As a member of my community board, I have the pleasure of attending monthly full board meetings. At these meetings, local representatives or their liaisons from City Council members to State legislators provide whatever updates they so wish, typically on legislation the elected official has introduced or recently had passed.

Initially, I was greatly impressed by the parade of bills and resolutions being touted. As the procession repeated itself with each passing meeting, however, I began to wonder why all our City’s problems weren’t fixed yet, given the impressive volume of legislation being passed in the City, State, and federal chambers.

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As I began having conversations with workers at city agencies and political advocates doing on-the-ground work, a more complete picture of these policies emerged.

While agencies often supported the policies being passed, they were frequently exasperated with the burden of new work being piled on without resources to implement them. These unfunded mandates ultimately undermine public trust in government effectiveness when the law says one thing, but the government is unable to enact or enforce it.

City Council Fiscal Impact Statements

Since the passage of the current New York City Charter in 1989, which abolished the Board of Estimate and massively expanded the City Council’s role in NYC governance, some version of fiscal impact statements has been required to vote on proposed legislation.

The New York City Charter requires that all proposed local laws and budget modifications must be accompanied by estimates of “the fiscal impact of the law or modification on the revenues and expenditures of the city” for the fiscal year the legislation would become effective, the following fiscal year, and the fiscal year in which the “full impact” of the legislation is expected to occur.

Regarding the accuracy of these estimates, however, the Charter is much more forgiving: “If the estimate contained in a FIS is inaccurate, such inaccuracy does not invalidate the local law or budget modification”.

Critically, appropriating the funds to cover the expenditures outlined in the FIS is not required, and while the costs of new legislation must be identified, they can thereafter be ignored by the Council. An FIS can acknowledge that a proposed local law would entail massive budgetary expenditures, yet no funding or revenue sources for the legislation are specified.

Introducing The City Council Fiscal Impact Tracker

Despite the limitations, these Fiscal Impact Statements provide a starting point for measuring the costs of new legislation. But it is not easy, as they are provided in unstructured Word document attachments on Legistar.

To better understand the totality of the potential costs of mandates and legislation being passed by the NY City Council (NYCC), I aggregated all fiscal impact statements since 2014 into the NYC Council Fiscal Impacts Tracker.

The tracker parses available FIS1 to break them down into the estimated revenue, expenses (operational and capital), and net fiscal impact of the associated local law.

Of the 1,563 fiscal impact statements in the Legistar API for Jan 2014- Apr 2026, 219 were added to the table. The FIS not added to the table were either because both revenue and expense impacts were zero (1,108 cases), no revenue or expense impacts could be found/extracted by Claude (183 cases), or there were duplicates with proposed bills and enacted local laws (~90 cases).

What The Data Tells Us About New Costs

Even with the limitations to what data could be scraped, the database contains over $7.5 billion in net fiscal impact (operational expenses + capital expenses - revenues) for City agencies introduced by Council legislation between 2014 and 2026.

The Council’s unfunded legislation had the biggest financial impact on the Department of Social Services through CityFHEPS, on the Department of Transportation through the Streets Plan and on the Department of Education (DOE) through mandates on payments to school paraprofessionals. These three policies alone have added over $6 billion in expenses to the city budget in the past five years, and no new revenue or specified source of revenue.

This is similarly reflected when looking at the net fiscal impacts of Council legislation by agency: DSS ($4.1 billion) and DOT ($2.4 billion) far outweigh the others, with DOE and HPD each carrying over $250 million in added expenses.

Without these four agencies, costs are much more evenly distributed – there remain 139 bills with over $500 million in net expenses, primarily operational. Interestingly, DCA is one of the few agencies with a revenue-positive net fiscal impact, receiving nearly $20 million in new revenue from eight relevant local laws, offsetting expenses.

While overall expenses added to these agencies are much smaller, total agency budgets are also much smaller, so that the proportional impact of the legislation remains large. For many affected agencies, the added costs from the past decade of legislation are at or near the total agencies’ FY2025 budget.

While in some cases these new expenses are offset by new revenue included in the legislation, 97% of the local laws in the tracker state only that funding will come only from the General Fund, meaning no dedicated funding source to cover the new expenses.

This effectively kicks the can down the road, severely constraining future mayoral administrations’ ability to introduce new policies as unfunded commitments from prior legislative sessions continue to accumulate. That’s also why NYC now faces exploding budget gaps in upcoming years, as well-intentioned but unfunded programs like CityFHEPS and the Streets Plan eat up fixed revenue streams, problems that MI’s E. J. McMahon warned about back in 2024.

Reviewing the current litany of mandates facing every agency and their yearly costs could also identify where the largest cost savings exist, on a much larger scale than what the Mayor’s Office shared from the Chief Savings Officers’ plans. Eliminating outdated, unnecessary, or redundant mandates would be a double win, enabling agencies to move faster and more effectively while reducing costs.

The lack of accountability for these expenses, which accumulate each year, explains why the City is frequently unable to comply with the new mandates. If DOT’s budget is not raised to cover the new costs from the Streets Plan mandate, along with other rising expectations for DOT’s curb management and ongoing costs, it is to be expected that the agency will not deliver on its goals.

Holding Legislators Accountable

The 2024 Charter Revision ballot proposal was a good start to add more teeth to FIS. These new rules make FIS more accurate and a more prominent part of the debate over proposed legislation. A better understanding of the true costs of new mandates would force Councilmembers to face the trade-offs of endless new rules and regulations for City agencies. But these adjustments to the FIS rules did not go far enough.

In an ideal world, Councilmembers would not introduce new legislation without specifying where the funding to enforce or carry it out would come from, and would work with agencies to determine the most cost-effective way to implement it. There could be exceptions to such a rule, such as applying only to legislation with expected fiscal impacts above a certain threshold.

In reality, however, Councilmembers are incentivized to introduce as much legislation as they can, to show their constituents their hard work and make the case for their re-election.

But hopefully, this tool can serve as a basis to hold City legislators accountable for new expenses they introduce.

In California, state legislators last year announced a program called Outcomes Review, which will look back at a sample of legislation passed by the State Assembly and review whether the outcomes of that legislation aligned with their intentions. The goal is to shift legislators’ focus from maximizing legislative output to maximizing the impact of legislation.

Maximizing the number of new bills introduced or passed in a session should not be the target for legislators; ensuring that each introduced bill addresses a real problem with a solution that can actually be carried out by the implementing body would be a better goal.

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Constituents armed with the knowledge from this new database can and should contact their legislators and hold them accountable for providing additional funding to the affected agencies. The Council and the Mayor’s office, together, can and should also be pressured to provide the necessary funding for existing mandates before introducing new ones. Accountability should not stop once legislation is passed; properly funding and ensuring policy implementation is just as, if not more, important.

Watch above or listen on your favorite podcast app.

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New York City’s recent council elections suggest a de facto three-party system, driven by cross-endorsements and growing competition on the left and right, that is straining rules built for two parties.

On the ballot, the fragmentation shows up as distinct blocs: Democratic–Working Families candidates, regular Democrats, and Republican–Conservative tickets, along with smaller parties that can still win an occasional seat. In practice, voters are not choosing between just two parties but among overlapping coalitions. (Check out the dashboard here.)

Fragmentation is greater than what the city’s rules predict.

Efforts to measure fragmentation often start with the “effective” number of electoral parties (ENEP). Political scientists use this index to count parties while accounting for their sizes. Consider three with 52, 45, and 3 percent of votes, respectively. Should we call this a three-party system, or would it be more accurate to say “a little more than two”? Taking the inverse of the sum of the parties’ squared vote proportions gives us 2.11.

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ENEP in the last council election was 3.3. This is based on votes for parties as they appear in the data. So, if a candidate appeared with two parties’ endorsements, I treat that endorsement combination as a party of its own. The largest party by votes was Democratic-Working Families (39%), followed by regular Democrats (35%), then Republican-Conservatives (14%). There are other parties in the data, two of which won one seat each.

Another way to look at the data is to treat votes for fusion candidates as votes for their major-party endorsers. For example, Democratic-Working Families votes count toward Democrats, and Republican-Conservative votes go into the Republican column. Computing ENEP in this way gets us to 1.6.

Which measure is better?

Some might say the former because it contains information on how parties presented candidates to voters. The New Republic recently described Working Families as “the third party that’s pushing the Democrats left.”

Another approach is to ask what figure the current electoral system is expected to produce. The seat-product model (SPM) calculates this expectation on the basis of council size (51 seats) and the average number of seats per district (one). That figure is 2.7, closer to the observed ENEP. This is not surprising because the SPM assumes voters act on how parties present themselves. Yet 3.3 is still much greater than 2.7.

Fragmentation extends into the City Council as well. There, the effective number of legislative parties is 2.6 versus an expected 1.9.

Disproportionality is considerable as well.

The Gallagher index summarizes differences between parties’ shares of votes and seats on a scale of 0-100. Its value at the last council election was 7.3 percent. Globally, this is moderate. The highest values concentrate in countries with very small parliaments or where many minor parties have been running under first-past-the-post. For the U.S., however, 7.3 percent is appreciable. The index value was 0.82 percent in the 2024 election to the U.S. House.

Why are Big Apple voters demanding more parties than their institutions can supply?

Reasons include an increasingly competitive Republican Party, an active Conservative Party that endorses some Republicans and even Democrats, plus other cross-endorsement combinations with enough support to win a seat or two. Above all, the regular Democratic and Republican parties ran candidates in many parts of the city rather than just districts that seemed winnable in retrospect.

The map below gives a sense of the geography of voting.

It shows district-level vote shares for four groups of parties that win seats under various simulations (more on those in a moment).

The left bloc comprises Democratic-Working Families endorsees and had the most geographically concentrated support. No candidate in this group got fewer than half of the votes.

The right bloc comprises Republican and Republican-Conservative candidates. This group earned the full range of votes in the districts where it ran. Support for regular Democrats similarly ran the full range.

“No votes” means that the respective party grouping did not have a candidate in the district.

A new interactive website lets users explore results, individual winners, and the indices just described under different electoral systems.

The first tab covers first-past-the-post (FPTP) with a 51-seat council.

The second covers open-list proportional representation (PR) with borough-wide districts of many seats each. In that system, votes for candidates also count for their parties’ lists. Seats are allocated to lists in proportion to their shares of votes. Then these seats go to candidates in descending order of their vote totals.

A third simulation covers mixed-member PR (MMP) based on the existing map of 51 single-seat districts, plus 20 “compensation” seats allocated to parties on a citywide basis. Compensation seats are used to make parties’ seat shares as proportional as possible to their vote shares after accounting for seats already won in the district races. The website default is 20 compensation seats. A forthcoming Manhattan Institute issue brief explains these simulations in detail.

Users can toggle several features of each simulation. For both PR systems, they can choose between two rules for allocating seats to parties. One prioritizes larger parties, and the other aims for a tighter fit between votes and seats. On the MMP tab, users can toggle the number of compensation seats up to 50 (effectively doubling the size of the City Council) or down to zero (duplicating FPTP).

Here are a few interesting points from the simulations.

No configuration changes council control because that depends on how parties decide to organize the chamber. Rather, each PR model (and variant thereof) makes minor adjustments to the relative balance among parties. Both PR simulations bring regular Republicans into council: one under borough-wide OLPR, three under MMP with the 20-seat compensation tier. Switching to the more proportional allocation rule in OLPR gives regular Republicans two seats instead of one. Under FPTP, only Republicans with Conservative Party endorsements win seats. The Democratic and Democratic-Working Families parties are neck-and-neck across configurations. All parties trivially get more seats when council size expands.

As for indices, all PR systems unsurprisingly reduce the Gallagher index, and switching to the more proportional allocation rule does so even more. OLPR also increases the expected effective numbers of parties. This is because the average number of seats per district increases; recall that the SPM rests on this value, plus assembly size. MMP keeps the expectations lower because a substantial share of districts have just one seat each. However, the SPM for MMP is still experimental.

We are excited to share the simulation with the public. Again, it is impossible to say whether New York City’s new three-party system is temporary, and we look forward to reporting on the situation as it unfolds.

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This week it is finally starting to get warmer again. There are more children outside (though not as many as there used to be), and the ice cream trucks have resumed their regular routes. It truly is lovely out there.

But we have had an exceptionally cold winter and spring, and crime almost always rises with warmer weather, as people spend more time outside and opportunities for all kinds of misdeeds increase.

The statistics for April will be out next week, and, based on how the data is shaping up, the mayor will celebrate yet another month of falling crime, standing somewhat stiffly next to his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who seems to be quietly keeping in place the tactics that actually drive crime down, including continued use of the gang database.

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How long Mamdani’s DSA base, many of whom would prefer to see the NYPD abolished, will let him get away with keeping the department largely as it is remains to be seen.

Yet as we hear all the good news about crime, it is worth remembering that, as of the end of 2025, major crime remains significantly higher than it was before the pandemic in every category except murder.

The Public School Calendar Is for the Teachers Union, Not Families

“A recent analysis found that NYC students spend roughly 130 fewer hours in class per year than the national average, over a month less than their peers. Over the course of a student’s K–12 education, that gap compounds into the equivalent of roughly a year and a half of lost instructional time. That is not even inclusive of chronic absenteeism, where it has been reported that 33.3% of students were absent at least 10% of the 2024-2025 school year,” MI’s Jennifer Weber writes.

“NYC students lose about as much classroom time as students in the most under-resourced states in the country. Yet NYC leads the nation in per-pupil spending, at $34,717 per student. The outcomes do not match the financial investment the city has made in education, raising questions about how effectively instructional time is being used and allocated. On the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessment, only 28% of NYC fourth graders read at or above proficiency, and economically disadvantaged students scored an average of 36 points lower than their peers.”

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Podcast: Autonomous Vehicles and NYC

In this week’s episode, Nicole and I talk with “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz, the city’s former Traffic Commissioner, and Kelly McGuinness, director of the Sam Schwartz Transportation Research Program at Hunter College, about the good, bad, and ugly about self-driving cars and dense, transit-centric cities.

It ended on a positive note:

Watch the full episode below or find us on your favorite podcast app.

The Bigger Apple

Autonomous Vehicles and NYC

In this episode, we talk with Sam “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz, former NYC Traffic Commissioner, and Kelly McGuinness, director of the Sam Schwartz Transportation Research Program at Hunter College, about the good, bad, and ugly about self-driving cars and dense, transit-centric cities…

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8 days ago · Liena Zagare and Nicole Gelinas

More From MI on Crime, Schools, and Housing

Rafael Mangual on New York’s repeat offender problem:

“[I]t’s time for policymakers to consider a middle-ground position that doesn’t force prosecutors and judges tasked with keeping the public safe to make decisions without all the facts. New York State should revise its clean slate and other record-related rules, allowing police, prosecutors, and judges to access rap sheets while still keeping them hidden from civilian employers.”

Nicole Gelinas on how Mamdani should deal with street mobs (in response to drag racing in Queens):

“Only human enforcement conducted by police officers can punish and deter these “extreme evaders.” Even the most ambitious streetscape-redesign plan can’t fix every road within the next few years. Moreover, such redesigns absent enforcement will only push lawbreakers onto parkways and highways. The mayor needs to embrace the critical role of police in keeping the streets clear of danger and disorder.”

John Ketcham on a small lot fix for New York’s housing problem:

Council Speaker Julie Menin announced a plan to reform construction rules that currently make it uneconomical to build on small lots in the city. “Menin’s approach stands in stark contrast to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s housing agenda, which has largely centered on government-subsidized development. But New York’s housing shortage will not be solved through subsidies alone. If the city wants to meaningfully expand supply, it must reduce the regulatory barriers that make new housing slow, costly, and often infeasible to build in the first place—including on small, vacant lots.”

Extra! Extra!

Richard Florida writes in The Financial Times about big companies unbundling their headquarters in the US:

“So the new corporate geography looks like this. The owners increasingly opt for lifestyle tax havens. Young talent stays in the superstar cities. And the large middle of the corporate workforce now has real choice, with a growing number opting for lower-cost, lower-tax blue cities in red states.”

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And in case you missed it, here’s last week’s episode:

You can also always find us on your favorite podcast app.

The NYC school calendar decisions are an outcome of collective bargaining between the DOE and the Teachers Union (UFT). District 1’s Community Education Council tried to pass a resolution calling for families to be consulted, but the DOE responded that they would provide an outline of the process for creating a school calendar.

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New York’s “Big 5” are the state’s five largest school districts—New York City, Buffalo, Yonkers, Rochester, and Syracuse—which operate under the same state framework, the same 180-day requirement, and the same general labor environment. NYC is the only district of the “Big 5” that relies on staff days to meet the requirement. The year will start on September 10 and end on June 28, a Monday, a single weekday after the weekend.

NYC stands out on every measure. It starts the school year the latest, ends it the latest, gives students the fewest days in class, and takes the most holidays and breaks. It is also the only “Big 5” district planning a remote learning day. Yonkers, the only district for students to begin before Labor Day, gives students five more days of school than NYC under the same state rules. What’s different is what each city negotiated in its labor agreement, and who got a say in drafting the calendar. These differences translate directly into less time for instruction over the course of the year.

Time in school is critical for student learning. A recent analysis of 74 studies found a positive relationship between instructional time and student achievement, identifying access to instructional time as “an underappreciated dimension of education inequality.” Students in states with the longest school schedules spend 133 hours more in school each year than those in states with the shortest school schedules, equivalent to 1.4 additional years of school over the course of K–12 education.

A recent analysis found that NYC students spend roughly 130 fewer hours in class per year than the national average, over a month less than their peers. Over the course of a student’s K–12 education, that gap compounds into the equivalent of roughly a year and a half of lost instructional time. That is not even inclusive of chronic absenteeism, where it has been reported that 33.3% of students were absent at least 10% of the 2024-2025 school year.

NYC students lose about as much classroom time as students in the most under-resourced states in the country. Yet NYC leads the nation in per-pupil spending, at $34,717 per student. The outcomes do not match the financial investment the city has made in education, raising questions about how effectively instructional time is being used and allocated. On the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessment, only 28% of NYC fourth graders read at or above proficiency, and economically disadvantaged students scored an average of 36 points lower than their peers.

Several features of the calendar trace directly to union contract provisions. The start date is one. In 2005, teachers reported for professional development on Thursday and Friday before Labor Day. By 2009, the city and the UFT had renegotiated the calendar  to start school after Labor Day. Teachers now report on the Tuesday after Labor Day. Since Labor Day falls late in 2026, students won’t return until the second week of September.

The contract also specifies that teachers do not work the last two weekdays of June. The 2027 calendar produces a single instructional day after a weekend (June 28th), immediately preceding two staff-only days. The other “Big 5 districts” end between June 22 and June 25.

Several holidays were added over the past decade—Lunar New Year, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Diwali, and Juneteenth—without corresponding adjustments elsewhere in the calendar to preserve instructional time.

A 2023 contract pilot expanded remote work for teachers, including for parent-teacher conferences. Snow days, formerly closure days that extended the year, were converted to remote learning during the pandemic and have not reverted. Under state regulation, remote days count toward the 180-day requirement. None of the other Big 5 districts has adopted this practice. In effect, the time that was once protected for in-person instruction has been reclassified without increasing the total time students spend learning in classrooms.

The DOE and UFT contract expires in November 2027. Calendar terms will be back on the table. The 2026–27 calendar shows what happens when only one set of stakeholders is in the room: a school year that meets 180 days on paper but delivers fewer days of in-class instruction for students, that starts in mid-September and ends on a Monday, and that gives NYC students fewer days in school.

Until student instructional time becomes a non-negotiable priority, rather than a byproduct of contract terms, NYC’s calendar will continue to reflect adult agreements more than student needs—and students will continue to receive less time in the classroom than their peers elsewhere.

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“New York City faces a multi-billion dollar budget deficit thanks, in part, to a recent ramp-up in social spending. The economy’s not in recession. But the local welfare state has, of late, registered impressive growth. Local policymakers reason that, since low and moderate-income New Yorkers are up against it, and federal programs aren’t expanding, this city must take the initiative,” Stephen Eide writes.

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Take the city’s rental housing voucher program, CityFHEPS. It is expected to nearly double to about $3.1 billion by 2030 even without the expansion the mayor is in court to stop, and officials in City Hall argue the demand for vouchers now exceeds what the city alone can sustain.

“When you talk about wanting a voucher program to be an entitlement program or a universal program, the only scale of government that can sustainably provide that is the federal government,” Leila Bozorg, Mamdani’s deputy mayor for housing and planning, told POLITICO.

“New York City is doing what only a national government can reasonably sustain,” Stephen concludes. “It is loosening targeting and expanding benefits without a clear plan to fund them, and its vision to lift its residents up is to offer them government jobs. In the long run, a system built this way will come under pressure from the city’s budget, its tax base, and the people it is meant to serve.”

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Not Everyone Wants Universal Childcare

This week, Mayor Mamdani cut the ribbon (or rather ran through red tape) to announce the opening this fall of seven new early childhood centers — 240 3-K seats — into a system the Independent Budget Office says has roughly 17,000 unfilled seats already.

Laser focused on delivering Universal Childcare, since taking office, the mayor has launched 2-K with Governor Hochul; opened 3-K and Pre-K applications with outreach in 13 languages; announced 1,000 new 3-K seats in 56 ZIP codes; launched a citywide childcare map; created a provider-permitting portal; and advanced a free childcare pilot for municipal workers.

Asked about enrollment, the mayor said this week the numbers are “lining up with where we were last year.” The administration blames an outreach team Adams effectively “disbanded” — but if Mamdani’s extraordinary marketing skills couldn’t lift it, maybe demand isn’t the issue.

The Supply-Demand Mismatch

The number of children in NYC has fallen dramatically since Pre-K (2014) and 3-K (2017) were launched. The city’s under-5 population peaked around 566,000 in 2015 and fell to roughly 451,000 in 2024—a 20% drop. The under-3 cohort, the leading indicator for future demand, declined from 335,000 to 260,000.

The early education system has carried substantial vacancies for years, with large geographic variation. The IBO found 16% of 3-K and 20% of Pre-K seats unfilled in 2023–24. The DOE’s section in the Mayor’s Management Report shows the pattern worsening: School Day enrollment dropped 3% from SY 2023–24 to SY 2024–25, and unfilled seats rose 15% to 17,497. Total 3-K and Pre-K enrollment was roughly 103,000 in SY 2023–24, well below the de Blasio-era peak near 131,000 in SY 2019–20.

This could simply mean that everyone who wanted to send their child to Pre-K has, and the DOE seems to acknowledge as much, writing that “the declines in Pre-K enrollment reflect the growing need to age down the early childhood education system.” But it also reflects the fact that the number of children keeps falling, and we are not adjusting.

The same demographic wave is rippling through K-12: the city has spent roughly $1.6 billion cushioning school budgets from enrollment-related cuts, a “hold harmless” policy, Mamdani now has to decide whether to continue. “Despite a nearly 92% increase in early childhood spending since FY 2018, enrollment has not increased commensurately,” the NYC Comptroller reported in 2024.

“As Mayor Zohran Mamdani seeks to fill his $5.4 billion to $7.1 billion budget hole, he has so far shown little willingness to cut Department of Education spending,” MI’s John Ketcham and Danyela Souza Egorov write in the New York Post. “But he’ll never balance the books if he keeps throwing good money after bad in the city’s public schools.”

Center-based care in NYC is expensive, and parents who need 8- or 10-hour days often can’t find or afford them. But only 5% of Pre-K and 10% of 3-K seats are Extended Day and Year-round. The rest follow the school day, which, for working parents, is not a substitute for the childcare they need to rely on. We also need to acknowledge that many parents will choose to continue caring for their children themselves.

Mamdani noted accurately in January that: “If New Yorkers are not choosing to opt into the system, it’s a reflection of inadequacies in the system itself.” The inadequacy may not be that people don’t know about free childcare, but that the demand simply isn’t there for what’s being offered.

Busy, Busy Mayor: Mamdani’s War on Too-Expensive Eggs and Too-Cheap Luxury Second Homes

In this The Bigger Apple Podcast episode we talk about Mamdani’s plans for municipal grocery stores and whether green carts and farmers markets are already doing this work, the mayor’s proposed Pied-à-terre tax, the state’s war against insurance schemes, and more.

Meanwhile, in Albany …

“The war no one in Albany seems eager to talk about may determine how long the money lasts,” MI’s E.J. McMahon writes.

Much of the state’s unusually large current reserves built from pandemic aid, booming tax receipts, and investment gains are already committed through tax credits, prepayments, and other maneuvers, leaving it less truly flexible than the headline numbers suggest, he argues.

With spending set to grow significantly faster than recurring revenue, New York looks flush in the short term but remains highly exposed to a downturn.

Read the full piece here.

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Local policymakers reason that, since low and moderate-income New Yorkers are up against it, and federal programs aren’t expanding, this city must take the initiative.

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However, a functional welfare state cannot be built on compassion alone; it must rest on more solid principles, and New York is building an expensive welfare state without the tools that make it possible at the national level.

Cities Have Limits

New Yorkers are more willing than most Americans to tax themselves to fund a generous welfare state. Why not celebrate that as federalism in action?

Because, according to a long tradition of urban politics and economic scholarship, the national government is far better positioned to run redistributive programs than cities.

No city can keep raising taxes on middle and upper-income households forever. People can move. Since international outmigration is more difficult than domestic outmigration, many scholars argue that the federal government, not cities and states, should lead in helping the poor.

The issue’s not just wealth flight. Local welfare programs hinder upward mobility by hindering horizontal mobility. Sometimes, people need to move elsewhere to move up. That is the premise of “moving to opportunity” programs, long promoted by center-left policymakers, that make low-income households’ access to housing benefits contingent on their moving to safer communities with stronger schools and job prospects.

New York, by contrast, links benefits to local residency. The New York model discourages horizontal mobility among moderate-income households, while encouraging it among upper-income households. A good socioeconomic system would do neither.

Lack of Vision for Middle Class Upward Mobility

In New York, the only vision of upward mobility into the middle class that policymakers these days seem to offer centers on government jobs.

One moves up the socio-economic ladder by getting a job with the school department, transit, state government, or perhaps an NGO. Healthcare jobs, often subsidized by public benefit programs, should also be considered a form of public employment. The result is a model where advancing out of poverty consists of shifting from one form of government dependence to another.

New York cannot afford this strategy for at least three reasons.

First, while all varieties of economically unexceptional communities rely on government jobs (Indian reservations, the Rust Belt, Appalachia), New York cannot afford to be unexceptional. Economic exceptionalism is necessitated by New Yorkers’ unique sense of pride in their city and the city’s exceptional fiscal commitments.

Second, it treats government employment as an economic growth policy. But the only principled reason to grow most varieties of government jobs is as a response to social breakdown. Under what conditions should status quo levels of investment in cops, correctional officers, teachers, homeless shelter staff, etc. be considered inadequate? Probably bad conditions. A government-job centered economic strategy is invested in social breakdown, just as a healthcare-centered strategy is invested in old age and sickness.

Third, when public agencies function as job programs, service quality inevitably suffers. It is absolutely idle to debate “outcomes” or “performance measurement” in a company town whose core business is government.

The government should be the employer of last resort, not first, and government employment should not be the primary path upward.

Wealth, Not Just Income

A stronger vision of upward mobility should focus on wealth formation, not just income. For low-income households, saving is often secondary to immediate needs. But for the working and middle classes, it is central, as wealth provides stability income alone cannot.

Here, New York is at a disadvantage. Not everything is more expensive in New York. Transportation is a deal, and CUNY ranks as one of the most affordable public university systems in the nation.

But housing costs are high, and because New York is a city of renters, proportionately fewer households than elsewhere experience the “wealth effect” from high and rising home equity.

In America, the less rich you are, the more of your wealth is concentrated in home equity. In New York, wage stagnation stings more than elsewhere because of working and middle-class households’ diminished access to home equity. Perception matters in economic policymaking just as much as it does in public safety.

If middle-class households in New York can’t rely on home equity for wealth formation, supporting other opportunities, such as small business ownership, becomes more important. Those have not been priorities of city policymakers, of late. When households cannot build wealth on their own, they end up relying more on the government, and over time, that reliance leads to further entitlements, such as unsustainable public pension expansions.

When Everyone Feels Poor

Affordability anxiety also frustrates a core principle of the American welfare state – targeting. America’s welfare state is smaller than Europe’s but better targeted to the poor, as has been illustrated in analyses by Chris Pope and others, which has helped keep safety net costs sustainable.

With federal programs, targeting was a legacy of the War on Poverty. In the 1960s, social activists such as Michael Harrington believed that the New Deal had not focused enough on the truly poor. Thus, the addition of Medicaid and expanded income support spending to the New Deal’s unemployment insurance and old age pension initiatives.

New York City has, of late, been moving in the opposite direction, launching programs that begin by narrowly targeting the neediest, then broadening eligibility. That’s what happened with the major benefit expansions over the past two decades: Pre-K, Fair Fares, and CityFHEPS.

Targeting requires an eligibility standard. But when everyone feels poor, or at least economically anxious, the ranks of those who believe they deserve government assistance expand inexorably. The line between poor and near-poor has always been blurry. The affordability crisis has made it blurrier, and political pressure is pushing programs outward.

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New York has to balance its budget, and when a program like CityFHEPS grows wildly, something has to give. If eligibility cannot be tightened, policymakers will have to resort to self-imposed spending caps, such as proposed by the Citizens Budget Commission. But such caps are often temporary, and when fiscal pressure eases, expansion resumes, and the cycle repeats.

Conclusion

New York will never embrace a minimalist “night watchman” model of municipal government. The local welfare state has deep roots stretching back generations. Even during the neoliberal era of Giuliani and Bloomberg, New York went above and beyond.

But New York City is doing what only a national government can reasonably sustain. It is loosening targeting and expanding benefits without a clear plan to fund them, and its vision to lift its residents up is to offer them government jobs. In the long run, a system built this way will come under pressure from the city’s budget, its tax base, and the people it is meant to serve.

To build a sustainable welfare state, compassion alone is not enough.

Governor Kathy Hochul presented her FY 2027 Executive Budget in Albany on Jan. 20. Just over a month later, a “little excursion” broke out in the Middle East—touching off what Bloomberg News called “the biggest oil supply shock in history.” Energy prices jumped, supply chains wobbled, stock prices slid, and inflation, which had been cooling, began heating up again. Economists quickly responded by raising their inflation forecasts, trimming expectations for growth and jobs, and putting the odds of a recession this year at roughly one in three.

The conflict arrived at what might have seemed like a fortuitous moment for New York policymakers. It broke out just as the state’s annual budget process was entering its most crucial phase—leaving time, at least in theory, for the governor and Legislature to absorb the implications before finalizing a spending plan.

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So far, however, the reaction in Albany might best be summed up as … War? What war? Negotiations have reportedly centered less on fiscal conditions than on a grab bag of non-budget priorities, even as the financial plan already calls for spending growth far outpacing inflation and is almost certain to grow further before adoption.

To be sure, the state is entering this period with an unusually large cash cushion. Years of pandemic aid, windfall tax revenues from a booming stock market, and billions in investment earnings have left Albany with reserves on a scale rarely seen in its history.

But much of that money is already spoken for—tied up in tax credit obligations, prepayments, and accounting maneuvers that make the balance look larger and more flexible than it really is. Meanwhile, underlying spending trends continue to point toward large out-year gaps even under stable economic conditions.

Which leaves the state appearing flush in the moment while remaining structurally unbalanced and highly exposed to a downturn—especially one driven by volatile global forces beyond its control. In a typical recession, tax receipts could fall by tens of billions of dollars over a few years, quickly eroding even a large reserve.

The war no one in Albany seems eager to talk about may determine how long the money lasts.

Read more about what it means in the full piece here.

It’s understandable why I’m skeptical of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new “grand experiment” in government-run groceries. I grew up in the Soviet Union, where the government decided what kind of bread, among other things, would be sold at what prices—it did not go very well when it came to equalizing supply and demand.

Mamdani announced earlier this week that the city will build a new supermarket on a vacant lot where La Marqueta once occupied five blocks in East Harlem, and set prices for a basket of groceries to be sold there. In his telling, this is a direct heir to mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s Depression-era campaign to make food affordable.

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But LaGuardia’s experiment was about reorganizing an entire food system, not running a handful of branded stores. Municipal markets were just one element of a broader plan to connect them to new wholesale terminals, to police racketeers, and to regulate weights and measures to narrow the spread between wholesale and retail prices.

Contrast that with what Mamdani has actually proposed. The N.Y.C. Groceries program will establish five city‑branded supermarkets, one in each borough, with about $70 million in capital funding. The city’s development agency will pick private operators, set “strict requirements” for pricing, labor standards, and reporting, and subsidize a “core basket” of staples to guarantee “meaningful, predictable savings.”

How much the city is planning to spend on subsidizing these supermarkets is unclear, nor has there been any public talk of plans that would help lower the cost of goods for the grocers, bodegas, and street vendors who already feed East Harlem.

La Marqueta itself is a reminder of how hard it has been to will this site back to life. In its mid‑century heyday, it drew tens of thousands of shoppers a day, including people coming in from downtown and the suburbs for niche products they couldn’t find elsewhere. Since urban renewal transformed the neighborhood and ethnic products dispersed across modern supermarkets, mayor after mayor has tried some version of revival here—capital upgrades, incubator stalls, cultural events—investing millions of dollars with little to show for it. Could one more round of massive capital spending and a subsidized supermarket operator finally overcome those structural problems? I fear, no.

Meanwhile, the basic grocery math hasn’t changed. Supermarkets are an unforgiving business, with margins in the low single digits. Stores survive by getting you to buy more than the sale items: you come for the eggs, you leave with coffee, cereal, snacks, and cleaning supplies. If the city‑branded supermarket succeeds at undercutting local stores on the classic loss leaders—milk, bread, eggs —it can easily tilt that math. The risk isn’t just that La Marqueta struggles; it’s that surrounding grocers lose the volume they need to stay afloat, leaving the neighborhood dependent on one heavily subsidized store whose fate rests on future mayors’ enthusiasm for this particular experiment.

LaGuardia used public markets to rationalize a messy private ecosystem, among other things. For now, Mamdani is building one shiny, expensive, city‑owned box on top of the same old supply chain and calling it a grand experiment.

• MI’s Eric Kober also wrote about the grocery proposal this week

Pied-à-Terre Tax

While Mamdani was celebrating Gov. Hochul’s proposal to impose a pied-à-terre tax on owners of $5 million plus second homes that is expected to generate half a billion in recurring revenue for the city, I was at Semafor World Economy, where I had a chance to talk to some of the business elite who’d be affected by the various “tax the rich” schemes on both East and West coasts.

My takeaway — they can certainly afford to live in NYC or have a pied-à-terre here; the question is — will they want to? While everyone I talked to had friends who had relocated to Texas or Florida, not everyone was eager to leave their expensive abodes just yet. As one executive put it, “I did not make this much money not to be able to live where I want to.” (disclosure — I’m married to a Semafor co-founder)

Insurance in Exchange for Rent Freeze?

At the other end of affordability spectrum, the Mamdani administration needed to come up with some solutions to improve the odds of survival for affordable housing providers. The goal is to increase the odds that the Rent Regulation Board will freeze the rents on the city’s million or so rent stabilized apartments and the mayor will be able to deliver on his biggest campaign promise.

Under current circumstances, buildings with large shares of such apartments are already barely making ends meet. The solution the city has proposed is an insurance fund to help lower insurance costs for landlords.

High Profile Incidents

This week, we had a cop on a horse chase down a handbag thief and a mass casualty event at Grand Central, where three riders were slashed with a machete.

Autonomous Vehicles

But while cops are happily riding horses, I’d rather be in a Waymo, I think. Or at least be able to try one without having to go to California. Or Texas.

NYC’s AV testing stopped at the end of March as permits could not be renewed because the state law governing the city’s permitting system expired with the state budget, and the new budget has yet to be agreed upon.

Nicole and I will talk with Sam Schwartz and Kelly McGuinness about the future of transportation, including autonomous vehicles in NYC, next week on our podcast. In the meantime, read their piece in Streetsblog, which begins with this scene:

“In the summer of 1925, a radio-controlled driverless car traveled down Broadway and Fifth Avenue through heavy traffic, turning corners, speeding up, slowing down, braking as warranted. The demonstration ended when this autonomous vehicle crashed into another vehicle full of photographers documenting the event.”

Jobs Numbers

New York City’s job growth basically stalled in 2025, with private employment rising by just 13,000 jobs after a 95,000-job surge the year before. Gains were weak and skewed toward lower-productivity services, while construction and manufacturing shrank and the office-using sectors that anchor the tax base—finance, real estate, professional services—were flat.

The problem is that the city isn’t generating growth in its most productive sectors, MI’s Eric Kober writes, and in that context, higher taxes risk compounding the slowdown. Full story here.

Extra! Extra!

MI’s Allison Schrager has a fascinating story in Bloomberg, noting that Americans are working fewer hours than they did in the 1950s and ‘60s, and the gap between Europe and us has shrunk by half. Other rich countries now work 92 hours for every 100 Americans do, and European hours rose in the 2010s while American hours fell.

A new NBER paper flags Medicaid expansion as one potential reason — the program covered about 10% of Americans in 1970 and 30% by 2020. Because benefits phase out as income rises, taking extra hours or a better job can wipe out the raise. The drop in work is concentrated among men and lower earners who are leaving jobs altogether, which flips the old pattern: today, higher earners put in more hours than lower earners, not fewer.

Have you added The Bigger Apple Podcast to your favorite podcast player yet? Nicole and I just wrapped our episode on Mamdani’s first 100 days, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is holding a rally this weekend to celebrate his first 100 days in office. Every outlet in the city is scrutinizing his performance, but few questions are asked about the longer-term implications of his short-term decisions.

Mamdani promised to make the city more affordable by bringing us universal childcare, freezing rents, offering government groceries, and fast and free buses. He also promised not to govern as an austerity mayor, but one focused on “ambition.” As he put it in his inaugural speech:

“The movement we began over a year ago did not end with our victory on Election Night. It will not end this afternoon. It lives on with every battle we will fight, together; every blizzard and flood we withstand, together; every moment of fiscal challenge we overcome with ambition, not austerity, together; every way we pursue change in working peoples’ interests, rather than at their expense, together.”

Thereby, he set the standard against which his mayoralty should be measured, whether it’s 100 days or 4 years.

The polls

A mayor can only be as ambitious as he is popular. Mamdani started from a position of strength, and is working hard to maintain his approval — he controls the biggest megaphone in the city, able to reach more residents than virtually all other media combined, and he has been using it.

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Two polls that came out this week, Marist found 48% of New Yorkers approve, 30% disapprove, and 23% still unsure of how well Mamdani is doing. Emerson similarly found 43% approve, 27% disapprove, and 30% neutral. Both are net positive, but both trail his predecessor, Eric Adams, at the same point — 61% — and are closer to Bill de Blasio’s 49%.

Marist found 74% of residents think he’s working hard. A majority aren’t so convinced he’s delivering results. The Emerson poll reports 59% of registered voters say the city is on the wrong track.

People like him, they think he’s working hard, but they are not sure he’s doing well or that the city is going where they want it to go. Personal approval can survive policy disappointment for a while, but if the wrong-track number stays high while the big promises stay unfulfilled, he loses the political capital he needs to move Albany and the Council, and absorb the stumbles that come with any first term.

What he has actually done

There is only so much one can accomplish in 100 days, good or bad.

His clearest wins are the most basic: garbage is being picked up. The city cleared the snow and filled 100,000 potholes. Crime, perhaps suppressed by the cold, has been historically low. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has held a steady line despite tension over gang databases and the new Community Safety Department, which mostly just consolidated existing programs under one roof.

This is not nothing, but it is also not transformational. So what about the big promises?

Childcare

On childcare, the story is real progress wrapped in inflated PR. He got Governor Hochul to fully fund his small and expensive 2-K childcare pilot. Governor Hochul committed $73 million in state funding for 2,000 seats this fall, expanding to 12,000 (and $450 million) next year. Beyond that, funding is unclear. As the 3-K rollout showed, that is never a good sign.

Enrollment in 3-K and UPK has been underwhelming for years, with seats sitting vacant across existing facilities. The city is now making an aggressive push to enroll more kids, framed as expansion, which is one way to describe trying not to contract. New enrollment numbers have not been released, and, given how eagerly this mayor promotes every win, the silence is telling.

There is also the cost. The 2-K pilot runs about $36,500 per child per year — roughly $13,000 more than what parents pay in the private market.

Housing

On housing, the Mayor’s posture has been aggressively on the side of tenants. One of the first appointments Mamdani made was to the Mayor’s Office of Tenant Protections. He also appointed six of the nine members of the Rent Guidelines Board, and expressed trust “they will consider all the factors facing the city's rent-stabilized tenants and come to an appropriate decision.” He would like to see the decision be to freeze rents on rent-stabilized apartments so he can fulfill yet another campaign promise, one that would have a real pocketbook impact on roughly half the city’s renters who live in such apartments.

The Rental Ripoff Hearings were held, loudly advertised, and were not really hearings, but as I’ve written before, yet another well-produced PR opportunity.

A rent freeze, if it happens, will not happen till October and would be considerably less great for providers of affordable housing, many of whom are already underwater. Freezing the rents will also inevitably accelerate the deterioration of the buildings that are heavily rent-stabilized, where income already exceeds expenses. My colleague Eric Kober wrote this excellent piece on “rental rip-offs” and the economic realities.

Mamdani has, meanwhile, made promising noises about helping on the supply side by fast-tracking affordable housing permits and promoting accessory dwelling units. But housing policy takes time — and the rewards rarely fall into place during a four-year term. The question is whether Mamdani can put his political muscle into this vital long-term project, which would involve working closely and building trust with hated developers — or whether he’s merely trying to keep abundance-focused centrists inside the tent.

Buses and streets

As was litigated extensively during his campaign, the city cannot make fares free — the MTA is a state agency and fare revenue is bonded. He has since conceded that free buses are not coming this year.

What he can do is remake streets. Mamdani has positioned himself aggressively as a streets mayor — sworn into office at the long-shuttered City Hall Station, with his first act the appointment of a transportation deputy who has been moving projects that sat dormant under the previous administration.

This week, Streetsblog reported he is creating the Office of Curb Management to manage what is becoming an increasingly contentious competition for finite public space: deliveristas, Citibike corrals, EV charging, street dining, garbage containerization, street vendors, metered parking, and bicycle storage come to mind. The people without a lobby in that fight — the elderly, the very young, pedestrians who need a clear path — are the ones losing ground quite literally.

Groceries

This big promise is playing small. On groceries, he wants to spend $70 million for five pilots, the New York Post reported.

The money

All plans need funding, and Mamdani’s budget is big. $127 billion big, with a $5.4 billion budget gap for FY2027. Governor Hochul has chipped in $1.5 billion to help close the gap, Mamdani claimed $1.7 billion in savings through his Chief Savings Officers initiative; his budget team has disclosed and approved approximately $237 million of that. It’s hard to say what kinds of efficiencies they are taking about — Tal Roded had a piece on this last week.

Mamdani’s preferred solution is to generate revenue from increasing income tax on millionaires and large corporations, or – if that fails – a 9.5% property tax hike. The latter was downplayed quickly after it alienated outer borough voters exactly as predictably as it should have. His preferred solutions, however, require Albany to act, and so far it has not.

Mamdani told Errol Louis of NY1 that he has been in conversations with Gov. Kathy Hochul and state leaders about the deficit.

“[I]t is that partnership with Albany that will help to put the city back on firm financial footing. And what we will see in our city is an honesty about the money that we are spending and also what it costs to provide the services that we want to,” he said.

Meanwhile, the city’s private sector shed roughly 19,500 jobs year-over-year through January 2026. What growth there has been is concentrated almost entirely in low-wage healthcare — not the kind of employment base that funds a $127 billion municipal budget.

The reversals

The new mayor reversed himself on two commitments he had championed as an assembly member and on his campaign trail.

CityFHEPS — the city-funded rental voucher program — over the years has exploded in cost with no ceiling in sight, and like the mayor before, Mamdani is fighting in court to limit it. Class size reduction, a state mandate he supported, would cost more than a billion dollars a year to comply with, and he is asking Albany for a delay.

Both reversals are fiscally prudent, but both are also examples of austerity, whatever he calls them — the thing he promised he would not do — against the constituencies he explicitly promised to serve.

What’s missing

I haven’t written much here about Mamdani’s relationship with the city’s private sector tax base, or his plan to help the city’s economy grow — because there’s nothing there. The mayor has been working on tenant protections, consumer protections, and labor solidarity, but he’s built no real support from the businesses that generate revenue.

But New York’s workforce, and its tax base, are driven by some of the world’s largest corporations. Mamdani won’t be able to build the tax base he needs for ambitious social spending while offering no strategy for attracting the private sector employers who generate it.

The verdict

Mayor Mamdani has made a friend of President Trump and extracted real money from Governor Hochul. He has cleared the snow, filled the potholes, and kept crime down. He has set in motion an ideologically coherent agenda on tenant and consumer protections and early childhood care. He has reversed himself quietly on the two commitments that would have cost the most to keep.

Has he made New York City more affordable for any of its residents? For now, the answer is no. Which is why, for all the genuine approval his personal qualities attract, a third of New Yorkers do not know what to make of him. They can see the effort. They are waiting for the results.

Podcast

Nicole and I tackled Mayor Mamdani's first 100 days, looking at his diluted promises of free childcare, fast and free buses, a rent freeze, and government groceries, as well as his ambition versus budgetary realities and how he’s dealt with the day-to-day challenges of running the city.

Extra! Extra!

• Where does a dog belong in the city? City Councilmember Chi Ossé: “I am noticing more dogs in public. And I don’t think I want to comment about how I feel about that because I hope to have a long political career.”

• Waymo’s self-driving car test ended at the end of March, Streetsblog reports. What does it mean for regulation, they wonder? My colleague Nicole Gelinas also had thoughts on AV regulation a while back, especially when it comes to labor issues.

American cities are losing their families. Since 2020, the number of children under 5 has fallen by 7% in large urban counties. In New York, the number is closer to 18%. Chicago, LA, and San Francisco are not far behind.

In a new Manhattan Institute report, Connor O’Brien, a fellow at the Institute for Progress, and I looked at the reasons why and what cities can do.

We found three themes dominated.

Affordability and fit — family-sized homes and reliable childcare are scarce and expensive, and what exists is frequently the wrong size or in the wrong location.

Reliability — parents struggle to plan around systems that shift unpredictably, whether it’s childcare waitlists, school admissions rules, or unreliable commutes.

Time — parents are chronically short on time, small frictions accumulate, and can be the last straw that makes families leave.

While cities cannot remove every difficulty of urban life, there is plenty they can do to keep families from leaving.

They can reform rules to help build more housing faster; support the kind of flexible childcare and high-quality schools parents actually want; and invest in safe and welcoming public spaces where families need them most. (Read the full report.)

Podcast: Rafael Mangual On Rikers, Canal Street, And How To Judge Mamdani’s Success

This week, Nicole Gelinas and I spoke with our colleague Rafael Mangual about the Raise the Age law and its role in rising juvenile crime, rising public disorder, Canal Street's counterfeit economy, and the legal and logistical chaos likely to unfold as the city's self-imposed 2027 Rikers Island closure deadline nears.

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According to the latest stats, crime is down by 1.6%, but as the weather warms up, the gains may not last. How should we judge Mamdani’s success?

Listen to the full episode here.

Local

• New York City lost almost 20,000 jobs in 2025, according to NYS Department of Labor — the city and state had expected an increase of about 40,000. Can Mamdani afford to keep focusing on redistribution rather than growth?

• The City Council released its preliminary budget, and the gloves are off, as Mamdani takes to social media.

• To extend his reach, Mamdani also lifted City Hall’s ban on using TikTok for outreach to constituents, privacy concerns be damned. At this point, I believe, he can reach more city residents to shape their perceptions of what’s going on and his own performance than anyone else in the city. So much for the Fourth Estate.

• Not quite free buses for all, but the City Council wants them for nearly 1 million low-income New Yorkers. Our Nicole Gelinas thinks this is not a good idea.

Can Mamdani Save His Way Out Of The Budget Hole?

The city is spending more than it’s bringing in and, with long-term revenues uncertain, Mamdani has been trying to cut costs, but the $250 million in savings he’s announced is a long way from the $5.4 billion he needs.

Tal Roded looked at what the proposed savings tell us about Mamdani’s priorities and what he is likely to need to balance the books. Read the story.

New York Has Thousands Of Basement Apartments. Here’s Why Few Will Be Legalized.

The Multiple Dwellings Law, written for tenements in 1929, is blocking thousands of NYC basement apartments from ever becoming legal. The city’s pilot to expand basement living in East New York produced not one legal conversion.

“New York City homeowners who wish to add a basement ADU [accessory dwelling unit] likewise trigger the MDL, requiring sprinklers and the law’s other requirements throughout the entire home, something that can easily cost north of $50,000,” writes MI’s John Ketcham.

Extra! Extra!

• California’s proposed one-time 5% billionaire tax — intended to raise $100B for healthcare — is backfiring before it even reaches voters: just six confirmed departures (Page, Brin, Thiel, Spielberg, Hankey, Sacks) have already removed an estimated $536 billion from the tax base, roughly a quarter of what the initiative was designed to capture, MI’s Shawn Regan writes in City Journal. The lost future income tax revenue from departing billionaires could exceed what the wealth tax would ever collect — meaning California ends up poorer overall.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

  City Journal Substack

  California’s Billionaire Tax Is Already Making It Poorer

  “Good riddance.” That was the response from one California commentator when several billionaires announced plans to leave the Golden State late last year to avoid a proposed “billionaire tax.” The ballot measure, which voters could be asked to approve this fall, would impose a one-time 5 percent tax, payable over five years…

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  a month ago · 34 likes · 5 comments · Shawn Regan

• Stephen Fulop of the Partnership for New York City, the city’s leading business advocacy group, talked with the New York Editorial Board (of which Nicole Gelinas and I are members) about the city, the role of large business, and Mamdani’s performance so far.

  The New York Editorial Board

  Steven Fulop on Fighting for Business Interests in Zohran Mamdani's New York

  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 Preside…

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  a month ago · 14 likes · 2 comments · New York Editorial Board

• San Francisco and Philadelphia homicide rates are at historic lows. The credit goes to a handful of Democratic mayors who broke with progressive orthodoxy on drugs and policing, Keith Humphreys argues in City Journal. “Those principles are simple: public policy should consider the impact of drug use on others, not just users; harm reduction alone is an inadequate response to drugs as a policy and a service; the best goal for addicted people is not mere survival, but recovery; it is socially just for police to prevent public spaces (e.g., playgrounds, sidewalks) from being taken over by drug-related commerce, drug use, or encampments; pressuring some people into addiction treatment is ethical and effective; and some publicly provided housing should require abstinence from substance use,” he writes.

City Journal Substack

Blue Cities Are Finally Showing Sanity on Drugs and Crime

This piece first appeared on our main website, city-journal.org…

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a month ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Keith Humphreys

To balance the books, the City has two options: raise revenue or cut expenses.

Raising revenue means either growing the tax base — desirable but slow — or increasing taxes, which requires Albany’s blessing for income taxes (unlikely) and is deeply unpopular for property taxes.

Increasing the tax base is the most desirable course of action as it grows the economic pie for all involved. Unfortunately, it is also one of the more difficult levers for the City government to control, as it relies on complex economic conditions at the city, state, and federal levels. I proposed some policies the Mamdani administration could pursue in this post, but even if the City follows through on them, it will take years for the effects to translate to City revenues at scale.

NYCuriosity

NYC’s Job Growth Has a Quality Problem

There are nearly 4.9 million jobs based in NYC, of which about 4.2 million are in the private sector (i.e., not government jobs). And yet, in 2025, NYC only added 33,400 new private sector jobs. Even worse, through the first half of 2025 there were 4,600 fewer businesses…

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2 months ago · 26 likes · 2 comments · Tal Roded

That leaves cutting expenses as the most immediate lever available. To that end and to his credit, Mayor Mamdani created Chief Savings Officers (CSOs) at every City agency, tasked with finding savings. Their plans came due on March 20. Here’s what we know so far.

The Mayor’s Strategy: Chief Savings Officers

The CSOs were tasked with identifying 1.5% in savings for 2026 and 2.5% for 2027 and beyond. The total came in at over $1.7 billion — right around 1.47% of the $116B FY26 adopted budget.

What the Mayor’s Office has shared publicly is far less: an “initial list of approved items” across 16 agencies totaling about $250 million over FY26 and FY27. The gap between $1.7B identified and $250M released raises questions worth examining — about what’s in the approved items, and about whether agency-identified savings alone can close a budget gap that keeps widening.

What we know about the CSO reports so far

I’ll use this “initial list of approved items” in my analysis below.

To put the CSO actions in context, I compared them to the relevant agency’s FY25 accepted budget. For each agency, the % of FY25 budget calculation is:

- FY27 savings ÷ FY25 budget (for agencies that have FY27 savings)

- FY26 savings ÷ FY25 budget (for agencies that only have FY26 savings – e.g., DOC, MONS)

The logic here is that FY27 is potentially more of a “steady state” ongoing savings target (of 2.5%), so it’s the more meaningful denominator year to benchmark against. For agencies with no FY27 figure, FY26 is used as the only available data point.

Given all that, here are the released savings by agency, sorted by largest savings for FY27:

The Office of Labor Relations (OLR) dominates. A single administrative action — a $100M audit removing ineligible dependents from employee health plans — accounts for roughly 51% of total FY27 savings in the Mayor’s announcement. This one item, from a tiny agency, dwarfs everything else on the list.

The Department of Finance (DOF) has the most substantive savings relative to its own size, at 1.27% of its FY25 budget. Its single savings item — strengthening verification for the primary residence co-op abatement — would on its own get DOF nearly to its FY26 savings target.

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Most other agencies’ savings are well under 0.1% of their budgets. The savings announced for MONS, NYCEM, TLC, OMB, and DSNY are effectively symbolic. If the released items represent the largest savings for those agencies, they risk falling far short of the 2.5% FY27 target.

What the savings items tell us about priorities

A majority of the announced savings involve contract renegotiations and bringing contracted work in-house, which aligns with a growing literature on excessive procurement costs in government. These are opportunities for NYC to both achieve cost savings and improve service delivery.

Agencies canceling contracts to bring services in-house include the Department of Corrections, the Department of Social Services, the Economic Development Corporation, the Mayor’s Office of Nonprofit Services, NYC Aging, and NYC Emergency Management. The Office of Technology and Innovation, Health + Hospitals, and the Fire Department all mention negotiating contracts. New York City Public Schools will terminate underutilized contracts and implement spending caps, the latter saving over $30 million in FY27 alone. Moving from outside vendors to agency personnel can reduce costs and build institutional capacity over time.

These canceled contracts and moves to in-house services also raise some questions, however. Will the agencies taking on additional in-house work be hiring new employees to manage these new tasks? If so, that may reduce some of the headline numbers from the canceled contracts. It also raises worries about whether these agencies have the ability to hire the needed talent on reasonable timelines, given the myriad difficulties with hiring at the City level. Civil service reform could go a long way toward improving the ability of NYC agencies to bring more services in-house.

NYCuriosity

NYC’s Civil Service System Is Broken. Here’s What Mayor-Elect Mamdani Can Do To Fix It.

12/8/25 EDIT: Adding this excellent resource on applying to City jobs from The City…

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5 months ago · 12 likes · 3 comments · Tal Roded

The announcement is full of other goodies and common-sense savings measures, from improvements in revenue collection to reductions in office lease costs. There are also some items mentioned that seem to hold deeper stories, such as the Department of Social Services canceling a McKinsey contract worth $9 million in FY26, and the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) canceling its Slack subscription, saving the agency $20,000 in FY27. I’m sure, like me, many are wondering what the TLC will be using for in-office communications now, and why they were singled out for their Slack usage!

How the CSO items compare to other savings options

I previously examined a set of budget options identified by the IBO. Even among options entirely within City control — changing the employee health insurance contribution, eliminating longevity payments, enforcing facade inspection penalties (which Mayor Mamdani is making progress on!) — the independently identified savings are significantly larger than the savings agencies have surfaced publicly.

Of course, IBO options involve Citywide policies, and certain actions require State approval; agencies can only recommend actions within their own domains. We also don’t know what was identified but not approved or released — the gap between $1.7B and $250M suggests there’s much more to the story.

Is it enough?

Facing a budget gap growing into the billions in upcoming years and with tax increases remaining uncertain, City agencies and the Mamdani administration may have to get more creative.

Even if CSO recommendations address short-term gaps, it will become increasingly difficult to find easy savings opportunities in subsequent years through contract renegotiations and cancellations. To sustainably balance the budget, a fiscally responsible administration will need to expand the scope or increase the avenues for savings.

And that’s assuming that costs can continue to be cut. Upcoming labor negotiations with the City’s many public sector unions will be a battle. Many of the savings options identified by both CSOs and the IBO involve cuts, restrictions, or caps on benefits for public sector workers. Regardless of how justifiable such reductions are, it seems likely that union leaders will protest them or demand more elsewhere in return for savings, such as cuts to health insurance subsidies or longevity payments.

At the same time, City-funded programs like CityFHEPS and State mandates like classroom sizes are adding billions in new expenses. Recent reporting indicates that the majority of savings would come from delaying the State’s class-size mandate and reducing the City’s rental assistance program.

Both these actions would cut against the commitments Mamdani made to the constituencies he ran on. Delaying the class size law pushes costs forward without resolving them, and while scaling back CityFHEPS is a real efficiency, it means fewer low-income New Yorkers get help paying rent.

To avoid these unhappy decisions, NYC must pursue consistent revenue-generating policies, such as attracting middle- and high-income workers and incentivizing housing production, to expand the base of taxable residents. A lack of good jobs or affordable homes will both prevent new residents from moving here and continue forcing current residents to seek out more affordable cities elsewhere.

Only through these strategies can future administrations be saved from cycling through tough budget choices year after year. The CSO initiative is a good start on closing the budget gap, but more expansive action will be needed for NYC to have sustainable, balanced budgets.ᐧ

One of the greatest accomplishments of Eric Adams’s mayoralty was City of Yes for Housing Opportunity—the most significant rewrite of New York City’s zoning code since 1961, and a reform for which history will likely treat him better than the past. In a city starved for housing, its ambition was straightforward: to unlock a little more housing in every neighborhood, including in places already built.

One of its provisions amended the zoning ordinance to allow accessory (or ancillary) dwelling units (ADUs)—small dwellings carved out of basements, attics, or home extensions, or built as standalone structures in backyards. These under-800 square foot units represent the closest thing New York has to “instant housing.” Basements across the outer boroughs already exist, so bringing as many of them as possible into the legal market should have been a top priority.

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Instead, state law has turned basement ADUs into a dead end.

New York’s Multiple Dwelling Law (MDL) applies to homes with three or more units and imposes a series of costly requirements, including fire sprinkler systems throughout the building and its units. When owners of a two-family home wish to add an additional unit, such as by legalizing a ground-floor “walk-in” apartment, they must install sprinklers throughout the entire home.

New York City homeowners who wish to add a basement ADU likewise trigger the MDL, requiring sprinklers and the law’s other requirements throughout the entire home, something that can easily cost north of $50,000. MI senior fellow Eric Kober warned about this in 2024, yet the legislature opted not to conform the antiquated MDL with newly legalized ADUs.

Add in other costs and the inconvenience of legalizing ADUs—which can involve as many as five different agencies—and the result is that despite the zoning change, few owners will bother adding basement ADUs.

Tens of thousands of basements already form part of New York’s housing ecosystem. They exist because they meet New Yorkers’ needs, particularly as a form of lower-quality, lower-rent housing. Former mayor Bill de Blasio once lived in a basement apartment.

In a city with a severe housing crunch, the policy goal should be to regularize as many safe apartments as possible as quickly as possible, not impose a compliance regime so onerous that it encourages them to remain underground. At a minimum, the state legislature should exempt two-family homes that wish to add an ADU from the most costly requirements of the MDL, such as sprinkler system installations.

Such a proposal would, of course, meet resistance from those who stand to benefit from perpetuating the status quo. The Plumbers and Steamfitters Unions and industry groups like the New York Fire Sprinkler Contractor’s Association share an interest in preserving government mandates that generate work.

Sprinkler systems may have a place in large buildings, but for small homes, their cost must be compared to the incremental safety benefit relative to an adequately charged and maintained fire extinguisher.

Despite invocations of overblown safety fears, policymakers should recognize that the alternative is to keep thousands of naturally affordable apartments off the market, which could go a long way toward alleviating the city’s housing crisis in the short run.

And a city that truly embraced innovation would use technology to ensure compliance and speed. Since 1995, New York City has allowed registered architects and professional engineers to self-certify that plans comply with building codes, subject to random audit. Professional certification reflects a recognition that ensuring compliance doesn’t require city officials to sign off on every job.

ADUs should follow the same logic. The city could establish clear safety standards, such as two means of egress, proper ventilation, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, and allow owners to demonstrate compliance through documentation. Photos, videos, and digital floor plans could be submitted periodically through a centralized portal, say, every 3 to 5 years. On the city’s end, AI tools could flag likely violations for human review and, where necessary, in-person inspection. Some self-certification applications could be subject to random audits, with violators subject to penalties and the loss of self-certification privileges.

Such a system could lower compliance costs and help bring thousands of affordable units online while preserving safety.

City of Yes was supposed to mark a turning point, a recognition that New York needs to build its way out of a housing shortage. Yet at least some of its promise has already fallen prey to the New York impulse for the government to offer relief, then make it difficult to obtain through costly regulations and time-consuming approvals.

As New York’s rents continue their relentless climb to record highs, city and state leaders have themselves to blame for keeping even the simplest, most obvious housing stuck in the basement.

John Ketcham is the director of Cities and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Wall Street Bonuses

Wall Street bonuses hit a record $49.2 billion last year, up 9%, with the average bonus coming in at $246,000 — a big boost for state and city tax revenue, the state comptroller reported this week. The city, however, had been counting on 15% in its budget estimates.

The securities industry, which employs less than 5% of the city’s private sector workers, accounted for roughly 8% of all city tax collections in fiscal year 2025 and nearly a quarter of all personal income tax revenue. That concentration means the city’s budget is very sensitive to what happens on Wall Street in any given year.

Savings Plans

Despite the strong Wall Street year, Mamdani is struggling to balance his proposed $127 billion budget, which the city is required to do by law, and where he’s looking at a $5.4 billion gap.

In addition to lobbying Albany for higher income taxes on the rich and floating property tax increases, earlier this year, he also tasked agencies with identifying $1.7 billion in savings. This week, Mamdani announced they have, and released details on $250 million of them, which were a mix of efficiencies and bringing contracted work in-house. How the city will accommodate the increased departmental workloads, and how effective the agencies will be, remains to be seen.

The most substantial savings would likely come from delaying compliance with the class size law Mamdani supported as Assemblymember, which caps student-teacher ratios, and reining in CityFHEPS, the city-funded housing voucher program the pro-tenant candidate promised to expand as mayor.

Mamdani is currently fighting a court order requiring him to do the latter. CityFHEPS already costs $1.78 billion, up from $26 million in 2019, and full expansion could push that past $4 billion by 2030. Housing advocates are calling it a betrayal. MI’s Stephen Eide explains just how unsustainable the program is.

And he would like the state’s help with the former. Back in 2023, the city’s Independent Budget Office estimated that fully complying with the class size law would cost the city between $1.6 billion and $1.9 billion annually, before any capital costs. MI’s Danyela Souza Egorov writes that, in addition to the high cost, it is clear that class size reductions are not an effective way to improve educational outcomes.

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The staunchly pro-worker Mamdani’s budget will also need to withstand labor negotiations later this year. The city has only budgeted for a 1.25% annual raise for its 300,000-person workforce, POLITICO reports. Historically, such raises run 2–3%, and every additional percentage point costs $500–600 million a year.

Rent Regulation

One of Mamdani’s signature campaign promises was to freeze rents for regulated apartments. The Rent Guidelines Board, which sets annual increases, just released its 2026 income and expense study, and the numbers complicate that promise.

Landlord net operating income rose 6.2% between 2023 and 2024 overall, but more than 9% of buildings ran at a loss, with expenses exceeding revenues. The variation across boroughs is significant, and a rent freeze that may be manageable for a Manhattan landlord could push a Bronx building into insolvency.

A Shrinking New York Can’t Afford Big Government

The latest Census data is out, and New York City has shrunk a little.

“Preoccupied with national politics, the news media typically frames every state population uptick or downtick in terms of congressional seats gained or lost. However, the outlook for New York’s post-2032 headcount in the House of Representatives is far less important than the implications of demographic decline for public policy closer to home,” MI’s E. J. McMahon observes. “In the absence of economic growth, a flat or falling population inevitably depresses tax revenues. But if New York has entered a new era of decline, you wouldn’t know it from watching current deliberations over state and city finances.”

The Forgotten Urban Worker

Both the left and right have failed America’s urban gig and service workers — the Uber driver, the career waiter, the freelance interpreter, MI’s Jarrett Dieterle writes in The National Review.

The left pushes unionization, reclassification, and minimum wage mandates that these workers largely don’t want and that the evidence suggests often hurt them: NYC’s 2023 delivery minimum wage raised pay on paper but created a 27,000-person waitlist of locked-out drivers; DC’s tip-credit repeal cut full-service restaurant jobs by 5% and reduced tipped worker earnings by $12 million. The right, meanwhile, has focused on blue-collar voters and seems to have written off cities entirely.

He argues conservatives have an opening to offer something neither side does: pro-worker policy without the union playbook.

At the heart of it is a portable-benefits model — employer and worker contributions to flexible accounts workers can spend on health insurance or retirement — that are already operating in several states and popular where tried.

Full story here.

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The Big Apple’s population declined by 12,196 during the 12-month period ending in mid-2025, according to the new census data. At the same time, Long Island and the city’s northern suburbs last year gained a net 17,281 residents.

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Both figures are just rounding errors in a city of 8.5 million and the surrounding New York suburban region with a combined population of 5.1 million people —but coupled with the ongoing slow and steady decline of upstate New York’s population (down another 4,007 in the latest annual count), they also spell demographic stagnation for the Empire State over the balance of the 2020s.

The latest census estimates cap a five-year period in which the statewide population seesawed from a record 20.2 million in the April 2020 census, sharply down to 19.7 million in 2022, and back up to just (barely) above 20 million in each of the last two years, including a barely perceptible gain of 1,007 people in 2025.

New York State’s population is still down a net 201,269, or about 1 percent, from the 2020 Census count—the biggest population decline of any state. By contrast, the latest national population estimate of nearly 342 million was up 10 million, or roughly 3.1 percent, from the 2020 census level.

Population growth has been weak almost everywhere in New York, but the main downward tug on the statewide number has come from New York City—a reversal of the pre-COVID trend.

After a concerted effort by the de Blasio administration to ensure a high rate of return for census questionnaires from every nook and cranny of the five boroughs, the final citywide count for 2020 produced a pleasant surprise. Contrary to projections based on annual estimates in the late 2010s, New York City’s population at the start of this decade had reached a new all-time high of 8.8 million, up 629,051 from the 2010 level. This accounted for fully three-quarters of the statewide gain during the decade.

But the news of the higher-than-expected 2020 total had barely settled in when the numbers headed (literally and figuratively) south. In the two years following the Census, the state lost 368,000 residents — thanks mainly to a temporary drop in foreign immigration and a surge in out-migration of New Yorkers to other states.

The city’s population then rebounded in 2022 and 2024 thanks to an influx of 375,000 immigrants—most of them undocumented border-crossers, who would be temporarily housed and fed at a cost to city and state taxpayers of more than $10 billion.

Reflecting President Trump’s renewed enforcement of immigration laws, foreign immigration to the city declined in the mid-2025 count to just 95,634 statewide and 65,824 in New York City—the lowest levels since the temporary Covid border shutdown of 2020-21, and among the lowest annual immigration figures on record in New York in recent decades.

With the overseas inflow slowed to a trickle, what’s driving New York’s renewed decline is the domestic migration outflow—the extent to which more New Yorkers are leaving the Empire State than moving in. Net domestic migration from the state last year came to 137,586 people—below peak pandemic levels, but roughly equivalent to the 2011-19 average of 151,000 out-migrants a year.

Where are those New Yorkers headed? Answers to that question can be gleaned from another recent federal data drop—migration data from the Internal Revenue Service for income tax returns filed in 2022 and 2023, which were posted late last week.

Consistent with long-standing trends, the most popular destinations for New Yorkers in 2022-23 were Florida and New Jersey, which accounted for nearly half the net outflow, followed by North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, South Carolina, Texas, and Georgia.

What all these states have in common—even New Jersey and Connecticut, heavily taxed by national standards—is that individual tax burdens are generally lower than New York’s.

Preoccupied with national politics, the news media typically frames every state population uptick or downtick in terms of congressional seats gained or lost. However, the outlook for New York’s post-2032 headcount in the House of Representatives is far less important than the implications of demographic decline for public policy closer to home.

In the absence of economic growth, a flat or falling population inevitably depresses tax revenues. But if New York has entered a new era of decline, you wouldn’t know it from watching current deliberations over state and city finances.

Budgets at both levels are structurally unbalanced, dependent for now on revenues generated in recent capital gains boom years by the millionaire earners and profitable finance and related firms now targeted in different ways by Mayor Mamdani’s tax agenda.

Governor Hochul has resisted the mayor’s most extreme demands—but on spending and taxes, Hochul and Mamdani differ only by degree.

Both executives, along with majorities in the legislature and City Council, are committed to a big-government vision that can’t be sustainably financed by an economy—and a population—that isn’t growing.

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The first is the push to roll back the 2009 and 2012 pension reforms, known as “Fix Tier 6,” which could add billions per year to public employer costs and blow a hole in Mayor Mamdani’s budget before he’s barely gotten started. (Excerpt below).

Public sector pensions are indeed most generous, as Ken writes below:

The other is the 2019 Climate Act, which effectively paused private energy investment in the state and left New York increasingly dependent on aging power plants and at risk of more frequent blackouts.

More on all that and the politics behind it in the full episode below.

Please listen and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. Here are the links to Spotify and Apple, and you can always find them under the podcasts tab.

Mamdani Watch

• What was once floated as a near-billion-dollar public safety department became, this week, a roughly $260 million Mayor’s Office of Community Safety, consolidating existing B-HEARD mental health teams and the Office to Prevent Gun Violence under one roof.

• Mamdani rescinded the NYPD policy of issuing criminal summonses for cyclists for minor traffic infractions, introduced under Mayor Adams. They will now receive ordinary traffic tickets. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who said the previous policy was the only realistic deterrent to reckless riding, was absent from the announcement.

• The city is hoping that with a bit of financing, outer borough homeowners will finally start building those ancillary dwelling units (ADUs) to help alleviate the housing crisis. But New York’s housing rules may be a bigger obstacle. More on that next week.

• Manhattan rents hit $5,000 for the first time, and median rent in Brooklyn also reached an all-time high of $4,296 per month in February, Corcoran reports.

• Would a raise help? A $30 minimum wage bill (something Mamdani campaigned on) has been introduced in the council. A fight is brewing.

The $100 Billion Question

$100 billion. That’s the minimum in additional costs New York taxpayers would owe over the next 30 years if Albany rolls back the pension reforms of 2009 and 2012, as the unions hope they will.

New York’s public pensions nearly broke the city in the 2000s, with annual costs surging from $1.4 billion to over $6 billion in a decade. Albany eventually passed reforms requiring new hires to contribute 3–6% of their salaries and pushing the full retirement age to 63 (from 55). Pension costs, now around $11.5 billion a year, were finally projected to bend downward.

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Now the UFT and DC 37 want those reforms undone. If it passes, Mamdani will wake up to pension liabilities that have ballooned overnight. Moody’s has already moved New York City’s outlook to negative.

MI’s Ken Girardin has the full story. Read it here.

On The Podcast

Nicole Gelinas and I sat down with Ken Girardin to talk through two fiscal problems that don’t get nearly enough attention. The pension fight is one, and his story above is the place to start.

The other is the 2019 Climate Act, which effectively paused private energy investment in the state and left New York increasingly dependent on aging power plants and at risk of more frequent blackouts. (Apple/Spotify)

In the previous episode, we talked with former cop and John Jay professor Peter Moskos about what higher tolerance for disorder looks like (his new book is on New York’s 1990s crime fight, Back from the Brink). We also talked about cops responding to mental health crises, crime numbers, and more. Worth going back for. (Apple/Spotify)

Housing Isn’t Cheaper Than Shelter

A popular idea in housing policy holds that it’s cheaper for the government to put people in apartments than in shelter beds. New York has become the test case, and so far, the numbers show costs climbing rather than falling.

The main issue is duration. People in the city’s main shelter system stay, on average, just over a year. NYCHA tenants stay for decades. CityFHEPS, the city’s rental voucher program modeled on Section 8, is nominally a five-year benefit. However, households can get extensions, and in practice, the benefit stretches much longer.

When you account for how long people actually use each program, the supposed savings from “housing, not shelter” evaporate — and the city is left with a growing rental‑assistance tab instead.

MI’s Stephen Eide has the full analysis.

Read on

Extra! Extra!

• The MTA announced it will purchase up to 2,390 new subway cars — the largest such order in the agency’s history - to replace roughly a third of its fleet.

• NYC is doing everything possible to ruin its chances for a huge World Cup windfall (NYP)

• Hudson Street storefront vacancies plunge following $13M streetscape revamp (Crain’s)

• Could Mamdani Really End Free Street Parking? (Curbed)

• Ann Arbor Is Terrified of Becoming a Big City (Michigan Enjoyer)

• Could This Be The End of Dubai? (NYT)