, arts sector, and, as the Clean Fight demonstrates, commercial innovation and climate change issues.

**The Brooklyn Marine Terminal** offers a promising model for equitable, large-scale, mixed-use economic development. This 100+ acre industrial site, neglected since the MAC days, is being reimagined through a complex, ambitious and multi-stakeholder planning process involving the state, city, the city's Economic Development Corporation, the Port Authority, local elected officials, unions, private developers and community stakeholders, including local nonprofit advocates and businesses. [The $3.5 billion project](https://edc.nyc/sites/default/files/2025-10/NYCEDC-Brooklyn-Marine-Terminal-Vision-Plan-09-30-2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) seeks to revitalize this stretch of Brooklyn waterfront into a 21st century all-electric port and in the process create good jobs, light industrial and commercial businesses, new public open space, shoreline access and thousands of units of housing, much of them affordable. The lessons are many, among them: Community-led planning, while cacophonous and contentious, is essential. And the creation of expansive, imaginative infrastructure requires private-sector participation.

**Housing, housing, housing.** With a vacancy rate stuck near 1%, [housing is the defining challenge of our time](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-14) — and the linchpin of affordability. Rising to the challenge will require partnerships of every stripe: better city and state alignment on zoning, public land and tax incentives; cooperation between developers, nonprofits and unions to speed production; and creative financing to build colossally more while ensuring it remains accessible. As the passage of City of Yes reminds us, this is an all-hands-on-deck moment to protect tenants, preserve and improve existing stock, and dramatically expand supply. Whether these new initiatives allow NYCHA to repair current units and construct new ones, incorporate housing into many more mixed-use developments or support[ significant rezoning](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/nyregion/amazon-rezoning-queens.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in places like Long Island City, this is the moment for a bold and inclusive consortium.

These examples are different in scope but unified in ethos: the public, private and nonprofit sectors ought not be adversaries but allies — partners in the collective project that is New York City. We recall the MAC of 1975 not for nostalgia, but for renewal: a social compact that commits us to each other and to our common future.
### Janno Lieber on Free Buses, the State of the MTA, and The Promise of the Interborough Express
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/janno-lieber-on-free-buses-the-state/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:07.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/janno-lieber-on-free-buses-the-state) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on October 29, 2025 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

Janno Lieber, Chair and CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs the New York City subways and buses, as well as the Long Island and Metro-North railroads, spoke with The New York Editorial Board on the morning of October 23, 2025\. *(photo via The MTA)*

*Participating journalists: Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Zagare.*

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Smith**  
The weird thing about media these days: it’s now no longer required that people talk to journalists. The ‘Department of War’ just tossed everybody out the other day and brought in some bloggers. So we appreciate you showing up. I think, Nicole, who just literally wrote [the book](https://fordhampress.com/movement-hb-9781531508210.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on transportation, will start us off–

**Janno Lieber**  
Can I spiel a little bit?

All these journalists here — most of you have covered us, maybe not every day, all day, but you’ve seen it. I’m actually very proud of where the MTA is right now. When I came in with a weird episode — Cuomo sort of tapping me, sort of, sort of, and Hochul going ahead with that decision — ridership was very COVID-y, was down in the 20% range. Safety was — Nicole’s, you know, one of the world’s experts on all these numbers — but safety, especially relative to proportionate ridership, was not great. And there was this incredible perception that the city was, that people were not coming back to, especially, Midtown, but the city in general.

We just this week had the JPMorgan Chase opening, where, whatever you think of the building and motivations behind it, it is coming at a moment when Midtown in particular is celebrating an incredibly hot real estate market. Commercial leasing is out of sight.

Ridership is, apples to apples, pushing 80 to 90% of pre-COVID, which is amazing considering hybrid work is a thing and a lot of that additional ridership is coming from folks on the weekends and nights. We put on a ton more service. Safety, I’m sure we’ll get into it, but just the bare statistics, we’re down 12-and-a-half percent versus where we were with COVID, on subway crime. Even assaults, which have been the thing that’s given us all special concern, the idea of a random attack, this year is down — both misdemeanors and felony assaults. And we had our billionth rider \[of 2025\]. You know, we didn’t make that number in ‘20 or ‘21 and in ‘22 and ‘23 we’re making it like two, two-and-a-half months earlier.

These are huge signs of progress, in tandem with the city’s revival. And I think that the comeback of the system — we live in the stats world, and I think all of us are trying to be more substance-oriented in how we evaluate things — but on the numbers, the best subway service in a long time. Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North are out of sight. Metro-North is three times the ridership that they had when I got in. Long Island Rail Road is two-and-a-half times, I think. And they’re all hitting these incredible records. Who would have thought the suburbs would beat the city in some way, numerically, on ridership coming back?

And a lot of that additional ridership is coming from the Bronx stations, which are getting a lot more service and especially reverse-peak service. So people are going to work in Westchester and Connecticut. We changed the pattern of service. And Long Island Rail Road Queens stations, because we cut the price dramatically with [CityTicket ](https://www.mta.info/fares-tolls/lirr-metro-north/cityticket?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)and we provided a ton more service to people in St. Albans and Laurelton and Locust Manor and all those predominantly minority stations along the way on the Long Island Rail Road in the city that used to be told, “No, we can’t stop for you,” in effect.

So I’m really proud. And this is a big year for the MTA. We got congestion pricing done. We got the capital program, the biggest capital program ever. Somebody wrote on social media, which I don’t have, but somebody pointed out to me that I’m no more than “a panhandler in a decent suit.” And I kind of embrace that, because getting money for the MTA is a big deal, and we have succeeded both in the operating budget — and Hochul has emerged as a transit champion, which, you know, for somebody from Buffalo was not always a given. So she’s been for the MTA, a great partner. We’re finalizing the tap-and-ride system, making that huge transition. We are ahead of projections on where we were going to be in terms of the switch to tap-and-ride. We’re at 85% now. We thought we weren’t going to get there, even by the end of this year. So this has been an amazing year, and a cap of a little bit of a positive four-year journey for the city, but, you know, for the MTA, which I always say is like the thing that makes New York City possible because of density — and, so, that’s my spiel.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Thanks for coming. And as soon as you start succeeding with your agenda, someone else comes along with their own agenda. So we’ll start right off with the free buses. A leading mayoral candidate \[Zohran Mamdani\] says he will eliminate the fare on all city buses. Doesn’t give himself a lot of room for compromise there. Do you see this as his decision? And what are the positives and negatives of free buses?

**Janno Lieber**  
Well, the positives are that all the candidates are talking about transit. So we have to start with acknowledging that. I grew up in a New York where the MTA was a problem, but people didn’t talk about it in the forefront of mayoral campaigns the same way they are. So that is a positive, and he has made transit a priority. So I’m going to take that as very positive.

We got to know Mamdani when he first came to the Assembly, because he was interested in transit and he came and pestered us for a lot of data. He got involved with the pro-transit side in the 2023 effort to protect MTA in the city and New York from what’s happening in the rest of the country in transit, which we call the fiscal cliff. That after the money that Washington gave in the COVID era runs out, and you’ve still got lower ridership and your costs have been rising, and your finances — and we see, and we see what’s happening in Philadelphia, Chicago, and so on. He’s been a pro-transit guy, and the others have certainly made transit part of their discussion.

I’m expecting that with something of the magnitude that’s being talked about that there’s going to be a serious policy process. The one thing that I’m going to resist is bumper-sticker decision-making. The ecosystem of transit in New York is a huge thing that makes the city possible and prosperous and more equitable, and everything that we value.

I don’t want to digress into my crazy philosophy, but I think it’s like our town square. A lot of how we form our opinions of whether this community is working or not is based on sharing public space with strangers. So it’s hugely important. We studied congestion pricing for five years, and we knew what the risks were — about where traffic might go, and where air pollution impacts might be. Something of this magnitude deserves to be studied.

Among the issues that I want to ensure gets a lot of attention is — first of all, transit is one of the very few things that makes New York affordable. It’s not an affordability problem, compared to the whole country, people spend a lot less on transportation as part of their budgets. It’s an affordability solution, but we want to make it more so. And the [Fair Fares](https://www.nyc.gov/site/fairfares/index.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) program has been successful with targeting affordability. But what’s good about Fair Fares is you can use that discount if you’re low-income for the subway or the bus.

So one of the first things I want to get into is, why would we say the bus is free, but \[not\] the subway — what does that mean? Are people going to ride the bus instead of the subway? I grew up on the West Side of Manhattan. So the folks who ride the 104 down Broadway instead of people who take the Number 1 are going to get a benefit? What’s that going to do to ridership on the subway? What’s that going to do to the poor people who take a slower, I mean, the lower-income people who are taking a slower form of transportation, strictly because of cost? Is that fair to the folks, mostly working class and low-income, who live in the boroughs and who are using the bus mostly to get to the subway?

Why is the bus the whole focus? Let’s talk about how to make transit— it’s affordable, it’s a good thing it is, but let’s talk about how to make it more affordable. And we do have tools like the Fair Fares program, where we could raise the eligibility threshold. And now one thing that’s like a little shocking is because it’s pegged to the federal poverty level, which is so low, that you have people who are working full-time in minimum-wage jobs who don’t qualify because they’re above 150% of the federal poverty standard, which, of course, is no relationship to New York costs.

So let’s look at whether we can have a hit for equity that is the spirit, I think, that is animating some of this discussion by looking at Fair Fares as an option, rather than strictly looking at, “Let’s make buses free.”

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So it doesn’t seem like you think this is his decision to make — even if he came along and said, “Here’s $700 million a year for the next five years.”

**Janno Lieber**  
Not just about the revenue, which is actually going up above the number that’s cited even in our financial plan. It’s about all these secondary and tertiary impacts, like are people going to take the bus instead of the subway? What does that do to subway revenue? Then you have to look at all these other economic impacts. Am I going to need more buses? Am I going to need more bus drivers? Am I going to need another depot? All these questions haven’t been studied. Let’s study them.

As to the question of whether he gets his side, obviously, a lot of this is about who’s going to provide the money and I think that the legislature is going to have something to say about that in a tough budget year. And at the end of the day, the MTA board sets the tariff policy. Let me just say that again: the MTA board sets the tariff policy, OK. The mayor has four votes on the MTA board.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
You would need bondholder approval. Is that a correct reading of that? I mean, you [pledged ](https://www.mta.info/document/184876?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)the future bus revenues explicitly to the bondholders.

**Janno Lieber**  
I always hate it when Nicole reminds me of something I should have mentioned. But yes, of course you’re right. Of course you’re right that it is a very complicated issue because our revenue bonds, which have been the core of the MTA financing strategy for umpteen years, pledge all the revenues, and dramatically altering that package has issues.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Let me just ask you one last thing on buses. Assemblyman Mamdani often cites the assault figure, that assaults fell 40% on the free bus pilot. They only fell 20% citywide. Do you put stock in that argument, that free buses will reduce assaults because the fare-beater won’t be interacting with the driver?

**Janno Lieber**  
The bus pilot was really limited in scope. What we saw was most of the additional ridership that was cited was, for lack of better term, cannibalized from the buses that still were fare-paying, and to the extent there were new riders, it was people going a block or two. And it also, needless to say, created a lot of confusion and complexity.

We are actually making progress on fare evasion, not strictly by enforcement. A lot of it is communication, just reminding people. Frankly, there’s a lot of confusion. COVID — we told people, “Get on the back of the bus, don’t pay.” Right now, there’s a lot of people who play by the rules in all their other walks of life who see nobody else paying. Literally, we’ve created an environment which is confusing. The [SBS](https://www.nyc.gov/html/brt/html/about/about.shtml?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) bus, where we say, “Don’t tap when you get on, buy a ticket here at the machine.” We have confused people and I worry that even if we don’t do the whole free bus program, the rhetoric itself is going to have consequences. I mean, you ever ride the B-35, Ben? There are people who are getting on and going to church who don’t pay, and part of it is because five people in front of them didn’t pay. It’s a confusing thing.

**Ben Smith**  
Is that a sin?

**Janno Lieber**  
That’s between them and whoever they worship.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Just a really quick follow-up bus question. While we’re talking about mayors: one obstacle to better bus service, free or not, is double parking of cars, which is rampant, something that the NYPD, I think, or the DOT, or somebody in New York City, controlled by the mayor, is supposed to enforce. So why hasn’t enforcement been functional at all, and what needs to change? What have you tried to do regarding the departments and the mayor so far on this?

**Janno Lieber**  
You’re absolutely right that there’s so much the mayor can do, and should do, within his or her power, right off the bat to make buses run faster. You mentioned double parking, but there’s so many things.

There’s [a law on the books](https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/about/nyc-streets-plan.shtml?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) about having bus lanes and busways, and they just violate it. That’s for starters. We’ve gotten the power from the legislature to do these automatic camera enforcements. So we have, not on every bus line, but I think at this point on about 20% or 25% of our bus lines, we have cameras that automatically take pictures of \[cars\] that are violating — double parking, that are in the bus stop, and if they’re there, I think it’s three to five minutes later, when the next bus comes, they automatically get a ticket. It has been successful because we only have, like, 8% recidivism. People get the message when they get a ticket, they stop doing that. So enforcement, yes, but we’re also developing tools outside of the direct enforcement model that can help us clear buses. We need busways, we need bus lanes, and we need the enforcement and maybe the power to have more of these automatic camera enforcements.

**Josh Greenman**  
I have one last thing on buses in the Mamdani promise, which is, he always says “fast and free, fast and free,” I wanted to drill down on that for a second, because you seem to be saying that if you make them free, in many cases, it won’t make them faster. His equation is, make them free, it will enable all-door boarding. That will speed up the process of people getting on and off. You’re suggesting that there will be maybe a lot of mode shift, and that might maybe overwhelm bus lines and slow them down. Is that what you’re suggesting?

**Janno Lieber**  
No, I’m not really taking a position. In the very limited pilot that was done, there was a loss of speed because there were all these additional riders, even if they weren’t paying, right?

**Akash Mehta**  
Because there wasn’t all-door boarding for–

**Janno Lieber**  
There was. There was all-door boarding. But let me just say this: All-door boarding is accomplishable in a paid model. We’ve been reluctant because we felt to get there, because I wanted to get fare evasion down to reestablish the position that the patterns of behavior that we lost during COVID, which is you get on the bus, you know, hopefully you say good morning to the bus driver, and you do something to pay. We can do all-door boarding in part because once we have OMNY — you know, true tap-and-ride, universal — and we can have fare enforcement agents, not armed, go up to people and say \[to\] anybody, “show me your OMNY card. Show me your phone, show me that you paid.”

**Josh Greenman**  
But why not do it now and allow all-door boarding?

**Janno Lieber**  
Right now, it’s associated with the avoidance of payment and I think we need an enforcement model that starts to, that says, wherever you got on, you’re going to be subject— because right now, somebody can get on the back and say, “I paid.” If they’re ever asked by an Eagle Team member, one of our fare enforcement people, let’s say, “I paid at the front, by coin, on the bus. You can’t validate every rider the same way you can a 100% tap and ride system. I want to get there. And then you have, universal, which is like what they have in Europe, where you can go up to anybody and say, “Please show me your fare payment.” So that’s what I think we’re waiting for to move towards all-door boarding, which I think is a positive if we can get there, once we get to OMNY.

**Harry Siegel**  
One more on buses and behavior while we’re spending a lot of time there, talking about unarmed enforcement models. The trains, we have the guys at the gates now, but bus fare evasion numbers have hardly moved despite a lot of fanfare about fare inspectors. I wanted to ask about the RFPs the MTA put out for behavioral change experts to try and reduce some of that, and why those haven’t been awarded so far?

**Janno Lieber**  
John \[McCarthy, MTA Chief of Policy and External Relations\], maybe you want to comment, because John was helping me to think that through. It got, honestly, turned into a little bit of psychotherapy. It looked like it was headed towards a psychotherapy clinic, and it did not seem like that— There’s some basic stuff. I think New Yorkers are— I don’t have the illusion that we will ever wipe out fare evasion entirely. I’m concerned about opportunistic fare evasion. I’m concerned about people that we all know, all of us who are walking towards it, they’ve got their OMNY open on their phone, or they’ve got even a MetroCard or OMNY card, and they see the \[emergency\] gate open and they go for it, and I wanted to eliminate those, that incentive structure. It’s not, to me, an exotic issue of, you know, that requires getting everybody on the couch. It’s basics. You create a structure that makes it very clear and doesn’t create all these random opportunities to fare-evade.

**Ben Smith**  
Now, does it make you feel crazy that you have to explain to people that they have to pay for the bus in such complex terms?

**Janno Lieber**  
What makes me sad is when, you know, I literally grew up riding the bus to school, and the bus driver was a figure of authority and was treated respectfully. \[Snaps fingers\], “Kid, kid, you owe me a nickel. You owe me nickel, right?” I got that a couple times — wise guy. I’m passionate about public space – it has to feel safe and welcoming and everybody has to be playing by the same rules, and it affects your view of this community. This is like a huge passion of mine. And when you have a kind of environment which feels rule-breaking at the entry point, like the turnstile, when it feels like there’s somebody holding the gate, and they’re shaking you down for money, and that is a message of, this is an unruly — not unruly, that’s an old-timey word — but this is a place where people don’t play by the rules, and it makes you feel like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” And then you see somebody smoking, and then you see somebody, you know, it has an impact. This is our public square. I’m bananas, but I think it’s sacred space, because it’s where New Yorkers form their impression: *Can I get along with all these people who are different from me?*

**Akash Mehta**  
I think Mamdani, if he were here, he would say, “Yes, exactly. This is the public square where New Yorkers form their impression of the city and it should be like parks, or like CUNY used to be. It should be something that we’re proud of, that it is free to all and accessible to all. Do you, as an aspiration, as a long-term aspiration, do you think making buses free and maybe going beyond that, making other forms of transit free, is a worthy aspiration? Or do you think that imposing a price is a way to safeguard it?

**Janno Lieber**  
I mean, respectfully, I don’t think that that’s a debate. You can tell how I feel about prioritization of one mode over another. I’m interested in making the system maximally affordable. It *is* affordable. I don’t want to lose that. It is, you know, one of the things that makes New York affordable. I want to make it maximally affordable to those in need. I don’t really have the option, because of the economics of this system, of saying I want to talk about free transit.

There’s been experiments around the world. Others have, I have not studied, but other systems have experimented with universal free transit, and there have been some downside consequences which would need to be studied, because all this stuff deserves to be taken seriously. We are like an incredibly business-like organization, and we’re not doing things– We’re not treating New York like it’s Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory: *Let’s just attach the electrodes and see what happens.* That’s not the way to run something that’s this important and this central to New York. It’s not a bumper sticker organization. I understand politics brings out bumper stickers, but I’m not in that business. We’re in the business of running an organization that is viable economically, is viable politically, and delivers great service, so I don’t really feel like that’s something that I need to be focused on because it’s not viable.

**Josh Greenman**  
You mentioned that you’re not on social media.. And you also mentioned, you know, the importance of the gates, the fare gates, on social media. Recently, these pictures circulated of these new fare gates going up at City Hall. It turned out it was in SEPTA, in Philadelphia, but there were lots of reactions from New Yorkers, like a little bit alarmed this might be happening in New York, on the far left at least. Why don’t we have fare gates that are — and when, if we’re getting them, when are we getting them — that are much more resistant to fare evasion. I understand that the exit door is part of the issue, is a big part of the issue, but the emergency door could be changed as part of that.

**Janno Lieber**  
You know, we spent a lot of time on this. I got to give credit to Demetrius Crichlow, who runs New York City Transit, and he’s really been a great partner in this. And, you know, this is a hard issue. We lost credibility. The combination of the physical changes to the turnstile – the turnstile is completely outmoded — you’re right it’s not effective anymore by international standards, but the changes that have been made to the turnstile— no back, you know, making it impossible to backcock, the little moons, but most of all, delayed egress and those gate guards who, you know, are not policemen so they can’t give out tickets and they can’t stop somebody who climbs under or whatever. But together, we have achieved a 30% reduction in subway fare evasion. Huge accomplishment. Everybody brushes it off but that is a huge accomplishment and we’re going to keep going.

How are we keeping going? We’re getting a billion dollars in the new capital program for modern fare gates. I don’t know about the Philadelphia episode you’re describing, but these are the rectangles that open, but they’re also transparent and they’re not absolutely perfect, impervious to fare evasion. I’ve seen them in Europe. I had a kid who did a semester abroad in Stockholm, and you see them all over in Europe; they’re not impervious to fare evasion, because there’s still what we call piggybacking, two people trying to go in at once. But you know, literally, [Jamie \[Torres-Springer\]](https://www.mta.info/transparency/leadership/executive-leadership/jamie-torres-springer?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is going, we’re testing out four, there are four competitors for this contract. They’re all going to be putting in, the next three or four months, installations at, I think, four or five stations each. And we’re going to see which ones are the best. And I’m sure New Yorkers will be — and social media will be ecstatic — trying out how to fare-evade on these. So we’re going to try them out, and we’re going to have a new generation of fare gates by the end of this capital program. I don’t disagree. It takes a while and money and procurement and installation and so on, but we’re going to have those new fare gates at stations that are responsible for 75% of our ridership.

**Josh Greenman**  
And then you don’t need cops at the gates. Or are you OK with cops at the gates?

**Janno Lieber**  
Interestingly, there have been more arrests in the system in general this year than last year, by a goodly amount. They’re dramatically more than 2019\. There is a little less fare evasion enforcement. But I like– I don’t want a cop at every gate, but I think some of it is good, because what we do at the gate is we get 75 guns a year. You know, we’re getting a lot of guns from people who– it’s bizarre that people who are carrying have warrants and I-cards out and fare-evade, and then they get stopped. And we get a lot of folks who, you know, are troubled for other reasons on fare evasion. So I’m not uncomfortable with a certain amount of police enforcement of fare evasion.

**Ben Smith**  
A couple other modes of transportation. Did you have an LIRR question?

**Akash Mehta**  
So the MTA just, I think this week, rejected federal mediators’ proposed deal with the LIRR union, and I believe it was in part because the plan that the mediators put forward didn’t address the rules. And I guess my question to you on that is: how do you think about the trade-offs between a potential strike and getting these work rules to a place you’re comfortable with?

**Janno Lieber**  
I mean, listen, the system that we have is insane, right? We have the Taylor Law that applies to New York City Transit — subways and buses. And then, because in 1928 when they were doing the Railway Labor Act, they created some definitions, somehow swept up commuter railroads, even if they’re state-sponsored. So we have this other system, which is controlled by this very bulky national mediation board process. I think I’m trying to convey to you, we are treating the commuter railroad more like part of an integral transit system that serves more and more of the same population, not, “Oh, they’re the suburbanites. They have one \[system\] and then there’s the city.” By the way, everybody who comes in on the commuter railroads ends up on the subway, if you look at the numbers. So it’s all one system. So that’s crazy.

Number two, the thing that’s most objectionable about what’s going on with the Long Island Rail Road is they’re trying to collapse the system of pattern bargaining — I was in public-private real estate for a while. Every project I did was union. I have a great relationship with the labor groups that I’ve worked with. But pattern bargaining is like— if you don’t have pattern bargaining, you have chaos. And we have the New York transportation world and labor in general, in public employment, I should say, has followed pattern bargaining. And this group of outlier unions, I’ll call them, has insisted that they want to go outside the pattern.

We have said we’re staying in the pattern, but we will pay more in wages, but we have to have offsets in productivity and getting rid of these insane, antiquated labor rules, a lot of which — the railroad industry work rules sometimes date to the 19th century. And in this case, you’re talking about some of the most egregious, insane work rules that really are galling when the public—

**Ben Smith**  
Like what?

**Janno Lieber**  
One of them is, if you drive an electric train the same day you drive a locomotive train, you get double pay for that day. If you then take the train back to the yard, and you’re told to set up your train so it’s ready for the rush hour in a certain order, you do a “yard move” — triple pay for the day. It’s bananas. It’s completely bananas. There’s no productivity, there’s no benefit to the public. And we’re going to fight hard to make sure that some of those rules are addressed.

Another one is the clerks who sell tickets — they won’t, like when \[it’s\] rush hour \[at\] some Long Island Rail Road station in a remote area, they won’t come out of the booth. We made a deal with the station agents in the subway system, get out of the booth and start to help people with the machines and directions and be customer service professionals, other than sitting in the booth doing nothing in the tap-and-ride era. But these people won’t come out of the booth because they won’t do anything else once the ticket sales are over.

**Josh Greenman**  
We’re a long way from [OPTO.](https://www.etany.org/statements/impeding-progress-costing-riders-opto?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Liena Zagare**  
How much of a financial impact would changing these rules have?

**Janno Lieber**  
You know, honestly, I can’t tell you offhand. What it does is it enables you to— the value of some of those rules, we change them and that enables us to actually pay people more than the standard, 3-3-3-and-a-half percent, 3-3-3-and-a-quarter-percent wage increases that were the pattern we have given in Metro-North, for example, where we have much more than half of the workforce under contract in this cycle.

You know, I have 80 separate unions to negotiate. So you break pattern, if the pattern is allowed to collapse, I mean, again, the pattern can be used to shape something or customize something for each union — want to do a little more productivity, you get a little more wages — but we’re not going to break the pattern.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Just one last thing on labor. Is my colleague Ken Girardin right that the Long Island Rail Road [should go under the Taylor Law](https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/09/12/how-hochul-can-keep-the-lirr-running/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and not be governed by federal law?

**Janno Lieber**  
Let me think about it — yes.

**Akash Mehta**  
Another rule that has gotten a lot of attention is the requirement for both the driver and a conductor on subways. And the state legislature passed [a bill](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S4091?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to prevent you in contract negotiations from, in future contract negotiations, from changing this. And I believe almost no one voted against this bill in the state legislature. How did that happen? Were you involved? Were you consulted?

**Janno Lieber**  
No. In the end of the session, the legislature passes a lot of bills very quickly, and that one slipped through. It’s been proposed for 20-plus years, and somehow it was allowed to slip through at the last minute this time. I don’t consider it serious, because the idea that we would now have to put— again, the public— It’s not a secret. We believe in investing in the MTA. What we don’t want the public to feel is there’s enormous lack of productivity, a lack of efficiency, and forcing the MTA to put extra people on Times Square shuttle, Franklin Avenue shuttle, and the G train, and any, if in the future we were running shorter trains more frequently, which in some neighborhoods might be a good way to serve people, that the idea that you’re just featherbedding, I think would outrage a lot of people, and I don’t think it’s a serious proposal.

**Akash Mehta**  
You said Hochul is a champion of transit. Have you been in touch with her about this bill?

**Janno Lieber**  
We have consulted with the office, I’ve not talked to her personally about it, but we’re in contact with the team about it.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
On featherbedding. I mean basic discipline where you have more control — I mean the [IG](https://mtaig.ny.gov/Reports/2025-07%20Unauthorized%20Cloned%20LIRR%20Cards,%20Fraudulent%20Timekeeping%20Records,%20and%20Time%20Abuse%20Across%20Multiple%20LIRR%20Locations.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) just came out and said that LIRR workers were cloning [\[workplace check-in time\] cards](https://www.newsday.com/long-island/transportation/lirr-time-fraud-enyqqg6u?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But why weren’t they fired? Some of them did suspensions, some of them were able to retire or resign. I mean, this is like, willful positive fraud against MTA, why not sue them for—

**Janno Lieber**  
It’s outrageous. It’s freaking outrageous.

First of all, credit to the IG who did it. It was a very long investigation. Number two, the people who I wanted to punish the most, and who were punished the most, are the supervisors. The idea that these are the people who are supposed to be making sure that everybody’s doing their job, and they were actually complicit in this, is beyond outrageous. And for reasons of the way that the rules are set up, some of them were able to retire before discipline was applied, but we went through and made sure that every one of them paid hundreds of thousands of dollars because they lost benefits. They weren’t allowed to trade in their vacation time. They lost accrued pension time.

I talked to[Rob Free](https://www.mta.info/transparency/leadership/executive-leadership/rob-free?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the Rail Road and the team over there, and we went through and made sure that the supervisors in particular were getting burned to the tune of hundreds and thousands of dollars. We can’t prevent them from retiring, but we used every lever that we had to make sure that the penalty was maximized. There’s a disciplinary process that I don’t control personally, that in some cases, when they weren’t supervisors, gave people six months to a year suspensions, which feels minimum to me, because of the outrage level that I feel. But costing people a hundred grand for that penalty, it’s not insignificant. But I’ll tell you that whatever the rules are, if something like that ever happens, we’re going to do everything in our power to make an example.

What is not going to happen ever again is that people are going to be able to do this without using biometrics, because we restored the biometrics. There was a big fight with the union about biometrics during COVID, because we all thought finger touches and the transmittal — it turned out to be different — and getting it restored was a big fight with all the unions. We’ve restored it everywhere.

**Ben Smith**  
It’s 40 minutes, and we haven’t mentioned Andrew Cuomo. He appointed you in an acting way. You worked closely with him. What did you learn about him and when you worked with him? And are you looking forward to potentially working with him again?

**Janno Lieber**  
Number one, I’m going to obviously work with whoever is the mayor in the City of New York and optimize what the relationship can deliver for transit riders, bus and subway, commuter rail. So we’re going to work with whoever prevails in the election. I had a good relationship with Andrew Cuomo when he was the governor, but I was the guy building projects that he liked, and he supported what we were doing, and we were getting a lot of stuff accomplished.

**Josh Greenman**  
So what about the rest of the MTA? How was their relationship?

**Janno Lieber**  
Well my observation is: it was complicated. There was a very fractious board. There was a lot of friction and tension at the board. Some of it the Executive Chamber was drawn into. That’s no secret. There was friction between the city and the state at that time that manifested itself at every level. I wasn’t in the middle of that.

The one thing that I got drawn into that was part of all the frictions that have been so well documented, was the decision about the L train where, I mean, listen: whatever was the background, whatever was the motive — in that case, Cuomo was right. It was possible to do that work, to accomplish that work, without fully shutting down the L train, and my outfit, which has since, was expanded, but my outfit was given that responsibility. We delivered that project six or nine months ahead of schedule, huge cost savings, and we never had to shut down the L train; we maintained, although limited, service.

**Ben Max**  
The question on that one, though, is the length of time that it’ll be applicable, right? I don’t remember the years at this point, but it was like, if you do the partial patch that you did it’s x number of years— the repair work that you did was more of an immediate versus long-term fix — or no?

**Janno Lieber**  
This was not a complicated issue. The bench wall in there was completely antiquated and irrelevant. You need a new bench wall, because all the cables and all the stuff that’s operating — almost all of it could be hung from what we call snake trays on the wall. And the whole project, the shut down, was being driven by the decision that we’re going to demolish and rebuild all the bench walls. It was insane. It was a bad choice. And by doing this partial, you know, structural rebuild of it — you described it as temporary, it’s not temporary.

**Ben Max**  
Well, I’m asking.

**Janno Lieber**  
You’re patching it with a structural material, which is being monitored and can be replaced. But the main thing is, we didn’t have to shut down services for 300,000 people a day. So you know, in that one, Cuomo does get credit. And you know, he relied a lot on these Columbia engineers. It wasn’t all his own idea in the middle of the night, but he gets credit for dealing, I think, in a somewhat innovative way with the problem. But as far as all the other dramas of the MTA, I was mostly an observer.

**Ben Smith**  
A bigger-picture question. I think his philosophy of governing, and also things he’s proudest of, is this idea that, basically, if you want to win people’s trust, you’ve got to build big, monumental, physical things that they can see: bridges, Moynihan, LaGuardia. If he came to you as mayor and said, “Hey, what’s my next Moynihan? I want to leave office with just another monumental, gorgeous, new public space.”

**Janno Lieber**  
Well he’d be the mayor — it’s really the governor over the MTA who has the most influence.

**Ben Smith**  
Say he wants to help, he would bring some money.

**Janno Lieber**  
[IBX ](https://www.mta.info/project/interborough-express?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)is a transformative project. We have a 14-mile long rail line right through the middle of Brooklyn and Queens.

The demand lines for travel have changed in New York, there are jobs in all these so-called “secondary downtowns.” You know, whether it’s Long Island City or downtown Brooklyn, people are moving between Brooklyn and Queens. Somebody told me, I haven’t checked this stat: there are as many people who move between Brooklyn and Queens for jobs as across the East River. Hard for me to believe, but they’re big numbers. People are moving around. Brooklyn and Queens are business centers and job centers that the original subway system was not designed to accommodate. We have an opportunity to use this virtually abandoned — it’s got one train a day — rail line to create a whole new connectivity and to serve communities that are basically off the rail map. Now, East Flatbush, when you go past the junction, you know where Brooklyn College is, where the 2 and the 5 end, there’s no subway service for huge swathes of Brooklyn — you will be serving that, you will be connecting as you go, you know, across from the Brooklyn waterfront up to Queens, you’re crossing one subway line after another. So there are roughly 20 stations, I think 17 of them connect to other subway lines. It is a dramatic opportunity. And the other thing I love about it is — like \[LIRR\] Third Track, like Penn Access — which we should talk about, because it is a deep problem right now — it is getting more transit out of the infrastructure we have.

I think that Second Avenue subway is a good project because it has high value on a cost-per-rider basis — everyone likes to talk about [cost-per-mile](https://nypost.com/2023/02/06/mtas-consultant-bill-for-second-ave-subway-was-double-tunneling-cost/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but it is, in my view, the wrong way to evaluate projects. But I love the idea of taking an existing infrastructure and squeezing a ton more service out of it, and here you got a rail line which is pretty intact.

**Alyssa Katz**  
So I live in a large co-op complex right on the IBX in Midwood. So I know the potential of it.

I also know the neighborhood dynamics around it. And I know while support has evolved over time, as certainly as my area has gentrified a little, and transit riders have moved in, you have an old guard that is very, very opposed. And I would say that’s up and down the line. The line goes through Bay Ridge, Midwood, Borough Park, in between that, a lot of areas that are car-oriented and very hostile to transit. And there’s a real political challenge in getting support. So what is your assessment of that challenge and what your strategy is for overcoming that?

**Janno Lieber**  
Part of the answer is in the prior question. What can the mayor do to help transit for his or her constituents in New York? Building support and a land use plan that really leverages transit to address the housing crisis that is our principal affordability challenge. Of course, I’m not going to quarrel with your assessment at all. There are a lot of low-rise neighborhoods where people are anxious about change. But that’s true with all change, with change in general, and especially physical change and demographic change that comes with going to multifamily where maybe there’s single-family housing, or low-rise to high-rise. Look at what’s happening in Gowanus, Fourth Avenue. Good, solid neighborhoods are being created along transit lines. And I think we have to effectively tell that story. The mayor is going to have to lead on that issue.

And just one other thing that’s also an opportunity: One of the principal barriers we have in transit, but it’s true of government in general, is jurisdictional fragmentation. And it makes no sense that we, unlike the rest of the world, haven’t figured out how to routinely leverage the value of transit to create funding for building transit — to do value capture — and this is the project that really should do it. So there should be some land-use planning that is connected to [value capture](https://todresources.org/blog/hudson-yards-a-value-capture-case-study/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and because the city doesn’t want to give up property taxes, they haven’t been able to do it.

**Alyssa Katz**  
Two follow-ups on that one. Have you or the MTA had conversations with mayoral candidates around any of these questions so far?

**Janno Lieber**  
No. Trying to stay out of the campaign.

**Alyssa Katz**  
The other question is sort of a comment, but I want your reaction. Under our laws, certainly, even now with the new constitutional amendment on the environment, you paradoxically can have just one neighbor or a few neighbors who say, “Oh, well, we think this project hasn’t been properly evaluated in the environmental impact statement, or whatever it is. We think it’s going to cause environmental harm,” which is such an irony, and they can sue and tie you up in litigation for years. So how do you manage actually getting anything built within that kind of contentious environment?

**Janno Lieber**  
It’s a good question. I mean, listen, we’re pretty experienced at that, from the congestion pricing debates and the whole congestion pricing process with five years of [NEPA](https://www.epa.gov/nepa?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). I mean, the abundance movement has really made a powerful case that, that in many cases, the effort to use environmental concepts to control development has backfired and is keeping us from dealing with a lot of things that are needed for valuable social goods that have some urgency associated with them. So I am for re-examining environmental processes without ditching them.

I also think that because of the Robert Moses story, we have in New York a political culture that routinely sees development as threatening to communities and human beings and even, especially, transit, because of the Cross-Bronx story and others like it. So we have a default setting that in some of our political culture — not everywhere and it’s changing a little bit — inhibits viewing infrastructure development sometimes as a benefit. And we have to address that in our laws and also in how people talk about and build coalitions around projects.

**Ben Smith**  
Is the Trump administration as hostile in private to public transportation in cities as they seem to be in public?

**Janno Lieber**  
It depends who you talk to.

**Ben Smith**  
\[Federal Transportation Secretary\] Sean Duffy?

**Janno Lieber**  
I haven’t spoken to Sean Duffy. I tried to catch up with when he came to New York for his inaugural ride on the subway — I believe the DeKalb to Broadway-Lafayette section of our system. But, [the FTA administrator](https://www.transit.dot.gov/about/news/us-department-transportation-announces-marc-molinaro-16th-senate-confirmed-administrator?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) \[Marc Molinaro\] is from New York, and I don’t view him as hostile to public transportation and to cities and to New York. But he’s operating in an environment that, you know, he’s got, certainly a lot of rhetoric \[around him\], remains to be seen whether it’s action, but we’re going to respond to all of this stuff in a businesslike way. That’s the only way that I know how to deal with it. One by one, we’re going to respond to the questions they ask, and I’m sure we’re going to be able to answer the safety questions. We just answered their [DBE](https://www.mta.info/doing-business-with-us/opportunities-for-certified-M-WBE-DBE-SDVOB?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), their surprise change to the DBE program. That was the stated reason for quote-unquote suspending funding for the Second Avenue subway. And we, you know, we’re going to be able to respond to all these questions professionally and accurately. And I’m not worried about that. It remains to be seen whether there will be excuses for taking anti-transit actions, but so far, I think we’re in good position.

**Ben Max**  
You said you’re staying out of the mayoral race, but if there’s a Mayor-elect Mamdani and you’re going in to meet with him in November, what — maybe it’s what you already said, so we can move along — but what’s at the top of the list if you have a new mayor, and assuming it’s not someone with a long background with the MTA, like Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani or anybody else, what do you come in and say to someone running the city, what they really need to understand better and what they need to prioritize?

**Janno Lieber**  
I mean, listen, I wouldn’t presume to say what they need to understand better. But I would say, you know, there you have in the power, and under the law of the City of New York, you’re obligated to do a lot of things to make buses faster. And let’s get started. That’s what I would say. Let’s get started with the things that are in your power to do. Let’s team up with some of these other things that cross jurisdictional lines, like planning for the IBX and, you know, I’m open to discussions about affordability, but I want to study, I want an appropriate preparation and study and analysis, we’re not operating on a light-switch-turn to do some radical change and see if, what happens. That’s not how the MTA works.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
What do you think of Cuomo’s latest idea, to transfer responsibility for the city’s part of the capital program to the city government?

**Janno Lieber**  
I mean, I think we made, I think it’s sort of superannuated. Honestly, we’ve, the MTA capital program is now, honestly, is one of the best-run infrastructure operations in the United States. I would, you know, we can get into all the details, but we’re getting enormous amount of work done. We’re doing it efficiently. We’ve got a long way to go, but the idea of segmenting it, and treating any part of the MTA as it’s separate from the regional transportation system, and giving it to the city, which, frankly, if you look at the [Department of Design and Construction](https://www.nyc.gov/site/ddc/about/about-ddc.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), they struggle to just do street infrastructure with sewers, and they can’t get Empire City Subway, the guys who control the fiber, to come at the same times as Con Ed, to come at the same times as DEP for the sewer, and, you know, the streets are open on Broadway for like 10 years. So the city does not have a great track record of delivering projects. The MTA has gotten a lot better, and we’re, there’s no—

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Well, the jails.

**Janno Lieber**  
The problem with the jails is you’ve got three of them that are being built by a company, as I said before, [Tutor Perini](https://www.tutorperini.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), that is really tough to work with. And we’ll see whether the jails actually get built.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Safety on the subways, assaults are still two-thirds above where they consistently were in the decades before 2020\. We’ve had four murders on subways this year, better than last year, but far higher by multiples than the pre-COVID average. Why has it been so hard to get crime and disorder back down to pre-COVID levels? I mean, what are your top three reasons?

**Janno Lieber**  
I’m not sure you and I look at, describe the situation the same way. I think that we, the numbers are, can’t argue with, that crime is down. You, you’re making the point that there’s certain types of crime that are alarming, which have gone up. And you know, those are, that is the concern that we share, that there are people in the subway who are, who are taking a swing at people, and part of that is a recidivism problem we have. We put up, you know, Nicole, didn’t get much attention, but I’m going to try to reopen the conversation. The governor was doing discovery \[reform\] and a couple other big things that are tough to do in Albany.

So our proposal, which she supported, didn’t get a lot of attention, but I think that if somebody commits multiple violent crimes, even if it’s a misdemeanor, because remember, a felony, it doesn’t become a felony assault unless, it’s almost attempted murder in terms of its impact, or it’s a cop or an MTA worker, and that automatically is, so there are a lot of misdemeanor assaults, which, you know, frankly, because the prosecution of misdemeanors is so low, you know, I’m not a criminal justice expert, but they’re basically not being prosecuted.

So there are a lot of violence that happens that’s not resulting in people having consequences or getting forced to enter a program or otherwise. So that is the recidivism issue, I think, is the one that I am concerned about. People have a tendency towards violence of some kind. There was one case where the guy, listen, this is obviously connected to the mental health issues, but I can’t be a full-time psychological expert. If somebody, was one guy who punched a woman and you cannot imagine how much damage she did to her face, in Grand Central, on the lower level. Grand Central’s got a really good safety record, but in the lower level, he punched her and then he was let out, and then, like, three weeks later, he came and punched an eight-year-old kid, and neither of those qualified as felonies because they weren’t close enough to, I don’t know, whatever the standard is for harm. And so I want those, I want there to be a standard where you do violence, you get treated, it’s an aggravated charge, and it gets treated more seriously, even if the violence for whatever reason is categorized as misconduct. So that’s my concern.

The other thing that we have had some success with, Nicole, and I believe, it’s not going to change the stats, but it’s made some positive impact. Is our so-called [SCOUT](https://www.mta.info/document/135741?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) program, where we were the leaders in saying, OK, we’re going to go, there’s people who are seriously mentally ill, who really should be, who qualify for involuntary commitment because they are a danger to themselves or to others. We got clinicians who are willing to pull the trigger on [958](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHY/9.58?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)s. We’re talking about a small population, but \[the teams\] go out, and they have police backing them up. Now the cops are not the ones doing the interaction, but they’re there to make sure the clinician feels safe enough to really get into it with the person and to evaluate them for serious mental illness and potential commitment under the law of the state of New York. And that has been a successful program. The city has copied it. They call it [PATH](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2025/10/mayor-adams-celebrates-one-year-anniversary-of-path-co-response-?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). And I think we’ve gotten like 500 people out – now, some of them cycle back, but the subway, in my experience, and everybody here is, I think, a usual rider, so you have your own impression. There are a lot fewer of those really, really seriously mentally ill people who dominate the subway environment. You feel empathy for them, but they also scare people. There are many fewer of them in the system now than there were two years ago, and we’ve been able to alter that now.

The most important thing is, where do they go? If you do involuntary commitment, when they get off the drugs or they, you know, they get back on the meds or whatever that they’re brought back to, they no longer qualify for involuntary commitment, which can happen in a couple days even, where do they have to go? We can’t— Our outreach system really prioritizes just getting people to shelter — “Do you want to go to shelter? Do you want to go to shelter?” I’ve been on those platforms in the middle of the night and watching outreach workers. God bless them for doing – I have a brother who’s in that business – but those outreach workers don’t have much to offer. If you’re just offering shelter, you have to be offering something that is a better, more appealing offering, and also has the ability to really treat the mental-health issues aggressively. That’s, that’s the gap in the system that I think the governor, and to some extent the mayor, are trying to address, and that’s super important for safety reasons as well as the mental-health reasons.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Did the clinicians ask for the police?

**Janno Lieber**  
Clinicians love the police. The clinicians, and that’s what’s wrong with Mamdani’s proposal on this, the idea that the clinician, the mental-health professional, is going to go out and deal with the most severely damaged folks who are suffering, in many cases, open wounds and lesions and maggots. I mean, I’m literally, you see this stuff, and I’ve seen it up close, and I’ve seen it in photographs and so on, and they’re going to deal with them without cops standing behind them in the event something goes wrong? Not fair. You have to have that backup. The key is the cops have to hang back to let the interaction take place. But that’s what we’ve done well with the SCOUT program. The governor, to her credit, has been a huge supporter of both SCOUT, cameras on trains, and a lot of things, Nicole, that have contributed to, I think, beating back the crime trend.

**Ben Max**  
Obviously so many of these issues are interrelated that you’re touching on, but you’re talking about criminal justice, mental health, housing, land use planning — you sound like someone who could potentially run for mayor or governor at some point — is that something you’ve thought about?

**Janno Lieber**  
Never. No, not running for anything.

**Liena Zagare**  
Can I go back to the subways and ask—

**Janno Lieber**  
It was that crazy a question that you’re not even going to let him get a follow-up in? If I can just bask in the, in this sort of pseudo-compliment of it—

**Ben Max**  
Well, you know, you’re from the business community.

**Janno Lieber**  
Yes.

**Ben Max**  
The business community has been in a very rough spot in this election. If there’s a Mayor Mamdani, it will be looking for the next candidate well in advance, and you’re just taking that off the table, as someone who has such deep experience?

**Janno Lieber**  
I’m not running for office, but, but I’ll tell you one thing that I hope that whoever wins this election recognizes New York’s success is, you know — whether you’re a Democrat or Republican or a Conservative, Right to Life party, a liberal or conservative — this is a city that has its success and dynamism is based on private-sector business, wherever you are on the political spectrum. And we, we’re accustomed to looking at business as an interest group, but you know, whether you’re left, right, or center, that’s what made our city great.

We were a port city, and then we were a manufacturing city, and then we were the city of Mad Men and advertising and law and finance, and now we’re a tech city, and you need to harness that and not view business as the enemy. You need the business community, which is moderate. You know, it’s not a right-wing business community. You need to be focused on, how do we make this a more attractive business city, which is why the housing crisis is the issue that must get the most attention, because the day that smart, ambitious kids — young people, they’re not kids — young people stop coming to live in your neighborhood, your neighborhood, your neighborhood, because they can’t afford it, is the day that businesses will accelerate, if they’re not or, stop coming here and stop hiring people, because that is where our our danger zone is that if we can’t attract the young people who are the smartest and most ambitious, the businesses will feel less compunction to come here and to stay here.

**Liena Zagare**  
Why are subways so dirty, and how much of that affects the perception of dangerousness, and why is it so hard to deal with?

**Janno Lieber**  
Yeah, I actually, I walked up here from Broadway-Lafayette, and I was like, wow, the streets are dirty.

**Alyssa Katz**  
It was pretty good today, better than I’ve seen it.

**Janno Lieber**  
I didn’t see dirt, you know, a pile of garbage in the station. On the street, I saw a lot of garbage. But listen, that’s an issue that I am turning my attention to more and more. I would say, there are some unique complexities from the subway environment that have to do with, like being underground at a level, which is, you know, there’s a lot of water and humidity, and just keeping it feeling clean and and so on, is, and having it be clean, and the collection of garbage, and how to do that with work trains on the overnight. But the bottom line is, I think you’re not wrong, and I pick up the garbage, and I want us to do a better job of it.

What we’ve done, is making it feel, installing LED lighting to make stations feel brighter. You know, when you have an environment that feels brighter, and that’s dank and dark, it encourages people to look after a little bit, and I’ve asked transit to go back. We lost all our cleaners during covid, and then, because people didn’t want to clean, we had to hire, in effect, a temporary workforce. And, and there was some ground lost in that exchange, to rehire the whole workforce, retrain a whole new generation, and we’re trying to improve stations in a lot of ways, brightness, safety, and you know, what we call rejuvenations, like investing in a station renewal to make it cleaner.

But I think the routine cleaning operation needs improvement, and I’ve talked to Transit about making that another way— we talked about service, we’ve talked about how to figure out getting all the work done. One of the challenges is, like 24/7, getting all the work done, not killing service. And there are many different things that we focused on, fare evasion, success there. I do agree with you that cleaning is something that we got to do better.

I’m just warming up, guys. You all are trying to get out here. I see, there’s a lot of good food.

**Harry Siegel**  
Small narrow question: Amtrak, Penn Station, Andy Byford, Donald Trump, all the themes you’ve been mentioning about keeping the city vital, jurisdictionality and overlap, cluster-fuckers, et cetera. Please discuss.

**Janno Lieber**  
OK, well, the number one Amtrak issue on my mind, and it’s really serious, is [Penn Access](https://www.mta.info/project/penn-station-access?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which is a project that, like people in Co-Op City, Morris Park, Parkchester, they’re spending like an hour-and-a-half getting to a job in Midtown. And they don’t have the opportunity that much of the Bronx does now to go north for jobs, which so many people in the Bronx do. When you go stand on, go to Fordham Station at rush hour. There are more people on the northbound platform than the southbound, because they’re going to the jobs in Connecticut and Westchester, and so Co-Op City, Parkchester, Morris Park, Hunts Point, are on that Hell Gate line, Amtrak. For 100 years, they’ve been running the trains, the New York Central, they never stopped in the Bronx. We made a deal with them, that we’re going to turn that two-track railroad into a four-track railroad, and we’re going to stop in the Bronx. This is consistent with what I talked to you about before, with turning the commuter railroad to serving the city people, and those people are off the map.

Amtrak has screwed up that project. We had— the first two years, we were supposed to get 48 weekend outages. We got six. When we started getting the outages, they don’t provide— they did the same thing to East Side Access. It is responsible for at least a billion dollars of the overage on East Side Access— when you’re operating, when you’re doing work on the Northeast Corridor, it’s Amtrak’s territory. They’ve neglected the maybe, in fairness to them, they didn’t have the money, whatever, but they’ve let it fall apart.

When you go to fix something, because we are 95% of the riders on the northeast corridor in the area, they say, you got to fix, you got to fix all my stuff. So 65% of the Penn Access project to provide Amtrak to Metro-North service on the Hell Gate line through the Bronx is Amtrak state of good repair. So they didn’t give us the outages. When you get the outages, people don’t show up. They’re over— they’ve never managed to get enough people to do the flagging and the supervision. You got to have a track foreman. You can’t turn off the electricity without electric traction power professionals. And then even when they’re there, and even when you get the outages there, they have their, like, they can’t enforce the rule book on their staff. So everybody says, 17 people standing there, looking at one person work, and you can’t get a second task. It’s insane.

So we have lost the schedule on this project, and we’re going to have to change. We’re going to have to do something to change it. My priority is to talk to Amtrak, and I’m going to do it soon, about, we got to find a way to give those people service and not have this turn into East Side Access and it takes another five years. The project’s been going on. It’s federally funded.

You know, I would have thought the Trump administration should be interested in reforming Amtrak because they’re sort of emblematic of a lot of the shortcomings of government, right? Bureaucracy, delivery problems, labor challenges, and so on. So far, we haven’t seen that, and I need the help from the feds to deal with Amtrak. Again, Amtrak, it’s not that they’re evil people, but these are problems that have been going on since I got there eight years ago, and literally on East Side Access, it was like a billion dollars and a couple years worth of delay. I’m not saying that was all them. The MTA and my predecessors had a screwed-up project. But all that work in [Harold Interlocking](https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/guiding-hundreds-of-trains-a-junction-named-harold/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was Amtrak-supervised, and it’s all Amtrak territory, so some of these same problems were harder. So that’s my biggest Amtrak issue. Penn Station, honestly, you know, I worked on it with Senator Moynihan way back when, on the Moynihan project, and it’s amazing, and it’s a success. Again, Cuomo gets credit for driving that one over the finish line.

We’ve done an amazing change in, like, in Penn Station with— if you haven’t been in this, in the corridor, runs from Seventh, Eighth Avenue subways, we doubled the width of the corridor, we raised the height, because the city street is above, it’s not Amtrak, and we put in all new retail. And the Long Island Rail Road rider satisfaction has gone from 50%, the Penn rider satisfaction going from 50% to 80% in a matter of two years.

So what the riders are telling us is, don’t tear it up again for something that’s like a beauty project. So you know, you saw what happened: Trump said, because he, I guess Hochul had talked to him about let’s work together on Penn Station. So as punishment for congestion pricing, they took it away. They sent in Andy \[Byford) to work on it. Andy’s a rail operations professional, I don’t know if he’s ever done a development project before, but all this is unfolding. But our priority is, don’t screw things up. Number two is the practical stuff, vertical circulation of the platforms. That’s what we were working on. We actually had a 30% design, which in design terms is a very advanced level of detail, like ready to be sent to the contractors for bidding. It’s all about your vertical circulation, the platforms, ventilation, because it’s a fire hazard. There is not enough, unlike Grand Central, you know, it’s basically not enough egress, and for fire code reasons, and more entrances and egress — you know, pretty practical stuff.

A couple of the concourses that are especially dingy, like the Hilton corridor, if you’ve ever walked down from the back end of the Seventh Avenue trains, that tiny little corridor that’s still got the 1920s tile in it that separates the NJT from the Long Island Rail Road portions of the station, you can blow all that up. All the lower level is filled with mechanical rooms and rooms where there are Amtrak offices that do not belong in the station. So you could blow all that out, raise the ceiling and have a pretty simple project.

I am concerned that Andy, and he did it again yesterday, keeps talking about, *the president wants this, the president wants that, the president* – that it’s all about a more, you know, visually high-drama project. I think we have shown that you can do a great transportation environment without spending, you know, $62 billion and blowing the whole thing up.

And the last thing I would say is they’re not really including us in any meaningful way. They took our design! So far, we said to Andy, hey, you got to pay for the design. We paid millions for that. You took our grant away — they confiscated the grant. They took our design away. And by the way, Long Island Rail Road, it has 160 years left on its lease, and the lease says you can’t touch a ceiling tile without our approval. So at some point, they will have to talk to us, and that’s what we will be saying: let’s do the practical stuff, let’s not spend a lot of money and kill the transit experience for, you know, some – a beauty project.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Do you support posting the project monthly oversight reports on Second Avenue Subway, other big projects?

**Janno Lieber**  
Michael, who’s, you know, the reason that’s happening? [Michael Aronson](https://www.nydailynews.com/author/michael-aronson/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) yelled at Marc Molinaro, and Marc Molinaro said, *sure*.

I’m not against transparency. The challenge is, if you’re trying to get a project moved, if everything becomes a public debate, it’s harder to— people become defensive and so on. But if they’re going to do it, that’s fine, as long as they also post our team’s responses.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
You could post it yourself.

**Janno Lieber**  
Yeah. I mean, the whole thing is, the point is, it should, what we’re shooting for, with, whether it’s the oversight professionals, and one of the concerns we have is the feds use all these oversight professionals whose principal incentive structure is more work for oversight professionals, right?

So they’re always, like, second guessing, like “your schedule contingency is three days off,” and like, I get it. But, you know, we’re interested in accountability for budget and schedule, so we really don’t, we’re not going to object to anybody talking about it.

**Akash Mehta**  
Talk to us more about costs. We’ve talked about union rules, and we talked a little bit about environmental regulations. Two other drivers of costs that researchers have pointed to, for the MTA, which spends, I know you said you prefer the rider metric, but these are physical projects. You know, on a per-mile basis, the MTA spends more than just about anywhere else.

Two other drivers that people have pointed to are the amount, the extent to which we outsource projects to contractors, and then just the physical size of the stations. And I want to ask you about each of those. For contractors, correct me if I’m wrong, I know you led construction for the MTA — I believe we used to have 1,600 in-house employees who managed the vast, who did most of the construction management themselves, and now we have far fewer, and we outsource much more to contractors. How do you think about that?

**Janno Lieber**  
So I think that you can do per-mile for tunneling budget. That’s a legitimate question, because that’s a generic— unless you have to measure a little bit by the size of the tunnel, but that’s an apples-to-apples comparison.

You cannot use per-mile as the metric when you’re including stations, because the stations are designed based on their volume, like their capacity you have to design. Some people say, Oh, complicated issue. But literally, you need more vertical circulation, based on— we have, you know, 1,000 people on the train. It’s much more than a light rail system has. You need to build a lot of vertical circulation capacity than other systems to make sure that those people can get out within a three-minute window under NFP, National Fire Protection standard 130\. It’s just totally different. The fact that we’re 24/7 means that we have to duplicate a lot of systems, because you can’t turn them off entirely to do maintenance and to do work.

So there are legitimate reasons that per-rider is, in many cases, the right metric. We were actually, we looked at a lot, because we take so much heat on this. We do. We are meeting international cost standards for tunneling. And you know, if anyone’s interested, we can go through it, where we get killed is on the stations, and that is because, not only, but mostly because of the capacity issue. The size of stations is a real issue, and we have shrunk the stations on the Second Avenue line from the design. When I got, and I arrived at the end of the Second Avenue phase one project, when it had just gone to \[inaudible\], I went to 96th Street, and you open up the door to go to the back of house at the north end of the station, it’s like a labyrinth that goes on for blocks. Every single New York City Transit department had its own room, and too many of those have got brown paper on the window, and who knows what’s going on. I took \[Andy\] Byford there because I was, when he was there, because I was trying to tell him, we’re going to squish down the back of the house. And he first was resisting, because he’s standing up for Transit and all of their departments, and eventually he gave way. We didn’t get to do the project together, but in principle, he gave way.

So we have squished the stations down. We have pushed a lot of the the support services out of the station environment, or the subway environment, and into what we call, what’s the, what’s the term of art, the above-ground thing, where you have, you have, like a ventilation tower, and then you build office space in tandem with it, so you’re not digging as much. You’re doing it above grade. So we’ve been intensely focused on this. Jamie \[Torres-Springer\], who’s done really a great job on this, has squeezed over a billion dollars out of Second Avenue phase two just doing that. So we’re intensely focused on the issues that you’re raising. I think that’s what I’m saying.

**Akash Mehta**  
Well, I want to get back to the contractors piece at some point. But also just on station size. You shrunk them, I think, from like, those stations, those three stations, from double the length of the platform to like, 30 to 50%.

**Janno Lieber**  
Too much [Nolan Hicks](https://nypost.com/2024/03/04/us-news/still-600m-in-potential-savings-from-second-ave-subway-designs-even-after-mta-trims-post-analysis/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

**Akash Mehta**  
But they’re still far larger.

**Janno Lieber**  
Let’s get into it, because there’s, we’re so intensely focused on this issue, that in order for me to answer that level of detail, I probably need to bring you together with Jamie and his team.

**Akash Mehta**  
Let’s do it.

**Janno Lieber**  
But happy to do it. Let you get into it. As far as the in-house stuff goes, I’m actually for that. We, we have jacked up the portion of the capital program that is being done by in-house labor. And if it’s simple stuff, if it’s pretty straightforward stuff, we’re going to continue to look at that as more of an option. What you’re talking about is technical; as projects get more about the technical side, we are having more and more, truthfully, this is just economic reality, just hiring scheduling professionals and other technical professionals to work full-time at the MTA becomes more challenging. So there’s definitely, some of those technical expertises that we use consultants for on projects, but in general, we are thrilled to look at opportunities to grow in-house.

I don’t accept the [Alon Levy](https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/people/alon-levy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) theory, which, you know, you’re articulating — that somehow, if we just had like this massive in-house force, we would be building everything way, way cheaper. That’s like, hiring— you cannot compete with private-sector engineering. And we don’t have one project after another, like he loves, like Madrid, which built all these subways in a row. We have, you know, one big project, and then we— they come much more episodically for us. So having a huge in-house force who’s only focused on building new is both economically non-viable, but also we just don’t have the right profile of the amount of work.

**Ben Smith**  
This has been phenomenal. I feel like people are going to eat this up, there’s so much here. There’s one last question…you talked about the vitality of the private sector. You’ve worked in development, worked in infrastructure, for so long.

Can you just quickly paint a picture— I feel like I’m still coming from a place where it’s like, oh, maybe Midtown is going away, and being replaced by residential housing, going to the outer boroughs or the burbs, and then I think, as I listen to you, I feel like, maybe this is like three years out of date — can you just give us, what is happening in New York?

**Janno Lieber**  
It’s really interesting. I don’t claim to be like the soothsayer on this at all. All I can tell you is what we see, which is that for a long time, we were all like, oh shit, what is going to happen with core Midtown? Nobody’s there. Park Avenue seems dead, and it ain’t anymore. They’re having the leasing, that for the last year-and-a-half, have been unbelievable leasing years for core Midtown.

Is there also an acceleration of the conversion of older office buildings to residential? It appears to be. I’m not enough of an expert to say just how fast. But that’s also a good thing. We all thought that was the holy grail. It takes a while for those projects to come together financially, every one of them is complicated and so on.

So what we’re seeing is kind of what I believe, we hope, which is, you know, the newer office stock is, seems to be attracting people, even with the era of hybrid work. The dramatic contraction of a lot of service firms, like law firms, seems to have flattened out. That people are coming back to office, whether we think that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It seems like it’s stabilized in terms of the amount of transit, people traveling to work, and the older office buildings may be getting converted. I don’t know.

The other thing that’s happening is that there seems to be a market for new construction in office buildings, which is what people want. You know, we’re not all experts. I did a little of this with the World Trade Center. It makes a big, new makes a big difference to companies, and they seem to be back in the business of wanting to pay more for new.

So all those things augur well for New York. Look, I don’t have the deep understanding of, like, how much hybrid work, and will there be more satellite downtown in, you know, clearly, like, the vision of lower— downtown Brooklyn as a satellite office center has dissipated to a great extent . It’s clearly shifted to almost all residential, right? I don’t know about Long Island City or others, but it seems like things are OK.

The big challenge always comes back to housing. Are the people going to be here? That fire, that motivate the companies to come and expand here? And that’s our big challenge, and I hope that whoever’s the next mayor will really give real priority to that, among everything else.

**Ben Smith**  
Thank you so much.
### A True Mandate for New York City
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/move-local-elections-to-even-years/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:35:59.000Z
The first early voting numbers are in, and it is clear: New Yorkers are turning out in historic numbers to cast their votes in the mayoral election. In the first three days of the 2025 general election voting period, [223,268](https://www.vote.nyc/page/early-voting-check-ins?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) checked in — almost five times as many as the [45,009](https://x.com/BOENYC/status/1452745416852787203?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) who showed up in the first three days of the 2021 general election early voting period.

But even if the high turnout rate persists, the most bullish predictions anticipate just 30-40% of registered voters will cast a vote this fall. That means fewer than one in four New Yorkers will have inked in the oval next to the next mayor's name. As the victor inevitably claims a mandate to follow through on his agenda, those who disagree will be able to ask: Does he really have one?

It need not be this way. Municipal election turnout in New York City has remained stubbornly [low](https://citizensunion.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Down-Ballot-Races-and-Even-Year-Local-Elections-Citizens-Union-Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for decades, but this fall we will vote on a proposal that could double turnout rates in our city elections. Proposal 6 would move New York City elections to the same year as presidential elections once state law allows it — a change that would dramatically increase voter turnout in city elections.

As a scholar of New York City elections, I've watched the turnout rates in our city remain stubbornly stagnant despite the valiant efforts of advocacy groups, like [Go Vote NYC](https://www.govotenyc.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), on whose board I serve. Legislation enacting early voting and no-excuse absentee voting was [passed](https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/protecting-new-yorks-democracy-senate-passes-historic-election-reforms?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the hopes they would improve the numbers, but turnout hasn't budged. Ranked choice voting was meant to decrease the appeal of negative campaigning and increase voter turnout, but its effects are limited and it is only used in closed partisan city primary elections.

The people who show up to vote are the ones elected officials pay the most attention to. In the 2025 primary election, people under the age of 35 voted in historic numbers, outperforming voters over the age of 65 by a [wide margin](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/nyregion/zohran-mamdani-voters-strategy.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But that was unusual; voters in off-year races tend to be [older and whiter](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/who-votes-city-election-timing-and-voter-composition/39CE6B9F0E906228F695248C874C0C36?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), making our local government less reflective of the city.

Voters feel more connected to government officials whose names they have read on ballots, and those elected can govern with greater confidence when they have achieved "buy in" from a majority of residents. The more people who vote in city elections, the broader a mandate elected leaders can claim, and the more power they have to enact their agenda. Conversely, low turnout erodes trust. When only a sliver of voters participate, politicians are more likely to cater to that narrow group, instead of the whole city. That's not democracy — it's inside baseball.

In the 2020 presidential election, [3 million New York City voters](https://vote.nyc/sites/default/files/pdf/election%5Fresults/2020/20201103General%20Election/00000100000Citywide%20President%20Vice%20President%20Citywide%20Recap.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) showed up. One year later, just [1.1 million](https://vote.nyc/page/election-results-summary-2021?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) voters showed up at the polls. These years are not outliers — presidential contests routinely draw nearly *triple* the number of participants as our municipal elections. That's especially remarkable given that it's hardly ever in doubt which way New York State's electoral college votes will go, whereas mayoral elections can be genuinely competitive.

Many cities across the country struggle with voter turnout for the same reason New York does. Elections held soon after another [depress turnout](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140231169020?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=An%20important%20exception%20in%20this,see%20Stockemer%2C%202017%2C%20p.) everywhere. But the comparison also provides hope. Other cities have solved this problem by moving local elections to even-numbered years. In other major cities that have made this change, turnout has [skyrocketed](https://yankelovichcenter.ucsd.edu/%5Ffiles/reports/Big-Cities-Tiny-Votes.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): Phoenix went from an average of 23% to as high as 77%, Baltimore turnout shot up from 13% to 60% and in Los Angeles, voter turnout doubled. The gains endure.

Critics argue that the issues that matter in municipal races will get lost in the public conversation amidst the noise of presidential years. But the evidence says otherwise. Voters are motivated to pay more attention to down-ballot races when they share the stage with big contests, evidenced by the fact that Assembly races in even years in New York City draw [higher](https://citizensunion.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Down-Ballot-Races-and-Even-Year-Local-Elections-Citizens-Union-Report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) turnout than City Council races in odd years. Holding our city elections when New Yorkers are already engaged in election-related conversations encourages voters to learn more about candidates at the city level, rather than trying to bring them back into a conversation when the rest of the country has moved on.

Others argue that adding municipal races to presidential ballots will make them too long and confusing for voters. Down ballot "roll off" is a challenge, but the turnout gains would more than offset inevitable roll off. Moreover, utilizing smart ballot design — like listing local offices first — would guard against voter fatigue and increase voter participation in local contests when they appear on presidential ballots.

Opponents of Proposal 6 who contend that city races will get swept up in the national partisan politics which dominate presidential years, reflecting the partisan makeup of the electorate rather than that of voters who are truly engaged in local issues, should ask what they think democracy is really supposed to be about. The unavoidable implication of their argument is that our city should only want to hear from certain voters, those who are suitably informed, weighing in on the issues at stake in local elections. That logic once justified literacy tests and disenfranchisement.

Nothing is ever easy or simple in New York City; passing Proposal 6 won't move our municipal elections immediately. It will require a state constitutional amendment — which hinges on two legislative approvals and a statewide referendum. But a strong "Yes" vote this year would send a message Albany won't be able to ignore: New Yorkers want to move our municipal elections to presidential years.

Do we want more people to have a say in who becomes our mayor, or fewer? New Yorkers are known for their loud and feisty voices, motivated by national politics but shaped deeply by local issues. By moving municipal elections to presidential years, we will ensure that more of those voices are heard.
### Flip the Script, and the Ballot, for Housing
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/flip-the-script-and-the-ballot-for-housing/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:37:52.000Z
At the final mayoral debate, the three leading candidates[ described different positions](https://gothamist.com/news/mamdani-attacked-for-refusing-to-take-position-on-housing-questions-in-nyc-mayor-debate?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the affordable housing ballot measures before voters this fall. Curtis Sliwa opposed them, Andrew Cuomo supported them and Zohran Mamdani said he's still considering them. Meanwhile, the City Council has drawn attention by actively campaigning against them.

Ballot questions two through four have become a flashpoint among New York City politicians. How can voters make sense of these proposals? By looking past the political jockeying and focusing on what New Yorkers need most.

The main characters in this story are not elected officials. They are the people of New York City whose housing is too expensive, who struggle to stay where they want to be or can't find housing near family and friends when they need to move because they're getting married or divorced or having a kid or lost a job or are struggling with personal circumstances. They are the people sleeping in shelters or on couches or are uncertain where they are going to sleep tonight. The vacancy rate for rental housing in New York City has [fallen to about 1.4%](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vacancy-rate-reaches-historic-low-1-4-percent-demanding-urgent-action-new?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/0) — the lowest it's been in decades. Half of NYC renters pay more than 30% of their income toward rent, and [nearly 30% of renters pay at least half their income in rent](https://furmancenter.org/stateofthecity/view/state-of-renters-and-their-homes-2024?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Meanwhile, on any given night, there are [over 100,000 people](https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-homelessness-new-york-city/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) sleeping in the city's shelter system, with thousands more living doubled-up or unsheltered.

This conversation involves politics, but it's not for the sake of politics; it's for the sake of housing. We have dug ourselves an enormous hole by failing to allow the construction of enough housing for the people who need it, particularly those who can least afford it. These ballot proposals are part of the long-term effort needed to get us out of this hole.

Well before these proposed changes were created, my organization — [Citizens Housing and Planning Council](https://chpcny.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a New York City-based nonprofit research and education organization focused on housing policy — researched how the current land-use process has been working. We found incentives embedded in it that [make it far easier to prevent housing than to allow it to be built](https://chpcny.org/publication/the-elephant-in-the-room/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). We have had some elected officials make heroic efforts to help get affordable housing built. But as long as it takes a hero to do this, we'll never get all the housing we need. To make our way out of this affordability crisis, we need to make building housing an ordinary event, not an exceptional achievement.

The original concept of ULURP — the City's land use review process, created in 1975 — was to begin with the airing of local priorities and perspectives, then to move to decisions from officials who represented borough-wide or citywide constituencies. This was intended to achieve a proper balancing of local and citywide perspectives — to value local views without empowering NIMBYism.

In 1989, however, with the creation of the modern, 51-member City Council, the last vote in this process was assigned to the Council — a citywide governing body, but one with a natural tendency toward "member deference." This practice allows the local member effective authority over decisions in their district. It's worth noting that the only strictly neighborhood-specific laws the Council votes on are about land use. This change disrupted the logic of the process — and its outcomes.

After 1989, the number of land-use applications approved for housing declined sharply. Residential rezonings today are approved at just 60% of the pace at which they were during the 1980s, when applications were typewritten, maps assembled by hand and applications took more than a week to transmit to Community Boards by mail. Member deference has effectively allowed a Council member to block new affordable housing in their district. "Don't bother spending your time and money on this; I'm not going to let it happen" has been the message to builders. And unsurprisingly, the map of where housing gets built — and doesn't — bears a strong resemblance to the map of where rezonings have been approved. This has made member deference a powerful tool for reinforcing segregation and exclusion.

Even for the most pro-housing local electeds, ULURP actions in their district are a political hot potato, giving them an incentive to delay, dodge or defer the conflict that they stir up. Notably, the Council recently approved two affordable housing developments over the objections of local members, which is worth celebrating! But this doesn't disprove the logic of member deference; it's actually the exception that proves it.

The only times in recent history that the Council has bucked member deference — in 2021, 2009 and 2025 — have all come in the waning months of the four-year electoral cycle, when the internal politics of the legislature are uniquely fluid. If we're going to make producing housing an ordinary rather than an extraordinary accomplishment, we need to be able to do this during the other 90% of the political calendar, too.

So as much as election season draws our attention to politicians and who might be political winners or losers, let's keep our focus on New Yorkers' most pressing needs and the Charter reforms that can make us better, more affordable and more equitably housed.
### Two Mayoral Debates: Not Nearly Enough
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/two-mayoral-debates-are-not-nearly-enough/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:42.000Z
I am ferociously proud of my colleagues who put together last week's 90-minute debate in the race for New York City mayor — the second and final general election faceoff in this campaign — and I am more convinced than ever that, going forward, we need to have many more debates, and to make them mandatory for all major candidates.

Final numbers aren't in yet, but [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/live/ot6zbhPLs4Y?si=8Dcx6WcPV8qWuoNd&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) alone has registered more than 883,000 viewers of the debate I co-hosted, a number that doesn't include the audience that connected via [WNYC radio](https://www.wnyc.org/story/listen-live-final-2025-mayoral-debate-wnyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [C-SPAN](https://www.c-span.org/program/campaign-2026/new-york-city-mayoral-debate/667477?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Spectrum News](https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2025/10/22/full-debate--mamdani--cuomo-and-sliwa-face-off-in-final-mayoral-debate?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Spectrum Noticias](https://spectrumnoticias.com/us/noticias/politics/2025/10/22/full-debate--mamdani--cuomo-and-sliwa-face-off-in-final-mayoral-debate?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and other platforms. The first debate, hosted by WNBC and Univision, [drew 922,000 viewers on broadcast and nearly 1.5 million on streaming platforms](https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/nyc-mayor-debate-wnbc-wnju-ratings/6408117/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Interest in the race reflects the magnitude of the choice voters will make on Nov. 4: New York's strong-mayor system concentrates an outsized amount of power in a single person, who will control a 37,000-member police force; a school system with nearly 1 million students and 75,000 teachers; and a $116 billion budget that is larger than the annual spend of all but four states.

The first debate and the debate that my organization, Spectrum News, hosted along with a team that included WNYC/Gothamist and The City, were the only two question-and-answer sessions that candidates were [legally required](https://www.nyccfb.info/law/act/mandatory-debates/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to attend as a condition of receiving millions of dollars in public matching funds from the New York City Campaign Finance Board. We did our best to explore what I call the Big Five issues: housing, public safety, the economy, public schools and public transit. But 90 minutes left little or no time to dive into many crucial issues.

Here are half a dozen questions that got left on the cutting room floor.

- According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly one out of every five children (18.6%) in New York City experiences food insecurity, which is especially true in the Bronx, where almost one-third of children are food insecure. But even though, on paper, New York gives every child free breakfast and lunch, New York allows principals the discretion to restrict breakfast to cafeteria-only, and to limit the time to first period or earlier. If elected, will you commit to making sure that all schoolchildren have a chance to eat free breakfast every day?
- As of last year, there were 1,600 paraprofessional vacancies — affecting multiple areas across the public school system. Paraprofessionals perform a range of functions, among them helping students with special needs with instructional and behavioral support. The union representing these workers has called for a $10,000 pay boost to attract new hires. How would you address this shortage?
- School bus delays in New York City reached a [seven-year high](https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-public-school-bus-delays/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) this school year, affecting students with differing abilities the most. How would you fix this issue to make sure students don't miss class and their families don't end up paying for cabs to get them to school?
- Property taxes alone constitute as much as 30% of the cost of a rent-stabilized apartment, with additional expense added by the highest property insurance premiums in America. Property taxes in particular fall under the control of local government — so exactly how will you attack that part of the affordability crisis?
- Public health is an ever-present issue that deserves attention. Five years ago, COVID swept across the city, killing at least 46,000 New Yorkers and sickening hundreds of thousands of others. Except for criticism aimed at Andrew Cuomo for how he handled the pandemic during his time as governor, little or nothing was said during the campaign about COVID. What steps will you take to get New York City ready for its next major health crisis?
- A decade after the launch of Vision Zero, New York has seen a drop in the number of fatalities and injuries, thanks in part to the widespread use of traffic-calming measures and infrastructure, such as protected bicycle lanes, speed cameras and pedestrian plazas. If elected, would you continue the city's commitment to Vision Zero — and if so, what measures do you think are especially promising when it comes to improving street safety?

**More is more**

We discussed most of these issues, and many others, at small, non-televised mayoral forums earlier this year, sponsored by civic, professional and academic institutions with subject-matter expertise in municipal matters. In April, I moderated a [panel on hunger and homelessness](https://sph.cuny.edu/event/2025-nyc-mayoral-candidates-forum-lets-talk-about-hunger-and-food-policy-in-nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) co-sponsored by Hunger Free America and the CUNY School of Public Health and a [Vital City forum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nh3KBOrRrg&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on crime and quality of life. In May, the Furman Center and the New York Housing Conference hosted a [mayoral forum](https://nyunews.com/news/2025/05/05/democratic-mayoral-forum-nyu/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with a focus on the city's housing crisis, and John Jay College held an in-depth discussion about [disorder in the streets](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBeC2LiVqe8&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In June, I co-moderated a candidate forum for the Jewish community at [B'nai Jeshrun](https://bj.org/event/mayoral-candidate-forum-for-the-jewish-community/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

While my co-moderators and I got a fabulous multi-month crash-course on a wide range of topics, none of these forums had 100% attendance by candidates, and most had less than 50% even in the crowded pre-primary phase of the campaign. Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo made a point of never appearing on the same stage as his opponents, and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani began telling forum sponsors that he wouldn't show up unless Cuomo did. That kind of gamesmanship cheated all of us — the public, the press and the candidates — out of a chance to focus attention and analysis on municipal problems that require more than slogans, quips and talking points.

The law that makes debate attendance mandatory for recipients of matching funds should be updated to require more debates. The Campaign Finance Board has delivered matching funds on 13 different dates this election cycle; that should translate into at least five additional mandatory forums, awarded to media sponsors the same way the big debates are. Each could be dedicated to one of the Big Five subjects, so we could hold separate discussions about housing, public safety, schools, jobs and transit.

So far this cycle, more than $48 million in public funds has been paid out to candidates for mayor, some of whom have barely shown their faces outside of controlled, limited appearances and paid advertisements. We can and should demand more for our money.
### How Zohran Mamdani Can Get Out of the ‘Gifted & Talented’ Trap
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-zohran-mamdani-can-get-out-of-the-gifted-and-talented-trap/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:42.000Z
The debate over how New York City schools should implement gifted education — or whether it should exist at all — has resurfaced in the mayor's race. I have followed this debate for years, starting with the proposed Bloomberg-era reforms two decades ago, and the entire situation frustrates me to no end. We have known for a long time that there are better ways to do advanced education, most of them built on common sense.

An important caveat is that [the current brouhaha](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/nyregion/mamdani-schools-gifted-and-talented-program.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was spurred by the mayoral candidates' brief responses to pre-election surveys and subsequent sound bites from campaign spokespeople. We have a general sense of what each candidate would do if elected, but details are few and far between.

The big brushstrokes are that, frustrated that current programs disproportionately serve white and Asian-American students and are a source of *de facto* student segregation, Zohran Mamdani wants to do away with the gifted program's kindergarten entry point; what happens next in his vision is unclear. Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, pushing back on this proposal as hostile to student excellence and contrary to the best interests of many New York families, say they would expand seats in the program.

First, a quick primer on the system we have and how it came to be. For decades, the city used a test for four-year-olds to determine who would qualify for special gifted and talented classes. Although designed to level the playing field, in fact the test wound up reinforcing existing socioeconomic divides. Parents with money and others with a strong inclination to prepare their kids for the test got their kids to qualify and fill these accelerated classes; the vast majority of the city, predominantly black and Latino kids, wound up on the outside looking in. Mayor Bloomberg proposed changes to the entire system as early as 2005, but the most promising improvements [were rolled back](https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/politics/columns/citypolitic/11544/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in response to strong parent pushback.

In part in reaction to ongoing criticisms and in part because COVID made the entry test difficult to administer, New York City scrapped the exam — and moved to a system built on pre-K teacher recommendations, followed by a lottery in cases where demand outstrips supply. Even with this change, profound inequities in access across the city remain.

The current system isn't working optimally; to serve its purpose, either more kids need to be enrolled across a range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, or it needs to be dialed back, so that general education classrooms do more to challenge kids at all levels.

A major reason for the lack of improvement is that the current system is a hodge-podge of old thinking about academic excellence, back when one-size-fits-all, find-the-gifted-child programs predominated. Within these models, students were identified and labeled as gifted as early as possible, with an emphasis on finding students who were high achievers in most subjects, under the assumption that they were very rare. These students then attended special schools and programs segregated from "less gifted" peers.

We now know better. Children may be highly talented in one area but not another, especially [twice-exceptional students](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00169862241302813?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that have significant talents while dealing with significant learning challenges. Student interests may also wax and wane regarding certain content and topics, appearing highly motivated to study math or history one year and completely uninterested the next. This is especially true for younger students. Some students may exhibit tremendous talents in preschool, while others are [late bloomers](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001698628102500204?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) whose talents and interests develop years later. Researchers and educators have also developed a [range of interventions](https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/building-wider-more-diverse-pipeline-advanced-learners?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that don't require a "special schools" approach to advanced education.

## "Advanced learning" vs. "gifted and talented"

If I could wave a magic wand to redesign the system, I'd start with this thought experiment: What if the term "gifted and talented" didn't exist in education, and we focused more on students capable of advanced learning? The key educational questions would become "How do we meet the academic needs of our advanced students?" and "How can we get more students to perform at advanced levels?"

This isn't a semantic distinction. I often find myself in conversations where people rail about the evils of "gifted education." When they finish their speech, I ask if they have similar complaints about AP, high school honors courses, student artistic competitions and varsity sports. The response is almost always, "Um, no?" My follow-up question is, "Do you want to get rid of all advanced programs, or do you want your child to have greater opportunities to receive advanced services?" Or put differently, "Do you want your child to have no playing field, or a level one that has fewer barriers to entry?" The answer is always, "A level one."

In other words, lots of people have problems with the g-word, but I rarely meet people who have a problem with advanced learning and academic excellence, especially if opportunities for advanced learning are widely available. This observation feels like the foundation of a new conversation, one focused less on ideology and more on meeting the needs of our children.

A system focused on advanced education would include two practical sets of interventions: identifying students who "need more" and providing them with educational experiences that give them the opportunity for more. As described below, "more" is best defined by educators and parents in each school and community. For example, in one school the regular math curriculum may be rather advanced already, but instruction in advanced writing may be needed. Another school that has never offered such opportunities in any subject may need to offer more academic challenge and rigor across the board. But the focus should shift from "find the gifted child" to "figure out who needs more advanced opportunity."

## **Fresh thinking on interventions**

Much ink has been spilled in recent weeks about what a research-informed talent development system would look like in New York City, and the suggestions are all worth considering. But I'll point to the change that strikes me as the foundation for everything else: Make advanced learning available *in every school*, because every school has students who need more or are capable of learning more if given the right opportunities.

Having advanced services in all schools facilitates identification strategies such as [universal screening](https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1605043113?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (which helps identify overlooked low-income students) and [using local norms](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858419848446?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (looking at who needs more within each school and community, rather than citywide). Taking things a step further, the push to find students who need more [should occur every year](https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=XG8IEQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=identification+gifted&ots=03MPDMG%5FLm&sig=IRKy-Zwjq2dFlmJiziDqkd8m13I&ref=vitalcitynyc.org#v=onepage&q=identification%20gifted&f=false) (and throughout each year!), not just at a handful of specific grade levels. And having advanced programs in every school would greatly facilitate a critically important change: Identifying students who need or want more [in specific subjects and not all subjects](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Lubinski/publication/249826186%5FRethinking%5FMultipotentiality%5FAmong%5Fthe%5FIntellectually%5FGifted%5FA%5FCritical%5FReview%5Fand%5FRecommendations/links/5cc1b5ad92851c8d220383db/Rethinking-Multipotentiality-Among-the-Intellectually-Gifted-A-Critical-Review-and-Recommendations.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). These identification changes alone, though not sufficient, would radically change the city's approach to talent development.

Once New York has improved its identification strategies and emphasized the need for advanced education in every school, several other, helpful interventions would flow quite naturally: A curriculum designed to help teachers work with students learning both below- and above-grade-level ([a "pre-differentiated" curriculum](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0002831214549448?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)); a mix of [acceleration strategies](https://www.accelerationinstitute.org/Nation%5FEmpowered/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (allowing students to move at a faster pace) and enrichment activities (allowing students to dive deeper into select curriculum); afterschool, weekend and summer experiences that allow students to explore advanced topics with likeminded peers; partnerships with community colleges and universities to provide advanced experiences, perhaps as early as middle school. Perhaps most importantly, schools should implement an [automatic enrollment](https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/43bc8b47-7fd8-40d4-a75c-520f7ae53a4f/content?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), in which high-performing students are automatically placed in advanced coursework the following year. This policy is being successfully implemented across the country, at the school, district and state levels, and is another necessary condition for a modern advanced learning system.

And here's the best part: This approach need not cost more money than the current system! We are talking about the same number of students and the same number of teachers. The change comes not from adding new services; it comes from replacing services and being creative in how they are administered. Initial investments may be required, but over the medium- and long-term, costs should remain the same.

My response to well-intentioned people on both sides of the current debate is "yes." Yes, the current program has created huge inequities that especially disadvantage bright Black, Latino and lower-income students. Yes, advanced education is critically important for the economic and cultural well-being of our students and communities. Yes, advanced education in the city's public schools is artificially scarce by design and doesn't reach nearly all of the students who would benefit from it.

And yes, we can replace the city's antiquated approach to academic excellence with pragmatic, research-based reforms that have the potential to transform the city. But will we have the leadership bold enough to make this happen?
### Done Right, Universal Child Care Would Be a Seismic Shift for New York’s Children
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/universal-child-care-could-be-a-seismic-shift-for-new-yorks-children/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:43.000Z
Zohran Mamdani aims to make New York the first major American city to implement universal child care. Perhaps more than any leading U.S. candidate for city or statewide office this year, the mayoral frontrunner has made the cause a centerpiece of his campaign, proposing free care for all children aged six weeks to five years old. "The best way to keep families in New York City is to make it cheaper to raise one here," he states in a campaign video.

The case for universal child care as an affordability measure is real. Free child care would put money back in parents' pockets and expand the city's workforce. The plan carries an estimated cost of $6 billion, a figure that underscores both its scale and ambition. But treating child care primarily as a pocketbook policy misses what matters most. When done well, it is an education reform with benefits that echo through high school and into adult life.

The science is straightforward. From birth to three, the brain wires itself at a [breathtaking pace](https://www.zerotothree.org/why-0-3/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Experiences during those years set the architecture for language, reasoning and self-regulation. High-quality early education takes that natural surge and organizes it. [Research](https://www.naeyc.org/sites/default/files/globally-shared/downloads/PDFs/resources/position-statements/advancingequitypositionstatement.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) tells us that the best programs do not drill toddlers on letters or numbers. They are built on warm, responsive relationships — back-and-forth talk and consistent routines — paired with hands-on exploration in blocks, art, storytelling, music, science and outdoor play. Teachers notice what children are trying to do and gently extend it: the measured pour that becomes early math; the rhyming song that becomes early language; the turn-taking game that builds self-control. Families are woven into the work — engaged handoffs at drop-off, regular two-way conversations, shared goals for growth. And behind it all is leadership that treats classrooms as places of practice, with coaching that helps caregivers get better at their craft.

This is not a luxury for a few neighborhoods. New York cannot wish away the stress many young children carry — housing instability, food insecurity, family crises. Over one-quarter of children in New York — nearly 420,000 youth — live below the poverty line, according to a recent [report](https://robinhood.org/reports/poverty-tracker-annual-report-vol-7/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by Columbia University and Robin Hood. Chronic stress frays the very capacities learning depends on. The countermeasure is not a worksheet; it is an engaged adult whom a child trusts and can count on. When children experience that kind of reliability, schools see the [downstream effects](https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/education/we-must-start-earlier-critical-importance-0-3?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): large public studies — from [Boston](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working%5Fpapers/w28756/w28756.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) and [Tulsa](https://mccourt.georgetown.edu/news/universal-pre-k-long-term-benefits-exceed-short-term-costs/?%5Fga=2.3977200.1702813498.1760734557-155199844.1760734557&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to [New Jersey's Abbott districts ](https://nieer.org/sites/default/files/2023-07/apples205th20grade.pdf?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com)— find that high-quality programs help students avoid being held back and put in special education placements, improve attendance and behavior, and raise the odds of graduating high school and enrolling in college.

Access to this kind of care is grossly unequal. Typical annual costs run well into the tens of thousands of dollars. For many families — especially those with infants and toddlers — enrollment is simply out of reach. This means children are often left with friends or relatives who themselves are overstretched and unable to provide quality care, or parents are forced to stop working to care for children. The market isn't failing because parents don't want care. It's failing because the economics of quality are upside down. The adults who do the work — the largely female Black and Latina educators who diaper, comfort, plan lessons, assess progress and partner with families — are paid wages that would be scandalous in any other sector entrusted with children's development. Programs then churn staff and ask toddlers to form new attachments again and again, undermining the core relationships that support healthy development.

Fixing this begins with pay. New York will not deliver quality at scale until early-childhood educators — many of whom are employed by community-based organizations or run daycare centers out of their homes — can afford to stay in the field. That means setting salary standards that move toward parity with public school teachers. Washington, D.C., offers a model: its early-childhood educator program supplements salaries to bring them in line with public school pay, strengthening retention and program quality. It also means creating real pathways — coaching and paid apprenticeships — for aides to grow into lead teachers without leaving the classroom. Stability in the workforce is stability for children.

Space is the other bottleneck. The city depends on both nonprofit centers and smaller, home-based programs, especially in neighborhoods outside Manhattan. To ensure children's health and safety, the City licenses all centers and sets strict standards that all providers must meet. Centers need capital to retrofit infant-toddler rooms with sinks, ventilation, bathrooms and safe exits. Home-based providers — often anchors of care in their communities — need help meeting safety and licensing requirements without being buried in red tape or forced into debt. A universal plan must pair operating funds with grants and low-interest loans for facilities, along with technical assistance that helps providers open seats quickly and safely where families actually live.

[Quality is not a mystery](https://educate.bankstreet.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=bsec&%5Fga=2.7587570.1367352059.1580740335-1524226221.1576784910&%5Fgl=1%2A1x68f0j%2A%5Fgcl%5Fau%2ANjgxNzgzNjIwLjE3NTg1Njg0MjI.%2A%5Fga%2AMTc3NjQzMTU1Ni4xNzU4NTY4NDIy%2A%5Fga%5F8BED3YJMC3%2AczE3NjA3MzM4MzQkbzYkZzAkdDE3NjA3MzM4MzQkajYwJGwwJGg1NzUyNzYxMTk.&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and it is not a luxury. It looks like low adult-child ratios that let teachers respond, not just supervise; play-rich curricula grounded in evidence; ongoing observation of children's growth; and regular, two-way communication with families. Most of all, it looks like instructional support with coaching, feedback and time for teachers to plan together. The City should set these expectations clearly and then support programs to meet them. The current approaches to ensuring quality, rooted in compliance checklists have minimal impact. Structured professional learning and steady staffing will.

The conversation to date has too often treated "universal" as the finish line — as if a seat alone were the point. That is too small for New York. A universal system worthy of this city would guarantee not only a place for every child, but a level of teaching and care that closes the opportunity gaps that persist across our schools. It would pay the educators who make that possible, build out the infant-toddler rooms we lack, and knit together centers and home-based programs into a coherent, dignified system that families can trust.

If a future Mayor Mamdani wants to lead boldly, he should aim to do more than provide affordable child care slots. Emphasizing universality without quality risks missing the chance to build a truly equitable birth-to-12 system in New York City. Promise parents relief, yes — but promise their children something far greater: the steady relationships and playful learning that turn toddlers into readers, problem solvers, artists and citizens who love to learn and contribute to their communities. New York can be the first city in the nation to guarantee universal quality child care from birth — quality that shows up not in the next political cycle, but in the commencement photos of the next generation.
### Why Isn’t Education at the Center of the New York City Mayoral Race?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/why-isnt-education-at-the-center-of-the-new-york-city-mayoral-race/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:00.000Z
Over 90 minutes. That's how long it took in the first of two general-election mayoral debates before anyone mentioned education. We heard about foreign policy, 311 and personal shopping habits well before the word "schools" was even mentioned.

There are more than 900,000 children in New York City public schools, and the next mayor will shape their future. If this city wants a new generation of New Yorkers who can thrive, education can't keep being treated like the-issue-that-must-not-be-named.

Some will say education isn't polling as a top issue. But that's a symptom of a larger problem. Public conversation follows the questions that debate moderators, reporters and everyday New Yorkers ask — and increasingly, the questions are about issues the mayor has no power over. Consider the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which dominated the first half of the debate. While New Yorkers may hold strong personal views on it, the mayor has no role in foreign policy. Contrast that with the delayed, muted whispers about the future of our schools, where the mayor has direct authority.

Even worse, the only substantive education discussion so far has centered on the kindergarten gifted-and-talented program — an issue affecting about [2,500 children](https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/10/10/mamdani-proposal-for-gifted-and-talented-comes-amid-admissions-shift/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=The%20gifted%20programs%2C%20which%20enroll,or%20schools%20through%20fifth%20grade.). This alone cannot be the entirety of our discussion of education in a mayoral election where the winner will run the largest school system in the country. There are myriad issues that are complex, difficult and must be discussed — ranging from teacher quality to charter schools, truancy and more.

One issue in particular is at the foundation of them all: literacy. And it's an issue where New York City is in a serious emergency. More than [70% of our fourth graders are struggling to read](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ToR6J6kgH3tGcvdEHb1pd2S3FNZAFaD%5F/view?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), according to the NAEP. For students with learning disabilities, this is especially perilous, and an estimated [one in 10 students has dyslexia](https://dyslexiaida.org/dyslexia-basics/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But reading hasn't been discussed. Dyslexia hasn't been discussed.

When questions on literacydon't get asked, serious plans to improve literacy don't get written. Education plans for our children's future become sparse. We should want every candidate competing to ensure that every child is a strong reader. But it's up to the media in particular to ask for that vision. If we don't, we risk a return to the status quo where reading is ignored in the midst of a literacy crisis.

Teaching children to read is the baseline by which any school system should be judged. New York City has made real progress through NYC Reads — the initiative we advocated for, which was implemented by the Adams administration, to remove broken whole language reading curriculum and replace it with exclusively evidence-based literacy practices. But that was the beginning, not a victory lap. If the next mayor isn't committed to continuing this work, those gains can easily slip away.

When schools adopt structured literacy rooted in the science of reading, students make gains. [When they don't, children fall behind](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy-is-a-policy-choice?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This isn't ideology. It's evidence. Other states like Connecticut, Mississippi and Wisconsin have deliberately chosen to prioritize replacing whole language with structured literacy and seen impressive results. Mississippi went [from second to last in the nation to seventh in reading proficiency](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/kids-reading-scores-have-soared-in-mississippi-miracle?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in just a few short years.

Silence has consequences. When education isn't a campaign issue, it risks being overlooked as a governing priority. While education may not poll as high as affordability and crime, for many parents, the quality of their children's education — their chance to succeed — *is* the issue, and one deeply wrapped up with questions of affordability. Many families aren't just leaving New York because of housing costs. The effectiveness of their local schools is also part of their consideration. If you can live more affordably elsewhere and the schools there are a priority of state and local government, why wouldn't you move?

Education is also one of the few issues in this race where candidates have genuinely different visions. Curtis Sliwa wants to rely more on trade schools. Andrew Cuomo wants to expand the gifted and talented program. Zohran Mamdani is focused on reducing class size by bringing more teachers into our schools. Understanding those differences matters. So does whether the next mayor will choose a chancellor with real literacy expertise and keep proven reforms in place, requiring evidence-based instruction in every classroom.

This election will determine whether New York continues to move forward on literacy or slides back to the era when most kids were taught to guess at words rather than read them. It will determine whether we build on progress or squander it.

Candidates, campaigns and the media should consider what's lost when education isn't given the platform it deserves. If it's an afterthought on the campaign trail, it will be an afterthought in City Hall.
### The One Debate Answer that Spoke Volumes about Zohran Mamdani
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-one-debate-answer-that-spoke-volumes-about-zohran-mamdani/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:01.000Z
In the first general election mayoral debate, one moment was especially revealing about how Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ran his campaign and how he might lead the city. It came after 15 circular minutes about Israel that went nowhere, though it had become a defining issue in the race. The election's many skirmishes on Gaza, Hamas, Netanyahu, antisemitism and so on largely played out to Mamdani's advantage, but he avoided the key question of whether or not he's willing to break the city's own rules (about occupying buildings or blocking transit hubs, for instance) when he's in sympathy with the rulebreakers, instead fuzzing things up by talking broadly but selectively about the First Amendment.

The big question about how much care the aspiring first-time executive will take to uphold the laws he is charged with executing as mayor crystallized in the exchange that caught my eye and ear — on a completely different topic.

It started with a question from Politico's Sally Goldenberg, one of the city's sharpest and fairest political observers, as she pressed Mamdani on his signature rent-freeze promise. The exchange showed at once the potency of his pitch and the problem with his product.

It's a minute worth going through in full, crosstalk and all.

A New York Post piece from early October, worth reading in full, laid out the issue: Mamdani promised, in advance, to have his Rent Guidelines Board freeze rents every year he remains mayor. But while the mayor-elect will indeed appoint the board's members, different ones are required by law to represent tenants and landlords, and to take into account specific objective factors.

That doesn't allow for a political prejudgement that the rent is too damn high, and landlords just have to eat the zeroes. Ignoring the law opens up an obvious space for the courts to get involved and, quite possibly, for this Supreme Court to get around to ultimately demolishing New York City's stabilization system that Mamdani's promise depends on.

In September, the New York Editorial Board, on which I sit, put the question to Bill de Blasio (the last mayor to freeze the rent) when Vital City's Josh Greenman asked him, "Does Mamdani have unilateral authority to preemptively say four years of rent freezes \[on rent-stabilized apartments\]? And if he does, what if his posture was, we're going to have four years of 3% increase? Would that be OK?" De Blasio's answer, more or less, was that a mayor doesn't have that much power. "New York City is not a police state. The people named have the power to make their own — they have a term, they have the power to make their own decisions."

Mamdani has insisted he can order up a four-year freeze, full stop, as part of some grand economic reparation for perceived past mistakes. Will that really pass muster in the political process? Will it really be a convincing position in court, when whatever decisions are made are inevitably challenged?

Here's the full exchange from the debate:

Goldenberg: The costs of maintaining a building change year to year for landlords. The Rent Guidelines Board is legally required to consider those costs when deciding whether to freeze rents. So how can you promise a rent freeze today before ever seeing that data next year?

Mamdani: You know, we've seen the data time and again…

Goldenberg: …But not next year's data…

Mamdani: …It's been data that's been overruled by mayors again and again. The last Rent Guidelines Board study showed that profits were up 12% for landlords of those units, and what did they do? They raised the rent, adding to more than 12% under Eric Adams' administration. What I am speaking about is actually reflecting the needs of these New Yorkers and the state of the market today. These are New Yorkers who have a median household income of $60,000\. We do not need to be pushing them further out of the city. We need to keep them in their homes.

Goldenberg: Aren't you saying in that answer that you're going to prejudge? You will not have seen the data for next year, and you're making a determination based on data you haven't seen.

Mamdani: I've seen the data year after year of the fact that salaries are stagnating…

Goldenberg: Based on the current data…

Mamdani: …costs are up. New Yorkers can't actually afford their apartments, and I will also take action to actually ensure that the landlords of those bills can better handle their costs by taking on their insurance, their property taxes —

Goldenberg: All right, we're at time. It is based on annual data and you have not seen next year's data yet.

What does it all add up to? Mamdani's central campaign promise is, in fact, a big maybe, and the question rises as to how much he'll be guided by evidence and the rules when the apparent imperatives of politics are pulling at his sleeve.

That cuts right to the heart of what Mamdani can deliver, and how outside forces could stymie the biggest parts of his ambitious agenda. Among those outside forces: an economy that's likely to be cooling, a governor running for reelection, and President Donald Trump's well-established wrecking-ball approach to governance and blue cities, let alone a Muslim socialist mayor in his hometown.

The job interview isn't the job, of course. But Mayor-elect Mamdani is now the manager as well as the messenger. He's going to be judged on how he delivers, not how well he can counter-punch wild swings from the right and the center.

*This piece was originally published in October 2025 and has since been updated to reflect the results of New York City's 2025 general election.*
### Zohran Mamdani’s Year One: A Time for Testing
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/zohran-mamdanis-year-one-a-time-for-testing/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:02.000Z
Now that Zohran Mamdani has won the 2025 election for New York City mayor, it's worth thinking about what comes next. Before he's even sworn in, Mayor-elect Mamdani faces a series of very tough choices and challenges — decisions that will define both his approach to the mayoralty and how we see him as mayor.

**Factors he will face:**

**1.) A significant deficit.** Right now, the City's FY 2026 deficit is projected to be $4.2 billion (out of a total operating budget of $112 billion), and it's likely to get worse. The $4.2 billion gap does not factor in any of the pending federal cuts to Medicaid funding. The City Comptroller's office estimates the deficit will double to $8.83 billion in FY 27 and to $9.95 billion in FY 2028 (that's still pre-Medicaid cuts). Eliminating these deficits just gets the City's budget books back to zero; it does not factor in a single penny for new spending on anything Mamdani wants to do, let alone the $3-5 billion in estimated costs for his childcare program, so he will have to make hard choices in areas that are generally spared.

**2.) An uncertain economy.** Inflation is rising, unemployment is rising and consumer spending is flatlining — and this is before the impact of Trump's tariffs is fully absorbed (assuming the Supreme Court upholds the president's authority to impose the tariffs). In the first seven months of this year, New York City added just 5,047 new private sector jobs — the lowest gain in 30 years. No city in the country fares worse during a recession than New York, because so much of our job base and revenue depends on the financial services sector. If we enter even a mild recession, the FY 2026 deficit grows by another $1.3 billion. If it's a severe recession, the deficit could double. Now do the same math for the subsequent years when the problem gets even worse.

**3.) 2026 state elections.** Gov. Kathy Hochul is up for re-election next year. She has a clear path to the Democratic nomination, but the general election, likely against Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, won't be easy. Hochul has already said she will not raise taxes, which both complicates Mamdani's budget and severely limits his plan to fund free childcare through a state income tax increase and a corporate tax increase. In the legislature, gerrymandering means that the vast majority of seats are safe no matter what, but the handful of swing seats could make the Assembly speaker and Senate majority leader wary of aggressively pushing Mamdani's agenda. With that said, the first year for any mayor is typically a honeymoon, and he will get something from Albany — likely either funding to pay for either a portion of his childcare plan or for free buses for one or two groups like senior citizens. He'll have to decide what half a loaf to ask for if the whole loaf isn't on the shelf.

**4.) Donald Trump.** Mamdani will likely become the symbol that Trump uses everywhere as shorthand for the decay of the left. Whether it's sending in federal troops or cutting federal funding or just attacking New York City on a constant basis, Trump is going to play a bigger role in this mayoralty than any president has in a long time (if not ever). This could all easily work to Mamdani's advantage, but either way, it will take up a lot of his time and energy.

**5.) The Wildcard.** In year one, something crazy or terrible will invariably happen. A natural disaster. An act of terrorism. A terrible fire or shooting or tragedy of some kind. A scandal involving City workers. And it will be an opportunity for Mamdani to either handle it well and shine or mishandle it and face accusations that he's not up to the job.

**Choices he will have to make:**

**1.) How should he pursue taxes in Albany?** Mamdani is committed to seeking an income tax increase on the wealthy in Albany and a higher corporate tax. (As with Bill de Blasio, it's a feature of his policy priorities, not a bug). Hochul is committed to blocking it, as then-Gov. Cuomo was with de Blasio's proposed tax increase, so it's very unlikely to happen. Mamdani can decide to make the pursuit of higher taxes on the rich his major issue and make Albany the villain — or he can decide not to waste political capital on something that can't happen and focus on getting something else instead. His allies in the Democratic Socialists of America will want the fight, but his budget and policy needs argue for cooperation and common ground. Given his firsthand knowledge of Albany, odds are he opts for comity, but who knows.

Meanwhile, at the City level, the mayor and the Council can increase property taxes. However, this may be even more difficult politically. Unlike raising income taxes on the top 1%, who will never support him anyway, a lot of New Yorkers are house-rich and cash-poor. For someone whose home is valued in the low seven figures but with annual income in the low six figures, facing a $3,000 new tax bill is a very big deal and could easily spark a lot of new voters in the next Council primary to vote against the incumbent. Overall property tax reform may be warranted, but even if it does happen, it will likely take a few years.

**2.) What can he do without meaningful new revenue?** By law, the City's deficit has to be eliminated — which makes free childcare very tough to offer even if Mamdani is truly willing to take on labor and find meaningful savings in the budget. He can order his appointees to the Rent Guidelines Board to vote to freeze rent increases, but the impact will be far less than people think. De Blasio did it three times. A freeze doesn't mean that everyone's rent is automatically frozen — it only applies to rent-stabilized apartments (of which there are a million). He can come up with creative ways to fund a City-owned grocery store in every borough, but that's small bore. And if he were willing to aggressively demand that the MTA and NYPD enforce fare evasion, that could free up the funds to make the buses free — but it would be directly at odds with the DSA platform of decriminalizing most misdemeanors. Tradeoffs are tricky indeed.

3.) How does he hire? There are two possible answers here: pragmatically or dogmatically. If he sees the role of mayor as mainly an operational job — making sure the trash is picked up, making sure the lights turn from green to red, making sure clean water comes through the taps — he will hire the most experienced and talented operators possible, regardless of their politics. (Mike Bloomberg used to say he wanted the best person for each job even if they were a communist; the same would apply here with an amended caveat: even if they're a capitalist.) Having a few unexpected, highly respected commissioners and deputy mayors lined up to announce on day one of the transition would send a strong signal and speed the recruiting process.

But that requires being able to recruit top people with the assurance that an ideological agenda will not dominate every decision, which is not what Mamdani's base wants. If he feels like each major hire has to pass a progressive purity test, then the talent pool narrows dramatically and what he gains in likes on Bluesky, he loses in operational competence.

**4.) Does he worry about the tax base?** Mayor-elect Mamdani can't implement most of his affordability agenda without new revenue, most of which comes from people with lots of money — as about 1% of residents pay 40% of the income taxes. Pursuing policies that risk losing more high-income taxpayers would satisfy the DSA agenda but cost his budget dearly. The Citizens Budget Commission just released a new report that showed that New York's failure to retain and attract millionaires at the rate of other states meant a $13 billion loss in tax revenue in just one year alone. Imagine that — enough money to cover any deficit, any loss of federal funding and all of Mamdani's affordability agenda. The more millionaires you lose, the more tax revenue you lose. Less revenue means less ability to help the poor, to fund social services, to combat homelessness, to fund NYCHA and to offer health care.

Beyond the tax question, Mamdani may or may not realize that many DSA priorities — ending mayoral control of schools, essentially eliminating accountability for teachers, placing more restrictions on the NYPD, eliminating the gang database, ending enforcement of low-level crimes — result in exactly what drives away high-income residents: worse schools and worse quality of life. So pursuing his affordability agenda may require him to ignore the DSA's quality of life agenda.

Even beyond the risk of losing more taxpayers, New Yorkers don't like it when the city feels dangerous, dirty and poorly run. That's why Eric Adams, fairly or not, has had such low approval ratings. For Mayor-elect Mamdani to achieve one part of his agenda may require him to spurn another.

**5.) What does he do about housing, the homeless, Rikers and more?** Freezing the rent for some apartments doesn't increase the supply of affordable housing. Doing that will mean not just fighting with developers but saying no to groups that are usually sacred cows on the left: unions, community groups and environmentalists. Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein made the case well in their book "Abundance" that most of the blame for the failure to build affordable housing in blue cities and states lies with the left — and ironically, that failure may lead to even fewer electoral college votes for blue states and even more GOP presidents. Will Mamdani do what it takes to force through more affordable housing, or will he just blame landlords without actually making any progress?

By keeping his campaign's focus on affordability, Mamdani has been able to avoid other, equally complicated issues that he will no longer be able to duck as mayor. The number of homeless New Yorkers is going down some right now because of the shrinking migrant inflow, but the shelter system is still bursting at the seams, and Adams hasn't really taken on street homelessness in the way that the public demands. Mamdani may try to thread the needle between compassion for people with problems that keep them from seeking help and the need to keep the streets safe. This will cost money in the short term but save over time; it will for sure mean pushing back on activist impulses. We will see how much appetite he has for that.

Mismanagement has turned Rikers Island into an unmanaged prison camp. If the federal judge in charge of the case appoints a receiver, the mayor will still have to cooperate, and it will be at least in part on the City to execute the measures they impose. Will Mamdani be able to resist calls for more progressive solutions like large-scale early release, which would play into the narrative that he is against public safety?

—

No one has ever said that being mayor is easy. And few mayors have run for office both promising so many new programs that require so much new funding while facing large budget deficits, a shaky economy, an emotionally unstable president with real hangups about his hometown and an uncooperative Albany.

If Mamdani can thread the needle and somehow manage to deliver on his big promises — free childcare, free buses, a lot more affordable housing — while still keeping the city clean, safe and well run, keeping the tax base stable and keeping his own allies from constantly attacking him for not fully pursuing their agenda, he will ascend to the ranks of the city's greats.

It's not going to be easy. It would be hard for anyone, let alone a 34-year-old with no management experience. For the sake of all 8.5 million New Yorkers, let's hope he has what it takes.

Note: Several employees of Tusk Strategies worked on Andrew Cuomo's 2025 mayoral primary campaign, separate from their work at Tusk. None of them are still involved.

*This piece was originally published in September 2025 and has since been updated to reflect the results of New York City's 2025 general election.*
### Can Cities Withstand Trump’s Assault?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/can-cities-withstand-trumps-assault/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:03.000Z
Donald Trump's double-barreled assault on cities — budget and administrative damage on the one hand, and attacks on immigration on the other — will severely hurt New York and other metropolitan areas. But although the actions of the Trump administration are exceptionally harsh in degree, they are sadly consistent with America's long anti-urban history.

Trump's attacks are compounded by America's dysfunctional metropolitan form — core cities that drive the economy, surrounded by suburbs that benefit from urban economic strengths (scale, agglomeration, specialization, innovation) but at best only partially share the full costs of the city's problems, including high rates of crime, substandard schools and a housing crunch.

The sad truth is that New York and other cities will struggle to deal with Trump's attacks because they are fighting with one hand behind their backs thanks to politically independent suburbs and the reality that state government effectively controls many city actions.

## A three-pronged attack

The Trump administration's attack on cities has three principal components: cutting budgets, reducing immigration and advancing economic policies that will damage urban areas.

Federal budget cuts will be very harmful to New York. Gov. Kathy Hochul's office estimates that the impact on health care will cost $13 billion annually statewide, including $8 billion in direct cuts to hospitals and the health care system. New York City is estimated to suffer $7.9 billion of those cuts annually. Cuts in food assistance, both in direct SNAP benefits and additional costs for state and local administration, could cost another $1.4 billion annually across the state.

Overall, State Comptroller Tom Di Napoli now estimates the state faces budget gaps of more than $34 billion over the next three years, driven not only by the federal budget cuts but also by a weakening economy. Many of those budget gaps and fiscal pressures will flow down to the city.

To be fair, New York City is not without fault here. To the extent it controls its budget, it has let it increase at a far faster rate than the rate of inflation in recent years. It is legitimate to criticize the City for failing to discipline spending, and for paying insufficient attention to government efficiency. But that having been said, the city is where it is — and the federal fiscal attack is going to do serious damage.

Attacks on immigration are a second damaging blow. Immigration has long been a major driver of New York's growth and prosperity, especially in comparison to less immigrant-friendly cities like Philadelphia or Detroit. About 38% of New York's current population is foreign-born, and by some estimates, around 60% of New Yorkers are either immigrants or second-generation. (Even with the recent surge in undocumented migrants, the percentage of undocumented immigrants hovers steadily around 15%, and estimates for New York State are that most undocumented immigrants have been in the country for more than 10 years.)

In 2023, foreign-born workers made up 44.3% of the city's labor force, with very high concentrations in construction (69.5%), transportation and utilities (65.3%) and manufacturing (54.7%). Other sectors, like health care, food delivery and hotels and restaurants, also have large concentrations of immigrant workers, many of them women. Undocumented workers are especially likely to work in construction, food services and home care. Many of these jobs are understandably categorized as "essential," and dramatically reducing the number of people available to occupy them could have a devastating impact on the health of the city.

Finally, Trump's overall economic policies, especially his trade and tariff wars, could push up inflation and induce an economic slowdown or even a recession. Cities are especially exposed due to their greater integration into international trade, and unlike agricultural regions, the federal budget doesn't provide payments to offset the impact of retaliatory tariffs. The Center for New York City Affairs reports that the slowing of international trade in the wake of tariffs means "New York City's unemployment rate is likely to increase while its GDP growth may decrease in the short run." There has already been a sharp drop in foreign visitors and tourism, with the New York City Tourism and Conventions office foreseeing $4 billion less tourist spending this year.

The city's economy is feeling the effects. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that only 5,079 private sector jobs were added in the first seven months of 2025, compared to over 68,000 by this time in 2024\. And health care, especially lower-wage home health aide jobs, is the principal source of net new jobs, not finance or higher-paying industries. The slowdown is driven in part by macroeconomic factors beyond anyone's individual control, but also by a toxic brew of uncertainty caused by erratic federal policy around taxes, regulation and investment, and increasing cost pressures from tariffs that serve to restrict hiring and job creation, especially for small businesses.

## American animus against cities

Trump's hostility to cities is well documented. He's called American cities "rotting" and "cesspools of blood." Atlanta? "A killing field." San Francisco? "Worse than a slum." Los Angeles? "A trash heap" that has been "invaded and occupied by illegal aliens and criminals." Milwaukee (the site of the 2024 Republican convention)? "A horrible city." And in justifying his takeover of policing in Washington, D.C., Trump said the city suffers from "crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor and worse" even while the city's violent crime rate is at a 30-year low.

No one should deny that cities wrestle with real problems, but Trump's hyperbolic and racially coded attacks are worse than we've heard in recent decades.

That said, his approach echoes a long-standing American animus against cities. Thomas Jefferson, in 1800, reflecting on a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, viewed the disease as "producing some good…(by) discouraging the growth of great cities in our nation… I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man."

The Constitution disadvantaged cities, allocating two senators each to both urban and rural states. In 1956, the great historian Richard Hofstadter wrote "The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city," while clinging to a "sentimental attachment to the rural way of life" even as the economy and society urbanized.

American cities were — and are — disadvantaged not only at the federal level but by state governments. In the late 1800s, disputes about whether cities could issue their own bonds and regulate railroads independently led to a series of legal battles, which culminated in states having virtually absolute sovereignty over their cities.

This was formalized in 1868 by Iowa Judge John F. Dillon, in what has come to be known as "Dillon's Rule." Dillon wrote, "Municipal corporations (cities) owe their origin to, and derive their powers and rights wholly from the (state) legislature…As it creates, it may destroy. If it may destroy, it may abridge and control." I don't here suggest that cities should be independent entities; as a matter of law, states are going to remain much more powerful. But the power imbalance is extreme, and unfortunate, and harmful to cities.

## Why New York will have a hard time fighting back

After World War II, American cities experienced a paradox: A booming economy was driven by growing metropolitan areas, but urban cores themselves faced persistent declines as wealth and political power shifted to suburbs. As my 2023 book "Unequal Cities" documents, suburban growth was fueled by racially and economically exclusionary federal housing and transportation policy. So even though central cities typically remained the hubs of the metropolitan and national economies, they suffered from poverty, crime, housing and education problems that the suburbs generally didn't help pay for.

Economists know cities drive economic prosperity; economist Edward Glaeser calls them "our greatest invention." They are the source of growth, innovation, jobs, tax revenues and population. America's metropolitan areas produce around 90% of GDP and the vast majority of patents and innovation.

But most American cities are disadvantaged by our urban form: a core city surrounded by exclusionary and sometimes hostile suburbs, even though those suburbs' prosperity depends on being in thriving city-centered metropolitan areas.

Government fragmentation in metropolitan areas has real costs in efficiency and policy coordination. The Houston region has more than 1,200 separate governments; the Chicago region has more than 1,300; and the New York City tri-state region has over 2,000\. This creates inefficiency and inequality, as suburbs that depend economically on their metropolitan location have higher tax bases and residential incomes, supporting better schools and housing that are not shared with the core city. That might be tolerable if suburbs could regularly be counted on to support urban priorities in the state legislature, but that is often not the case. In state government, suburbs often ally politically with rural areas against cities.

Even with its powerful economy and large population, New York City has long grappled with this problem. The city's economy on its own produces close to 60% of state GDP, and if the suburban New York counties are included, the GDP share rises to around 80% of the state total (despite being home to only about 65% of the state's population).

Metropolitan tax revenues fuel the state budget. In 1905, Tammany Hall's George Washington Plunkitt (the man who coined the phrase "honest graft") called the city "the milch (milk) cow of the state" with "the politicians up in Albany…after the last drops of milk in the udder." Today, roughly 70% of the state's tax revenues come from the New York metropolitan region.

Yet New York City's ability to act on its own is constrained by the state. Among many other issues, Albany has mandated costly pension changes for city employees, imposed class size limits in public schools without funding them, authorized property tax abatements and exemptions that affect housing construction, regulated city borrowing, set bail laws and court procedures that have been controversial for some advocates, and even controlled whether the city can install red light and speed cameras for traffic control.

To be sure, New York City has cost problems it has brought upon itself. Its government is no paragon of efficiency. I don't suggest that if left to its own devices, the nation's largest city and other cities would automatically be well managed. The point, rather, is that the ingrained structural constraints make it far harder for cities to get out of the box.

## What the future holds

Given the fiscal and power imbalances baked into the political system, New York faces few good options under Trump's anti-urban regime.

The severe budget cuts will likely force contentious political battles over how to spend limited resources. Should the state and city pay additional billions to cover the health insurance and hospital cuts being imposed by Trump? What about the gaps in food assistance, housing, transit and other services? Should taxes or borrowing be raised to cover these gaps, much less Mamdani's new and expensive proposed transit and social programs?

Trump's policies hurt New York in other ways. His anti-immigrant hostility seems to be reducing the population, labor force, tuition-paying college and graduate students and tourism. Jobs and businesses in construction, health and elder care, hotels and restaurants are all being hit, and the lost paychecks from those employment declines will cut consumer spending and tax revenue.

Without more authority over their metropolitan economies, New York and other cities will have a hard time crafting appropriate strategies in response to Trump's policies. Lost federal revenues might be replaced by increased local taxes, but Albany's control over city tax policy, especially with a gubernatorial election in 2026, make this unlikely.

The city does have some levers under its control. We can (and should) keep making it easier for the private sector to build housing, through both new construction and converting offices. If enacted, the proposed City Charter amendments on housing will help, as will the changes made in zoning under the "City of Yes." Continuing to support immigrants, including undocumented ones, will help keep up the city's labor supply, and ongoing education and training for all the city's workforce should be a priority. Mobilizing new streams of investment capital also should be on the table. And streamlining regulatory policies to make decisions faster and less uncertain could also help growth.

But if suburbs and states didn't hold as much structural power as they did, cities would have even more ability to adapt to the hostile new climate.

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will face enormous budgetary and economic pressures when he assumes office. The constraints on city autonomy in our fragmented metropolitan economies, grounded in America's anti-urban bias, will combine with the additional blows coming from Trump's anti-urban policies. A new mayor — and all of us — face a very tough challenge.

*This piece was originally published in October 2024 and has since been updated to reflect the results of New York City's 2025 general election.*
### Zohran Mamdani’s Real-World Constraints
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/zohran-mamdanis-real-world-constraints/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:43.000Z
The mayor of the City of New York is the most powerful municipal official in the United States, and it isn't even close. But to say this isn't to say that Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will have the ability to unilaterally do some of the things he promised on the campaign trail. There are very real structural, budgetary and legal limits on what the city's chief executive can accomplish without the cooperation and support of other branches of city or state government.

New York's mayor is usually called a "strong mayor," and it's clear why. The mayor commands a workforce of approximately 300,000 — about the same number of people who live in Pittsburgh or Cincinnati.

With a few exceptions — mainly his commissioner of investigations and the corporation counsel, who lead the city Law Department — he can appoint hundreds of commissioners, department heads, their deputies and other senior managers without the advice and consent of the City Council.

One of the entities and employees under the mayor's control is the Department of Education, which operates the city's public high schools, middle schools and elementary schools — a function often overseen by semi-independent Boards of Education in other cities. (It is worth noting that Mamdani has said he wants to weaken this mayoral control in favor of a system that allows more community input, which might require City Council and/or state legislation.)

Unlike most other mayors across America, he is not constrained by a county executive or county legislature. Indeed, he has five counties under his direct control with the ability to deploy city resources among them pretty much as he sees fit.

And the resources he has to allocate are enormous — an annual operating budget of more than $115 billion (about the same as the entire state of Florida) and a 10-year capital budget of about $175 billion.

But while these powers and his resources are vast, the mayor is far from omnipotent. So it is worth asking, especially with respect to Mamdani's ambitious proposals, what is it that he will be able to do on his own and what will require the cooperation and approval of others?

Let's take a look at some of his most significant proposals:

**Fast and free buses.** The mayor controls the streets; he does not control the bus network, which is run by the MTA, and which is mainly accountable to the governor. It is certainly within his power, through his appointed commissioner of transportation, to delineate bus lanes and, through a variety of physical designs — including physical barriers — assure that those lanes would be used exclusively for buses. While there would be consultations with local communities, ultimately most of the mayor's commitment to faster buses can be realized without the approval of others. Presumably, faster buses are also a goal of the MTA's, so there should be close cooperation between the mayor and the MTA on realizing much faster bus service.

As to making buses free — which in Mamdani's vision would make them somewhat faster as well because loading wouldn't be slowed down by the process of passengers boarding through one door and paying fares — it is less likely that the mayor, on his own, will be able to get this done. It would cost more than $500 million annually to the MTA in lost fares to make all buses free to riders. To replace this lost revenue, the city would have to provide those funds annually to the MTA either through a reallocation of existing approved funding under the mayor's control or, more likely, a budget modification approved by the City Council. Alternatively, the State Legislature, with the governor's support, would have to allocate additional annual operating funding to the MTA. In either case, the MTA might have to be required through state law, or otherwise directed to make buses free, given the Authority's institutional resistance to free buses. That probably would require support from the governor and, possibly, majority support from the state Assembly and Senate — none of which is a sure thing.

**City-run grocery stores.** It is not yet clear exactly what form Mamdani's promise to open a small network of publicly run grocery stores would take. What is clear, however, is that the mayor will have the unfettered ability to do this through the city's Economic Development Corporation, which is under his control. EDC already operates and controls several retail food operations, and the city has been in this business — in one way or another — for more than 80 years. The cost of establishing these new stores, assuming just one in each borough as Mamdani has suggested, is fairly minor in the context of the city's overall budget and EDC has the resources to undertake it.

**Rent freezes.** The mayor derives his power to freeze the rent on rent-stabilized apartments from his authority to appoint members of the Rent Guidelines Board. The RGB cannot act arbitrarily or capriciously; it is supposed to be guided by a series of real economic indicators. Deviating from that would make it vulnerable to lawsuits. But it is most likely that the mayor's appointees would follow his policy guidance. Mayor de Blasio has already established the precedent that a mayor-appointed RGB can freeze rents — his appointees did so. But it's also important to note that Mamdani's authority would only apply to rent-stabilized units, which number about 1 million. The mayor does not have the power to freeze (or affect) rents on market-rate units or maintenance fees on unregulated condominiums and co-ops. Rents on thousands of more recently designated "affordable" housing units, which are governed by a myriad of federal, state and local laws and regulations, could not be subject to the mayor's unilateral action.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25499017?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Department of Community Safety.** Mamdani has proposed to take a chunk of activities out of the New York City Police Department and put them into a new Department of Community Safety. The premise is that such a department would be able to more efficiently and humanely address people struggling with serious mental illness and quality of life problems, while allowing the uniformed police force to focus more efficiently on serious crime. Creating such a department would require the approval of the City Council and a reallocation of funds, currently budgeted to the NYPD, to the new department. Of course, even if the Council resists, the mayor does have the power to simply reorganize the Police Department and create an "Office of Community Safety" within it. This might not accomplish all the goals of a new department — especially the cultural change to certain types of enforcement action — but it might be a unilateral first step.

**Housing production.** Mamdani has proposed having government directly finance and build 200,000 units of affordable housing over the coming decade. That would cost $100 billion, which would hinge on the City getting permission to borrow $70 billion — or about 40% more per year added to its annual capital budget — which would exceed the city's debt limit. Without a very substantial increase in taxes or an infusion of funds from the State, the City would be unable to sustain the added debt service required, absent legislation.

**Universal childcare.** Mamdani envisions providing universal free childcare to New York families, from six weeks to five years of age. Operationally, the mayor could probably do this on his own if he had the resources. However, the cost of childcare is considerable; estimates put the price tag around $5 billion annually. Depending on the scale, it would require either a substantial reallocation of existing city resources — or additional funding to the city from either direct funding from the state or an increase in taxes. This brings us to taxes.

**Taxes.** To pay for many of his priorities, Mamdani has proposed raising income taxes on New Yorkers who earn more than $1 million a year by two percentage points to help fund some of his ambitious proposals. He also proposes raising the state's highest corporate tax rate from 7.25% to 11.5%. The mayor does not have the power to increase taxes unilaterally. Indeed, the City itself does not have the power to impose new taxes or increase existing ones without the approval of the State Legislature and the governor, with the notable exception of the local property tax, which requires only the approval of the mayor and City Council.

Of course, much of Mayor-elect Mamdani's vision could be realized through additional funds flowing from the federal government, but — let's face it — that's not in the cards.

*This piece was originally published in October 2025 and has since been updated to reflect the results of New York City's 2025 general election.*
### John Lindsay, Zohran Mamdani and How Ambitions Collide with Reality
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/john-lindsay-zohran-mamdani-and-how-ambitions-collide-with-reality/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:37:54.000Z
Sixty years ago, a charismatic young politician took New York City by storm. His record in office offers some warnings to the current Democratic candidate for mayor.

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's road to victory in the mayoral election stunned many observers. The 33-year-old outsider defeated a flawed former governor,, but one with huge name recognition and an established political reputation. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani presented a more radical vision for city government and has caused controversy with past statements on Israel and law enforcement. (Mamdani would not be the first democratic socialist to become mayor. Many forget that David Dinkins was a member of the DSA, but he was also a product of the Harlem Democratic machine, which exerted just as much influence on his politics as any left-wing affiliation.)

Young and charismatic, Mamdani brought energy to the Democratic race and stood in stark contrast to the older Andrew Cuomo, who represented another era in Democratic politics. Yes, Mamdani was able to motivate large numbers of voters to the polls — a wide range of New Yorkers, but especially younger people — campaigning on the idea that the city is too expensive and there are too many people struggling to make ends meet. On the trail, Mamdani made "woke" cultural politics secondary to a left-wing populist economic message.

Sixty years ago, New Yorkers elected another young, charismatic political voice who ran on a message that New York was a "city in crisis" and was becoming unlivable. John Lindsay condemned the city's "power brokers" whom he believed ran Gotham to their own benefit, not in the interests of the common good. He promised to bring a new energy to city government and was in sync with the idealistic, good-government movement of the early Great Society, when optimism about the ability of government to solve problems was high.

Lindsay was not quite the outsider that Mamdani is. He was a Manhattan congressman with deep roots in the city's leadership class. Though Mamdani criticizes the wealthy, Lindsay was a Republican from the Silk Stocking district of the Upper East Side of Manhattan and had the support of much of the business community. While Mamdani is driven by left-wing ideology, Lindsay was a classic urban reformer determined to right the city from the damages of Democratic machine politics.

Still, even though the old machine-reform dialectic in urban politics within which Lindsay operated is long dead, there are important historical lessons to learn from Lindsay's tumultuous eight years as mayor.

> It is fine to be animated by larger moral and ideological concerns, but if people do not feel safe on the streets, snow is not plowed after snowstorms and schools fail to teach their students basic reading and math, then any mayor will lose popular support.

First, New York has always been a cauldron of different racial, ethnic and religious groups. Tensions — and even on rare occasions, violence — are inevitable. In the late 1960s, racial tensions in the city and in the nation worsened. Lindsay found himself the target of a backlash from white ethnic voters who resented the elite liberalism of the mayor and his supporters. The fear of street crime, demands for racial justice, a fight between a mostly white, Jewish teachers union and an African American school district in Brooklyn, and changing demographics in some city neighborhoods all made for a combustible mix. Whatever the issue, many middle- and working-class whites found themselves pitted against Lindsay and his liberal supporters, who blamed white racism for many of these issues. It is no surprise that the term "limousine liberal" was coined in New York at this time by one of Lindsay's political opponents.

Successful politicians are those who are able to navigate group tensions, not exacerbate them. Mamdani is a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause and a strong critic of the Israeli government, both of which are fine, but he must take great pains to understand the trepidation that many Jewish New Yorkers feel over his past words and actions.

Second, crime and disorder affect New Yorkers on a daily basis and can make or break a mayor. Under Lindsay, the city saw a dramatic increase in crime rates across the board, with murders more than doubling between the beginning and the end of his term. The bold reformer had a difficult relationship with the NYPD and was never able to adequately deal with the crime problem.

In the past, Mamdani has made pointed criticisms of law enforcement and supported the "Defund the Police" movement. As mayor, will Mamdani further drive down police morale? Will his proposed "Department of Community Safety" — which comes with a hefty price tag — make the streets safer? Any sense that crime and disorder are increasing under Mamdani will quickly sink his approval ratings and make it hard for him to govern, just as it did with Lindsay.

Third, Lindsay's eight years led to the city's infamous fiscal crisis of 1975\. Although Lindsay was not solely to blame, his administration greatly increased city spending. The many needs of city residents, Lindsay found, come with great costs that are difficult to cover by taxes and funding from the state and federal government. In the economic boom of the 1960s, New York could cover the new city spending (with help from the new city income tax). When the economy slowed down, it made city finances more unstable.

Mamdani has made many promises that carry large price tags. City revenues are not infinite, and if his policies drive wealthy New Yorkers and employers out of the city, it will make the city's fiscal problems more precarious. Mayor-elect Mamdani will need to balance his promises to increase City spending and address social needs with a larger eye toward the city's fiscal health.

Lastly, Lindsay possessed a deep moralistic strain. Mamdani is a deeply ideological politician. As elected mayor, will he govern as a kind of performative progressive, an inverse Donald Trump at the city level? In the end, running a large city is about providing basic public services to residents. It is fine to be animated by larger moral and ideological concerns, but if people do not feel safe on the streets, snow is not plowed after snowstorms and schools fail to teach their students basic reading and math, then any mayor will lose popular support.

New Yorkers have taken a big risk with Mayor-elect Mamdani. It is unclear how much he understands about the city's history and its political past. As was said during the Lindsay years, New York is the "second toughest job in the country." In order to succeed as mayor, Mamdani will need to grapple with the city's history and hopefully find some helpful parallels.

*This piece was originally published in July 2025 and has since been updated to reflect the results of New York City's 2025 general election.*
### Even Mamdani’s New York Needs Millionaires
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/even-mamdanis-new-york-needs-millionaires/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:44.000Z
Zohran Mamdani's campaign galvanized people with its disciplined focus on affordability — promises of universal childcare, free buses and a plan to build 200,000 units of housing — paid for by increasing taxes on businesses and high-income New Yorkers.

Underlying this narrative is the entirely correct assertion that lower- and middle-income residents are struggling to make it in New York. Left out of the conversation is the fact that those with higher incomes already pay a lion's share of the personal income taxes that fund the services so essential to the lives and livelihoods of working families.

One question that emerges is whether, over time, increasing New Yorkers' already nation-leading taxes would play a part in decreasing the share of millionaires that call New York City home — and ultimately further squeeze the social safety net and basic services New Yorkers need to thrive.

First, some context. Throughout its history, New York City has been a magnet, attracting ambitious people from all over the world who have thrived on its opportunities. It has strived to be a generous city, from the start of its settlement houses to its nation-leading social safety net.

At its best, New York is a global powerhouse offering vast opportunities and a high quality of life to its diverse population, while providing robust services for its lower-income and higher-need residents.

Supporting New York's expansive public services has long depended on a high-performing economy and high earners who pay a disproportionate share of the City's personal income taxes. In fact, filers with adjusted gross income over $1 million — less than 1% of filers — [paid 40% of New York's personal income taxes in 2022](https://www.ibo.nyc.gov/assets/ibo/downloads/pdf/fiscal-history/pit-tables/2022-pit-data.xlsx?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Personal income taxes will provide $18 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2026, and 22% of total City tax revenue.

So the moment is ripe for this question: Do the mayor-elect's proposed tax increases risk adverse consequences? What would be the impact on top earners, who already pay the nation's top marginal tax rate, especially when [positive ratings for services and quality of life in the city](https://cbcny.org/research/straight-new-yorkers-2025?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have declined?

> To sustain its economy and government, New York City doesn't just need to keep the millionaires it has; it needs to keep growing and attracting new ones.

The answers matter. A recent report by the Citizens Budget Commission, where I work, delved into these questions. ["The Hidden Cost of New York's Shrinking Millionaire Share"](https://cbcny.org/research/hidden-cost-new-yorks-shrinking-millionaire-share?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that while the number of high earners is growing all across the country, New York City and State — historic epicenters of economic opportunity — are losing ground.

This is important, because the problem is sometimes framed as "millionaire flight," as though all of the city's millionaires might pick up and leave as Mayor-elect Mamdani starts to put his agenda in place. History shows this is unlikely to happen; indeed, [New Yorkers across the income spectrum have moved out](https://cbcny.org/competitive-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). People see that fact and conclude that if millionaires won't leave en masse, there's no problem to worry about.

It's not that simple. To sustain its economy and government, New York City doesn't just need to keep the millionaires it has; it needs to keep growing and attracting new ones. Between 2010 and 2022, the share of U.S. millionaires living in New York City fell 35%, from 6.5% to 4.2%. Statewide, the share fell by nearly one-third, from 12.7% to 8.7%.

Yes, the number of millionaire taxpayers in New York State nearly doubled over the same time period, from 35,800 to almost 70,000 — but that growth lagged far behind national trends. Nationwide, the number tripled, as it did in Texas and California. Florida in particular witnessed explosive growth, with its millionaire ranks quadrupling in the same period.

This relative loss of the wealthiest to other parts of the country has real fiscal impacts: If the City had maintained its 2010 share, it would have collected $2.5 billion more in personal income tax revenue in 2022 alone. The State would have collected an additional $10.7 billion that year.

To put that in perspective, Mayor-elect Mamdani's campaign projected the proposed tax increases could raise between $9 billion to $10 billion per year.

Once the unmatched hub of finance and culture, New York City's 2.3 percentage-point drop in its share of millionaires shows how much ground and influence has been lost to rival metropolitan areas.

Importantly, it's not only millionaires who are choosing other states to call home. Domestic outmigration has been sapping New York of [residents of all incomes, races and ages](https://cbcny.org/competitive-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In 2024, [91,000 more residents moved out of the city](https://cbcny.org/competitive-nyc?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to other parts of the U.S. than moved in.

Why is that? Why is New York, New York, big city of dreams, of money-making, of finding whatever you seek, sending away more and attracting fewer*?* What's the problem?

> Filers with incomes over $1 million make up less than 1% of taxpayers — yet pay 40% of the city's personal income taxes.

High income taxes are one factor — New York State's and City's combined top marginal rate, [14.776% for the highest earners, tops the nation](https://cbcny.org/research/hidden-cost-new-yorks-shrinking-millionaire-share?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It exceeds California's 13.3%, New Jersey's 10.75% and Massachusetts' 9.0%. Nearly all of NYC's suburbs top out at 10.9%. Florida and Texas have no personal income tax at all. Mayor-elect Mamdani's proposed increase would take this tax to 16.776%. That may or may not prompt the wealthiest among us to up and leave; only time will tell.

But taxes are not the only factor; California's share of millionaires grew while New York's shrank. The simple truth is more New Yorkers feel the City's value proposition is faltering. The city's cultural and economic magnetism is becoming harder to justify against its high cost of living, fraying infrastructure and declining quality of life.

Housing costs are a huge factor. The severe housing shortage drives up rents and home prices, making it difficult not only for lower-income New Yorkers, but increasingly for [middle-class families.](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/newsletter/new-york-by-the-numbers-monthly-economic-and-fiscal-outlook-no-105-september-2025/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Cleanliness, ease of travel, street noise and feeling safe in a park or on the subway also weigh heavily.

CBC's [Straight from New Yorkers 2025](https://cbcny.org/straight-new-yorkers?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) survey found only 34% of New Yorkers felt the quality of life was good or excellent. Just 27% rated public services the same. Notably, in 2023 and 2017, higher-income New Yorkers rated these categories better than other residents — but by 2025, the gap disappeared. Now they give the same general low marks as other New Yorkers.

Lifestyle and economic factors play a role: the pandemic accelerated remote and hybrid work, enabling some to relocate to warmer climates, lower-cost states or even farther out of the city without sacrificing career prospects. [Office visits and subway ridership](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/newsletter/new-york-by-the-numbers-monthly-economic-and-fiscal-outlook-no-105-september-2025/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) remain below pre-pandemic levels, demonstrating that the impact persists in 2025.

New York will never be cheap. People, and perhaps especially people with disposable income, are willing to pay some premium for New York's unmatched amenities, but they are less willing to pay for subway delays, vacant office towers and storefronts or persistent street disorder. The issue is not merely high taxes, but low value — the erosion of the essential qualities that once justified the cost of being here.

> If New York City had maintained its 2010 share of millionaires, it would have collected $2.5 billion more in personal income tax revenue in 2022 alone.

Mayor-elect Mamdani has focused on eliminating some key affordability and quality of life challenges that drive New Yorkers away, and he's discussed the importance of improving basic city services. But paying for it all by increasing the City's already nation-leading marginal personal income tax rates risks accelerating New York's shrinking millionaire share and missing out on billions of dollars to fund services. What's a better answer?

Imagine a city that offers stability for investors and affordability for tenants; that catalyzes innovation and growth while providing great services that improve everyone's well-being — from those in need, to school children, to working families. Such a balance would deliver for all New Yorkers while attracting high earners whose taxes provide substantial revenue.

New York's bright future depends on including all these constituencies — the financiers and the front-line workers, the landlords and the tenants, the taxpayers and service recipients — in shared civic prosperity.

Focusing on the fundamentals strengthens New York City's value proposition.

Expanding housing production to improve affordability is paramount to ensuring that living in New York remains feasible and attractive for a broad range of residents.

Clean and safe streets are equally vital, providing the order and quality of life that residents, businesses and visitors deserve.

High-quality *and* efficient public services — from transit to education — support a prosperous city. New Yorkers should not pay top dollar for mediocrity; inefficiency rips off everyone.

Stable public finances preserve services for all New Yorkers. Just like we learned from the city's 1975 fiscal crisis, expanding services without minding the store ultimately hurts those most in need.

These investments will strengthen the foundation for long-term prosperity across all income levels, while helping retain, attract, and grow millionaires. Whether New York City is able to do this successfully will determine whether it continues to shrink in influence — or rediscovers its role as the city that makes prosperity possible for all.
### Bill de Blasio, Role Model?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/bill-de-blasio-role-model/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:44.000Z
Ah, we remember …

The bizarre morning rides across the city in a police-driven SUV to use the gym at the Park Slope YMCA, where he sometimes forgot to wipe down the exercise equipment. The quixotic and disastrous presidential campaign. The chronic lateness. The boomlet of fundraising corruption scandals involving some of the city's sleazier characters. The endless battles with the governor.

But also …

Universal pre-K for the city's children. An end to the racist scourge of stop-and-frisk police harassment without an increase in crime and with a decrease in incarceration (at least until COVID-19 hit). Contracts with unions that the previous administration had left behind like ticking financial time bombs. Midtown East rezoning. Ferry wakes crisscrossing our rivers. Vision Zero driving down pedestrian and traffic fatalities.

It's been nearly four years since Bill de Blasio left office; at the time, much of the city said "good riddance." But Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has called him his favorite living former mayor, pointing to progressive policy achievements, and prompting at least a few non-Mamdani voters to snarkily refer to him as "de Blasio 2.0."

With four years of Eric Adams behind us, it's instructive to gaze back at the de Blasio years in light of Mamdani's praise. Have the de Blasio administration's successes and failures stood the test of a little time?

While it's too soon to declare history's final verdict, patterns are emerging, as are lessons for the city's young new chief executive:

Don't let your progressive ideals and hunger to be a star on the national stage get ahead of the mayoral work of nailing the basics. Don't micromanage your staff or the professionals you put in charge of agencies. Finally, don't let your annoying personality get in the way of your accomplishments — being sanctimonious or above it all will be a major liability when it comes to your legacy; that's what New Yorkers will remember most.

De Blasio critics and fans agree that his single greatest achievement was the introduction of universal pre-K, a resource that had only been previously available in select corners of the city when he was elected in 2013\. Making good on a campaign promise, de Blasio and his team secured $300 million from the State for a program that has since accommodated roughly 73,000 young children a year.

This early win showed flexibility that the mayor lost as his first and second terms wore on. While he'd initially wanted to fund the program with a new tax on the wealthy — essentially killing two progressive birds with one stone — he dropped that demand when then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, pathologically opposed to tax increases, found the money elsewhere.

Allocating the space and lining up the teachers for all those kids was no mean feat, either, but it got done.

"I don't think he gets enough credit for universal pre-K," said Ken Fisher, a lawyer and former City councilman who deals often with City Hall. "Clearly this was a big accomplishment. Not that it was necessarily controversial, but logistically it was something that was difficult to do, to basically will a new part of the school system into being."

This piece of de Blasio's legacy lives on every time a 4-year-old enters school for the first time.

There is also little disagreement on de Blasio's extraordinary accomplishment of ensuring steady drops in crime as the City, initially under pressure from a lawsuit, moved away from the controversial police policy of unconstitutionally stopping and frisking minority men by the hundreds of thousands.

Stop-and-frisk had run amok under his predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly. In 2011, for example, [officers conducted 685,724 street stops with little or no justification](https://www.nyclu.org/data/stop-and-frisk-data?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). It was a policy that helped sweep de Blasio into office (remember the [famous ad with his son Dante](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgvXniTz7D8&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)), as was Bloomberg's stated belief that New York was a "luxury product."

The stop-and-frisk numbers had declined dramatically in Bloomberg's final years, but the question lingered: Could the new progressive mayor keep crime down, too? De Blasio set aside his ego — again, something he'd have trouble doing down the road — and brought in former police commissioner Bill Bratton. Picking a former commissioner and not his own new guy — one who'd worked for Rudolph Giuliani, of all people — was a bold move, according to Peter Madonia, a former staffer of Mayor Edward I. Koch and chief of staff to Bloomberg who helped advise de Blasio on his transition in 2013.

"I told him, 'I think you should pick your own.' I believed that," Madonia said. "You have to have the loyalty of your police commissioner. But at the end of the day, he picked someone else's police commissioner, and it was a really smart thing to do."

This decision may have already influenced Mamdani, who has said he wants to keep Adams' popular police commissioner, Jessica Tisch.

Fisher, Madonia and others in and around the City Hall firmament point to other de Blasio successes. In 2017, his administration created the NYC Ferry program and extended ferry routes to all five boroughs with fares that were the same as the subway.

His Vision Zero traffic safety program brought down pedestrian deaths across the city — to 101 in 2017 from 140 in 2014 — using a variety of enforcement measures and infrastructure improvements.

More wonky but nonetheless crucial to a functioning City were his administration's successful negotiations with 13 powerful unions, which somewhat outrageously had been left without contracts by Bloomberg. The de Blasio administration made deals with the teachers union, District Council 37 and all of the uniformed services unions, among others, although not without some drama.

Other high points cited by City Hall-watchers of those years include rezoning to the East side of Midtown Manhattan and moderate successes in building affordable housing.

It's harder to pinpoint abject policy failures. New Yorkers recall a discernible increase in troubled homeless people, as well as increasingly frequent subway breakdowns, and were quick to blame de Blasio. But the causes of both are complex, with a great deal of the blame being laid at the feet of Cuomo, who [had cut funding for a program called Advantage](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/23/spike-in-homelessness-followed-cuomos-move-to-cut-off-voucher-funds-as-governor-00414646?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that subsidized housing, and whose administration had starved the State-run MTA of funds for years.

The most glaring de Blasio policy miss in people's memory, perhaps, was the ThriveNYC program, which was created to address mental health issues. De Blasio assigned it to his wife, Chirlane McCray, despite her lack of experience and the inherent conflict of interest of appointing a family member to such a high-profile role. The program was generally seen as a $1 billion boondoggle, with at least one former official calling it "well-meaning but poorly thought-out."

Entrusting ThriveNYC to McCray, who also sat in on job interviews at City Hall, underscores what many saw as de Blasio's most glaring flaw — a kind of goofy arrogance that propelled him to do things that almost any advisors would have begged him to avoid, and almost surely did.

Famously, that involved using his security detail to drive him from Gracie Mansion to his favorite gym in his home Brooklyn neighborhood, where, by many accounts, he engaged in less-than-energetic workouts. These morning jaunts were constant fodder for the tabloids. He also was chronically late to events, including emotional memorials.

"He had this arrogance about knowing how to fix all the problems," said Karen Hinton, de Blasio's press secretary for a year during his first term. "Once he got his head there, it was very hard to move it. I saw this happen with a lot of people who got very frustrated with him."

On the other hand, she added, "What politician on the planet doesn't do that sometimes?"

For his part, Madonia said de Blasio "was his own chief of staff, and that's not good."

Forgotten by many in the wake of COVID-19 was the 2015 outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease in several Bronx apartment buildings that left 12 dead. At the time, in the view of many, de Blasio acted as the City's doctor-in-chief and took the lead in being the public face of the crisis, sidelining his Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and making the outbreak appear worse than it was.

De Blasio's presidential campaign in 2018-2019 suggested to many that he'd lost interest in being the mayor of New York City. And it came with a cost — [he was eventually fined $475,000](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/15/nyregion/de-blasio-fine.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for using City resources (again, his security detail) during the campaign. For Mamdani, this would be more a question of optics than reality — having not been born in the United States, he can never be distracted by an overly optimistic run for president.

Notwithstanding Bratton, the former mayor's relationship with rank-and-file police officers was terrible from day one. After officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were assassinated in their car in Bedford-Stuyvesant in late 2014, grieving officers turned their backs on de Blasio and McCray in the blood-drenched hospital emergency room just feet from the slain men's corpses.

"It was a world gone mad," de Blasio said soon after, clearly rattled. Seemingly intent on avoiding this conflict — after all, he'll be in charge of the cops — Mamdani has already apologized for previous comments he made calling officers racist; only time will tell if that and other gestures will avoid any schisms.

De Blasio's relationship with the City Hall press corps was even worse than it was with the police, another example of his misplaced confidence in himself. Arriving late to events and dragging reporters to far corners of the city for modest policy announcements was the least of it. He consciously scorned and mocked journalists, refused to build relationships with them, and paid for it every time the presses rolled.

De Blasio "failed to even try to allow the tabloids to get to know him or see him as human," Madonia said. "I begged him to go have a cup of coffee with Murdoch. He refused. Said he didn't need them. So they tortured and embarrassed him for eight years and severely damaged his legacy."

Then there were the corruption scandals and investigations. The misdeeds, such as they were, appeared in the view of at least one former City Hall insider to be another example of misplaced confidence, in this case that the former mayor knew how to walk right up to the line of impropriety without crossing it. No one ever accused de Blasio of seeking to line his own pockets.

Many of his headaches stemmed from the actions of two real estate developers, Jona Rechnitz and Jeremy Reichberg, who wound up convicted of bribing police and other officials. The mayor had solicited donations from them but was never charged with a crime.

This was all especially jarring after three terms of billionaire Bloomberg, who had no reason to engage in fundraising, the realm where the scammers come out to play. In a sense, it was a return to the past. This would seem to be a minimal threat for Mamdani, who's powered his campaign with small donations and has consciously, and quite publicly, eschewed the big money-giving class.

De Blasio gets passing marks for his handling of COVID-19, although there are quibbles as to whether he acted too slowly to push for school closures or to reopen restaurants. In any event, by pulling the rug out from under him when it came to most pandemic policies, especially schools, Cuomo at times left de Blasio practically powerless.

Which brings us to de Blasio's relationship with the mercurial governor, his former boss at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who toyed with him like a cat with a mouse throughout his two terms. Engineering a scant one-year extension of mayoral control of the schools and shooting down the 421 tax break for developers, a de Blasio priority, were two of many examples. These prompted de Blasio to publicly slam Cuomo. It's hard to fault de Blasio in this struggle because, as a certain president might say, he didn't have any cards, but observers think his penchant for fighting back wasn't always the best idea. Certainly, it invigorated the cat.

"Sometimes when you are fighting with a superior political foe, it might make you feel good to fight with them, but it's not the most responsible thing to do," said one former official who did not want to be quoted by name.

The lessons for Mamdani from the two terms of his favorite living former mayor will ultimately be up to the young Democratic Socialist to decide, but topping the list would surely include building bridges with the police and journalists, recruiting a strong team and listening to it, and putting good government ahead of politics. When fundraising, stick to the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law. And pick a gym near Gracie.

To his credit, he has so far avoided several de Blasio missteps. His collegial relationship with Gov. Kathy Hochul and his previously mentioned police apology suggest he's paid close attention to the failings of his favorite mayor.

And as for de Blasio's legacy? Most of those interviewed felt that his personal foibles would forever outweigh his policy successes in New Yorkers' memories. But Hinton, once deeply frustrated by the man, conceded that his stock has risen for her in recent years.

"Looking back on it now, we can understand better the challenges he faced and the risks he took to try to do the right thing, especially for people who are lower-income residents of the city," she said. "Unlike in many ways what Michael Bloomberg had done, Bill took on a whole new class of people as his own and was courageous at times at helping them through really tough times. I think that's one reason Zohran Mamdani has embraced things about Bill, because he relates to that himself."
### Living in the City, Floating on the Hudson: A Conversation with Leslie Day
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/leslie-day-interview-hudson-river-houseboat/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:04.000Z
*New York is a city defined, quite literally, by water. The Hudson River flows along Manhattan's western edge, the East River (actually a tidal strait) runs to the east and the Harlem River cuts across the top. These waterways have shaped the city from its earliest days as a Dutch trading post to its current status as a global metropolis.*

*The Hudson in particular has been central to New York's identity and economy. For centuries, the river served as the city's highway — ferries carried commuters, barges hauled goods and ocean liners brought immigrants to Ellis Island. There was a downside: Shipyards, warehouses and factories dumped their waste directly into the water. By the mid-20th century, that industrial might had poisoned the river.*

*Then came the Clean Water Act of 1972\. Over the following decades, the river came back to life. Fish and birds returned. Today, humpback whales feed in the New York Harbor. It's one of the great environmental success stories in American history — proof that even the most degraded urban ecosystem can recover.*

*For 36 years, Leslie Day lived on a houseboat at the 79th Street Boat Basin, raising a son with her husband, teaching science and watching the river heal. Her forthcoming book,* [*"River,"*](https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501783883/river/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *is a story about finding nature in the heart of the city, about a floating community of people from around the world, and about what it means to have an intimate relationship with a river.*

*We recently talked to Day, who now lives in the Bronx, about life on the water, how the Hudson has changed, and what New York loses when it pushes nature to the margins. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

**Vital City:** Why does a person who loves nature want to live in New York City?

**Leslie Day:** I was born in New York City, on West 73rd Street, so I always think of the city as home. However, the only place I truly felt happy as a kid was when I was in nature. When I was five we moved to Forest Hills, near Meadow Lake, which was ringed with weeping willows. Every fall until I was 8 or 9, I'd go down there with a shoebox and my little friends, and we'd collect colorful autumn leaves. Then we'd go under the largest weeping willow — whose hanging branches created a long green curtain — and we'd lay out our leaves, look at all the different colors and then lay down on them and hold hands. The beauty of nature and community still mean everything to me.

At the same time, I genuinely love the city. I love being among people from all over the world. At the Boat Basin, we had our cake and ate it too because we were immersed in the natural world and were umbilically tied to the city. We had people from all over the world — from Holland, Italy, Guadalajara, France, Japan, Korea, Australia, Ireland, South Africa, Colombia and Switzerland. All these people came to New York for work, or school or to find themselves, and they wanted to be immersed in the city but close to nature. And then at the end of a long day or night of work we'd come home to the river. We'd walk through the marina gate and be surrounded by peace and beauty. And each night we were rocked to sleep.

**VC:** Explain how a person winds up living on a boat in New York City, because it's not something that many people even know is possible.

**LD:** I can't tell you how many times I'd get in a cab and say 79th Street Boat Basin, and they'd say, "What? Where?" Most people in New York have never heard of the 79th Street Boat Basin.

During the 1960s, I went out to San Francisco during the great Hippie migration, and was introduced to the work of the writer Anaïs Nin. One of her books, "Collages," is a collection of short stories about women who live on houseboats around the world — on the Seine, on the Thames and in Sausalito. I found a boat to live on in Sausalito, and it was there that I found my element: the beauty of the natural world, a tight-knit community, close to a major city. When I came back to New York, I found a boat at the Boat Basin.

The first boat I had was called the Mandala, about 375 square feet. I bought it for $4,000 in 1977 — which I had to borrow from friends. It was built by Sean Disney, an architect who built a ferrocement hull in Staten Island, then built the cabins — a tiny living room, a loft bed with a closet under it, a little bathroom and a small galley — the kitchen. There were windows all around and front and upper decks. It was 34 feet long and nine or 10 feet wide. Sean's fiancé hated being on the boat and so he had to get rid of it.

When he sold it to me, he said, "Do you want to buy it with the engines or without? It would be $6,000 with the engines or $4,000 without." I didn't even have to think about it. I said, "I don't need the engines."

It's such a magical way to live. The sky at dawn and sunset. The changing colors of the river. You're part of an interesting and caring community. We had to help each other through storms, sickness, and loneliness. Together we celebrated births, birthdays, weddings and holidays. It was an extended family.

**VC:** Did people come and go? How many people were there for extended periods of time?

**LD:** When our son was born in 1980, 110 boats were people's year-round homes. Very few would leave. Most of us stayed for 30, 40, 50 years. People left if they got married and their spouse didn't like to live on the water or if they had too many children to comfortably live on a boat, and of course as people died. One of my neighbors moved to the marina in 1963 and stayed until 2021 when everybody was forced to leave.

**VC:** How do you raise a kid on a boat?

**LD:** You think of the outside of the boat and the dock like you would the street in front of your building or house. You don't let them out by themselves and you're constantly holding their hand or strapping them into a stroller.

When there were storms, like the nor'easter in December 1992, when it rained for three days and the river kept rising, we had our then 12-year-old son Jonah stay with a friend on West End Avenue. We put our dogs and cats in the car in the garage under the Rotunda and stayed up all night watching the river rise up the pilings that our boat was tied to until there was one inch left. Then it stopped raining and the tide went out. Several boats sank. It was a devastating storm.

The winters were freezing, and boats aren't insulated. We had every kind of heater imaginable over the 36 years. If it was below freezing, the fresh water hose on the dock had to run 24/7 until there was a thaw. If anybody kinked the hose, the whole line would freeze up. We'd have to detach the hoses, bring them into our boats, put them by our heaters until they thawed out, then reattach them.

But winter was beautiful and we had Riverside park to ourselves.

**VC:** Everyone was kicked out in 2021, when the City vacated the marina. Who in New York City lives on the water these days, and where?

**LD:** The majority of my neighbors moved their boats to Liberty Landing Marina in Jersey City, near the Statue of Liberty. They've maintained their community, but in Jersey. Many just gave up their boats. There's still the Rockaways — a marina there with few restrictions. There's a houseboat community on Westchester Creek in the Bronx. But leaving the Upper West Side, where our doctors, pharmacies, gyms, hospitals, all the stores, restaurants, houses of worship and friends are, and moving to Jersey City where, at least right near the marina, there's nothing, is tough. When you're going to live on a boat, you want to live near a thriving neighborhood.

**Reflections on the city and water**

**VC:** What do you think you learned about nature — and the city — living on the water?

**LD:** Nature abounds in the city. We have over 30,000 acres of parkland, hundreds of thousands of street trees, gardens, a tremendous diversity of bird life and pollinating insects. Once you take the time to look, to stop and focus on the natural world, it is astounding how much is here. No matter what borough you live in, as long as there are trees, you're going to have all kinds of life.

Just being able to identify everything that I see makes all my anxiety and worries fade away. I'm totally in the present, taking in the beauty. It's so therapeutic. If you get into birds, different leaf shapes, the different types of flowers that trees produce — there's so much to learn and see every single day. Living on the Hudson allows you to experience the diversity of fish, crabs, shrimp and shore birds.

**VC:** Have you noticed changes in the waterways around New York City over the years?

**LD:** When I moved to the Boat Basin in 1975, the only birds I saw were cormorants and some gulls. Before the Clean Water Act, every toilet from the southern tip of Manhattan to Inwood flushed directly into the Hudson. The river was a sewer.

From the '40s to the '70s, there was a General Motors plant in Tarrytown, and at the end of every day they would dump all the leftover paint into the Hudson. You could look at the river and tell what color they were using to paint the cars that day. Then there was General Electric, which for 30 years dumped hundreds of tons of highly toxic PCBs into the river that still make certain fish and crabs inedible for children and pregnant women. The Hudson remains a superfund site from New York Harbor 200 miles north to Hudson Falls.

But since the Clean Water Act and the building of the North River Sewage Treatment Plant, the native fish that left the river have returned. The bird life has come back. All the animals that feed on the fish have come back, including whales. There are hundreds of humpback whales now along the coast of New York City, and dolphins. It's just fantastic. The government did such a good thing by passing that act.

**VC:** We've seen a significant increase in the active use of the water — we now have an active ferry network, as well as people who run and play along the water.

**LD:** There used to be a tremendous number of ferries bringing people from the outer boroughs to Manhattan for work. It's wonderful that we have that again. When the river was still swimmable, there were bathing beaches along the Palisades. In the summers, two million people would take the ferry from Inwood to Englewood Cliffs to spend the day and swim. You can swim in the river now. I started swimming off my boat in 1998.

I love watching the ferries and sailboats, especially the Clearwater, the sloop that Pete Seeger built to educate people about the Hudson. When we lived at the Boat Basin I'd kayak from April through November. From our building in Riverdale I'm able to see the river, though from a distance, and I love watching everything: the sightseeing boats, the tankers, the jet skis and recreational boats.

**VC:** What is it that's so pleasurable about looking out at the water?

**LD:** Water is mesmerizing — the way it moves and the way it reflects the light and shimmers. Right now, as we speak, the Hudson's going from blue to green to yellowish green to almost white. We respond to color. The color blue has a calming effect. I swim almost every day in our building's pool. Looking through my goggles at the blueness of the water makes me happy.

Where do we go when we take vacations? We go to the water. It's nice to be near a lake or a pond or a beautiful stream. Then there are all the animals that use the water. It's so interesting to watch the birds diving and hunting.

When we lived on the boat I would feed the swans, geese, ducks and gulls. The fish would follow the birds as I was feeding them. Some of the fish would goose the birds to make them drop the food, and then the fish would eat it. It was thrilling.

My husband took a picture of me feeding the swans with our cat Woody on my shoulder. Woody loved it when I fed the birds. He would jump onto my shoulder and lean out the window with me to watch the swans reach up for the food. It was magical.

The Boat Basin was what one of my neighbors called a magical village. Simone di Bagno, who had emigrated here from Rome and was a documentary filmmaker for the United Nations, said there were *pueblos magicos* — magical villages — in Mexico. Simone said that the Boat Basin was one of the few magical villages left in the world.
### Curtis Sliwa Talks Public Safety
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/curtis-sliwa-talks-public-safety/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:37:56.000Z
*On Monday, Oct. 6, in the second of a series of sit-downs with New York City mayoral candidates, Republican mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa took questions at a Vital City event co-sponsored by Columbia Journalism School. Sliwa was quizzed on his public safety philosophy and proposals by Errol Louis, Spectrum News NY1 political anchor and Vital City contributing writer. What follows is a complete, unedited transcript.*

**Personal safety, security detail, campaign climate**

**Errol Louis:** Thanks so much for being here, and in the interest of time, I want to jump right into some things. You made a little bit of news, I noticed, on the way up today: that you now have a full security detail that you did not have before. According to the reports, it said this was because of credible threats.

What can you tell us about that?

**Curtis Sliwa:** I’m the oldest candidate, 71, and Errol, you’ve seen me come and go. I’ve never had security. But both I and my wife were subject of direct threats, and so over the weekend I had armed security with me for the first time. Now you gotta understand I’m a guy who was targeted by the Gottis and Gambinos and shot five times with hollow point bullets, I never had armed security.

But my wife is the most important thing in my life. Obviously, the rhetoric is way too high. Zohran Mamdani is getting all these threats. We need to lower it and let the people decide in the election. And in order to have a safe and secure election, I’ve agreed to have armed security with me, and my wife will have armed security with her.

**Errol Louis:** When you say armed security, you mean the NYPD?

**Curtis Sliwa:** No. These are former members of the NYPD. They’re part of a private security team who have liaison with the NYPD.

**Errol Louis:** You’re entitled to a police detail the same way Zohran Mamdani as the democratic nominee has received. Did you specifically not want that?

**Curtis Sliwa:** Yeah. In 2021, when I ran against Eric Adams, I felt that police were better served to be in the community. We didn’t have enough police. And at the start of this campaign, I made the same claim. And you know, I’m in the subways every day — the only candidate to actually campaign in the subways and the buses and the express buses.

Never felt the need for security. But when you have credible threats, then you have to do what’s best for the campaign, and also try to bring all this craziness that exists. “You gotta get out of the race. You are responsible for Mamdani.” Guess what? Let the people decide who the next mayor is and not the billionaires.

That’s my opinion. They’ve interfered too much in this race, the professional political class. I trust the people you know. I’ve always trusted the people. I’m well received by the people. But there are people out there with their agendas, and we’re gonna make sure that everything is safe and secure up until November 4th, and I’ll live with the decision that the people make as to who their next mayor is.

**Errol Louis:** As far as you know, are the threats from within New York or from somewhere else?

**Curtis Sliwa:** We’ll discuss that with police intel tomorrow when I go there.

**Errol Louis:** Okay. One of your opponents around Momani joined us for a forum just like this, sat right in that chair last month.

Another, Andrew Cuomo, has not yet agreed to attend. I’m wondering if you think you should and if you’re, well…

**Curtis Sliwa:** Of course he should. Because I’ve said about Andrew Cuomo that he is not the law-and-order candidate that he pretends to be because he is the author of No Cash Bail, Raise the Age, closing Rikers Island.

I know Zohran Mamdani shares that belief. I’m the only person outside of that, who was opposed to that. Obviously, when we debate, the two debates, we’ll have one with NY1, I’m gonna bring those subjects up. But I probably have more experience in the public safety field than both of them together.

**Stats, strategy, tactics, staffing**

**Errol Louis:** In general, I want to talk less about what is working as a political campaign position and more about what’s gonna happen in 88 days or so from now when the next mayor is sworn in. And what happens if that happens to be you. Let’s start out with, how safe is the city now and I don’t just mean a static quantity of safety, more or less this or that number, but the profile, the shape: How are things going as far as you’re concerned?

**Curtis Sliwa:** Because I am in the streets and subways every day, I hear from a wide variety of people. The people who feel most stressed out? Women — and I don’t think in this election cycle, women’s voices are being heard. Because my wife, who made our first TV commercial — and Errol, I stayed quiet. Everybody who knows me, I’ve never stayed quiet in my life.

She pointed out how, even in the subways and streets, men are sexually harassing women. They’re perving on women. They’re making life so threatening in what they call these “random attacks.” A random attack? They’re targeting women. And we don’t seem to be prioritizing them. Look, they’re the majority of the workers. Many of them are the single parent leaders in the household who pay all the bills and raise the kids. And if you consider nightlife, they not only own restaurants, bars and nightclubs, they manage ‘em. They work there. And one universal thing they say to me “I can’t keep affording to pay for yellow cabs, Lyfts and Ubers.” We’re not focused on their needs. And I think we do ourselves a disservice because a lot of them are just not coming out into the streets and going into the subways at different times.

**Errol Louis:** So now, for the first quarter of this year, homicides are down 34%. Shootings are down 23%, assaults are near 25-year highs. So there’s these different numbers that are out there. What number do you want be judged by if you’re sworn in 88 days from now?

**Curtis Sliwa:** I’ll give you an example, Errol. I heard the police commissioner Jessica Tisch say over July 4th, Wow. First time we never had any shootings. I’m a street guy. I heard a lot of bullets being fired. If the bullet does not hit the intended target, it doesn’t go on the stats in the precinct. It doesn’t go up to CompStat. So that means if we are gang members and I’m firing at you and I hit a tree, or I hit a bird, or I blow out the back window of a Toyota Corolla, that’s a crime. Doesn’t go on the books. 

So I truly believe that a lot of the statistics are suppressed. Just to give you a few: 90,000 packages a day are stolen in New York City. The mayor has admitted that publicly. So that’s FedEx, Amazon, USPS, UPS. You go to the precinct and say, “Hey, few of my packages were stolen.” They won’t take a report because if it’s over $1,000, it’s a felony. 

Then when you look at all the shoplifting that takes place. The men and women who do that, they have an E-ZPass to go in and out. A lot of that is not reported.

And the last category is stolen mail, which definitely affects the outer boroughs that I represent. Towards the end of the month Social Security checks, debit cards, credit cards. They go right into the box. They don’t even wear a mask. They wave. Try to go to a local precinct and report that. They won’t even take a report on it. 

So that’s the way they cook the books. I’ve been into all 350 neighborhoods in this city. Some are friendly, some are not. I’ve yet to find one person, say, “Oh, Curtis, you’re really exaggerating this. I feel so much safer and more comfortable in New York City.”

**Errol Louis:** You, you have an interesting proposal to create a long-term plan for crime reduction. Could you say more about that? Because I never really thought about it, but you point out on your website, New York City has no long-term plan to dramatically lower crime. How would you do that?

**Curtis Sliwa:** First and foremost, it starts with the police. I don’t think people quite understand that not only do we not have enough police, but they are the only civil servants who have had the insurance that we all pay for stripped from them. It’s called qualified immunity. It’s a fancy name, but it’s really the insurance that guarantees that if something goes awry, we, the taxpayer cover it. 

Now, judges every day sentence, men unfairly. They get out 25 years later. We find out it was wrong. DAs. All of a sudden they don’t get sued. Cuomo himself, sexual harassment charges, 13\. \[State Comptroller\] Tom DiNapoli has said, we’ve paid out $60 million in settlement. He doesn’t pay a penny because of qualified immunity. I’ve got to fight to get that restored because not only do we need 7,000 new cops, we need them to feel comfortable in doing their work, which they don’t do now.

So that’s step number one. Step number two, we need to bring back the homeless outreach unit. These were men and women police officers dedicated to dealing with homeless and emotionally disturbed. When Bill de Blasio and the City Council pulled $1 billion out of the budget for the police in the summer of 2020, they disbanded this great unit.

They knew the clients. They would go into the homeless shelters, they’d speak with the directors, the security, they’d speak with community leaders. Once they disbanded that, they left it to the local precinct. And those are men and women who are not trained to deal with that. It takes a very strong skill level. And number two, they don’t have the connections to deal with that. And we’ve seen the rampant rise of homeless, emotionally disturbed, not only in the subways, but in the parks, in the streets. So I think long-term, that’s what we do.

**Errol Louis:** Okay. I wanna come back to that in a couple of minutes, but let’s get into the staffing of the NYPD. The department currently has about 33,000 officers down from 37,000 in 2018\. You want to hire 7,000 more. Why is that necessary given we saw a steep decline in crime over the last 20 years, and the size of the force was declining along with it?

**Curtis Sliwa:** We don’t see visibility now. Visibility is such a key to making people feel more comfortable. So whether you’re merchants, whether you’re residents of a community, the women, the elderly, the infirm, who are being targeted for attack. When you see the blue uniforms out there — and by the way, they better put their caps on. They know there’s the cops. They don’t put their caps on. Gotta put your caps on, that’s how you spot them in a crowd. So there are certain things I would do tactically. 

In the subways, they have the police assigned to what they call the transit police, but they never go up and down the trains as they used to. Now before they could patrol by one. Because of all the emotionally disturbed, they determine they’re safer if they patrol by two. I don’t care, but in uniform, they should start in the rear car, walk all the way up, all the way back. You’d be surprised how many people will tell, “You there’s a man in another car. He’s having a problem. He’s banging his head on the side of the door.” That’s not a crime, but they can then take him out and get him the help that he desperately needs.

These are the kinds of things you’re never gonna know if you are assigned to a platform. And by the way, they get assigned near the turnstiles, they do nothing about fair evasion. Fair evasion has cost us $1 billion according to the Citizens Budget Commission that has determined that.

**Errol Louis:** Did you pick this up from your years of patrolling with the Guardian Angels?

**Curtis Sliwa:** Oh yeah. Remember 46 years and had pretty much seen what works in the subways, what doesn’t work. I cannot comprehend why they are not putting police officers on the moving trains. Now last year we had a subway crime crisis. Kathy Hochul, to her credit, assigned close to 1,000 National Guardspersons.

The big time was when Debrina Kawam, who they all want to forget, that’s the woman who was set on fire like a torch on December 22nd of 2023 in the F train at Coney Island Stillwell by the migrant who watched it, the pyromaniac. The cops didn’t know how to handle it. The people who were all filming it live at five.

And I see this on a repeated basis. That’s a stain on our soul, that we’re not resolving the emotionally disturbed and the homeless issue. These people live in the trains. It’s not good to live in the trains.

**Errol Louis:** Does that, does any of this change because there are now cameras on apparently all of the cars?

**Curtis Sliwa:** No they’re not in all the cars, but they’re in a lot of the cars. In fact, we had on the train down at Whitehall Street, this was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever experienced in the, since I was five years old, 1959, I’ve been riding the trains by myself. A man comes onto the train, it’s on camera. Unfortunately, a migrant has died on the train. He rapes the migrant on the train. It’s a dead person. You then watch the film, continuous people come on. I guess they thought it was filming a TV show. A woman comes on later, unattached to the guy, the rapist, and she then picks the dead man’s pockets. No police. Sure you have it on, but no response because we just don’t have enough cops. 

I’ve never seen anything so egregious in my life, all the years that we’ve focused on subway patrols. And it’s not getting better, it’s getting worse.

**Errol Louis:** The department is struggling to fill the seats that are currently vacant. How would you hire 7,000 more, and are you worried about quality declining?

**Curtis Sliwa:** Well, that’s always a problem because a lot of the potentially young and middle-aged men and women who might seek a career in law enforcement, sometimes they’re being lured away as soon as they get into the NYPD. I remember showing up at Jacob Javits Center, they were having a sergeant’s test, about 4,000 of the men and women, you know, the number 2 pencils, they were there. They had RVs outside from the Tidewater Peninsula in Virginia. Tempe, Arizona, come on in offering them, they would bring them to their community, pay the first year of housing them, improved opportunities and moving up the ranks, feeling better as a police officer in those communities.

And that’s the problem. We end up recruiting a lot of men and women, and they end up leaving the department three years later because obviously they have the experience of the NYPD. We’re not offering anything to keep them, to maintain the police officers. 

The first five years are miserable for a police officer. They’re usually sleeping in the basement of their mom and dad’s house until they eventually have enough money to get their own apartment. Affordability is a crisis for everybody in New York City. The rent is too high to pay, as Jimmy McMillan said in 2010 when he debated Governor Cuomo. It’s now way too high to pay and include police officers and say, “I can’t find anything affordable on the five boroughs.” That’s why sometimes you see them going all the way up to Dutchess and Orange County in order to find something affordable.

**Errol Louis:** You have called for increasing salaries and benefits on the front side. And you say that would reduce the need for overtime?

**Curtis Sliwa:** Oh, absolutely. Look, overtime should exist because there are plenty of men and women who need the overtime. But there are plenty of men and women who don’t want the overtime because it’s affecting their family life, their domestic life. So if the overtime is available and there are those that need it, fine. But don’t force it. That’s what’s destroying the morale of the police department now. And by the way, after eight hours, you’re not as effective. If you’re on 12-hour tour, you’re not as effective. 

And speaking of that, the group that gets no attention, no recognition, the most dangerous job in the city — because I’ve been on the rock — Rikers Island, the Department of Correction. They’re on 12-hour shifts. It’s a perpetual, Errol, 911 call. They can’t do anything about the tiers. The gangs control the tiers. It’s predominantly women of color now who are the correctional officers, they’re getting sexually assaulted, sexually harassed. Where’s the #MeToo crowd? They’re not around for women of color in corrections. And you know what? They end up getting sent back to the same tier, there’s no discipline of the inmates who are harassing the female correctional officers.

**Errol Louis:** We have a lot to talk about with the jails in a minute. Let’s talk about quality of life though. Generally speaking, do you think the broken windows theory is correct? Meaning, if you let small quality of life violations go unaddressed, it will actually lead to serious crime?

**Curtis Sliwa:** I think there’s a variation of that. I’ll give you a perfect example. We know that the recreational use of marijuana is legal. You go into a state-licensed store, you buy it, you use it for your personal use, whatever you want to do. But when people are whipping out blunts and smoking it in public, and then I show up with an interview for you, Errol Louis, and you’re saying, “Oh, you’ve been doing puff pass, huh?”

It’s like there’s a purple haze that hangs over the city. It’s not legal to smoke it in public. There’s no enforcement whatsoever. You go on a beach, you see you can’t smoke cigarettes, cigars, tiparillos. What if I got a blunt on the beach? Nobody does anything about it. You have to enforce what is. It’s legal, it’s recreational, obviously medical marijuana. I’ve used that, medical marijuana, series of injuries I had. I had prostate cancer. I had Crohn’s Disease, shot five times. I know the benefits of that. But you can’t let people be smoking it out in public. Then you smell like, yourself, like you’ve been, like, you’ve been doobing up.

**Errol Louis:** So do the idea or the question of having cops respond to relatively minor quality of life violations — shoplifting, fare evasion, public urination, public intoxication of whatever kind. What about the argument that it is wasteful to have one of these highly trained, highly paid officers that you want to recruit chasing after a guy for stealing a $20 bottle of shampoo?

**Curtis Sliwa:** Yeah. Unless you happen to be in the store, and then it’s learned behavior. Isn’t it crazy that the number one question I get asked by people who come into New York City, whether they’re tourists or they work, or they live here, “Curtis, we live in a city where we lock up toothpaste and we don’t lock up criminals.”

We lock up toothpaste. You know how many times you’ve been in a pharmacy and you have to wait 20 minutes for an attendant to come with the keys to open up something because it’s constantly being stolen. Men and women will come in with duffel bags and fill it up and then just walk out like they own the store.

There’s no enforcement whatsoever. Part of that is the responsibility of the DAs. The DAs will cut ‘em loose under what premise? No cash bail. Thank you, Governor Andrew Cuomo, because you are not only the author, you inspired it. And in the primary against Zohran Mamdani and the other Democratic challengers, remember, he doubled down on no cash bail.

**Errol Louis:** Let’s talk about the DAs. The district attorneys — and I moderated many of these debates, followed this, interviewed them many times. They have decided, and the voters ratified this decision, not to use prosecutorial resources to chase shoplifters, fare beaters and minor violations. They got elected on a promise not to do. If you are the mayor and you disagree with what they’re doing, where does that leave you?

**Curtis Sliwa:** I’d put it up for charter revision. I believe, as you know, Errol, in initiative and referendum. I favored term limits, I favored ranked choice. I think it’s the people’s right to make those determinations.

If the people make that determination — like sanctuary cities, I would’ve put it out there for a vote. If I’m the mayor, I’m opposed sanctuary cities. But if the people vote for sanctuary cities, then I have to do what is the will of the people. I don’t trust the politicians and the lobbyists and the professional class of people who try to control those things.

I trust people to make the right decisions. I think they should. Now, I happen to know one of the DAs, Melinda Katz, who is the mother of my two youngest sons. So when I visit, we have conversations. “Would you let go of this, that guy who set the dog on fire after killing it. No cash bail.” “I had no, I was handcuffed because of the Cuomo law, no cash bail.”

So whether it’s humans or animals — and as you know, I have the first independent line ever Protect Animals, which is no-kill shelters, animal abusers go to jail — but every time I ask, the blowback I get is “the Cuomo…No cash bail. No cash bail.”

**Errol Louis:** But let’s put the responsibility where it belongs, which I think is with the voters.

I mean, I moderated that debate with Melinda Katz. The same thing went down in the Manhattan District Attorney’s race. We’re gonna have another debate in a couple of weeks, and I don’t expect it to go any different. The voters have said to the district attorneys, “we do not want our highly paid six-figure cops chasing after $20 fare…you know, shoplifters. We don’t want that.” The district attorney then follows that guidance from the voters, stops prosecuting those cases and we end up where we are.

**Curtis Sliwa:** Well, that was before we saw the complete catastrophe. As you know, with charter revision, you can come back two years later. Why not put it up for a review in simple language and let the people make the determination? I think people have had enough of this no cash bail. I think if you put it up for a vote, people would say, “I’m tired of the fact that I’m watching people go in and out of a store with an E-ZPass stealing products that I have to pay for. And obviously the prices go up. You don’t think the store owners are absorbing that loss. You just raise the prices. That’s part of the reason that prices are so high and it’s unaffordable.

**Homelessness, mental illness and street disorder**

**Errol Louis:** Let’s talk about disorder on the streets and in the subways and mental illness in particular. For people who are visibly unstable or in need of help, what would be the street-level triage you would favor? Like when do you send engagement teams? When do you call EMS? When do you send the cops? When do you mandate involuntary transport or even arrest? How do you do that?

**Curtis Sliwa:** It’s always been the goal. We saw that with Bill de Blasio and his wife Chirlane, who ran a program called Thrive. In five years, they spent one and a half billion dollars. They were gonna have Thrive members, specially trained, go out there and deal with the emotionally disturbed, sometimes in tandem with police. What happened? Never happened. Eric Adams said the same thing. Never happened. I don’t have a problem with that, but it’s gotta happen at the precinct level. Your first responders are probably gonna be the police. This also goes for domestic abuse. Zohran Mamdani said, “I’ll send social workers.” Apparently, he hasn’t had the experience I’ve had with the Guardian Angels.

You go in, domestic abuse, it’s the most violent situation you can face. You are always wrong. You’re never right. The police sometimes would come later. It is the most dangerous situation for everybody involved in that room or that apartment. I don’t think social workers alone can deal with it. I’ve dealt with emotionally disturbed persons. As you know, I have a really good feel for these men and women. Some that I know on a first-name basis. They need hospital care. Again, I have to go to Andrew Cuomo. When he came into office, 40,000 beds in the state mental health facilities. By the time he fled, fearing impeachment, to the Hamptons, 4,000 beds. He cut dramatically the number of state beds.

**Errol Louis:** So if you’re mayor on January 1st, what do you do? 

**Curtis Sliwa:** Well, because the state may not respond — Hopefully Hochul would, or maybe the next governor — but you would have to increase…

**Errol Louis:** She funded, I think, about 700 beds…

**Curtis Sliwa:** Right. You would have to increase the number of municipal beds. Now, remember during the lockdown and pandemic, we were all frightened. Nobody knew what would happen. Friends of ours healthy one day would go into the ICU, ER, come out in a body bag the next. I knew of people, you probably knew of people. So they released all the mental healthcare patients in the private hospitals and the municipal. I get that. They had to do that. They needed the beds, but they never went back afterwards to find them.

Some of them still walk around with the hospital tags. I read ‘em all the time. “Oh, you were in Bellevue. This is the medication you’re taking. Have you had your medication since?” “No.” “Have you gone for therapy?” “No.” All that does is exacerbate what ails them. Now, if we had a child crawling around — obviously, the thought process of a child, we would immediately rescue that child.

We have elderly and we have adults who have the mind of a child who’ve lost control of their mental and physical faculties, wallowing in their own defecation and in their own urine, and we just go like this \[covers eyes\]. We Guardian Angels, we don’t. We care for them. We try to give them food, clothing, sustenance, try to get to know them on a first-name basis.

I don’t know of anybody in the city who does that, and we supposedly spend millions of dollars in order to do outreach.

**Errol Louis:** So talk about it though. If this person that you’ve encountered on the street, who should respond, should it be EMS? Should it be NYPD? Should it be somebody else?

**Curtis Sliwa:** Could be a combination. Let’s take Jordan Neely. That’s the case that everybody remembers. He ended up being restrained by Daniel Penny. And everybody has a different point of view on that, but Jordan Neely was living in the subways for years. I knew Jordan Neely. He used to come entertain the…Guardian Angels during Christmas. He was a great imitator of Michael Jackson. He lived right in Washington House. Then he digressed. Imagine he was living in the subways. You had some outreach units who listed him as part of the 50 most dangerous individuals who were living in the subways. Well, if they’re dangerous to themselves and everyone else, why do we then just let them live in the subways?

**Errol Louis:** Okay, so January 1st or January 2nd, who do you give an order to? That same top 50 list. The names might change, but there will be a list. And it is a relatively small universe, which is what makes it so frustrating, right? There’s probably not more than 2,000 or 3,000 from what I’ve been told by…

**Curtis Sliwa:** It’s a lot of people.

**Errol Louis:** It’s a lot, but you have their names. What do you who do you call in as Mayor Sliwa? Who do you call in? And what order do you give them?

**Curtis Sliwa:** You sit with your police commissioner. I would hope that Jessica Tisch would continue to serve, only to maintain stability, because Adams created chaos at One Police Plaza.

And then you say, “I want to put back into effect the homeless outreach unit.” Trained professional police officers. If we want assign them with healthcare workers, mental healthcare workers, so be it. But let’s do it, because we talked about it for eight years with De Blasio. We talked about it for four years with Eric Adams, and they haven’t done it. I’ll make sure it gets done.

**Errol Louis:** There’s some findings from other jurisdictions, and I think this is what was behind the idea of a 988 instead of a 911 phone system for New York, that cops showing up with guns and handcuffs is a non-therapeutic approach that freaks people out. They don’t want the services, it’s not necessarily gonna stick. They might even regress rather than get help. Any thought to that?

**Curtis Sliwa:** I’ve seen that sometimes. The psychosis of the individual is so strong that they have a negative reaction to almost anybody who approaches them. A combination of the two: specially trained police officers who can work with healthcare providers, mental healthcare providers. I think that’s the route to go. But sometimes, remember that 911 call comes in, it’s an emergency. Somebody has a knife to their throat. It’s a domestic situation. The cops are gonna be the first responders, you can’t wait. Zohran Mamdani’s plan of just having social workers respond will lead to the deaths of women and children. I’ve been in too many of those situations to see mostly men.

**Errol Louis:** You’ve also seen cases going back to Eleanor Bumpurs, Gidone Busch, Deborah Danner, we could call out names all day. Saheed Vassell.

**Curtis Sliwa:** Eleanor Bumpurs, I knew that situation personally. She was in the Sedgwick Housing Project.

**Errol Louis:** Somebody emotionally disturbed, the cops show up first, and they kill the person. Usually within minutes.

**Curtis Sliwa:** I remember at that time, \[Phil\] Caruso and the PBA \[police union\] was going at \[longtime Bronx DA\] Mario Merola who I knew personally, who was a friend of mine, and I stood with Mario Merola, got a lot of blowback from the PBA. 

**Errol Louis:** How do you prevent that from happening? It’s been going on for decades now.

**Curtis Sliwa:** I understand. And that’s finally we’re gonna prioritize that. It wasn’t prioritized by de Blasio. It wasn’t prioritized by Eric Adams. You have the people train first. Remember, the one thing that the police department really does well. Training training training training. Obviously anti-terrorism unit, disaster, OEM, Office of Emergency Management. A lot of the time, it’s training, training. There’s no training involved in this. That’s why the homeless outreach unit is so important. There are men and women who are dedicated to helping these people, and then you team them up with mental healthcare workers. But it has to be rapid response. And I know, I’m the person who can do it, because they’re all…I do it all the time with the Guardian Angels. I’m very proficient at this.

**Criminal justice reform**

**Errol Louis:** Let me switch topics and talk a little bit about bail and court reform. You’ve mentioned even just this morning that you have some problems with the bail reform laws from 2019\. Let me just ask as a threshold question: Do you accept the basic premise that the only reason for bail is actually to ensure that a defendant shows up in court? I mean it’s not intended as a crime control measure.

**Curtis Sliwa:** I don’t accept that premise because if a person has had a history of violent crimes being committed, crimes in which people’s lives are threatened, I think a judge should have to be able to consider that. That’s not part of no cash bail. So we see a turnstile.

Now, I’ve been arrested, you know, Errol, 81 times the first 13 years. The police hated the Guardian Angels. I’ve been on Rikers Island in the dorm in what they call Punk City, protective custody. I’ve seen the system inside out. I’ve gotten wooden shampoos and concrete facials from cops who didn’t like us, and then eventually they learned: Wow, these are really good young men and young women who want to make a difference.

So I know what it’s like to be abused, but I also know the differentiation between those who should be available for being released back into society and those who have proven themselves to be a danger to society again and again.

**Errol Louis:** Why should cash be the tool? So like, if two people are arrested on suspicion of robbery, one happens to have money, they walk free waiting for their day in court, the other has to sit on Rikers Island ‘cause they don’t have a few hundred dollars. Is that fair? And how does that make the city…

**Curtis Sliwa:** You want to change it to Venmo? One of those things?

**Errol Louis:** The average person, at the time that they passed these, the average person was staying on Rikers Island for hundreds of days. And they were staying on average, I think it was like less than $500\. 

**Curtis Sliwa:** Understood. And that needs to be reformed. But I also know of many families who have the wherewithal to bail out their sons, their daughters mostly, and they won’t put up the bail. That tells you something right there, because they know this is a person who is a danger to the family and a danger to everybody else.

Look, I’m open to working on it. It’s really more of a state issue because that was imposed by Governor Cuomo. It can be dealt with, but I think by experts in the field…remember, when Cuomo imposed no cash bail, he never contacted police. He never contacted prosecutors. He never contacted people in the field and put together a cross-section of people to come up with a plan that was fair. He basically just shoved it down our throats. And we’ve been suffering with this ever since.

**Errol Louis:** I know he’s your opponent and he did sign the law, but my sense, my memory of it was that this really came from the legislature.

**Curtis Sliwa:** Oh, who ever forced Andrew Cuomo to do anything, bully boy that he was? He threatened, he used intimidation. You remember Ron Kim, the assemblyman. “How dare he stand up and accuse me of having killed 15,000 elderly because of my executive order?” He tried to drive that guy outta the assembly. You know how Cuomo operated, like the head of an organized crime family. That’s why he was able to come back from being like Napoleon on the Island of Elba escaping, being impeached, because everybody was afraid of him.

They all endorsed because they said, if you don’t endorse Cuomo, he’ll get retribution and revenge on you. That’s the only reason he came back.

**Errol Louis:** So it sounds if elected, you’re going to put on your wishlist when you go up to Albany, the first session trying to change the bail reform laws. Does that include…

**Curtis Sliwa:** Alter it, sit down and say, “Hey, I’m somebody who’s been on both sides of it.” 

The other thing is the gang issue. We have a gang roster. I’ve recruited gang members into the Guardian Angels. I know that there are some young men and young women, they haven’t had affiliation with a gang in five years. They’re still on the gang roster. 

You gotta take ‘em off. It’s like okay, you put ‘em on. If they’re active, you take ‘em off. If they’re not active, I always suggest to the young men and women, especially the older ones, you get laser, you get the tattoos off, ‘cause you are walking around, MS-13 on your neck like a giraffe, people are gonna think you’re MS-13\. You might no longer be involved with them for five years. But that should be reflected on the roster. And if you’re a gang member, I would suggest get rid of the gang tattoos because people are gonna think, you’ve got tattoos of a gang, you’re a gang member.

**Errol Louis:** So when the City Council says we should get rid of the gang intelligence unit, it sounds like you’re on the same page. 

**Curtis Sliwa:** You can’t do that. We’ve had an uptick of gang violence, mostly juveniles, 16 to 18 because of the Raise the Age law that Zohran is in favor of that Cuomo did. I’m opposed to that because older gang members then use the younger ones to go out and do the drive-by shootings and commit the violent acts because they know there are almost no consequences for that, they end up going to family court.

**Errol Louis:** When they changed the law, New York was an outlier. I think it was only New York and North Carolina that were treating 16-year-olds as adults. You want to go back to that?

**Curtis Sliwa:** No. You alter it, but you also make special accommodations that you’re not gonna be sending hardened criminals who have been killers or people who have raped to juvie prisons. You’re just not gonna do that. You have to be able to bifurcate this. 

See, I’m open-minded. I don’t think I’m omnipotent, as much experience that I’ve had in public safety. I would say, let’s sit down. Let’s have town hall meetings, let’s have forums. Let’s try to work on something that’s viable.

We’re not doing that. It’s basically “My way. That’s the way it is.” I don’t think many of the legislators are street smart. In fact, I know they’re not street smart ‘cause they never ride the subways. They never walk the streets. They’re not taking buses, they’re not dealing with the working-class people.

That’s why I’ve dubbed myself the mayor of the working class people, who never, their considerations are never put up and prioritized.

**Errol Louis:** Given the case backlogs, are there process reforms like digital discovery or remote arraignments that you would favor in order to speed up trial readiness. That’s partly why so many people are sitting in jail.

**Curtis Sliwa:** Oh, yeah. I love the old fashioned newspapers, the Jersey Journal, which was over in Jersey City by Journal Square, they would show you all the arraignments that were done vis-a-vis television, teleprompter. The attorney is there for the accused, the judge, they’re able to give speedy justice to the accused and also make the system more malleable.

The way it is now? No. It’s so slow that nobody benefits from this process. And in an age of technology, where we should be able to…Errol, I gotta tell you a story. ‘cause I know your whole family was involved with the police: In order to make overtime, when the cops busted me, they had to get three sheets of carbon paper and they would type it out. “How do you spell your name?” “S-L-I.” At the end of the report, they say, “Oh, Curtis. That last piece of carbon paper didn’t work. We’re gonna have to start the process all over again.” I said, “How many kids am I putting through college for you by doing this?” We have such great technology now. A lot of the old school ways just don’t work.

**Corrections, immigration and civic management**

**Errol Louis:** The next mayor is gonna have to deal with a federally appointed receiver over Rikers Island to address the violence and the poor management. The Adams administration resisted the appointment. Do you agree that outside intervention was needed? And if you’re elected, would you be cooperating with the monitor?

**Curtis Sliwa:** I would say to the feds, “How dare you assume that you could do a better job on Rikers Island?” We have one fed lockup in Sunset Park. It’s miserable, as you know Errol, it’s horrible the conditions there. So having a federal monitor, basically because Eric Adams and the Adams administration ignored communication back and forth… his correctional commissioners. I think had he been more forthcoming, had there been more transparency, we wouldn’t have gotten into this draconian situation. 

But remember recently his police commissioner who filed charges against him saying that Eric Adams ran the police department as if he was a head of organized crime. No transparency, not revealing what’s going on in an agency that we as citizens have a right to know what’s going on, I think is true to form. And that’s why you have a federal receivership: refusal to deal. Like with the Campaign Finance Board. How many times did the Campaign Finance Board ask Eric Adams, “How could you account for these contributions from Turkish American business people?” And they never responded and always acted like they were victims. That was part of the Eric Adams administration. Non-response. I would have a totally transparent administration. The good, but also the bad and the ugly. We like the good news bears, right? But you know, in government, a lot of bad news bears. 

And the other thing I would elevate are the civil servants, many of them who have served for Democrats and Republicans, they’re the silent number of people who keep the government going. Because elected officials, I don’t care if they’re Republicans or Democrats, are too busy dialing for dollars. The staff does all the work. As you know, Errol, they never get put on a pedestal.

They’re never given an opportunity of exposing great ideas. There are correctional officers I deal with all the time. They have some great ideas. As mayor, I would sit back, I’d analyze, I’d have to sign off on it, I’d say, “But you, George, you are the one who was the architect of this. You’ve been a correctional officer for 32 years. You know the system inside out. I want you to give the press conference and explain how this works.” Wouldn’t that be a novel idea?

**Errol Louis:** I mean, it’s reminiscent of how you know Jack Maple and some of the other lieutenants….

**Curtis Sliwa:** Wouldn’t that be a novel idea? The people who actually know what goes on, the people who do the heavy lifting, who are silent, who are never given their due, would actually introduce these concepts to the citizens, and all I would have to do is just sign off on it.

**Errol Louis:** Let’s talk some more about Rikers. Under New York law, the island has to be closed by 2027, or no new people housed there. The four borough jails are behind schedule. They’re over budget. There are too many people in Rikers to fit in those borough jails. You’ve said you want to keep it open, but the law says otherwise. So what, how do you plan to address that?

**Curtis Sliwa:** Okay. First we have the four borough jails. Staten Island somehow got exempted. How did that happen?

**Errol Louis:** Well, they have a couple hundred people on…

**Curtis Sliwa:** The point being is they got exempted, so we got four borough jails.

The original assumption was it would cost $8 billion. Sounds like an MTA project, you know, when they’re building a new station. Now it’s $16 billion. It’s expected when they’re completed, $32 billion. What I would do is say, “No. Let’s slow down the process on Rikers. Look, I know I’m gonna get sued. We’re gonna get sued. Legal Aid, New York City Liberties Union. We have 1,000 Corporation Council members. We go into court, we battle, we win some, we lose some. “But I would say to the people who need affordable housing, “how about we convert what was built to be a jail into affordable housing?” 

Because the circumstances are, they’re brand new. You wouldn’t have bars, you wouldn’t have a prison. You make affordable housing. It’s not gonna work as a prison. As you said, we have more inmates than we have space in those new jails. What are we gonna do? Shut Rikers Island down? Since I’ve been on Rikers Island, I would have some of the sections for the mentally ill — who shouldn’t be in Rikers Island, because they have severe mental problems that we should be working on until the time of their release. We’re not doing that now. We mix everybody together.

And we have to separate the gangs. When you go on to Rikers Island, everybody from MS-13 is all together with MS-13\. Everyone who’s a Trinitario. It’s like homecoming! Bloods with Bloods. Crips with Crips. That is a recipe for insanity. And who do we leave to deal with that? Predominantly women of color who are correctional officers, who are almost incapable of dealing with that as the male correctional officers are, because the system says keep the gang members of the same gang together. Anybody with common sense knows you gotta split ‘em up.

**Errol Louis:** Let’s talk about immigration for a minute. Exactly how much do you want, and how much would your NYPD cooperate with ICE? Should they hand off people accused of serious crimes before they get their day in court?

**Curtis Sliwa:** Everybody’s entitled to due process. Everybody. That’s the law. So even if you are, as Trump has called them, the bad hombres — okay? Drug dealers, gang bangers, narco terrorists, sex traffickers — you get charged here. You go to court here. Let’s say you plea out or you’re found guilty. You do your time here. Then the detainer gets issued and ICE comes and picks you up and deports you to your country of origin. You should not be sent to a gulag in El Salvador.

I understand why the Trump administration did that. You don’t want people coming in, especially people who are narco terrorists, sex traffickers, which is a real problem that I’d have the FBI, Patel, deal with ‘cause we’re not handling it very well. In parts of Queens on both sides of the Grand Central Parkway, where open prostitution flourishes in Corona, Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and Flushing. And the sanctimonious hypocrite that Cuomo is, he says, you know, Zohran Mamdani is for legalizing prostitution. He is. You know who signed the law into effect? Governor Andrew Cuomo. He said it was okay. No more loitering, loitering laws go away.

**Errol Louis:** I don’t wanna belabor the point, and you can talk to Melinda Katz about this, we did a story on NY1\. Prostitution is not being prosecuted. The district attorneys, I mean, you might get a couple of dozen cases in the course of an entire year…

**Curtis Sliwa:** I would say, first of all, you have absentee landlords take the building. They’re allowing their facility to be used for prostitution.

You have madams and you have pimps. Prosecute them. You have Johns. Expose who they are because they are the ones that keep this business alive. I would help the women — many of them who have been forced here from either Asia or from Central America and South America, who need help, a lot of ‘em want to go back. They can’t. I understand it from the street level. I would not hold the women responsible, but the pimps, the madams, the landlords who are making money, hand over fist and live in Delray, Florida because they’re absentee landlords. Absolutely, they gotta be prosecuted.

**Errol Louis:** But you’re gonna have your cops make these arrests even if the DA has no interest in it and…

**Curtis Sliwa:** Over and over and over and then shine the light on the DA and force the public, you say, “I’m trying to do our job. Look at what the DA is doing here. I want to protect the women in this trafficking.” I wanna go at the sex traffickers, some of whom are part of the narco terrorist organizations that exist in foreign countries that are imprisoning their own people. We gotta help them. Help them in. That’s what I’m saying.

This whole discussion of being mayor never talks about the plight of women. Have you ever heard them talking about the plight of women, how they get abused, how they’re in sex trafficking, how we don’t do anything to rescue them, how they’re targets of random assaults, sexual harassment, perversions? I wanna prioritize women and take care of them.

I was raised by my father and mother, you take care of the elderly, the infirm, the children, and especially the women. What kind of a man is not gonna take care of women who are in distress, especially if we know it?

**Errol Louis:** Okay. This is a question from Zach Jaworski. He’s a Stabile student here at Columbia Journalism School. In 2021, you said that you don’t believe the mayor of New York City needs police protection specifically if they call for defunding the department. Do you stand by that statement today, even with the increased political violence in America?

**Curtis Sliwa:** No. No. Like other things, I amend that. I see what Zohran Mamdani is going through. I’m aware of the threats. They’re serious. He has a different political philosophy than me. He’s got a wife, he’s got staff, he’s got people that are loyal to him that are under threat. We need to make sure we take care of everybody. Whether you’re running for office, elected office, the temperature is too high.

And remember, 71 years, even though I was targeted by organized crime, I never had armed guards. Today the first time I officially am taking armed security and my wife, who’s also under threat, armed security. You know how bad that makes me feel, that I can’t walk the streets of the city that I love, ride the subways by myself, which I’ve been doing since I was five years old in 1959? And that’s because the rhetoric is too hot.

**Errol Louis:** One of your opponents has called for — this is a First Amendment question. One of your opponents has called for reassigning the Strategic Response Group, which was designed and armed to repel terrorist attacks, but is also used to police constitutionally protected protests and demonstrations. Does it make sense to bring the department’s most lethal unit out when people want to hold a demonstration?

**Curtis Sliwa:** I would be a little different when it comes to demonstrations. You should be able to get your permit for a demonstration in a day, which is normally the case, your sound permit in a day, but then you’re in a restricted area. Ever since Bill de Blasio was the mayor, all of a sudden there are no restrictions. A demonstration becomes a parade, and then you walk wherever you want to go. That’s why you need this strategic unit. Used to be, normally the police from the precinct, they would put up, you know, the wooden horses. You had an area you could demonstrate, certain time you could start, certain time you’d eliminate.

When de Blasio became the mayor, he threw all that out the door. And so I’m gonna try to get everything back on track. Everyone is entitled to demonstrate. I believe that the way you deal with hate speech is more free speech. I don’t want to abridge anybody’s right of hate speech. I was a talk radio show host for 35 years, probably the longest here in New York City. We gotta keep free speech alive. That’s the greatest thing about the United States. If you’re bothered by hate speech, the remedy is more free speech. More free speech.

**Errol Louis:** Last couple of questions. You call for the city to invest a few million dollars to support auxiliary cops and neighborhood watches, presumably like the Guardian Angels. To the extent that there’s a conflict of interest there, how would you handle it?

**Curtis Sliwa:** Look, I’ve dealt with auxiliary police. They dress ‘em up in a police uniform and they move them around like pawns on a chess board to give you the impression that they have more police than they really do. These are dedicated men and women. They never get attention. They never get recognition.

We should make sure, for the volunteer service they do, that some of their needs are met. And that would require us sitting down. Now there are a lot of different patrol groups that exist in the City of New York that have cooperation with the NYPD, but again, they rarely get attention and recognition because the attitude of One Police Plaza is, they really don’t like volunteers. I know how they treated me like a hemorrhoid in a red beret and they were looking for Preparation H to rub on me and the Guardian Angels and hope we dry up and…

**Errol Louis:** Let me be more specific. You wanna put resources toward volunteers? Would you give money to the Guardian Angels? Cause that would be a conflict of interest.

**Curtis Sliwa:** No. Because clearly that would be a big conflict of interest.

**Errol Louis:** In that same section of your website, I noticed you don’t specifically talk about the violence interrupters who follow the Cure Violence model. I was wondering what you think of those groups and whether the city should keep or overhaul or defund them.

**Curtis Sliwa:** I’ve dealt with violence interrupters where they started in Chicago, where we have Guardian Angels, in Washington, DC and here in New York City. There’s only one problem with the violence interrupters. They’ll tell you straight out, “we are not going to give information to the police.” Many of them will tell me straight up, “Curtis, snitches get stitches and end up in ditches. For us to maintain our relationship with gang members, guys and gals who are doing bad things, we can’t snitch ‘em out to the police.”

Now, some of these are really serious criminals. There has to be an understanding. What are you gonna do with that information? If you know somebody was out on a warrant for murder or rape or really serious crimes, you’re not gonna convey that to the police? This is gonna ruin our effectiveness. I’d sit down with all the violence interrupters, ‘cause I’ve dealt with them for years.

I agree with them in some instances, I disagree in others. We find out a way to accommodate one another. I don’t think this mayor has done that. The previous mayors haven’t. Andrew Cuomo talks about violence interrupters. What, in the Hamptons, violating people as they’re going out for their martinis and cocktails? What does he know about violence interrupters? He’s not a street guy.

**Errol Louis:** Is what you’re describing there, is that done at the precinct level? Is that done at One Police Plaza?

**Curtis Sliwa:** It’s the higher crime areas where you have the violence interrupters, where you can see there’s been a pattern of crime.

Look, they do some really good work. Some of them were bad and wayward themselves and they’ve rectified their life and they have vans and they’ll go into intense areas, but there is that Maginot Line that many of them will not cross. And again, if they’re saying it, young people pick up on that. “Snitches get stitches and end up in ditches,” which has caused enormous numbers of problems in our city.

**Errol Louis:** What’s the standard for Guardian Angels? If you come across information that would be of interest to police or prosecutors, you turn it over?

**Curtis Sliwa:** Absolutely. Obviously, you go through the leadership, make sure that everything is tightened up, that you have your information correct. We work with the police, but again, we’re outliers. We’re not an auxiliary police department. And there were times initially in which they wouldn’t even give us the time of day. They looked at us as if we were the criminals, and then eventually that was resolved.

**Errol Louis:** Okay. That brings us to the end of our time. Thanks so much. Great discussion.

**Curtis Sliwa:** Thank you. Thank you very much.
### Designing Cities to Go the Distance
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/designing-cities-for-a-sustainable-climate-future/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:05.000Z
Seated in Space Age plastic chairs, millions of visitors aboard the Ride to Tomorrow skimmed past stainless steel models of midtown airports, high-speed bus-trains, mile-high skyscrapers, moving sidewalks and underground conveyor belts. The popular General Motors exhibit at the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows Park forecast a gleaming fantasy future of prosperity and endless possibility, with "plazas of urban living rising over freeways."

"What is to come, through the fair's eyes at least, is wonderful," marveled science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in an [August 1964 feature in the New York Times](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*

Looking back at the '60s vision for the future from the vantage point of today, it seems clear that we were hoodwinked by a big, beautiful, ingenious marketing ploy. The same people who were selling us Impalas, Sting Rays and Rivieras were imagining our cities not for us, but for cars. But what they didn't plan for was climate change, even though there were ample warnings of how the automobile-centric present and future would alter the planet irrevocably. It's not too late for a dramatic course correction.

If there was one New Yorker responsible for moving those cars off the lots, it was Robert Moses. In 1953, as construction coordinator and parks commissioner of New York City, chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and president of the Long Island State Park Commission, [Moses won a $25,000 prize in the General Motors Better Highways Contest](https://www.nytimes.com/1953/06/19/archives/moses-wins-25000-for-highway-essay-gets-top-g-m-contest-award-urges.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=DETROIT%2C%20June%2018%2DRobert%20Moses,General%20Motors%20Better%20Highways%20Contest.) for his essay "How to Plan and Pay for the Safe and Adequate Highways We Need." That winning essay set him squarely on a path to remake New York City.

While Moses spent the '60s successfully overseeing the construction of the Throgs Neck and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge — a linchpin linking a network of highways including the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway and the Belt Parkway — he was ultimately thwarted in his attempt to make New York a car-centric capital.

While Jane Jacobs and other critics who argued that the Power Broker's projects upended community cohesion, displaced people and demolished buildings, skipped past one fundamental fact: climate change. By stopping Moses from slicing through Washington Square and the West Village to build a proposed expressway, Jacobs and her supporters not only saved the soul of New York City but, arguably, prepared it for a more climate-resilient future.

Then as now, carbon dioxide gases were warming the Earth. The fossil fuel industry certainly knew it, and in 1965 — alerted by President Lyndon B. Johnson himself — even Congress knew it.

As Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes recently concluded after conducting an exhaustive investigation to find out when concern about warming really heated up, "We discovered a universe of discussions by scientists, by members of Congress, by members of the executive branch. The more we looked, the more we found."

Even Ruth Reck, a young physicist hired by GM Research Laboratories in 1965 to study physical chemistry, found strong evidence that CO2 gases were heating the planet and could trigger melting ice sheets and sea-level rise.

But the warnings of Reck and others were dismissed as car-centric neighborhoods and cities grew — in New York, across the country and throughout the world. "Model" cities like the utopian Brazilian capital of Brasilia, which was designed to replicate the futuristic contours of an airplane and to project progress, power and efficiency, were built without even the most minimal sidewalks or mass transit system.

> By stopping Moses from slicing through Washington Square and the West Village to build a proposed expressway, Jacobs and her supporters not only saved the soul of New York City but, arguably, prepared it for a more climate-resilient future.

Today, as our world grows steamier, soggier and stormier, Brasilia represents all that's gone wrong with that monolithic concrete and steel model. Like cities across the globe, and particularly in the Global South, Brasilia today is chaotic, sprawling and scrambling to find enough water and other resources.

Meanwhile, New York, Paris and London — cities that long pre-dated cars — are considered among the world's most sustainable. According to [the IESE Business School of the University of Navarra's Cities in Motion Index](https://citiesinmotion.iese.edu/indicecim/index.eng.html?lang=en&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which in 2025 evaluated 183 cities across 92 countries across factors including governance, mobility, sustainability and technology, New York City ranked second after London. It's walkable and has an efficient transportation system — key elements to urban climate resilience.

Already, half the global population lives in cities. By 2050 — the year that world leaders at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris set as the target for "net zero," when all greenhouse gas emissions should be equal to the emissions removed from the atmosphere—an estimated seventy percent of some 9.8 billion people projected to inhabit the planet will be urban dwellers.

To put those numbers into greater perspective, Yale geographer and leading climate scientist Karen Seto estimates that "urban expansion will result in building a city equivalent in size of New York City every eight days for the next 35 years."

Not only is the number of cities soaring, but their size is exploding. In the next 25 years, the number of the world's megacities — those with populations of more than 10 million — is expected to shoot up from 44 to 67.

Much of that growth is occurring, chaotically, in the sultry Global South — in cities like Dhaka, Bangladesh and Lagos, Nigeria, where glossy, costly high-rise centers stand surrounded by vast, sprawling, congested, polluted shantytowns that gobble up land and resources. These economically and ecologically marginal, often low-lying areas typically lack running water or sanitation and are particularly vulnerable to flooding and storms.

Rather than piling *upward*, most of this growth — except in parts of China and South Korea, where high-rise construction predominates — sprawls inefficiently and unsustainably *outward*. Take Lagos, for example, which in 1960 had a population of 760,000\. Today, an estimated 16 to 20 million people inhabit an area that stretches uncontrollably across 450 square miles — mostly in informal settlements that lack running water and sanitation. By 2050, 30 million people are expected to live in Lagos, making it one of the fastest and least sustainably growing cities on Earth.

Seto maintains that "one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce urban emissions is to have higher density housing located closer to amenities and needs, like shopping and jobs." Zoning and design that encourage co-location (also known as the "15-Minute City"), where services and amenities are accessible within a short, shade-lined walk or bike ride from people's homes, are not only essential to a climate-resilient future but to the strengthening of communities' fragile social fabric.

Five years ago, to address rush-hour gridlock and air pollution, and improve livability, Paris embraced the 15-Minute City. This design approach has, within just a few years, transformed the City of Light, which now has 746 miles of protected bike lanes and once-empty office spaces repurposed for housing, co-working, gyms and shops. From Cleveland to Melbourne to Ottawa, other sprawling cities are moving toward the 15-Minute model.

At the same time, newly planned cities like The Line, a linear urban community currently under construction in Saudi Arabia, which will stretch 110 miles upon completion, are conforming to these 15-minute model principles. Indonesia, which is in the process of moving its capital from congested, polluted, rapidly sinking Jakarta — a city of 10 million squeezed into an area half the size of New York City — to Nusantara on the Island of Borneo, is upping the ante by aiming for a 10-minute city, where daily needs can be met within a short walk or bike ride away.

> Yale geographer and leading climate scientist Karen Seto estimates that urban expansion will result in building a city equivalent in size to New York City every eight days for the next 35 years.

In the early 17th century, when the Dutch first settled Manhattan, they developed streets based on existing paths and land contours before more systematically laying out roads. On Pearl, Beaver and Stone streets, for example, residential, commercial and even agricultural areas coexisted.

Driven by a desire to divide populations based on class, ethnicity and race, zoning that segregated land-use became the norm across the country. Over time, schools, churches and stores began to be located farther away from where people lived. This trend accelerated a reliance on cars, and the intensification of carbon footprints. These days, across much of America, people think nothing of jumping into their cars and driving for fifteen minutes or more to pick up a quart of milk. It's a design flaw that squanders precious resources, increases carbon footprints and contributes to social isolation.

The good news is that United States cities are rapidly moving toward adopting so-called "form-based" building and planning codes, which promote mixed uses, smaller setbacks, denser development, more varied housing types, and reduced parking requirements.

A recent study conducted by Seto colleagues Arianna Salazar-Miranda of Yale and Emily Talen of the University of Chicago, found that communities in the car-dependent South — where urban sprawl is at its ugliest — are leading the adoption of such codes, most recently, Orange County, Florida, home to sprawling Orlando.

Meanwhile in January, the New York City Council passed the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, the most extensive zoning regulations in sixty years. While the Zoning Resolution of 1961 — largely the vision of Mayor Robert Wagner and Robert Moses — paved the way for more cars and high-rises rather than housing, the new rules roll back restrictions that encouraged the construction of glass towers in high-density neighborhoods. Instead, they are designed to facilitate the building of more modest structures and encourage the conversion of underutilized buildings and the development of new mixed-use spaces around transit hubs.

Looking back at the '60s vision of progress, GM's promises seem preposterous. Were we really gullible enough to believe that "technology has found a way to control the wild profusion of \[jungles\]" by first applying searing laser lights to cut through trees before steamrolling toward progress on a "factory on wheels" that would grind up jungle growth and lay the foundation for multi-lane "forest highways bringing to the innermost tropic world the goods and materials of progress and prosperity?"

By now, we should know better than to be distracted by implausible science fictions or duped by augmented future realities. While AI is enhancing data analysis of traffic patterns, energy use and zoning allocations, it's also apparent that lessons for the climate future of cities are found firmly rooted in the past: compact, vibrant, urban areas with good public transportation systems and a profusion of cool, green, leafy spaces. Cities employing these centuries-old common-sense approaches to urban design that enhance walkability and social cohesion will lead us toward a more vibrant, livable and climate-friendly future.
### Percy Sutton, Eric Adams and the State of Black Political Power in New York
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/percy-sutton-eric-adams-and-the-state-of-black-political-power-in-new-york/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:05.000Z
The abrupt end of Eric Adams' mayoral campaign closed one of the most difficult chapters in recent New York politics. Voters had grown weary — embarrassed, even — by an administration marred by state and federal investigations, erratic messaging and a perceived alignment with Donald Trump that seemed antithetical to the interests of most New Yorkers. For Black voters in particular, the fallout carries a deeper sting: an uneasy recognition that the city may not see another Black mayor for a long time to come.

This is about more than Adams heading to the exits to become New York's first one-term mayor since David Dinkins, the city's last Black mayor, left office more than 30 years ago. The demographic and political realities shaping New York today are vastly different from those that enabled the city to elect David Dinkins in 1989 or even Adams in 2021\. Outmigration of Black New Yorkers to southern states mirrors the transformation of other Rust Belt cities where once-robust Black communities have been hollowed out by economic and housing pressures. Those who remain in the city are more dispersed; Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant and other neighborhoods no longer hold the same density of Black voters who once anchored a powerful political base. At the same time, younger and wealthier Black residents who are gentrifying neighborhoods often lack deep ties to Democratic Party machinery. Their party registration may be as much a tool for access to the ballot box in the primary as an expression of ideological loyalty. The political ecosystem I grew up in feels far away.

I am a member of Generation X, perched at the intersection of analog and digital. We were children of white flight, navigating a city in flux even then. We were raised on hip-hop. We played outside until the streetlights came on. My earliest exposure to politics came during the era of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition and David Dinkins' "gorgeous mosaic," which seemed to fit right into a modern and quickly changing city. Jackson's electrifying speeches at the 1984 and 1988 Democratic National Conventions invited me to imagine a bigger table.

By the time I entered political work in the early 1990s, I had the rare chance to meet the so-called "Gang of Four" — David Dinkins, Charles Rangel, Percy Sutton and Basil Paterson — and work with them in various capacities throughout my career. Each was formidable, but Sutton left the deepest impression.

Sutton's biography reads like a roll call of Black excellence in the 20th century. A Tuskegee Airman. Manhattan borough president. co-founder of Inner City Broadcasting. Attorney to Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz. He was tall, elegant and carried a commanding presence. He spoke with sharp eloquence, always certain of his point. Other leaders referred to him as "The Chairman," a recognition of his stewardship of Black politics rooted in Harlem but extending across the entire city.

What made Sutton unique was his mastery of both inside and outside political strategies. Andrew Cuomo, for instance, excelled in maneuvering within government but often struggled to connect with people. Eric Adams, who built his reputation as a retail politician, couldn't really get his hands around the levers of public agencies and offices. Sutton could do both. As Manhattan borough president and a member of the powerful Board of Estimate, he wielded bureaucratic power to deliver for his constituents. Yet his closeness to Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and grassroots activists grounded him in the politics of mobilization. He understood that true influence required aptitude at both levels. Later, he worked to leverage Black media to tell our stories and leverage Black wealth to widen economic opportunity.

He also recognized the importance of political institutions within the Black community, such as the once-powerful Council of Black Elected Democrats (COBED). Though largely forgotten today, COBED was a regular gathering of Black elected officials in New York City, an effort to set policy priorities and coordinate electoral strategy. Its decisions were not binding, but the effort at consensus gave weight to the concerns of Black New Yorkers. Many, including the other members of the Gang of Four, trusted his counsel. Al Sharpton, as a convener through the National Action Network — a successor to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Push Wall Street Project — is the closest equivalent. But it's unclear whether younger generations of political leaders and operatives will see that institution as part of the establishment politics it's campaigned against.

Staffers were not admitted to COBED meetings, but young operatives like me found outlets through parallel gatherings. Journalist Jonathan Hicks of The New York Times, for example, hosted off-the-record conversations for young Black politicos to trade insights and test ideas. The rules were simple: Do no harm. You could work on opposing campaigns, but you supported each other's growth. These experiences mirrored the seriousness of the elders while also acknowledging the gaps in mentorship.

In retrospect, those spaces were invaluable. We learned by watching, by absorbing the lessons of Sutton and his contemporaries. But as time passed, the "young guns" became veterans themselves. And without direct sanction from the old guard, our attempts to organize often met resistance. In a 2010 article, I reflected on how Harlem's political elite sometimes treated new leaders with suspicion, guarding the gates rather than opening them. Sutton was different. His grasp of the totality of civic and political engagement meant he understood the importance of preparing the next wave of leadership.

Sutton's absence since he passed away in 2009 has been keenly felt.

He lived long enough to see Dinkins ascend to City Hall and Barack Obama claim the presidency, but not long enough to witness Adams' brief and troubled tenure. Since his death, New York City has lost other towering figures — Rangel, Harlem Chamber of Commerce leader Lloyd Williams, NAACP President Hazel Dukes, Dinkins and Basil Paterson. Today, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Attorney General Letitia James, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, and Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado represent a lineage that can trace its roots back to Sutton's generation: believing that institutions were flawed and inherently discriminatory, but that they could be improved by leaning into inclusive decision-making and power sharing. Sutton sought those linkages throughout the public and private sectors.

The entire Adams episode, however, reminds us that Sutton's absence left a vacuum not only of institutional history but of moral authority. From the outset, Adams sought to model himself on Dinkins' example and legacy, aspiring to be as beloved. But Adams' missteps were largely self-inflicted. His flirtation with Trump in his final months only deepened voters' disillusionment. The enduring lesson he didn't learn from Sutton, which Sharpton often conveys, is that Black politics is rooted in a sense of a shared fate — historical memory of political marginalization and collective understanding of the need for a strategic response.

It is tempting to romanticize the past and fall into a kind of nostalgia tourism, but the impending exit of Eric Adams from the political scene still leaves a hole in the aspiration of Black political power. The lesson of "The Chairman" is not about longing for the past. It is about recognizing the need for leaders who can marry institutional savvy with grassroots connection, who can build consensus and enduring institutions while mentoring the next generation.

Maybe Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will work to build a new "gorgeous mosaic." Regardless, the next generation of Black political leadership in New York will not look like the last. The demographics are different, the neighborhoods transformed, the party less centralized. Percy Sutton showed us how to build cross-sector leadership that many across race and ethnicity benefited from. We would be wise to remember.

*This piece was originally published in October 2025 and has since been updated to reflect the results of New York City's 2025 general election.*
### How NYCHA Can Serve More New Yorkers — Without Any New Buildings
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-nycha-can-serve-more-new-yorkers-without-any-new-buildings/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:06.000Z
Affordable housing is a central issue in the New York mayoral campaign. Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani has offered the most ambitious — and expensive — proposal: a bond-financed $100 billion initiative to build 200,000 new apartments, to add to what is already by far the nation's largest (177,000 units) public housing stock. There's a lot to question about it: NYCHA already faces massive capital repair needs and such large borrowing would require state permission that's unlikely to be forthcoming.

But there's a way that the current public housing system could accommodate thousands more people, an approach that private developers are well familiar with: subdividing large units into smaller ones. It's a way to get more from housing that already exists — and, in the process, to give those on the NYCHA waiting lists what the Authority's records show they really want.

To be clear, this is not an approach that has previously been tried, which is why it may require unusual arrangements to accommodate tenants. But creativity is in order given the city's huge housing challenges.

To appreciate why it's worth considering, one must start with the little-known fact that a great many NYCHA tenants are what is technically called "over-housed." Specifically, [30% of tenants have empty bedrooms.](https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/assthsg.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) That reflects the fact that many tenants have aged in place and now live alone after their children have grown up and moved on. 10% of tenants have lived in their units for 40 years or more.

Understanding that this is precious space, NYCHA has tried, with little success, to convince these older tenants to relocate to smaller units. But what if, as tenants vacate units voluntarily or pass away, modest construction projects could carve out smaller units from their 3-bedroom apartments?

That would not make sense, of course, if large families were queued up on the waiting list. But NYCHA records show that's not the case. The largest group of tenants, per records not previously made public, want small apartments. Many more want studios and 1BR units than 3BR ones. Small unit turnover, as indicated below, is extremely slow. The units that most potential tenants want are occupied.

NYCHA's current mix of apartments is a reflection of its original vision as a long-term home for large families. NYCHA's apartment stock has many more large units than small — even as tenant preferences have downsized. It's a mismatch for the needs of the city's current population.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25399134?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NoVk-64-aZnSVePM-9n3-6Drw2BDN28YZ%5Fm5GAgzE4I/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25399258?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18A-WE32LDXLgdeOplMoRb14K41WBVewC7JePMv70cGw/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

A quick comparison of the two above tables underscores the disconnect between what potential public housing tenants want and what NYCHA can currently offer. These figures show, for instance, that there are extremely few (4,903) studio apartments in the NYCHA system, but that 47% of those on the waiting lists (84,923) prefer such units.

The math of subdivision could begin to align supply and demand. If 30% of units — those now characterized by "overhousing" — could be subdivided into additional units, that would mean, at minimum, 53,000 new units, if even only one new 1-bedroom was carved out of each unit. 2- and 3-bedroom units could be further subdivided, yielding more. It might not add up to 200,000 units — but it would be a big number.

Subdividing is far easier said than done. More would be required, of course, than simply slapping up additional walls. Apartments need bathrooms and kitchens. And in most cases, it's probably folly to believe that people could stay in their units while they're being worked on.

But it might get easier if paired with other creative ideas, such as dormitory-style shared common areas. A walk down the hall to shower is better than a homeless shelter. In at least some NYCHA units, one can imagine whole floors converted to SRO-type housing, though that would require working front door locks; the Housing Authority has often struggled to maintain these.

Among the most serious drawbacks to public housing has been the fact that it is a kind of frozen city — its sites cannot be adapted for new purposes even as the city has changed. The Ingersoll Houses were first built, for instance, to house shipyard workers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, long since closed. Subdividing units is at most an "unfreezing," but it could be a useful one.

Financing such internal reconstruction may even be practical. As now planned, NYCHA will include 140 of its 335 developments in its [Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT) renovation plans, through](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nycha/downloads/pdf/PACT%5FDataset.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) which private funds will be funneled into developments that remain publicly owned. (This is New York's version of the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration program initiated by the Obama Administration.) These extensive renovations could serve as vehicles for requests-for-proposal specifications that call for subdivision cost estimates and plans.

No tenant should be involuntarily evicted. But it's worth considering using public funds to buy out long-time tenants — who might use the funds to help with relocation. It's also worth considering larger scale buyouts in order to free up whole buildings on high-value real estate — to produce revenue NYCHA so desperately needs, including to undertake subdivision.

Subdivision could also help NYCHA in meeting a difficult challenge looming from a Trump Administration proposal: [to impose a two-year time limit on public and subsidized housing tenancies.](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/study-says-trumps-proposed-time-limit-for-low-income-housing-most-likely-to-affect-working-families-and-children?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) HUD Secretary Scott Turner has called this a way to ensure that subsidized housing is a "trampoline, not a hammock." Creating new units from existing ones would provide a means to relocate tenants—and comply with the time limit by starting the clock anew.

It's worth saying that NYCHA should want its non-elderly, non-disabled tenants to do what Turner suggests: move out and up. It will help, however, if those in desperate need of housing have a chance to move in at all. Creating new, small units that align with the preferences of those on waiting lists could provide that opportunity.
### Is Eric Adams Our Last Tabloid Mayor?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/is-eric-adams-our-last-tabloid-mayor/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:07.000Z
During April's annual Inner Circle dinner, a musical review in which the New York press corps lampoons the politicians they cover, Eric Adams capped the show with the traditional mayoral comic rebuttal.

He stood on the stage, his backdrop a mock-up of a New York Post front page picturing the shirtless, buff mayor grinning below an all-caps headline: "SEXY IN THE CITY."

After calling the event "my least favorite night of the year," Adams, [the Post noted](https://nypost.com/2025/04/05/us-news/mayor-eric-adams-numerous-ny-pols-lampooned-by-journalists-at-legendary-inner-circle-dinner/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), told the Ziegfeld Ballroom crowd: "I look forward to coming back to this for the next four years."

We now know that the appearance would be his final Inner Circle gig, at least as a mayor of New York City. And with his exit Sunday from the race for City Hall, the bit, in retrospect, underscores that Adams may very well be our last made-for-the-tabloids mayor.

It could spell the end of an era — or an error, depending on your view (and your tolerance for tabloid-friendly puns). Also, depending on how you see the world: The tabs either educate the public on who the politicians really are or caricature them beyond recognition — denigrating civic engagement, trust in the media and the papers' own relevance.

Assemblyman and Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani (D-Queens), who is leading in the polls, has built his insurgent mayoral run as a young Democratic Socialist largely on a mix of social media mastery (heavy on the [food videos](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/dining/zohran-mamdani-nyc-mayor-food.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)), made-for-the-people message clarity and an army of door-knocking volunteers.

It's a very different form of political celebrity than the brand long forged by his last-standing rivals, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa. Cuomo's public life began as a teenager when he helped run his father's failed 1977 mayoral campaign. Sliwa, now 71, emerged during the same period as the city's self-appointed red-bereted crimefighter.

The duo, like Adams — and the president who rescued the mayor from a corruption rap — knew how to play to the Post, the Daily News and, for a while, New York Newsday, as well as to local (and eventually national) TV news cameras. And they've largely stuck to their tried-and-true love-hate relationship with the press, even as the power of traditional media has waned. Many a reporter and editor have been on the receiving end of an angry Cuomo or Donald Trump rant.

Adams may be less hands-on, but his career trajectory owes just as much to the tabs. He first gained widespread attention in the 1990s as an outspoken leader of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, crusading for racial equity.

The activist cop morphed into the "swagger" mayor with his declarations of "my haters become my waiters" and "If you're going to hang out with the boys at night, you have to get up with the men in the morning" — even if it wasn't always clear where he was awakening, given confusion over his residency.

The laws of tabloid physics mandate that rises come with inevitable falls, usually self-inflicted. The archetype fits Adams as well as the designer-tailored suits he favors.

For perspective on how we got to this point, check out journalist Jonathan Mahler's insight-filled, ["The Gods of New York,"](https://www.amazon.com/Gods-New-York-Idealists-Opportunists/dp/052551063X?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) which tackles (among other things) the late 1980s plummet of Ed Koch, whose mayor-as-celebrity reign dwarfed that of John Lindsay and even Fiorello LaGuardia. Mahler also chronicles the tabloid-propelled elevation of characters still in the public realm, among them Al Sharpton, Rudy Giuliani and Trump.

None are remotely god-like, but some have proven more resilient than others, as Andrew Cuomo has no doubt pondered.

Mamdani, born in 1991 during David Dinkins' mayoralty, is busy writing his own TikTok-friendly script as he defies the laws of tabloid physics. Take his relative lack of experience, his past criticism of the "racist" NYPD (he says he [plans to apologize](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/nyregion/mamdani-police-apology-floyd.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but has yet to do so) and his [threat to arrest](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/nyregion/mamdani-arrest-netanyahu-nyc-mayor.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Benjamin Netanyahu should the Israeli prime minister step foot in New York during his mayoralty. All have landed Mamdani on screaming front pages (or "woods," as we old ink-stained wretches call them) — and all would have made his candidacy a nonstarter in times past.

But he's brought to the polls [young voters](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/new-yorks-primary-and-the-power-of-better-election) unconcerned with Rupert Murdoch's Post deriding him as a virtual communist (one July front page [pictured Mamdani](https://nypost.com/2025/07/27/us-news/ny-republicans-tie-dem-opponents-to-zohran-mamdani-theyre-mamdani-democrats/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) with the Soviet hammer-and-sickle). The Daily News, my former employer, hasn't been much friendlier. Even The New York Times' [vexing](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/our-advice-to-the-new-york-times-about-a-vexing-editorial-decision) Democratic primary non-endorsement editorial telling New Yorkers not to vote for Mamdani also failed to sway his fans.

The 33-year-old Democratic nominee's approach is working for him — so far. But the dynamic will almost certainly change should he become mayor of New York, a platform for aspiring larger-than-life figures with varying degrees of inflated egos screaming out to be punctured. The question is how much: Will the tabs set the tone, or will the media-savvy mayor?

Mamdani's mayoral hero, Bill de Blasio, became defined in the press by his much-criticized chauffeured rides from Gracie Mansion to his beloved Prospect Park YMCA, perhaps speaking to a stubbornness that at times hampered his effectiveness.

Mike Bloomberg, the nonplayboy billionaire, played an unnecessary cat-and-mouse game with reporters by trying to keep weekend jaunts to his homes in Vail, Bermuda and elsewhere a secret.

Both could be prickly, but not nearly as much as Koch and Giuliani, who relished verbal battles with the press and other perceived enemies. Both became the pugnacious face of the city of their time (before Giuliani's response to 9/11 would briefly earn him the honorary moniker of "America's Mayor").

Cuomo falls into the combative category, both cultivating and cudgeling generations of journalists, including some who later reported on the multiple sexual harassment allegations that drove him out of Albany in 2021 (he denies the accusations). He's been kicked around in recent months by the Post, though the paper is softening up a tad with Adams out of the race (the editorial board recently advised Cuomo to [show more warmth](https://nypost.com/2025/09/29/opinion/can-cold-andrew-cuomo-warm-up-and-get-out-of-his-comfort-zone-to-beat-mamdani/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the campaign trail).

If he's elected mayor, how Mamdani will be pegged by the press — and how much it matters — will depend on how he rises to the challenges of leadership and how he engages with the media day-to-day. Much also will depend on whether Trump makes good on his vow to make Mayor Mamdani's life hell.

Even as a frontrunner, Mamdani has generally engaged with reporters, showing some earned confidence. But he should keep in mind another tabloid maxim: Anything can happen between now and Election Day.

The only certainty is whoever's standing on the stage at next year's Inner Circle will have the last laugh, at least for one night.
### A City of Winners and Losers: New York in the 1980s
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/jonathan-mahler-thomas-dyja-gods-of-new-york/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:08.000Z
*If you want to understand Donald Trump, you need to understand New York at the end of the 1980s. This was the moment when the future president was transformed from a local real estate developer into a household name ("The Art of the Deal" was published in 1987.) Just as important, this was the time and place that shaped Trump politically.*

[*"The Gods of New York,"*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/568081/the-gods-of-new-york-by-jonathan-mahler/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *the new book by Jonathan Mahler, powerfully conjures a particularly intense period in the life of New York. The gay community was furious at the failure of public health authorities to stop the spread of AIDS. The black community was up in arms over a series of incidents — including the deaths of Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpurs and Michael Griffith — that confirmed their suspicion that the criminal justice system was fundamentally racist. Activists watched with alarm as the homeless population grew to unprecedented heights. And everyone was set on edge by the violence and disorder that the crack epidemic brought with it.*

*Presiding over this febrile environment was a mayor who was predisposed to combat (Ed Koch) and a collection of tabloid newspapers that were incentivized to throw gasoline on the fire. Is it any wonder that Donald Trump emerged from this toxic breeding ground with an instinct for how to command attention and a thirst for conflict?*

*We asked Thomas Dyja, the author of* [*"New York, New York, New York,"*](https://thomasdyja.com/book/new-york-new-york-new-york/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *to sit down with Jonathan Mahler to talk about what went wrong in the 1980s, how New York recovered, and what lessons present-day decisionmakers should take from the experience. The following transcript of their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

**Thomas Dyja:** Let's start with the scene of your great new book, "Gods of New York." There's often a before-and-after mentality when people talk about New York City — the terrible "Drop Dead" New York of the 1970s, and then now. Your book covers 1986, which is not 1975, when your first book "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning" was set. This is further along. Is this a different New York yet? What's changed in the city between your two books?

**Jonathan Mahler:** New York died and was reborn. I would say that in 1977 New York is at its nadir. It's a couple years after the infamous "Ford to City: Drop Dead" headline, a couple years after the near bankruptcy. It's the year of the blackout, the year of Son of Sam. It's really when the city bottomed out.

By 1986, when this book begins, the city has been reborn. But what happens in the four years I write about — 1986 to 1990 — is that New York begins to grapple with the wages of this rebirth. The city's new identity, its new economic structure largely built around Wall Street, finance and real estate — that city is a very different place. It's a city of winners and losers, a city of rich and poor, a city with a great deal of racial conflict.

Add into the mix the AIDS crisis, the arrival of crack cocaine and the rise of the homelessness crisis, and it becomes an incredibly combustible period. These are the years when the reborn city began to really grapple with what its new identity meant and how many people were going to be left out of it.

**TD:** A book like this is a benchmark. You and I have both written about the same period — I did 40 years, you did four. So between us we have a long haul and a core sample. What's great about your core sample is that it lets us make comparisons between then and now, to see what we've learned, if anything.

Since we're in election season, let's start with talking about mayors — in this case, Ed Koch. My introduction to Ed Koch was moving here in 1980 from Chicago during the drought and watching him on TV with a bunch of kids singing about toilet flushing. I thought, "This is a very different place from Chicago. This man is not Mayor Daley." Give us a quick sketch of Koch and where he was at this point.

**JM:** By 1986, he's just been reelected yet again. He is really the most popular mayor that New York has had, probably since LaGuardia. He's swept into office with a huge victory, basically uncontested.

But what we see over the course of his third and final term is that the whole city unravels. He goes from being this enormously popular, beloved figure — not just a mayor but the symbol of the city's rebirth, like the city's mascot — to someone whose shtick gets old. He was always out there, a proud New York booster when New York was down in the late seventies, always engaging with voters on the street with his famous "How am I doing?" He was shticky in that Catskills way, and people loved it.

But it all starts to get a little tired and old in these final years. The city and this great rebirth that he presided over really begins to unravel, and he's ultimately driven out.

**TD:** When you look at Bloomberg's last term, which wasn't his best term either, how much of this do you think was Koch specifically and how much is just the perils of a third term?

**JM:** I think Koch, like Bloomberg, overstayed his welcome. People were tired of him. People started to feel there was a callousness to him, a narcissism. That's what happens when you have a politician who refuses to leave office — they begin to look like a narcissist. That happened with Bloomberg and certainly happened beforehand with Koch.

Then combine that with a series of events, many of which were out of his control, that he reacted poorly to. That didn't help matters. In some ways it was the chickens coming home to roost from decisions he'd made, and in some ways it was just bad luck.

**TD:** I also think by the third term, you have trouble getting the same level of talent that you had coming in. During the primary this year, we kept hearing people complaining about the talent pool. "Why are all the candidates so bad? Why can't we ever have a good mayor?" Do you think our talent pool is significantly different now, or is this just something we always say?

**JM:** I was talking the other day with [Bradley Tusk](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/contributors/bradley-tusk), and he was making the point that basically the moderates in New York, the centrists, the Bloomberg types — they have no political machine in New York. There's no organization producing candidates. All the energy is out on the edges.

Looking at the mayoral race I wrote about in "The Bronx is Burning" — we had Bella Abzug, Mario Cuomo, Percy Sutton, who was a very successful Harlem businessperson and Manhattan borough president. It does seem like we're far from that now. New York local politics are not drawing the most talented people.

**TD:** The one tragic flaw that I think we probably all agree on with Koch is race. At the end of the day, whenever I'm asked questions about Koch, it always comes around to that. One of the other big figures in your book is Al Sharpton. So let's talk about the racial situation then and now. In your book, Koch is freezing out Black New York and the only forms of resistance, really, are two things you talk about: Al Sharpton and hip-hop.

**JM:** That's right. And I guess film — "Do the Right Thing." So protest and culture, or culture as protest.

One of the wages of the rebirth was that Koch did not bring Black New Yorkers into his administration to start. He also really actively alienated the Black community and Black leaders during his first campaign. There were his infamous comments about "poverty pimps." Another thing that really cost him support in the Black community was that he promised he would not close Sydenham Hospital in Harlem — a campaign promise to the Black community. Sure enough, he turned around and closed it down.

He had no goodwill, really, in the Black community. By 1986, he had some Black votes — it wasn't that he was completely wiped out — but among the city's Black leadership, they wanted to run a candidate against him. There was already a sense in the Black community that their interests weren't represented by Koch.

What really struck me in my research was Benjamin Ward, the city's first Black police commissioner during these years. In his unpublished memoir, Ward says that he admired Koch, but Koch just didn't understand Black people. He didn't understand what the world looked like from the perspective of a Black New Yorker, and he didn't really seem to care to. That really became clear during these years. It's not quite right to say Koch was racist — I think Koch had a problem with empathy more broadly. He wasn't successful at seeing the world from anyone else's point of view except Ed Koch's.

**TD:** So Sharpton — is he different now? Is he someone who has really changed, or is this just him adapting over time?

**JM:** I think the same fundamental forces are in tension in Sharpton that have always been — his desire to be famous and important and powerful, and his desire to make the world into a more equal place. Those two forces that make him such an interesting, complicated person have always been there.

What changed is he realized over time that he was accruing power and influence, that he didn't need to always be the bomb thrower. He already was the person people were turning to, the person white politicians couldn't ignore. As he began to accrue power and confidence in his ability to draw crowds, he didn't need to be as outrageous because he had the power he was looking for. In some ways, it's not so different from Donald Trump — he learned how to capture the public's attention and then recognized all the power that came with that ability.

**TD:** Your book touches on the Central Park Five, Howard Beach, all these incidents. Where are we now compared to then with race relations?

**JM:** I think we're far from that. When people ask me what's better about the city now, I do think racial relations are unquestionably better. Black New Yorkers feel like they have much more of a voice in the politics of the city.

There was so much mistrust between Black and white New Yorkers during these years. White people didn't go into Black neighborhoods, Black people didn't go into white neighborhoods. The city is hardly a model of integration now — the schools are still largely segregated — but it just feels like a very different place.

The idea that movie critics were up in arms that Spike Lee had made "Do the Right Thing," which ends with a riot in Bed-Stuy after cops kill a Black New Yorker — critics and political pundits were writing that it was irresponsible to release it. Can you imagine what the social conditions in the city must have felt like for a critic to feel justified in writing something like that? It's almost beyond imagination.

**TD:** Yes, and George Floyd in many ways brought together Black and white people. In the 1980s, when Al Sharpton took several hundred Black New Yorkers into white neighborhoods to protest after Howard Beach or when Yusuf Hawkins was murdered, they had epithets screamed at them and watermelons held up.

**JM:** Exactly. The civil rights movement was primarily a southern movement. In New York, it was more of a militant Black power movement — Malcolm X and his acolytes. Those were people who had a very different understanding of the civil rights struggle, much more separatist.

**TD:** Another thing that's hard to explain from then to now is crime. This book is a great reminder of how insanely dangerous New York was in this period, especially 1986 to 1990.

**JM:** This is when crime peaked in New York. I think it was 1990 when murder peaked. Obviously crack was a big part of that. You had a police department that had been shrunk during the fiscal crisis and was also overwhelmingly white.

We are so far statistically from where we were then in terms of crime. In some ways, Trump's idea of how dangerous American cities are is because his brain still lives in that era. Going out in the street — everyone got mugged in the 1980s in New York if you lived here. That's just what happened. The city is really a very safe place now, even though much of the country sees New York through a distorted lens.

But it wasn't just street crime. There was also endemic political corruption — one Koch administration official after another in scandals. You had these high-profile white collar criminals — not just the insider traders like Boesky and Milken that Giuliani prosecuted, but Leona Helmsley the tax cheat, Imelda Marcos. The police corruption was endemic and ingrained. The whole city felt foul.

**TD:** And the mob, the Gotti lionization...

**JM:** Yeah, Trump — this is the world, the crucible for Donald Trump. There was almost a sense of immorality that had descended on the city during these years. Everyone, whether civil servants, politicians or the already rich, everyone was just trying to grab what they could. They were all looting the city in a way.

**TD:** Do we feel the city is still criminal in that way?

**JM:** No, though Eric Adams... that's a pretty corrupt administration. But it doesn't feel as endemic and widespread. It also doesn't feel like everyone's just taking what they can.

**TD:** I wonder if 9/11 was a kind of reset in how New Yorkers viewed each other. The concept of crime seemed so odd after that. We had all had this thing inflicted on us. Even if you weren't standing downtown when it happened, it was emotionally so immense and it became clear we don't like to do this to each other in some basic ways.

**JM:** Yeah, there's just a different mood now, a different atmosphere.

**TD:** Another big factor is media and the role of tabloids. How do you see that then versus now?

**JM:** The tabloids played a huge role because they played a huge role in the city. There were really three or four of them if you include Newsday. Everyone read the tabloids. Everyone read Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton. These columnists were important, influential people — influencers long before the internet.

This had a paradoxical effect. On one hand, tabloids by their nature are very polarizing — they divide the world into heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys. They're comic books for adults. On the other hand, the fact that everyone was reading the same newspapers made everyone concerned about the same stories and issues. There was much more of a sense of New York as a single city. It was a single city whose identity was up for grabs and being fought over intensely, but it was still a place. If you were a New Yorker, you read the tabloids.

I think we've lost something with the fragmentation of media. People don't care about the city in the same way. People care more about their neighborhood, their street, their life in the city, their kids' school. We've lost a larger sense of civic identity — what Mario Cuomo once called "the New York idea." What is the New York idea now?

**TD:** What would that era have looked like with social media?

**JM:** What's funny is, you had influencers then too. This was the attention economy. Donald Trump and Al Sharpton were in command of New York's attention economy. Page Six and the gossip columns made celebrities out of people in the same way TikTok makes celebrities out of people who aren't doing something necessarily worthy of notice. The tabloids were the precursors to social media.

**TD:** Homelessness is another issue that really begins to come together as a concept and policy problem at this point.

**JM:** The term "homeless" didn't really arrive until the '80s. There had always been homelessness — during the Depression, for instance — but it was always seen as a temporary condition. When it returned in the early 1980s, aside from the winos and bums around the Bowery, the thinking was this was just a temporary social crisis. Then it became clear that if someone didn't do something, it would go on. No one was able to figure out what to do, and this temporary social crisis became a permanent one we're still living with today.

It was shocking to see people sleeping on the streets in the 1980s. Now we routinely step over them on our way to the subway. We have for decades now. It shocks the conscience when you think about it that we still don't have a solution, to say nothing of the mentally ill homeless, who are a whole other and much more urgent population.

**TD:** This was because of policy choices — we got rid of SROs, decided we wanted a family-oriented city starting in the '60s. We got rid of housing for singles, including the elderly. We also changed how we dealt with the mentally ill and deinstitutionalization. These were reversible policy choices.

**JM:** Absolutely right. One thing that becomes clear during these years is that the economic policy of incentivizing real estate development, which led to the demolition of so much affordable housing and SROs, might have been great for getting the economy moving again and spurring construction. But it also kicked tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers out of their homes. Many didn't have the means to find or afford new ones. These were economic policy decisions.

**TD:** Tell me some good things that happened from 1986 to 1990.

**JM:** If you're a fan of hip-hop, these were amazing years — Beastie Boys, Public Enemy. Fort Greene during these years was an incredible neighborhood, filled with Black artists.

I would also go back to my earlier point — there was an investment in New York. There was a sense of "we care about this city" that I don't always feel now. I have a pretty limited circle of friends who are into New York politics the way I'm into New York politics. But then, in the '80s, you lived in New York and you were a New Yorker. I feel like a lot of people just live here now. They live here because they have money and can afford the great restaurants and theater. This is just where they happen to plunk themselves.

**TD:** I've always had problems with Jane Jacobs' street ballet metaphor because watching ballet is a spectator thing. A lot of what happened was people coming in and living on top of the city and watching — "this place is adorable, it's got the coffee shop" — but they don't go to the PTA meeting or community board meeting. They don't do the day-to-day things that are part of why that street ballet happens. You've got to jump in and folk dance, not watch the street ballet.

**JM:** Yes, for sure. One nice thing about this mayoral race has been seeing people, young people in particular, galvanized by a local politician. That's something we really haven't seen in a long time.

I was in college during these years, but working on the book made me nostalgic for a New York that existed then. I was in Chicago reading the Village Voice every week and feeling like, "Oh my god, New York!" Even though lots of horrible stuff was going on, it was alive and people were fighting for something.

The other thing that was good about those years was the characters were just amazing. I don't know if that's "good," but it was fun to observe them. They were larger than life. "Gods of New York" is rightly titled — and many of them still march among us.
### Crime Victims Can Help Point the Way Forward
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/crime-victims-can-help-point-the-way-forward/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:45.000Z
New Yorkers have access to mountains of statistics, updated weekly, about crimes committed in New York City and what happens to the people accused of committing them. Policymakers and the general public, however, lack the data necessary to track what happens to crime victims. It's time that changed.

An important national statistic mostly unknown outside criminal justice circles is that [more than half of all crimes are not reported to the police.](https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv23.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) This critical finding has been consistent since 1973, when the federal government first launched the [National Crime Victimization Survey](https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (NCVS). This household survey asks whether individuals were victims of crime and if so, whether they reported the crime to the police. It also asks what support victims received following their victimization, whether they accessed victim services and, for those who did not report the crime, why they chose not to.

But the NCVS is for the nation as a whole; there's no corresponding way to track what happens to crime victims in the nation's largest city. There should be.

We encourage the next mayoral administration to invest in an annual victimization survey that builds upon the NCVS platform, but with additional statistical power and enhanced questions. This robust survey would allow for a granular understanding of the reasons city residents do not report crimes and the steps they take, if any, to seek assistance following the crime. It would also shed light on variations across neighborhoods and within different demographic groups. In light of the Trump administration's enforcement and deportation policies, this would be particularly important to document shifts in trust in the police in neighborhoods with a high percentage of immigrants. The overarching policy goal of this initiative would be to help all victims of crime across the city, including victims who did not file a complaint, rebuild their lives.

**New York City: A decline in victimization and a decline in reporting**

The potential of such a local study is illustrated by a recent analysis of NCVS data from New York City. [Research](https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Crossroads%5FNCVS%5FReport.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) published earlier this year by Dr. Min Xie, a criminology professor at the University of Maryland, documents changes over the years in crimes reported by victims in New York City, the reasons given for not reporting and the use of victim services.

Xie's study analyzed data from 1996 to 2022\. Consistent with crime trends based on police reports, she found that both violent and property crime victimization decreased significantly over this time period. Violent crimes declined from 38 to 15 per 1,000 residents, while property crimes declined from 161 to 100 per 1,000\. Her analysis also supports the finding from police statistics that New York City remains one of the safest cities in the country.

More importantly, however, Xie found that over time, fewer victims were choosing to report the crimes committed against them to the police. In the late 1990s, 49% of violent crimes werereported to the police. By the early 2020s, this decreased to 35%. In the late 1990s, 31% of property crimes were reported to the police. This decreased to 21% by the early 2020s. Another cause for concern is that, in recent years, other large cities had higher reporting rates than New York City for both violent crimes (42% vs. 35%) and property crimes (29% vs. 21%).

New Yorkers should be concerned that fewer crimes are being brought to official attention. Reversing this trend requires a deeper understanding of the reasons victims do not report. Fortunately, the NCVS provides a good place to start because it asks why the crime was not reported. Was the crime dealt with another way? Was it not considered important enough to report? Was the crime covered by insurance? Did the victims fear retaliation if they were to report the crime? Victims can also respond that they thought the police couldn't help or wouldn't help.

Xie looked in particular at the number of victims who said that "police wouldn't help." Here again, the trends are concerning. In the late 1990s, 7% of New York City victims of violent crime gave this as their reason for not reporting. By the early 2020s, this number had risen to 16%. A similar trend has been reported in other large cities across the country, underscoring the national challenges of enhancing public trust in the police.

Xie's study also highlights some good news. Among New Yorkers who experienced serious violence (including rape, sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault), the use of victim services *increased*sharply over the study period. From 1997 to 2021, the percent of victims of these crimes who reported using services doubled, from 15% to 30%, rising to a level seven times higher than in other large cities.

This is a testament to the city's rich array of nonprofit and government services for crime victims. For decades, nonprofit and government agencies in every borough have provided services for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Safe Horizon, the nation's largest victim services organization, has offered advocacy and assistance to victims of any crime. In 2016, Safe Horizon began expanding its services by placing two victim advocates in all 78 police precincts — one for victims of domestic violence, the other for victims of all other kinds of crime. These advocates offer assistance to every victim who reports the crime they were a victim of to the police. This is the largest partnership between a victim assistance agency and a police department in the country. The NCVS data indicate that as more services became readily available, more victims of crime accessed them.

**Where we go from here**

The advent of a new mayoral administration provides an opportunity to leverage these findings into policy reforms. At a minimum, the City should focus on improving victims' trust in the police and building a stronger network of victim services. To track improvements in these metrics, the City should commit to its own annual victimization survey based on the NCVS. If conducted with a larger sample size, this would allow for important analyses by subpopulation (race/ethnicity, age) and neighborhoods (between and within boroughs). With this information, the City could target resources to those communities with the highest levels of non-reporting and lowest levels of confidence in the police.

We propose expanding the survey to ask more questions about crime victims' experiences in order to shed light on how to best address victims' physical, emotional and financial needs in the aftermath of crime. [Research](https://www.amazon.com/Parallel-Justice-Victims-Crime-Herman/dp/0615326102/ref=monarch%5Fsidesheet%5Ftitle?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) shows that victims of crime, compared to the general population, experience higher rates of depression, PTSD, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide and poor performance at school and at work.

An expanded survey could reveal what services and supports are most helpful, and what more public and non-profit institutions could do to support victims. Do our social services contribute to victims' healing? Is our victim compensation system designed to maximize support? Answers to these questions could enhance both crisis response and long-term care. By asking victims where they turn for support, we would also value and strengthen the community and familial bonds that help victims heal.

This new survey would also document the complex relationships between crime victims and the individuals who caused them harm. This information could lead to the design of better interventions to keep victims safe and, wherever possible, support reparative work such as restitution or mediation. In addition, by expanding the frame from recent experiences to the ongoing impact of crime, we could address the long-term ripple effects that are not always observable in the immediate aftermath. And, by understanding patterns of repeat victimization, a phenomenon that occurs across crime categories, we could target services such as safety planning to interrupt cycles of ongoing harm. Ultimately, addressing the trauma many victims experience can keep victims engaged in community life.

Indeed, if the survey's framing shifted from system-centric to victim-centric, the results would lead to a deeper understanding of the multidimensional experience of crime victims. It would shift the emphasis from framing the victim as someone who does or doesn't trigger a law enforcement response to a person who needs and deserves our support.

When it was first launched, the NCVS was revolutionary. It opened the door to an understanding of crime that went beyond police reports. Today, it stands as a tool that hasn't met its potential. Under the next mayoral administration, New York City should lead the way and encourage a new wave of surveys that put victims' needs and experiences front and center. Then, New Yorkers can embrace a policy goal to support all parties to a crime — those responsible for the crime and those who are harmed by it — as they both rebuild their lives. That is the highest aspiration of justice.
### Newark and the Limits of Criminal Justice Reform
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/newark-and-the-limits-of-criminal-justice-reform/
Last updated: 2026-08-24T21:20:54.000Z
By the time the car began to slow, the officer already had his gun drawn. 

On August 31, 2017, 20-year-old Raheem Bryant saw a convertible idling near a gas station in Newark, New Jersey. He jumped in and drove off. The car was quickly reported stolen, and the police began a pursuit. 

Most of the responding officers followed department protocol: keep a safe distance, avoid escalation and wait for the vehicle to stop. Bryant wasn’t armed, and he wasn’t posing an immediate threat. The plan was to wait him out. 

But as the car came to a stop near a residential block, off-duty officer Xavier Pimentel ran up to the vehicle. He wasn’t assigned to the call. He approached the driver’s side and fired a single shot into the car, striking Bryant in the neck.

The bullet severed Bryant’s spine and left him permanently paralyzed. 

A grand jury later declined to file charges against Pimentel. Bryant has since filed a civil lawsuit against the city and the police department. 

The shooting occurred during a turning point for Newark. Three years earlier, [a U.S. Department of Justice investigation](https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2014/07/22/newark%5Ffindings%5F7-22-14.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that the Newark Police Department routinely engaged in unconstitutional stops, searches and use of force, all of which disproportionately impacted Black Newark residents. At the same time, the city was still one of the most dangerous in the country. A [federal consent decree](https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-reaches-agreement-city-newark-new-jersey-reform-police-department-s?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) followed in 2016\. It was designed to overhaul the department’s policies and practices to restore public trust and ensure constitutional, accountable policing. 

Today, Newark is often held up as a [national model](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/25/camden-newark-new-jersey-police-reform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for [police reform](https://giffords.org/analysis/lessons-on-police-reform-from-newark/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Since entering the federal consent decree, the city has shifted its policing strategies toward more community-based approaches, strengthened oversight and seen a steady (though [not uninterrupted](https://patch.com/new-jersey/newarknj/violent-crime-rises-newark-still-lower-past-decades?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)) decline in violent crime. By the summer of 2020 — when protests over unlawful police violence turned chaotic in cities across the country — Newark stood out for its restraint. Demonstrations remained peaceful, and the city recorded [zero police shootings](https://www.ksby.com/national/newsy/with-no-police-shootings-in-2020-newark-makes-case-for-consent-decrees?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that year. 

But during that same period, Raheem Bryant’s case remained unresolved. 

“\[The city has\] been trying to get the case dismissed on qualified immunity,” said Jarrett Adams, a civil rights attorney representing Bryant. “The consent decree specifically said officers should be trained not to shoot at fleeing suspects who pose no danger.” 

According to Adams, Pimentel was never given that training. 

The case is still tied up in appeals, while Bryant continues to battle serious medical complications stemming from the shooting. “The city of Newark is waiting on this man to die,” Adams said. 

Bryant’s case didn’t make many headlines, but it lingers in Newark as a quiet reminder of how difficult lasting reform can be. Nearly a decade after the city launched sweeping changes aimed at building trust, many residents and organizers say the same frustrations continue. Traffic stops still spark tension. Complaints still go unanswered. For those who lived through the department’s worst years, the distance between policy and practice doesn’t feel nearly as wide as it looks on paper.

> By the summer of 2020, Newark stood out for its restraint: Demonstrations remained peaceful, and the city recorded zero police shootings that year.

“Law enforcement has to be accountable to the communities they serve, and that still hasn’t happened,” said Aqeela Sherrils, founder of the Newark Community Street Team, a grassroots violence intervention program he led from 2014 to 2019\. “They still believe they have more authority than the people who pay them to provide a service. It’s a cultural shift that still needs to take place.” 

The mayor’s office and the police department did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but activists and residents point to persistent signs of mistreatment. There are stories of officers unjustly stopping Black residents, behaving aggressively during routine interactions, and using unnecessary force during arrests. 

[Department data](https://www.newarkpublicsafety.org/npd/transparency-data/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) support some of those concerns. In 2024, Black residents in Newark were stopped by police at more than twice the rate of white residents. And of all recorded use-of-force incidents last year, 76% involved Black individuals. While officials often argue that these numbers reflect where crime is concentrated, critics say those explanations overlook longstanding issues of over-policing. 

A [2023 Fairleigh Dickinson University poll](https://www.fdu.edu/news/category/fdu-poll/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that public confidence remains fragile. Just 10% of residents rated police performance in their neighborhoods as “excellent,” and fewer than half said they’d likely report a crime to the police. 

Trust in the police also varied sharply by race and geography, according to the poll. Black and Hispanic residents were far less likely than white or Asian residents to say they felt safe or that officers treated people equally. And while many agreed that Newark had improved as a place to live, a majority, particularly in the South and West wards, believed that crime victims often have to seek justice of their own. 

“We know our communities have been overpoliced. We understand that the war on drugs disproportionately impacted our spaces, and the residuals of that will take a while to overcome,” said Will Simpson, a Newark native and former director of Community Safety & Justice at Equal Justice USA. 

Part of Newark’s response to that history has been the creation of more collaborative, data-informed strategies for public safety. Alejandro Santana leads one of those efforts as the executive director of the Newark Public Safety Collaborative, an initiative housed within the Rutgers-Newark School of Criminal Justice. His group collaborates with the Mayor’s Office, the Department of Public Safety and a network of community partners to reduce harm and violence through data sharing, trust-building and strategic intervention. 

> The shooting of Bryant and the broader mistrust it represents is a reminder that reform is not a fixed destination.

Santana says Newark has made meaningful progress in recent years, especially when it comes to building trust through community feedback sessions, expanding the role of social workers and supporting community-led approaches to public safety like the city’s Office of Violence Prevention. 

“From my point of view, we’ve never had an issue with the police not being at the table or being collaborative,” he said, noting that more than 50 organizations now work in concert on public safety strategies across the city. 

Still, he acknowledges that many residents continue to raise concerns about how officers interact with the public, adding that those voices need to be part of the conversation. “There are people who still have legitimate concerns that have to do with policing, and they need to be heard,” he said. 

The shooting of Bryant and the broader mistrust it represents is a reminder that reform is not a fixed destination. It’s an ongoing process, one that requires constant attention from city leaders, law enforcement and the communities they serve, even after progress has been made. 

There’s another reason progress is especially fragile. Earlier this year, federal funding cuts to community violence intervention programs threatened the very partnerships that helped reshape the city’s public safety model. Many of the impacted organizations have played key roles in bridging the gap between police and residents. 

“I think the biggest hurdle we’re facing is the federal cuts,” Santana said. “This will continue to impact the system over the next few years, and it’s really going to put the system itself to the test.” 

As Newark pushes forward with its reform agenda, Adams is still hoping for some justice for Bryant, even if there’s no sign it’s coming. “They’ve changed the culture and deserve credit for that,” Adams said, but he wonders what the lack of accountability in this case says “about their progress.”
### Bill de Blasio on Zohran Mamdani, New York's Future, and Why He Had a Chip on His Shoulder
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/bill-de-blasio-interview-transcript/
Last updated: 2026-09-17T16:19:06.000Z
*This interview* [*originally appeared*](https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/bill-de-blasio-interview-transcript) *on the New York Editorial Board Substack on September 22, 2025 and is republished on Vital City with permission as a public service.*

Former New York City Mayor **Bill de Blasio**, a Democrat who served two terms as mayor from 2014 through 2021 and was previously Public Advocate and a City Council member, spoke with The New York Editorial Board on the morning of September 18, 2025\. *(photo by Juan Manuel Benítez)*

*Participating journalists: Juan Manuel Benítez, Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Myles Miller, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Zagare.*

**Full Transcript**

**Ben Smith**  
First I just want to state for the record that Mayor de Blasio ordered an omelet. It’s a novel – that’s the first time that’s happened at The New York Editorial Board.

**Bill de Blasio**  
Say for the record that I was early.

**Ben Smith**  
I should also state for the record that Mayor de Blasio was early—

**Bill de Blasio**  
Before some of the journalists.

**Ben Smith**  
Before some of the journalists, and we were perhaps slightly surprised and should not have been. But anyway, thank you for coming in. I’m reminded that the last time I sat down with you like this was at Buzzfeed in 2013, where we asked you about Anthony Weiner’s surging campaign the whole time, and you were so annoyed.

**Bill de Blasio**  
I was right, by the way.

**Ben Smith**  
And you were correct. Yeah. Just to begin with, we’re at a very particular moment in this mayoral campaign, which is why we wanted to have you in, and I wonder: How often do you talk to Zohran Mamdani?

**Bill de Blasio**  
Pretty consistently. I don’t want to put an exact day amount on it, but I’d say we’ve had a good number of conversations in the course of the year. And, I think several people have recognized this, I don’t remember a lot of people who were so prominent in public life or became so prominent who had such genuine conversations. I remember when I attempted conversation with Michael Bloomberg as a Council member or public advocate, there was literally, like, Bloomberg would talk, you’d try and say something, and then he would say something else that had no reference to what you said. And Mamdani is an extremely engaged conversationalist. Really listens, responds very specifically to what you raise, takes it in, thinks about it. It’s been striking to me. It’s one of the reasons I have a lot of faith in him.

**Josh Greenman**  
What do you talk about the most?

**Bill de Blasio**  
I would say in the primary time he was often seeking insight on different policy matters and, obviously, how they play out politically as well. And a lot of it was understanding what happened in the 2013 campaign. And then since, without getting into any detail, substantive matters and where New York City is going and what it’s gonna take to deal with the current realities of New York City.

**Ben Smith**  
What is your advice for him?

**Bill de Blasio**  
It’s hard to give a lot of advice politically to someone who’s doing such a great job. I think he’s honestly tremendously gifted. So I don’t feel like I have any great political revelations except the only thing I’ve said is: If you feel something didn’t come across right or has been misunderstood, speak to it. I also have been candid previously, and I’ve said it to him, that I struggled with acknowledging mistake because I felt the ever-changing environment that I entered into — sort of the growth of social media, one thing or another — as my administration began, it felt like if you acknowledged mistake, it would be repeated a thousand times. And there’s truth in that. But I increasingly came to believe toward the end of my time as mayor, and certainly since then, there is a way to acknowledge you need to do something better or you didn’t understand something before or you’ve evolved that could be very healthy. And I think people see authenticity in that.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
A couple weeks ago I got to interview Kathy Wylde from the Partnership for New York City [for my podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v6mKf5H7vg&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). And she told me that the way she is comforting the wealthy or the business community is by telling them: “Listen, you survived Bill de Blasio for eight years–”

**Bill de Blasio**  
The republic still stands.

**Juan Manuel Benítez** 
**“**Mamdani is not like Bill de Blasio, because Bill de Blasio was vindictive.”

**Bill de Blasio**  
Was what?

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
Vindictive. And that you wanted to punish the wealthy with tax increases. You wanted to tax the wealthy. And she tells them, “Mamdani, at least he’s not like that. He listens and he’s open to other possibilities to raise the money that he needs to implement all those social services that, all those plans that he has.” So I want just your response to the vindictive claim and whether you think that’s an accurate difference between you and Mamdani.

**Bill de Blasio**  
The first thing I’d say to Kathy is, bless her heart. I just think that’s unfair, and strange. Do I think I had a chip on my shoulder? Yes. Coming off the Bloomberg years, a long 12 years, and especially the way Bloomberg got his third term, I felt the city was increasingly being dominated by the wealthy and the powerful, and it bothered me deeply and I certainly wasn’t hiding that. So I clearly had a chip on my shoulder and I probably would’ve been well advised to push some of that down and try to offer an open hand a little more, even though I think my critique was fair. But substantively I can name a host of things where I think my administration worked well with the private sector and held them to account. I think the whole approach to affordable housing and rezonings, for example, was to say, “we’ll work with you and we’ll help you get done some of the things you’re trying to get done, but you have to give the public back their fair share,” which I think was a good balance and I actually think a lot of folks in the real estate community found that perfectly livable.

So I think this comes down to the interesting role of emotion, which obviously is politics. So many people in the world of capitalism freak out easily at the slightest criticism or whenever they’re held accountable. And I find it very interesting that people with so much money and power are so sensitive. But I had this conversation over the years — real estate folks, Wall Street folks — and they basically said, if you say nice things to them, they’ll be cool and they can even work with some of your policies they disagree with. I think Zohran has figured that out, that offer an open hand, you don’t need to be as overt with your critique as I was, but ‘vindictive’ makes no sense. Where’s the vindictive? Because I wanted higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for pre-K? That wasn’t vindictive. So I think she’s lost in her own thing.

**Josh Greenman**  
You refer to capitalism. You don’t sound like a member of the DSA.

**Bill de Blasio**  
No. I am not.

**Josh Greenman**  
Would you be?

**Bill de Blasio**  
No.

**Josh Greenman**  
Why not?

**Bill de Blasio**  
Notwithstanding what I deeply appreciate about Zohran, I think a lot of the DSA platform’s wrong and I think a lot of their approach is too rigid, and I don’t think they’ve been as good as they should be about connecting with working class communities. That doesn’t mean I don’t agree with them on some things, or I don’t see value in their movement, but no, I would not.

**Myles Miller**  
What specifically, though, what specifically about their platform doesn’t help working—

**Bill de Blasio**  
I don’t, especially partway through my first coffee, I am not gonna go point by point down the DSA platform. I’m trying, I think my answer is authentic. I have never had an impulse to join them. I respect, again, some of the worldview I respect. I’m sure there’s some things I agree with but Zohran to me has been such a breath of fresh air because it’s like democratic socialism with a human face. Whereas I think before a lot of what we saw from the DSA was extremely rigid, prone to internecine warfare in the left, which is not helpful. I’ve been in one form or another left my entire life and one of the things that bugs me the most is how easily people find a reason to be pissed off with each other.

I love this story, so I have to tell it, that when Dante \[de Blasio\] was at Yale, he said he noted with interest that some DSA members thought it would be righteous to go off campus and form affinity houses. You know, group houses for people of similar beliefs. And he said what inevitably happened was after a few months, the houses would break up because people managed to argue over extremely small ideological matters and they couldn’t live with each other. That is an example of what has been wrong with the DSA. It would be great for the world if people like Zohran would teach the left to chill and work together better, but also to do what he did in terms of really rooting in community and going out into working-class communities and making the work about working people, which is what the entire history of the left has been. But too much of the American left for generations has been highly-educated folks who want to talk to other highly-educated folks, and not actually engage working people.

**Ben Max**  
That actually gets to a two-parter on the sort-of state of the race and Democratic coalitions in the city. First, a very brief one: Do you see this mayoral race as over? What percentage do you give a Mamdani victory?

**Bill de Blasio**  
I think he’s gonna win, but it’s far from over. It’s far from over. Look, this is such a dynamic moment in history to begin with. Just things are changing all around us, literally daily. So I think a cardinal rule of politics is: You are deeply affected by the surrounding environment and even if you’re doing everything right, you cannot account for larger forces that might change the public’s focus or interest. I think he’s running a great campaign. I think he’s done a great job reaching out to people who weren’t with him originally, and a lot of them have come over to him, but this ball game is not over.

**Ben Max**  
The second part relates to all the general election polling we’re seeing is he’s right at 45%, and you might say in a commanding position there as you just got at, but also stuck there. It’s obviously a unique field. Connected to what you were saying earlier, talk about your view a little bit of electoral coalitions in the city, because obviously unlike yourself, he hasn’t had such strong support from Black voters in the city. He’s got a different coalition. There’s different generational lines being drawn. It’s complicated. But he’s sort of stuck at 45% here. He’s got two other Democrats, obviously, in the election with him. What’s your view of his strength and his electoral coalition?

**Bill de Blasio**  
I think his coalition’s evolving. We have to put in context that on January 1st, very few New Yorkers knew who he was. So it’s an imperfect comparison to my situation because even though in the beginning of the year in 2013, I was way back in the pack, at least I held the citywide office and had some amount of name recognition. So he had a really incredibly fast trajectory, in less than six months, going from essentially nowhere to victory. In coalition building, you need time. You need validators, you need emissaries, and I think he got about as far as a human being could get in that timeframe.

Since then, I think he’s done a great job of building a broader coalition. Now, the number one x-factor and the reason that polling has been shot to hell since 2016, the number one x-factor is turnout. There’s just no polling that can capture turnout dynamics. It’s just, in my strong, personal, narrow opinion, literally impossible. And so if turnout is taken into account, I would trust Zohran’s ability to turn out his vote and his operations ability to turn out his vote over any of the other candidates all day long, which is why I believe he will absolutely break 50%. Forty-five percent *polling* easily translates to 50 or more if you bring turnout elements into play, in my opinion.

But he’s also not done building his coalition. Meanwhile, I don’t think any other candidate is offering a compelling vision. As we all know, politics is, again, about emotion and emotion is motivated by the personality of the candidate, by message, by vision. And there’s basically one candidate doing that, and everyone else is doing something else. So I think there’s a certain inevitability that he will keep gaining support slowly but surely, but then the turnout operation does the rest. That said, I don’t think he should be resting on his laurels. I don’t think he is. I don’t think his team is. I think they are taking this very, very seriously and there’s no triumphalism, but I don’t think— I think your thesis on paper makes sense, that the polling keeps saying, look, mid-forties. But I think the reality is there’s a very simple pathway to break 50.

**Ben Smith**  
You don’t think he’s sort-of dropped the ball politically by letting, I don’t know, what is he doing? He had a scavenger hunt. He hasn’t announced new policies. You don’t think that’s a mistake?

**Bill de Blasio**  
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of what he’s doing.

**Ben Smith**  
Someone is gonna read this transcript and get mad at me.

**Bill de Blasio**  
That’s OK. It’s New York City.

**Josh Greenman**  
Realistically, if he wins with 47%, or 49%, or whatever, and turnout is whatever it is, do you have any particular guidance about how to — the rest of the voters will probably be pretty anti-Mamdani—

**Bill de Blasio**  
No. I don’t believe that.

**Josh Greenman**  
You don’t believe that?

**Bill de Blasio**  
I don’t believe that.

**Josh Greenman**  
Well, how should that inform his post-election agenda, if he wins with right around 50% or under 50%?

**Bill de Blasio**  
You’re describing most recent presidents of the United States of America, right? Remember, Bill Clinton never broke 50%. I just want to immediately say, first of all, I do think Zohran is running an energetic campaign, a campaign that continues to put out ideas, but really what he has been doing up to now is broadening his coalition effectively. Every few days it feels like more people are coming on board who used to not be with him, and that’s what you’re supposed to be doing in a general election campaign. So I think it’s perfectly vibrant. The final weeks will be different, in my opinion. I think the final weeks are where he gets to re-imprint the vision more deeply when people truly focus, because we all focus all day long, but most voters, we all know, it’s the last week, if you’re lucky, people pay attention. And that’s when you reiterate vision.

On the question of what do you do if you’re under 50%? The idea is you got elected for a reason, stick to your program, but have an open hand to people who don’t agree. And I think that’s been his impulse. So I don’t feel like it’s, you know, Paris is gonna be burning, that there’s gonna be this 49% or 50% of New Yorkers who are totally agitated all day long. I think there’s gonna be people who didn’t feel yet ready to support him and if he does a good job, if he can get some of his main initiatives started, chooses good people, handles some of the immediate challenges well, people will absolutely give him a chance.

**Liena Zagare**  
You brought up the working class and I wanted to ask about Richard Florida’s creative class that drove a lot of New York’s revival, and at the same time also gentrification and displacement. Right now, many of these same creatives, having traded security for flexibility in terms of their jobs, are struggling with the same rising costs that they contributed to creating. And—

**Bill de Blasio**  
That’s called irony.

**Liena Zagare**  
Exactly. So how do you think, how do you reconcile that? How do you think the city reconciles that? It is the Mamdani voters and his affordability agenda.

**Bill de Blasio**  
This is an ongoing phenomenon. I got elected on a platform that was in many ways about affordability, although we didn’t say the words the same way and there was more of a civil rights element because of stop-and-frisk. But really if you come down to the focus on affordable housing or paid sick days or pre-K for all, a lot of it was obviously about affordability.

So the notion that that creative class obviously helped fuel gentrification and now is feeling the negative effects of it, that’s been happening for a while. I would say the solutions that Zohran is putting forward are very pertinent to that class of people, especially. And I was totally shocked how much creative folks valued pre-K and 3-K. We did it for everyone, very explicitly. I assumed the greatest energy would come from working-class folks and lower income folks because it was much deeper relief financially. But the response I’ve gotten in the years since from classic, you know, brownstone Brooklyn folks who, it’s often phrased as, “I would’ve had to leave the city, go to Jersey,” whatever. So I think that community of people is looking for any and all relief they can get — on rent, on childcare, et cetera. So I think his platform is well-directed toward them. And there’s also, again, the emotional reality of feeling that your government sees your situation, is trying to do something about it. So I think it’s very helpful that he can connect deeply with that community of folks and also has policies that would help them. But that doesn’t mean you can arrest these dynamics overnight, right? We’re fighting a very long battle here to keep this place at all affordable and hopefully one day make it more affordable. It’s a long, long effort.

And I have to say, and everyone in this room is pretty steeped in New York City history, such a fascinating conversation to have here in this beautiful room \[at the Lafayette Grand Café & Bakery\] because when I came to NYU, I got to NYU in September of 1979, and if you had told me you wouldn’t be able to afford the rent in New York City because it had gotten so expensive and popular, and at that point the place looked like it was falling apart entirely, I wouldn’t have believed you in a million years. So it’s this fascinating, really problematic phenomenon that we have to address for years. We’ll be addressing it for years and years, but we have to remember the alternative would’ve sucked, which is we would continue the sixties, seventies, eighties decline and be extremely affordable because people didn’t want to be here.

**Josh Greenman**  
Can I ask a quick rent-freeze question, please? You, for a while, were saying about your rent freezes that the RGB, the Rent Guidelines Board, was independent and that they still used their math, whatever they used. I’m not sure if that shifted after a little bit of time, but that was your initial posture. Does Mamdani have unilateral authority to preemptively say four years of rent freezes \[on rent-stabilized apartments\]? And if he does, what if his posture was, we’re going to have four years of 3% increase? Would that be OK?

**Bill de Blasio**  
Important thing to understand about any board, particularly one with stipulated membership, because RGB is not name-whoever-the-hell-you-want — you have to name by category. And then, New York City is not a police state. The people named have the power to make their own — they have a term, they have the power to make their own decisions. And I learned this with multiple boards in multiple situations, they’re independent. Once anyone has a term, they have a measure of independence. So a mayor can choose people that they think will philosophically follow a certain vision, and we’ll communicate, but you do not get to purely control, first of all. Second of all, our vision was that the RGB had not, in the past, looked beyond the needs of landlords, and needed to balance the equation, which I think was the right thing to do, and I think is resonant with what Zohran is saying. So sometimes there might be a call for a rent freeze, sometimes there might be a call for something else. But the vision was always to say it can’t just be about the needs of landlords.

**Josh Greenman**  
OK, but he’s preemptively promising four years of rent freezes. How can you, given what you just said, how can he do that?

**Bill de Blasio**  
I’m gonna be clear that I have not seen, I know he’s obviously called for a rent freeze. I haven’t seen his specific language around four years. But the point is he’s offering a vision that’s perfectly acceptable, perfectly fair. I’m emphasizing the fact that once you name people, you do not control them entirely. Just a fact.

**Alyssa Katz**  
I want to ask whether you think the circumstances now are the same or similar enough to the ones that you faced when you called for a rent freeze? And I’ll just note two pieces of background here. One is that, we had a 2019 \[state\] law that severely limited landlord’s ability to raise the rent on vacant units and use other loopholes — that were widely abused, I don’t think there’s any question about that — but the picture is very different around getting revenue out of rent-regulated units. And I also wanna give a shout out to Josh’s journal Vital City, which has a great new [issue on housing](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-14), including a piece that really drills in. You know, Mamdani’s picture of rent freezes, right? A voter would think it’s for everybody — regulated, not. Of course, it’s just for rent-regulated tenants, but even beyond that, you have some buildings that are a hundred percent rent-regulated where landlords basically can barely raise the rent. You have others, especially in Manhattan, that have a lot of high-income tenants that can help the landlord pay for the stabilized units with very limited rent increases. And as [a Vital City article](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-rent-is-too-damn-high-but-also-too-low) gets into, there’s a real problem out there, and it’s been documented by lenders to regulated housing. It’s shown in the sales prices, which are rock bottom right now for these buildings. There’s a real risk that they’ll go into foreclosure, that maintenance will get cut back, and so on.

So that’s a lot of background there, but just to say: Do you think that the circumstances now still call for the kind of across the board rent freeze that Mamdani is proposing?

**Bill de Blasio**  
Two pieces. The 2019 law needs to be changed. It wasn’t done right in terms of the MCIs, the major capital improvements. I agree with your statement before. We had a law, previously, that was extremely prone to abuse and the whole legal structure supported landlords over tenants in a way that led to a lot of displacement. Classic scenarios where people who had been part of a neighborhood for a long time were pushed out, priced out, consistently.

So the impulse for the 2019 rent law in general was right, but the part about MCIs went too far the other way and took away, in my opinion, the ability of some landlords to appropriately maintain their buildings and improve their apartments and get some kind of appropriate return but one that did not encourage aggressive displacement efforts. So that needs to be fixed, still. And I would argue fixing that particularly would be a good balance to a rent freeze or other actions to address affordability.

The affordability situation is insane right now. So I think using measures like a rent freeze, as needed, to give some measure of relief to people is a perfectly legitimate strategy. But I would contextualize it. My argument would be you do it in concert with other actions. And one thing I think that really would help would be if Albany, with the city’s urging, would correct that mistake from 2019.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
On taxes, your plan was a $800 million personal income tax increase, it would’ve brought the city’s income tax rate from a little under 3.9% to about 4.4%, 4.5%.

**Bill de Blasio**  
For upper-income folks.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Yes. Above half a million. Mamdani’s plan is many magnitudes greater. He’s asking for a 50% increase in the city’s income tax rate. It would go from little under 4% to 6%.

**Bill de Blasio**  
And he’s starting at, is it a million \[dollars in income\]?

**Nicole Gelinas**  
Yes. Is he asking for too much? Is there some place in the city’s universe where we do have to worry that we will start to erode this tax base with the 50% increase? That’s the policy. Politically, what happens if the governor doesn't give it to him? Should he take something else and call it a victory as you did?

**Bill de Blasio**  
OK. A lot of pieces there. When I was calling for that, which I thought was perfectly fair, and by the way, for those students of history, I borrowed from, because I worked for \[Mayor\] David Dinkins, I borrowed from the formulation of Safe Streets, Safe City, which is a highly targeted tax increase to achieve a specific goal. And Dinkins was working in a different environment. I came along post-Occupy Wall Street, post-recession. I targeted mine to upper-income folks, but again, specifically for pre-K and after-school.

And I will say, even in those days there was some angst around it from some wealthier folks, there were also a decent number of wealthy folks who said, “You know what, I could live with that because I agree with the specific cause, assuming it worked well.”

But that was before the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. So we now have an entirely different playing field where the notion that what Zohran is proposing will somehow discomfort wealthy people is ludicrous to me. Whether it’s pretty to look at or not, wealthy people did incredibly well during the pandemic. They’ve done incredibly well in the stock market and done incredibly well because of the tax cuts that Trump and the Congress have given them.

I don’t think it’s reductionist to say, can they afford what Mamdani is suggesting? Of course. And he’s doing it to try to preserve affordability in the city, which is necessary to the workforces that provide the wealth to wealthy people. So I think it’s absolutely fair, absolutely logical. I don’t think it’s too much of a burden. Where I think the interesting question comes in, about how will wealthy people react, gets back to the earlier question about the tone of things and the emotion of things. Ironically, if he were to pursue that policy while continuing to offer an open hand to the private sector and the wealthy and invite them in and show what they might regard as respect and appreciation for their contributions to New York City, which are very real, I suspect that medicine goes down pretty simply in the end.

**Josh Greenman**  
But just to push back on the thing that the wealthy are doing just fine, there was a [recent analysis by the Citizens Budget Commission](https://cbcny.org/research/hidden-cost-new-yorks-shrinking-millionaire-share?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that said New York City is losing its share of millionaires compared to other places. That Florida has seen them quadruple and other places have seen them triple, we’ve seen them grow at a slower rate so I think we now have 9% instead of 13% of the millionaires \[in the country\]. Are you worried about that continuing to erode and what would that do to the tax base if it happens?

**Bill de Blasio**  
I think it is a responsible view to say we should look factually at what’s happening with our tax base and who constitutes it and how they’re responding. That said, the notion that somehow you will make policy decisions fundamentally based on the needs of a very, very narrow class of very wealthy people, that’s a slippery slope. And I wouldn’t encourage that way of thinking.

I think there is a way to show respect, to bring those folks into the discussion, to be responsive to some of the things they care about that are legitimate public policy concerns without turning over decision-making in government to the wealthy. I think you can balance the equation. I also think we should not ignore the fact that we continue to produce a lot of new millionaires because of all the strengths of New York City that continue unabated.

My argument is if we don’t take some of the actions that Mamdani is talking about, the city’s in tremendous danger in terms of being a place that can have the kind of values we’ve historically had, but also have the workplace, the workforce, the creativity, the entrepreneurial spirit. All the things that have historically made New York City great for literally centuries ride on addressing the affordability crisis. You can’t do that without money. So I think that, ironically, if wealthy people said, you cannot touch us at all, they would be killing their own golden goose in the end.

To the question of Albany, I think it’s going to be very hard, obviously, to get anything substantially done in terms of tax increase in Albany, maybe there’s a particularly narrow piece that could be done. If Hochul said, “I have an alternative to support what you want to do,” of course he should be open to it. And I think by his nature he would be, but I think his proposal starts in the right place.

**Ben Smith**  
On the proposal to be nicer to rich people, or the advice: Do you think the fact that he is a child of a kind of Manhattan elite world in a certain way and you didn’t grow up in that world gives him an advantage in that kind of vibes-based approach to the rich? And then Juan Manuel had a question about education.

**Bill de Blasio**  
I hadn’t thought of that, Ben. It’s an interesting thesis. I would just say that for reasons personal, familial, ideological, life experience, I did have a certain amount of angst. I did have a chip on my shoulder. And no, I didn’t— I think it’s fair to say, like that milieu — anytime I went into a private club, I always thought some authority figure would remove me because I didn’t belong there, right? So I don’t think I culturally connected particularly easily with wealthy folks. I think in some ways the public picked up on that and appreciated that. I think it’s perhaps one of those underlying things that somehow people appreciated that that was not my world.

That said, I think it’s a healthy thing to be able to communicate well with them and connect with them. I don’t know that I’d say his ability to do that is because of his familial background. It could be. I just don’t know enough about it. I do think he has a sharp, clear— I was struck, I was at Christian Cultural Center with him on Sunday and Pastor \[Rev. A.R.\] Bernard, who’s a perfectly moderate, pro-capitalist person, was doing a little interview session with him and pushed him on a few things. What I really liked was Zohran heard the questions, responded to them respectfully, acknowledged where he wanted to try and work with people who might have different views, but always stated his sort-of core philosophical belief. And I think there’s a comfort in his own skin that’s really striking and really positive. That probably helps him go into rooms where people disagree and still have his center and be at peace. So I don’t know if it’s so much community culture, it might be, but I do think whatever it is in his upbringing or his formation, he’s very comfortable talking with people who are different philosophically but not placating and losing his center, which I think is a great attribute.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
As we speak, charter school parents and staff led by Success Academy are gathering today in Lower Manhattan. They’re gonna march over the Brooklyn Bridge advocating for charter schools. My Columbia journalism student Julie Lee [reports in Labor New York](https://medium.com/labor-new-york/rally-attendance-is-mandatory-staff-say-charter-schools-are-forcing-advocacy-ahead-of-election-80974d631e72?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) today that Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of Success Academy, has been pressuring staff to attend this march and this rally. And most teachers my students spoke to believe that the main enemy, the person the rally is going to be targeting, is Zohran Mamdani, because they see him as having similar policies and ideas about charter schools that you had. What’s your advice to potential new mayor Zohran Mamdani when dealing with charter schools, and what’s your take on this kind of political advocacy that charter schools are putting forward?

**Bill de Blasio**  
First of all, I don’t think it’s ever healthy to pressure teachers or staff or parents or students to go to rallies that they don’t want to go to. And I think it’s just a mistake. I think it’s a karmic mistake. It comes back to bite you. Second of all I would argue that what they’re doing is kind of anti-politics. At this moment, Zohran’s the most likely, by far, person to be the next mayor in New York City. So by affronting him at this sensitive moment, they are creating more distance and less ability to find common ground. I think it’s a dumb mistake.

That said, what I came to see about the charter school community is it’s extremely diverse, like shockingly diverse. And there are some charter schools that as I got to know them, I felt 100% comfortable with, that I felt were very community-oriented, were very inclusive, who were not corporate. And there were others that I thought were bringing the worst of corporate culture to education and were overtly exclusionary towards special-ed kids or kids who didn’t test well. So that to me, the first category should be supported a hundred percent. The second category doesn’t sound like public education to me. I don’t know why they get public support.

And I still think, as I’ve felt all along, the numbers say it, in New York City, overwhelmingly, we will live or die by traditional public education. The rest of the United States of America even more. Charter schools are very little, a very small part of the equation in most parts of the country. The idea of the charter movement originally was to create innovation that could come into traditional public schools. That concept got lost along the way. Maybe it could be re-found, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The thing we have to do better on, and the thing we have to fix, is traditional public schools, period.

**Josh Greenman**  
School desegregation was a sizable push of yours. District 15 in Brooklyn did away with a lot of the screens in middle school. Should that go citywide? That’s one question. I think Mamdani is more supportive of continuing those efforts than you, but correct me if you think I’m wrong there. And second is, he’s less enthusiastic, I believe, about mayoral control \[of schools\] than you were when you were mayor. What would your advice to him be on that?

**Bill de Blasio**  
My advice on mayoral control is it’s the only way to improve the schools. It’s my [“Ebony and Ivory”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXAlfh6QKQs&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) moment with Michael Bloomberg, that we agreed entirely on mayoral control — quoting a great song there. There’s no way we would’ve gotten Pre-K for All without mayoral control of education. There’s no way we would’ve reopened schools — partially in September, 2020 and fully in September, 2021, and with no remote — if we had not had mayoral control. It’s the only way to move this gargantuan complex school system forward. So I do think there’s very legitimate concerns about increasing parental voicing and community participation in education. Those are real things. There’s improvements that can be made. But if the \[State\] Legislature took away mayoral control, it would set back the New York City school system for years. There’s no question in my mind.

On desegregation, I think we’ve seen some success. I think it should deepen. I think at the same time — in my painful experience on the specialized high schools, which was one of those situations where I look back and I’m like, what were we thinking? And our philosophical orientation was right, but our strategy was really off. There’s got to be a way to have a better dialogue with parents in the process of desegregation and opening up educational opportunity. I think District 15 did it pretty damn well. I think District 15 also had some real advantages going into it. In general, I think getting away from screens is smart, but I think there’s gotta be a framing dialogue and a level of parent engagement that has been missing in the past if it’s gonna be truly successful.

**Harry Siegel**  
We convened this group because the New York Times [stopped doing local endorsements](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/12/business/media/the-new-york-times-editorial-board-political-endorsements.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). You’re shaking your head.

**Bill de Blasio**  
I have no words. I think I expressed my opinion on [their non-endorsement editorial](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/opinion/new-york-mayor-election-advice.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) quite clearly. I feel I did.

**Myles Miller**  
Do you think it was just mean?

**Bill de Blasio**  
Oh, yeah. Mean and inaccurate.

**Harry Siegel**  
To open that up a little bit, the New York Post helped elect your successor. They [endorsed in the Democratic primary](https://nypost.com/2021/05/10/the-post-says-eric-adams-should-be-nycs-next-mayor/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). I’m stunned they have not done even a “Mam-dummy” headline yet, or maybe I missed it, but I’m just interested in your take on the maybe weakened media landscape, having been through it.

**Bill de Blasio**  
Yeah. It’s sad and it’s worrisome. You know, I don’t want– there were no ‘good old days,’ so let’s start with that. Anytime— Something I always appreciated, Chirlane’s broad worldview was that the ‘good old days’ were not so good for a lot of us. That was something she would say frequently to me whenever I got a little nostalgic. So let’s put aside the notion of [good old days](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF%5FQpQ5q7NA&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but I can also say in my personal formation, especially in the time around David Dinkins’ campaign in 1989, not only was it an extraordinary richness of media outlets and the talent that accrued to them because people actually got paid, right? I mean, it’s pre-social media and everything else, and different structures around journalism, but it was also like really powerful commentary that affected people’s lives. You know, the Jimmy Breslinses and everybody else, actually a lot of people took that in and it affected thinking. And there was certainly a theory in the 1989 campaign that if it weren’t for, you know, Jack Newfield and some other people’s voices, it would’ve been a lot harder for the city to elect its first Black mayor. So I think there’s a direct correlation between progress and a vibrant media.

**Harry Siegel**  
Is it satisfying to watch the Post struggle a bit?

**Bill de Blasio**  
Why would you say they’re struggling?

**Harry Siegel**  
They’ve been gunning for the candidate who easily won the Democratic primary — and despite, by the way, an influx of the outside money, that’s something else coming in after Bloomberg — and struggling to find their target and swing zone, I would say.

**Bill de Blasio**  
I would separate the pieces. I—

**Harry Siegel**  
And they gunned for you, of course.

**Ben Max**  
But you both supported Eric Adams.

**Bill de Blasio**  
What’s that?

**Ben Max**  
You both supported Eric Adams.

**Bill de Blasio**  
The truth and nothing but the truth. There was never a formal endorsement. I was certainly helpful to him.

**Ben Max**  
“Supported.”

**Bill de Blasio**  
Absolutely. I think the money-in-politics reality is horrendous, but beautifully imperfect. Bloomberg, so many fascinating just Bloomberg examples of this. The 2009 mayoral \[race\] after the term limit change, where had \[Bill\] Thompson run a different, better campaign he actually could have beaten Bloomberg, the Bloomberg presidential, my all-time personal favorite, $1 billion, you know like three delegates or whatever. But also this recent effort for Cuomo in the primary, Bloomberg and many others. I mean, how do you spend that much money and get so little effect? So that says something good about the people.

And even though media has been buffeted, there’s still as of today enough freedom of expression and enough media discourse that people were offered an alternative in the primary and took it regardless of being bombarded with paid media telling them to do something else. So I think the jury keeps coming back and saying, the money-in-politics equation — as much as many of us fear the corrosive impact of money in politics — it is not a pure equation, thank God.

And then the question of the Post, look, this is an interesting scenario. ‘cause I would say in terms of a lot of what I experienced, they were extraordinarily influential and they led a lot of coverage in ways I found often very destructive. It is interesting, I think as Adams experienced his troubles, I think they didn’t quite know what to do. And in some way to their credit, they had spent a lot of time bashing Andrew Cuomo over the years so that was not an easy alternative. So I think they ran out of options. I think that’s some of the story here.

**Josh Greenman**  
I want to ask about crime and disorder a little bit. You ran to reform stop-and-frisk, and you did, but you also made Bill Bratton your first police commissioner. Very important decision. And you held the line on broken windows policing even as criticism increased substantially about it, and quality-of-life policing in general. And you pushed back when I think the City Council attempted to decriminalize certain things that you did not want to decriminalize.

**Bill de Blasio**  
Correct.

**Josh Greenman**  
What would your guidance be to Mamdani, who seems more open to decriminalization than you were?

**Bill de Blasio**  
I would argue he should look at what we did and see some lessons in that could be helpful. I think he has certainly shown openness— an unimpeachable commissioner and there’s numerous people that could fit that description. He’s done, I think, some very important things lately to reach out to officers and show he wants to work with them. And that’s, the officers are different than the unions, are different than the leadership. So I give him a lot of credit. He’s doing something very smart by sending a message directly to the officers and I think he should do a lot more of that.

On the decriminalization, look, we never got to a full set of policy changes around prostitution, and obviously that’s city *and* state, but I think something has been obviously historically wrong with the laws, and it tracks some of what we see with laws around drug usage. I think there’s a growing understanding that if someone is victimized or suffering, an addict in the case of drugs, someone who is in sex trade often not by choice or not their ideal, that’s not who we should be punishing.

**Josh Greenman**  
What about things like fare-beating, other forms of disorder that I believe you held a line on enforcement for many of these things. What would your advice be there?

**Bill de Blasio**  
With fare-beating, and I think Zohran and I would say some similar things on this, our central concern was to use police to address violent crime. And I was troubled, and even NYPD leadership saw this problem of if full-blown police officers are dealing with a fare-beater and that’s where their time and energy is going, that is not the highest and best use of those police officers. We tried to see if a summons approach rather than an arrest approach — because an arrest as I think you know is a big deal and an elaborate procedure. It takes up a lot of time and energy. We tried to see if summonses would be sufficient. I think the jury has come back and said, not exactly. That’s not working enough. There has to be something more aggressive around fare-beating. Whether it is going back to arrest, I’m not so sure because there was plenty of fare-beating even when we did arrest. So I think we’ve got to rethink the equation. Is it different physical barriers? Is it a placement of officers in different points at different times that kind of creates a blitz and convinces people that at any point they might get penalized? I don’t know the exact answer. I do know the fare-beating situation is unacceptable as it is. But I don’t want to romanticize that in the past, the situation was fully under control or arrest for fare-beating was such a great thing. I still think the fundamental question is: How do you first and foremost use police time and energy to address violence?

That said, and I think your rendition was accurate, most people in the public thank God do not experience violence but do experience quality-of-life offenses and they do want to see action on that. They want to see action on fare-beating. They want to see action on retail theft. And some of that is going to have to require the deployment of police officers creatively. Again, I’m not so sure it is about arrest. I think it might be about more penalty. So right now, the summons and the follow-through on a summons is insufficient. Is there a way to do something on that front where if you get one of these summonses, like with parking tickets, where people, many people take them very seriously because of the sheer cost, is that a direction that might be more productive?

**Josh Greenman**  
That doesn’t sound like the Zohran Mamdani-voter answer.

**Bill de Blasio**  
I don’t know what it sounds like. I’m just saying what I think.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
What about the notion that’s been proven that disproportionately these fare-beating stops catch people with warrants, catch people with guns, catch people with knives. We still get hundreds of weapons out of the subway system before they are used in the subway system via fare-beating stops. Is this not a way to prevent violent crime rather than arrest people once they’ve committed the violent crime?

**Bill de Blasio**  
Look, I believe in precision policing. I obviously believe in CompStat. I believe in all the powerful ideas that have emerged in the last quarter century in New York City policing. So if you do that as a precision strategy, of course. If you say, “we know at a certain subway stop that there’s been a particular issue around weaponry, and we’re going to have a regular presence there to catch weapons,” great. Bluntly, the level of fare-beating we’re experiencing now, the vast majority of those people are not carrying a weapon. So I would just put it in the bigger vein of, if it’s strategic, absolutely.

**Alyssa Katz**  
So you talked about lessons learned on police, and I also wanted to ask you about lessons learned on mental health and particularly when it comes to serious mental illness. Looking back at ThriveNYC in hindsight and the interventions that you led, do you think at this point that serious mental illness is something that a mayor can meaningfully address? And, regardless of your answer, why do you think that the perception and the reality in many ways of serious mental illness, particularly for unhoused people, has persisted as an issue years after you’ve left office?

**Bill de Blasio**  
We had a problem before, and it got exacerbated by COVID. I am by no means an expert on the nuances of mental health, but I think we can all say that the COVID crisis one, exacerbated the mental health challenges a lot of individuals were facing, and two, brought mental health even more squarely into the public understanding and debate. So I think there’s even more sensitivity than there was previously to the fact that many people are dealing with severe mental health problems.

I would say that often in the era when we were creating ThriveNYC, that the thing that would actually allow us to address mental health consistently, effectively would be if we had universal health insurance in America. And if it gave parity to mental and physical health. So it’s really important to say that we are never going to be able to solve this problem effectively if we can’t insure people and provide, really implement health services, and the only way that happens at the federal level — and that ain’t happening anytime soon. So it comes down to state and city, and I think it’s fair to say some of the best tools belong to the state but what the city can do, because we did develop new tools for health insurance, NYC Care, and more use of MetroPlus. The city has had real success getting more and more people into those programs, we have to go deeper on that. Some of the pieces of Thrive were effective, particularly the helpline, 888-NYC-WELL, the peer counseling, the mental health first aid, those pieces should be deepened. I don’t know who’s seen the recent video that Zohran did on Roosevelt Island about mental health, which I thought was very compelling, very powerful. It definitely picks up on some of the policies that we found were pretty effective with ThriveNYC.

I will take a note, just a second point of privilege: Less so today, but a year or two ago, quite frequently people who listen to right-wing radio and right-wing websites, etcetera, would aggressively scream out at me or Chirlane and me, that they alleged she stole $850 million. I just have to say, and again, I know right here around this table this is decent, well-intended people, but this is a really painful thing that our society has degenerated in such a manner that first of all, anyone could think a public servant — in her case an unpaid public servant — could somehow pocket 850 million. They literally think she took 850 million — that’s insane. It’s wrong. It’s inaccurate. It’s painful. It’s awful. And there’s been no effort out in the world to correct it despite our efforts. In the end, every dollar spent on Thrive, which is, as everyone here knows, is regulated wildly by the mayor’s office and OMB and the City Council and the comptroller, and everyone else, every dollar was spent on mental health. It is fair to say, was some of it really effective and other pieces more experimental that proved not to be so great? Absolutely. We explicitly said we are with mental health starting so much from scratch, we have to try different things to figure out what works.

**Josh Greenman**  
Looking back, do you have any guidance on the use of spouses in public policy…

**Bill de Blasio**  
Let’s finish this and I’ll come to you.

**Alyssa Katz**  
So particularly around treatment, individuals who do not want treatment, that’s really the core of the issue, right? And we have a state law now that Eric Adams advocated for that allows for much easier involuntary commitment. Where do you stand on the use of involuntary commitment, and if you don’t support it, how do you approach treatment resistant people?

**Bill de Blasio**  
Thank God I’m not a candidate for anything, so I can’t give you a perfect answer. I can only say that we all saw with our eyes that there were people who really should not be out on the street despite honest efforts by public agencies to address the problem. I think it’s fair to say the previous law, the previous judicial decisions really, although fantastic at protecting individual rights, which I value deeply, made it really hard to get someone in, even if they were evidently in deep distress.

We right before the pandemic were starting to do a better job of coordinating police and homeless services and Health and Hospitals to very coherently bring people in and give them a full medical evaluation, which in some cases yielded that in fact they were a threat to themselves or others and should be held in. So I think it’s fair to say I do not believe the city of New York nor the state of New York were utilizing the previous legal reality to the maximum extent possible. But I also don’t believe that was easy to do. So some law change makes sense to me. I don’t know the nuances of the new law. I do know that sometimes it’s just what you see with your eyes. There are too many people out there who should not be on the street, period. But, that is a really fine line as we’re seeing now the events of the last few days in terms of the potential of censorship in America and those dangers. The courts, you know it was frustrating as a public servant to feel that we were very limited in how we could approach certain homeless individuals, but it never escaped me that the courts were saying, if you can too easily commit someone that is a very slippery slope and could easily take us back to where we were in the seventies, eighties, where people were committed very lightly and had very little recourse, and there was very little transparency into what was happening to them. So I think the courts took a kind of a deeply Constitutional view that taking away someone’s individual liberty should be very difficult. Hopefully, a little bit more give in that situation is part of this new law. Again, I don’t know the nuances, but I would emphasize that I think the city and state have tools that I think we could use better but that are really labor-intensive if we want to get people in and keep them off the streets in a legal and appropriate way.

**Ben Smith**  
We are a little short on time and I didn’t want spend most of this time looking backward but I thought Myles had a pretty interesting question.

**Myles Miller**  
I was wondering about COVID, and the daily briefings and all of that. I wonder what you think you may have mis-stepped on in the first 60 days of the pandemic response?

**Bill de Blasio**  
I’ve taught about it a lot, I’ve been asked about it a lot. The bottom line is we just didn’t have enough information, and based on what I knew in the beginning, in the very beginning, I was trying to avoid panic in the city. I was trying to avoid a collapse of the economy and a collapse of the city’s ability to serve people. And once it became clear to me that we needed much more aggressive measures, then I felt like I had the facts I needed and I could support shelter-in-place, and then later things like vaccine mandates. But the first couple of weeks were extremely hard to make sense of. And I had many, many meetings where different health leaders in the team would have different views and the sum total was, but we don’t have, we don’t have the facts.

**Ben Smith**  
It’s funny because I think you’re sort of saying that in retrospect you wish the city had locked down sooner and that feels like the 2022 retrospect. Do you feel like in 2025 retrospect— I think you, among Democrats, were probably among the most anti-lockdown, among the quickest to open schools nationally. Do you think maybe you shouldn’t have, in retrospect looking at just politics and culture that you actually locked down too hard?

**Bill de Blasio**  
No, I don’t. Look, Ben, it’s very interesting. From the moment I left office, my flow of information decreased radically. So I follow the news intensely, but not anywhere near— I mean, I used to get briefed obsessively on everything all the time by real expert people. So I want to say, I don’t know if I have every bit of information that’s emerged since 2022\. Looking back at the pandemic, I’m a hundred percent comfortable with what we did on schools — a hundred percent. And I’m appalled — it doesn’t matter what the jurisdiction was politically, I think that one of the biggest mistakes in a lot of parts of this country was not reopening schools. But in terms of lockdown, we had an immediate surge in March of 2020 that from everything I know, and I will lay it squarely at the governor’s feet here, when I called for shelter-in-place I think if he had just forgotten all his other politics and intrigue and emotion and just done it right then, I think it would’ve helped. I think it could have saved lives. I think the only way to break the pattern, that first intense surge of COVID, was to do lockdown. And then you’ll remember we were— by the way, we had projections around that time that were, things could get much, much, much worse. And I do think the lockdown arrested the surge of COVID and helped us reset. And by that summer, we had a very tough May and June in terms of protest and other things, but in COVID terms, by the summer, we were substantially better.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
You were repeatedly humiliated by Governor Cuomo, not only during the pandemic but even before that. How are you experiencing right now, his campaign for mayor?

**Bill de Blasio**  
It’s a horrible campaign. First, easy analytical point: he’s run a horrible primary campaign and a horrible general election campaign. And I think it’s about essence. Howard Glaser used to work for him, who I worked with very closely, and he had some great tweets about this. Like the guy’s running for an office he doesn’t want, he maligned, he thought was second class—not just an attack on me, just his general view of the mayoralty. And his only goal in life is to be president of the United States and be quote-unquote better than his father, which is insane and an insane way to look at life. But that’s how he lives his life. And I think the fact that he doesn’t even respect the job and in many ways doesn’t even respect New York City — and that’s how he comported himself as governor — the chickens are coming home to roost, right? This is just, this is very karmic. So that’s what I’m seeing. Look, it was painful dealing with him, but even when I was in office, I think more and more people were seeing through it. I’m glad it is being seen even more clearly now, but this is not the first time I think that people started to realize what was really going on with this guy.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
And quickly, a follow up, because there seems to be a disconnect here, fairly or unfairly: New Yorkers don’t have a pretty loving opinion of you and your time as mayor. And every time we had a Democratic candidate for mayor here earlier this year, when we asked them to rank the top five mayors of their lifetime, most of them I think put Michael Bloomberg pretty high up. The only one who, from what I remember, put you at number one was Zohran Mamdani. After he said that, I thought, this guy’s losing it.

**Bill de Blasio**  
Thank you for your honesty.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
So where’s the disconnect when everybody else who’s having or still has Bloomberg in such a high regard, and then the guy who is leading and most likely winning this thing is someone who is trying to follow in your steps.

**Bill de Blasio**  
I don’t know if I can give you a perfect answer to that. I think the view of Bloomberg, and again, I’ll give Bloomberg credit for some of the things I think he did well, particularly on public health. But the public came damn close to rejecting him in 2009 and then by electing me certainly was consciously choosing the clearest alternative to Bloomberg in 2013, and then reelected me squarely in 2017\. So I think this notion of the public being in love with Bloomberg, I don’t buy., I think the political class, the media, whatever, different discussion. The elites, I agree.

I haven’t seen recent polling, but I’m sure I still have my share of challenges in polling but the policies were very popular. In other words, the things I stood for and the things I acted on were perfectly popular. I think sometimes the problem was me and my own missteps and communication problems, et cetera. And sometimes it was just dumb luck and circumstance. Governing during COVID was not a formula for popularity. But the policies, the direction, the ideals, I think were popular then, are popular now, and I think Zohran understands that. I think he gave an answer from the heart. I think it was an authentic answer. But I think he also understood that’s where New Yorkers are.

**Harry Siegel**  
It’s been over an hour. Thank you for taking the time and going through all this. We barely touched on Trump and him looming over the city.

You were a steadfast supporter of Israel as mayor, beginning when Zohran Mamdani was a college student first getting involved in politics as a BDS supporter. In 2019, [you said in a speech](https://web.archive.org/web/20250507140505/https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/094-19/transcript-mayor-de-blasio-delivers-remarks-rally-against-anti-semitism) that the attempt to boycott, divest and sanction Israel as an apartheid regime was “unacceptable” and noted that the majority of hate crimes in New York targeted Jews, which I believe is again true this year and said, quote, “maybe some people don’t realize it, but when they support the BDS movement, they’re affronting the right of Israel to exist, and that is unacceptable.”

Is that still your position? And then more broadly, could you reflect on why the Democratic Party and its mayoral nominee seem to be in such a different place than it was during your two terms in office — which also overlapped with Netanyahu being the prime minister of Israel, and Mamdani said he’ll arrest him at the airport if he comes to New York — and those changes.

**Bill de Blasio**  
Look I think there’s been extraordinary change in recent years and not for the better. And I’ll place all the original sin in the world at the feet of Hamas for the massacre that they perpetrated. But I also think Netanyahu’s actions have profoundly alienated a huge swath of the American people. And I think the attempt to say Democrat, Republican really misses a lot. I think there’s a lot of pain in this country over what’s happening in Gaza. So I believe what I believe, because I am blessed with a certain view of history. As I think many of you know, my parents were disproportionately older when they had me. They were both 44\. So my dad was a captain in the U.S. Army during World War II and was wounded in action on Okinawa, and my mom worked for the Office of War Information on broadcast to Italy when it was fascist or later German occupied. So the memory of Nazism, the memory of the Holocaust, et cetera, it’s very present for me familially — let alone then on my journey, including the many years in the City Council where I represented Borough Park and would consistently come in contact with Holocaust survivors. I mean, it’s very, very personal.

I say that to say I believe in the state of Israel. Even with the problems that have existed recently, I believe in the state of Israel. I believe it’s necessary in the world. I don’t think anything that has happened has changed that. But I also understand why more and more people can’t feel what they used to feel about Israel. And I said, I think it was on MSNBC the other day, that I want people to remember that it was not that long ago that Israel was profoundly admired in the world as this response to oppression and a place that was in many ways enlightened. I think Israel once upon a time was seen through a profoundly humanistic lens, and it’s very hard to feel and see that in some ways now. And I hope and pray that subsequent Israeli governments will go back to that, to help protect Israel in the future.

So I still believe in the state of Israel. I still oppose BDS because I still think BDS is an affront to the concept of the state of Israel. But I, like so many Americans, believe Netanyahu should not be the leader, believe people have been killed in Gaza, children have been killed in Gaza, who should never have died, that famine is being perpetrated that should never have happened, et cetera. And I don’t know why that wouldn’t change American politics. It is not Vietnam because we don’t have boots on the ground, because we’re not seeing our brothers and cousins come back, wounded or dead. But like Vietnam — I think this is being missed a bit in the discourse — something’s being done in our name, with our weapons, with our money, and I think people are deeply pained, especially if they happen to be younger and don’t have access to some of that history very personally.

**\[Crosstalk\]**

Just real quick, just to finish, I don’t think someone who’s 20, 30, 40 and doesn’t have as much vantage point on what happened in the 1930s and ‘40s, and also doesn’t even have vantage point on some of the better impact that Israel had in the world and as an example in the fifties, sixties, seventies, whatever you wanna say. I think if all they’re seeing is recent events, not notwithstanding again the absolute and total guilt of Hamas, I understand why it’s just deeply painful.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
So do you think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza?

**Bill de Blasio**  
Sadly, yes. I didn’t used to, I didn’t used to…

**Josh Greenman**  
Should Netanyahu be arrested by the NYPD?

**Bill de Blasio**  
I don’t think, I don’t know how to answer that because I don’t see a precedent given that this country doesn’t subscribe to the ICC \[International Criminal Court\]. I just don’t know how to answer that.

**Juan Manuel Benítez**  
But you do believe \[Israel is committing genocide\]?

**Bill de Blasio**  
Yeah. I did not. Honestly, a year ago or even less, I thought the word genocide was too much. I thought it was an unfair characterization. But the famine dynamics, I mean the fact that there is a famine and it is being explicitly ignored by the Israeli government, unfortunately, we’ve entered into a new territory, and that’s a word that– and again, that is not the people of Israel. That is not the broader concept of the state of Israel. That is the Netanyahu government.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
So let me just, to somewhat incongruously switch topics abruptly: Vision Zero was a big success of your mayoralty, saved hundreds of lives through cutting traffic deaths.

**Bill de Blasio**  
Thank you.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
But the issue of Uber: Do you think that you were wrong to not do the cap on the number of for-hire vehicles earlier on in your mayoralty? And what would your advice be to the next mayor with the driverless cars, which have the potential to just flood the streets with cheap cars even more than Uber did?

**Bill de Blasio**  
The driverless cars are a public safety danger, period. We’ve seen it around the country, and we are so much more complex a setting than San Francisco or Arizona, the places where we’ve already seen people die. No: driverless cars make no sense in New York City, and they would be horrific in terms of employment, which I think is a much bigger question about AI in general. I think we’re going to a dangerous place in employment terms. So I would strongly urge any new mayor to not allow driverless cars in New York City.

On the issue of the \[for-hire vehicle\] cap, yeah, there’s several things I wish we had in retrospect and we tried, remember, in the City Council to act on Uber and Uber fought back very effectively. So what I’d say is what we tried to do, I wish we had succeeded at, and I think I fundamentally misunderstood Uber’s ability to organize people. So yes, more early aggressive action. But the even truer thing is I wish we had said to the taxi industry, like really aggressively, that you can do what they’re now doing here and around the world where they could create their own Uber-like alternative or blend with Uber in some ways. I think there was a couple years in there where if that had been done, it would’ve strengthened the taxi industry and created more accountability and balance for Uber. And we did not perceive that we could get them to move as an industry. They were quite resistant, but it’s kind of a time and energy thing. If we had been smart enough to say no, let’s try and get them there, we might have saved everyone an immense amount of trouble.

**Nicole Gelinas**  
How do you fight back when they created a base of activist-consumers. Maybe you could see the same thing with people saying, “I love my driverless car. It’s $5 to get from here to here.” How do you fight that?

**Bill de Blasio**  
Educating people and building broader coalitions. I think later, as we were able to do some aggressive things on Uber because people saw many more of the problems with Uber. And they understood that the drivers were being treated unfairly, and also people were pissed off at surge pricing and different things. So I think what I learned in that and many other situations, I could give you a list of things where we didn’t lay the framework properly. Had we done that, we could have succeeded much more. And with driverless cars, yes, I agree with you. Some people might be tempted, it’s low cost, but the public safety danger I think is gonna be abundantly clear.

**Ben Smith**  
Have you ever taken a Waymo?

**Bill de Blasio**  
No.

**Ben Smith**  
OK. As a Waymo activist, who’s gonna be working you on this, you should check it out. I think they’re very nice, and safe.

**Bill de Blasio**  
Wait a minute: You’re calling yourself a Waymo activist?

**Ben Smith**  
I think I might be. I’ve taken them four or five times, it’s a really nice experience.

**Bill de Blasio**  
Wait a minute, I thought you were, you were an objective journalist?

**Ben Smith**  
I know. I’m falling off the objective horse for driverless cars.

**Bill de Blasio**  
Scandal! Scandal here at the New York Editorial Board!

**Ben Smith**  
Just one final question, which I’m stealing from Akash Mehta, who’s not here. Big picture, what are the biggest substantive differences between you and Zohran Mamdani, and do you think of him as to your left?

**Bill de Blasio**  
I haven’t analyzed that question, where he stands, becauseI know what I have seen reported about his views. I have not asked him about every topic or researched everything he’s ever said, so I don’t know where he and I fit specifically on the spectrum. I think there’s a perception that he is more left, but I just don’t have a perfect scale for that. What was your first part? I’m sorry,

**Ben Smith**  
That’s the question. The biggest difference? Are there substantive differences?

**Bill de Blasio**  
Look, I would say on most of what I’ve seen on affordability, no there’s not. I think the one, I’d say mayoral control of education, which again, he said what he said and he’s not mayor yet, and there’s time to see where that goes. But I think the concern I would have for him, and the ability to have the impact he wants to have for kids, is that there needs to be a real effort to protect mayoral control.

**Ben Smith**  
Well, thank you for doing this.

**Bill de Blasio**  
Thank you everyone.
### What Happens If Adams Resigns
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-happens-if-adams-resigns/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:45.000Z
*For the past few weeks, rumors have surrounded Mayor Eric Adams and his potential resignation. Is he going to leave office early? Will he work for the Trump administration? Can his voter base really keep Mamdani from becoming the mayor of New York? Jamie and award-winning journalist and Executive Director of Citizens Union Grace Rauh pick apart these rumors and examine what this race says about the state of democracy in NYC.*

*You can listen to this podcast on* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-happens-if-adams-resigns/id1794619189?i=1000727137101&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *or* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/0m2h8tk1oRQgHM9DdWohBz?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*
### Editors' Note: Brick by Brick, Rule by Rule
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/brick-by-brick-rule-by-rule/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:45.000Z
Sometimes with editors' notes, the goal is to convince readers that a given topic is worthy of their attention. Many issues of Vital City have focused on fairly niche (but important!) subjects, such as the role of [the nonprofit sector](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-11) in running cities, the use of [social science evidence](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/issue-7) in crafting public policy or the size of [the jail population](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/how-many-people-should-new-york-citys-jails-hold) on Rikers Island. Vital City editors have spent thousands of words explaining why you should care about these topics.

This issue is different. Almost no one needs to be convinced that housing is important. Indeed, housing has been the topic of preeminent concern in New York City for months. In the mayor's race, upstart Zohran Mamdani has leaped to the front of the polls, driven in no small part by his campaign's relentless focus on affordability, including his pledge to freeze the rent for the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers living in rent-stabilized apartments.

Meanwhile, the national policy discourse of late, at least on the left side of the spectrum, has been dominated by the debate over [the abundance movement](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/why-abundance-matters). Sparked by the publication of "Abundance" by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, YIMBY advocates have been aggressive in extolling the virtues of loosening government rules and regulations as a means of sparking more building. (Their exuberance has been matched by their progressive critics, who have been equally vocal in attacking the idea that fewer rules and regulations will produce more housing, or more affordable housing, as opposed to more profits for wealthy interests.) There was even [a crossover moment](https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-speaks-to-me-about-abundance?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) when, in [an interview with Thompson](https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-speaks-to-me-about-abundance?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), Mamdani embraced some of the language of abundance as part of a concerted effort to convince moderate voters that he is not a crazed ideologue.

Whatever the merits of Mamdani's campaign and the abundance movement, much of the public discussion of these topics has tended to focus on political questions: Who is going to win the mayor's race, Mamdani or his rivals? Who will control the future of the Democratic Party, abundance advocates or their opponents? As a result, these conversations have also tended to shed more heat than light. (If you want to encounter unhinged vitriol, try searching for @ZohranKMamdani's mentions on X. It ain't pretty.)

At Vital City, we acknowledge the importance of the current political debate between left, right and center. But politics is most meaningful when it is connected to policy and practice on the ground. And that's where we focus our attention with this issue. While there are, of course, references to the mayor's race and President Trump and the future of the Democratic Party here, we want to wrestle with the thorny challenges of how to actually improve housing in New York and other cities — making (and preserving) more of it, making it more affordable and making it more beautiful, too.

We are joined in this effort by an A-list collection of writers, including activists and architects, planners and developers. Our contributors don't all agree with each other, but they do share a desire to do something more than curse the darkness — each in his or her own way attempts to offer concrete proposals for solving the housing problems that are currently roiling New York.

Generally, these solutions fall into five categories (we hope the mayoral candidates are taking notes):

**Zoning and land-use reform**. The City's approval process for development projects — the Uniform Land Use Review Process, or ULURP — is rigorous and thorough, requiring approvals by several different levels of government. It works better in theory than in practice, however. With staggeringly few exceptions, the whole process hinges on the judgment of the council member in whose district a project happens to be located. A development project can win the endorsement of everyone else in the chain, including the mayor and the City Council speaker, and still fail thanks to the Council's tradition of deferring to the local member. Several of our contributors call for reform of this process, as well as expanding City of Yes for Housing and pushing for legislative changes in Albany to ensure that suburban counties contribute to solving New York City's housing challenges.

**Transit, transit, transit.** Public transit is the lifeblood of New York, so it comes as little surprise that several of our contributors choose to underline the need for more development around transit hubs and to better coordinate transit planning with housing production. Other places (think Tokyo) have done this to far greater effect than New York City.

**Reducing the cost of construction**. In New York, it is a fact of life — and a call to political action — that the rent is too damn high. Our contributors highlight a not-unrelated phenomenon: The cost of building is also too damn high. Attacking this problem will not be easy. Among the ideas floated in this issue: Repealing New York's unique Scaffold Law, which inflates insurance premiums by imposing strict liability on contractors; modernizing building codes to allow for innovations like single-stair buildings and new forms of piping; and using bulk procurement to scale modular housing, something Sweden has pioneered.

**Addressing neighborhood concerns.** The specter of displacement has haunted many efforts at economic development in recent years. In New York and other cities with strong progressive traditions, the accusation of gentrification is a powerful political weapon that has been used to derail numerous projects. Even as they call for a massive effort to build more housing, our contributors understand the need to be responsive to community worries. They offer a number of ideas to ensure that development benefits local residents, including the use of new vehicles like Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trusts that are designed to empower local voices and reduce the chances of displacement.

**Making Cities Beautiful Again.** One major impediment to winning public support for a massive expansion of housing constructionis the reality that many new developments are, in a word, fugly. They don't look good in the first place, and they look even worse after five or 10 years. If we are to build, let's build beautifully, this issue suggests. This includes investing in attractive design and taking seriously the idea of integrating new buildings into the existing character of their neighborhoods.

**\*\*\***

Few things evoke more powerful emotions than the idea of home. Home, at its best, means safety, love and a sense of belonging. Those without housing, or struggling with substandard housing, find themselves in a uniquely vulnerable position: It is hard to make progress in any aspect of your life if you do not have a stable roof over your head.

That's why the current focus on building more housing, and making it accessible to every New Yorker, is such a welcome development. We hope this issue of Vital City will make a small contribution as policymakers wrestle with how to translate the interest in this topic into tangible progress on the ground.

This issue would not have been possible without the contribution of Kaley Pillinger, a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School with considerable expertise in affordable housing. Kaley was a crucial thought partner and coconspirator as we put the issue together. We thank her for her insight, hard work and good humor.
### New York’s Housing Crisis: Self-Inflicted and Solvable
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-yorks-housing-crisis-self-inflicted-and-solvable/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:45.000Z
New York City is living through its worst housing affordability crisis in a century. While the City and State distribute billions of dollars in housing subsidies each year, maintain the most robust rent-stabilization program in the nation and sustain a public housing system that is home to a population larger than many cities, almost all of the personal outcomes associated with housing here are terrible. Around 86,000 New Yorkers stayed in a City-run shelter on a typical night in October 2025\. The median New York renter spent 31% of their income on rent last year. Only 1.4% of rental apartments are available for rent — including an infinitesimal 0.4% of apartments that cost less than $1,100 per month. In 2023, only 53% of NYCHA Housing Choice (Section 8) voucher holders — already a small subset of those eligible by income — were able to secure an apartment before their voucher expired.

All of these devastating statistics are rooted in the fact that we have not built nearly enough homes to accommodate all those who want or need to live in New York City. Some of the most centrally located neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn are actually losing homes as people with means combine multiple apartments, and their neighborhoods do not add enough new homes to make up the difference.

## How did we get here?

Our crisis is in part a product of New York City's success. Since the high-crime, high-dysfunction late 1980s, we have increasingly become a city in high demand. Between 2011 and 2023, the city added almost 900,000 new jobs but only 350,000 new homes — a difference of almost three new jobs for every home built. Removing the pandemic-related job losses of 2020 from the average, that ratio leaps to almost 6-to-1\. That shortfall shows up in everyday life: Rents climb faster than paychecks, people in their 40s live with roommates, and many workers must commute from far-flung suburbs. Scarcity also tilts the playing field against housing voucher holders and renters with lower credit scores; with dozens of strong applications, landlords pick the safest prospect, and vulnerable populations fall further behind.

Other big cities prove that scarcity is a choice. Tokyo adds roughly 80,000 homes a year — two to three times New York's pace — and rents there stay moderate even as its population rockets past 14 million. Houston allows townhomes and small apartment buildings on most blocks, keeping supply high and virtually ending chronic homelessness. Austin expanded its housing stock by 14% in two years — New York managed 2% — and saw rents fall 22%. Auckland upzoned transit corridors, which sparked a construction boom that flattened rents within three years.

The lesson is consistent: Sensible zoning to allow more homes of all kinds, along with streamlined approvals, can unlock the construction needed to curb rent spikes.

New York has produced lots of housing at a rapid clip before. In the 1920s, the city added nearly 730,000 new homes, nearly four times what was added in the 2010s. As recently as the 1960s, we built twice as many homes per year as we build today. In the intervening decades, a combination of new restrictive zoning rules, layers of paperwork and changes to public review processes has resulted in a city where it is impossible to add enough homes to meet need.

Now and again, you'll hear antidevelopment voices suggesting that the city is "full," and that adding lots more people will stress infrastructure and services. Any such argument defies the very essence of New York City as a place where openness, diversity and entrepreneurial energy are its engine — meant to be fueled, not stalled.

It also defies the dynamic history of New York City development, which has been defined by the renewal and regeneration of buildings (think East Midtown, where 19th century brownstones made way for the Chrysler Building in the 1930s), the creation of new neighborhoods via land reclamation (think Battery Park City) and the organic growth of apartment buildings of different sizes and forms (think Astoria to Jackson Heights, where single-family houses along Broadway and Steinway Street evolved into the three- to six-story walk-ups above storefronts that still anchor commercial corridors).

The story of why New York City slammed the brakes on housing production is complex, mixed with both good and bad intentions, and outdated policies linger on the books even as the challenges we face have changed dramatically. Guardrails that were initially necessary to protect working-class and nonwhite New Yorkers from poor labor standards, industrial pollution and urban renewal overreach have been co-opted over the decades by well-resourced homeowners and other moneyed interests to freeze many neighborhoods in place. Many rules that were created to prevent displacement and protect residents have come to drive up rents citywide and push the very working- and middle-class New Yorkers those rules were meant to protect out of their homes.

The evolution of zoning rules tells the tale. The first half of the 20th century saw rapid growth under (mostly) reasonable zoning laws that attempted to promote resident health and safety. But in 1961, an overhaul of the City's zoning framework introduced more prescriptive zoning that significantly restricted housing density across the city. Charter revision commissions in 1975 and 1989 established the contours of the current Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), meant to counter the overreach of years of top-down master planning with a more decentralized decision-making process. The resulting process incorporated advisory opinions from community boards and borough presidents and binding votes from the appointed City Planning Commission and City Council.

While the process has many strengths — a predictable seven-month "clock" to ensure projects don't stall forever, as well as clear, uniform steps aimed at transparency and accountability — our housing shortage today is far more severe than it was in 1989, and ULURP's built-in political incentives skew against approving housing in the places we most need it.

In theory, ULURP gives every project an objective review. In practice, the local Council member's unwritten veto — "member deference," whereby the Council rarely, if ever, bucks the judgment of the member in whose district a given project sits — means no major plan lacking their support has passed since 2009\. Well-funded developers can slog through, but small builders rarely bother. Layers of environmental paperwork invite delays and lawsuits, so even modest projects can take years or collapse under the weight of waiting.

Ironically, public-sector-led affordable housing projects, which should have widespread support, face even greater barriers. Since 2022, the city has lost more than 3,500 proposed apartments — nearly 1,000 of them income-restricted — when they have been downsized or withdrawn through the public review process.

What began as efforts to protect neighborhoods and give residents a voice has hardened into a system that freezes much of the city, favoring wealthy enclaves and worsening the housing crunch.

## How to fix it

Fortunately, an emerging coalition of advocates and political leaders has, since the late 2010s, paved the way for new opportunities to build more homes more equitably. In response to the Bloomberg administration's zoning changes — which significantly limited housing growth in predominantly white and wealthy neighborhoods, paired with upzonings lacking required affordability — the de Blasio administration initiated efforts to build more, and more inclusively. De Blasio's policy agenda began with mandated affordability in new upzonings, but even then, it did not initially focus on the wealthiest neighborhoods where the tool would be most effective. Yet by the end of de Blasio's mayoralty, new grassroots activism and political leadership helped refocus the priority on mandating affordability in neighborhoods that needed it most. Proposals in this policy legacy in neighborhoods like SoHo/NoHo (2021), Gowanus (2021) and Windsor Terrace (2025) — neighborhoods that previously would have been assumed politically off-limits to growth — have since been successful.

Under Mayor Eric Adams, the big wheel has turned faster still. Last winter, the City passed City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, the most significant set of major citywide changes to restrictive and exclusionary zoning rules in a generation, along with a $5 billion package of complementary investments known as City for All. City of Yes pared back parking mandates, legalized backyard accessory units, granted height bonuses for buildings that lock in permanent affordability and more. Spread across every neighborhood, these changes could yield more than 80,000 new homes over the next 15 years and, just as crucially, have forged an even broader prohousing coalition with a necessary citywide approach. While a major step, ultimately these gains cover only a fraction of the roughly 800,000 homes experts say we need in the next decade.

Closing the gap requires bold action on multiple fronts. The New York City Charter Revision Commission approved reforms that would help curb the influence of the well-housed minority from vetoing new homes in the districts where they are most needed. In four ballot measures this November, voters realigned the rules toward fairer, more abundant housing citywide. Mayor-elect Mamdani and City Council must build even further on this momentum with ambitious neighborhood and citywide reforms.

The 2025 elections yielded promising results. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's campaign succeeded after centering affordability and energizing many young New Yorkers fed up with the status quo. Mamdani, a proponent of City of Yes, has notably evolved his thinking about the need for both private- and public-sector housing and a broader agenda of effective governance. And pro-housing City Council members won reelection handily, including those who had taken hard votes for more homes.

However, no mayor or City Council can solve the city's housing shortage on their own. For better or worse, New York State government holds many crucial levers that contribute to the shortage, including decision-making over the City's regressive property tax system and the overly litigious environmental review processes that are often weaponized to delay or kill proposals for new homes, especially in well-resourced neighborhoods.

New York State has also failed to update its basic zoning framework to curtail the many restrictive and exclusionary rules that its municipalities have created over the past 80 years. Unlike counterparts across the country, New York lawmakers have chosen not to enact a statewide legislative mechanism to push forward home construction in areas that continually block new homes. Westchester and Long Island have some of the most restrictive and exclusionary zoning in the nation; their lack of growth also exacerbates the severe housing pressures within New York City's bounds when it can't spill over into neighboring suburbs.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/24669062?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XpBPB40A7UAlEyy0vkdvGcn9taHZiViltE67hQSIX7U/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

The outcome is unsurprising: few affordable options, particularly in areas with high-performing schools, and a perpetuation of the patterns of segregation under the guise of "local control." Legalizing modest apartment buildings near regional transit stations, allowing homeowners to build backyard cottages or granny flats and setting enforceable targets for affordable housing growth are all critical solutions that other states have embraced.

In 2023, Gov. Kathy Hochul laid out a promising blueprint including solutions to many of these problems, but it ran aground. And since then, she has shied away from pressing ahead on many of the most impactful ideas. The Legislature has shown interest in a smart first step with the Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act, which streamlines the ability to build affordable housing on land owned by faith-based organizations across the state, but did not pass the bill this past legislative session. Without an assertive Albany, even the boldest mayor will be stuck playing whack‑a‑mole with rising rents.

## The bedrock beneath every issue

Housing is the foundation of civic life. When homes are scarce and expensive, teachers leave, storefronts go dark and neighborhood ties fray. New York spends more per capita on affordable housing than any other state in the nation — almost $1,000 per person per year. California, the closest second, doesn't clear $750 per person. Yet dollars alone cannot solve shortages created by outdated rules. Fix the housing-production bottleneck — make it easier to build more homes of all types in the neighborhoods people most want to live in — and the rest gets easier: Rents stabilize, voucher holders can find homes, families stay and grow, and overcrowding eases. Ignore production, and displacement, homelessness and fiscal stress all worsen.

New York City missed keeping one of its congressional seats in the 2020 reapportionment by just 89 residents. Since then, more than half a million people have left the state. If the trend holds, we will likely lose yet another two seats — or three — after the 2030 Census, shrinking our voice over transit funds, disaster aid and every federal program the city relies on, and eroding New York's importance in the Electoral College.

Time is short. Act boldly, and we can keep the promise that anyone who wants to build a life here can find a place to live. Shrink from the task, and we will see rents climb, the tax base erode and New York's seat at the national table grow smaller. The choice — build or bust — is ours, and the clock is ticking.

*This piece was originally published in September 2025 and has since been updated to reflect the results of New York City's 2025 general election.*
### Jane Jacobs and the Quest for Goldilocks Density
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/jane-jacobs-and-the-quest-for-goldilocks-density/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:08.000Z
This year, the “abundance” message has been heard loud and clear. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance,” Yoni Appelbaum’s “Stuck” and Mark Dunkelman’s “Why Nothing Works” all make the case that America has been way too fussy about the built environment, putting up barriers to all kinds of development, particularly housing.

And with the accompanying call to loosen up and build more stuff — more multifamily housing, more density, more mixed-use, more infrastructure — one woman long considered a saint of urban living has been blamed, somewhat counterintuitively, for contributing to the problem:[ Jane Jacobs](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/03/american-geographic-social-mobility/681439/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

The argument goes that while she stopped many bad things from happening — slum clearance to make way for soulless towers in the park and neighborhood-destroying urban freeways — her legacy has left places like her beloved Greenwich Village essentially frozen in amber. The people who live there are quite content to be in four-story brownstones with high-class boutiques on the ground floor. No added density is tolerated. True to the laws of supply and demand, not just enclaves but long stretches of city blocks have become staggeringly expensive. There might as well be a velvet rope at 14th Street. 

What started as earnest protest against top-down planning has morphed into a framework for defending these neighborhoods from any incursion. The local community board is fully in control, and what they invariably do is say no.

**The real Jane Jacobs**

I first noticed the co-opting of the Jane Jacobs legacy soon after publishing[ “Wrestling with Moses,”](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/50509/wrestling-with-moses-by-anthony-flint/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the story of her battles with Robert Moses in New York City in the ’50s and ’60s. It was 2009, the book had just come out, and James Gandolfini was considering playing Robert Moses in a movie adaptation. I was all in on the fight-the-power narrative and was struck by how many current city residents were channeling Jane Jacobs and her power-to-the-people energy from 50 years ago. One such instance was out at Coney Island, where several women had donned white wigs and black-rim glasses reminiscent of Jacobs’s classic look to protest against redevelopment plans. Perfect, I thought: Davids against the Goliath of greedy developers and a Moses-nostalgic City Hall.

On further review, however, I saw that the new development they derided wasn’t really much of a monstrosity at all. In fact, it was a badly needed increase in the supply of multifamily housing, on underutilized urban land. It was clear these folks just didn’t want anything to change in their backyard. They were energetic in their Jacobs-caliber activism but had strayed from her guiding principles for how cities grow. 

While some of what Jacobs wrote can indeed seem antidevelopment, only a narrow reading of her work would classify her as a NIMBY given the current challenges cities face. It’s important to remember what she actually said about urban development, which, in large part, was that cities must change and evolve. Yes, she was against Le Corbusier-inspired high-rise apartment buildings; she favored what she believed was more human-scaled development, like the[ West Village Houses](https://villageview.nyc/2023/06/05/the-west-village-houses/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Yes, she was all for historic preservation, another trend that is at odds with the abundance agenda, yet Jacobs urged new uses for old buildings in an approach in line with today’s widely accepted ethos of [retrofit and adaptive reuse](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-12/at-boston-architecture-convention-retrofits-and-rehabs-are-the-rage?srnd=undefined&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). 

At the same time, she was increasingly aghast at how expensive the Village had become, what she called “oversuccess.” Her answer was to make it so these gentrifying urban neighborhoods weren’t so rare, but rather ubiquitous. Her solution was more supply — ideally, mostly low-rise attached town houses, but just lots and lots of them. She identified all the ingredients to make new development successful, like shorter blocks, a mix of uses and a variety of building types. But the inherent value of more housing options was a given.

Jacobs, understood in full, wasn’t antidevelopment, nor was she exactly a YIMBY. What she was really seeking was Goldilocks density — not too much, not hulking and inhospitable, but also not too little, so as to be a drop in the bucket in terms of supply. That kind of development is the key, most experts now say, to affordability. Though contrarians like[ Patrick Condon](https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2024/07/19/Patrick-Condon-Why-Housing-Costs-So-High/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at the University of British Columbia say prices don’t actually come down when cities let developers build, baby, build, breaking down regulatory barriers and increasing the total number of housing units in a metropolitan region is seen as an optimal market-based solution.

**How to get there**

Of course, along the way to this balanced density, there’s room for further conversation about the concern about redevelopment and any [unearned profits](https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/conference-papers/unearned-increment/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that builders make. Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, has espoused more direct subsidies for affordable housing, aligned with the European concept of[ social housing](https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/nyc-mayor-primary-rent-housing-affordability-78e26691?gaa%5Fat=eafs&gaa%5Fn=ASWzDAhsA5w2I%5Fn7AR9f4TllMS9roBVuczUFf8cgodyx9JbvbGkfN1Z-d1DGPVYwW14%3D&gaa%5Fts=685cb885&gaa%5Fsig=yg5dnY949PGAvnu6upt-rVW9XhhPFFhE9v-XotUKzqcwtZR1CB0VNxX0qfQpr%5Fyz2gxRhs3HthHDHUgoWe3wzA%3D%3D&ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

But either way — whether market-based or government-funded — new housing is going to be more dense, and everyone, whether established residents or first-time homebuyers or renters seeking reasonably affordable shelter, would do well to share that reality.

How density plays out on the ground has been a central occupation of architects, builders, planners and policymakers for a long while now. Stantec’s[ David Dixon](https://www.stantec.com/en/people/d/dixon-david?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), an elder statesman of the topic of density, says it’s not that complicated: About 30 units per acre is what it takes to support mixed-use retail, workplaces and transit. Put another way, he recommends envisioning a 200-unit condo building, perhaps six or seven stories high, integrated into a well-designed public realm.

Speaking at the Congress for the New Urbanism in Providence, Rhode Island, in June, Dixon referred to [demographic trends](https://www.prb.org/resources/u-s-household-composition-shifts-as-the-population-grows-older-more-young-adults-live-with-parents/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=This%20increase%20in%20the%20share,groups%20in%20the%20coming%20decades.) anticipating that a net 80% of new households will be singles and childless couples, at odds with 62% of current housing options being single-family homes designed for traditional larger families of two parents, three kids and a dog.

Accordingly, multifamily development will be very much in demand, Dixon said, to accommodate the surging demand from these smaller households. Indeed, it’s a matter of economic development for cities, he said, as they compete for higher-income[ knowledge economy workers](https://www.wsj.com/articles/DJFVW00020120903e893h14fs?gaa%5Fat=eafs&gaa%5Fn=ASWzDAga%5Fyv-fN62Z-P0tEo5MY98pn5Jb%5Fphde-0rlvEzWoncqNH7fg-enxRKaCg6KE%3D&gaa%5Fts=684c3a6d&gaa%5Fsig=Do8LZ%5F7%5FBOj2HWl6B4oTR1wSX4B0xIdgL00GI60fYGsgbHAjjaQYRij-8x0Muk3U3Ju%5Fct%5FS8rTMRRp7r7jtOg%3D%3D&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in amenity-rich urban settings — ergo, density.

In Massachusetts, the MBTA Communities Act tells cities and towns to allow 15 units per acre by right in catchment areas near T stations. This level of density is seen as scary and onerous by [some communities](https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/milton-mbta-communities-law-housing/3636991/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that have balked at the program, though[ 15 units per acre](https://www.lincolninst.edu/data/what-does-15-units-per-acre-look-like/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is a relatively unobtrusive threshold, especially for land that now stands as vacant parcels or parking lots. It’s just plain old infill.

**Neighborhood character and the way forward**

Many of those who purport to channel Jacobs mourn how development threatens the “character” of neighborhoods. Again, the idea is misappropriated. Jacobs understood that the character of a neighborhood is partly about the way it looks and feels and partly about the people who inhabit it and otherwise make use of it. 

When a lack of development drives prices through the roof and makes a swath of the city a playground for the wealthy, that creates conditions for a monoculture, which she opposed. Economic homogeneity can take hold even if the cosmetic character of blocks and buildings hasn’t changed.

Faithfully following through on her ideas means understanding that the key to making density acceptable requires making new development fit in with the surrounding fabric. Which is to say, preserving neighborhood character is a design challenge above all else.

It’s a bit of a gauntlet. Guides like Northeastern University’s[ Equitable Zoning by Design](https://impactengines.northeastern.edu/ie/equitable-zoning-by-design/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) help government officials and public stakeholders understand the physical and spatial implications of zoning regulations in transit-oriented and walkable mixed-use hubs. The idea is to make infill density more acceptable to wary established residents, with the goal of illustrating how the new building fits in with the fabric of a neighborhood. The now-ubiquitous facades of 5-over-1 developments, five stories of wood-frame residential on top of a concrete foundation, have triggered complaints that all new multifamily housing[ looks the same](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-america-s-new-apartment-buildings-all-look-the-same?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a legitimate critique, though the reaction was much the same 100 years ago when now-beloved brick and brownstone streetscapes were conjured in Boston or Philadelphia.

Another important factor in terms of public understanding is making it clear what different levels of density actually look and feel like. Over the past few months, I’ve been helping curate an online tool kit called [Visualizing Density](https://go.lincolninst.edu/l/153411/2025-09-04/prrhb7?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at the[ Lincoln Institute](https://www.lincolninst.edu/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which debuted this month. The resource offers image galleries of different densities via compelling aerial photographs by Alex MacLean. Users are able to see what San Francisco density looks like compared to transit-oriented development outside Dallas. The spoiler alert is that they’re both pretty pleasant.

Ultimately, attitudes toward density may require a shift in mindset similar to the corollary narrative of ’70s-era environmentalists who pushed for laws that stopped bad things from happening, similar to the legendary crusades of Jane Jacobs.

That dynamic has been equally excruciating: Advocates were virtuous in seeking to stop damaging projects, but now those rules are being used as a cudgel blocking things the planet desperately needs, like solar farms and wind turbines and[ transmission lines](https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/2023-06-how-land-use-battles-are-hindering-clean-energy-transition/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to facilitate the clean energy transition.

The irony is searing. A movement that started out well justified has now become mindlessly obstructionist — preventing progress on the ultimate environmental objective, combating climate change.

In the same way, zoning, codes and land-use regulations, as well as grassroots community control over planning and development, served a purpose that is no longer quite so relevant. Like climate change, housing affordability is a 21st century crisis that warrants thoughtful new approaches that aren’t tied so literally to the battles of 50 years ago. “A living culture is forever changing, without losing itself as a framework and context of change. The reconstruction of a culture is not the same as its restoration,” she wrote in her last book, “Dark Age Ahead.” Being nimble and not so black-and-white in our understanding of density will be critical in accommodating the new housing cities need. It’s a mindset she would applaud.
### Teachings from Tokyo
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/teachings-from-tokyo/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:46.000Z
New York City faces a well-documented housing crisis: Rents have soared, supply lags far behind demand, and an acute unit shortage looms. A 2022 report from the urban economics consulting firm AKRF found that the city would need roughly [560,000 additional housing units by 2030](https://cbcny.org/advocacy/only-way-build-what-we-need-nycs-construction-imperative?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) just to keep up with population and job growth; the city is [nowhere near on pace](https://www.citysignal.com/how-the-nyc-planning-commission-plans-to-address-the-citys-housing-shortage/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to meet that goal. For tenants, this shortfall translates into sky-high costs and low vacancy rates. Every major candidate to be the next mayor of New York this cycle has run a campaign focused on promises to fix the runaway cost of housing, and whoever is ultimately elected will face the daunting task of transforming those campaign promises into workable, concrete policies.

New York City's housing shortfall stands in stark contrast to the housing situation in Tokyo, a global metropolis that is comparable in many respects — a coastal national center of culture and industry with a robust public transportation network and a metropolitan area that is home to tens of millions — but has overwhelmingly avoided any housing affordability crisis, with [modest rent increases](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-housing.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) over the past decade and an incredible variety of livable neighborhoods on offer. All this while Tokyo's population, now at 14 million in the city proper and 37 million in the broader metro area, [continues to grow](https://pdf.savills.asia/asia-pacific-research/japan-research/japan-investment/jp-tokyo-demo-spotlight-06-2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — the result of Japan's younger generations moving to cities — despite the nation's population falling overall. Tokyo and New York are two of the world's largest and most dynamic cities, but Tokyo offers its residents housing and livability at a fraction of New York's cost.

What is Tokyo doing differently, and what can New York's next mayor learn from its example? Thankfully, the short answer is simple enough: Japan has long embraced housing abundance through prodevelopment policies (both intentional and unintentional) and as a result continuously builds a large quantity of urban housing — [130,000 new units began construction](https://www.toukei.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/tnenkan/2023/tn23q3e003.htm?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the most recent recorded year and averaged [roughly 150,000 new units per year](https://jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/how-tokyo-built-its-way-to-abundant-housing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for the two decades from 1995 to 2015 (and that's before counting the railway commuter suburbs that house the majority of the Tokyo metro area's population, which would bring those numbers even higher). This strong development pipeline allows Tokyo to maintain a degree of "slack" in the market, where buyers and renters alike have options and prices remain relatively stable. And even though New York can't simply copy-and-paste Tokyo's policies, there are indeed ways to reach the same result in New York's context. A better, more Tokyo-esque future for New York is possible.

Tokyo's housing abundance is a credit to policies in three key categories — zoning laws, building regulations and land division patterns — that all interlock with one another. In each case, there is a path for the next mayor of New York to follow Tokyo's lead, but New York City will need to recreate the preconditions for Tokyo's abundance in a way that reflects its own unique history and context. Tokyo accomplishes this impressive amount of construction despite providing tenants with [fairly strong rent stabilization protections](https://housekey.jp/when-can-you-raise-tenant-rent-in-japan/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which have less of a distortional effect on the market in an environment where housing is abundant.

The most obvious lessons for New York from Tokyo relate to how land use and development are governed by zoning. Tokyo's zoning system is fundamentally *additive* and *housing-permissive*. Land uses are divided into roughly a dozen tiers of land-use intensity, with the lowest tier mainly limited to residences, small shops and restaurants and schools, all the way up to heavy industrial zones. But unlike in the United States, land that is zoned for a given "tier" can also be used by right for any use covered by lower tiers as well. This means that, with the exception of heavy industrial zones, residential housing can be built on nearly any parcel in the city entirely by right, even in more heavily commercial areas.

> It is not enough for an area to be zoned for housing in theory; the devil is in the details, and the City's zoning must actually allow ample housing to be built in practice.

In today's New York, by contrast, opportunities for as-of-right residential construction are relatively scarce. At first glance, much of New York City is [already residentially zoned](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/zoning/zoning-districts-guide/residence-districts?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and [80% of the housing units](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/planning-level/housing-economy/how-much-housing-is-built%20as-of-right.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) constructed in the city since 2010 have been built as of right, which sounds positive. Upon deeper inspection, however, these numbers paint a darker picture due to the City zoning code's layers of restrictions on how these residential zones can be used in practice. Tightened floor-area ratio requirements (zoning regulations that determine the maximum size of a building relative to the size of its plot of land) and other building restrictions mean that only [20% of the residentially zoned lots in New York](https://cbcny.org/research/strategies-boost-housing-production-new-york-city-metropolitan-area?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are actually suitable to have additional by-right housing units built on them; they are functionally "full" under the zoning code. Mayor Adams' signature City of Yes initiative has marginally improved that outlook, but is only expected to produce roughly [5,500 additional housing units](https://citylimits.org/the-blocks-strips-and-neighborhoods-carved-out-of-city-of-yes/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) per year, or a total of 82,000 units over 15 years. As for that promising-looking ratio of 80% of new housing being built by right? Looking at the anemic amount of overall new construction, the real origin becomes clear: The process for obtaining a site-specific discretionary rezoning (done through New York's Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP) is generally so onerous that developers usually abandon any plan that would require one. It is not enough for an area to be zoned for housing in theory; the devil is in the details, and the City's zoning must actually allow ample housing to be built in practice.

In the past, there have been [numerous proposals](https://cbcny.org/research/improving-new-york-citys-land-use-decision-making-process?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to reform New York's byzantine process for granting discretionary rezonings, but since the process reflects the entrenched power of key city interest groups, major changes are unlikely even in the present crisis. The practice of ["member deference,"](https://edc.nyc/housing-crisis-and-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for example, which grants City Council members incredible power to block discretionary rezonings in their district according to their personal whims, has been discussed repeatedly for years but is unlikely to end — those with power are loath to surrender it.

Given the steep political barriers to reforming the site-specific discretionary rezoning process, the best path forward for the next mayor will be instead to push early and hard for the council to adopt a dramatic shift of the residential zoning code, allowing significantly more housing to be built on residentially zoned lots, thus limiting the need for one-off discretionary rezonings in the first place. The new mayor will enter office with considerable political momentum, and in the past, the council has shown a degree of willingness to work with each new mayor on their signature initiatives. Allowing for more housing construction is politically popular; while nothing is certain in municipal politics, rezoning stands a decent shot at becoming law if the next mayor makes it an early priority.

It's worth noting that, in certain contexts, Tokyo faces a similar situation to New York's discretionary approval stagnation. Projects that require the buy-in of local stakeholders to proceed, such as the [Roppongi Hills megadevelopment](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/business/worldbusiness/27mori.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) completed in the 2000s, have often taken decades to move forward as change-averse neighbors fight to maintain the status quo. The fundamental difference between the two cities is that Tokyo's zoning (which in Japan is largely controlled at the national level) allows for such a high number of as-of-right projects that seeking a project-specific variance is a rare exception rather than the rule, so the onerousness of the process is not a major drag on housing construction.

> If the next mayor can push a zoning code update that dramatically expands as-of-right residential construction, New York City can achieve results akin to Tokyo-style housing abundance.

Relaxed zoning isn't the only lesson from Tokyo for boosting New York's housing production; New York could also ease the burdensome restrictions it places on both the smallest- and largest-scale new housing construction. On the one hand, regulatory compliance in New York creates major disincentives to microunit developments. Across the United States, minimum unit sizes were[ widely adopted a century ago](https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/urban-minimum-lot-sizes-their-background-effects-and-avenues-reform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) over largely unsubstantiated health and safety concerns. Whatever their merits at the time, in today's New York City, they represent a costly anachronism that prevents building affordable units for young urbanites. Although the law notionally allows microunits as small as 150 square feet, compliance with various accessibility regulations[ in practice means that 270 square feet is the minimum possible](https://manhattan.institute/article/small-is-beautiful-micro-units-can-help-make-nyc-housing-affordable?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and the City's structural bias against single-room occupancy (SRO) buildings (where sleeping quarters are private but common amenities such as kitchens are shared) generally prevents developers from reducing housing costs by moving shared resources out of personal quarters and into communal areas.

Making matters worse, large housing developments of over 100 units are also now disfavored by statute. In April 2024, the City enacted a new version of the Real Property Tax Law under Section 485-x, which replaced the previous tax exemption 421-a for new construction projects. 485-x features a number of well-meaning provisions, such as an affordable unit mandate and a "prevailing wage" requirement for labor, that both kick in for projects that involve building 100 units or more. The logic here was that bigger projects were making enough money to shoulder additional, socially valuable costs. While well-intended, these requirements are onerous even for developers benefiting from economies of scale. As a result, new developments seeking 485-x tax abatements now artificially restrict themselves to 99 units to avoid triggering these provisions, and the city loses out on housing as a result. This particular case of regulatory malpractice is new, but at the same time emblematic of a pattern of well-intentioned City regulations that, by misaligning developer incentives, ultimately backfire and fail to produce the housing New Yorkers need.

In Tokyo, by contrast, there is generally no minimum unit quantity or lot size for housing, nor are large by-right developments saddled with the same onerous requirements as found in New York. A range of historical factors from [informal postwar rebuilding processes](https://nextcity.org/informalcity/entry/when-tokyo-was-a-slum?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to strict inheritance tax laws, [which have at times required up to a 50% tax on inherited estates](https://www.cao.go.jp/zei-cho/history/1996-2009/gijiroku/kiso/2002/pdf/kiso22a.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), payable immediately upon the owner's death (and thus required division of any inherited land, as part of it could then be sold off to pay the tax), have all contributed to the subdivision of what were once larger plots into smaller parcels, which in turn play host to smaller housing. The proliferation of smaller housing not only adds density and unit quantity to areas of Tokyo where buildings have comparable floor-area ratios to New York City by fitting more residents into the same space but also allows for a greater diversity of housing options and richer neighborhood fabrics.

U.S. urbanists[ increasingly recognize](https://buildingoptimism.substack.com/p/the-undeniable-financial-supremacy) the benefits of smaller-scale, fine-grained urban design even within our megacities, based on a body of evidence now demonstrating that smaller, unconsolidated lots can promote vibrant neighborhood life while maintaining the same development profitability and number of units found in consolidated, formulaic podium-style developments. A walk through Tokyo's backstreets into its wonderfully alive,[ dense low-rise neighborhoods](https://marketurbanism.com/2022/05/25/unpacking-emergent-tokyo-with-author-jorge-almazan/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), many of which feature small living quarters even by Tokyo standards, will ease any apprehensions that the scale of microunits inevitably leads to unlivable urban squalor. And in Tokyo, large-scale housing developments by right are not hampered by the [excessive step functions](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-09/nyc-apartment-construction-wage-requirement-leads-to-99-unit-buildings?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — like the 485-x obligations imposed on 100+ unit projects — that sometimes disincentivize scale in New York City. Instead, most projects are governed by [consistent formulas](https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/news/floor-area-ratio-and-building-coverage-ratio/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) linking building size to road width. Unlike the step functions in the New York code, they scale smoothly and easily allow for large-scale developments around commuter transit hubs, particularly in the suburban districts that house the majority of metropolitan Tokyo's actual population.

If New York's next mayor wants to take bold action to restore the city's housing affordability, Tokyo offers meaningful lessons, all of which are variations on a single theme: Make housing easy to build by right in as much of the city as possible. If the next mayor can [push a zoning code update](https://www.niskanencenter.org/zoning-reform-in-gotham/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) through the City Council that dramatically expands as-of-right residential construction, removes onerous provisions against microunits and SROs, and rethinks poorly designed regulatory step functions, New York City can indeed achieve results akin to Tokyo-style housing abundance. The alternative — continued stagnation and tinkering around the edges of the ULURP process as the city becomes ever more unaffordable to working New Yorkers — is no alternative at all. Subsequent mayors, no matter their politics, will be faced with the same housing crisis until bold action is taken to fix it.
### The High Price of Fine Print
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-high-price-of-fine-print/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:46.000Z
In the parable of the blind men and the elephant, a group of men who cannot see try to piece together the true nature of the pachyderm, each touching a different part of the animal's body and confidently extrapolating from there. One man touches the tusk and says the elephant is a pole; another touches the tail and says an elephant is a rope; a third touches the leg and says the elephant is a column.

Something similar is happening with the nation's ever-expanding affordable housing crisis, which has become a top political issue even in traditionally affordable Sun Belt sprawl towns like Charlotte and Houston. To say nothing of New York City, where the [vacancy rate is 1.4%](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/nyregion/apartment-vacancy-rate-housing-crisis.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and apartment hunting is a blood sport. The median age of the first-time American homebuyer [has shot up](https://www.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/2024-11/2024-profile-of-home-buyers-and-sellers-highlights-11-04-2024%5F2.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to 38 — from 31 a decade ago.

What's to blame? The YIMBYs say it's the zoning; the Wall Streeters say it's the financing; the leftists say it's the landlords. Others focus on the high cost of land or permitting delays or insurance rates or the ["everything bagel problem"](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/02/opinion/democrats-liberalism.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of political priorities like wage requirements and low-carbon design layered on every new project.

Indeed, all those features contribute to housing's cost and scarcity. But there's another significant, underappreciated driver of costs that deserves scrutiny, especially in a heavily regulated city like New York: building codes. New York City has its own special Building Code, and while it contains some improvements over national norms, it adds other provisions that make it even more expensive to build here.

Building codes are the complex set of documents and standards that govern how workers can put a structure together, from the strength of the concrete to the shape of the pipe beneath a toilet. There are codes for single-family homes, ventilation systems, swimming pool installation and construction in fire-prone areas. Local officials examine drawings and construction projects for compliance. Most U.S. cities place multistory buildings under a version of the International Building Code (IBC), which, notwithstanding the name, is a mostly American institution. There's value in standardizing the rules rather than having every jurisdiction across America craft its own elaborate requirements. But a growing chorus of critics says the International Building Code, a so-called "model" document that is revised every three years at stakeholder conferences and then adopted by local jurisdictions, is antiurban and insensitive to cost.

As I[ wrote in Slate in February](https://slate.com/business/2025/02/housing-crisis-apartments-development-single-stair-reform-codes.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), pressure is mounting from all sides to overhaul these design guidelines. Some downtown boosters would like to change local rules to ease the way for office-to-residential conversions, where large floor plates are often incompatible with residential light and air requirements. Staring down the rebuilding challenge after the Los Angeles fires, California has frozen [new energy-efficiency updates](https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/05/building-code-california-housing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from the IBC until 2031 (these updates are also a routine gripe in red states). And companies building modular construction, heralded by some as the future of cost-effective housing development, are having trouble adapting their innovations for patchwork inspection standards.

> A growing chorus of critics says the International Building Code is antiurban and insensitive to cost.

These advocates may be on to something. A building industry study claims that 11% of total development costs since 2012 [can be attributed](https://www.nmhc.org/globalassets/research--insight/research-reports/cost-of-regulations/2022-nahb-nmhc-cost-of-regulations-report.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to increasingly restrictive code changes. Mike Eriksen, a professor of economics at Purdue University who is studying the Code's effect on safety and cost, explained that codemakers rarely undertake cost-benefit analyses of their impacts on construction: "I'm worried we're building a world that's too expensive to live in."

Reformers have seized on an observation by the Seattle architect Michael Eliason, who, over the past five years, has drawn attention to the problem of the International Building Code's two-stair rule. In plain English, every apartment in a building of four stories or more is required to be accessible from two separate stairways, ostensibly for fire safety reasons. The resulting layouts, with long rows of apartments branched off windowless hallways (think Danny riding his tricycle in "The Shining"), create apartments that have only one exposure and no cross ventilation. Large areas of interior space are wasted on hallways. On small lots where there's no room for two stairways and a corridor, three stories becomes a hard limit.

More than 10 states (and a few cities) have passed their own "single-stair" legislation over the past three years, hoping to enable the kind of design-efficient, low-cost, small-lot apartments that flourish in places like Switzerland, where building codes are more friendly to urban growth. The reforms are too recent to have generated a meaningful sample size, but the [results](https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/seattle-special-us-citys-unique-approach-small-infill-lots?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in cities that *do* permit single-stair buildings are promising.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/24669523?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Bl%5FGkf0l80%5FQgG5y7fM%5FcHotlMOoK7uLojrJXex21Rg/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Here, New York City is an American outlier in a good way. Since New York has long allowed buildings of six stories with one staircase, it made a good place to study the risks of having only one way out of a burning apartment. According to [a Pew Charitable Trusts study](https://www.pew.org/-/media/assets/2025/05/single-stair%5Freport%5Fsummary.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) released earlier this year, there was no correlation between fire deaths and single-stair buildings over a 12-year period in New York.

"There has been so much interest from policymakers," Alex Horowitz, the director of Pew's Housing Policy Initiative, told me. "The one question holding back authorizing single-stair construction to help make a dent in the housing shortage has been about fire safety. That's why we wanted to do empirical work here, and we found that there's no trade-off with safety."

The City's single-stair carveout is both a feature and a bug, the result of a strain of New York exceptionalism that led the City to resist the ongoing march of model codes, whose standardization otherwise appeals to manufacturers, architects and engineers. For decades, the City and State led the way on mandating their own design standards. The first City building code was adopted in 1850; the State followed with the famous Tenement House reforms that required basic amenities like fire escapes, courtyards, windows and toilets. The competition between safety and cost was often explicit: Early building code reformers hoped their requirements would crowd slum housing out of the market.

For the latter third of the 20th century, New York City built under its own 1968 code, even as most other cities adopted one of the other model codes gaining in popularity. By the turn of the millennium, the vast majority of cities outside of New York had adopted the IBC; meanwhile, the bespoke [700-page rule book](https://www.nyc.gov/site/buildings/codes/nyc-code.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) dictating the rules for construction in the five boroughs was causing problems. Not only did New York have different rules from the rest of the country, but the code on its own terms was described by a mayoral reform commission as "cumbersome" and "convoluted." "It has also become increasingly difficult for design professionals to accurately and consistently interpret code provisions," [the commission's report](https://www.mzarchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ibc.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) read. "Ultimately, these difficulties have led to confusion, inconsistent interpretations and delays." The flourishing business of "expediters" to help architects and developers navigate this labyrinthine process, combined with a series of Department of Buildings [corruption scandals](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/nyregion/23buildings.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), helped make the case for the City to switch to the IBC, which it ultimately did — kind of — in 2007.

Why "kind of"? The City still wasn't willing to live by the same rules as the rest of the country, deeming itself too dense and too different to use a model code straight off the rack. The result is that today, the City uses a heavily modified version of the IBC, different from the national model in two ways: It is more geared toward urban density, and it has more union-backed provisions. That leaves us with rules that are simpler than before, but still with their fair share of complexity. Relatedly, we still have those expediters.

Some of the City's departures from the IBC are good, some are bad, and many are in the eye of the beholder.

The good? In addition to permitting six-story buildings with one staircase, the New York Building Code also allows "scissor stairs" — an interlocking double staircase that takes up less room than two separate staircases. Because New York has so many high-rise buildings, the City also has special rules for standpipes and diesel generators in case of fires or blackouts. These don't make building cheaper but do promote safety in a city with a skyline like this one.

Other provisions are more complicated to evaluate. Recognizing the potential for an urban conflagration, the State prohibits New York City from building the wood-framed "five-over-ones" that have become the dominant typology in many American cities. This anti-wood policy also discourages the use of mass timber — wood is prohibited on a building's exterior, which means that any mass-timber construction[ would have to be dressed up](https://www.curbed.com/article/mass-timber-nyc-construction-projects.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to disguise its structural ingenuity.

> New York's restrictive plumbing rules force the use of more expensive materials like cast iron and copper, driving up housing costs without clear evidence of improved performance or safety.

And some are simply concessions to interest groups, especially building trades unions. New York requires a quarter-inch metal-bar lattice for office drop-ceilings, where the IBC allows thin wires. These only-in-New-York systems are robust and pricey, and it's not clear whether the rest of the country's office drones have a problem with ceilings collapsing on their cubicles.

New York's Code (along with those of several other big cities) still has restrictive rules limiting the use of plastic PVC and PEX pipes in plumbing, which are easier to install than the metal pipes favored by plumbers' unions. (When Philadelphia decided to permit plastic pipes in high-rise construction, a building industry consultant[ told](https://whyy.org/articles/changes-to-plumbing-code-expected-to-sharply-reduce-philly-construction-costs/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) PlanPhilly, "A common saying in the industry is that it takes 10 men to carry one length of cast iron pipe, but only one man to carry 10 lengths of PVC pipe.") "The result," Brian McDonough, a mechanical, electrical and plumbing consultant, told me, "is a reliance on more expensive materials like cast iron and copper, which significantly increases installation costs and ultimately contributes to higher housing costs, without clear evidence of improved system performance or safety." While these larger, more expensive pipes once made some sense, they are bigger than strictly necessary for today's buildings — the Code has not rightsized dimension requirements to accommodate modern low-flow fixtures.

Builders indulge New York's eccentricities because the market is so large: It can support a whole ecosystem of architects and engineers who understand its special requirements. "It would be grand if the whole country had the same building code," said the architect and real estate lawyer James P. Colgate, a former assistant commissioner at the Department of Buildings, "But New York City can have its own code — it's bigger than some countries — and have thriving industries within it."

While the City has sometimes influenced national building practices — glow-in-the-dark stairway markings became IBC policy following a post-9/11 task force — the City mostly lets the IBC do its business, knowing it can make changes later. "As a result, New Yorkers don't really participate in the national process as much as I'd like," argued Stephen Smith, founder of the code advocacy think tank the Center for Building in North America.

Not all building practices are rooted in the Building Code per se. In New York City, for example, the Code is supplemented by a number of code-adjacent local laws. One law requires those little floor plan maps to be placed by all elevators; another mandates much of the scaffolding that supplies the city with its very own sidewalk arcade. The City has[ banned](https://citylimits.org/nyc-votes-to-ban-gas-in-new-construction-as-plastic-utensils-bill-stalls/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) gas hookups in new construction. Most controversially, the New York City Council passed [Local Law 97](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-new-york-citys-building-emission-law-may-harm-the-environment-and-economy) in 2019, which requires dramatic reductions in carbon emissions for all (existing) buildings over 50,000 square feet. It's a massive expense for the city's aging housing stock — there's currently no efficient way to electrify a steam heating system.

But those big-ticket policies are not typical of the inefficiencies and outdated rules that pervade the codes in New York City and elsewhere. In most cases, it is much harder to tease out both the logic behind the rule (which may have been established decades ago, with no documentation) and the cost of implementing it (often less than 1% of total construction cost).

It's only in the aggregate that these requirements create a meaningful divergence from our low-cost, high-design neighbors abroad. "There is no silver bullet," said Smith. "The problem needs to be constantly hacked away at."
### New York City Needs a Two-Track Mind
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/new-york-city-needs-a-two-track-mind/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:11.000Z
New York City has, by some measures, the most expensive housing in the nation.[ Renting a typical apartment](https://www.zillow.com/research/data/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) costs almost $4,000 a month, according to Zillow. That's more than in any other U.S. city with more than 100,000 residents. (In terms of home values adjusted for apartment size, New York also dominates the list, at fourth place.) New York's rental rate is more than two times what average renters pay in cities like Charlotte, Houston and Phoenix.

The city's high housing costs impose a considerable burden, but New Yorkers have something residents of those other cities don't: access to an extensive and (despite grumblings, mostly) effective transit system. New York City's subway and bus network isn't just a nice thing to have. It's also a money saver that enables residents to avoid the[ costs of car ownership and operation](https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/what-rising-gas-and-rent-prices-mean-families-low-incomes?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which amount to thousands of dollars a year per household.

While[ 56% of New York City households live without a car](https://censusreporter.org/data/table/?table=B08201&geo%5Fids=16000US3651000,16000US0455000,16000US4835000,16000US3712000&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), that's true of less than 10% of households in any of those other cities. As a result, the *combined* costs of housing and transportation in New York and Phoenix[ wind up being the same](https://htaindex.cnt.org/map/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for the typical U.S. household.

Building more housing and creating guaranteed affordable units are unquestionably necessary steps to reduce the cost of living. But equally key to achieving that goal is ensuring that the city grows its housing supply in close connection with its transit system. That requires deliberate, coordinated planning — in some cases, adding more housing near transit, and in others, adding more transit to areas with a lot of housing.

**The location of New Yorkers' homes helps determine whether they use transit**

New York City has the nation's most extensive transit network, and most of its residents have good access to it. About 44% of denizens live within a quarter-mile — about a five-minute walk — of the closest station on the subway map (including the Staten Island Railway); an additional 28% live within a half-mile. (I'll refer to the subway and the Staten Island Railway collectively as the "subway" for this article.)

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/24748721?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13dtF4b6HchNih4hIhkpXVG2lWzDAsXpXVjVRFD18nKU/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Nevertheless, some people are left out: About a quarter of the population — in areas like Mill Basin in Brooklyn, Fresh Meadows in Queens or the North Shore on Staten Island, among many other neighborhoods — resides too far from a subway station to make it an easy part of their daily routine. About 1.2 million New Yorkers live more than a mile from the nearest such station.

Though almost all New Yorkers live within easy distance of a bus route — including express bus routes, which are especially important on the edges of the five boroughs — and others live close to the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North commuter rail systems, distance to the subway, which has a flat fare, great coverage and frequent service, plays a huge role in influencing people's likelihood of using transit. Citywide, a majority of workers who live within a quarter-mile of a subway station commute by transit, but fewer than 30% of those who live more than a mile from a station do.

Residents near subway stations are also much less likely to own a car. Among households within a quarter-mile of a subway stop, 66% have no vehicle — compared to just 21% among those living further away.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/24748824?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17WA08mSMv66b9vKSmsxxI19y2R0aCCV953Laef5o0xQ/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

If everyone in the city lived within a quarter-mile of a subway station and had the traveling patterns of residents in those locations today, 200,000 additional commuters would take transit to work citywide — a 12% increase. And the city would have 400,000 more zero-car households.

That kind of citywide subway access could save New Yorkers thousands of dollars each year by allowing them to get rid of their cars. Evidence suggests that fewer people driving and more people riding transit would also mean[ less congestion](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?%20id=10.1257/aer.104.9.2763&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and[ less air pollution](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20150414&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Transit use also means[ less need for parking](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3141/2245-07?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which can reduce the cost of new housing construction and free up space for homebuilding.

Opening up more corridors to car-free households could also spread housing demand more evenly across the city, lowering costs. Coupled with City of Yes zoning reforms that increased buildability in low-density neighborhoods and dramatically scaled back parking requirements in new construction, more transit could unlock tens of thousands of new units.

Achieving those cost savings for households can be accomplished by both increasing density near existing lines and expanding the transit network. Together, those changes can produce a more transit-oriented city with a greater supply of affordable housing.

**Accelerating transit-oriented development**

New York City has always been oriented toward its subway system, and natural demand and wise city planning continue to make it even more so. Over the past 15 years, almost 60% of newly occupied housing units were located within a quarter-mile of stations; an additional 27% were within a half-mile of stations.

In 2015, the[ extension of the 7 Train to Hudson Yards](https://www.hydc.org/no-7-subway-extension?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) was funded by a[ tax-increment financing system](https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/insights-blog/the-cost-of-hudson-yards-redevelopment-project?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a value-capture tool that collects increased property taxes paid to fund infrastructure — that leveraged a massive upzoning designed to enable the construction of the approximately [4,000-unit](https://www.hudsonyardsnewyork.com/sites/default/files/2020-09/HY%5FPressKit%5F092420%5Flores.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) development there.

In Brooklyn, the City engaged in a[ series of upzonings](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/realestate/brooklyns-fourth-avenue-gets-in-gear.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) along the Fourth Avenue corridor, changes that transformed a previously[ low-slung, automobile-dominated](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brooklyn,+NY/@40.6782065,-73.9825944,3a,75y,37.1h,92.59t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sWEarUlMAZTk2eG5weCZ3ng!2e0!5s20090601T000000!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb%5Fclient%3Dmaps%5Fsv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-2.5869669084726183%26panoid%3DWEarUlMAZTk2eG5weCZ3ng%26yaw%3D37.0955998731216!7i13312!8i6656!4m6!3m5!1s0x89c24416947c2109:0x82765c7404007886!8m2!3d40.6781784!4d-73.9441579!16zL20vMGNyM2Q?entry=ttu&g%5Fep=EgoyMDI1MDgxMy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) space well served by the R train into a[ hub of apartments](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brooklyn,+NY/@40.6781825,-73.9825777,3a,75y,37.1h,92.59t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sR6C2JtgEkaejIc-8m%5FcUww!2e0!5s20241101T000000!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb%5Fclient%3Dmaps%5Fsv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-2.5900000000000034%26panoid%3DR6C2JtgEkaejIc-8m%5FcUww%26yaw%3D37.1!7i16384!8i8192!4m7!3m6!1s0x89c24416947c2109:0x82765c7404007886!8m2!3d40.6781784!4d-73.9441579!10e5!16zL20vMGNyM2Q?entry=ttu&g%5Fep=EgoyMDI1MDgxMy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D&ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Those[ City of Yes zoning reforms](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/our-work/plans/citywide/city-of-yes-housing-opportunity?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) passed by the City Council late last year legalized middle-scale apartment buildings[ on large streets](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/downloads/pdf/our-work/plans/citywide/city-of-yes-housing-opportunity/housing-opportunity%20guide-transit-oriented-development.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in[ districts near rail transit](https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/5ea895beb7154042a694371502ab9480/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). These parts of the city had previously only allowed low-density homes. This change will likely have major impacts; [more than 90% of buildings](https://buildingtheskyline.org/tod-nyc/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) near the subway are now three stories or less.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/24748892?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QonFc2EhYcH4IwkEDL7CfjJtwNu4Z19acinzYc1dML0/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Blind spots**

Not every development change has fully incorporated the need to link transit and housing. The Gowanus redevelopment zone in Brooklyn, expected to add about 8,500 housing units, is[ largely located](https://www.esd.ny.gov/sites/default/files/media/document/Item-VA-Exhibit%203-Gowanus-ESD-Technical-Memorandum.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) further than a quarter-mile from subway stations. While residents won't have to walk too much further than that to jump on a train, based on existing evidence, several hundred new residents will end up driving instead of taking transit because of that distance.

In Queens' College Point neighborhood, the City is readying a plan to[ add 3,000 housing units](https://newyorkyimby.com/2025/08/3000-unit-complex-revealed-for-former-flushing-airport-site-in-college-point-queens.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on the site of the former Flushing Airport — more than a mile from a subway station. Based on experience, that site will attract almost 1,000 fewer daily transit commuters, and require parking for more than 1,000 more cars, than it would if it were within a quarter-mile of a subway station — only possible if new transit facilities were constructed there or if the development were located near an existing station.

And coordinating transit and housing requires more than just adjacency. Despite its new apartment buildings, for example, Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue remains relatively inhospitable to pedestrians; it is dominated by five lanes of car traffic, has few trees and lacks the comfortable mix of public spaces and retail that make nearby Fifth and Seventh Avenues so appealing.

Creating a neighborhood that's more walkable[ boosts transit ridership](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1077291X22002429?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), especially for[ people with disabilities](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692322000424?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

**The road (and track) ahead**

One key need is continuing to implement major zoning reforms designed to increase housing availability near transit. The planned[ Interborough Express](https://www.mta.info/project/interborough-express?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — which is proposed to link outer Brooklyn and Queens and which will be completed after 2030 — is expected to carry[ 160,000 daily riders](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-interborough-express-advancing-planning-active-phase?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). A potential rezoning along its route could[ accommodate 70,000 additional homes](https://www.6sqft.com/70000-new-homes-could-be-built-along-interborough-express-with-zoning-changes/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), leveraging the new transit line as a mechanism to absorb the city's growth while ensuring it occurs in a way that limits the overall cost of living to future residents.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, similarly, should accelerate the redevelopment of land it and other governmental entities own in areas near transit stations. Public agencies can take advantage of[ federal policies and funding opportunities](https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/leveraging-underused-transit-properties-could-produce-more-affordable-housing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and lead the development of these neighborhoods, including funneling affordable housing subsidies toward those projects, ensuring that every subway station is surrounded by at least medium-density homes and providing transit access to New Yorkers who may need it most.

Simultaneously, the City should make sure that the neighborhoods near transit are walkable, landscaped and offer access to public services like libraries. These investments can ensure that housing near transit is located in communities people find appealing and livable.

Finally, New York City should further[ expand](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/expand-the-reach-of-the-subway-system-a-2125-map) and[ improve](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-new-yorks-subway-system-can-learn-from-cities-around-the-world) its transit network to better serve the housing that's not accessible enough. This could mean, for example, a[ new subway line](https://bsky.app/profile/yonahfreemark.com/post/3lahechedns2a?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) connecting College Point, Flushing, Queens College and Jamaica. It might mean reactivating once pie-in-the-sky plans to extend the 1 line to Red Hook, Brooklyn, a rare transit desert in the city's most populous borough. Or it could mean creating [express subway links](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/what-new-yorks-subway-system-can-learn-from-cities-around-the-world) that dramatically improve the transit system's speed.

These transit improvements should focus on the subway — but also improve bus service and commuter rail lines enough to make them as attractive to potential riders as the subway currently is. Better transit could help reduce the cost of living for thousands of residents and maximize the impact of reforms that make the city's housing more affordable.
### Why It Costs So Much To Build in New York City
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/why-it-costs-so-much-to-build-in-new-york-city/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:10.000Z
New York City has a massive undersupply of housing, which drives up prices and exacerbates the affordability crisis. That is not news to anyone searching for an apartment. The [citywide vacancy rate](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/2023-nychvs-selected-initial-findings.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — at 1.4% — is the lowest it's been since 1968, and the asking rent for vacant apartments, as measured by[ Streeteasy's Rent Index](https://streeteasy.com/blog/data-dashboard/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), soared to a record-high $3,730 in July.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/24699204?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PpPkxQYex1-KGisd0zEqmVZypbHdiC5NYMQDbTIAk9U/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Even previous ["supply skeptics"](https://furmancenter.org/research/publication/supply-skepticismnbsp-housing-supply-and-affordability?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) now generally agree that a massive increase in housing supply is needed to bend the curve on housing costs in New York City. At a minimum, that means doubling the anemic housing production level — which has [averaged](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2025/7-21-2025-charter-revision-commission-adopted-final-report-digital.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 25,000 units annually in recent years — to at least 50,000 units per year.

With so much demand for housing, why hasn't New York City's supply kept pace? Part of it is a scarcity of land — there's nowhere to build but up. But even when there is an available site to build on, New York's construction costs are higher than in almost any other city. The cost of labor, materials, services and land are all higher here than elsewhere, and onerous regulations further increase the price tag. Higher construction costs generally mean lower profit margins, which constrain the number of projects that developers are willing to build.

High costs restrict growth because developers typically only build housing in neighborhoods where rents are high enough to make at least some profit on new construction. Absent public subsidies, developers must find projects with reasonable costs to make lower-rent apartments worthwhile to build. Lower costs would boost production by making more market-rate and affordable buildings economically viable.

Let's take a closer look at what inflates each of the three types of costs that developers incur: hard costs (labor and materials), soft costs (financing and professional services like lawyers and architects) and land.

**Hard costs**

The cost of labor and materials — what real estate professionals call "hard costs" — typically account for [around 60%](https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/making-apartments-more-affordable-starts-with-understanding-the-costs-of-building-them?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the cost of constructing a building in the United States.

New York City's hard costs consistently rank as the most expensive in the world, according to an[ annual survey](https://www.turnerandtownsend.com/insights/global-construction-market-intelligence-2025/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by the construction management company Turner & Townsend. After losing the top spot between 2019 and 2022, New York reclaimed its position as the world's costliest city to build in for each of the past three surveys.

And it's not just because in New York City, more people want to build vertically. Building the same building costs more in New York than elsewhere, including both high-rise and low-rise buildings.

In the [2024 Turner & Townsend survey](https://publications.turnerandtownsend.com/international-construction-market-survey-2024/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), New York had the highest high-rise residential hard construction costs in the world: just above San Francisco, 30% higher than London, 40% higher than Los Angeles and more than double Houston, Toronto, Amsterdam and Paris.

For low-rise town house construction, New York was tied with other costly cities like London, Los Angeles and San Francisco, but 75% to 100% more expensive than Houston, Toronto and continental Europe.

New York is also the costliest city for commercial projects, including offices, hotels and industrial properties.

Why? New York City's high labor costs are the primary reason. Turner & Townsend found that New York's labor costs across all types of development, including commercial and residential and union and nonunion projects, are 10% higher than San Francisco's, at least 40% higher than Chicago's or Los Angeles' and double Houston's.

Residential development is extremely sensitive to wage costs. Just look at what is happening with the recently approved 485-x property tax incentive. 485-x offers tax breaks to projects that offer a certain share of restricted affordable housing units, but it also imposes wage floor requirements that kick in when 485-x buildings have 100 or more units. Unsurprisingly, developers have responded by [building 99-unit buildings](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/real-estate/new-york-city-builders-continue-favor-projects-under-100-units-amid-485-x-requirements?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to avoid triggering the wage floors, even when they could have built more units.

Residential developers in New York also increasingly use [nonunion labor, or a mix of union and nonunion labor](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/rpa-org/pdfs/RPA-CUI-Construction-Costs.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), to reduce the cost of building. Union labor is generally more expensive than nonunion labor due to negotiated wages, benefits and work rules. The Regional Plan Association estimated in 2011 that projects that use at least some nonunion labor (often referred to as "open shop" projects) are 20% to 30% less expensive than union-built projects.

Some developers, however, don't have a choice about wages. Affordable housing programs often require developers to pay workers prevailing wages, which are based on union wage and benefit rates. In New York City, affordable projects with prevailing wage requirements [cost 23% more to build](https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/the-impact-of-prevailing-wage-requirement-on-affordable-housing-construction-in-new-york-city.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), according to the City's Independent Budget Office.

Productivity also explains some of the cost differences between New York and other cities. Nationally, construction industry productivity — the amount of construction work produced per worker — has [declined since the 1970s](https://www.nber.org/papers/w33188?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but factors unique to New York make construction still less productive here.

Collectively bargained union work rules can raise costs for union projects, typically by increasing the number or skill of workers required to complete tasks. Infamously, overstaffing is a major reason why New York has the world's highest subway construction costs: The New York Times reported that subway work in New York requires [four times as many laborers](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as underground construction in other cities. This overstaffing affects residential and commercial construction as well. [For example](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/rpa-org/pdfs/RPA-CUI-Construction-Costs.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), steamfitters are required to work in pairs, and additional workers must be available to monitor site conditions, operate elevators, or repair equipment.

Licensing rules and regulations also affect productivity. For example, New York City's[ licensing rules for tower crane operators,](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160515/REAL%5FESTATE/160519910/dan-mooney-s-skypicker-crane-could-save-millions-in-construction-costs-here-s-why-it-s-gathering-dust-in-a-war?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) which go beyond the[ requirements in other cities](https://www.city-journal.org/article/deconstructing-new-yorks-building-costs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), effectively limit the number of operators who can work in the city. That drives up costs and dissuades the use of tower cranes, even when they would save time or improve safety.

Materials are the other main component of hard costs. It is not that raw construction materials are that much more expensive in New York City; they are, but not nearly to the extent of labor costs. Rather, laws and regulations dictating the use of specific materials and methods drive up the overall hard costs by requiring the use of more expensive materials that take longer or require more skilled labor to install.

Sometimes these requirements are about safety. The building code requires concrete-and-steel construction to mitigate fire risk, largely barring the wood frame construction commonly used elsewhere.

But in other cases, requirements are motivated by factors, such as job preservation, that also drive up costs. For example, the [plumbing code](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCadmin/0-0-0-163374?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) requires metal rather than plastic piping, commonly used in other cities, in buildings of six or more stories. Similarly, the electrical code requires specific metal conduits for wiring.

While many of these requirements were enacted in the name of safety, few have been evaluated to see if their benefits outweigh the higher costs — or if the difference in safety exists at all. For example, a study on the [safety of single-stair buildings](https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2025/02/small-single-stairway-apartment-buildings-have-strong-safety-record?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found no difference in fire safety between buildings with one or two means of egress, even though many cities require developers to build two exit stairs.

A final factor unique to New York is the cost of liability and workers' compensation insurance, which is bundled into construction contracts. Construction insurance is substantially more expensive here than in other states. Part of this is because New York State uniquely assigns strict liability to contractors and building owners for on-the-job injuries involving falls under its [Scaffold Law](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/LAB/240?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), meaning that if an injury occurs, the contractor is automatically on the hook — no matter what reasonable precautions they had put in place, and even if the injured party was at fault. Every other state uses a comparative liability standard that balances responsibility between owners and workers. The Scaffold Law increases total development costs[ by at least 7%](https://verticalaccessllc.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/2014-02-study-the-costs-of-labor-law-240-on-new-york-economy-and-public-infrastructure.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), according to analysis by the Rockefeller Institute of Government.

**Soft costs**

Soft costs, which are typically another 20% of a project's construction budget, include the "behind-the-scenes" work that makes building possible: The architects, engineers, lawyers, consultants, lobbyists, expediters and bankers who shepherd a project from inception to closing to ribbon cutting.

The longer it takes to build a project, and the more complex the planning requirements, the higher the soft costs will be.

The cities with the highest construction costs — New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London — also have complex and restrictive building rules. By contrast, the cheapest cities make building fast and easy. Project approvals take[ 30 days](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research%5Freports/RRA3743-1.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Houston, compared to 15 months in San Francisco, according to a RAND study. In New York City, it takes [an average of 2.5 years](https://cbcny.org/research/improving-new-york-citys-land-use-decision-making-process?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to secure zoning changes, which is one reason why most developers choose to build housing on land that is[ already zoned for development](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/planning-level/housing-economy/how-much-housing-is-built%20as-of-right.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This is in addition to the months it takes to get a permit for as-of-right work, a process so complex that many contractors[ hire expediters](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/realestate/renovating-dont-forget-the-expediter.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to navigate the Department of Buildings; it's often cheaper to pay someone to avoid delays that could wind up costing even more.

Perhaps most significantly, affordable housing projects specifically have complex design requirements imposed by City and State agencies and[ take years](https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/research-and-policy/reducing-the-complexity-in-californias-affordable-housing-finance-system/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to secure financing and approvals, with firms all charging billable hours along the way. Each step drags out project timelines, and time equals money: The Citizens Budget Commission, where I work, estimated that a two-year discretionary review increases hard and soft costs by as much as $82,000 per unit due to inflation, as input costs creep ever higher, and additional professional services fees.

Lengthy reviews disproportionately increase soft costs on small- to midsize buildings. Because soft costs are more fixed than hard costs, larger projects are better able to take on the risks of development by spreading soft costs over a larger number of units.

**Land**

The last piece of the puzzle is the price of land. Land costs (the remaining 20% of a total construction budget in most places, but often higher in more desirable or zoning-constrained neighborhoods) are a function of supply and demand.

Some supply constraints can't change: Even though some people have proposed [making Manhattan bigger,](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/expand-manhattan-for-housing) the amount of terra firma probably isn't changing anytime soon.

But other aspects are within government control: Zoning dictates (and often restricts) what and how much you can build; tax policy can make building more (or less) profitable; mass transit or highways make properties accessible to more of the region; and school quality makes homes more or less attractive to families. That is why land costs [vary greatly](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/plans-studies/mih/bae%5Freport%5F092015.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across the city: A condo developer will outbid a rental developer for a prime site near the High Line, but an affordable housing developer might be sole bidder on a parcel in an outer-borough neighborhood. Similarly, land near transit zoned to allow office or residential uses is worth more than land that is inaccessible or zoned exclusively for manufacturing.

That said, the average land cost in New York City remains among the[ highest in the country](https://www.fhfa.gov/research/papers/wp1901?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). To some degree, that's a feature, not a bug, of being the country's densest and most populous metropolis. Barring economic changes, land will always be more expensive here.

But it need not be *this* expensive*.* In cities like New York, restrictive land-use policies — like those recently loosened by a trio of City of Yes laws — [drive up land costs](https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.32.1.3?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), creating a vicious cycle: High land costs increase the cost of new development, which reduces development and increases housing scarcity, thereby driving housing and land costs even higher.

**What to do about it?**

New York will never be a cheap place to build, but the City and State can take specific actions to make New York a little more like Houston and a little less like San Francisco. Government cannot change the price of steel or land-use lawyers, but it can make building more efficient.

Reducing hard costs will require the City and State to improve productivity and modernize building codes. The City could align construction codes and regulations, which are often now bespoke to New York, with best practices from other global cities. Other cities allow the use of less costly materials that require fewer labor hours to install, encourage efficient and innovative technologies like off-site production and [modular housing](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/is-modular-part-of-new-yorks-housing-solution), and boost productivity by making it easier to use tower cranes on job sites. And all without sacrificing safety.

It can also better balance the trade-off between prevailing wage requirements and production. While workers deserve to be paid fair wages, onerous wage requirements can render new residential development financially infeasible or increase the subsidy needed to build. Imposing these requirements on affordable housing in particular can disincentivize more construction of some of the housing we need the most.

The State should repeal New York's exceptional Scaffold Law and adopt the liability standards used in every other state in the country.

For soft costs, the City and State should focus on predictability and simplicity over site-by-site approval processes and complexity, with speedy permitting, as-of-right approvals and simple financing and design requirements for affordable housing. The State should also reform environmental review laws to exempt beneficial projects.

The easiest way to address the high cost of land is rezoning to increase opportunities for development and chip away at the scarcity that drives up prices. Increasing density allows more sites to be developed, which ultimately reduces the per-unit cost of building housing.

The Adams administration is making it faster and cheaper to build housing in some of these areas, and the New York City Charter Revision Commission has [proposed ideas to streamline the lengthy land-use review process](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/four-ballot-items-to-unlock-more-new-york-city-housing) to allow more housing to be built.

Yet much more can be done. Take a wrecking ball to higher costs — and watch more housing rise up.
### Learning from Jersey City
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/learning-from-jersey-city/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:09.000Z
When New York City politicians invoke New Jersey, they don't usually offer words of praise. But recently, one small slice of the state has been feeling the love from across the Hudson.

Jersey City has become a source of housing inspiration for its much larger neighbor. Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president and New York City's all-but-certain next comptroller, has tweeted [enviously](https://x.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1688976991507087383??ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of Jersey City's home building boom. So has state senator and former mayoral candidate [Zellnor Myrie](https://www.brickunderground.com/live/zellnor-myrie-build-one-million-housing-units-in-decade-fund-right-to-counsel-housing-court-lawyers?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), along with the Democratic nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

"We need to interrogate why Tokyo is building 10 homes for every thousand people, Jersey City is at seven, and New York is barely at four," [Mamdani said](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2025-05-23/zohran-mamdani-the-socialist-running-in-the-democratic-primary-for-nyc-mayor?sref=ndQeXqOs&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast in May.

In fact, Mamdani understated the discrepancy. In 2024 — New York's [biggest year](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/about-us/newsroom/pr-20250310?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for housing production since 1965, as developers scrambled to take advantage of expiring property tax abatements — the city did in fact produce about four new homes per 1,000 residents. But Jersey City actually produced 13 homes per 1,000 residents. Last year, this city of 300,000 added [twice as many](https://jerseydigs.com/jersey-city-rental-construction-2024/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) apartments as all of Queens, whose population is 2.3 million.

The discrepancy is even greater compared to more suburban parts of the region. Last year, Hudson County, the county of 700,000 where Jersey City is located, issued permits to about 5,000 new housing units, [Census data show](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BPPRIV036059??ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Nassau County, with its 1.4 million residents sprawled across Long Island, issued permits to about [800 projects](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BPPRIV036059??ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

It's worth interrogating: How does Jersey City build so much housing? And beyond that, how has the building boom affected city life, particularly the central concern of housing policy: affordability?

While an undeniable good for the region, Jersey City's growth spurt has come with some growing pains. And affordability remains a huge challenge despite all of the new development, though the situation on the ground is complex.

What Jersey City does show, unequivocally, is that when municipalities clear the way for building massive apartment buildings right next to transit stations in the New York City area, developers will do so. Jersey City also shows that a building boom can coexist with rent control and inclusionary zoning. It's a model that, if repeated across the region, could someday go a long way toward addressing the housing crisis.

\*\*\*\*\*\*\*

Jersey City is, [by some measures](https://jerseydigs.com/downtown-jersey-city-growth-study/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=StorageCafe%2C%20a%20self%2Dstorage%20marketplace,Image%20courtesy%20of%20StorageCafe), the fastest-growing city in the Northeast. Its population increase of more than 20% between 2010 and 2024 puts it in a class with Sun Belt cities like Phoenix and San Antonio.

However, compared to its high-growth peers, Jersey City is tiny. Its 15 square miles of land (not including the watery surrounds of Ellis Island, most, but not all, of which is technically within city limits) were completely built out long ago.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/24669302?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sn1TKOmKM7vMwXzqL3AmtDjv17sWmwnR7NZn6b24KH0/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Jersey City leaders knew that to accommodate more people, the city had to grow up rather than out, especially near the PATH train stations that whisk commuters directly to Manhattan's business districts. The groundwork for this vertical growth was laid in the 1970s, when downtown and adjacent industrial areas [were rezoned](https://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/22/archives/jersey-city-planning-waterfront-housing-new-park-planned-kinney-is.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to accommodate as many as 60,000 additional residents.

The Exchange Place [redevelopment plan](https://data.jerseycitynj.gov/explore/dataset/exchange-place-redevelopment-plan/information/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), passed in 1974 and amended in the 1980s, allowed projects to reach a floor area ratio (FAR) — a measure of building size and density — of 15 or even greater in certain cases. Subsequent rezonings around PATH stations were even more permissive. The [Journal Square](https://data.jerseycitynj.gov/explore/dataset/journal-square-2060-redevelopment-plan/information/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) plan, initially adopted in 2010, has a maximum FAR of 25 on lots closest to the station.

These zoning regulations meant that for the past half-century, the highest allowable densities in the region were not in Manhattan, but across the river in Jersey City. New York City's 1961 zoning ordinance capped FAR at 12, requiring developers to assemble complex air rights packages or build large plazas to reach greater densities. (The state legislature lifted the cap last year.)

Jersey City is "a rare example of a city that has, of its own accord, without state mandate, pursued real transit-oriented development," said Alex Armlovich, a housing policy analyst at the Niskanen Center. "These are big buildings going up on top of the train stations."

Armlovich describes Jersey City's development pattern as "missing massive," in contrast to the "missing middle housing" idealized by many urban planners. It's a pattern that's commensurate with housing need in a region with an extreme shortage, and complementary to a high-frequency-rail rapid-transit system like PATH, he said.

Much of Jersey City's zoned capacity went unused until the region's economy hit its stride around the turn of the millennium, when employment growth in Manhattan resulted in housing demand overflowing outside the five boroughs. Not only could developers build larger buildings than they could in New York, but they were also greeted with handsome tax breaks and a streamlined approval process.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/24669166?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YkSg3ZTd1Hj43FpL9ghux%5FZBX0sU257lNZ2kphCi-IQ/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

"I​n the '90s and early 2000s, the development community here got pretty much whatever they asked for," said Annisia Cialone, director of housing, economic development and commerce for Jersey City. Typically that meant generous [property tax abatements](https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/09/nyregion/residential-real-estate-140-million-complex-for-jersey-city-riverfront.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or payments in lieu of taxes, called "PILOTs," that effectively reduce a project's tax bill and increase its value. By 2010, a [state report](https://www.nj.gov/comptroller/news/docs/tax%5Fabatement%5Freport.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that $2 billion worth of real estate in Jersey City — owned by big names like LeFrak, Kushner and Trump — was exempted from the property tax rolls.

Since then, Jersey City has steadily demanded more from developers. In 2013, when Mayor Steven Fulop took office, he created a tiered system of PILOTs, making them less generous in the most desirable parts of the city. The city also began asking for community benefits agreements, through which developers paid for improvements to parks, schools and other infrastructure. Then, in 2021, the city adopted an inclusionary zoning ordinance that required projects seeking zoning variances to dedicate 10% to 15% of units to affordable housing, depending on the neighborhood.

Nonetheless, the building boom continued. Between 2010 and 2022, nearly 26,000 new homes were constructed in Jersey City, growing its housing stock by 24%, according to [an analysis](https://rpa.org/work/reports/jersey-city-housing-needs-assessment?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by the Regional Plan Association. And the development applications keep on coming, with 68,000 units approved since 2015, many of which have not yet broken ground. "Our planning board agendas are full," Cialone said. "We're backed up."

Even as it has asked for more from developers, Jersey City has maintained a broadly prodevelopment posture, with permissive zoning and a planning process geared toward efficiency and speed. Many developers that work in Jersey City are New York-based firms attracted to the more favorable development climate. "We meet with them, we talk with them, we work together," Cialone said of the city's relationship with developers. "We're not impossible."

City staff independently review project financials to see how much they can extract from a developer without pushing them away. The city is also helped by state-level policies that require less environmental review; there's nothing resembling the cumbersome New York City Uniform Land Use Review Process, or ULURP, here. And when it comes time for developers to seek approvals, projects tend to sail through in a single planning commission meeting because everything's been negotiated in advance.

So the Jersey City growth machine grinds on. "It has been producing housing at an incredible rate, but in spite of that, the affordability conditions kind of have remained stagnant," said Marcel Negret, author of the RPA report. "Jersey City cannot resolve the housing problems for the metro area on its own."

> Last year, this city of 300,000 added twice as many apartments as all of Queens, whose population is 2.3 million.

For most of Jersey City's building boom, its housing costs have risen along with the skyline. Median market-rate rents increased 50% between 2015 and 2024, roughly matching increases in the metro area overall, according to the RPA report. Jersey City has taken on the region's housing burden, but it hasn't always felt the benefits.

For many locals, it's a frustrating dynamic. "We hear the concerns of the residents," Cialone said. "It's hard to see how much we build and still see the prices where they are."

However, median rents may not describe the average tenant's experience, since, in Jersey City's case, that figure is pulled upward by a large proportion of recently constructed higher-end homes. Meanwhile, most older units in Jersey City are under a rent-control ordinance that limits annual rent increases. It's possible the new buildings are acting as ["yuppie fish tanks,"](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/yuppie-fishtanks-yimbyism-explained?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) absorbing demand from high earners and preventing them from competing for the older homes of more working-class residents.

Census reported "transaction rents" that existing leaseholders pay have grown much more slowly than median asking rents for newly available apartments in recent years, [according to a study](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b996f553917ee5e584ba742/t/67ebf71fd6f1664558bb46b8/1743517472774/The+Other+Cities+Report%5FApril+2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity. The study also found that the number of rent-burdened households in Jersey City declined slightly between 2015 and 2023.

That could be evidence that longtime residents are not being hit as hard by higher housing costs; on the flip side, it could be a reflection of the fact that the average resident is now wealthier and in a better position to afford the high rents.

Jersey City's demographic change during its development boom is also a complex story. While the city's Black population has declined in recent years, its Asian, Hispanic and foreign-born populations have continued to grow. It remains one of, if not [the most](https://www.nj.com/hudson/2022/09/this-new-jersey-city-is-still-the-most-ethnically-diverse-in-the-entire-country.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), racially diverse cities in the country, with white, Black, Hispanic and Asian residents each making up about a quarter of the population. The sidewalks and storefronts of Little India are overflowing with shoppers, while 50-story towers rise up a stone's throw away.

It's also possible that supply is finally catching up with demand and providing tenants some relief. Vacancy rates are up slightly, Census data show, and some builders have begun grumbling about an oversupply in the market. The latest data from real estate platform Zumper show [Jersey City rents](https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/jersey-city-nj?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have declined 9% over the past year, with one-bedroom rents declining by 17%. [New York City rents](https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/new-york-ny?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have decreased by 2% overall and 6% for one-bedrooms over that same period, according to Zumper data. (Rental price data are notoriously fickle: [Other](https://www.apartmentlist.com/nj/jersey-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#rent-report) real estate [sites](https://www.apartmentlist.com/ny/new-york?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#rent-report) show rents in both cities being relatively flat.)

There have also been other growing pains. As Jersey City prospered, state aid for schools declined, shrinking by nearly [$300 million](https://hudsoncountyview.com/op-ed-heres-why-your-property-taxes-are-soaring-while-jersey-city-schools-struggle/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) since 2018\. New Jersey calculates its subsidies based on property values and median incomes, a formula intended to favor poorer districts. But as with housing affordability, median incomes and property values do not convey the full picture. Jersey City remains socioeconomically diverse, with many high-need students from underprivileged backgrounds.

> Jersey City is a rare example of a city that has, of its own accord, without state mandate, pursued real transit-oriented development.

The city's ability to absorb state funding cuts is exacerbated by the many high-value properties that remain off the tax rolls, as well as PILOT windfalls that were spent immediately, instead of being saved for the long term. To close the gap, the city [raised property taxes](https://newjerseyglobe.com/local/mcgreevey-overspending-a-way-of-life-in-jersey-city/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by 50% between 2021 and 2023.

Katie Brennan, the Democratic nominee for the state Assembly seat representing Jersey City in the November election, has [campaigned on](https://hudsoncountyview.com/op-ed-heres-why-your-property-taxes-are-soaring-while-jersey-city-schools-struggle/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) rejiggering the school funding formula by weighting median income and property values less, and weighting the number of students in poverty and students for whom English is a second language more.

"The state is punishing us for growing," said James Solomon, a Jersey City councilmember and a candidate for mayor in the November election. Solomon, a frequent critic of Fulop, the three-term mayor he hopes to replace, also feels that for much of the building boom, the city did a "poor job maximizing the public benefit of that development, leveraging that development for infrastructure, for affordable housing, for the types of public goods that can come through the development process."

He's one of several mayoral candidates calling on the city to do more to specifically promote affordable housing construction. Solomon, along with other candidates like former New Jersey governor [Jim McGreevey](https://hudsoncountyview.com/mcgreevey-elaborates-on-affordable-housing-plans-for-jersey-city-if-elected-mayor/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), councilmember [Bill O'Dea](https://www.billodeajc.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and former school board president [Mussab Ali,](https://www.ali2025.com/platform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is calling for increasing the inclusionary zoning rate to 20% or more in certain cases. (All are running as Democrats in the nonpartisan general election. Despite being eligible to run for a fourth term, Fulop declined to enter the race in order to mount an unsuccessful bid for governor.) Solomon also spearheaded a recently passed development fee that will fund ultra-low-income housing and the city's right to counsel program for tenants facing eviction.

Notably, none of the major candidates are calling for reducing new development in the city. Even Solomon, the progressive standard-bearer, concedes that "rents would be higher if a lot of those (new buildings) hadn't been built."

But there's a risk that Jersey City is pushing the limits of what it can demand from developers to the point where they stop building. The city's inclusionary zoning ordinance has yielded about 500 below-market-rate homes as of the end of 2024\. However, no project has yet broken ground at the 15% inclusionary rate, Cialone said. She believes a few are poised to do so soon.

To keep housing production going through tough economic times, you have to "err on the side of generosity" toward developers when it comes to inclusionary zoning, Armlovich said. That's "not always politically attractive," he added.

In recent years, Jersey City has walked a fine line. It has rolled out the red carpet for developers with high-density zoning and an easy planning process. Simultaneously, it has steadily increased public benefits developers are required to contribute. And it has done all this while maintaining a strong rent-control program for older units.

Perhaps the city could have asked for more from developers. Perhaps it's already asking for too much. Either way, "It would make our lives so much easier," Solomon said, "if New York City got its shit together and started adding supply commensurate with demand."
### The Property Tax Cannot Stand
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-property-tax-cannot-stand/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:38:00.000Z
Most policy conversations about producing more housing focus on creating financial incentives for more development, streamlining the zoning code and rationalizing the elaborate web of rules that drive up the cost of construction. All of that matters, but the way we tax property in New York City is as big an impediment to housing production as any other factor. It's time we focus on that broken piece of the status quo.

Let's start with a quick primer: The property tax people pay varies depending on the tax class to which the property is assigned and then four key numbers about the property itself.

New York City has four tax classes. One-, two- and three-family homes are assigned to Class 1\. All other residential property, including apartment buildings, co-ops and condos, is assigned to Class 2\. (Other classes of property, 3 and 4, are nonresidential.)

Which numbers determine the size of the bill?

First is the market value, which the City estimates using three appraisal methods. For small homes in Class 1, it mostly assesses market value by looking at sales of comparable buildings. For apartment buildings, co-ops and condos in Class 2, and for office buildings, factories and stores in Class 4, it generally looks at the building's income or the income of comparable buildings (this is called the "income approach"). For unique properties like utility equipment, churches and museums, it uses the cost to replace the property.

Second, there's the assessed value of a property, which is a percentage of the market value, that the City chooses to ensure that all properties within a tax class are taxed equivalently (uniformly) across that tax class.

Third, the City Council determines the share of taxes that will be paid by each tax class based on a not-easy-to-explain formula. Once the amount of money to be raised — the levy — is determined, the City Council sets a tax rate for each tax class so that it can raise the target levy.

In simple terms, the math works like this: Tax Class Rate = Class Levy / Total Tax Class Assessed Value.

But it's anything but simple. New York City's property tax system is known for its complexity. That complexity adds significant inequities, unfairness and confusion.

A few examples:

- Assessment caps for small homeowners (Class 1) limit assessment increases to 6% per year and 20% over five years. This, along with the City's failure to adopt a uniform assessment ratio (assessment divided by market value) within Class 1, means that in neighborhoods with fast-rising property values, assessments are kept low, resulting in lower tax bills than would have otherwise been the case.
- In multifamily buildings, rentals pay a disproportionate share of the property tax levy compared to very expensive cooperatives and condominiums. This is a huge problem in a city where the vast majority of residents rent rather than own. [Decades of research](https://furmancenter.org/files/FurmanCenter%5FShiftingtheBurden.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [by the Furman Center](https://furmancenter.org/files/publications/Distribution%5Fof%5Fthe%5FBurden%5Fof%5FNew%5FYork%5FCitys%5FProperty%5FTax%5F11.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and the New York City Independent Budget Office shows that the effective tax rates paid by rentals are higher than co-ops and condos. For the rent-stabilized stock, the Rent Guidelines Board reports that taxes [constitute a whopping 29%](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025-PIOC.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of operating costs — the largest single line item.
- Co-ops and condos, regardless of how fancy they are, are valued by comparing them to rental income from regulated, rather than from market-rate, rental buildings. As a result, some of the most expensive co-op and condo buildings are undervalued, which shifts a greater responsibility for the classwide tax levy to modest co-ops, condos and rental buildings.

These are just a few examples; there are more. Add them up and they place a greater financial burden on rental apartments, drive up rents and discourage the production of high-density housing that New York desperately needs. In addition, homeowners in modestly priced homes are paying substantially more taxes.

After decades of hearing elected officials talk about the problems with the property tax but not seeing sufficient solutions, Tax Equity Now New York (TENNY) [sued New York State and City](https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:f38d9905-d956-47e1-999d-154d8e9d8e10?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in April 2017\. (Disclosure: I am the policy director for TENNY.) The suit sought a declaration from the court that the City's property tax system violated the New York State Constitution and several provisions of State law. In its review, the Court of Appeals, the State's highest court, clarified the law in two important respects.

First, the Court debunked the City's excuse for not adopting a uniform assessment ratio for small homeowners: In response to the City's argument that the 6% and 20% caps were the reason why assessments were not uniform, the court held that the City could both adopt a uniform assessment ratio and comply with the required caps. In other words, contrary to the City's belief, the assessment caps did not trump the requirement for uniformity.

Second, the Court clarified that the City was not required to use regulated rental income when valuing co-ops and condos that would *not* have been subject to rent regulation. In 1997, [the New York State legislature allowed](http://www.housingnyc.com/html/resources/reform.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) apartments with rents of more than $2,000 and household incomes of more than $175,000 to be deregulated. The laws were [amended in 2011](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/rent-regulation-laws/rent-act-of-2011/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [again in 2015](https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/rent-regulation-laws/rent-act-of-2015/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to allow apartments to be deregulated if rents were more than $2,700 and the household income was greater than $200,000\. For expensive co-ops and condos that the City had been valuing using regulated rents, the deregulation that was allowed between 1997 and 2019 almost certainly would have led to the deregulation of almost all of those co-ops and condo units. Therefore, the City could start to use market-rate rents to value those co-ops and condos. The use of market-rate rents from comparable buildings could increase the unfairly low assessments on these higher-end buildings.

The Court also held that the City is on the hook to make these changes: It doesn't need to surrender its power to Albany to get a more equitable tax policy done. The next mayor can take a series of steps now to begin to make the property tax more fair and legal and to loosen the cinder block tied to the legs of New York's housing market.

**Advance fairness for small homeowners in middle-income and predominantly minority neighborhoods**

For the more than 700,000 small homeowners in the five boroughs, equity principles are clear: Homes that have the same value should have the same tax assessment. Yet this is not the case under current City tax policy; homeowners in the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island bear the brunt of the inequities. If you look at the median assessment ratio for all small homes by borough, Staten Island has the highest at 4.41%. That means, for example, that a home that the New York City Department of Finance — the agency responsible for determining property taxes — values at $100,000 would have an assessment of just $2,800 in Manhattan but would be 57% higher ($4,410) in Staten Island.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25164159?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16mzMTp0jhG9G7FZQ4Ic-Utxf%5FJqXiisqI7%5FXhYhb-6k/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Even within boroughs, there are wide disparities. For example, in the Bronx this year, the Department of Finance estimated the value for 200 properties at $802,000 each. Yet the assessment for these properties — which, based on their valuations, should be the same — ranges from a low of $6,300 to more than $42,000.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25163804?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QP2suWS3kWmOrk9MKpZWFyQZPwWME5333vZtEqhklxU/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

The City once had a much more equitable policy, and it could again. Between 1982 and 2006, it [continuously lowered the uniform assessment ratio](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/fiscal-note-implications-of-lowering-the-class-1-assessment-ratio/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for small homeowners of Class 1 properties to comply with the law. But the City has not complied with the law requiring uniformity for almost two decades. It is important to note that Nassau County and the City have the same assessment rules for Class 1 properties. To comply with the law, Nassau County has lowered its assessment ratio almost every year.

For the City, that means homeowners in every borough — and especially Staten Island, the Bronx and Queens — are overassessed. Under an equitable tax policy where the burden is shared more evenly between homeowners, the overall assessment for homeowners on Staten Island, in the Bronx and in Queens could be reduced by 33%, 28% and 26% respectively.

**Doing right by tenants**

Today, the market value and resulting assessed value for rental units, cooperatives and condominiums are determined using a system that significantly understates the value of the most expensive cooperatives and condominiums in the city. Under New York City law, the Department of Finance cannot value Class 2 apartments based on sales prices, but instead must estimate the value of multifamily units based on the building's rental income (or likely rental income, if a co-op or condo).

The question for the City is how to estimate co-op and condo rental income. The City believes the law requires benchmarking against regulated rental income. However, regulated rents are significantly lower than market-rate rents, which means that co-ops and condos valued with those rents would be low. For example, imagine a co-op or condo that, based on sales price, is worth $1 million. If the City used the median rent for a regulated apartment in 2023 of approximately $1,300, the Department of Finance would estimate the property value at around $156,000\. However, if the City used the median rent for a Manhattan unregulated apartment (almost $4,500), the resulting value would increase to $540,000.

The use of regulated rents to measure property value means some of the most expensive co-ops and condos in the city are compared to buildings that include rent-regulated units, regardless of whether the cooperatives and condominiums were regulated in the past.

It doesn't have to be this way. The Court of Appeals agrees that the City could use market-rate rents when estimating the market value for high-value cooperatives and condos. Such an approach would result in property taxes for the most expensive cooperatives and condominiums that are as much as 40% to 50% higher than they currently are, taking the burden off of tenants in low- and medium-cost rental buildings who are shouldering more than their fair share.

Implementing this change for high-valued cooperatives and condominiums could help reduce the tax burden for rental buildings and lower-valued cooperatives in Manhattan and the boroughs.

For example, the current 12.5% Class 2 tax rate could be reduced. Currently, Class 2 property owners pay $15 billion in property taxes. Proper assessments of higher-valued co-ops and condos would allow Finance to lower the rate across the board. A fairer system could lower the rate to approximately 10.5%, under which the average taxes per rental apartment could go from $5,600 to $4,700\. It is one very concrete way to mitigate the skyrocketing rents.

**Stop penalizing owners who renovate and improve their properties**

For renovated properties, the City uses a hybrid method to estimate market value. The City values apartment buildings based on the income from the property. Typically, when valuing a property by the income approach, the value would not increase unless rents go up or expenses go down. However, rather than base the new value for renovated properties on those factors, the City typically *adds* the cost of the renovation to its preexisting value. This approach overassesses owners who invest in renovating and upgrading their properties and can discourage needed renovation and improvements.

**Move toward truth in taxation**

While we fix the most egregious flaws in the tax system, we must also hold elected officials accountable when they decide to raise taxes. Right now, elected officials and policymakers play hot potato when it comes to accepting responsibility for increases in New York City property taxes. While the authority for deciding the amount of taxes each year is vested in the City Council, they blame the Department of Finance for the tax increases.

A principle called "truth in taxation" seeks to elucidate the relationship between City revenue growth and assessment changes, requiring elected officials to explain to the public their decision-making by showing the public what the tax levy would be if frozen (and tax rates are reduced) and what the levy would be if it were increased based on assessment (and tax rates remained the same). While it is a simple requirement, it forces elected officials to remember that they are accountable for decisions about the levy.

**Adopt the statewide 2% property tax levy cap**

Another policy related to "truth in taxation" is a levy cap. In 2011, New York State adopted a property tax levy cap, under which the [amount of revenue raised](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/local-government/property-tax-cap/pdf/inflation-and-allowable-levy-growth-factors.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from property taxes cannot increase by more than the lesser of 2% or inflation each year, unless the legislative body overrides the cap with a 60% supermajority vote (with some variation for different jurisdictions). Unfortunately, the law does not apply to New York City.

Since adopted, the property tax levy for New York State local governments and school districts, not including New York City, has grown by just 25.5%. New York City's property tax levy, by contrast, grew by 71.3% — from $24.1 billion to almost $38 billion per year. If the City adopted the State property tax cap in 2011, the property tax levy would be just $23.6 billion this year, $15 billion less than it is currently.

Would that mean a smaller City budget? Yes. But it would also mean lower rents — and not only for stabilized units.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/25163941?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jBIhy3spaCU6Q82SddBw%5FWTJG1cTH6dOdVMx6zYNTEc/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

**Stop violating the constitutional operating expense limit**

New York City and other local governments rely heavily on the property tax because it is the one tax primarily within local government control. However, there is a constitutional limit on the amount that can be raised for operating expenses. The City can raise the levy as much as it needs to pay for the debt it has borrowed.

The City should seek clarification and a ruling from the State attorney general to make sure they are not violating the constitutional provision.

In short, there are several steps the City can take to increase fairness and clarity and genuinely incentivize production and maintenance of the types of housing New Yorkers most need. Now is the time. As the Court of Appeals has said, the City has the power.
### What Hangs in the Balance Sheets
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-hangs-in-the-balance-sheets/
Last updated: 2026-04-16T19:02:02.000Z
In order to help readers better understand how landlords keep their rental buildings in the black — or why they fall into the red — Vital City asked real estate companies to share income and expenses for two buildings for calendar year 2024\. We agreed not to identify the exact addresses of the two buildings so that companies could share private accounting and loan information.

We chose two buildings, one wholly market-rate and one entirely rent-stabilized, because the regulations, costs and income associated with rent-stabilized and market-rent apartments can differ significantly. However, neither building is intended to be a representative example of a typical market-rate or rent-stabilized building. Each income statement simply represents an overview of one year in the financial life of a real building.

These two buildings also have different ages, sizes and locations: The nearly-100-year-old rent-stabilized building in Inwood is smaller, while the larger market-rate building in Midtown, built in 1962, includes a retail component and amenities. In general, under the [Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974](https://hcr.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2024/11/fact-sheet-08-11-2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), rent-stabilized buildings are mostly older pre-war or post-war buildings built before 1974, which makes maintenance and heating more costly. Market rent buildings tend to be either smaller buildings (such as a Brooklyn brownstone) or larger but newer buildings with amenities (such as a high-rise in Long Island City or Hudson Yards). Within and among regulation types, the cost of running a building will vary. The income statements of brand new market-rate buildings would look different, as would buildings with a significant number of affordable units, as would very small buildings, as would coops and condos. Public housing presents its own economic complexities. To reiterate, these are just two snapshots.

Whenever possible, similar account approaches were used to categorize income and expenses for each building. (In one income statement, we have rounded numbers to the nearest dollar; the other includes revenue and expenditures to the cent.) Cassidy Jensen did the reporting for this project.  

## A 1962 market-rent building in Murray Hill

This 198-unit Manhattan elevator building, built in 1962, is made up of market-rent apartments along with a parking garage and a small retail space. It was originally used as a hospital dormitory. A large New York City-based family-owned real estate development company purchased the building in 1994 and has owned it since. The building was most likely exempt from rent regulation despite its age because it was built as a dorm, not apartments. The building has been free-market since the company purchased it. The company's portfolio includes other older buildings like this one that are fully market-rent along with newer buildings that have a mix of market-rent units and stabilized units. For newer buildings constructed in the last 15 years, developers commonly include 20% to 30% affordable units to qualify for tax breaks.

Unit Mix

198

42 (stu), 151 (1br), 5 (2br)

Highest Rent

$6,700/month

2-Bedroom

Lowest Rent

$3,200/month

Studio

Income

Residential Rent

Rent that would have been collected if all units had been filled with paying tenants. Includes $137,210 in concessions made to renters (for example a month of free rent), and the super's apartment ($72,694).

$9,489,807.00

Vacancies

There were 66 vacant apartments in this building in 2024\. Portfolio average is 35%-40% turnover each year.

\-$339,490.00

Uncollected Rent

This represents one tenant who was 45 days late on rent as of December 31, 2024\. This company doesn't write off bad debt, and this particular building does well at collecting rent on time compared to others in the company's portfolio.

\-$3,054.00

Other Income

Income from a retail space and a parking garage.

$260,032.00

Other Revenue

Mostly amenity fees, including gym fees.

$72,652.00

Total Revenue

$9,479,947.00

Expenses

Real Estate Tax

This older building doesn't have any tax abatements. Most newer buildings qualify for tax abatements that lower this cost. New buildings in this company's portfolio tend to include about 25% affordable units to qualify for tax programs.

\-$2,275,565.00

Payroll

This represents pay for nine full-time employees, including door staff, cleaners and repair people. Includes benefits and payroll taxes.

\-$903,076.00

Repairs and Maintenance

Does not include large capital projects (like the new roof, broken out below)

\-$544,390.00

Utilities

Water, sewer, gas and electric. Tenants pay their own electric bills, apart from cooling in the common areas. In 2023, this was $242,071 and in 2022 it was $270,546.

\-$249,333.00

Insurance

Increased from $178,024 in 2023 and $162,237 in 2022\. Property insurance costs have risen nationwide in recent years.

\-$193,695.00

Administrative/Professional

Includes legal fees to take tenants to housing court and accounting services, plus computer software for the leasing office.

\-$53,419.00

Property Management

Property management fee is 3% of total revenues. This company manages their own properties instead of paying an outside company.

\-$286,120.00

Owner Paid Broker Fees

\-$99,018.00

Leasing & Advertising

\-$81,221.00

Total Operating Expenses

\-$3,885,837.00

Capital Expenses

This is the cost of a 2024 roof replacement. One-time expenses like these are not included in yearly operating cost numbers. Another example: In 2017, a facade replacement cost $6 million. Lenders typically require money for large capital repairs like this to be held in reserve. A new building might require about $300 per unit per year to be set aside.

\-$800,000.00

Net Operating Income

$4,794,110.00

Interest Payment

\-$2,650,000.00

Net Cash Flow After Debt Service

$2,144,110.00

### Per Unit

Total Revenue

$46,565

Total Expenses

\-$23,666

Net Operating Income

$22,899

### Loan Details

Loan Amount

$50,000,000

Interest Rate

Between 3.0-3.5%

Debt Service Coverage Ratio

1.81x

Owners took out a 15-year mortgage in 2015, benefitting from low interest rates at the time.  
  
This ratio is the net operating income divided by debt service. A minimum ratio is usually 1.20 or 1.25, although some lenders might go as low as 1.1 with a high interest rate or where units are subsidized by government programs. A ratio greater than 1 means the property can generate enough income to cover its debt obligations. 

#   

## A pre-war rent-stabilized building in Inwood

This 75-unit elevator building, built in 1926, is located in Inwood in Manhattan between the Met Cloisters and Inwood Hill Park. It was built as moderate middle-income housing, shortly before the A train was completed. The owner, a 3rd generation family company, purchased the building in 2010\. Because it was built before 1974, all its units were rent-stabilized, meaning the New York City Rent Guidelines Board determines how much the rent can be increased each year, or rent-controlled, meaning the rent for tenants or their successors who have lived in a particular unit since 1971 can't exceed a certain maximum amount. New York City has about one million rent stabilized units, generally in buildings of at least six units constructed before 1974 or in newer buildings that receive tax breaks. About 16,000 units are rent controlled. In this building, tenants in rent-controlled apartments either died or left those apartments and those units moved into rent stabilization. Today, all its units are rent-stabilized.

Unit Mix

75

6 (stu), 59 (1br), 10 (2br)

Highest Rent

$2,648/month

2-Bedroom

Lowest Rent

$881/month

1-Bedroom

Income

Residential Rent

All the rent the owners expected to collect, not what was actually collected in cash. $5,199 in rental income came a combination of Section 8 (a voucher program in which the New York City Housing Authority pays a portion of a tenant's rent) and the Senior Citizen Rent Increase Exemption program (a city program for seniors that freezes the tenant's rent and gives the owner a property tax credit to make up the difference).

$1,536,240.12

Vacancies

At the beginning of 2025, there were 10 vacant apartments in this building as owners tried to decide whether to lease the open units. Now two are vacant. Usually, the vacancy rate is closer to 2-4%, depending on the season. Across the company's portfolio, the turnover rate for longer-term rent stabilized units is 5-10% annually.

\-$91,703.00

Other Income

Includes interest and other fees.

$13,923.07

Bad Debt

Bad debt is uncollected rent that the owner doesn't expect to collect. This company writes typically writes this debt off about 3 months after those tenants leave (either move out or are evicted). This debt includes one tenant who stopped paying rent in 2019 and moved out in 2023, but the debt was written off in 2024.

\-$232,450.98

Total Revenue

$1,226,009.21

Expenses

Real Estate Tax

Taxes have gone down in recent years after the owner successfully challenged tax assessments. Expected taxes were $350,414.48 in 2023 and $355,414.70 in 2022\. This building doesn't qualify for abatements.

\-$318,406.38

Payroll

\-$59,775.64

Repairs and Maintenance

The cost of getting vacant apartments ready to rent again make up $34,261.55 of this number. Last year included a one-time expense of $18,300 for lead testing.

\-$244,167.13

Utilities

Includes water and sewer, electric for common spaces, and natural gas for building heating. Tenants separately pay electricity for their units. Decreased from $160,654.39 in 2023, but has increased 27% since 2019.

\-$148,161.94

Insurance

Insurance increased from $69,570.47 in 2023 and $63,869.62 in 2022\. This real estate company has used the same insurer for years across most of their buildings. Property insurance costs have risen nationwide in recent years.

\-$80,575.56

Administrative/Professional

Includes legal fees to take tenants to housing court and accounting services. Also covers permits.

\-$32,571.00

Property Management

Property management fee is 6% of collected revenue. A 5-7% management fee is standard for rent stabilized properties. Because rent stabilized buildings have lower revenue, property managers sometimes demand a higher share of it to make projects worthwhile. Property managers may also pursue other strategies to reduce costs on rent stabilized portfolios, such as centralizing property management in one office across a portfolio of multiple buildings, like this company does. This company manages their own properties instead of paying an outside company.

\-$90,407.19

Total Operating Expenses

\-$974,064.84

Capital Expenses

No major capital expenses were incurred in 2024.

$0.00

Net Operating Income

This number for 2024 should be slightly higher, closer to $300,000 or $400,000, because some 2023 unpaid rents were assigned to 2024 rather than the previous year. In 2023, NOI was $525,006.90.

$251,944.37

Interest Payment

\-$456,468.00

Net Cash Flow After Debt Service

\-$204,523.63

### Per Unit

Total Revenue

$16,347

Total Expenses

\-$12,988

Net Operating Income

$3,359

### Loan Details

Loan Amount

$11,650,000

Interest Rate

3.84%

Debt Service Coverage Ratio

0.55x

Owners refinanced in 2020, when income still exceeded interest payments. Net operating income was $696,796.17 in December 2020\. Vacancies and expenses increased during the pandemic while rents remained more or less the same. The loan was extended in January 2025 and is now up in 2030.  
  
This ratio is the net operating income divided by debt service. A minimum ratio is usually 1.2 or 1.25, although some lenders might go as low as 1.1 with a high interest rate or where units are subsidized by government programs. A ratio less than 1 means the property isn't generating enough income to cover its debt obligations. 

###
### Why It Costs So Much To Build in New York City
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/why-it-costs-so-much-to-build-in-new-york-city/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:10.000Z
New York City has a massive undersupply of housing, which drives up prices and exacerbates the affordability crisis. That is not news to anyone searching for an apartment. The [citywide vacancy rate](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/2023-nychvs-selected-initial-findings.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — at 1.4% — is the lowest it's been since 1968, and the asking rent for vacant apartments, as measured by[ Streeteasy's Rent Index](https://streeteasy.com/blog/data-dashboard/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), soared to a record-high $3,730 in July.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/24699204?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PpPkxQYex1-KGisd0zEqmVZypbHdiC5NYMQDbTIAk9U/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Even previous ["supply skeptics"](https://furmancenter.org/research/publication/supply-skepticismnbsp-housing-supply-and-affordability?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) now generally agree that a massive increase in housing supply is needed to bend the curve on housing costs in New York City. At a minimum, that means doubling the anemic housing production level — which has [averaged](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2025/7-21-2025-charter-revision-commission-adopted-final-report-digital.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) 25,000 units annually in recent years — to at least 50,000 units per year.

With so much demand for housing, why hasn't New York City's supply kept pace? Part of it is a scarcity of land — there's nowhere to build but up. But even when there is an available site to build on, New York's construction costs are higher than in almost any other city. The cost of labor, materials, services and land are all higher here than elsewhere, and onerous regulations further increase the price tag. Higher construction costs generally mean lower profit margins, which constrain the number of projects that developers are willing to build.

High costs restrict growth because developers typically only build housing in neighborhoods where rents are high enough to make at least some profit on new construction. Absent public subsidies, developers must find projects with reasonable costs to make lower-rent apartments worthwhile to build. Lower costs would boost production by making more market-rate and affordable buildings economically viable.

Let's take a closer look at what inflates each of the three types of costs that developers incur: hard costs (labor and materials), soft costs (financing and professional services like lawyers and architects) and land.

**Hard costs**

The cost of labor and materials — what real estate professionals call "hard costs" — typically account for [around 60%](https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/making-apartments-more-affordable-starts-with-understanding-the-costs-of-building-them?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of the cost of constructing a building in the United States.

New York City's hard costs consistently rank as the most expensive in the world, according to an[ annual survey](https://www.turnerandtownsend.com/insights/global-construction-market-intelligence-2025/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by the construction management company Turner & Townsend. After losing the top spot between 2019 and 2022, New York reclaimed its position as the world's costliest city to build in for each of the past three surveys.

And it's not just because in New York City, more people want to build vertically. Building the same building costs more in New York than elsewhere, including both high-rise and low-rise buildings.

In the [2024 Turner & Townsend survey](https://publications.turnerandtownsend.com/international-construction-market-survey-2024/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), New York had the highest high-rise residential hard construction costs in the world: just above San Francisco, 30% higher than London, 40% higher than Los Angeles and more than double Houston, Toronto, Amsterdam and Paris.

For low-rise town house construction, New York was tied with other costly cities like London, Los Angeles and San Francisco, but 75% to 100% more expensive than Houston, Toronto and continental Europe.

New York is also the costliest city for commercial projects, including offices, hotels and industrial properties.

Why? New York City's high labor costs are the primary reason. Turner & Townsend found that New York's labor costs across all types of development, including commercial and residential and union and nonunion projects, are 10% higher than San Francisco's, at least 40% higher than Chicago's or Los Angeles' and double Houston's.

Residential development is extremely sensitive to wage costs. Just look at what is happening with the recently approved 485-x property tax incentive. 485-x offers tax breaks to projects that offer a certain share of restricted affordable housing units, but it also imposes wage floor requirements that kick in when 485-x buildings have 100 or more units. Unsurprisingly, developers have responded by [building 99-unit buildings](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/real-estate/new-york-city-builders-continue-favor-projects-under-100-units-amid-485-x-requirements?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to avoid triggering the wage floors, even when they could have built more units.

Residential developers in New York also increasingly use [nonunion labor, or a mix of union and nonunion labor](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/rpa-org/pdfs/RPA-CUI-Construction-Costs.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), to reduce the cost of building. Union labor is generally more expensive than nonunion labor due to negotiated wages, benefits and work rules. The Regional Plan Association estimated in 2011 that projects that use at least some nonunion labor (often referred to as "open shop" projects) are 20% to 30% less expensive than union-built projects.

Some developers, however, don't have a choice about wages. Affordable housing programs often require developers to pay workers prevailing wages, which are based on union wage and benefit rates. In New York City, affordable projects with prevailing wage requirements [cost 23% more to build](https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/the-impact-of-prevailing-wage-requirement-on-affordable-housing-construction-in-new-york-city.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), according to the City's Independent Budget Office.

Productivity also explains some of the cost differences between New York and other cities. Nationally, construction industry productivity — the amount of construction work produced per worker — has [declined since the 1970s](https://www.nber.org/papers/w33188?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), but factors unique to New York make construction still less productive here.

Collectively bargained union work rules can raise costs for union projects, typically by increasing the number or skill of workers required to complete tasks. Infamously, overstaffing is a major reason why New York has the world's highest subway construction costs: The New York Times reported that subway work in New York requires [four times as many laborers](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as underground construction in other cities. This overstaffing affects residential and commercial construction as well. [For example](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/rpa-org/pdfs/RPA-CUI-Construction-Costs.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), steamfitters are required to work in pairs, and additional workers must be available to monitor site conditions, operate elevators, or repair equipment.

Licensing rules and regulations also affect productivity. For example, New York City's[ licensing rules for tower crane operators,](https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160515/REAL%5FESTATE/160519910/dan-mooney-s-skypicker-crane-could-save-millions-in-construction-costs-here-s-why-it-s-gathering-dust-in-a-war?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) which go beyond the[ requirements in other cities](https://www.city-journal.org/article/deconstructing-new-yorks-building-costs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), effectively limit the number of operators who can work in the city. That drives up costs and dissuades the use of tower cranes, even when they would save time or improve safety.

Materials are the other main component of hard costs. It is not that raw construction materials are that much more expensive in New York City; they are, but not nearly to the extent of labor costs. Rather, laws and regulations dictating the use of specific materials and methods drive up the overall hard costs by requiring the use of more expensive materials that take longer or require more skilled labor to install.

Sometimes these requirements are about safety. The building code requires concrete-and-steel construction to mitigate fire risk, largely barring the wood frame construction commonly used elsewhere.

But in other cases, requirements are motivated by factors, such as job preservation, that also drive up costs. For example, the [plumbing code](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCadmin/0-0-0-163374?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) requires metal rather than plastic piping, commonly used in other cities, in buildings of six or more stories. Similarly, the electrical code requires specific metal conduits for wiring.

While many of these requirements were enacted in the name of safety, few have been evaluated to see if their benefits outweigh the higher costs — or if the difference in safety exists at all. For example, a study on the [safety of single-stair buildings](https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2025/02/small-single-stairway-apartment-buildings-have-strong-safety-record?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found no difference in fire safety between buildings with one or two means of egress, even though many cities require developers to build two exit stairs.

A final factor unique to New York is the cost of liability and workers' compensation insurance, which is bundled into construction contracts. Construction insurance is substantially more expensive here than in other states. Part of this is because New York State uniquely assigns strict liability to contractors and building owners for on-the-job injuries involving falls under its [Scaffold Law](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/LAB/240?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), meaning that if an injury occurs, the contractor is automatically on the hook — no matter what reasonable precautions they had put in place, and even if the injured party was at fault. Every other state uses a comparative liability standard that balances responsibility between owners and workers. The Scaffold Law increases total development costs[ by at least 7%](https://verticalaccessllc.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/2014-02-study-the-costs-of-labor-law-240-on-new-york-economy-and-public-infrastructure.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), according to analysis by the Rockefeller Institute of Government.

**Soft costs**

Soft costs, which are typically another 20% of a project's construction budget, include the "behind-the-scenes" work that makes building possible: The architects, engineers, lawyers, consultants, lobbyists, expediters and bankers who shepherd a project from inception to closing to ribbon cutting.

The longer it takes to build a project, and the more complex the planning requirements, the higher the soft costs will be.

The cities with the highest construction costs — New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London — also have complex and restrictive building rules. By contrast, the cheapest cities make building fast and easy. Project approvals take[ 30 days](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research%5Freports/RRA3743-1.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Houston, compared to 15 months in San Francisco, according to a RAND study. In New York City, it takes [an average of 2.5 years](https://cbcny.org/research/improving-new-york-citys-land-use-decision-making-process?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to secure zoning changes, which is one reason why most developers choose to build housing on land that is[ already zoned for development](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/planning-level/housing-economy/how-much-housing-is-built%20as-of-right.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). This is in addition to the months it takes to get a permit for as-of-right work, a process so complex that many contractors[ hire expediters](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/realestate/renovating-dont-forget-the-expediter.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to navigate the Department of Buildings; it's often cheaper to pay someone to avoid delays that could wind up costing even more.

Perhaps most significantly, affordable housing projects specifically have complex design requirements imposed by City and State agencies and[ take years](https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/research-and-policy/reducing-the-complexity-in-californias-affordable-housing-finance-system/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to secure financing and approvals, with firms all charging billable hours along the way. Each step drags out project timelines, and time equals money: The Citizens Budget Commission, where I work, estimated that a two-year discretionary review increases hard and soft costs by as much as $82,000 per unit due to inflation, as input costs creep ever higher, and additional professional services fees.

Lengthy reviews disproportionately increase soft costs on small- to midsize buildings. Because soft costs are more fixed than hard costs, larger projects are better able to take on the risks of development by spreading soft costs over a larger number of units.

**Land**

The last piece of the puzzle is the price of land. Land costs (the remaining 20% of a total construction budget in most places, but often higher in more desirable or zoning-constrained neighborhoods) are a function of supply and demand.

Some supply constraints can't change: Even though some people have proposed [making Manhattan bigger,](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/expand-manhattan-for-housing) the amount of terra firma probably isn't changing anytime soon.

But other aspects are within government control: Zoning dictates (and often restricts) what and how much you can build; tax policy can make building more (or less) profitable; mass transit or highways make properties accessible to more of the region; and school quality makes homes more or less attractive to families. That is why land costs [vary greatly](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/plans-studies/mih/bae%5Freport%5F092015.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) across the city: A condo developer will outbid a rental developer for a prime site near the High Line, but an affordable housing developer might be sole bidder on a parcel in an outer-borough neighborhood. Similarly, land near transit zoned to allow office or residential uses is worth more than land that is inaccessible or zoned exclusively for manufacturing.

That said, the average land cost in New York City remains among the[ highest in the country](https://www.fhfa.gov/research/papers/wp1901?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). To some degree, that's a feature, not a bug, of being the country's densest and most populous metropolis. Barring economic changes, land will always be more expensive here.

But it need not be *this* expensive*.* In cities like New York, restrictive land-use policies — like those recently loosened by a trio of City of Yes laws — [drive up land costs](https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.32.1.3?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), creating a vicious cycle: High land costs increase the cost of new development, which reduces development and increases housing scarcity, thereby driving housing and land costs even higher.

**What to do about it?**

New York will never be a cheap place to build, but the City and State can take specific actions to make New York a little more like Houston and a little less like San Francisco. Government cannot change the price of steel or land-use lawyers, but it can make building more efficient.

Reducing hard costs will require the City and State to improve productivity and modernize building codes. The City could align construction codes and regulations, which are often now bespoke to New York, with best practices from other global cities. Other cities allow the use of less costly materials that require fewer labor hours to install, encourage efficient and innovative technologies like off-site production and [modular housing](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/is-modular-part-of-new-yorks-housing-solution), and boost productivity by making it easier to use tower cranes on job sites. And all without sacrificing safety.

It can also better balance the trade-off between prevailing wage requirements and production. While workers deserve to be paid fair wages, onerous wage requirements can render new residential development financially infeasible or increase the subsidy needed to build. Imposing these requirements on affordable housing in particular can disincentivize more construction of some of the housing we need the most.

The State should repeal New York's exceptional Scaffold Law and adopt the liability standards used in every other state in the country.

For soft costs, the City and State should focus on predictability and simplicity over site-by-site approval processes and complexity, with speedy permitting, as-of-right approvals and simple financing and design requirements for affordable housing. The State should also reform environmental review laws to exempt beneficial projects.

The easiest way to address the high cost of land is rezoning to increase opportunities for development and chip away at the scarcity that drives up prices. Increasing density allows more sites to be developed, which ultimately reduces the per-unit cost of building housing.

The Adams administration is making it faster and cheaper to build housing in some of these areas, and the New York City Charter Revision Commission has [proposed ideas to streamline the lengthy land-use review process](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/four-ballot-items-to-unlock-more-new-york-city-housing) to allow more housing to be built.

Yet much more can be done. Take a wrecking ball to higher costs — and watch more housing rise up.
### Learning from Jersey City
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/learning-from-jersey-city/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:09.000Z
When New York City politicians invoke New Jersey, they don't usually offer words of praise. But recently, one small slice of the state has been feeling the love from across the Hudson.

Jersey City has become a source of housing inspiration for its much larger neighbor. Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president and New York City's all-but-certain next comptroller, has tweeted [enviously](https://x.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1688976991507087383??ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of Jersey City's home building boom. So has state senator and former mayoral candidate [Zellnor Myrie](https://www.brickunderground.com/live/zellnor-myrie-build-one-million-housing-units-in-decade-fund-right-to-counsel-housing-court-lawyers?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), along with the Democratic nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

"We need to interrogate why Tokyo is building 10 homes for every thousand people, Jersey City is at seven, and New York is barely at four," [Mamdani said](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2025-05-23/zohran-mamdani-the-socialist-running-in-the-democratic-primary-for-nyc-mayor?sref=ndQeXqOs&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) on Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast in May.

In fact, Mamdani understated the discrepancy. In 2024 — New York's [biggest year](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/about-us/newsroom/pr-20250310?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for housing production since 1965, as developers scrambled to take advantage of expiring property tax abatements — the city did in fact produce about four new homes per 1,000 residents. But Jersey City actually produced 13 homes per 1,000 residents. Last year, this city of 300,000 added [twice as many](https://jerseydigs.com/jersey-city-rental-construction-2024/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) apartments as all of Queens, whose population is 2.3 million.

The discrepancy is even greater compared to more suburban parts of the region. Last year, Hudson County, the county of 700,000 where Jersey City is located, issued permits to about 5,000 new housing units, [Census data show](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BPPRIV036059??ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Nassau County, with its 1.4 million residents sprawled across Long Island, issued permits to about [800 projects](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BPPRIV036059??ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

It's worth interrogating: How does Jersey City build so much housing? And beyond that, how has the building boom affected city life, particularly the central concern of housing policy: affordability?

While an undeniable good for the region, Jersey City's growth spurt has come with some growing pains. And affordability remains a huge challenge despite all of the new development, though the situation on the ground is complex.

What Jersey City does show, unequivocally, is that when municipalities clear the way for building massive apartment buildings right next to transit stations in the New York City area, developers will do so. Jersey City also shows that a building boom can coexist with rent control and inclusionary zoning. It's a model that, if repeated across the region, could someday go a long way toward addressing the housing crisis.

\*\*\*\*\*\*\*

Jersey City is, [by some measures](https://jerseydigs.com/downtown-jersey-city-growth-study/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=StorageCafe%2C%20a%20self%2Dstorage%20marketplace,Image%20courtesy%20of%20StorageCafe), the fastest-growing city in the Northeast. Its population increase of more than 20% between 2010 and 2024 puts it in a class with Sun Belt cities like Phoenix and San Antonio.

However, compared to its high-growth peers, Jersey City is tiny. Its 15 square miles of land (not including the watery surrounds of Ellis Island, most, but not all, of which is technically within city limits) were completely built out long ago.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/24669302?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sn1TKOmKM7vMwXzqL3AmtDjv17sWmwnR7NZn6b24KH0/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Jersey City leaders knew that to accommodate more people, the city had to grow up rather than out, especially near the PATH train stations that whisk commuters directly to Manhattan's business districts. The groundwork for this vertical growth was laid in the 1970s, when downtown and adjacent industrial areas [were rezoned](https://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/22/archives/jersey-city-planning-waterfront-housing-new-park-planned-kinney-is.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to accommodate as many as 60,000 additional residents.

The Exchange Place [redevelopment plan](https://data.jerseycitynj.gov/explore/dataset/exchange-place-redevelopment-plan/information/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), passed in 1974 and amended in the 1980s, allowed projects to reach a floor area ratio (FAR) — a measure of building size and density — of 15 or even greater in certain cases. Subsequent rezonings around PATH stations were even more permissive. The [Journal Square](https://data.jerseycitynj.gov/explore/dataset/journal-square-2060-redevelopment-plan/information/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) plan, initially adopted in 2010, has a maximum FAR of 25 on lots closest to the station.

These zoning regulations meant that for the past half-century, the highest allowable densities in the region were not in Manhattan, but across the river in Jersey City. New York City's 1961 zoning ordinance capped FAR at 12, requiring developers to assemble complex air rights packages or build large plazas to reach greater densities. (The state legislature lifted the cap last year.)

Jersey City is "a rare example of a city that has, of its own accord, without state mandate, pursued real transit-oriented development," said Alex Armlovich, a housing policy analyst at the Niskanen Center. "These are big buildings going up on top of the train stations."

Armlovich describes Jersey City's development pattern as "missing massive," in contrast to the "missing middle housing" idealized by many urban planners. It's a pattern that's commensurate with housing need in a region with an extreme shortage, and complementary to a high-frequency-rail rapid-transit system like PATH, he said.

Much of Jersey City's zoned capacity went unused until the region's economy hit its stride around the turn of the millennium, when employment growth in Manhattan resulted in housing demand overflowing outside the five boroughs. Not only could developers build larger buildings than they could in New York, but they were also greeted with handsome tax breaks and a streamlined approval process.

[View Chart](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/24669166?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Download Data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YkSg3ZTd1Hj43FpL9ghux%5FZBX0sU257lNZ2kphCi-IQ/edit?usp=sharing&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

"I​n the '90s and early 2000s, the development community here got pretty much whatever they asked for," said Annisia Cialone, director of housing, economic development and commerce for Jersey City. Typically that meant generous [property tax abatements](https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/09/nyregion/residential-real-estate-140-million-complex-for-jersey-city-riverfront.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or payments in lieu of taxes, called "PILOTs," that effectively reduce a project's tax bill and increase its value. By 2010, a [state report](https://www.nj.gov/comptroller/news/docs/tax%5Fabatement%5Freport.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that $2 billion worth of real estate in Jersey City — owned by big names like LeFrak, Kushner and Trump — was exempted from the property tax rolls.

Since then, Jersey City has steadily demanded more from developers. In 2013, when Mayor Steven Fulop took office, he created a tiered system of PILOTs, making them less generous in the most desirable parts of the city. The city also began asking for community benefits agreements, through which developers paid for improvements to parks, schools and other infrastructure. Then, in 2021, the city adopted an inclusionary zoning ordinance that required projects seeking zoning variances to dedicate 10% to 15% of units to affordable housing, depending on the neighborhood.

Nonetheless, the building boom continued. Between 2010 and 2022, nearly 26,000 new homes were constructed in Jersey City, growing its housing stock by 24%, according to [an analysis](https://rpa.org/work/reports/jersey-city-housing-needs-assessment?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by the Regional Plan Association. And the development applications keep on coming, with 68,000 units approved since 2015, many of which have not yet broken ground. "Our planning board agendas are full," Cialone said. "We're backed up."

Even as it has asked for more from developers, Jersey City has maintained a broadly prodevelopment posture, with permissive zoning and a planning process geared toward efficiency and speed. Many developers that work in Jersey City are New York-based firms attracted to the more favorable development climate. "We meet with them, we talk with them, we work together," Cialone said of the city's relationship with developers. "We're not impossible."

City staff independently review project financials to see how much they can extract from a developer without pushing them away. The city is also helped by state-level policies that require less environmental review; there's nothing resembling the cumbersome New York City Uniform Land Use Review Process, or ULURP, here. And when it comes time for developers to seek approvals, projects tend to sail through in a single planning commission meeting because everything's been negotiated in advance.

So the Jersey City growth machine grinds on. "It has been producing housing at an incredible rate, but in spite of that, the affordability conditions kind of have remained stagnant," said Marcel Negret, author of the RPA report. "Jersey City cannot resolve the housing problems for the metro area on its own."

> Last year, this city of 300,000 added twice as many apartments as all of Queens, whose population is 2.3 million.

For most of Jersey City's building boom, its housing costs have risen along with the skyline. Median market-rate rents increased 50% between 2015 and 2024, roughly matching increases in the metro area overall, according to the RPA report. Jersey City has taken on the region's housing burden, but it hasn't always felt the benefits.

For many locals, it's a frustrating dynamic. "We hear the concerns of the residents," Cialone said. "It's hard to see how much we build and still see the prices where they are."

However, median rents may not describe the average tenant's experience, since, in Jersey City's case, that figure is pulled upward by a large proportion of recently constructed higher-end homes. Meanwhile, most older units in Jersey City are under a rent-control ordinance that limits annual rent increases. It's possible the new buildings are acting as ["yuppie fish tanks,"](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/yuppie-fishtanks-yimbyism-explained?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) absorbing demand from high earners and preventing them from competing for the older homes of more working-class residents.

Census reported "transaction rents" that existing leaseholders pay have grown much more slowly than median asking rents for newly available apartments in recent years, [according to a study](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b996f553917ee5e584ba742/t/67ebf71fd6f1664558bb46b8/1743517472774/The+Other+Cities+Report%5FApril+2025.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity. The study also found that the number of rent-burdened households in Jersey City declined slightly between 2015 and 2023.

That could be evidence that longtime residents are not being hit as hard by higher housing costs; on the flip side, it could be a reflection of the fact that the average resident is now wealthier and in a better position to afford the high rents.

Jersey City's demographic change during its development boom is also a complex story. While the city's Black population has declined in recent years, its Asian, Hispanic and foreign-born populations have continued to grow. It remains one of, if not [the most](https://www.nj.com/hudson/2022/09/this-new-jersey-city-is-still-the-most-ethnically-diverse-in-the-entire-country.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), racially diverse cities in the country, with white, Black, Hispanic and Asian residents each making up about a quarter of the population. The sidewalks and storefronts of Little India are overflowing with shoppers, while 50-story towers rise up a stone's throw away.

It's also possible that supply is finally catching up with demand and providing tenants some relief. Vacancy rates are up slightly, Census data show, and some builders have begun grumbling about an oversupply in the market. The latest data from real estate platform Zumper show [Jersey City rents](https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/jersey-city-nj?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have declined 9% over the past year, with one-bedroom rents declining by 17%. [New York City rents](https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/new-york-ny?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) have decreased by 2% overall and 6% for one-bedrooms over that same period, according to Zumper data. (Rental price data are notoriously fickle: [Other](https://www.apartmentlist.com/nj/jersey-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#rent-report) real estate [sites](https://www.apartmentlist.com/ny/new-york?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#rent-report) show rents in both cities being relatively flat.)

There have also been other growing pains. As Jersey City prospered, state aid for schools declined, shrinking by nearly [$300 million](https://hudsoncountyview.com/op-ed-heres-why-your-property-taxes-are-soaring-while-jersey-city-schools-struggle/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) since 2018\. New Jersey calculates its subsidies based on property values and median incomes, a formula intended to favor poorer districts. But as with housing affordability, median incomes and property values do not convey the full picture. Jersey City remains socioeconomically diverse, with many high-need students from underprivileged backgrounds.

> Jersey City is a rare example of a city that has, of its own accord, without state mandate, pursued real transit-oriented development.

The city's ability to absorb state funding cuts is exacerbated by the many high-value properties that remain off the tax rolls, as well as PILOT windfalls that were spent immediately, instead of being saved for the long term. To close the gap, the city [raised property taxes](https://newjerseyglobe.com/local/mcgreevey-overspending-a-way-of-life-in-jersey-city/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) by 50% between 2021 and 2023.

Katie Brennan, the Democratic nominee for the state Assembly seat representing Jersey City in the November election, has [campaigned on](https://hudsoncountyview.com/op-ed-heres-why-your-property-taxes-are-soaring-while-jersey-city-schools-struggle/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) rejiggering the school funding formula by weighting median income and property values less, and weighting the number of students in poverty and students for whom English is a second language more.

"The state is punishing us for growing," said James Solomon, a Jersey City councilmember and a candidate for mayor in the November election. Solomon, a frequent critic of Fulop, the three-term mayor he hopes to replace, also feels that for much of the building boom, the city did a "poor job maximizing the public benefit of that development, leveraging that development for infrastructure, for affordable housing, for the types of public goods that can come through the development process."

He's one of several mayoral candidates calling on the city to do more to specifically promote affordable housing construction. Solomon, along with other candidates like former New Jersey governor [Jim McGreevey](https://hudsoncountyview.com/mcgreevey-elaborates-on-affordable-housing-plans-for-jersey-city-if-elected-mayor/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), councilmember [Bill O'Dea](https://www.billodeajc.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and former school board president [Mussab Ali,](https://www.ali2025.com/platform?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is calling for increasing the inclusionary zoning rate to 20% or more in certain cases. (All are running as Democrats in the nonpartisan general election. Despite being eligible to run for a fourth term, Fulop declined to enter the race in order to mount an unsuccessful bid for governor.) Solomon also spearheaded a recently passed development fee that will fund ultra-low-income housing and the city's right to counsel program for tenants facing eviction.

Notably, none of the major candidates are calling for reducing new development in the city. Even Solomon, the progressive standard-bearer, concedes that "rents would be higher if a lot of those (new buildings) hadn't been built."

But there's a risk that Jersey City is pushing the limits of what it can demand from developers to the point where they stop building. The city's inclusionary zoning ordinance has yielded about 500 below-market-rate homes as of the end of 2024\. However, no project has yet broken ground at the 15% inclusionary rate, Cialone said. She believes a few are poised to do so soon.

To keep housing production going through tough economic times, you have to "err on the side of generosity" toward developers when it comes to inclusionary zoning, Armlovich said. That's "not always politically attractive," he added.

In recent years, Jersey City has walked a fine line. It has rolled out the red carpet for developers with high-density zoning and an easy planning process. Simultaneously, it has steadily increased public benefits developers are required to contribute. And it has done all this while maintaining a strong rent-control program for older units.

Perhaps the city could have asked for more from developers. Perhaps it's already asking for too much. Either way, "It would make our lives so much easier," Solomon said, "if New York City got its shit together and started adding supply commensurate with demand."
### What Hangs in the Balance Sheets
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/what-hangs-in-the-balance-sheets/
Last updated: 2026-04-16T19:02:02.000Z
In order to help readers better understand how landlords keep their rental buildings in the black — or why they fall into the red — Vital City asked real estate companies to share income and expenses for two buildings for calendar year 2024\. We agreed not to identify the exact addresses of the two buildings so that companies could share private accounting and loan information.

We chose two buildings, one wholly market-rate and one entirely rent-stabilized, because the regulations, costs and income associated with rent-stabilized and market-rent apartments can differ significantly. However, neither building is intended to be a representative example of a typical market-rate or rent-stabilized building. Each income statement simply represents an overview of one year in the financial life of a real building.

These two buildings also have different ages, sizes and locations: The nearly-100-year-old rent-stabilized building in Inwood is smaller, while the larger market-rate building in Midtown, built in 1962, includes a retail component and amenities. In general, under the [Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974](https://hcr.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2024/11/fact-sheet-08-11-2024.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), rent-stabilized buildings are mostly older pre-war or post-war buildings built before 1974, which makes maintenance and heating more costly. Market rent buildings tend to be either smaller buildings (such as a Brooklyn brownstone) or larger but newer buildings with amenities (such as a high-rise in Long Island City or Hudson Yards). Within and among regulation types, the cost of running a building will vary. The income statements of brand new market-rate buildings would look different, as would buildings with a significant number of affordable units, as would very small buildings, as would coops and condos. Public housing presents its own economic complexities. To reiterate, these are just two snapshots.

Whenever possible, similar account approaches were used to categorize income and expenses for each building. (In one income statement, we have rounded numbers to the nearest dollar; the other includes revenue and expenditures to the cent.) Cassidy Jensen did the reporting for this project.  

## A 1962 market-rent building in Murray Hill

This 198-unit Manhattan elevator building, built in 1962, is made up of market-rent apartments along with a parking garage and a small retail space. It was originally used as a hospital dormitory. A large New York City-based family-owned real estate development company purchased the building in 1994 and has owned it since. The building was most likely exempt from rent regulation despite its age because it was built as a dorm, not apartments. The building has been free-market since the company purchased it. The company's portfolio includes other older buildings like this one that are fully market-rent along with newer buildings that have a mix of market-rent units and stabilized units. For newer buildings constructed in the last 15 years, developers commonly include 20% to 30% affordable units to qualify for tax breaks.

Unit Mix

198

42 (stu), 151 (1br), 5 (2br)

Highest Rent

$6,700/month

2-Bedroom

Lowest Rent

$3,200/month

Studio

Income

Residential Rent

Rent that would have been collected if all units had been filled with paying tenants. Includes $137,210 in concessions made to renters (for example a month of free rent), and the super's apartment ($72,694).

$9,489,807.00

Vacancies

There were 66 vacant apartments in this building in 2024\. Portfolio average is 35%-40% turnover each year.

\-$339,490.00

Uncollected Rent

This represents one tenant who was 45 days late on rent as of December 31, 2024\. This company doesn't write off bad debt, and this particular building does well at collecting rent on time compared to others in the company's portfolio.

\-$3,054.00

Other Income

Income from a retail space and a parking garage.

$260,032.00

Other Revenue

Mostly amenity fees, including gym fees.

$72,652.00

Total Revenue

$9,479,947.00

Expenses

Real Estate Tax

This older building doesn't have any tax abatements. Most newer buildings qualify for tax abatements that lower this cost. New buildings in this company's portfolio tend to include about 25% affordable units to qualify for tax programs.

\-$2,275,565.00

Payroll

This represents pay for nine full-time employees, including door staff, cleaners and repair people. Includes benefits and payroll taxes.

\-$903,076.00

Repairs and Maintenance

Does not include large capital projects (like the new roof, broken out below)

\-$544,390.00

Utilities

Water, sewer, gas and electric. Tenants pay their own electric bills, apart from cooling in the common areas. In 2023, this was $242,071 and in 2022 it was $270,546.

\-$249,333.00

Insurance

Increased from $178,024 in 2023 and $162,237 in 2022\. Property insurance costs have risen nationwide in recent years.

\-$193,695.00

Administrative/Professional

Includes legal fees to take tenants to housing court and accounting services, plus computer software for the leasing office.

\-$53,419.00

Property Management

Property management fee is 3% of total revenues. This company manages their own properties instead of paying an outside company.

\-$286,120.00

Owner Paid Broker Fees

\-$99,018.00

Leasing & Advertising

\-$81,221.00

Total Operating Expenses

\-$3,885,837.00

Capital Expenses

This is the cost of a 2024 roof replacement. One-time expenses like these are not included in yearly operating cost numbers. Another example: In 2017, a facade replacement cost $6 million. Lenders typically require money for large capital repairs like this to be held in reserve. A new building might require about $300 per unit per year to be set aside.

\-$800,000.00

Net Operating Income

$4,794,110.00

Interest Payment

\-$2,650,000.00

Net Cash Flow After Debt Service

$2,144,110.00

### Per Unit

Total Revenue

$46,565

Total Expenses

\-$23,666

Net Operating Income

$22,899

### Loan Details

Loan Amount

$50,000,000

Interest Rate

Between 3.0-3.5%

Debt Service Coverage Ratio

1.81x

Owners took out a 15-year mortgage in 2015, benefitting from low interest rates at the time.  
  
This ratio is the net operating income divided by debt service. A minimum ratio is usually 1.20 or 1.25, although some lenders might go as low as 1.1 with a high interest rate or where units are subsidized by government programs. A ratio greater than 1 means the property can generate enough income to cover its debt obligations. 

#   

## A pre-war rent-stabilized building in Inwood

This 75-unit elevator building, built in 1926, is located in Inwood in Manhattan between the Met Cloisters and Inwood Hill Park. It was built as moderate middle-income housing, shortly before the A train was completed. The owner, a 3rd generation family company, purchased the building in 2010\. Because it was built before 1974, all its units were rent-stabilized, meaning the New York City Rent Guidelines Board determines how much the rent can be increased each year, or rent-controlled, meaning the rent for tenants or their successors who have lived in a particular unit since 1971 can't exceed a certain maximum amount. New York City has about one million rent stabilized units, generally in buildings of at least six units constructed before 1974 or in newer buildings that receive tax breaks. About 16,000 units are rent controlled. In this building, tenants in rent-controlled apartments either died or left those apartments and those units moved into rent stabilization. Today, all its units are rent-stabilized.

Unit Mix

75

6 (stu), 59 (1br), 10 (2br)

Highest Rent

$2,648/month

2-Bedroom

Lowest Rent

$881/month

1-Bedroom

Income

Residential Rent

All the rent the owners expected to collect, not what was actually collected in cash. $5,199 in rental income came a combination of Section 8 (a voucher program in which the New York City Housing Authority pays a portion of a tenant's rent) and the Senior Citizen Rent Increase Exemption program (a city program for seniors that freezes the tenant's rent and gives the owner a property tax credit to make up the difference).

$1,536,240.12

Vacancies

At the beginning of 2025, there were 10 vacant apartments in this building as owners tried to decide whether to lease the open units. Now two are vacant. Usually, the vacancy rate is closer to 2-4%, depending on the season. Across the company's portfolio, the turnover rate for longer-term rent stabilized units is 5-10% annually.

\-$91,703.00

Other Income

Includes interest and other fees.

$13,923.07

Bad Debt

Bad debt is uncollected rent that the owner doesn't expect to collect. This company writes typically writes this debt off about 3 months after those tenants leave (either move out or are evicted). This debt includes one tenant who stopped paying rent in 2019 and moved out in 2023, but the debt was written off in 2024.

\-$232,450.98

Total Revenue

$1,226,009.21

Expenses

Real Estate Tax

Taxes have gone down in recent years after the owner successfully challenged tax assessments. Expected taxes were $350,414.48 in 2023 and $355,414.70 in 2022\. This building doesn't qualify for abatements.

\-$318,406.38

Payroll

\-$59,775.64

Repairs and Maintenance

The cost of getting vacant apartments ready to rent again make up $34,261.55 of this number. Last year included a one-time expense of $18,300 for lead testing.

\-$244,167.13

Utilities

Includes water and sewer, electric for common spaces, and natural gas for building heating. Tenants separately pay electricity for their units. Decreased from $160,654.39 in 2023, but has increased 27% since 2019.

\-$148,161.94

Insurance

Insurance increased from $69,570.47 in 2023 and $63,869.62 in 2022\. This real estate company has used the same insurer for years across most of their buildings. Property insurance costs have risen nationwide in recent years.

\-$80,575.56

Administrative/Professional

Includes legal fees to take tenants to housing court and accounting services. Also covers permits.

\-$32,571.00

Property Management

Property management fee is 6% of collected revenue. A 5-7% management fee is standard for rent stabilized properties. Because rent stabilized buildings have lower revenue, property managers sometimes demand a higher share of it to make projects worthwhile. Property managers may also pursue other strategies to reduce costs on rent stabilized portfolios, such as centralizing property management in one office across a portfolio of multiple buildings, like this company does. This company manages their own properties instead of paying an outside company.

\-$90,407.19

Total Operating Expenses

\-$974,064.84

Capital Expenses

No major capital expenses were incurred in 2024.

$0.00

Net Operating Income

This number for 2024 should be slightly higher, closer to $300,000 or $400,000, because some 2023 unpaid rents were assigned to 2024 rather than the previous year. In 2023, NOI was $525,006.90.

$251,944.37

Interest Payment

\-$456,468.00

Net Cash Flow After Debt Service

\-$204,523.63

### Per Unit

Total Revenue

$16,347

Total Expenses

\-$12,988

Net Operating Income

$3,359

### Loan Details

Loan Amount

$11,650,000

Interest Rate

3.84%

Debt Service Coverage Ratio

0.55x

Owners refinanced in 2020, when income still exceeded interest payments. Net operating income was $696,796.17 in December 2020\. Vacancies and expenses increased during the pandemic while rents remained more or less the same. The loan was extended in January 2025 and is now up in 2030.  
  
This ratio is the net operating income divided by debt service. A minimum ratio is usually 1.2 or 1.25, although some lenders might go as low as 1.1 with a high interest rate or where units are subsidized by government programs. A ratio less than 1 means the property isn't generating enough income to cover its debt obligations. 

###
### Local Democracy is Land-Use Policy
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/local-democracy-is-land-use-policy/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:47.000Z
If you've ever been to a community board meeting or other public hearing about a contentious rezoning to produce more housing, it really seems like *everyone* is up in arms. There's a lot of yelling and people claiming that "the neighborhood" has clearly defined views, usually against anything new getting built.

But if you pan out a bit, it's clear that the people yelling at these meetings — which, let's remember, [take free time, civic know-how and commitment to attend](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/27/who-is-the-public-at-public-meetings?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — represent a tiny fraction of "the neighborhood" and an even smaller percentage of the people who will be affected by the construction of a new apartment building or office.

Not in that room are the huge number of people who work long hours and can't make it to a meeting, people who don't think the specific project is that big a deal, people who would like to move to the neighborhood but can't because there isn't enough housing and people representing citywide interests like employers and unions who benefit from more construction and lower housing costs but don't care much about any specific project.

To some extent, that's the way democracy always works — with only the people who are motivated to vote actually choosing our leaders, and a tiny fraction of them lobbying for specific changes. But local governments, and New York City particularly, have built institutions and practices that enhance and protect the voices of the residents near proposed new developments, to the exclusion of all others, with predictable effects on policy. Members of the City Council rely on neighborhood recommendations, and as it currently stands, council members have effective veto power over rezonings in their neighborhood. There's long been a culture of deference whereby the entire 51-member Council follows the lead of the member in whose district a given rezoning is happening.

You can understand this as a theory of how democracy should work: that the people closest to a particular decision and with the highest intensity of preferences should have the most — and even the only relevant — say.

Call it hyperlocalism, and it describes how land-use policy in New York City — and many other places — generally operates. It's not *crazy*. People near new projects do have both specific knowledge about the likely effects of new development and strong beliefs about how their neighborhoods should look and feel. America has always had a soft spot for raucous political participation by small groups, from its earliest town meeting-based governments to utopian communities on the prairies.

But hyperlocalism is also not the only type of democracy about land use that is possible, nor is it the best way to look at these questions. While existing neighborhood residents care about development, so too do many others. Practices that privilege the views of existing neighborhood residents, like council-member deference or community board meetings, are built on an assumption that outsider voices, larger in number if lower in intensity about a particular decision, shouldn't matter. This is a particularly strange belief in New York City, which, as [E. B. White famously noted,](https://langurbansociology.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/white-on-nyc.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has always been defined by its newcomers and transplants — and, for that matter, in cities generally, which rely on dynamism and churn to thrive.

Perhaps more pressingly, hyperlocalism imports a deep conservatism into public policy, putting almost exclusive power in the hands of those who would rather not see change. Local homeowners who like how their neighborhoods look and feel clearly do not care if failures to build housing lead to ever-increasing rents, prices and homelessness (and indeed can benefit from the increases to their home values that scarcity brings).

We can use [procedures that encourage other voices](https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/1162%5Fm41e7ifa.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to participate, including potential residents in new housing, ordinary citizens seeking economic growth, employers and unions. Doing so generally entails that power must be put in the hands of high-profile citywide officials — mayors, most notably, but also heads of citywide agencies, borough presidents and city council speakers — who are known by and represent this broader range of voices. Cities that do this with citywide rezonings and plans have seen the greatest land-use policy successes in recent years, from [Minneapolis' 2040 plan](https://minneapolis2040.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to citywide rezonings in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Austin, Texas, to our own City of Yes.

Land-use policy is downstream from the type of democracy we have. Citywide elections and hyperlocal politics are both democratic, but they are fundamentally different kinds of democracy and lead to different outcomes. A hyperlocal system will be skeptical of change, protecting neighborhoods while rents rise and the homeless population surges. Relying more on citywide officials and decisions will encourage participation by a wider range of voices and, as a result, do more to embrace growth and change, but will reduce the ability of the loudest neighborhood voices to decide the fate of their communities.

New York must choose what kind of democracy it wants to be.

**Our development problems are democracy problems**

Having public meetings about changes to individual spending lines in local budgets would be considered ridiculous, a huge imposition on an already complex process. But we have public meetings about individual rezonings. What purpose do they serve?

In New York, any substantial land-use change must go through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), an early step of which is a public meeting before a community board. [Community board recommendations are technically advisory](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/planning/public-review?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#process); opposition from neighborhood activists, in theory, can be overcome. But in practice, this is a serious hurdle and is usually only surmounted by making very serious compromises, reducing the amount of housing and commercial space that gets built. And then there are all of the projects that never get proposed because developers know neighborhood opposition is likely and will be fatal.

There is an asymmetry of process here that gives more power to those who want to stand in the way of new development. The very fact that there is even[ ](https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/1162%5Fm41e7ifa.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)a debate over a rezoning that [only covers a single project or neighborhood](https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/1162%5Fm41e7ifa.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) creates dynamics that limit new building. Potential consumers of new housing may not be from the neighborhood yet and thus don't care that much about this or that specific rezoning. Important interests — employers, unions — want more housing supply generally, because it drives down housing costs and increases population, creating greater demand for services and jobs. But they don't care that much about specific projects either.

In contrast, opposition clusters around individual projects. Public meetings help organize this opposition. Organizing people in politics is notoriously difficult. But a big public meeting about a specific project provides local activists with a focal point to organize around and a way to monitor who shows up (or even — gasp — supports a rezoning). The public meeting requirement is effectively a subsidy to opponents of projects, a chance for all those who are against it to gather and marshal their arguments.

Further, public meetings are particularly influential because of the way elections work in New York.[ ](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=1122422&ref=vitalcitynyc.org)Members of the City Council are functionally elected in [low-turnout, low-information primary elections](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=1122422&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), in which the same voices you hear at community board meetings — local homeowners most notably — dominate. The absence of strong party organizations in local legislatures usually leads to ["member deference,"](https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/4488?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Abstract,housing%20as%2Dof%2Dright.) or a strong norm that City Council members get veto power over rezonings in their district.

This is roughly how it came to be that former Council Member Carlos Menchaca [killed the redevelopment of Industry City](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2020/08/why-industry-city-rezoning-is-failing/175744/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in Sunset Park; that Council Member Raphael Salamanca [stopped the rezoning of Southern Boulevard](https://www.welcome2thebronx.com/2020/01/southern-boulevard-rezoning-is-rejected-by-councilmember-effectively-killing-it/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the Bronx and that then-Council Members Antonio Reynoso and Raphael Espinal [blocked dense new housing in Bushwick](https://citylimits.org/downzoning-differences-clash-over-housing-projections-led-to-bushwick-stalemate/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

The result is hyperlocalism. The loudest neighborhood voices have the ability to veto or change new projects, meaning far too little gets built.

**The better way**

We can't easily change the way people think, but we can retool the procedural dynamics to stop putting a thumb on the scale to effectively advantage antidevelopment forces at nearly every turn.

Big cities can pass citywide text amendments that change land-use policy for all similar neighborhoods, as New York City did with its[ City of Yes](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/plans-studies/city-of-yes/housing-opportunity/housing-opportunity-guide-illustrated.pdf?r=1001&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and[ Zoning for Quality and Affordability](https://council.nyc.gov/land-use/plans/mih-zqa/zqa/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) amendments. Cities can adopt citywide plans, which require them to zone in accordance with the plan's commitments, [as Minneapolis did](https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/comprehensive-zoning-reform-in-minneapolis-mn/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in its widely hailed[ Minneapolis 2040](https://minneapolis2040.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) plan.[ ](https://texaslawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/SchleicherHills.printer.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)Cities can leave [more power in the hands of Mayors](https://texaslawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/SchleicherHills.printer.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and their appointees, who are well known by and thus accountable to the public. [The recommendations by the Charter Revision Commission ](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2025/7-21-2025-charter-revision-commission-adopted-final-report-digital.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)that will be on the ballot in November are designed to encourage a more citywide perspective on land-use policy. States can either directly preempt local zoning, as we've seen on different issues in[ California](https://cayimby.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CAY-ADU%5FReport-2024-v4.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org),[ Montana](https://www.sightline.org/2025/04/25/montanas-housing-miracle-strikes-twice/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and[ Texas](https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/16/texas-legislature-housing-bills/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), or set targets for new housing supply for jurisdictions, as we've seen in[ Massachusetts](https://spectrumlocalnews.com/charlotte/supreme-court/news/2025/06/04/mbta-communities-law-augustus-compliance-massachusetts?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and[ California](https://reason.com/2021/02/09/california-massively-increased-the-amount-of-housing-the-bay-area-has-to-allow-yimby-lawsuit-says-eh-could-be-more/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Each of these strategies has its own challenges. But the reason to pursue them is that they force a broader group of people and groups to get involved in deciding how much housing and commercial space should be allowed to be built. They usually lead to more liberal outcomes — i.e., allowing more building — than does hyperlocalism, because they consider the voices of those harmed by excessive zoning.

Hyperlocalism isn't inevitable or necessary. It has done great harm to our economy. We should try something different.
### The Misunderstood Urban NIMBY
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-misunderstood-urban-nimby/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T18:36:14.000Z
One of the most consequential political battles of the 21st century does not cleanly map onto our ordinary ideological lines. But it does lean heavily on easy cultural stereotypes — ones we need to get past if we're going to build the housing we need to build and to understand the limits of ["just building."](https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/11/a-yimby-and-a-left-nimby-duke-it-out?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)

Here's a cursory sketch of the two ideological camps, purposely oversimplified. Spurred by ever-escalating housing prices in desirable urban spaces, the YIMBY ("yes in my backyard") movement — now seemingly absorbed into the prodevelopment, regulation-critical abundance movement incited by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's [book of the same title](https://bookshop.org/p/books/abundance-what-progress-takes-derek-thompson/20165403?ean=9781668023488&utm%5Fsource=google&utm%5Fmedium=cpc&utm%5Fcampaign=coop%5Fs&s&utm%5Fcontent=s&s%5Fdsa&utm%5Fsource=google&utm%5Fmedium=paid%5Fsearch&utm%5Fcampaign=bookshop%5Fdsa%5Fsands&utm%5Fterm=&utm%5Fcontent=176349376953&utm%5Fpage=%7Blpurlpath%7D&gclid=Cj0KCQjwzaXFBhDlARIsAFPv-u9l66oJAgJc-IssLkk-nnTkZAXShe7dNCwjxFDqzvHyffBrn42GqxoaAqmcEALw%5FwcB&gad%5Fsource=1&gad%5Fcampaignid=22224636854&gbraid=0AAAAACfld40HyUpzFlkNlPMazoL1CGoQX) from this March — calls for a dramatic reduction in regulatory barriers to building, including an overhaul of our country's Byzantine zoning systems and an elimination of rules that prevent development, such as mandatory parking minimums and height maximums for residential buildings. The YIMBY movement has taken fire from both conservative forces that seek to protect incumbent advantages and leftists who deeply distrust both deregulation and the corporate interests that build and own residential real estate.

YIMBYs' foil is NIMBYs, those who might theoretically support new development somewhere, but, worried about neighborhood character and the spirit of the community and other vague things, supposedly say "not in my backyard" to essentially anything in their own neighborhood. NIMBYs have sometimes been caricatured as BANANAs ("build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone"). Sometimes that shoe fits.

In our current political imagination, the NIMBY is an all-too-familiar figure: a relatively wealthy, white, boomer-aged homeowner living in a leafy single-family neighborhood, jealously guarding property values and suburban tranquility by opposing any and all new housing development. YIMBY rhetoric, driven by a mix of economic analysis and moral urgency, has leaned heavily on this archetype. In this telling, the NIMBY is the villain of the housing affordability crisis, an avatar of privilege defending a grotesquely exclusionary status quo.

There is certainly some truth to this image, especially in affluent suburbs and exclusionary neighborhoods that are most often the site of NIMBY conflict. But this reductive view of who fights against development is also a simplification, one that fails to capture the full range of actors resisting new construction, especially in the dense urban cores of American cities.

In the neighborhoods experiencing the strongest NIMBY pushback, the politics of housing are not shaped primarily by rich white homeowners but by working-class renters, often people of color, who are mobilizing against development not to protect wealth but to defend themselves from displacement and gentrification. These are not reactionary property owners clinging to racial segregation but marginalized communities trying to hold on to the tenuous roots they've established in cities that have long underserved them.

The YIMBY movement, for all its valuable contributions to housing policy, has too often flattened this distinction. The image of the NIMBY perpetuated on social media, on podcasts and at conferences is of the wealthy white landowner who agitates against new building as a way to pull up the ladder, to protect and consolidate their own advantage. In conflating antigentrification resistance with suburban exclusion, YIMBYs risk alienating natural allies and obscuring the complexities of urban housing politics. The case they make for zoning reform and increased housing supply becomes less persuasive when we fail to account for the very real fears that underlie much urban NIMBYism.

If we are to have a real hope of building the housing we so desperately need, we must begin by understanding who NIMBYs really are and why some of them have good reasons to say no. The YIMBY critique of NIMBYism emerged in response to undeniable realities: In wealthy coastal cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, restrictive zoning, discretionary permitting and endless community veto points have made it virtually impossible to build enough housing. This shortage, coupled with the inelastic demand created by job-rich urban economies, has sent rents soaring and home prices into the stratosphere. The result is what scholars have called a ["housing trilemma"](https://0xjim.medium.com/the-housing-trilemma-7974769bdbfd?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): Cities are forced to choose between affordability, economic growth and the vague but potent factor of "neighborhood character" that many voters push for.

> Urban NIMBYs are not reactionary property owners clinging to racial segregation but marginalized communities trying to hold on to the tenuous roots they've established in cities that have long underserved them.

YIMBYs — who pick the first two options of the trilemma — rightly argue that breaking this impasse requires more housing, including dense, transit-oriented and market-rate housing, to absorb demand and stabilize prices.

To advance their case, YIMBYs often deployed a rhetorical foil: the suburban NIMBY who opposes development out of selfishness, nostalgia or racial animus. This figure is politically potent and often real. In places like [Palo Alto](https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/23/fierce-7-year-nimby-battle-in-palo-alto-reaches-a-luxury-conclusion/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Marin County](https://sfist.com/2022/11/10/power-nimby-move-marin-residents-give-selves-hefty-tax-hike-to-block-housing-development/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Westchester County](https://howprop.com/nimbys-banana-and-cave-people-what-they-mean-to-development-in-westchester/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [Beverly Hills](https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-09-04/beverly-hills-is-dragging-its-heels-on-a-new-building-the-governor-says-build-it?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), organized homeowner groups have indeed spent decades fighting off apartment buildings, subsidized housing and even modest infill projects (that is, attempts to build more housing through greater density in already-developed spaces). The pushback to these projects tends to fall under the guise of "neighborhood character" and "quality of life."

These rich neighborhoods and municipalities are the true bastions of exclusion, and the YIMBY critique has done well to puncture their pieties.

But when this critique migrates wholesale to cities and neighborhoods like Oakland, Boyle Heights, Crown Heights or the Mission District, it begins to lose coherence. In these places, NIMBY resistance often comes from people in low-income communities who do not own homes and who are acutely worried about, if not always vulnerable to, displacement. Their opposition to development is not rooted in greed or parochialism but in survival. To treat them as ideological equivalents of suburban homeowners is not just analytically wrong but politically self-defeating.

Making the oversimplification even worse is this fact: In the urban core, many development proposals wind up concentrated in neighborhoods where land is cheapest, zoning is more permissive and political resistance is weaker. Mayor Bill de Blasio's first big rezoning was in [East New York](https://gothamist.com/news/grading-de-blasio-in-east-new-york-mayors-first-rezoned-neighborhood-promises-fall-short?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). These happen to be low-income, often majority-Black or Latino neighborhoods that have long borne the brunt of disinvestment, environmental degradation and underpolicing.

When capital begins to flow back into these areas (often in the form of luxury condos, new restaurants or boutique retail), longtime residents fear they won't be financially able to enjoy the benefits.

And they recognize the signs. Gentrification is not an abstract concept to them; it is a lived experience of rising rents, no-fault evictions, loss of cultural institutions and the sudden appearance of outsiders who reshape the social fabric. The very existence of gentrification as a widespread phenomenon is controversial, and its effects are far less obvious or certain than many fear. But there are undoubtedly neighborhoods that underwent a classic gentrification process, such as Williamsburg in Brooklyn, which went from being a working-class neighborhood to a wealthy enclave in less than a decade and a half, and it's natural for local residents to fear the same result in their community. You can't change their minds by calling them white and rich, especially when they're neither.

In a context of ever-spiraling housing costs, opposing new development can be a rational political act even if its fundamental logic confuses YIMBYs. It's a way of asserting community control over space, resisting economic forces that have never acted in the favor of these communities and attempting to slow down or mitigate displacement. These NIMBYs are not against "housing" in the abstract. They're against the kind of housing that they believe is not for them — units that are too expensive, too unwelcoming to residents who look the way they do, too indicative of a city slipping out of their grasp.

This is not to say that every antidevelopment fight in the urban core is justified or constructive. But it is to say that the motivations are fundamentally different from those animating the homeowners of Atherton or Scarsdale. And when YIMBYs collapse this distinction, they invite understandable backlash.

In six years in tenant activism in New York City, I saw conflict after conflict between local communities of color and the whims of absurdly well-moneyed corporate interests that sought to helicopter in and start buying up land for luxury development. Prominent examples of neighborhoods that saw antigentrification fights that some would deride as NIMBYism include Inwood and Washington Heights, where the [Northern Manhattan is Not For Sale](https://www.metcouncilonhousing.org/campaign/northern-manhattan-is-not-for-sale/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) movement fought tooth and nail against planned construction that they feared would displace incumbent populations; the ["Fight for Sunlight"](https://www.bbg.org/support/save%5Fthe%5Fsunlight%5Foppose%5Frezoning?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and similar conflicts in Crown Heights and Prospect Lefferts Gardens; and the successful [opposition](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/nyregion/industry-city-rezoning-nyc.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to an expansion of the Industry City megacomplex in Sunset Park.

> Gentrification is not an abstract concept to some urban NIMBYs; it is a lived experience of rising rents, no-fault evictions, loss of cultural institutions, and the sudden appearance of outsiders who reshape the social fabric.

The first campaign was dominantly led by Hispanic renters; the second by Black residential groups like Alicia Boyd's Movement to Protect the People; and the latter by a coalition of Asian, Hispanic and white residents. None of these groups were made up primarily of rich people — in fact, they're almost all working- and middle-class — and very few of those involved in them were homeowners. They had no property values to protect. Instead, they had legitimate fears of being displaced and seeing the neighborhoods they love taken out from under them by the kind of rootless white elites who have casually conquered so many other places in New York.

For an example from a different city, consider Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, a historically Mexican American neighborhood with deep roots and fierce community pride. In recent years, [residents have opposed](https://field-journal.com/issue-14/desarmando-desarrollismo/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) several art galleries, coffee shops and apartment projects, seeing them as beachheads of gentrification. I assure you, the Boyle Heights activists were not all wealthy white landowners of the NIMBY stereotype. Yet YIMBY critics were quick to denounce these campaigns as irrational or selfish. They failed to honestly reckon with the questions: What is it that people fear losing? And how might policy address those fears without dismissing them outright? The more the YIMBY movement has grown into an online social club, the less patience it seems to have for engaging in even basic political empathy for its foes.

The mischaracterization of urban NIMBYism as the same phenomenon as suburban exclusionism has real political consequences. It creates unnecessary antagonism, fuels distrust and makes coalitional politics around housing more fraught. Worse, it allows policymakers to dodge the hard work of designing development that actually protects vulnerable residents.

Yes, building is good. But the YIMBY mantra of "just build" is exactly the kind of slogan you come up with when you're fighting for an abstraction; the antigentrification activists, meanwhile, are fighting for their homes. If all opposition to development is treated as reactionary, then the only acceptable response is to override it. That may be politically satisfying, but it is rarely sustainable. In places like Minneapolis or Oregon, where prohousing reforms have had some success, those wins have required building alliances, not dismissing local concerns. That means acknowledging that development can have both positive and negative consequences and that mitigation (through stronger tenant protections, community land trusts, inclusionary zoning and other measures) is essential to any serious prohousing agenda.

Moreover, painting all NIMBYs with the same brush obscures one of the central dynamics of urban development: Supply follows demand. Developers do not build housing where it is needed most; they build where it is profitable. That often means luxury housing in gentrifying neighborhoods, not affordable housing in underserved ones. Without aggressive public investment and planning, simply "unleashing" the market can reproduce inequality even as it adds units.

Yes, luxury development can drive down the cost of housing overall over time. But that process is slow, diffuse and necessarily hard to observe for long-term residents. Indeed, long-term residents will very likely see statistics point to average rent going up in their neighborhoods: After all, a brand-new building of any kind in a developing neighborhood with aging housing stock will almost certainly charge more in rent than the median existing apartment; charging more than the existing average raises the average, definitionally. Gentrification fears do not spring from nowhere.

Smarter YIMBYs have begun to acknowledge some of this nuance, and the movement is not monolithic. But the dominant narrative that all opposition to housing is bad, and all support is good, remains powerful. It simplifies the public debate and hardens opposition among precisely the communities most in need of affordable housing.

If a prohousing movement wants to succeed — not just on X, but in actual policy — it must broaden its moral and political vocabulary. That means moving beyond economic modeling and embracing a politics of solidarity. It means listening to communities that resist development and understanding their fears as legitimate, not pathological. And it means distinguishing between those who fight development to protect the asset price of their third vacation house and those who fight it to protect their homes. This does not require surrendering to every neighborhood demand or allowing the status quo to persist, but it does require humility. The housing crisis is not just a story of bad zoning and selfish boomers; it would be convenient if it were, but it isn't. It's also a story of decades of disinvestment, racism and top-down planning imposed on communities with little voice. If we are to build more housing (and by God, we must), we need to build it in a way that earns trust.
### How Housing Supply and Design Intersect
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-housing-supply-and-design-intersect/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:47.000Z
*Almost everyone agrees that New York City needs more housing — and that building housing here takes too long and costs too much. New York Magazine architecture critic Justin Davidson wants to remind us that one thing we shouldn't cut corners on is good design. Jamie and Justin talk about what architects really mean when they say "design," and how good design and abundant housing are closely related.*

*You can listen to this episode on* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-housing-supply-and-design-intersect/id1794619189?i=1000719740964&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *or* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/0bYTvKAjKaIfH70zB3Y6gU?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*
### California Dreaming
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/california-dreaming/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:47.000Z
After decades of climbing rents, City Hall is finally treating New York City's housing shortage with the urgency it deserves. That was the message of City of Yes, the sweeping 2024 rezoning that represents [the biggest transformation](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/19/nyregion/city-of-yes-nyc-housing-crisis.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the local land-use system since the City's 1961 downzoning. That misbegotten overhaul helped precipitate the current crisis by constricting the city's ability to build more housing when its population once again began to grow.

But for all its ambition, City of Yes is still only a first step. The package is [expected to yield 80,000 new housing units](https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-mayor-adams-and-council-speaker-adams-celebrate-passage-most-pro-housing?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) over 15 years; credible estimates of the city's actual housing needs suggest a deficit of [closer to half a million homes](https://cbcny.org/building-crisis?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Many are the plans to produce more housing. Mayor Eric Adams has what he considers an aggressive agenda, as does Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, running for mayor as an independent.

But the five boroughs' housing supply problem can't be solved by the five boroughs alone. Metro areas function as ecosystems, and New York City has long been surrounded by suburbs with [terribly restrictive housing production rules](https://furmancenter.org/research/publication/ending-exclusionary-zoning-in-new-york-city8217s-suburbs?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (along with a few decidedly pro-growth places like [Jersey City](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/learning-from-jersey-city)). That exclusionary zoning only increases pressure on New York City itself to generate all the new units New Yorkers need.

Not even Albany can touch exclusionary suburbs in Connecticut and New Jersey, but New York lawmakers can certainly upzone Westchester County and Nassau County, which together send [thousands of commuters](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/planning-level/housing-economy/nyc-ins-and-out-of-commuting.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to the city each day, and which could serve as release valves for the five boroughs' growing population. Only the governor and State Legislature can overcome the collective action problem that throws the burden of solving a regional housing crisis on a handful of individual municipalities — while white, affluent, single-family-only communities free ride off the metropolitan area's booming economy.

**A problem of collective action**

How to tackle this problem? Political leaders in Albany can take inspiration from California. California's major cities are grappling with profound housing shortages and epidemics of homelessness, just as New York City is. And, like New York City, all of California's high-cost cities are surrounded by suburbs whose exclusionary land-use regimes have only fueled downtown crises.

Yet Sacramento, unlike Albany, has now spent the better part of a decade preempting local zoning and permitting rules in an attempt to open those suburbs up to housing. New York needs to follow this lead.

Albany has already taken the first fitful steps in this direction. Gov. Kathy Hochul has at least talked a good game on housing production. In 2023, before abundance became a hot brand, she proposed a housing compact that would have loosened rules to allow more accessory dwelling units (ADUs or "granny flats"), allowed higher-density construction near train stations and incentivized housing production through tax exemptions. It foundered in the face of legislative opposition from both sides of the aisle. In 2024, her second, less ambitious attempt at statewide housing reform yielded [real but woefully insufficient](https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/04/23/kathy-hochul-budget-housing-good-cause-421a/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) results.

California, in contrast, has now taken dozens of bites at the apple — and has the results to show for it. Sacramento's pro-housing run began in earnest in the mid-to-late 2010s, when a handful of legislators embraced housing as a top priority. Around the same time, in 2017, a new advocacy organization called California YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) became the main voice for YIMBYs in state-level politics. (Disclosure: I was California YIMBY's policy director from mid-2022 until early 2025.)

With the help of California YIMBY and other pro-housing advocacy groups, a herd of housing bills was shepherded to the governor's desk. Within the span of a few years, California enacted [a series of ADU reforms](https://cayimby.org/reports/california-adu-reform-a-retrospective/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) (discussed below) that produced tens of thousands of new units of housing, [legalized multifamily housing](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill%5Fid=202120220AB2011&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) along commercial corridors, [eliminated parking requirements](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill%5Fid=202120220AB2097&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for housing located near transit stops and [added serious teeth](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill%5Fid=201720180SB167&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to the state's long-neglected oversight powers over local zoning. Most recently, the legislature passed a [transit-oriented development bill](https://cayimby.org/news-events/press-releases/historic-housing-legislation-passes-in-california/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that automatically upzones parcels near some transit stops. (As I write this, the bill is awaiting the governor's signature.) That list of examples doesn't even begin to cover the full breadth of California's recent pro-housing reforms.

A mix of inside-game and outside-game strategies was key to these successes. Thousands of local YIMBY volunteers across the state contacted their legislators and even flew to Sacramento in order to support specific bills. They also organized their communities, spoke out in favor of individual projects in their towns and rallied to the support of local pro-housing candidates. Many of them even ran for office themselves. The volunteers gave crucial leverage to the professional YIMBY advocates tasked with rounding up votes for pro-housing legislation.

And crucially, pro-housing heroes in the legislature heard them and acted. It was these representatives and their staff who bore primary responsibility for carrying their bills from the first committee hearing to final approval in the second chamber. It was they who had to take most of the heat from both skeptical colleagues and NIMBY constituents.

**Sacramento on the Hudson?**

There's no time for victory laps. The long fight to end the Golden State's housing shortage continues, both inside and outside the legislature. According to the state's Department of Housing and Community Development, California has a deficit of [approximately 2.5 million homes](https://www.hcd.ca.gov/planning-and-community-development/housing-element-implementation-and-apr-dashboard?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Homelessness remains at historic levels, and [more than half of all renter households](https://chpc.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/California-Affordable-Housing-Needs-Report-2024-1.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) are moderately or severely cost-burdened.

Still, we've made enough progress for New York to take a hard look at what's gone right in California, and why.

Lesson one is that the legislature needs its own housing standard-bearers who know how to navigate both the halls of power and the public discourse and who have a certain appetite for political risk.

Second, work must proceed on multiple tracks at once. Consider the California YIMBY legislative package of 2019\. That year, YIMBYs pursued a dual-pronged strategy: They attempted to pass a massive bill that might have single-handedly ended the housing shortage ([SB 50](https://cayimby.org/legislation/sb-50-the-more-homes-act/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a hypertrophied predecessor of the transit-oriented development bill that passed this year), but they also pursued a set of apparently mundane technical fixes to ADU regulations, which were putatively aimed at adjusting inefficiencies in the process to approve these smaller housing units on the lots of larger, usually single-family, properties.

California, just beginning to grapple with its housing crisis, saw in SB 50 the value in starting out strong: The bill's ambition matched the scale of the crisis. And while it ultimately died on the Senate floor, the bill helped push housing to the top of the legislature's agenda and elevate the perceived strength of the YIMBY movement. It also drew fire away from those minor ADU tweaks.

Those relatively modest ADU reforms passed — and showed the power of fine print. In 2016, cities and counties [issued 1,336 ADU permits](https://www.hcd.ca.gov/planning-and-community-development/housing-element-implementation-and-apr-dashboard?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); in 2017, they issued 5,153; in 2023, they issued more than 28,000\. That's thousands of new homes.

YIMBYs in both the legislature and at the local level have been building on ADU law since 2016\. Part of the secret to this approach has been that housing advocates approach ADU policy as a single coherent package: they have fought for tweaks related not just to zoning and permitting, but also to utility hookups, parking requirements, owner-occupancy rules and so on. The sheer comprehensiveness of ADU reform is an important takeaway in itself; exclusionary jurisdictions will use every tool at their disposal to block new housing, so any attempt to legalize a particular housing typology must be watertight.

**A cautionary note**

Not every lesson from California is a positive one, however. Take the story of [SB 9, a bill from 2021](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill%5Fid=202120220SB9&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). That bill, which was hyped as [the effective end of single-family zoning](https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/california-sb9-housing-duplexes-20175585.php?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in California, was supposed to allow for the construction of duplexes on most single-family lots; further, it would allow homeowners to split those lots in two, effectively legalizing the creation of up to four units of housing where previously only one had been permissible. It was a great idea in concept, but the results have been disappointing: In the first year since implementation, California's largest cities [approved just a handful](https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/research-and-policy/sb-9-turns-one-applications/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of SB 9 permits.

SB 9 hasn't worked for a few reasons. First, the bill is far from watertight: Some jurisdictions have succeeded in keeping out SB 9 projects through tricks like [imposing unworkable design standards](https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-cities-rush-to-limit-new-law-16647764.php?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and making tactical use of [historic preservation rules](https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/nimbys-ceqa-housing-historic-preservation-19761668.php?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Second, just because it is legally feasible to build something, that doesn't mean it is economical: Converting a single-family home into two duplexes tends to cost more money than it is worth. And third, many people who own single-family lots already had an option for adding one or two additional units: It is likely that SB 9 is, to an extent, a victim of ADU reform's success.

In 2024, a new piece of legislation fixed some of the flaws in SB 9, but most of the underlying problems remain. Cleaning up the legislation has proved challenging, as there appears to be little appetite in the legislature for revisiting the original, fairly bruising fight to pass it. (Another cleanup attempt, this year's [SB 677](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill%5Fid=202520260SB677&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), didn't make it out of committee.)

One lesson here is that it is better to underpromise and only ask your allies to take hard votes if there will be a substantial policy or political payoff. Overpromise today; engender cynicism tomorrow.

Another important takeaway is that economic feasibility is everything when it comes to pro-housing legislation: If you want units to get built, you need to make sure that it is worth someone's while to build them. That means the process needs to be as smooth and efficient as possible, and the rules need to be flexible enough that projects will reliably yield sufficient returns to compensate developers' shouldered risk. ADU reform satisfied these requirements; SB 9 did not.

If future attempts at state-level housing reform are going to succeed, New York's pro-housing advocates will likely need to engage in deeper grassroots organizing, especially outside of the five boroughs; they will need to cultivate charismatic and highly sophisticated legislative champions, ideally on both sides of the aisle; and they'll need to pay close attention to the legislative politics of reform.
### What Can We Learn from Social Housing?
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/when-government-built-homes-for-people/
Last updated: 2026-08-24T21:37:03.000Z
Home is formative, and the particularities of home especially so. In her memoir “Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right,” Jennifer Baum narrates the ways she and her family were shaped by their unique home: a [Mitchell-Lama](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/mitchell-lama-program.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) cooperative she was raised in as a child, that served her as a backstop and crash pad when a young adult, that provided a foundation when she became a mother and that still plays the role of touchstone. [RNA House](https://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/RNA-House/history/50Ann-history-booklet.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which stretches its honey-combed facade for nearly half a block of West 96th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, is a creature of a singular moment in New York City history. It was built as social housing in 1967 within an urban renewal area that, unlike many of its predecessors, sought a gentler, if still disruptive, approach to upgrading a neighborhood, sidelining full-on urban clearance for a mix of rehabs, more contextual public housing and new middle-income buildings. 

Everyone involved in today’s conversation about how to produce new and more affordable housing in New York City — organizers of community land trusts, advocates and foes of Mayor Eric Adams’ City of Yes rezoning, the YIMBYs, [those who point out that even “affordable” housing is affordable to far too few families](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/nyregion/housing-crunch-affordable-housing.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — needs to understand how such housing came to be, how to preserve it and how to build on its legacy.

**What Mitchell-Lama meant, and still means**

Back in 1955, a coalition of state and city politicians, unions and developers (particularly large not-for-profit outfits like the United Housing Federation) met a dire need for more affordable units accessible to New Yorkers by pushing through the Limited Profit Housing Companies Law. Mitchell-Lama, as it’s better known, was designed as the gap-filler between public housing owned and operated by government-run housing authorities and market-rate homes. Offering new builds at affordable prices, the program [aimed to keep mostly white, middle-income families in the city](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0096144209339558?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — a counterweight to the lure of a new suburban dream. By offering developers low-interest-rate mortgages that covered up to 95% of project costs, generous property tax breaks that reduced operating costs over time, and, sometimes, a ready-made site to build on, New York City and State funded the creation of permanent units, kept so by limiting developers’ profits and, initially, placing perpetual restrictions on how much a co-op share could be sold for and how much a rental apartment could be rented for. 

A permanently affordable home outside the market under community control: This is the promise of social housing, and that of Mitchell-Lama co-ops. And it remains the promise, for all those that remain in the program. A legislative change in 1959 meant to spur the construction of more Mitchell-Lama rentals, then erroneously applied to the very different context of co-ops, means that the rental owners (mainly large real estate firms) and co-op owners (the residents themselves) can opt to exit the program if they pay off the state or city mortgage and vote to leave. Many co-ops have stayed true to the program — only 10% of the roughly 69,000 cooperative apartments built between 1955 and 1974 through Mitchell-Lama have privatized, but more than 50% of the rental units, some 36,000, have flown the coop. 

> A permanently affordable home outside the market under community control: This is the promise of social housing, and that of Mitchell-Lama co-ops. And it remains the promise, for all those that remain in the program.

Despite Mitchell-Lama’s success in building social housing on a large scale, this loss to the speculative market of apartments once meant to be permanently affordable — and with them the public subsidy that made them possible — makes the program as much a cautionary tale for our current moment as it is a pinnacle of a brighter past. Today, we are engaged in a perpetual scramble to build enough affordable homes to replace what we lose as affordability restrictions on publicly subsidized homes sunset. Mitchell-Lama was in some ways a harbinger of this present, an example of how government shifted from building upon its own investments through the maintenance of public goods to a recurring crisis of letting those investments wither, necessitating additional, more expensive ones anew. 

**More than a morality tale**

This aerial view — an understanding of the scale of the challenge or analysis of how we got here — gets inconsistent attention in Baum’s memoir-cum-argument for replicating the likes of RNA House. But her reminiscences of that building, and the many kinds of structure it provided, are both useful and necessary. They serve as a kind of oral history of the lived experience of a housing program, injecting the less quantifiable components into a policy conversation so stuck on numbers that we too often talk about housing as units — even widgets — and not as homes. 

Baum’s view of her home, be that RNA House or the wider neighborhood, is unquestionably nostalgic. Her memories, and those she sources from former neighbors through Facebook reconnections, are imbued with an “everything was better then” gloss that allows her to look back at her beloved city and claim that “nowhere had the unified effort to provide a decent home for all been as comprehensive or successful as in New York City.” As the title states, she considers the era that gave rise to her home as one “when the idea that housing is a human right was a guiding principle of politics, urban design and planning.” 

These sweeping statements are historically questionable — not the least summing up the multifaceted, watershed Housing Act of 1949 as “inspired yet flawed” — but Baum the memoirist can be forgiven for extrapolating from the often inspiring snapshots of her co-op and her neighborhood. There’s the uncannily heartwarming image of the group of neighborhood kids of many colors tipping a departed pet into the building incinerator in a makeshift funeral. Down the hall, a group of mothers distribute food among themselves after a pre-dawn trip to buy from wholesalers at Hunts Point, a co-op operating within the co-op. Upstairs, Baum’s mother studies, taking advantage of the low maintenance to go back to school after Baum’s father tragically dies on a visit to her fifth-grade classroom. 

This death understandably reverberates through Baum’s life, and its echoes reveal the contours of her home’s significance. RNA House “provided a ballast” when her father passed, though at the time “she had no sense how important Mitchell-Lama’s social justice values were to our mother or that our father's spirit lived on in the building.” This link between Baum’s father and her co-op is made first by his involvement on its board. With his death, it’s cemented in the way that RNA House can be said to care for her. The loss of his income doesn’t lead to an eviction; rather, it results in a reduction in her family’s housing costs. When she’s yearning to return to New York with her future husband and their child, RNA House provides a leg up: Her name rises to the top of the waitlist, and she’s able to buy into the co-op herself. For Baum, the state, in the form of this publicly subsidized opportunity at middle-income homeownership, isn’t a nanny. It’s a dad.

The way the Mitchell-Lama model adapts to the changing circumstances of Baum’s family should be instructive for any housing policy. But what does Baum have to say about how we get there, and then, how we maintain such decommodified housing in an era of runaway housing costs? In her telling, the answer is ethical, inspired individuals. She largely gives credit for the success of Mitchell-Lama, and the vitality of her neighborhood, to “enlightened politicians, urban planners and architects,” and frequently ascribes normative value to the formal aspects of the spaces they shaped, referring to her parents’ pursuit of the “morality of modernism” — so much so that modern architecture “was her \[mother’s\] god.” 

> For Baum, the state, in the form of this publicly subsidized opportunity at middle-income homeownership, isn’t a nanny. It’s a dad.

As for maintaining this housing, little attention is paid to the ongoing acts of governance of the co-op, by its resident-owners or the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Instead, she emphasizes the background and morals of RNA’s cooperators, with particular reverence given to Jewish families like hers schooled by labor unions. For Baum’s family and city alike, the halcyon days of social housing’s arrival on the Upper West Side are presented as the progressive summit of a family *and* of a city. Everything that follows — Baum’s moves to Vancouver, Paris and Arizona, and New York’s turn towards luxury and unaffordability — is a downward spiral.

This lament is both warranted and damaging. Her focus on individuals is similarly both helpful, in documenting the way good housing policy shapes lives, and harmful, in attributing the success of that policy almost solely to personal initiative. The utopian rendering of RNA House and the Upper West Side obscures the contentious, impure politics that brought it into being. Baum does acknowledge the role of community organizations like Strycker’s Bay Neighborhood Council and her building’s sponsor, the Riverside Neighborhood Assembly, in realizing, for a time, a racially and economically integrated Upper West Side. But that acknowledgment pales in comparison to her lionization of bureaucrats, who, without the agitation of the likes of Strycker’s Bay, would have planned for the kind of luxury-tinged Upper West Side she now rails against. 

Her depiction of the 60s and 70s as an era in which housing justice was broadly accepted and enshrined in policy like Mitchell-Lama transforms what was, in truth, political pragmatism within a substantially different economic landscape into a too-tidy narrative of moral uplift. It is true that a different idea of what housing is for is embodied by the social housing that came from the program. But in this retelling, the less straightforwardly progressive aspects of the program aren’t given the necessary attention. For instance, [the integration that occurred under the program ran counter to the policy’s original intent of keeping the white middle-class in city limits](https://www.academia.edu/43531790/Housing%5Fthe%5FCo%5Fop%5FA%5FMicro%5Fpolitical%5FManifesto%5FClaims%5Ffor%5FAction?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). [Mitchell-Lama’s incentives were also so generous that it made for low-risk, if “limited,” profits for the developers](https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501716430/freedomland/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that employed the modernist architects Baum’s mother deifies. 

In so doing, Baum, like others who exclusively lament the state of the city, pays too little attention to the workaday governance and strategic organizing that has allowed elements of the era she reveres to endure, just as new policies and politics that could usher in a renaissance of social housing in New York begin to take root. 

**A gift of honesty**

In the course of the book, Baum does, however, deliver key information to aid the cause of preserving the social housing we already have. In recent decades, the question of privatization has raised its head at RNA House, presenting the possibility that cooperators could vote to leave the Mitchell-Lama program and remove the resale restrictions that have kept their homes affordable for generations. These homeowners could then sell their shares for any sum they’d like, and future generations would lose out on the opportunity that served, and shaped, her family so significantly. This variety of privatization is meaningfully distinct from the kinds of real estate transactions among large corporations that led to the erosion of other key sources of housing built for the public like [Stuyvesant Town](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/oct/29/stuyvesant-town-corporate-greed-affordable-housing-new-york?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), or the growing role of private operators in the renovation and management of public housing through programs like [NYCHA’s Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT)](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycha/about/pact.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). In the case of Mitchell-Lama co-ops, the greatest beneficiaries of this already privately owned and managed social housing are the possible agents behind their elimination, and with them, the public purpose enshrined in their construction. 

In this context, Baum’s greatest gift is her honesty about her changing relationship to her co-op, from embarrassment in youth, to reverence during her political awakening, to the more complicated ambivalence of adulthood. Late in the book, she sits on the floor of her childhood home waiting to turn it back over to the co-op. The inevitability of her mother’s passing means her apartment at RNA will now be passed to the next family on the waitlist. She shares, “As my mother aged, the reality that we'd lose the apartment became more pronounced, and I'd found myself partially holding out hope for privatization, not due to the attraction of a real estate sale windfall, but to keep the apartment in the family.” She adds: “Morally, philosophically, intellectually, I understood the building should stay public; privately, though, I was already mourning the loss of my childhood home.” Years later, with no RNA shares to her name and thus no skin in the game, Baum “learned the family who moved into our apartment were in favor of \[privatizing\], leaving me gasping, as though I’d lose #14E all over again. If RNA remained public, my mother’s common good values and spirit would live on, and apartments would continue to go to families in need. If it were to privatize, all that my mother stood for would vanish.”

In telling her family history as the housing history that it is, and owning up to how her personal attachments to home collide with the prerogatives of the housing policy she desires, Baum in fact demonstrates the need for more than just enlightened individuals to realize her vision. The same ethical individuals who once built a co-op can also, in other circumstances, destroy it. Which is why collective action, state regulation and an ecosystem of support are needed to sustain housing that properly serves its role as a public good. Which is also why housing policymakers must also talk about more than units. In crafting good policy, they must reconnect with the fact that such units are in fact homes, imbued with emotions and meaning that deeply affect the success of the programs that aim to build and maintain them.
### The Promise of Floating Zoning
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-promise-of-floating-zoning/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T20:11:40.000Z
On the banks of Lake Erie in 1922, a small village abutting Cleveland, Ohio, passed a controversial law. Under the new ordinance, the village drew lines across its jurisdiction and, within the polygons those lines created, set requirements for the type of buildings that could be built in each.

One landowner, Ambler Realty, sued the village, claiming an infringement of its property rights. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled against Ambler, allowing a new form of urban policy: zoning.

New York City, as it often is, was already ahead of the curve. The City had [established](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/downloads/pdf/zoning/zoning-nyc/1916%5Fzoning%5Fresolution.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) the United States’ first zoning code in 1916, and New York State courts [had signed off on its legality](https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914a89aadd7b049347005c6?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Now, such rules would be permissible nationwide.

The type of zoning that Ohio village instituted — setting fixed spatial boundaries for building types, dividing up residential, industrial, commercial and other uses — came to be called Euclidean zoning; not for the Greek mathematician, but after the defendant in the suit, the Village of Euclid. Today, Euclidean zoning is the most [common](https://northamericancommunityhub.com/euclidean-zoning-explained/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) form of regulating land use across the country.

Euclidean zoning makes intuitive sense. Separating hazardous factories from places where people live is uncontroversial, as is relegating Times Square to only one tourist-crowded zone. But the top-down urban planning scheme, under which neighborhoods could be categorized and divided, created opportunities for discrimination. New York’s original 1916 zoning code pushed garment factories and their working-class employees [out of the tony Fifth Avenue shopping corridor](https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/items/f137a8fa-5e52-4c55-8952-3ffa768c5b97?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Districts zoned for only single-family houses made those areas [too expensive for low-income residents](https://citylimits.org/opinion-how-exclusionary-zoning-perpetuates-segregation-in-new-york/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), dividing wealthier households on larger lots from low-income neighborhoods.

The Godlike planning power of Euclidean zoning also made it easy to treat poor neighborhoods differently. In her book [“Noxious New York,”](https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/2798/Noxious-New-YorkThe-Racial-Politics-of-Urban?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) Julie Szeargued that Euclidean zoning tools allowed planners to spare whiter, wealthier communities from the brunt of environmental hazards — shunting high-polluting industrial zones to locate next to already disadvantaged residential neighborhoods.

Even the most well-intentioned Euclidean system has elements that are too rigid for modern urban development. Cities change, and so do patterns of demand for land. There is no clearer example than the past several decades in New York City, where many people want to live (Yay! [Urban density is good!](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/upshot/coronavirus-urban-density-risks.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)), but limited supply is [pushing up rents](https://www.newsweek.com/new-york-rent-hits-all-time-high-1945346?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and [pushing out our neighbors](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/nyregion/black-residents-nyc.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Euclidean zoning makes it hard to transition neighborhood-use type when needs have shifted. (On this front, New York’s current zoning is actually *stricter* than the kind in Euclid, Ohio: Early Euclidean zones were “cumulative,” which meant that putatively higher-value uses, like single-family housing, could locate in lower-value districts like industrial lots. Today, New York’s housing cannot be built in industrial zones without a rezoning.)

Transitioning is what New York neighborhoods do best, but under our current land-use system, it takes time for the built environment to catch up. Wall Street hosts [more apartments and fewer Wall Street firms](https://nyublueprint.substack.com/p/transforming-the-financial-district) — but that took long years of[ clever regulatory rethinking](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/office-to-residential-conversions-in-nyc-economics-and-fiscal-estimates/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). When a coalition of elected and planning officials sought to rezone the Garment District — no longer home to many garment factories, and in a top-tier transit zone — for housing, it took nine months to get from [rezoning application](https://zap.planning.nyc.gov/projects/2024M0142?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in late 2024 to [City Council approval](https://www.6sqft.com/city-council-approves-midtown-south-rezoning-unlocking-9500-new-homes/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) this summer. Not to mention historic preservation restrictions under the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which subject zones covering 3.4% of the city (and 27% of Manhattan) to additional review prior to construction, and which research from the Furman Center found [reduce development](https://furmancenter.org/files/NYUFurmanCenter%5FHistoricDistrictsBrief%5F7MAR2016.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in affected neighborhoods.

> Cities change, and so do patterns of demand for land. Euclidean zoning makes it hard to transition neighborhood-use type when needs have shifted.

Planners, urbanists and academics have argued that it’s time to [move](https://sites.bu.edu/dome/2018/07/19/the-problems-with-euclidean-zoning/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [on](https://northamericancommunityhub.com/euclidean-zoning-explained/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [from](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2009/1/21/whats-wrong-with-zoning.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) [Euclidean zoning](https://www.governing.com/community/our-cities-get-zoning-all-wrong-heres-a-way-to-do-it-better.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), and its use is softening.

(Some have gone so far as to champion the no-zoning model exemplified by Houston, which planner and native Houstonian Sara Bronin describes as [“the poster child of urban anarchy.”](https://thewaroncars.org/episode-136-key-to-the-city-with-sara-bronin-final-web-transcript/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) That no-zoning model is, in part, why Houston has such a strong track record of [adapting to the housing needs](https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/detached-townhomes-gentrifying-gentrifiers-and-housing-regulation-uniquely-houston?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of its residents and [keeping prices down](https://benjaminschneider.substack.com/p/learning-from-houston). Yet even in the most land-use-anarchic city, Bronin points out that [residents can lose flexibility](https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/houston-matters/2024/10/01/501502/want-some-control-over-houstons-future-growth-maybe-try-zoning/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in a different way: Homeowners, seeking more stability, have created de facto zoning through an [above-national-average number](https://www.axios.com/local/houston/2025/04/17/homeowner-association-houston-rates?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of homeowner association covenants — which, among other effects, can foster residential inequality.)

Once more, New York is ahead of the curve — this time in moving away from rigid Euclidean boundaries in favor of programs that allow neighborhoods to adapt to changing use needs.

The City has a track record of seeing a need for more or different types of housing and finding ways to build it. Where a trek out to the industrial meatpacking district once felt like fulfilling manifest destiny, the City began to encourage housing and commercial activity, developing the [affordable artists’ complex Westbeth](https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/16/realestate/once-gritty-neighborhood-comes-alive.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in 1969\. In 1982, as artists took over underused, formerly industrial buildings in SoHo, the State Legislature [amended the Multiple Dwelling Law](https://www.nyc.gov/site/loftboard/about/about.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to formally recognize the lofts as residential. A 1968 rule change allowed property owners to [transfer unused development rights](http://mildredwarner.org/www.mildredwarner.org/gov-restructuring/privatization/tdr.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=The%20new%20zoning%20ordinance%20set,Department%20of%20Planning%2C%202002%29.&text=The%20idea%20of%20transferring%20development,proved%20to%20be%20no%20exception.) to lots elsewhere in the city, a mechanism that helped pay for [ambitious development projects](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/our-work/plans/citywide/transferable-development-rights?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) like the High Line and South Street Seaport. In the past decade, the City has passed a series of rezonings that increase residential buildability in formerly industrial areas like [Gowanus](https://www.brownstoner.com/development/gowanus-rezoning-impact-new-construction-affordable-housing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=He%20said%20while%20he%20understands%20the%20need,industrial%20space%2C%20too%2C%20and%20said%20the%20rezoning), Brooklyn, and a swath of [Jerome Avenue](https://ny.curbed.com/2018/3/29/17174676/bronx-new-york-jerome-avenue-rezoning-photo-essay?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in the Bronx. This year, the City upzoned part of Brooklyn’s [Atlantic Avenue](https://council.nyc.gov/crystal-hudson/aamup/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), paving the way for 4,600 [new apartments](https://council.nyc.gov/press/2025/05/12/2865/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

We still live under a Euclidean system, but New York has made large strides toward developing more adaptive zoning processes.

Can we push the rigid boundaries of Euclidean zoning even further and make it easier for development to follow demand? One New York urban planner said yes.

Peter Marcuse (1928-2022) was a lawyer and Chair of the Division of Urban Planning at Columbia University. In 1985, he published an article in the [NYU Review of Law and Social Change](https://socialchangenyu.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/PETER-MARCUSE%5FRLSC%5F13.4.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) proposing that New York adopt neighborhood-wide “floating zones.” Floating zones are predrafted sections of zoning code that describe regulations like size or use requirements, but are not placed in a specific location on the map. They only come into play when the planning department decides they should be used in a certain area and then applies them there (which is called “drawing down” the zone to that area, as though pulling down clouds from the sky and placing them on earth). Where Euclidean zones assign specific uses to neighborhoods in the zoning ordinance, floating zones leave the location of certain district types to future decisions by planning officials.

> Floating zones could allow for streamlined, targeted upzonings in neighborhoods that most need additional housing, releasing the demand pressure valve where it is easiest or most essential to do so.

In contrast to our current zoning amendment process, in which changes to neighborhood zoning are written on a case-by-case basis and must be approved by the City Council each time, the floating zones would be preapproved by the Council and not require legislative sign-off to apply to a given neighborhood. And floating zones can also be designed to restrict too-dramatic change, where appropriate: For example, New Rochelle’s [zoning ordinance](https://ecode360.com/6731220?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#6731285) contains a floating zone that encourages affordable housing development, but that floating zone can only be drawn down in already residential neighborhoods. Once the floating zones pass through the Council once, the City Planning Commission would be empowered to draw down the zones to neighborhoods that need them. With floating zones, theoretically, planners could move faster to accommodate market or social demand than they can under our current process.

As in Japan, [which has only 12 simple zoning categories](https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/crpsp/article/1173/&path%5Finfo=2017%5FPetrillo%5F%5FAnthony%5FJapanese%5FZoning%5Fand%5FIts%5FApplicability%5Fin%5FAmerican%5FCities.pdf&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) nationwide, Marcuse suggested a limited set of floating zones to meet different types of neighborhood needs.

There’s suddenly more demand for housing in a previously unpopular neighborhood? City Planning could draw down a higher-density floating zone. Need to encourage commercial activity along a subway corridor? It could draw down a mixed-use district.

Neighborhood-wide floating zones were Marcuse’s idea, but traditional floating zones — which apply only to one property at a time and are drawn down based on the request of the property owner — had already been around for several decades. (New York, conveniently for the drumbeat of this article, had been at the forefront of floating zones, too: In 1951, the State was the first to [declare them legal](https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/property/property-law-keyed-to-smith/zoning-property-law-keyed-to-smith/rodgers-v-village-of-tarrytown/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).)

The original idea for floating zones came about during the growing-pain years of zoning. Within a few short decades of Euclid v. Ambler, cities realized that Euclidean zoning wasn’t flexible enough. In the postwar suburban boom, planners had to rethink the division of residential and commercial. The [growing popularity](https://scholarship.law.edu/lawreview/vol16/iss1/6/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) of residential subdivisions whetted Americans’ appetite for grocery stores and small retail in previously monolithic single-family zones. Floating zones could allow property owners to apply to use their lot in a suburban residential district for retail. During the Cold War, the federal government wanted to build defense manufacturing plants close enough to cities to be easily accessible but far enough to mitigate wartime risks to major centers of commerce. In Maryland, a light-industrial floating zone was designed. In each of these cases, Euclidean zoning would not have allowed for such an interspersion — a full rezoning of the neighborhood to allow these uses everywhere would have been too politically unpopular to pass and could have resulted in oversaturation of certain facilities needed only in moderation.

Rather than make guesses about where future demand would fall, floating zones were intended to let planners wait and see — and then adjust zoning accordingly.

> It’s New York’s adaptability and appetite for change, more than anything else, that has allowed it to grow from a cramped seaport 200 years ago to the five-boroughed metropolis it is today — and will let us thrive for the next two centuries.

Marcuse wanted to use floating zones to mitigate the residential displacement he was witnessing. The 1980s were a period of growing economic divides in New York City. Coming off a decade of urban crisis — in the 1970s, the lights went out (1977), the Bronx burned (1977), and the city was told to drop dead (1975) — New Yorkers’ incomes diverged dramatically. The top fifth of earners brought home [32 times as much income](https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/25/nyregion/gap-between-rich-and-poor-in-new-york-city-grows-wider.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=By%20the%20end%20of%20the,it%20was%20$94%2C264%20versus%20$6%2C810) as did the bottom. Estimates clocked that New York was [losing 140,000 households a year](https://socialchangenyu.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/PETER-MARCUSE%5FRLSC%5F13.4.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Following the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, [we see these trends accelerated](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/28/nyregion/nyc-income-gap-wages.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Traditional, one-parcel-at-a-time floating zones worked well for a landowner who wanted to apply for a commercial zone to build a shopping plaza, or for a defense contractor to apply for an industrial zone to build a factory. But to adjust zoning to meet residential demand, Marcuse looked to the neighborhood level.

While his plan was, by his own admission, only a first sketch, it offers a model for neighborhood groups (such as nonprofits, community boards or local legislators) to raise their hand and ask for more buildable area for housing in their communities. And it offers a regulatory strategy for city planning to provide that area efficiently, meet market demand quickly and stave off the risk of cost-induced displacement.

New York’s recent rezonings have brought great wins to increase buildability, but citywide upzonings likely won’t get us there alone. City of Yes, the lauded 2024 zoning initiative to expand housing stock, is estimated to enable the construction of an incredible [80,000 additional units](https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/882-24/mayor-adams-governor-hochul-speaker-adams-celebrates-passage-most-pro-housing-proposal-in?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Yet still, estimates of demand are [closer to 500,000](https://www.centernyc.org/urban-matters-2/a-big-deal-thats-not-nearly-big-enough-what-the-city-of-yes-will-and-wont-do?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=Richard%20McGahey:%20With%20its%20sights,similarly%20bite%2Dsized%20reforms%20available?.). Floating zones could allow for streamlined, targeted upzonings in neighborhoods that most need additional housing or in neighborhoods where building more is [politically salient](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/about-us/newsroom/pr-20240425?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) — releasing the demand pressure valve where it is easiest or most essential to do so.

Marcuse’s idea isn’t the only supra-Euclidean one floating around. In his 2025 mayoral campaign, Zellnor Myrie proposed [“sandwich rezonings,”](https://thenyhc.org/mayoral-candidates/zellnor-myrie/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) under which new housing could be built in industrial zones squeezed between residential areas. Legal academics [Roderick Hills](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/contributors/roderick-hills) and [David Schleicher](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/contributors/david-schleicher) (both Vital City contributors) [have proposed](https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/77-1-NoncumulativeZoning-Hills%20-%20Schleicher.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) allowing housing development along Brooklyn’s in-demand industrial waterfront, providing flexibility more akin to the very early cumulative Euclidean zones. Since the publication of their article, New York City’s Economic Development Corporation has started making [strides in that direction](https://edc.nyc/project/brooklyn-marine-terminal?ref=vitalcitynyc.org).

Fast changes don’t always move in the right direction. Some New York [zoning overlays](https://zola.planninglabs.nyc/about?layer-groups=%5B%22building-footprints%22%2C%22street-centerlines%22%2C%22subway%22%2C%22zoning-districts%22%5D&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which are a schema to allow planners to design bespoke edits to certain zones without displacing the underlying requirements, actually reduce the amount that can be built — so an ideal floating zone system may be designed to allow only zone drawdowns that *increase* buildability. Other built-in safeguards may protect Marcusian zones from abuse: By streamlining legislative review, a Marcusian system would organically shift power from individual council members to the mayor — an approach that has gained momentum with this year’s [Charter Revision Commission report](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2025/7-21-2025-charter-revision-commission-adopted-final-report-digital.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in response to a system that overaccords power to the politically cautious and sometimes development-phobic local council member for a given rezoning. (Disclosure: I served as a policy advisor to the Commission.)

It’s New York’s adaptability and appetite for change, more than anything else, that has allowed it to grow from a cramped seaport 200 years ago, where [pigs roamed](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674979758?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) downtown’s streets, to the five-boroughed metropolis it is today — and will let us thrive for the next two centuries. As [Jerry Seinfeld argued](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/opinion/jerry-seinfeld-new-york-coronavirus.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) at the beginning of COVID, New York isn’t and will never be dead, because all good cities facing a crisis change. “They mutate. They re-form.”

New York moves fast. As we move toward more flexible land-use regulation, our zoning should be able to keep up.
### Building Better, Piece by Piece
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/building-better-piece-by-piece/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:48.000Z
Over the last 50 years, the United States has[ experienced a steep decline](https://www.nber.org/digest/202502/stagnation-us-construction-productivity?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) in construction productivity.

While manufacturing has seen productivity growth aided by new technology, amazingly, we are somehow *worse* at building homes today than we were during the post-World War II era, when developers like Levitt & Sons adopted assembly-line techniques to mass produce affordable communities.

In the last decade, software-trained investors in Silicon Valley — the country's most expensive housing market — have poured millions into startups aiming to fix how the U.S. builds, by upgrading Levitt's approach for the digital age. Insiders now prefer the term ["off-site"](https://offsiteconstructionnetwork.com/what-is-offsite/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) or ["industrialized"](https://www.autodesk.com/design-make/emerging-tech/industrialized-construction?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) construction to describe the brimming field, to dodge the stigma of "modular," a word that, for many Americans, conjures images ranging from Soviet-era housing blocks to the flimsy trailer homes of the 1970s. (I will continue to use the term "modular" here for simplicity.)

Whatever the label, the sector now encompasses a[ wide range of building types and techniques](https://www.karmod.com/en/blog/volumetric-vs-panelized-modular-construction/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), spanning skilled tradesmen assembling a building from Ikea-like 2D panels, to the delivery of full 3D rooms, which are then "stacked" like Lego bricks. The common thread that unites and defines modular development approaches is that most of their construction work is done in a factory.

Yet for all the buzz about modular's potential, few startups in the U.S. have[ made it past their first building](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/18/modular-housing-a-century-old-sustainable-housing-idea-is-struggling.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Infamously, Softbank-backed Katerra[ went bankrupt](https://www.constructiondive.com/news/what-does-katerras-demise-mean-for-the-contech-and-modular-industries/608037/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=In%20March%202021%2C%20Greensill%20Capital,of%20the%20COVID%2D19%20pandemic.) shortly after achieving a $4 billion valuation, leaving projects abandoned across the country. The companies that survived the latest hype cycle have been sold for pennies or [shifted to the Middle East](https://www.archdaily.com/1016213/building-the-future-the-rise-of-modular-construction-in-the-middle-east?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), chasing demand from new-city projects like [NEOM](https://www.neom.com/en-us/our-business/sectors/design-and-construction?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as a temporary reprieve.

I lived this hype cycle as an employee at several U.S.-based modular companies. I also began my career in Scandinavia, where a more mature, economically rational modular sector is thriving. In the United States, approximately [4% of new construction is manufactured ](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/making-modular-construction-fit?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)off-site — mostly single-story buildings. In Scandinavia, by contrast, that number sits at 45% and includes mid- and high-rise apartments, of the type the U.S. desperately needs to confront its worst housing crisis in a century.

There is a range of theories about why the U.S. has failed to keep pace with other developed countries. Economists have posited that increasingly[ restrictive land-use regulations](https://www.nber.org/papers/w33188?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) fragmented the construction market into small companies, which underspend on R & D. In my experience, the United States' decision to[ federate the development of building code](https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-building-codes-work-in-the-us?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to 20,000+ local jurisdictions, each with its own byzantine requirements, made it impossible to develop a standard product that can be sold at scale across state lines. (The exception is single-family homes delivered on a steel chassis, for which the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development does [have a national building code](https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-mobile-home?ref=vitalcitynyc.org); in this piece, I am focused on mid- and high-rise buildings.) Add NIMBY-coded land-use policies and antiquated permitting regimes, and the government can look like a head-banging obstacle to growth rather than an ally.

An obvious solution is [to relax land-use regulations](https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/zoning-reforms-to-support-factory-built-housing/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But I also think that — perhaps counterintuitively — the government should get a lot *more* involved in the modular industry. Specifically, it should follow the lead of countries with robust public housing programs, where the government has played a catalytic role for the sector by placing up-front bulk orders — the type of[ advanced market commitment](https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-to-start-an-advance-market-commitment/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that provides builders with the scale and predictability they need to invest in their factories.

The stabilizing presence of a big and patient buyer, like the government, helps overcome the[ "valley of death"](https://www.owensdesign.com/custom-automation-design-engineering-manufacturing-blog/how-to-get-your-technology-manufacturing-startup-across-the-valley-of-death/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that tends to afflict early-stage manufacturers.

Ford didn't get his car right on the first try, and the same is true for most modular builders. In fact, first projects often go quite wrong. That was the story with [461 Dean Street](https://atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.com/2018/03/forest-city-sells-461-dean-troubled.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), New York City's first off-site high-rise development. A closely watched part of Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, it ended up taking twice as long as initially projected. Even under the best circumstances, first modular builds are rarely cheaper than traditional construction, given the extra up-front costs of design and engineering. Economies of scale and associated cost savings typically emerge only after the third or fourth building.

To make modular economics work, you need a buyer willing to order multiple, similar-enough buildings. Those buyers do exist in the private sector, but they are rare: For example, Marriott, which has a[ 263,000-room pipeline](https://marriott.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/marriott-international-celebrates-outstanding-development-year?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=United%20States%20and%20Canada,the%20Luxury%20Collection%20Midtown%20Manhattan.) in North America, has invested in modularizing some of its hotel brands. Greystar, the largest U.S. apartment owner,[ purchased a modular factory in Pennsylvania](https://www.greystar.com/business/about-greystar/newsroom/greystar-nears-debut-of-its-first-modular-us-apartment-project?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) to act as a supplier for its development pipeline.

But some of the strongest examples come from national governments in other countries. A program run by Sveriges Allmännytta — which roughly translates to Public Housing Sweden (PHS) — offers a clear road map for the United States.

PHS represents 310 municipally owned housing companies managing over one million rentals. In 2011, Sweden saw an acute need for more affordable rental housing — in part a reflection of its relatively friendly immigration policies — but most of PHS' members had limited experience constructing new buildings. PHS, which had historically played a role more akin to advisor and auditor of its subsidiaries, jumped into development.

PHS launched an open call, asking regional builders to put forth a Kombohus — or "concept" housing design — that they would be willing to deliver at a fixed price per unit. It selected three vendors, each with distinct designs and with factories that provided coverage across the length of the country. (While Sweden's population is only slightly larger than New York City's, its land mass spans the distance from New York City to Jacksonville.) Member housing companies were given the opportunity to purchase a "Kombohus" off PHS' master agreement at the prenegotiated price.

The response was immediate, and PHS quickly expanded into a full catalog of options: a basic mid-rise apartment building ("bas"), an urban tower ("plus"), a small-unit model for students and seniors ("mini") and row houses for peri-urban areas ("småhus"). Every six years, PHS runs a new public procurement to add developers to its master contract. During its first six-year term, PHS delivered over 10,000 units. Houses ordered on contract were delivered five months faster and 18% cheaper than houses off contract.

A similar, cross-jurisdiction procurement strategy is possible in the U.S. — and it could simultaneously lower costs and bolster domestic industry.

The most obvious place to start is the military, which has a nearly $20 billion annual construction budget and a robust housing pipeline. Hundreds of thousands of people live in barracks or other military housing, [much of which has fallen into disrepair](https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article%5Fd383f16c-2114-47f2-887a-2d5ffb0f6ef5.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). At a congressional hearing earlier this year, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle pressed leadership to [incorporate industrialized construction techniques](https://appropriations.house.gov/schedule/hearings/innovative-techniques-military-construction?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as it creates its next capital plan. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people across the spectrum can all get behind the goal of better, cheaper housing for the enlisted and their families. (Disclosure: I have advised the Department of Defense on its modular efforts.)

The next step, though more contentious, is for HUD to lead its own initiative. Like Public Housing Sweden, HUD could establish master contracts that local housing authorities tap through cooperative purchasing. The U.S. tried a watered-down version of this approach before: In the late 1960s, HUD ran a national modular program known[ ](https://www.construction-physics.com/p/operation-breakthrough-americas-failed?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)as [Operation Breakthrough](https://www.construction-physics.com/p/operation-breakthrough-americas-failed?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), which lost momentum in the 1970s as private market housing starts shot up.

In 2023, HUD commissioned research [on a possible Operation Breakthrough revamp](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/headway/how-an-american-dream-of-housing-became-a-reality-in-sweden.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Seemingly not much has happened since the administration changed in January. But a Breakthrough-esque program could be a way for the Trump administration to give new direction to the beleaguered agency while providing a much-needed lift to a struggling domestic industry. Call it the Made in America Homes program or the National Industrialized Construction Strategy.

Other countries are already moving. In June, Canada's new prime minister, Mark Carney, launched [Build Canada Homes](https://www.mpamag.com/ca/mortgage-industry/industry-trends/can-carneys-26bn-prefab-housing-solution-solve-canadas-housing-crisis/535123?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), a government agency with $25 billion in debt financing and $1 billion in equity dedicated to modular-home builders. Crucially, the agency has authority to place bulk orders. It plans to encourage the use of Canadian materials like timber, a [staple](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352710222014917?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=modular%20CLT%20construction.-,Abstract,emergency%20and%20rapidly%20constructable%20housing.) of the modular industry.

Rather than wait for federal action, some state and local agencies in high-cost areas of the U.S. are taking matters into their own hands. Cal Poly, for example — part of the California State University system, the largest public university system in the country — has set up[ a factory to deliver 4,200 units of off-site student housing](https://www.fullstackmodular.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Fast-Company-FullStack-Modular-2.24.25.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) over the next decade. Sitting in San Luis Obispo, a small town located in the middle of California, its factory will be positioned to provide dorms across the state.

Meanwhile, in New York, the governor's 2025 budget includes[ $50 million for a modular "starter home" initiative](https://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default%5Ffld=&leg%5Fvideo=&bn=A03004&term=2025&Summary=Y&Memo=Y&Text=Y&ref=vitalcitynyc.org), though few details have been released. And one could imagine the New York City Housing Authority's [surprisingly sophisticated procurement department](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/opinion/elon-musk-government-spending-reform.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) playing a similar role to Public Housing Sweden, using its market power to set a modular room rate scheme accessible to housing authorities across the state. The key is to structure procurement around a comprehensive program and pipeline — not just one building — using the State's market power to get better pricing.

Venture capital won't inaugurate the next great era of modular building. But government demand might. If Washington is serious about solving the housing crisis, it should stop passively waiting for the next Katerra and start acting like the customer the industry needs.
### Predictability Begets Productivity: A Conversation with Alicia Glen
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/predictability-begets-productivity/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:48.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/04/znmyfzbwfbowez9n_vitalcity_glen1-auto-format-compress-1776259681467.png)

Credit: Arthur Mount. Portrait of Alicia Glen.

*After serving as assistant commissioner for housing finance at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) — and building a successful career in municipal finance on Wall Street — Alicia Glen served from 2014 to 2019 as deputy mayor for housing and economic development under Mayor Bill de Blasio. She is now the founder and managing principal of MSquared, an affordable housing development firm she launched in 2020.*

*As deputy mayor, Glen oversaw a housing plan that by the end of her tenure had built or preserved more than 135,000 affordable units across New York City. She also led the creation of the Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT) initiative, which brings private ownership and management into partnership with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) to rehabilitate deteriorating buildings. The agencies under her leadership were responsible for a series of neighborhood upzonings, including the administration's two signature zoning reforms: Mandatory Inclusionary Housing and Zoning for Quality and Affordability.*

*At MSquared, Glen and her team focus on mixed-income, mixed-use development projects in urban areas. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

**Vital City**: You've had a remarkable career in both the private and public sectors. What did your time in New York City government teach you about how to get housing produced?

**Alicia Glen**: The most important thing I learned is that you need to know what the rules of the road are. There needs to be certainty in the system. For investors, construction companies, developers and nonprofits, and all the players in housing, it's not helpful when people are trying to put together a deal to have too many pieces of the puzzle that are uncertain.

City government can't control global interest rates or federal policy, but the things they can control need to be as knowable, with as little discretion, as possible. This is why what's going on now is very worrisome. Some people say each deal should be underwritten separately, and to make sure we don't oversubsidize this one or that one. All of which sounds like great policy, but if you really want to build housing, you need clear rules.

In 2017, we changed the rules pretty dramatically from the old 421-a to the new 421-a, rebalancing the program more in the public's interest. Then the market responded. They react, they adjust. But everybody knew what the rules were. Same with zoning — if you want to rezone your site, this is how much affordable housing you have to do. It's not bespoke, not subject to political whim. It is what it is. Advocating and fighting for more units is where legitimate dealmaking comes in. Administrations can and should have discretion over how they use their discretionary resources.

But at the end of the day, jurisdictions that don't take seriously their obligation to establish clear rules of the road cannot produce housing at scale.

**VC**: Do you think New York City is one of those jurisdictions now?

**AG**: New York has historically been the poster child for having very clear rules about how you get it done. It's had very little corruption in the housing space and has been a very knowable system for capital markets and developers. Every five years or so, the game is up for grabs, and it's chaos, but then at least you know what's going on.

There are two things that worry me. First, there are people who argue that every deal should be individually underwritten and then the City should figure out what it can get from the developer. That's completely unscalable and impractical — you'll never get a deal done that way. It sets you up for corruption, because it becomes all transactional.

Second, the City has increasingly stopped obeying its own program rules. I think only one deal this year is being done at "term sheet." That's outrageous. What's the point of having term sheets if you're not following them?

> Jurisdictions that don't take seriously their obligation to establish clear rules of the road cannot produce housing at scale.

**VC**: Walk me through how a project goes from concept to reality.

**AG**: There's a great [kids' book about this](https://akidsco.com/products/a-kids-book-about-real-estate-development?srsltid=AfmBOorgnSp3s9EPfaJdZUuAnfWKsPx9jXJoWRHxroAYGd3vKsNAMACb&ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Let me break it down simply.

For as-of-right market-rate housing: You see a piece of land and buy it for $1 million. In New York, each piece of land is zoned; let's say this land permits a 10-story building with 100 units. You hire an architect to design the building and get a contractor to say they can build it for $10 million. You go to a bank and get a $5 million loan, then find an equity investor for the remaining $4 million. The architect files plans with the Department of Buildings, they self-certify compliance with all codes, and boom — they get a building permit. No review, nothing. Your contractor builds the building. No fuss, no muss. Virtually unheard of anywhere else in the country.

When you need or want a rezoning: You want to build 200 units instead of 100, or your site is in a mixed-use neighborhood, and you can't do that as-of-right. Now you spend two years convincing everyone you should be able to double the size and allow residential. Under New York law, you now need affordable housing in it. It's harder to get financing, and you have to talk to the council member and deal with people who don't want a 20-story building. Two years of politics and predevelopment financing costs.

When you want to build affordable housing: You call the City, and they say, "Fantastic, we'll give you $200,000 per apartment." You fill out forms, take it to the bank, then sit in line for five years while the property costs you money. Every time you call your contractor, costs have gone up. You go back to the City asking for $250,000 per unit, then $500,000\. Seven-and-a-half years later, you have 200 units of housing.

**VC**: How much of the high cost of affordable housing is due to the wait versus other requirements?

**AG**: The biggest driver is the wait. The actual requirements aren't that complicated — New York's Housing Department has pretty much standard plans and specs. They've been doing this since the Koch Housing Plan, which was the first comprehensive plan laying out how the City would finance, fund and regulate construction and preservation of housing through a series of programs. These all-affordable building requirements are generally straightforward.

Yes, the City sometimes requires passive house standards or other expensive features on public sites, but that's a political choice. New York City's code is already very progressive on environmental issues.

**VC**: What about labor costs and prevailing wage requirements?

**AG**: Historically, we had a bifurcated labor market with detente. The affordable housing pipeline was left alone, and labor wasn't much of an issue. Very large rental or condo projects have almost always been built with all-union labor. More recent tax policy has caught affordable housing in union politics, which is challenging.

The wage premium is real — I just got bids both ways, and it was about 26% to 27% more for union labor. That's enormous, especially in this environment with tariff uncertainty driving up raw materials costs. The way they've implemented it is also dumb — if the wage premium triggers at 100 units, people just build 98 units.

> The wait is the biggest driver of cost in affordable housing — not the requirements, not the standards. It's the years lost to bureaucracy.

**VC**: If you were queen for a day, how would you attack the wait problem?

**AG**: The wait is a function of decisions about which projects to do. If you do projects that are very expensive and you have the same number of dollars, there's a longer wait for other projects. You need to think about bang for your buck.

Take Site 5 at the World Trade Center. We decided bids should comply with Mandatory Inclusionary Housing — 25% affordable housing in this luxury high-rise that costs at least a million dollars per unit. Then politicians and advocates screamed that we needed more affordable housing. Everyone caved and magically came up with another $65 million to go from 25% to 31% affordable. That $65 million could have funded three deals in the pipeline that had been waiting for years.

The debate is: What's more important — building more units or having equitable distribution of affordable housing throughout the city? We've increasingly leaned toward using scarce public resources to build housing in expensive neighborhoods or expensive building typologies. I find the building typologies particularly upsetting. Why use City dollars for people in an elevator going to the 80th floor when you could fund good mixed-income projects in great lower-density neighborhoods where most families want to live?

**VC**: Is there a policy fix?

**AG**: The fix is having more money, or doing what we did in the de Blasio administration — using Mandatory Inclusionary Housing and tax policy to get affordable housing in neighborhoods without costing the City anything. We attacked the economic segregation problem through Mandatory Inclusionary Housing and by requiring that rental buildings in New York built with a tax exemption require affordable housing. And almost every single rental building has a tax exemption.

If 30% affordable isn't good enough for the Upper West Side, people are living in la-la land. Not everybody can live in every neighborhood. Land costs more. Period. I'd rather have a moderate-income family live in Queens or Brooklyn and have a place to live than have no place to live. The answer isn't to put everybody in expensive neighborhoods — it's to make investments in physical and social infrastructure in other neighborhoods and make them better.

**VC**: What about City of Yes and other zoning reforms?

**AG**: City of Yes is great — it's an extension of Zoning for Quality and Affordability, which we did in the de Blasio administration. It fixes stupid stuff in the zoning resolution. Its projected impact is maybe 80,000 units over 12 years, which is part of the solution. By comparison, the first de Blasio housing plan was 400,000 to 500,000 units of market and affordable housing over 10 years.

The bigger win was lifting the floor-area ratio cap on residential. That's potentially enormous. There used to be a State law limiting how much of a building could be residential — even if you could build a 100-story building, you couldn't make it all residential. Removing that cap means that where I could build 700 units before and use the rest of the site for office or retail, I can now build 1,000 units.

We also need to keep doing larger-scale neighborhood-wide rezonings like the Atlantic Avenue one that was recently certified, as opposed to one-offs. Once you're done with a neighborhood rezoning, that property is as-of-right, and you just go. No discretionary review needed.

**VC**: What about downzoned neighborhoods and historic districts?

**AG**: Pitting landmarks people against housing advocates is a fake narrative. There are buildings and neighborhoods that should be landmarked and respected — we're not Phoenix. We have bones, terroir, neighborhoods. But the Bloomberg downzonings did result in significant loss of potential production in neighborhoods that weren't really about preservation.

With good leadership, you could reopen some of those conversations. Life is different now from 20 years ago. But I think we should finish the more obvious ones first — neighborhoods that historically had more density or have existing infrastructure for more density.

**VC**: How do you get developers to build more family-size housing instead of just studios and one-bedrooms?

**AG**: The market won't do it on its own, because it's all driven by per-square-foot economics. Developers only build family housing if it's either required or lucrative, and in New York's rental market, it's generally not lucrative except for very high-end condos.

You'd have to force it through regulation — then the market would react by adjusting land prices and financing. And there are some fixes that don't need legislation — the City currently provides the same amount of subsidy for a studio or a three-bedroom, which is insane. But that means announcing 7,000 units instead of 10,000 units. So it's a political choice.

In the next round in Albany, you could also require that, if you get a tax exemption, you have to provide family-size housing. Regulation is a toolbox, and you have to think about things from a variety of perspectives.

**VC**: Why can't the housing market respond to demand faster, like other industries?

**AG**: The residential cycle is just different from something like making jeans. There are some examples of overbuilding — for example, Austin might have zombie buildings soon because the market overresponded.

New York is weird because we don't build nearly enough, and we've generally avoided boom-bust cycles — except in luxury condos. We should get better at shaving time off construction through technology, but in a dense, old city with old infrastructure, you're never going to cut off that much time.

The real problem is that the time before construction — the pipeline — is getting longer, not shorter. The City officially says the average time to get an HPD-financed building in the ground is at least five years. Every year they're not moving forward, costs go up. I think there's no sense of urgency from some public-sector actors, because if they miss this cycle, they'll get the next one. But there's a real cost to waiting.
### A New Construction Lender in Town
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/a-new-construction-lender-in-town/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:48.000Z
In rental housing markets, a vacancy rate of 5% or lower is typically considered an emergency level — because it means there is so little housing available for new households. New York City's vacancy rates are now 1.4%, according to the [housing census conducted in 2023](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vacancy-rate-reaches-historic-low-1-4-percent-demanding-urgent-action-new?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#/0). Unsurprisingly, [market rents here have risen](https://streeteasy.com/blog/data-dashboard/?agg=Median&metric=Asking%20Rent&type=Rentals&bedrooms=Any%20Bedrooms&property=Any%20Property%20Type&minDate=2010-01-01&maxDate=2025-08-01&area=Flatiron,Brooklyn%20Heights&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) sharply over the last five years, from $3,400 to $4,400 for a Manhattan one-bedroom and from $4,400 to $5,400 for a Manhattan two-bedroom.

Those rents are the main thing that makes the city increasingly unaffordable for many individuals and families, and the only sustainable way to drive them down is to produce more supply so that the city's vacancy rate is in a reasonable range. Think of this like musical chairs (a [common](https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/1/3/the-best-evidence-yet-for-the-housing-musical-chairs-theory?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) analogy to help explain the importance of housing supply): Say you have 100 homes; when people or families are looking for a new apartment, like when their lease ends or when they move out from an apartment with roommates, there is only one empty chair. It's no wonder our housing market has such fierce competition and sky-high prices.

Producing more units requires a clear-eyed look at the current development process in New York City to determine which pieces of that process are creating barriers. So let's do that.

What does a developer need? Three things: land, permission to build and capital. Land is limited and therefore expensive in New York, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon. But the other two ingredients are within our collective control. We can do something about them, and we should.

The barrier that is permission to build is having a moment these days: Pro-housing groups like Open New York have been advocating for changes to the permitting and zoning processes in the city and successfully advocated for a major reform last year, the [City of Yes](https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/our-work/plans/citywide/city-of-yes-housing-opportunity?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). Nationally, the pro-housing agenda, driven to prominence by the bestselling book ["Abundance,"](https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Progress-Takes-Ezra-Klein/dp/1668023482?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) has taken corners of the Democratic Party by storm. And New York City voters have the chance this November to make significant further progress on this issue with four important [ballot measures](https://www.yesonaffordablehousing.com/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that would make affordable housing development much easier and faster.

But this piece will discuss a less talked-about ingredient: investment, or how people who want to build housing go about getting the money to build. Let's start with the basics of understanding how a multifamily construction development is financed.

On the face of it, it seems like the economic math should be simple: There's a lot of demand for housing. People will pay for it. So there ought to be market forces for people to build it, knowing that they'll get paid handsomely once it's built. That's the way it works with most products.

But housing is different for a few reasons. First, housing is simply capital-intensive to build, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars per home. Second, housing takes a long time to build, even with permissive zoning and building codes: It takes months, and often years, to turn a piece of land into even a small apartment building. These two things combined make investing in building housing more risky than, say, buying stocks and bonds, and as such, investors want to be compensated handsomely, too.

## Let's build an apartment

Say we are a developer who wants to build a 200-unit apartment building in Long Island City that is going to cost $100 million. We've got our land, but before we go get our permits and start building, we need to go out and get that $100 million to cover our costs.

There are essentially two ways to go about this: We can get that money from government affordable housing programs, or we can get that money from private investors.

First, let's explore the conventional, subsidized affordable channel. These subsidies take a few different shapes: "tax-credit equity," which acts kind of like a grant; low-cost debt; or ongoing operational supports like housing vouchers. When we cover a chunk of the project's cost with tax-credit equity, the loan covering the rest of the costs can be smaller. Think of the tax-credit equity like a large down payment: With a big down payment, you get a smaller loan, which means smaller monthly mortgage payments, which means the rents needed can be lower — i.e., "affordable."

This sounds great — and *is* great — but there's one challenge: Cities and states only have so many housing tax credits (and tax-exempt bonds, and additional city and state subsidies) to go around each year — and every year, New York spends every last dollar. In fact, New York's housing subsidies are heavily oversubscribed: At any given point, there are five to 10 projects waiting for each slot in the subsidized pipeline. That means that at any given time, there are scores of projects waiting in the wings, often otherwise "shovel-ready." But for our project, we don't want to wait years in line to get started, so let's see what our other options are.

The second channel is private investment. We'll try for market-rate apartments instead, because private capital is more expensive and we need higher income potential to make that project work. The first stop is the bank to get a construction mortgage. Just as with affordable projects, banks want to ensure that there's a "down payment," and won't give a loan to cover the entire cost. Depending on interest rates, where we are in the business cycle and our project's modeling, we could get anywhere from 50% to 65% loan-to-cost. Optimistically, in today's market, let's say we get 60%, or $60 million, from the bank as a construction loan.

Finding the other $40 million, the "down payment," is harder — we have to find investors willing to take a risk. We send out a pitch email to a bunch of limited-partner equity investors explaining to them why our "beautiful project" is projected to generate "20% returns." They won't believe us, so we'll send them our financial models. They'll say our rent growth model is overly optimistic, and the project will actually only generate 13% returns — so they're not interested. We'll do this about 14 or 15 times and often still not get an investment.

Sometimes, neither our affordable nor our market-rate channels for multifamily investment pan out. One might say that if the projects aren't generating high enough returns, then they aren't economically efficient and shouldn't be built. But that's hard to square with New York City's 1.4% vacancy rate. With housing in such short supply, shouldn't more projects be viable? Why wouldn't they be built?

The U.S. Census Bureau, which, among many other statistics, measures construction activity, keeps track of when buildings get permitted, when they start construction and when they finish. As such, one of their measures looks at the number of units that have received permits but have not yet started construction — often because the project is facing a financial constraint.

In recent years, [that number has skyrocketed](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AUTHNOT5MUSA?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) nationwide, more than doubling, up to 140,000 units per year, above the average last decade of around 60,000\. And despite their preeminence, even superstar cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles are not immune to these challenges.

## A third channel

Several states and some cities have put in place solutions to these financial barriers, and New York City could learn from these ideas to boost our own housing production. The gist is simple. If we've spent all of our housing tax credits for the year, and sufficient investor equity isn't forthcoming, New York can offer a third approach to investment: Make revolving construction loans to cover costs during construction, and, when construction is over, use the repaid debt to fund another set of projects. This type of funding is called a "revolving loan fund," because, like a person walking through a revolving door, the capital cycles into a project, back out to the fund and so on.

Without typical subsidies, buildings financed this way won't be 100% affordable, because the rents would not cover the costs. But if cities or states offer revolving capital at a cheaper rate than the private markets, the resulting buildings can support a mix of incomes. In many states, projects with publicly supported construction loans like this can support rents for people across the income spectrum.

Several states have recently set up programs to do this, including [Massachusetts](https://www.masshousing.com/en/developers/bild?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [Michigan](https://www.michigan.gov/mshda/about/press-releases/2025/08/22/mshda-to-launch-michigan-housing-accelerator-fund?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and even New York at the state level, with our new [Housing Acceleration Fund](https://hcr.ny.gov/new-york-state-housing-acceleration-fund?ref=vitalcitynyc.org). But how do these programs scale up, and how can we really make the most of them here in New York City?

As noted above, on the affordable side, New York City has far more project proposals than projects that actually get built. A revolving credit fund could help push almost-there projects — those that just need a little more funding to fill the gap — into reality.

In Michigan, for example, the state has started with providing revolving fund money to projects that applied for federal or state subsidies but were not selected. The state program targets projects that can generate the revenue to pay back the revolving loan, allowing the funds to be redeployed elsewhere after construction is completed. For an enterprising housing agency with a backlog of applications, a revolving construction fund that can process stalled projects as mixed-income can be a monster tool, churning out units even when interest rates make it challenging.

Here in New York, one could imagine this type of tool being used to finance New York City Housing Authority redevelopment projects, both for its [Housing Preservation Trust](https://www.preservationtrust.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) and its [Preserving Affordable Communities Together](https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycha/about/pact.page?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) program.

One could also imagine revolving credit that prioritizes Mandatory Inclusionary Housing projects using the State's property-tax incentive programs that, by virtue of having a municipal construction fund as a coinvestor, could provide additional affordability above and beyond what is required to qualify for the incentive programs.

The opportunities for the City to support housing abundance through public construction investment are plentiful, and the need for [hundreds of thousands](https://edc.nyc/housing-crisis-and-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=While%20calculating%20just%20how%20much,and%20its%20economy%20have%20room) — maybe millions — of new units is getting deeper every day. We can implement a uniquely New York City structure for supercharging multifamily investment if we put our minds to it.
### The Quality of Quantity
URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/the-quality-of-quantity/
Last updated: 2026-04-15T13:36:48.000Z
A welcome consensus is starting to emerge in New York City: If we are ever to make our city more affordable, we have to build more apartments to address our severe housing shortage. In a win for housers, virtually every mayoral candidate has proposed to increase housing production, but the devil will be in the details — what kind of housing, where, built by whom and for whom? Reasonable minds agree that we need to ramp up housing supply to address the city's success of increased demand, but what will we demand of this supply?

With all this talk of quantity, shouldn't we, in this, the greatest city on earth, equally insist upon quality?

Fran Lebowitz, Gotham's famed raconteur, once observed that "No one can afford to live in New York. Yet, eight million people do. How do we do this? We don't know!"I often wonder when it was that people considered New York affordable: during the time of our Indigenous predecessors, the Lenape? There was of course the 1970s, when the city lost hundreds of thousands of jobs and communities of color were ravaged by crime — is that the era for which people pine? Put differently, our current struggles with affordability are due to decades of magnetic success most places would envy: Millions of residents want to stay, while newcomers of all stripes and means want in. The statue in the harbor is doing her thing.

Our Democratic nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has understandably focused on the struggles of everyday New Yorkers to make ends meet with his populist oratory, a luminous smile, impactful social media and head-scratching policy prescriptions. (I visited the Soviet Union before its collapse. Government-run grocery stores? No, thank you.)

One of Mamdani's central campaign promises — freezing the rent in rent-stabilized housing — was [enacted](https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/09/02/rent-freeze-mamdani-affordable-housing-stabilized-apartments/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) before by Mayor Bill de Blasio. Yet little evidence points to increased affordability during de Blasio's eight years as mayor, particularly for low-income New Yorkers, despite that administration's laudable achievements in other key policy arenas such as building working-class housing and establishing universal pre-K. As[ ](https://cssny.org/news/entry/de-blasio-housing-legacy?ref=vitalcitynyc.org#:~:text=The%20American%20Community%20Survey%20suggests,than%20those%20of%20previous%20administrations.)cited by the Community Service Society, the [2017 Housing and Vacancy Survey](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/2017-hvs-initial-findings.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) found that the city's affordability crisis did not subside under Mr. De Blasio, but to be fair, the City has been in an official state of "housing emergency" [since the 1960s](https://edc.nyc/housing-crisis-and-new-york-city?ref=vitalcitynyc.org): There are no quick fixes here.

With over 100,000 homeless people [in our shelters tonight](https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-homelessness-new-york-city/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), including countless children, it should be painstakingly clear that our entire housing system is broken in terms of both process and product. The Adams team deserves immense credit for its City of Yes zoning amendments to produce more housing; recent[ recommendations](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/charter/downloads/pdf/2025/7-21-2025-charter-revision-commission-adopted-final-report-digital.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) from the New York City Charter Revision Commission, which will be voted upon this November, bring additional hope for achievable reform. But much more must be done.

> Perspiration without inspiration is just sweat, so how beyond sweating over our inability to produce sufficient housing do we inspire people to actually want more housing in their neighborhoods?

No matter who wins the mayoralty this year, they must adopt an all-of-the-above approach. For [the nearly half of New York City apartments](https://www.nytimes.com/article/rent-stabilized-apartments-nyc.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) that are rent-stabilized, the incoming administration should of course advocate for a fair balance between struggling renters and their landlords, who must maintain their buildings in the face of rising costs. But the new mayor must also deal with the crisis in the remaining half of our housing stock — apartments that are market rate rather than rent-stabilized — by significantly advancing housing construction for both renters and those who aspire to own. The Koch, Bloomberg, de Blasio and Adams administrations all enabled new housing, albeit in different ways for different eras, but construction takes time while we continually fall behind the curve of extraordinary ongoing demand overwhelming this limited new supply, which in turn causes ordinary people to doubt the supply-demand analysis as their rents continue to rise.

But perhaps the political challenge isn't the veracity of the analysis but the appeal of its aesthetic. Technocrats speak of facts; populists — who are all the bipartisan rage today — speak of emotion. The first is a rhetoric of light, the second of heat. Perspiration without inspiration is just sweat, so how beyond sweating over our inability to produce sufficient housing do we inspire people to actually *want* more housing in their neighborhoods? It is abundantly fashionable today to blame community groups for our inability to build, but perhaps the greater fault lies with the policy wonks who must learn to not only be impatient for new housing, but to be inclusive and inspirational as well.

As an architect, my first impulse is to focus on homes, not housing. Little is more intimate than the space of one's dwelling, where one makes love and dinner, where one raises children while praying for a raise. Eighteen months ago, in The New York Times, my team and I [proposed a plan](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/30/opinion/new-york-housing-solution.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) for building homes for 1 million New Yorkers. In our plan, we visualized the spaces and places where people across the city can be housed near transit and out of flood zones, with images that helped readers understand new buildings in relation to the scale of their neighborhoods. Much to my pleasure, the article inspired many everyday New Yorkers, from whom I heard in droves. A number of the random emails I received spoke to the aesthetics — "if only new housing in our neighborhood could *feel* like that," people would suggest, often employing language not about how the imagined architecture looked, but what it meant for them as an experience. The green-eye-shades among us will immediately jump to the conclusion that I am advocating spending more money on design, and they would largely be right, but with fewer dollar signs than they often fear and more intelligence than they typically summon. How is this for math: If your building cost 5% more in order to be attractive, and this shaved precious time off your approvals process while helping you sleep better at night as a good citizen, isn't that worth the trade-off?

> As the richest city in the richest nation on earth, these are false choices we must reject, lest we end up with nothing but rejection of all construction by a beleaguered public.

Efficiency and experience don't have to be at odds. My firm has been working on a deeply affordable development in East New York called the Innovative Urban Village, and while the construction budget is tight, our aspirations are not. We are designing more than 2,200 homes, including some homeownership opportunities, in handsome brick apartment buildings for individuals and families over a range of low to middle incomes, all organized around social infrastructure, public space and a performing arts center. So far, the community acceptance level has been extraordinarily high and the dialogue respectful, with an atmosphere of mutual trust that I do attribute, in part, to their embrace of the design as their own.

As the winds of change blow through our politics this autumn, I can only hope some leaves will settle on this side of beauty, which will only happen if we embrace it as egalitarian rather than elitist. Otherwise, we have descended so far down the political rabbit hole that the aspiration of high quality for the public — so commonplace from socialist Europe to capitalist Japan to our own exquisite Grand Central Station — has become elitist in the eyes of today's political elite.

The quality of mercy is not strained, and neither is the quality of our lives. We no more have to choose between neighborhood character and inviting new neighbors than we do, for instance, between additional train capacity and beautiful architecture at Penn Station. Such attempts to pit need against desire, efficiency against experience, are the constant challenge my profession confronts in this still Puritanical society. As the richest city in the richest nation on earth, these are false choices we must reject, lest we end up with nothing but rejection of all construction by a beleaguered public.

We do not have to tell communities that we need to churn out ugly modules of housing — a notion they will rightfully spurn — in order to achieve expeditious delivery of quality homes. As we propose much-needed new construction in people's neighborhoods, we must learn to be inclusive, impatient and inspirational, trusting that creating spaces and places of both affordability and beauty fulfills our most basic human desires.

When I look out my apartment window, I not only want to see a city that current and future New Yorkers can afford, but will cherish. That isn't elitist or profligate or technocratic. It's human.

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