I got a lot of feedback about last week’s story about Midtown’s felony assault spike — and a lot of questions about what the numbers show about the rest of the city.

So — with the help of Claude — I spent a little time this week building a tool to analyze publicly available data for all 78 of New York’s police precincts. I hope you’ll check it out, and tell me what you find, and what questions it raises about crime policy across this giant city.

New York, Precinct by Precinct shows how crime has changed in every precinct since 2019, how this year compares with last, how quickly police and ambulances arrive, and how many reports were filed near any address you type in.1

A couple of my main takeaways:

This year, citywide most crime is falling, but assaults are not. As of October 25, murders are down 18% compared to the same period last year, robberies are down 13%, and burglaries down 14%. Felony assaults are up 0.7%, and misdemeanor assaults 1.9%. (Vital City’s midyear review looks at the same trend in detail.) Data varies between precincts.

Help is taking longer to arrive. Citywide, the typical time for NYPD to reach a critical call, such as a shooting, a robbery or an assault with a weapon, rose from 3.3 minutes in 2019 to 4.2 minutes in 2025. For ambulances responding to life-threatening emergencies, the typical time rose from 6.6 to 7.6 minutes.2

Check your block at Precinct by Precinct.

Can NYC’s Dog Poop Problem be Solved by Emoji?

As it gets darker, dog owners need to pay more attention to where their pet does his business, a task that seems to be challenging at all hours, if city data is to be believed.

The city keeps trying to educate residents through “curb your dog” signage and posters of potential $250 fines, to little effect. My colleagues Brittany Montgomery and Jennifer Weber think that public education campaigns leaning on humor might do better.

They look at cities that have successfully influenced residents’ behavior through such humorous measures, and explain the reasoning why it works. They suggest that the city experiment with deploying a poop emoji mascot, and we mapped the spots it should head to first. You can read the full story here.

Election Time

Early voting in the local elections ends on Sunday, in-person voting is on Tuesday, November 3, and in the deep blue city where most surprises come in June during the primaries, we are paying attention to three assembly and one senate seat that Brooklyn Democrats are hoping to flip.

It will also be interesting to see how residents vote on the ballot questions, which the Mayor has been promoting, which aim to accelerate decision making by City Hall, some at the expense of public and interagency consultation and council approvals. Here are the ballot questions.

• City & State created an excellent in-depth cheat sheet to NY super PACs for this year’s election.

Education: Enrollment Drops

City Comptroller Mark Levine released a report this week on student enrollment in NYC public schools, generally in line with projections of the School Construction Authority, but with more detail.

“The steepest drop in enrollment is between 5th grade and 6th grade, when parents need to decide where to send their kids to middle school,” his office finds.

MI’s Danyela Souza Egorov writes that the city’s Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels is right to focus on closing under-enrolled schools, something he has identified as a priority: most are financially unsustainable and propping them up has already cost billions.

“There is even a high school that is so tiny it can only afford one math teacher, and students must take night school to get enough credits to graduate—all for $46,000 per pupil,” Souza Egorov writes.

Related:

• What to Do About NYC’s Empty Schools (Manhattan Institute)

• 700 choices, one algorithm: Making sense of NYC high school admissions (Chalkbeat)

• An Education Agenda for New York City (Manhattan Institute)

• Nikole Hannah-Jones blames segregation. Linda Quarles, president of the Citywide Council On High Schools in New York City, blames a system that stopped expecting anything of children.

Extra! Extra!

• The numbers behind New York’s AI economy (Crain’s)

• The new Midtown bus terminal: Decks over Lincoln Tunnel approach and a new park (Gothamist)

• Malls are becoming the midtowns of the future. (Planetizen)

• Can We Make a Dent in the Housing Crisis? Two Projects Say Yes. (The New York Times)

• Pied-à-terre tax’s fate hinges on appeals court as city races against deadline (Crain’s)

• Some US transit systems weigh whether to run trains without a human at the controls (AP)

This is the right approach.

Over 60% of NYC public school students are Black and Hispanic, with Black students leaving the system at the fastest rate. The most effective way to increase diversity is to improve school quality and encourage families of all backgrounds to enroll.

Declining enrollment is an urgent and challenging issue, and not an easy one to tackle. The School Construction Authority projects a loss of over 150,000 students in the next decade.

Currently, more than 130 schools have fewer than 150 students, and 25% of schools operate at under 60% capacity. These schools cannot function within their budgets, which are based on enrollment, and so the city has spent nearly $2 billion since 2020 on ‘hold harmless’ policies that keep funding schools based on their pre-COVID enrollment.

There is even a high school that is so tiny it can only afford one math teacher, and students must take night school to get enough credits to graduate—all for $46,000 per pupil.

The NYC Council addressed this issue at the FY27 Education budget hearing, where Councilmember Phil Wong asked Chancellor Samuels, “At what point do we acknowledge that we are funding empty seats, and is there a long-term plan to phase this out?”

Education Committee Chair Eric Dinowitz stated that “mergers should be on the table” and noted that small schools “lose economies of scale and it does make it more challenging to program properly.”

This month, Chancellor Samuels proposed closing Urban Assembly School for Global Commerce, which has only 112 students this year. In District 2, a merger is proposed between PS 131, a middle school with 224 students, and PS 126. Additional merger proposals may be presented at the next Panel for Education Policy meeting.

Since taking office, Chancellor Samuels has expanded the Adams administration’s strongest initiatives, NYC Reads and NYC Solves, to improve reading and math instruction, and while NYC Reads faces implementation challenges, including a low-quality curriculum in many low-income districts, it remains a significant improvement over the prior balanced literacy approach.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proved to be more moderate on education than his campaign rhetoric would have had you believe and should stay the course—prioritizing strong instruction and addressing declining enrollment.

The Pooper Scooper Law clearly does not work.

Almost 50 years ago, the city passed a law that owners were to pick up after their dogs, only to expand it this summer in response to the ballooning number of 311 complaints about dog waste.

The idea is to do more than just issue $250 DSNY tickets for those caught in the act.

The city now plans to curb the dog poop problem with further negative reinforcement, like signs that state the rules and educate about the risks of dog feces and fear of public health risks from dog poop.

It also wants to make it easier to do the right thing through free waste bags and dispensers, which NYC Parks has already said it does not have the capacity to administer, and to clean up when people do the wrong thing by deploying volunteer pooper scoopers.

Despite good intentions, these legislative measures are unlikely to make a dent in the dog poop problem.

Any type of lasting change requires more than just telling people what they should do, or threatening a consequence that probably would not occur.

The environment shapes behavior, and behavior changes based on what the environment makes easy, what happens after someone breaks the rules, and what people see others get away with. Therefore, signs can prompt behavior but will lose their power when they are not paired with strong social norms or meaningful consequences.

There is also an immediate payoff for doing the wrong thing. Walking away means avoiding the hassle of stopping, picking up something unpleasant, carrying it around, and then finding a trash can. The reward is instant.

The $250 fine, by contrast, may exist but enforcement is so rare that most dog owners are unlikely to actually expect it. If someone can continually walk away without anything happening, that is what the environment continues to teach them.

Using behavioral science to tap into emotions beyond fear to shift civic culture isn’t a new idea, but it’s one that New York leaders have seldom tried.

Humor helps develop, reinforce, and sustain social norms.

Cities that mirror New York’s population, complexity, and crime rates have used humor effectively to reshape civic behavior. Mexico City, Lima, La Paz, and Bogotá have all reduced urban traffic fatalities by up to 50% using costumed characters—dancing zebras, mimes, gyrating humanoid traffic cones.

One borough in Bogotá took on its stubborn dog waste problem with the help of a personified poop.

Accompanying an outreach team to local parks and special events, a photo-worthy moment with this cheerful costumed character provided a shareable reminder to pick up dog waste that transcended the wrist slap of a fine.

We could choose to push back against classic New York cynicism with humor.

Instead of defaulting to punitive measures and policing tactics, we could choose to make people laugh, improving recall, engagement, and motivation for people to do the right thing.

Research has found that messages with humor can hold people’s attention longer, improve their memory of the message, and even, under the right conditions, make a message more persuasive. It can also make a familiar message harder to ignore, increasing the chance that people will actually respond to a cue that they may otherwise ignore.

Imagine meeting a human-sized “poop” emoji—the brown pile of crap with googly eyes, a smile, and a swirl up top—posing for photos, handing out poop emoji cupcakes, and reminding your neighbors to pick up their messes? Would it be ridiculous? Yes. Would you remember it? Probably, if nothing else, for an Instagram post about how ridiculous it is that the city procured a poop emoji costume.

Would it reduce the problem? Maybe. Maybe more than the two DSNY citations issued in 2025 did. The poop emoji costume worked for a borough president in Bogotá, Colombia - there’s only one way to find out if it could work in New York, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani should try it.

Around 4 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 31, a woman armed with two knives attacked two passersby in Times Square. She stabbed a 68-year-old man, then Erin Piacenti, a 32-year-old Bank of America vice president from Chester, N.J.; Piacenti died at the hospital. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch called it a random and unprovoked attack. It was the second killing in Times Square this year.

Nearly seven weeks later, at midday on a Saturday, a 26-year-old man was shot dead on the E train platform at Seventh Avenue and 53rd Street, a few blocks from Carnegie Hall.

If Midtown feels less safe to you than it used to, you aren’t imagining things.

While killings like these remain rare, the broader serious violence, felony assaults, is not. Felony assaults in Midtown’s two precincts rose from 375 in 2019 to 884 in 2025, according to NYPD figures, up 136% against a citywide increase of 44% over the same period. 2025 was Midtown’s worst year since at least 2000.

And 2026 is no better. Through Oct. 18, Midtown recorded 764 felony assaults, 6% more than at the same point last year. In Midtown North, felony assaults are up 20% this year.

On the Street, in the Evening

What makes Midtown different from the rest of the city is where the assaults happen. Three-quarters of its felony assaults take place in public, according to NYPD complaint records1: on sidewalks, in subway stations and the bus terminal, in stores and restaurants. Citywide, fewer than half do.

The rise is concentrated from late afternoon into the night.

The subway tells a similar story systemwide. Felony assaults on riders rose from 276 in 2019 to 389 in 2025, while ridership fell by a quarter. Per ride, the risk nearly doubled. In Midtown’s two precincts, felony assaults in the subway rose from 40 in 2019 to 65 last year.

But Isn’t It Just...

More assaults on cops? The shelters concentrated in Midtown? A 2024 law that made assaulting a retail worker a felony?

Even after you take out every assault on a police officer and every assault inside a shelter, and in stores and restaurants, Midtown’s felony assaults still nearly doubled, from 280 to 546.

NYPD doesn’t publish whether suspects are homeless or mentally ill. But this month, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that 48% of this year’s transit felony assaults citywide were committed by people with a documented mental-health history in police records.

Thousands of Witnesses

Felony assaults are still rare relative to the number of people who pass through Midtown.

But criminologists have long described “signal crimes” that have “a disproportionate impact upon fear of crime,” because of what they say about a place. On a busy Midtown block at rush hour, the city’s own pedestrian counts suggest hundreds of people could pass within the same block witnessing an assault before police arrive, and thousands more may pass by the scene before police leave.

Studies have also found that hearing about crime from neighbors, or seeing it on the local news, is linked to feeling less safe, whatever the actual crime rate.

Confidence in the subway has dropped, too. In 2017, 46% of New Yorkers told the Citizens Budget Commission they felt safe on the subway at night. In 2025, 22% did.

What Would Help

Experts point to concentrating police on small, high-crime spots, and to follow-up care for people with serious mental illness.

“While those are good suggestions, given how many violent crimes are committed by offenders with preexisting (and often lengthy) criminal histories, another policy intervention that should be considered would be to impose escalating sentencing enhancements in response to repeat offending to incapacitate the most prolific offenders,” says MI’s Rafael Mangual. “Though even this kind of approach comes with difficulties in light of the city’s arrest-sealing practices coupled with high dismissal rates attributable to the 2020 discovery reform.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has offered sympathy after some of these attacks.

NYPD’s own numbers have told the same story for five years running — while the city overall is safer, Midtown’s felony assaults are up. It would be irresponsible for City Hall to wait for a sixth.

50 Practical Ideas to Make NYC Better

“The mayor is right that improving the quality of life is a cause that ought to transcend partisanship or ideology. New Yorkers across the political spectrum want a city where they can find work, get ahead, afford a home, and raise a family. They expect safe neighborhoods and good schools, and they deserve public services that justify the taxes they pay. Addressing these quality-of-life concerns should be a source of common ground,” MI’s John Ketcham and Sean Speer write in a new brief.

They then present us with solid ideas for building more homes that people can afford, improving schools so children are better prepared for adult lives; ideas to support childcare that fits family life, make streets, parks and transit safer, and suggestions on how to create more opportunities for business and better city government.

You can also play around with this quiz MI’s Daniel Golliher created to see if you are a Manhattan Institute Urbanist:

Where Accountability Starts: Lessons From Paris’s School Riots

MI’s Jennifer Weber makes the case that France’s school riots are a warning for New York. What started as a blockade at a Créteil high school over teacher shortages and crumbling buildings quickly spread to more than 1,000 schools, ending in a national protest over things beyond education.

Weber looks at the situation from a behavioral point of view: students learn what they can get away with long before a crowd forms, and a government that shut schools, politicians who praised the blockades, and a discipline system that leaned on restorative justice helped normalize escalating the disruption.

Read the full story.

What to Do About NYC’s Empty Schools

The city is considering closing a small high school in Harlem that enrolls just 112 students and has had a 39% decrease in enrollment over the last five years, Chalkbeat reported.

I asked my colleague Danyela Souza Egorov, who wrote a brief earlier this year recommending closing such schools, how small is too small?

“Schools with fewer than 150-200 students are not financially viable, and they tend to be underperforming,” she told me. “NYC has more than 130 schools with fewer than 150 students. It’s a good start to deal with a massive problem that NYC will have to face sooner or later. ”

Related:

• The Unrelenting Nightmare of Applying to High School in New York City (The New York Times)

• Do Socialists Care About Education? (The Bigger Apple)

• Does the D.S.A. have a vision for public education? (The New Yorker).

Extra! Extra!

• NYC Schools Chancellor dodges questions:

• The MTA has suspended bus fare enforcement while it investigates enforcement irregularities, effectively making bus fare optional. Half the passengers already do not pay, and statements like this from the Mayor’s office do not exactly discourage nonpayment: “No New Yorker should fear for their safety because they cannot afford the fare. We welcome the MTA’s decision to suspend fare enforcement while it investigates reports of excessive force by members of its fare collection teams. Our transit system should make life easier, not harder.” (Gothamist)

• City Council outlawed the operation of horse-drawn carriages in NYC, effective as of June 1, 2028. (The New York Times).

• Community Opportunity to Purchase Act: the city council made it easier for nonprofits to acquire some distressed buildings that are put up for sale by requiring owners to give them an exclusive 90-day opportunity to purchase before offering it on the market, a watered-down version of a bill that was being considered last year. (New York Post)

• Total and private-sector employment in NYC both fell in September while the unemployment rate remained steady at 4.8%, according to a new report from City Comptroller Mark Levine.

Student protests in France began at Saint-Exupéry, a high school in Créteil, southeast of Paris, where students blocked access to the school over teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, and deteriorating buildings. Within days, the protests had spread. By October 1, more than 1,000 high schools had been affected, and 222 were blockaded. Some protests also turned violent.

Two weeks later, unions and other groups joined a much larger national protest. By then, it was no longer just about schools; it also became about budgets and the cost of living. Between 550,000 and 800,000 people took to the streets on October 17^th across France. Masked groups also broke into and robbed stores, attacked police and public buildings, and set fire to Limoges city hall.

So, how does a teenager protest become a citywide riot?

For decades, explanations for teenage urban riots have focused on poverty, segregation, discrimination, failed institutions, and policing. That explains how conditions accumulate and why some neighborhoods are more vulnerable.

From a behavioral perspective, we can look at this differently.

A teenager does something, whether it’s showing up late, skipping math, or disrupting a class. The student learns quickly what will happen, if anything at all. The student either does it again or doesn’t. Each school day offers hundreds of opportunities. These events create what we in behavior analysis call a learning history. Most of it gets written in school.

With that in mind, we need to consider the early responses to the riots.

Government’s first response was to close the schools.

Closing the schools gave the disruptive behavior exactly what it was producing: no class.

At Saint-Exupéry, students began blocking the school in late September. On September 30, a Wednesday, the education minister announced a national “consultation platform” to collect students’ demands.

By Friday, roughly 400 schools had closed as blockades and damage made normal instruction impossible. The minister met with student unions, parents’ federations, and teachers’ unions at the ministry.

The following week, the minister pledged that the government would not cut any teaching posts in 2027 and said it would amend the budget to address some of the student demands.

Schools’ response was handcuffed by their discipline rules.

France’s national code includes warnings, reprimands, responsibility measures, temporary classroom and school exclusions, and permanent expulsion. A hearing is even required when a teacher is verbally threatened and mandatory when one is assaulted.

Yet, more than a thousand schools were disrupted in ten days, and teachers were assaulted on video, and there is no public record of disciplinary hearings on anything like that scale.

On October 16, in the middle of the crisis, a teachers’ union in western France filed a formal alert that local education authorities distrusted staff trained in restorative justice and even blamed the practices themselves for the rioting.

Since 2014, France’s national guidance has explicitly encouraged what it calls a restorative justice approach: up to twenty hours of “responsibility measures,” suspended sanctions, and alternatives to exclusion intended to reintegrate the student and repair relationships. The same guidance also says schools must sanction serious, repeated misconduct.

American cities have spent the past decade testing the same idea of restorative justice. The problem with restorative justice in schools is that districts use it as a replacement for consequences rather than a supplement.

A two-year randomized evaluation by RAND in Pittsburgh found that restorative practices reduced suspensions in elementary grades and improved teachers’ ratings of school climate, but did not reduce middle-school suspensions, and academic outcomes worsened for students in grades six through eight. A federally funded evaluation of restorative circles in Brooklyn high schools, by the Center for Court Innovation, found no evidence of any effect on student behavior, suspensions, or school climate.

In a Manhattan Institute brief last year, I found that New York City spent nearly $97 million on restorative justice over a decade while classroom disruption and police interventions in schools all got worse.

Societal enabling

The coordinator of France’s hard-left party said on national radio that the student mobilization deserved everyone’s salute and should spread. The mayor of Saint-Denis, standing outside a blockaded high school, said on television that violence can at a certain point be legitimate. Teachers’ unions called strikes in support. None of these adults told a student to riot directly. The students connected what they heard and jumped to the conclusion that riots would produce change.

What they heard was: My school is broken. The government broke it. Blocking the gate is how I fight for it. The police are who the government sends when I fight. And fighting back can be legitimate; a mayor said so.

Peer contagion

Researchers have known for decades that unstructured time with peers is linked to delinquency. A longitudinal study of urban youth in Chicago found that unstructured socializing with peers is a powerful predictor of violent behavior. Psychologists call what happens when teenagers get together without adults “peer contagion.” Kids may laugh, notice the kid who did it, and then do it themselves.

A blockade creates almost perfect conditions. It takes students out of classrooms, puts them together with nothing structured to do, and gives them an audience.

The first student blocks a gate, and students cannot enter school. Another school does the same, and that gets the government’s attention. A teenager takes a bigger risk, and his friends laugh, film it, or join him. The school then closes. More students are outside. Videos circulate to thousands of other teenagers. Politicians tell them the cause is just. The crowd grows, while the chance that any one student will face consequences decreases.

That is how a school protest can become something else entirely.

Lessons for New York

And that lesson isn’t just for Paris. New York City has many of the same conditions. One in three public school students was chronically absent last year, and in high schools the rate has remained above 40 percent.

Those students already spend school hours outside the one place where adults are supposed to structure their day and set the rules for what happens when they break them. The city’s discipline code has told principals to make every effort to resolve misbehavior through restorative practices before imposing more serious consequences.

What reliably interrupts that cycle is an adult who models accountability and follows through with setting expectations and providing consequences.

That is why schools are critical to teenage riots in cities. Children and teenagers will learn what works somewhere. For most of the day, that somewhere is supposed to be a building full of adults whose job is to teach them. When those adults don’t, teenagers will teach one another instead.

By the time a teenager joins a crowd in the street, he has already spent years learning what happens when he breaks a rule, challenges an adult, or follows his friends.

During the protests in France, students watched schools close, the government respond to blockades, politicians praise their cause, and other teenagers take even bigger risks.

By the time a riot starts, it is too late. Schools have years to do it before then. It starts with setting clear expectations.

Then, respond when students cross the line. Finally, follow through with consequences.

This week, City Council Speaker Julie Menin said she supports Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s push to raise taxes to pay for childcare.

“A tax increase that goes to child care, I think would be something that would be beneficial for the city because it will help to attract more workers here,” Menin said at a POLITICO event on Wednesday, calling for progressive taxation.

But before committing to further childcare expansion, the city should fix the existing, already poorly performing programs.

Mayor Mamdani talks a good talk about public sector “excellence,” but making it easier to enroll in poorly-managed programs is not enough. The city could begin by fixing other problems: The fact that 20,000 seats remain empty while families elsewhere struggle to find the kind of care the city is already paying for, and New York’s struggles to pay providers.

The demand for vouchers offers another reason to examine what families actually need before expanding the city’s contracted programs. More than a hundred thousand children receive vouchers, with another 20,000 on the waitlist. From a recent survey, we know that not all parents would choose the kind of care the city offers through its universal program. Expansion should respond to those preferences.

Then there is the cost.

It is easy to understand why the relentless calls from advocates to raise taxes — the bill for a universal, year-round, full-day program serving all children under 5 may equal the historic budget gap Mamdani was lamenting earlier this year. The State Comptroller estimates it could add anywhere from $2.7 billion to more than $8 billion a year to already existing program costs that exceed $3 billion, before accounting for services to kids with special needs. The New School puts the number at about $9 billion a year.

Where the actual number lands would depend on how many seats the city decides to contract for, for how many hours and at what rates. The city’s push for pay parity will also affect the bill. Those choices should be explicit before officials commit to an entitlement whose scope and recurring costs remain uncertain.

Governor Kathy Hochul has committed no funding beyond next year’s phase two of 2-K. Mamdani has proposed higher taxes, but neither has explained how future years would be funded should Hochul refuse to raise income or corporate taxes.

It would be irresponsible to extend an entitlement that will be almost impossible to reverse, regardless of how popular the move may be, without the city specifying what care it will provide, demonstrating that it can administer that care responsibly, and explaining how the ongoing cost will be paid.

NYCHA Owes New Yorkers an Explanation for Its Unpaid Rent

Why are so many of NYCHA tenants behind on rent? Real Deal’s Erik Engquist blames NYCHA’s rent collection problems on pandemic-era leniency and, maybe even, Zohran Mamdani’s election.

NYCHA’s own numbers are difficult to decipher.

NYCHA collected about 95% of the rent it was due until 2017. By 2019 it was near 90%, and the share of households owing rent had risen from 28% to 35%. Unpaid rent fluctuated around $60 million through 2016, reached $111 million by 2019 and $456 million by the end of 2024, according to its audited financial statements. As of June 2026, 46% of households, about 62,000, owe rent. The average rent at NYCHA is around $650 a month, and generally set at 30% of a household’s income.

NYCHA continues to blame the pandemic and reductions in rental aid. But the decline began earlier, before the pandemic and before the right to counsel took effect, and while NYCHA was still filing tens of thousands of nonpayment cases a year, though it reported carrying out 561 evictions in 2018.

The agency’s numbers don’t make answers easier. NYCHA quietly redescribed its collection measure in 2022 without saying whether the calculation itself changed or restating earlier years. The latest Mayor’s Management report puts collection of current rent, excluding old arrears and rental aid, at 84% over the past 12 months but offers no comparison numbers.

Half a billion dollars in unpaid rent is money not spent on repairs. Tenants who pay deserve to know why.

Issue Brief: Recovery Housing As a Solution to Homelessness

“Housing First” has been the dominant federal approach to homelessness for more than a decade. Transitional housing, which requires sobriety and services, went from about a third of Continuum of Care funding in the late 2000s to 1% in 2024. More than 80% now goes to permanent housing. Meanwhile, homelessness is at historical highs.

A new report from my MI colleague Stephen Eide argues that recovery housing—shared, sober residences—could help fill the gap.

Full brief here.

Hispanic Students Are Not OK

It’s Hispanic Heritage Month, and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels is eager to celebrate. “Over 40% of our students identify as Latino, and our schools must be places where they can see their stories reflected in the classroom,” he wrote on X.

However, there is little to celebrate when it comes to the kind of education city’s Hispanic students are getting.

I’ve been looking into the cohort of students who will graduate 8th grade this school year, and the share of Hispanic kids who are not proficient in English has barely budged over the time they have spent in school. (This data does not include charter schools). Time spent in school is another problem — 40% of Hispanic students are chronically absent, missing 10% or more of the school year.

Who’s Accountable For the State’s Schools?

When Mayor Mamdani got grilled on Brian Lehrer about Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay on her daughter’s school, he was the one ultimately responsible for its poor performance. Under mayoral control, he appoints the chancellor and a majority of the Panel for Educational Policy.

About a quarter of the state’s spending is education, yet the governor has no say in who runs it: the legislature picks the Regents, who then pick the commissioner. Daniel Weisberg, a former NYC first deputy chancellor, argues in Vital City that the governor should have oversight of the Board of Regents.

Read the full piece here.

Extra! Extra!

What Is a School For?

“Chabad’s schools show us that when we trust parents and protect religious freedom, a religiously traditional educational system can produce what its community needs in the modern age – resilient, family-oriented adults who spend their lives serving others and strengthening their community,” MI’s Ray Domanico argues in the Bigger Apple.

How Superstar Cities Tax Away Top Talent

“London’s exodus of billionaire wealth offers a warning to major U.S. cities: economic advantage won’t offset high taxes forever,” MI’s Sean Speer reports.

Are Unions Rising from the Political Grave?

“Though its influence has greatly declined, organized labor is attracting new allies on the Left and the Right,” MI’s Jarrett Dieterle writes.

Kathy Hochul Chooses Kids Over the Teachers’ Union

By opting New York into the federal scholarship tax credit, the governor is putting kids first, and other blue states should follow suit, writes MI’s Danyela Souza Egorov.

“Unfortunately, not all state officials showed Hochul’s resolve. Some lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, joined the New York State United Teachers in calling on Hochul not to opt-in,” she observes. “It’s disturbing that so many elected officials are afraid of New York families gaining control of less than 2.5 percent of the state education budget—and even more alarming that they would side with the teachers’ union, thereby letting FSTC dollars flow to other states’ children. It suggests they care more about good relations with the teachers’ union than about New York families and students.”

Mamdani’s $131.5 Million DoorDash Settlement Is Smaller Than It Looks

“The mayor characterized it as a victory against corporate greed. Meanwhile, 65% of affected drivers were underpaid by $1 or less, and the average underpayment was $7.70,” MI’s Jarrett Dieterle explains in Reason.

• NYC spending on homelessness has more than tripled since 2019, as the number of street homeless reached 5,000, up from 3,600 over the same period. “Homeless advocates, business groups and elected leaders say the problem is that the Mamdani administration needs to streamline what’s become an inefficient and largely uncoordinated street outreach system — and one that lacks clear accountability,” Gothamist reports.

• Mamdani Backs Bill to Let Consumers Sue Over Unfair Business Practices. “The proposed New York City legislation would also allow nonprofits, including tenants’ unions, to sue companies directly rather than relying on agency enforcement,” the New York Times reports.

• City Journal’s College Rankings are out.

• NY Gov. Kathy Hochul and Bruce Blakeman spar over immigration, cost of living in the only gubernatorial candidate debate, Gothamist reports, and offer opposing visions for jobs.

• Citi Bike expanded to 7 more neighborhoods.

• How a Dancer Lives on $13,500 in East Harlem, the New York Times reports.

New York City, home to more Jews than any city in the world outside of Israel, is experiencing a rise in antisemitism on its streets, in its schools and in public statements and actions. Against this rising tide of hatred, Jewish groups of all types are rising to support and strengthen their community.

I have come to know one of these groups, Chabad-Lubavitch, because its boys’ schools have been caught up in the struggle between religious freedom and New York State’s legal requirement that private and religious schools offer a curriculum substantially equivalent to that of local public schools.

Based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, since 1940, Chabad Lubavitch’s mission is to provide religious support to Jews across the world, regardless of their level of religious observance or non-observance. Its story centers on education: after-school programs, day schools, classical yeshivas, and post-secondary seminaries.

Some schools, including the Tamim Academy network, combine Jewish and secular studies for a diverse Jewish student body; Chabad’s classical yeshivas are single-gender and more fully Hasidic, with boys’ schools focused heavily on Torah, Talmud, and Hasidic texts, while girls’ schools generally include a broader secular curriculum.

Today, Chabad has more than 6,000 emissary families working in 3,500 Chabad houses, centers, schools, social-service programs, and campus centers across one hundred countries. That work depends on Chabad’s elementary and secondary schools, including thirteen affiliated schools in Brooklyn that enroll about 2,600 boys and 2,100 girls from pre-K through twelve, along with post-secondary programs that prepare young men and women for religious and educational leadership.

Chabad boys’ schools, along with those of other Hasidic groups, have drawn scrutiny from the New York State Education Department because they do not provide a full secular curriculum, aligned with that of local public schools.

That scrutiny centers on Hasidic and Haredi boys’ schools in Brooklyn and parts of upstate New York and was propelled by a former Hasidic yeshiva graduate, who claimed that his Yeshiva education did not prepare him adequately for college or for the secular world more generally. He has since recanted his original complaint as misguided and announced that he deeply appreciates the Orthodox way of life and the valid role of Hasidic schools.

However, the state continues its efforts to enforce the substantial equivalence law in these schools. What that effort lacks is a recognition that schools like Chabad’s are training grounds for its mission to support Jewish communities across the globe.

Chabad’s reach is sizeable and well beyond the Orthodox community. Pew Research Center’s 2020 survey of Jewish Americans reported that 38 percent of U.S. Jews had engaged with Chabad in some way, with 18 percent reporting that they “often” or “sometimes” participated in Chabad’s activities and an additional 20 percent reported minimal engagement.

Its work is rooted in scripture, the Talmud, Hasidic teaching, and the writings of the seven Rebbes; these sources form the curriculum in its elementary, secondary, and post-secondary schools for boys and young men. These schools in the U.S. and elsewhere help produce graduates who sustain its worldwide network of religious, educational, and social-service work, offered to Jews across all levels of observance.

New York should therefore approach these schools with respect, restraint, and a willingness to consider outcomes as well as inputs. Under that approach, there would be little rationale for punitive action against parents who choose Chabad schools for their sons. The state’s highest court has ruled that the locus of enforcement of substantial equivalence is the family, not the schools themselves.

Today, schools of all types face a myriad of technological, cultural, and pedagogic challenges. Artificial Intelligence promises to solve the information input side of education, or encyclopedic function – any kid with a smartphone has access to more information than they can absorb.

But children will still need to be able to reason, discern valuable information from bad, and to develop as fully formed moral, emotional, and analytic beings. As technology advances, our society’s problems are increasingly human. Despite having infinite information, kids are more isolated, lonely, lost, and anxious.

As AI’s presence grows, the test of our education system will be in what kind of human beings our schools, public and private will form. A machine cannot build a community, lend a helping hand, or stand up for what is right.

Chabad’s schools show us that when we trust parents and protect religious freedom, a religiously traditional educational system can produce what its community needs in the modern age – resilient, family-oriented adults who spend their lives serving others and strengthening their community.

New York should recognize that in an era of both rising bigotry and technological advance into uncharted territories, moral, religious and cultural formation are valid foundations for education.

The MTA is successfully tackling fare evasion, but subway crime is up 26% since Labor Day, and counterfeit goods vendors on Canal Street are still vending.

Governor Kathy Hochul’s announcement that New York will participate in the new federal scholarship tax credit program, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s decision to fund 10,000 childcare vouchers are in line with what parents want. A new survey reports on what the city’s parents say they need when it comes to childcare.

Plus some thoughtful pieces on homelessness policy, why Americans support involuntary treatment, and on communism and compassion.

Fare Evasion Down

Fewer passengers are skipping the fare, the MTA said, announcing that it will be installing the new fare gates at 20 more stations. The harder-to-circumvent fare gates have succeeded in reducing fare evasion by 35%, and some stations have seen reductions of over 70%.

Similar efforts in San Francisco’s BART system not only resulted in a reduction of fare beaters, but also increased the cleanliness and safety of the system, with crimes against riders falling 67%.

But NYC has a long way to go on that count.

Subscribe now

Subway Crime Up

The NYPD reported that while overall crime in the city is down, major crimes in the subway system were up slightly (0.9%) year-on-year as of the end of September.

However, major crimes in the transit system were up 26% in the four weeks since Labor Day, and in the week ending on October 4, they were up 21%.

“From 1997 to 2019, the decades before Albany implemented criminal justice ‘reforms,’ New York City experienced an average of two transit murders each year,” MI’s Nicole Gelinas wrote in the New York Post this week. “But from 2020 through last year, perpetrators have killed an average of seven mass-transit riders annually — and we’re on track to meet or exceed that figure for 2026. Through August, felony assaults are up 10% from last year, to 435 — a total that’s 84% higher than the comparable figure from 2019.” So far this year, we have already had 6 murders in the subway system.

More than half of the 734 people arrested for major crimes in the subway system this year had been arrested at least three times before, and 214 of them have been arrested at least three times in 2026 alone, according to the police.

Repeat offenders are a big part of the problem, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch stressed at a press conference discussing the latest numbers. “In the category of felony assaults, we have real challenges with recidivism,” she said. “So, one of the things that we have to do is work with the other stakeholders in the criminal justice system to address those issues.”

Related:

• MI fellows have written repeatedly on the issue of recidivism in NYC. Here’s a recent piece by Charles Fain Lehman.

• Congressional testimonies from 2022 offer interesting insights from across the country on public transportation, challenges and opportunities for change.

• Vital City looked at subway crime trends in detail last year.

Why New York Can’t Shut Down Canal Street’s Counterfeit Vendors

The city has lost control over Canal Street, where counterfeit goods vendors rule the sidewalks, so we looked into the reasons behind it more closely.

“Thanks to civilian complaints against cops, a felony threshold nobody can prove, and lax prosecutions, the market hasn’t missed a day of business,” reports MI’s Daniel Edward Rosen.

Read more.

Federal Scholarship Tax Credit and Teachers’ Unions

Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that New York will participate the new federal scholarship tax credit program, despite objections from the teachers’ unions.

The tax credit lets taxpayers deduct up to $1,700 ($3,400 for joint filers) in federal taxes for donations to approved scholarship granting organizations starting in 2027.

As a result of the governor’s decision, New York’s students will be able to receive scholarships to fund qualified education expenses, from books and tutoring to tuition. Otherwise, these tax dollars would have gone to other states. (We discussed the tax credit on our podcast last week and MI’s Danyela Souza Egorov wrote about it in City Journal.)

This tax credit could potentially raise as much as $26 billion a year nationwide by 2030, according to the Treasury.

Parents Want Flexibility and Choice in Childcare

A survey the Mamdani administration commissioned this spring, after applications for 3-K stayed about the same despite a big outreach campaign, on what families actually want and need when it comes to childcare, was released yesterday.

Turns out, parents want to take care of their young children themselves; need flexibility and the ability to choose the provider that works best for them, and, most importantly, one they trust to take good care of their child. And yes, childcare is expensive.

However, while the average childcare expense for all children under 6 (not cost per child) for families who do pay for care comes to $19,452 a year, the report did not say how much the median family pays. Only 60% of all families with children under 6 pay for regular childcare.

The report found that the demand for formal care for 2-year-olds was higher in the more affluent neighborhoods, and that the more affluent parents are the ones paying the most for childcare.

The authors conclude that the city’s universal childcare program needs to be more flexible than currently designed, and that the city should work with the state to broaden and extend paid parental leave as part of its universal childcare strategy. New York State currently mandates 12 weeks of parental leave.

Choice Over Seats: Mamdani’s Childcare Pivot?

Whether or not influenced by the findings of the report mentioned above, the decision to fund 10,000 more childcare vouchers that Mamdani announced last week is a good move, MI’s Jennifer Weber wrote earlier this week. The vouchers enable parents to obtain exactly the kind of flexible care arrangements their work responsibilities require.

The city’s funding is matched by the state for these means-tested vouchers, where the waiting list of qualifying families had grown to 29,000—the only childcare support program in the city to see growth in demand. Meanwhile, the city funds about 21,000 empty seats across its 3-K and Pre-K programs.

Read more.

Homelessness Policy at a Crossroads

MI’s Stephen Eide took a look at national trends in homelessness policies and argues in City Journal that what comes next will depend on “how much voters care about the issue in blue states, where homelessness is truly a crisis” and affordability has come to dominate public concerns, and that a decisive midterm win could pit moderate and far-left Democrats against each other on this issue.

“Far-left Democrats in Congress will want to countermand Trump’s reforms to the Continuum of Care. Many centrist liberals don’t want a revival of Housing First, but it will take political courage for any Democrat to defend policies backed by Trump. The center-left has thwarted homelessness policy reform before,” he writes.

Read more.

Why People Support Involuntary Treatment

Some advocates reject involuntary interventions because they believe the cost of added stigma from linking mental illness and violence outweighs the benefit of access to treatment. But it turns out, Americans support involuntary treatment first of all because they believe it works, MI’s Stephen Eide and Valerie Franchitti write, reviewing a new study from Arizona State University, which concludes that advocates overstate the role of fear in the public response.

“Of course, it’s one thing to note that the public’s overriding concern is “treatment effectiveness,” Eide and Franchitti note. “It’s another thing to build a system that meets that standard. Perhaps conservatives, who occupy the other side of the debate from progressive advocates, also have lessons to learn from this study. More sustained attention to mental-health reform—and yes, more money—will be required to develop more effective involuntary interventions.”

Read more.

How Communism Kills Kindness

“Nearly half of the members of the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) leadership body identify as communists. As Stu Smith reported earlier this summer, ‘Members with Communist political tendencies now significantly shape the DSA’s leadership.’ In their December 2025 newsletter, members of the DSA’s Red Star Caucus celebrated Mao Zedong’s 132nd birthday,” MI’s Robert Henderson writes in The Free Press. At least seven DSA backed candidates are likely to head to Congress this year, three of them from New York City.

Henderson questions where this romantic notion for fundamentally cruel regimes comes from and where it could lead.

“Why does kindness die under communism? In Mao’s China, the first sign was that kindness itself became suspect. Sympathy was allowed, but only for the right people,” he notes.

Read more (gift link)

Extra! Extra!

• Inside New York’s October 7 Pro-Intifada Protests—MI’s Josh Appel in City Journal.

• Confrontations over ICE in NY, following shooting during arrest of Oscar Belgal in NYC—The Post

• The air is a little cleaner in lower Manhattan. A new study by the Columbia Climate School looking at first full year data of congestion pricing finds that a 13% drop in fine particulate pollution in the congestion area mirrors the 11% reduction in traffic, accounting for other factors.

• To Deliver Public Excellence, Mamdani Must Challenge Public-Sector Privilege—MI’s Ken Girardin in Searchlight.

• Left Flank Riles Union Old Guard as City Contract Talks Loom—The City Reporter

• New York And The Value of Smart Risk-Taking—Searchlight talks with MI’s Allison Schrager.

• ‘A different ballgame’: Housing fast-track shifts political pressure to City Planning—Crain’s (paid)

• Suburbs devised before the car may have the answer to doing transit-oriented development right. (Planetizen)

• Is Central Park a victim of its own success? The park is wildly popular with pedestrians, runners, bicyclists, dog owners and users of various e-mobility devices, and crashes among them are piling up — three people have died since June. (Gothamist)

  NYCuriosity

  I Built Tools to Read NYC Council Laws So You Don't Have To

  NYC’s legislation and agency data are, by law, “open”. For example, you can access any City Council legislation text and details through Legistar. But laws and data being made public does not necessarily make them accessible to anyone, particularly for those without a data background. While New York is among the best at making its data “open,” with…

  Read more

  25 days ago · 9 likes · Tal Roded
  Agglomerations

  The Chart that Explains Work in America

  Warning: As Mark Twain once said, persons who claim these figures are unadjusted for inflation will be prosecuted. Persons who tweet such a claim will be shot…

  Read more

  23 days ago · 11 likes · Cardiff Garcia and Ben Glasner

A good one can save a family thousands of dollars in private school tuition, or rent in the “right neighborhood.” A bad one may make another leave — few parents would willingly send their children to a poorly performing school, given a choice. Too many families in the city don’t have one.

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a controversial essay in The New York Times Magazine about her choice to send her daughter to local elementary and middle schools that struggled to educate their pupils. She blamed segregation, school choice and underfunding for the poor outcome, but stood by her decision. Her daughter struggled to accept it.

Nicole and I sat down with MI’s education fellows Danyela Souza Egorov and Jennifer Weber to talk about that and more.

Some takeaways – Mayor Mamdani should not react rashly to the fallout and stick with NYC Reads and NYC Solves. He should, though, tackle the under-enrolled schools and return to letter grades and more accountability. Many of the fixes – like holding kids to high expectations – cost nothing, Jennifer and Danyela pointed out.

Meanwhile, families are not waiting around to see if their underperforming school will get better—Black families are leaving the traditional school system faster than others, many choosing charter schools nearby. If the governor opts in, a new federal tax credit may give them another option.

Listen to the full episode.

Universal free childcare is one of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s signature proposals.

Since taking office, Mamdani’s focus has been on expanding the city’s free universal childcare program to two-year-olds (2-K), and this September he launched 2,000 seats, with plans for an additional 10,000 seats next year. This adds to the existing 3-K and Pre-K programs serving three- and four-year-olds, which are already struggling with implementation and enrollment problems.

So it was welcome news when on October 5, Mamdani announced that about 10,000 of the 29,000 children on the city’s childcare voucher list will now receive one.

But is the city spending money wisely?

In September, the mayor released his first Mayor’s Management Report (MMR), the city’s annual report card, providing insight into his progress toward his universal childcare commitment.

Pre-K and 3-K Update: 21,000 Empty Seats

Roughly 450,000 children under 5 live in the city, some of whom are cared for entirely by families, and some through a mix of city and private daycare providers.

The overall number of children continues to decline—there are 17% fewer four-year-olds in the city than in 2020.

Pre-K enrollment continues to decline as well, MMR shows.

Since 2023, Pre-K enrollment has fallen by 8%, from 59,687 to 55,042, and the city does not expect that trend to change, projecting next year’s enrollment at 53,117. 3-K enrollment has stabilized at around 44,000 children.

Meanwhile, the city continues to have more seats than children to fill them.

The share of filled Pre-K seats rose from 79% to 81%, but only “due to fewer seats being available.” Despite the city cutting about 7,600 Pre-K seats over the years, 12,609 sat empty last year. The city’s target for this fiscal year shows 15,138 empty Pre-K seats.

Together, nearly 21,000 seats went unfilled across the 3-K and Pre-K programs last year. The report attributes the enrollment decline to the previous administration’s disinvestment in outreach to families, lower birth rates, and families leaving the city.

The City Council found that some neighborhoods have many empty seats while others have shortages and blamed the rollout of 3-K—the program was expanded citywide quickly, using temporary federal stimulus money—for the misalignment.

But the empty seats are costing the city money: “lower total program utilization generally translates to higher per-participant costs,” the Comptroller explained. In other words, the city is paying for every seat whether it is filled or not, and the average 3-K seat costs $23,541.

Demand for Childcare Vouchers Up: 29,000 Waitlisted

The one program that has seen a significant increase in demand over the years, according to MMR, is the Child Care Assistance Program. CCAP provides low-income families with a subsidy (voucher) they can use at any licensed child provider, including home-based ones.

Since Albany raised the income limit for vouchers to 300% of the federal poverty level in 2022, the number of children using non-mandated low-income vouchers increased from about 9,400 in FY 2022 to 71,500 in FY2026. Counting the vouchers the city must issue to families on public assistance, total enrollment increased from 47,535 to 109,875.

In May 2025, the city and state fought over who would pay for that growth. The state, which, along with Washington, had historically funded nearly all of the program, offered $350 million on the condition that the city match it. The city stopped issuing new low-income vouchers and put newly eligible families on a waitlist, which, according to the mayor, had grown to more than 29,000 children by yesterday.

The average voucher costs about $19,075 and typically covers children under 13, with rates that vary by the child’s age.

In this year’s state budget, the governor offered the city up to $475 million in matching funds to fund vouchers. Neither the Governor nor the city explained how much each is contributing to pay for the 10,000 new vouchers.

Mamdani’s Choice

Mamdani inherited the voucher freeze and the empty 3-K and Pre-K seats. However, with both problems in front of him, he chose to build and expand universal childcare to 2,000 2-year-olds and add 2,000 additional 3-K seats first, with no permanent plan to fund them. Gov. Hochul is funding the first two years of the launch and has not committed further funding.

Since the problematic Pre-K and 3-K roll-outs, the city has lost 1,300 family-run day cares that could serve nearly 10,000 children, according to a Center for New York City Affairs report. Provision of 2-K will rely on community and family providers, and the community groups that run the city Pre-K and 3-K programs say the city pays them less than it costs to operate.

Lauren Melodia, director of economic and fiscal policy at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs, told New York Magazine: “Most of the people who work in the field are like, ‘Please don’t do this. You have to fix the other problems we’re already dealing with first.”

In his press release, Mamdani called the vouchers “nothing short of transformational” and a “critical step” toward universal childcare, but he hadn’t mentioned them as a priority until now.

Universal programs, like the ones Mayor Mamdani has been advocating for, put the city in charge—it allocates seats, sets schedules, and chooses the providers. Many families want a choice of care, not just a seat in a city program, as the waitlist for childcare vouchers, which will still have 19,000 children on it, proves. A voucher follows the child to the provider that the family picks.

Putting up the money to fund vouchers is a prudent way for the mayor to work toward his promise of providing free childcare, and he should consider using the money spent on empty seats to eliminate the rest of the waitlist.

The Mamdani administration named the 12 community districts that have seen the lowest growth in affordable housing over the last 5 years and are now on the affordable housing fast track. A fast track qualified project could receive city approval in 3 rather than the usual 7 months.

From tony parts of Manhattan to Staten Island and Canarsie, these neighborhoods are diverse, and the kind of development they may see will also likely vary significantly.

There is one big reason why housing is generally more affordable — the inconvenient commute. (“Leaving Brooklyn – Fuhgeddaboudit!”) And there is little the mayor can do to improve the situation — the MTA, which controls subways and buses, is a state entity.

Upper West Side and Upper East Side have convenient transportation, especially since the completion of the 2nd Avenue stops on the Q line. But they also have large landmarked areas, constraining where new development could go — especially on the UWS.

Staten Island is hardly easy to get to, unless you have a car, as are parts of the Brooklyn and Queens districts — it is hard to argue, when taking public transit can mean commutes of more than an hour to get to Midtown.

Interestingly, five of the districts the mayor named are directly touching the one major transportation project in the city that is in the works — IBX — a light rail line that will, hopefully, soon connect Bay Ridge in Brooklyn with Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. By the time it opens, some new housing projects along the route should be in the works.

If you are curious about these neighborhoods, Furman Center is an excellent source of data in a very accessible format. According to the 2024 data, the Upper East Side and Upper West Side had the shortest average commutes of the 12 districts, about 30 minutes, and by far the highest median rent, $2,860 and $2,780. The other ten districts had rents between $1,710 and $2,310, and all but Borough Park averaged 41 to 48 minutes to work (not necessarily in Manhattan).

And so you don’t have to go looking, here are the neighborhoods:

• Brooklyn CD 10: Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights

• Brooklyn CD 12: Borough Park, Kensington

• Brooklyn CD 18: Canarsie, Flatlands

• Manhattan CD 7: Upper West Side

• Manhattan CD 8: Upper East Side, Roosevelt Island

• Queens CD 4: Corona, Elmhurst

• Queens CD 5: Ridgewood, Maspeth, Middle Village

• Queens CD 10: South Ozone Park, Howard Beach

• Queens CD 11: Auburndale, Bayside, Douglaston

• Queens CD 13: Queens Village, Bellerose, Rosedale

• Staten Island CD 2: Mid-Island

• Staten Island CD 3: South Shore

The Rent Is Frozen. Heating Costs Aren’t.

On October 1, with the lawsuit challenging it still unsettled, rent-freeze for rent-stabilized apartments went into effect. Also on October 1, the heating season started.

The Rent Guidelines Board research had projected that fuel costs would decline by 7.5% between April 2026 and March 2027, having risen 11% from April 2025 to March 2026, which is unlikely to happen.

“For rent-stabilized owners, however, a rent freeze layered on top of soaring fuel-oil prices could make this one of the hardest heating seasons in decades,” MI’s John Ketcham writes.

The Unmentioned Villain in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Story

The New York City teachers’ union contract shapes most aspects of school operations, MI’s Danyela Souza Egorov writes, limiting opportunities for change as well as accountability.

Over the last decade, Black student enrollment in the city's charter schools grew from about 53,000 to more than 65,000. Last year, 38% of Black elementary school students attended a charter school.

“These black families are fleeing the public-school system to avoid exactly the challenges that Hannah-Jones found: lack of discipline, poor instruction, and the total absence of a system to measure students’ learning,” Souza Egorov writes. “Hannah-Jones blames this dysfunction on persistent inequality—wrongly. But she misses the true culprit driving the problems: the teachers’ union constraints on schools and the concurrent lack of accountability for low-performing schools.”

Read the full story.

New York City’s AI Boom

The City Council is set to hold a meeting on Oct. 5 to discuss the risks of AI and a package of oversight legislation.

“But while New York politicians are focused on the perils of AI, the city has emerged as a center for AI companies, second only to the Bay Area, showing the industry’s growing importance to the city’s economy — and the risks if the AI boom turns into a bubble,” The City Reporter reports.

New York has become an AI hub for the same reasons it became a tech hub over the last decade.

The city has a deep talent pool (about 70,000 AI specialists, according to The City Reporter) and it is the biggest market for the industries AI startups sell to — finance, law, medicine, insurance, real estate and other regulated sectors. Taking office space, as OpenAI and Anthropic have both done in Manhattan, is the logical next step; venture money follows. And, it seems, at least some of the founders don’t want to live anywhere else.

Read the full story.

Can Canal Street Be Tamed?

Best known for sidewalk merchants selling anything from fruit to counterfeit goods, Canal Street has long defied attempts to change it. We discussed the current state of affairs on the podcast earlier this year.

“Canal Street is one of those places that I think you can make a strong argument has simply been lost,” MI’s Rafael Mangual argued. “And how do we know that? Well, because it’s constantly home to visibly illegal conduct on a daily basis, and no one seems scared of enforcement, and no one seems to be willing to do anything on the enforcement side. So I don’t know how else you could define who controls a strip, if not for that, but it seems very clear to me that the city has obviously lost control of Canal Street.”

“What exists now is a failure of basic public space,” a frustrated Manhattan resident opined in Streetsblog this year. The city has since proposed safety improvements to the busy corridor. How would taming traffic change the street?

“Canal’s identity is tied up with timeless entropy, untidy humanness and disarranged beauty, reflecting the city around it,” The New York Times observes as it takes a picturesque walk through it, relishing the grittiness.

Recommend

MI’s Brittany N. Montgomery's Substack Bulletproof Bureaucracy unpacks why anticorruption rules meant to protect government integrity end up "bulletproofing" bureaucracies against progress, drawing on 20 her years working in government in New York, Bogotá, and beyond.

Extra! Extra!

• Last week, a bill was introduced in the City Council to pilot Low Traffic Neighborhoods (LTNs) in five neighborhoods across three boroughs, with the goal of reducing through traffic through devices like speed humps, curb extensions, traffic diverters, median barriers, and raised crosswalks.

• This week, following some high-profile crashes, the council had a marathon hearing on e-bikes. Streetsblog called the 10+ hour hearing a “legislative farce.”

• Mamdani released an updated Vision Zero traffic safety plan.

• Bulldozing the NYC School Construction Authority as Mismanagement Accusations Mount (Susan Edelman)

• Mamdani invites New Yorkers to enter yet another lottery — this time for a citywide scavenger hunt.

• NYC-DSA Wants to Make Buses Fast and Free; Now It’s Organizing Riders, Streetsblog has the details.

• K-12 enrollment is falling rapidly; school closures tend to follow. What does this mean for real estate? (Thesisdriven)

This week, the United Nations General Assembly is taking place in New York, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been holding court, welcoming President Donald Trump and various foreign heads of state. Over the weekend, he hosted mayors from far-flung cities during the 2026 Urban 20 (U20) Mayors Summit.

The mayor also found time to talk with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre about AI in schools at P.S. 59 in Manhattan and, together with Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin, visit seniors (and play bingo) in Queens. He planted an olive tree at Gracie Mansion, and announced a partnership with the Metropolitan Opera for another free ticket lottery.

What he’s so far neglected are the city’s schools. Schools like the ones The New York Times’ writer Nikole Hannah-Jones exposed on Sunday as massively failing their students (gift link). Unlike at P.S. 59, where more than 8 out of 10 students are proficient in English and math in 5th grade, at P.S. 307 in Brooklyn, fewer than 15% are. Kids should not have to be lucky to get a good education in our city, or the mayor’s attention.

It’s reasonable to expect Mayor Mamdani to focus on this issue, given he has full control of and responsibility for the city’s school system, and education is the single largest item in his budget, accounting for almost a third of it.

“As the next mayor of New York City, I would be proud of investing in New York City public school students. And at the same time, I think we desperately need better outcomes. I think that sometimes those outcomes, as you were pointing to, are not always directly related to additional investment. They also have to do with prioritization. They also have to do with follow-through,” he told The New York Editorial Board during his campaign. “I do think that some of this is indicative of: is this a priority for you?”

But Mamdani did not want to have control of schools (something he changed his mind about shortly before taking office), and from his track record so far, K-12 education has not been a priority.

When it comes to children, his focus has been almost exclusively on expanding childcare, but 2K, 3K, and Pre-K account for only three years of a child’s life. Even if he makes it more affordable for some parents to stay while the kids are little, are they going to stick around when it’s time for elementary school?

Back to Basics

“How does a child with two educated, affluent, involved parents, in the highest-spending school system in the country, reach ninth grade without knowing fractions?”

That is the question MI’s Jennifer Weber poses in her latest piece in City Journal dissecting the issues raised by the Nikole Hannah-Jones article referenced earlier.

“The failures that Hannah-Jones recorded demonstrate how schools trained teachers in ill-conceived but fashionable instructional methods—at the expense of proven approaches—while also incorporating equity policies that eroded standards and made no one truly responsible for student learning,” she writes.

Pedagogy failed Hannah-Jones’ daughter and her classmates, she concludes. Pedagogy is something leaders can fix.

Read more.

Related:

• NYC students may soon only need passing grades to graduate. (Chalkbeat)

School Choice: Necessary But Insufficient

“Nearly 50 years ago, education researcher Ronald Edmonds asked why some urban schools succeeded with poor children while others serving similar students failed. Across several cities, effective schools shared strong leadership, high expectations, order, a clear academic mission and frequent monitoring of student progress,” Roland Fryer, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes in The Wall Street Journal (gift link). “Decades later, Will Dobbie and I studied charter schools serving similar children but producing different results. Five practices distinguished the most effective: more instructional time, high-dosage tutoring, frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction and a culture of high expectations.”

But how does one create effective schools at scale? Should it be the invisible hand: giving parents reliable information, letting the full amount of money follow the child, and leaving the rest to the market? Or should we let the government do the job of the market?

“Competitive markets require consumers who can judge quality and suppliers that can respond to demand,” he writes. “School districts reliably provide neither.”

Read more.

Parents Need Options

This summer, New York City told the parents of more than 150,000 children that their kids aren't reading and writing at grade level. Fewer than half of 5th graders are above grade level. Falling behind reduces their chances of getting into a well-performing middle school, and limits their options thereafter.

Good tutoring is expensive, as are private and parochial schools. Charter schools have limited seats, assigned by lottery, as do well-performing screened public schools. Many parents whose kids the city’s public schools are failing have limited options to help them in time.

The Federal Tax Rebate for Scholarships, if Gov. Kathy Hochul opts New York in, would create an opportunity to get some help from outside the system for public school kids as well as those in non-public settings.

Read more.

Related:

• Why I’m Sending My Black Son to Private School (The Atlantic, gift link)

• From 3,000 students to about 90: Inside the decades-long failure to fix or close NYC’s smallest high school (Chalkbeat)

New York City’s Prime Economic Challenge: Middle-Class Family Affordability

New York's affordability crisis is disproportionately squeezing out the middle class families, and Mamdani's treating affordability as a roughly uniform issue, except for the very rich, misdiagnoses it, Jordan McGillis, a fellow at the Economic Innovation Group, argues in Vital City. “[A]ffordability means dramatically different things to differently situated New Yorkers.”

Based on Census data across the 2021–2024 ACS samples, McGillis estimates that when it comes to domestic migration, “about 89,000 married couples with children under 18 left New York City for its suburbs or other parts of the country, while only about 17,000 such families moved in. The estimated number of children in the departing families exceeded the number in the arriving families by more than 100,000.”

For every middle class family with children that moved to the city between 2021-2024, almost 6 moved out.

The reasons are many, but all come down to the need for appropriately sized housing the family can afford, of which there simply is not enough. That extra bedroom remains elusive.

Read more.

Related:

• NYC’s Family-Sized Housing Shortage (The Bigger Apple)

• Building Family Friendly Cities (Manhattan Institute Report)

• Mamdani Sets Ambitious Housing Goal (The Bigger Apple)

Pothole Politics or Sewer Socialism?

MI’s Stephen Eide looks at the early performance of two socialist mayors — New York’s Zohran Mamdani and Seattle’s Katie Wilson — and argues that Wilson is the more authentic “sewer socialist” on substance, even though Mamdani has claimed the mantle too, via his pothole-filling.

“Sewer socialism” is old-school shorthand for city government judged on delivering essential, capital-intensive services rather than ideology, and for Eide, transit is the modern test: “’Sewer’ connotes municipal services that are essential, too-often-taken-for-granted and just large, capital intensive. Which system checks all those boxes? Transit, especially with big cities.” Wilson cares passionately about transit.

Yet being the more substantive sewer socialist hasn’t made Wilson the more successful one: she’s far less popular and politically effective than Mamdani, Eide argues, and her path forward likely means drifting toward San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie-style centrism rather than further left.

Read more.

Related:

• Smoother streets are not the same thing as better government. (City Journal)

From A Press Conference

Asked what’s next for sewer socialism:

Mayor Mamdani: You know, I think the next step is, what are the issues that people are dealing with in terms of their quality of life. We’ve seen New Yorkers come forward to say it’s the pothole on their block — that’s a priority for us. We’ve seen others come forward and tell the Council member, the Council member [has] brought it forward of, “I need a place to be able to take my kid when they need to go to the bathroom.” That’s the priority for us.

Anything that a New Yorker is struggling with in their day-to-day life, that’s a priority for us, because we want to show that City government can help you live a better life in this city, and for far too long New Yorkers have been rightfully skeptical of that.

Extra! Extra!

• “New IRS data confirms millionaire exodus to low tax states is a myth,” Fiscal Policy Institute writes. MI’s Ken Girardin thinks they are stretching the data.

• MI Report: Automatic License Plate Readers: Benefits, Risks, and Sensible Regulation.

• Mamdani bans NYPD from responding to 311 calls on homeless encampments. (New York Post)

• DoorDash agrees to $131.5 million settlement for underpaying Deliveristas. (New York Post)

• Judge unlikely to rule before October 1 on rent freeze, orders NYC officials to turn over phone messages, keeps rent freeze in place. (Gothamist)

• NYC expands J-51 tax break for repairs at co-ops and condos. “[E]ligible owners will be able to receive relief worth up to 100% of what the city determines to be the reasonable cost of renovation work, up from 70% under the previous version of the program, with the benefit spread over as many as 20 years.” (Crain’s)

• NYC lawmakers want ‘low-traffic neighborhoods’. (Gothamist)

• The case for a portable benefits pilot for gig workers. (CUF Report)

The leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America cites Zohran Mamdani’s popularity as proof that socialism works. But Mamdani’s not the only socialist mayor in America. Another is Katie Wilson of Seattle, first elected, like Mamdani, in November 2025. Seattle’s experience with socialist leadership has thus far been much rockier than New York’s.

Wilson’s approval rating is about twenty points lower than Mamdani’s. An early September poll found that 57% of New York City voters rated Mamdani’s job performance as “excellent” or “good.” An August poll found that 37% of Seattle voters approved of Wilson. Mamdani’s at least as popular as he was when he took office; Wilson’s popularity has dropped considerably.

Wilson defeated an incumbent, Bruce Harrell, who was well-favored to win at the campaign’s outset. She was a transit advocate, having helped found and run for many years Seattle’s Transit Riders Union, the equivalent of New York’s Riders Alliance. Mamdani has embraced the idea of municipal socialism as sewer socialism, most notably by means of his ostentatious pothole-filling. But Wilson is far better cast in that role.

“Sewer” connotes municipal services that are essential, too-often-taken-for-granted and just large, capital intensive. Which system checks all those boxes? Transit, especially with big cities. Arguably, no big city mayor should be considered a sewer socialist unless he or she is passionately committed to transit reform. Wilson cares about transit like Mamdani cares about Palestine. It’s the issue on which no one doubts her commitment. She supports Fair Fares-style subsidized transit but not necessarily free-for-all transit. And, unlike Mamdani, just making transit cheaper for riders isn’t the alpha and omega of Wilson’s transit agenda. If you really want sewer socialism, your model is Wilson, the workhorse to Mamdani’s showhorse.

Subscribe now

That twenty-percentage-point polling gap raises doubts as to whether blue city residents really do want sewer socialism, though. It also attests to how mayors must be more than just single-issue obsessives. On most major policy questions in Seattle—crime, surveillance cameras, homelessness, the city’s budget deficit and slow-growing economy—Wilson has seemed outmatched, reacting rather than leading, “a work in progress.”

Both Wilson and Mamdani have had to rethink major campaign promises.

In the case of Wilson, that’s meant backing off on building a thousand new shelter beds per year to “end unsheltered homelessness.” Mamdani has backed off on replacing cops with social workers on mental health calls, expanding housing vouchers, giving bonuses to teaching paraprofessionals, and forbearing from homeless encampment sweeps. Mamdani seems to have backtracked on more promises than Wilson. What explains his superior polling numbers? “Charisma,” many would say. Wilson, who at first disdained even attending public ceremonies, very obviously lacks Mamdani’s social media chops (37,000 X followers to his 1.2M) and has no influencer army.

But it’s really more political heft than just charisma. Mamdani’s only major achievement thus far was helping eight candidates for office win their primary this past June. Wilson tried a similar kingmaker move and fell flat. She endorsed two candidates in Washington state legislative Democratic primaries in August, both of whom performed poorly. Mamdani, along with the New York City DSA, truly intimidates other Democrats. Wilson, not so much.

Wilson calls herself a “democratic socialist,” though she has never technically been a DSA member. The local chapter declined to endorse her in last year’s election partly because she was insufficiently left-wing but also because she didn’t want to subordinate her entire agenda to theirs. The daylight between Wilson and the Seattle DSA could, in theory, have made her more attractive to centrists. But by denying her access to the kind of organizational assets Mamdani has used to build his machine (doorknockers, etc.), Wilson’s independence from the local DSA may also have contributed to her political inadequacy and thus general perception of ineffectiveness.

Not that Seattle’s DSA, which one hears far less about than New York’s DSA, necessarily made out the better in that non-bargain. In America’s political system, parties are weak, and therefore organizations need good candidates more than vice versa. That applies to the DSA just as surely as it does to Democrats and the GOP.

On paper, Wilson had many qualities for socialists to admire: she proved she can win elections and is sincerely committed to governance, a quality the DSA’s going to need in candidates if for no other reason than to distract Americans from the organization’s fixation with wildly unpopular stances on social issues. She hasn’t proved an effective standard-bearer for socialism, but whether the Seattle DSA could have found a better one is another question. That things have gone sideways in Seattle for socialists says as much about the movement as it does about her.

One thing that Mamdani’s boosters get right is their supposition that socialism’s future will depend heavily on what mayors do. This is being a bit overlooked amidst the obsessive current focus on the 2026 midterms. U.S. Senators, members of the House, and state and local legislators all matter. But it’s often hard to get much done as a member of a legislative body. True, a small, intensely ideological cohort can hold a larger body hostage, Tea Party-style. But emulating the Tea Party, which didn’t last, is not a sustainable model. To generate true proof of concept, socialism needs to be applied to executive office, and in the near term that looks more likely to happen at the municipal rather than gubernatorial or presidential level.

However much DSA leadership wants to tout Mamdani, business and civic leaders in Seattle are now looking less to Mamdani than San Francisco’s Daniel Lurie. A centrist Democrat much in the model of Michael Bloomberg, Lurie’s work on street homelessness and economic development has created hope for his city and other West Coast communities wracked by crime, disorder, and disinvestment.

It’s obviously early for Wilson, as it is for Mamdani. But if things work out for her, that will likely result from her moving in a Lurie-like direction. Few outside of socialist circles believe that Wilson would get way more popular by becoming more left-wing.

Gov. Hochul has yet to formally decide whether New York will opt into the new Federal Tax Credit for Scholarships. This is an up to $1,700 dollar-for-dollar tax credit for qualified contributions to scholarship-granting organizations, which families can apply to for scholarships covering tuition as well as tutoring and other education related expenses for children in elementary and secondary schools, including public school students.

Tutoring is exactly what the New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones turned to—according to her much-discussed essay—once she realized just how far behind in school her daughter was. Few of the public school children who fail proficiency tests have that opportunity, and this tax credit could help to start to fix that.

The problem

New York has been testing and identifying children who fall behind in English and math as early as third grade, and it knows that there is a problem—last school year, just 44% of 3rd-graders were proficient in English and 61% in math1. The problem is not a lack of information; it is a lack of accountability at the city’s schools, and a lack of parental ability to do much about it.

Many parents exercise choice when they can, moving their children into better-performing schools.

Entrance to the city’s screened schools is competitive. The city’s charter school networks have been growing and now educate about 16% of all public school students, many with superior results; however, their expansion is capped by the state, and seats are allocated by lottery. Parochial and private schools are often out of reach financially.

But too many parents have little choice. Even when they know their child is not doing well, or could be more challenged, there are few options open to them– 75% of public school students are classified as low income by the city, and parents themselves may not be in a position to help academically.

What the data shows

Citywide modeling of a single kindergarten cohort 2016-172 shows that children attend starkly different public schools from day one. At one third of the elementary schools, most children—64%—were proficient in English by the time they graduated 5th grade. At the rest, most were not, and at the bottom third—just 18% of students were.

In NYC, most students apply separately to middle and high schools; the best-performing schools screen students academically or through other aptitude tests. Children who fail proficiency tests in elementary school are set up to struggle thereafter, leaving many of them woefully unprepared for life after high school.

Looking at that 2016-17 kindergarten cohort, the elementary school Ms. Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to, P.S. 307 in Brooklyn, was among the worst performers. It tested 32 5th graders in 2022, and 75% scored in the lowest proficiency band—Level 1—in English. Only 3 students tested proficient. At Urban Assembly Unison School, where her daughter attended middle school, only 37% of its 8th graders, from that same cohort, were proficient in English in 2025, compared with 56% citywide.3

Looking at high schools, 55% of the city's traditional public high schools, which enroll nearly 100,000 students, or about 38% of the total, averaged below 65 on their Regents exams in 2025, by my calculations4. 65 is considered a passing score on an individual Regents exam. Small non-charter non-screened high schools had the worst scores5, and these small schools are concentrated largely in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, in Central Brooklyn (Districts 16, 17, 18, 19) and the South Bronx (Districts 8 and 12).

New York’s decision to drop the (already watered-down) Regents diploma requirement starting with the class of 2028 may help graduate more students, but does not fix any of this and will only make it harder to see how the city yet again has failed to educate too many of its children to a very basic proficiency level.

To opt in or not?

The UFT, along with NYSUT, the AFT, the state AFL-CIO and the NAACP’s New York chapter held a press conference earlier this month urging Hochul to opt out of this tax credit, arguing that it is just another voucher scheme and that opting in would take money away from public schools. It is unlikely to: the credit is federal, and no state or city education dollars are involved.

Among those in favor of opting in are school-choice advocates and charter schools, along with the Robin Hood Foundation, United Way of NYC, the New York Immigration Coalition and other anti-poverty organizations.

“We recognize this is a complicated program, and we share the concerns that have been raised about its design,” a coalition of 37 anti-poverty, community and charter school groups wrote in a letter to Gov. Hochul. “But we believe New York can shape its participation in ways that meaningfully benefit public school students.”

Gov. Hochul has indicated she plans to opt in, pending final guidance on rules. She is right to.

Scholarships won't replace public education in a city where private school tuition can be upwards of $70,000, but they should hopefully give some power back to the parents of children the school system is currently failing and who have little recourse.

There are many ways to improve New York’s public schools, as my colleagues have written in numerous research reports and briefs, from consolidating schools, to addressing student discipline and attendance issues, to reforming special education. What it comes down to is this: we need high expectations, real consequences, and accountability all around. We need to be willing and able to make hard decisions as well as reward excellence.

Opting in to receive the tax credit won’t fix public schools, but it may give more parents the same opportunity wealthier families already exercise: the ability to get their child help when there is a problem, rather than wait and keep trusting an institution that has had every opportunity—and tens of billions of dollars a year—to fix this, and has not.

The administration observes this principle when it suits Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s political needs. For instance, it touted the “unprecedented public transparency” of a new housing tracker. In September, City Hall released a trove of documents relating to air quality in Downtown Manhattan in the wake of 9/11.

“New Yorkers should welcome proactive disclosure,” my colleagues Cameron Macdonald and Santiago Vidal Calvo write. “But transparency is not limited to dashboards that City Hall chooses to publish. It also includes the calendars, communications, and facts informing decisions that the public chooses to examine.”

The Mayor’s Office’s arguably excessive delays (more on that below) in responding to basic record requests under the Freedom of Information Law insulate such decisions from timely public oversight. Which is why the Manhattan Institute is in court to make sure not just we, but the public at large can access public information in a timely manner.

But transparency is not just about documents.

When the mayor’s campaign promises of guaranteed rent freezes for the city’s rent-stabilized apartments shadow the Rent Guidelines Board — which did freeze said rents — there are valid questions about whether such an institution can operate independently or is acting on political mandates, especially since Mamdani appointed the majority of RGB members. (There’s another lawsuit, more below.)

There’s more.

One of the first decisions Mamdani made was to establish the Office of Mass Engagement, directed by the campaign’s former field director, that consolidates city outreach under an explicit organizing mandate. Perception is everything, and the kind of outreach the office engaged in from Rent Freeze hearings and tenant organizing, down to a table for the DSA, his political home, as just another nonprofit transit advocate at a bus resource fair — seems to muddle outreach and politics.

Mamdani’s first press conference was not with traditional media (though the mayor does find time to answer their questions), but creators and influencers, a practice the city has continued, including through Signal group chats that have brought up issues around record preservation.

The city argues the former have bigger reach. They may, but they are also less likely to scrutinize the administration. Since Signal messages were not preserved, we are unlikely to learn what conversations took place. The Signal group was formed out of the Creators4Zohran group that supported the mayor’s election campaign, Columbia Journalism Review reported.

Mayor Mamdani has shown no hesitation in using executive orders to force increased transparency on landlords and businesses. That makes his own office’s resistance to timely disclosure rather ironic.

Transparency Lawsuit

In order to keep the city accountable, the public needs access to information about what the city is doing in a timely manner, and it has the right to request such information under the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).

MI is suing the city, again, this time over the Mayor’s Office delaying a response to a reasonable FOIL request in a reasonable time.

“Transparency is about timing as much as anything. When a controversy is in the making, records are what drive the reporting, oversight, and legislative debate,” Santiago Vidal Calvo and Cameron Macdonald argue. “To be told in January that a decision on a July request is coming is to have the news after the story has run its course and the officials have moved on. Put off disclosure until the civic moment is over and you have denied it in all but name.”

What triggered this lawsuit was such a six-month delay on MI’s request to see a list of meetings with people outside of the city government by Ana Maria Archila, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs.

Archila, as MI’s Adam Lehodey reported in July, had been planning to meet with Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, without Mayor Mamdani’s knowledge. The meeting was canceled once it became known, but prompted the question of who else had she met since taking office without the mayor’s knowledge?

While MI would like the court to order the city to provide information requested by us within 5 days, the case is asking the court more broadly “to enforce a modest rule: before City Hall makes a requester wait six months, it must have a request-specific reason for doing so,” Vidal Calvo and Macdonald write.

The Other Lawsuit: Rent Freeze Promise

The other lawsuit is over this year’s rent freeze which Mamdani explicitly promised during his electoral campaign, and then his appointed Rent Guidelines Board delivered.

The judge decided this week that he wanted to see what written communications the City Hall had with the board to come to a conclusion in the case. The rent freeze is currently set to take effect on October 1.

Why this case matters?

“If the courts don’t nullify the freeze, mayors will obtain de facto control over stabilized rent increases, despite statutory text and structure designed to insulate these decisions from political pressure,” Gandolfo DiFiore and MI’s John Ketcham write. “If successful, our legal challenge would not end rent stabilization or resolve the deeper issues with the HSTPA. It would, however, ensure that owners receive a fair process and prevent mayors from co-opting an independent body for political gain.”

Fixing NYC’s Tech Isn’t an IT Problem — It’s an Operations Problem

New York City has a long track record of spending millions of dollars on tech initiatives like the MyCity app that fail to deliver on their promise. Most recently, the mayor has deployed Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crews to fulfill his tech promises.

But simply hiring more developers or giving large contracts to vendors won’t ensure meaningful digital service will be delivered on time and on budget, MI’s Brittany Montgomery writes in Vital City.

The solutions to those challenges are operational, and without changing how the city hires, buys and budgets for these investments, even the most ambitious projects will fail to deliver.

The city should move from “waterfall” to “Agile” procurement, which is three times more successful at delivering projects as promised, stop treating tech investments as capital expenses they once primarily were and rethink how it buys technology as a service, she recommends.

And it needs to rethink its diversity requirements.

“The City’s current approach to procurement makes this way of working difficult, if not impossible. Local Law 2019/174 specifies percentage goals of total annual agency expenditure for six classes of minority-owned businesses, adding up to 73.52% of total spend for professional service contracts,” Montgomery writes. “In my experience, procurement officers apply all or most of these percentage goals across all contracts. Requiring blanket target participation rates on a single Scrum team would imply a minimum of six distinct companies supplying staff for a four-person team — a certain (and nonsensical) recipe for failure.”

Read more.

Issue Brief: How New York City Can Use AI to Improve Quality of Life

While national debate surrounding artificial intelligence often focuses on abstract risks, New York City has a concrete opportunity to use AI to improve daily life for residents.

In a new issue brief, MI’s Josh Appel outlines how Large Language Models (LLMs) can transform municipal governance—building on historic NYC data innovations like CompStat, FireCast, and 311—to synthesize data across city agencies, and how, by leveraging LLMs to analyze multi-agency data in real time, NYC can shift from troubleshooting to addressing emerging issues before they impact residents’ quality of life.

On Keeping Race Out of Student Discipline

New guidance on compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights charges schools with two “fundamental duties”: maintain safe, orderly learning environments and eliminate racial discrimination in disciplinary enforcement.

This is the right approach. By focusing on basic fairness rather than over- or under-disciplining students to align with racial metrics, schools can work on applying behavioral science and addressing the root causes of misbehavior rather than managing public relations metrics, MI’s Jennifer Weber writes in City Journal.

“Schools need to be willing to do more than just count suspensions, assign labels to behavior, and refer students elsewhere for help. Teachers and administrators must be willing to examine their own behavior, too,” she argues. “They must teach expectations, identify missing academic or behavioral skills, respond consistently, and track whether the student improves. The measure of a discipline system should be whether students’ behavior—and their lives—actually get better.”

Read more.

More on Education

• The state moved ahead in the process to eliminate passing Regents as a high school graduation requirement. The results of this test were not meaningful, MI’s Ray Domanico told The Post, but “[t]here has to be a meaningful way to determine if students are meeting expectations. They have to come out of high school prepared.” Officials are yet to share how they plan to ensure that the proposed “portrait of a graduate” paints an accurate picture of a graduate’s skills across the competencies to be judged, like critical thinking.

• Councilmembers make new push to improve diversity at NYC specialized high schools (Gothamist)

• 1 in 3 NYC students were chronically absent from school last year, missing 10% or more of school days. This number hasn’t budged and remains higher than pre-pandemic, Chalkbeat reports. As my colleague Danyela Souza Egorov and I have written, such absences, which start as early as kindergarten, for many students compound over years into significant learning loss.

• Gov. Hochul is under pressure from unions and civil rights leaders to “Opt Out” from a federal tax-credit scholarship program, Chalkbeat reports. The governor is firm in her resolve — opting in will benefit all children and takes no money away from public schools. MI’s Ray Domanico agrees, Gov. Hochul is right to stay the course.

Extra! Extra!

• Park Avenue redesign moves ahead, city plans leafy walkway and 2-way bike lane (Gothamist)

• You’re Joining a Union — Whether You Want to Or Not (City Journal)

• How’s Mamdani Doing? Mayor Releases Mixed City Scorecard (The City Reporter)

• ‘Off a Cliff’: AI Devours Entry-Level Tech Jobs, As Experienced Workers Hold On (The City Reporter)

• NYPD expects daily UN General Assembly protests as NYC street closures begin (Gothamist)

• More EV charging (with future implications for curb management) and testing bus stop roof gardens coming to Brooklyn, and Tesla starts testing driverless cars in the city.

• What The Dickens? DOT’s Final Truck Route Map Is A Tale Of Two Cities (Streetsblog)

On 9/11, I was not yet a New Yorker, nor did I know I ever would be.

I vividly remember the morning; I was a foreign visitor in D.C. on a work trip. Along with millions of others, I watched in horror the second plane hit the South Tower on live television. But I experienced it as an outsider, not as a New Yorker and not as an American.

I remember sitting that night alone in a hotel room thinking about what was likely to happen next in the rest of the world. 9/11 was a horrific, foreign tragedy, and yet it was personal, for it was crystal clear it was about to affect all of us.

I moved to New York a year later, one of the more than 3 million New Yorkers — almost 40% of the city’s residents — who are foreign-born. Millions have moved through the city since the terrorist attack, and more than half of New York’s foreign-born residents in 2023 had arrived in the country after 2000.

When they came, they brought with them, as I did, a very different, global perspective on what 9/11 meant.

Our lives were shaped by the event elsewhere, in ways that other New Yorkers may not understand. We come carrying memories that were not formed here, into a place that was defined by the event. We live in a city shaped by its reaction to it, but we know no different life here than the one we arrived into. We belong to a different New York than those who were here before.

As Harry Siegel writes, more than three-quarters of today’s residents were not here on 9/11. People are born, die, come and leave. The city creates institutional memory — surveillance, safeguards, procedures, etc. — but, as Nicole Gelinas observed, life in the city went back to normal, if a new normal, remarkably quickly. The event shattered many lives, but the city survived.

The attacks on 9/11 changed the world; they were a watershed moment in New York, American and global experience. It’s also the defining day of the calendar in New York City: a day of remembrance that’s individually and communally brutally all of ours.

More:

• September 11 and the Loss of Certainty by City Journal’s Johnathan Clarke

• The Resilient City by MI’s Nicole Gelinas

• What murals tell us about 9/11 (NYT)

• A City Forgets. Maybe It’s Supposed To. (Vital City)

• The First Rough Draft of 9/11 History (Free Press)

• After 9/11, Documents Suggest, New Yorkers Were Misled About Air Quality (NYT)

And now to the rest of New York’s news.

Back to School

The first day of school for public school students was yesterday, September 10, which was also the launch date for the city’s new free, universal childcare program for 2-year-olds.

The launch was mired in payment controversies and the sudden departure of the head of the program at the Department of Education just weeks before launch. Not every parent was pleased with their assigned, mostly home-based childcare providers, choosing to keep the children in their existing daycare settings.

As for the city’s overall school system, enrollment keeps going down. According to late-August data, the city enrolled almost 22,000 fewer kids last school year than the year before, and total enrollment in the city’s traditional K-12 public schools fell below 790,000 from almost a million just a decade ago. Data for this school year will be collected in October.

Related:

• NYC teachers were promised $8,500 bonuses for large class sizes. The details are murky. (Chalkbeat)

• Mamdani’s top task to fix NYC schools: make kids show up (MI’s Danyela Souza Egorov and John Ketcham in the Post)

• Education needs reform: the latest Gallup poll shows a rapidly falling satisfaction with the quality of education our schoolchildren are getting.

Housing News

In Why We Are Taking Mamdani’s Rent Freeze to Court, MI’s John Ketcham and property owner Gandolfo DiFiore explain their thinking and why MI is providing financial support and recently filed an amicus curiae brief in the case.

“We did so because we believe Mamdani’s repeated promise to freeze rents prejudged a decision that by law belongs to an independent Rent Guidelines Board (RGB),” they write, hoping the outcome of the case would result in a fairer process, one that includes the board justifying its decisions with a rationale.

“If the courts don’t nullify the freeze, mayors will obtain de facto control over stabilized rent increases, despite statutory text and structure designed to insulate these decisions from political pressure,” they write. “Rent freezes will become standard campaign promises, threatening the existence of privately owned, rent-regulated housing.”

Other:

• The City Council confirmed Mayor Mamdani’s appointee John Mangin to the city’s five-member Board of Standards and Appeals after all. The position will allow him to weigh in on approving changes and overriding council objections to certain kinds of housing developments. MI’s Eric Kober and John Ketcham argued last month that Mangin is certainly “qualified to carry out the policies that the city has already chosen,” and that this was the wrong fight for the city council to pick when it came to housing.

• Over 2,000 NYC buildings could be subject to the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), which gives city-approved nonprofits and joint ventures the first opportunity to buy distressed rental buildings, Crain’s reports. MI’s John Ketcham was blunt when he wrote about COPA earlier: “COPA is an attack on fundamental private property rights that will exacerbate the city’s housing crisis merely to benefit nonprofit allies of the City’s progressive leadership.” The revised and reintroduced bill is moving through council hearings.

Worker Power

• “As Mamdani lauds ‘worker power,’ unions for NYC employees get a cooler reception,” Gothamist reports. When Mamdani announced the new Office of Worker Power, “he was flanked by hotel workers, Amazon delivery drivers, and home health aides as he signed the executive order. Teachers, firefighters and sanitation workers were noticeably absent.”

• Ahead of Labor Day, I wrote about Mamdani’s Shadow Workforce — the 80,000 or so non-profit workers who deliver the city’s services under city contracts and who are increasingly unionizing, in part as a result of the city’s poor contracting practices. Read MI’s Stephen Eide’s piece on Mamdani’s NGO Model Army to understand how we got here.

Extra! Extra!

• Gothamist took an in-depth look at the city’s vast private surveillance network.

• MTA Flips the Switch from Electric Buses Back to Natural Gas, The City Reporter reports, with officials pointing to challenges in the electric bus industry.

• Grocers file antitrust suit to block Mamdami admin’s plan for NYC-owned supermarkets: ‘Predatory pricing’ (New York Post)

• Can you air-condition a city? (Bloomberg City Lab)

• Quality of Life Comes at a Cost: The most desirable cities are the least affordable (Aziz Sunderji)

Will The Politics of Affordability Undo The Nonprofit Human Service Provision?

This Labor Day, local politicians will once again extol their support for working New Yorkers, standing shoulder to shoulder with the city’s unions. Staunchly pro-labor Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be there and may point to his support for the Delivery Protection Act, which would prohibit operators of last-mile facilities from contracting out their core warehouse and delivery work.

The bill is principally aimed at Amazon’s Delivery Service Partner model and would require companies operating these facilities to employ workers directly.

Mamdani argues that a company should not control working conditions while outsourcing responsibility for workers.

But the Mayor is also management now. And before he targets private sector contracting practices, he might want to look inward: New York City itself relies on a vast contracted workforce to deliver essential public services, and does a notoriously bad job paying and managing those contracts.

More than 80,000 employees of nonprofit organizations provide human services under New York City contracts, staffing shelters and senior centers, representing indigent defendants, and operating foster-care and after-school programs, among others.

There are good reasons to contract out work: it allows the city to potentially offer better service more efficiently, and these nonprofits tend to possess the knowledge, agility, and specialization that the city may not. But those advantages depend on the providers being able to operate independently and compete with one another.

That is, often, not how it works.

The New York City style of outsourced government means that city agencies are the main purchaser, with enormous leverage over price and contract terms. Yet it also cannot credibly allow many providers to fail and let services stop. So, the city preserves incumbents and outdated contract terms rather than risk disruption, especially when it comes to serving “vulnerable populations.”

Human services account for 87% of the city’s negotiated contract extensions since 2010. Over time, some providers become too big, too specialized, or simply too embedded to replace, and repeated extensions in turn weaken both competition and the pressure to innovate.

Incumbency can be mutually convenient—the city likes familiar providers, providers like guaranteed contracts.

But providers and workers alike bear the costs of this system.

Bureaucratic rules result in slow contract processing and notoriously late payments, effectively limiting competition to those nonprofits who can fund operations while waiting for the city to pay and know how to navigate the bidding process.

A 2025 review of payment delays for the city’s human services by the comptroller found roughly 4,000 unpaid nonprofit invoices worth $861 million. At seven of the eight agencies examined, providers waited more than 200 days on average from the official start of a contract to receive their first payment.

To help meet their contract obligations, providers often borrow to make payroll, leave positions vacant, and ask existing employees to do more.

Meanwhile, the city micromanages away the flexibility that was a reason to outsource work in the first place. Micromanaged budgets make it difficult for providers to respond to changing market conditions: moving money into payroll may require city approval that can further delay payments. Stagnant wages have led to high turnover and high vacancies.

It is hardly surprising that workers have turned to unions.

Nonprofit human-services employees earn an estimated 25 to 30 percent less than city workers in comparable jobs. This summer, employees of Bronx Defenders, a legal aid organization, staged an 11-day strike over compensation. Such negotiations are effectively three-sided: workers bargain with the nonprofit, but City Hall largely controls the money available for a settlement.

In response to this precarity, the City Council has introduced legislation (Int. 0452) that would establish a “required wage” for contracted human services providers tied to comparable city employment. #justpay, a coalition of nonprofit human services providers and workers, unions and advocates, has made passing this bill a priority.

What’s really happening here is that the city’s own contracting failures are pushing the system toward public-sector wage structure.

In a better-managed system, competitive compensation would not necessarily mean matching municipal salaries, benefits, and collective-bargaining increases—many of which are inflated by the political power of public-sector unions. By one estimate, salary parity would cost the city between $965 million and $1.35 billion annually. Replicating the full municipal compensation would risk turning nominally independent providers into a shadow civil service.

The reasons to outsource this work were and remain good ones.

Nonprofits often possess expertise and community relationships that government agencies lack; outsourcing should give them operational flexibility, and competition may produce better services at lower cost.

But if New York wants outsourcing to deliver on its promise, it needs to start by reforming its contracting practices so providers are able to operate as independent contractors: pay them on time, give them operational discretion, and rates that allow them to compete for labor. The city also needs to ensure there is enough competition so that incumbency does not become an entitlement, and capable challengers have a genuine chance to enter.

And, as MI’s Josh Appel argues, it should judge providers by service quality, not their ability to finance the city’s late payments or master its paperwork.

Mamdani’s NGO Model Army

The contracting system has also affected the city’s political landscape.

The administrative choice to shift provision of New York’s social-services from unionized city employees to a large, lower-paid nonprofit workforce has had political consequences no one fully appreciated until last year, when Zohran Mamdani won a campaign powered by tens of thousands of young, ideologically motivated volunteers.

Read Stephen Eide’s brilliant piece on Mamdani’s NGO Model Army to understand how we got here.

Related: What Role Should Nonprofits Play in Cities? (Vital City)

More from MI:

New Brief: The Mediocre State of New York State Schools

New York “spends more per pupil than any other state, pays among the highest teacher salaries, maintains some of the most rigorous teacher certification requirements, and identifies a larger share of students with disabilities than nearly every other state,” MI’s Jennifer Weber, Carolyn D. Gorman, and Ray Domanico write in a new report. Yet student outcomes remain mediocre.

They point to a governance system, led by the Board of Regents and the State Education Department, “that makes no-one truly responsible for results” as the root cause of this failure and recommend that the state measure what works and use evidence to guide policy and classroom decisions.

Full brief here.

Rethinking NGO Procurement Through Performance-Based Models

This winter policy analyst Josh Appel looked at New York City’s nonprofit procurement process and found that the current reimbursement-based model provides few incentives for cost control or performance.

Transitioning to a performance-based model “will reduce administrative burden on the front end while incentivizing improved outcomes and lower spending,” he writes, acknowledging that “the challenge will be finding the best metric to measure “performance” across the categories of nonprofit work. But certainly, even while operating the cost-based model, we should be able to measure success to some extent even if it is not a prominent factor in procurement today.”

Full brief here.

Extra! Extra!

• Mamdani’s mixed signals on use of Signal. (The City Reporter)

• Inside Mamdani’s Private Army of Public Influencers. (The New York Times)

• Should NYC Have Open Primaries? Hellgate is curious why “Mayor Mamdani now opposes an election reform that would allow 1.1 million independent voters—people currently shut out of a major part of the democratic process—to vote in City primary elections.” MI’s John Ketcham thinks we should have open primaries.

• Recent Trends in Personal Income & Wage Inequality — a report released this week by the city comptroller finds that New York today is more unequal than it was before the pandemic, however, “most of the increase in income concentration, in recent years, appears to have been driven by business and investment income, reflecting wealth inequality, and also by bonus incentive pay. Base wages and salaries do not appear to be the culprit—as looking at them alone suggests, paradoxically, that workers in lower-wage occupation have generally seen faster income growth than workers in higher-wage fields.”

• Rules surrounding the new street vending licenses are murky (The City Reporter).

• The city announced a one-year moratorium on AI for students in 2-K through eighth grade. To understand why that is a step in the right direction, read MI’s Jennifer Weber’s brief.

From street-corner cameras to high-flying drones and license plate readers, the eye of government is getting harder to escape in New York. In today’s round-up, we weigh the evidence on whether ALPRs actually deter crime, look at the NYPD’s latest public housing lawsuit, and break down key updates on city labor battles, fiscal policy, and Wall Street earnings.

Are ALPRs Worth It?

CCTV cameras capture you passing by, the NYPD watches over many street corners and from the sky, dispatching drones to evaluate 911 calls and monitor large gatherings, as well as using license plate readers to find vehicles of interest, all fed into its Domain Awareness System.

On August 26, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, launched an investigation into Flock Safety’s AI-powered network of thousands of cameras across the country.

Writing in defense of automatic license-plate readers (ALPR), some of which are produced by Flock, and AI surveillance in The Atlantic, MI’s Charles Fain Lehman notes that cameras in general are known to reduce crime. Do ALPRs work? There is little research, but one recent report found they resulted in an 11% drop in vehicle theft.

There has been legitimate pushback against such cameras from both the right and the left over systematic surveillance by the government and the potential for abuse of such powers. But we should not dismiss ALPRs reflexively, Lehman argues.

He points to research that cameras in Medellin, Colombia, reduced crime by about 19%. Subway stations in Stockholm, Sweden, saw a 25% reduction in crime after cameras were installed, and similarly, crime fell 20% in areas with cameras in Montevideo, Uruguay.

“Cameras help police catch criminals,” he writes. “That reduces crime through two channels: incapacitating offenders who are caught and convicted, and increasing the certainty of apprehension, which theoretically should deter criminals from offending in the first place.” Appropriately regulated, such cameras have the potential to “make the criminal-justice system both fairer and less punitive.”

Cato Institute’s Mike Fox pushes back on Lehman’s piece, quoting Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

“Flock is merely one piece of a vastly expanding surveillance state,” he writes. “The company’s potential downfall should not be blamed on legislation targeting ALPRs specifically but through the firm enforcement of the Fourth Amendment itself.”

Related:

• Two of the city’s public housing (NYCHA) tenant associations are suing the city over privacy concerns from NYPDs direct, real-time access to nearly 20,000 public housing cameras, NY Focus reports. The footage goes straight to the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System to support the NYPD’s “predictive policing” approach.

Crime Data & Reality

Murders and shootings are down mid-year, and while the rest of the seven major crimes are also down, overall major crimes remain 25% higher than in 2019. Felony assaults have increased for 6 straight years and are now 48% higher than in 2019.

“Criminologists have for years generally viewed homicides as one of the most reliable markers of general crime trends because they tend to have the highest reporting rates. They also constitute a category that is relatively difficult to manipulate,” MI’s Rafael Mangual writes. “But in New York’s case, homicides have diverged from many of the other crime categories tracked by the city, which over the last several years have not declined at nearly the same rate, if at all.”

Despite progress, the city was not yet at pre-pandemic crime levels at the end of 2025.

Related:

• The State of Crime in New York City, Midyear 2026: The Detailed Picture — Vital City.

• Where Do Voters Turn When Crime Goes Up? Apparently, Nowhere in Particular, MI’s Robert VerBruggen writes.

Unions and Fear of Being “LaSalled”

Mamdani is right to take on the City Council over paraprofessional pay, MI’s Ken Girardin explains. Such payment should be part of collective bargaining under the 1967 Taylor Law, and a ruling against the mayor would embolden public-sector unions to make similar deals with lawmakers outside of contract negotiations.

“The fight between the city council and Mamdani will be compelling because of the extent to which the unions have gone in attacking the independence of the state’s judicial system,” Girardin writes, referring to the union-led campaign three years ago to derail Hochul’s nominee Hector LaSalle. “The UFT seems to be betting that judges, at least at the trial level, will fear getting ‘LaSalled’ if they question the legality of what the union and its proxies are attempting.”

Read more.

More from MI

• Nicole Gelinas on NYC Austerity. What do we mean when we talk about austerity in New York? In a must-read piece in City Journal, Gelinas dives into the city’s history and looks at what Mamdani’s narrative is likely to mean in practice. “Though politically useful, Mamdani’s attacks on austerity may only hasten its return,” she notes. “Regardless, then, of how New York’s mayor or other political leaders talk about austerity, the real question is how long governments can keep avoiding it. After decades of rising debt and expanding budgets—and financial markets willing to absorb both—fiscal restraint has been the exception rather than the rule. The uncertainty is not whether austerity will return—but when.”

• John Ketcham on Urban Density. “Whether greater density yields shared prosperity or urban dysfunction depends on whether public and private institutions can channel the concentration of humanity into productivity rather than cacophony,” Ketcham writes in City Journal. “The denser the city, the more capable its government must be to address its disadvantages.”

• Christian Browne on Mamdani vs. Amazon. “The city council has no general power to ban employment contracts or to dictate the labor arrangements between last-mile operators and their workers,” Christian Browne writes. “The New York State Labor Law governs employment matters throughout the state.”

Extra! Extra!

• Comptroller’s monthly economic snapshot of the city’s health notes that Wall Street firm profits reached $24.8 billion, boosting corporate tax payments that surpassed New York City’s full-year Financial Plan profit projection in just six months.

• Mamdani has assembled his Business Advisory Council, to be announced imminently, the New York Times writes.

• The number of millionaires in New York is virtually unchanged, according to the latest income tax data from the IRS, MI’s E.J. McMahon writes.

• Economic gain from the 2026 FIFA World Cup for the region: $3.5 billion, a report from Gov. Hochul says.

• Grocers sue the city over Mamdani’s city-owned supermarket plan, claiming such stores would be unfair competition, NY Post reports.

• REBNY second quarter real estate report shows that condo construction is down.

• Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax rollout has been a mess, but it has cost Mamdani nothing in terms of support from his political base, MI’s Daniel Rosen writes.

• Students want to be in the city, and universities are hiring, the City Reporter reports.

The Free Press

Are Americans Losing Faith in Capitalism? We Asked Them.

Welcome back to The Honesty Project, a series of opinion surveys from The Free Press. We’re asking Americans what they believe about the most important issues in public life. And we’re going deeper than a typical poll…

Read more

2 months ago · 20 likes · 223 comments · Mene Ukueberuwa

Mamdani Sets Ambitious Housing Goal

A draft “Fair Housing Growth Strategy” released by the Mamdani Administration this week sets the goal of producing 700,000 units over 10 years to relieve the housing crisis. It also sets out five-year, non-binding housing goals by community district, sketching out the outer borough past low-growth neighborhoods expected to see the highest growth, while avoiding specifics of how it plans to get there.

“The maps comparing high- and low-growth areas have a lot of overlap with the maps depicting areas that supported Mamdani and those voting for his principal challenger, Andrew Cuomo, in the 2025 mayoral election,” MI’s Eric Kober observes. Mamdani owes little to the low-growth areas, and has the powers to facilitate much more housing development.

“What’s needed is clarity from the administration on where and how it intends to utilize the mayor’s new land use powers. It is probably unrealistic to expect council endorsement of these plans, but there needs to be enough of a working understanding with a majority on the council so that city government can continue to function, even with continual bickering,” Kober concludes. “Until that happens, the council will continue to lash out, as with the Mangin nomination – and the tools that can get the city closer to meeting its housing needs will fail to fulfill their potential.”

Read more

Related: Another housing fight the city doesn’t need is over John Mangin’s confirmation to the Board of Standards and Appeals. “The BSA needs a chair who understands New York’s complicated land-use rules and will exercise good judgment in applying the law,” MI’s Eric Kober and John Ketcham write of Mamdani’s nominee in City Journal. “Mangin is a strong fit on both counts.”

The Trouble With Bonuses

The City Council unanimously passed the RESPECT Check Act, requiring the city to pay up to $10,000 in “workforce stabilization payments” to paraprofessionals employed by the city’s Department of Education. The council argues that a starting salary of $33,000 leads to vacancies, which contributes to the high cost of Carter cases.

The mayor let the legislation become law this week and instead opted to sue the council, even though he had promised to support the payments during his election campaign. The administration is arguing that the council’s move circumvents conventional labor bargaining and would open the door to similar fights in the future.

"The mayor is taking up an important fight, the outcome of which will have enormous implications for the city,” MI’s Ken Girardin explains. “The Council has essentially told the city's public employee unions that they can get goodies outside the give-and-take of the bargaining process, where mayors weigh costs and tradeoffs. Why should a union agree to efficiencies or other reforms in exchange for raises? Why should they eat vegetables when the Council they helped elect is handing out dessert?"

In fiscal year 2025, the city spent $1.3 billion on Carter cases, where it pays for special needs children to receive education the city cannot provide in private settings, something that needs to be reined in, MI’s Jennifer Weber writes, by bringing more special education services into the public school system.

The Moving Dividend

Just what is the premium we are willing to pay to live where we want to?

MI’s Daniel Martino has created an interactive tool that allows anyone to examine hypothetical moves to see roughly just how much more (or less) in taxes they may be paying by moving from one metropolitan area to another.

“My new income tax tool shows that not only the rich, but also low- and middle-income Americans, have a lot to gain from moving across state lines,” he writes. “If Democratic-controlled states do not keep tax rates in line with those in Republican-controlled states, the middle class in those states might begin to flee as fast as the rich.”

Check it out

Related: Escape from New York may not be easy.

The Bigger Apple Podcast: Why Small Classes Won’t Save Our Schools

On the latest episode of The Bigger Apple, Nicole Gelinas and I talked with education policy expert and MI fellow Jennifer Weber about the history of school choice, the limits of small schools and small classes, and reforms that could help the city improve its schools. Listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

Sweden Doesn’t Mandate Childcare Ratios. Why Does America?

“Child-to-staff requirements in daycares raise costs without delivering clear benefits,” Chelsea Olivia Follett, a Research Fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, writes in City Journal.

All U.S. states have such mandates. But Sweden, often looked to as an example of universal childcare, does not regulate staffing ratios for preschools serving 1- to 5-year-olds, proving that “the choice isn’t between mandates and bad care,” she writes. “Sweden’s approach asks policymakers to place their confidence in childcare professionals and families instead of micromanaging these arrangements. If Sweden can trust parents and providers to deliver quality care, so can we.”

Related: Center for New York City’s modeling estimates that Mamdani may need $5 billion more each year, for a total of $9 billion, to provide the kind of universal childcare the city envisions, largely due to expected higher wage costs. Full report here or you can read the writeup in the New York Times.

More from MI:

• The Hidden Costs of Affordable-Housing Mandates

  “Inclusionary zoning can reduce construction and raise rents. Some cities are starting to rethink it,” Shawn Regan writes in City Journal. “Last month, San Francisco sharply scaled its program back, cutting the requirement from 15 percent of units to 5 percent across much of the city and exempting projects with fewer than 25 units altogether. The retreat comes as new research finds that inclusionary zoning comes with a steep hidden price: fewer homes, higher rents, and costs far greater than other affordable-housing programs.”

• New York’s Resource Curse

  New York suffers from a municipal “resource curse”— “a condition in which abundant revenues weaken the pressure to spend wisely and govern efficiently,” MI’s John Ketcham writes, but “Mamdani’s reluctance to pursue genuine reform creates political openings for Hochul and Menin.”

  Gov. Hochul and Speaker Menin can help break the curse by controlling the state’s costs, resisting the council’s move to expand the CityFHEPS housing-assistance program, which has ballooned from $25 million to $2 billion in just 7 years, and pushing for an overhaul of the city’s property tax system.

Safety vs. Labor Unions

“In Democratic jurisdictions, a coalition of labor unions, anti-tech activists, and politicians have kept driverless vehicles off the streets,” Rogé Karma writes in Atlantic, California being a notable exception. “They argue that the new technology would make the roads more dangerous and throw millions of human drivers out of work, all to enrich a handful of tech oligarchs.”

But when it comes to Waymo, data seems to prove them wrong on safety, and how to reconcile the benefits to many with the costs to the few is up for debate.

“Democrats’ main job in blue states and cities with robust mass-transit networks is not to protect driver jobs, but to make sure that we don’t have a repeat of the Uber and Lyft price wars,” MI’s Nicole Gelinas says. “That is, any movement from the transit system to a low-occupancy car, whether driverless or not, is an urban failure.”

Related:

• How To Make Driverless Ride-Hail Work in New York (Vital City)

• The Bigger Apple Podcast episode with Sam “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz on autonomous vehicles from earlier this year.

• Four Bad Arguments Against Self-Driving Taxis

• In a new-ish report, Hunter College and Open Plans, a street advocacy group, looked at what lessons New York should take from California when it comes to autonomous vehicles. (When it came to safety, they got their numbers wrong and had to retract that section of the report.)

Extra! Extra!

• DSA leader Gustavo Gordillo has it good in NYC, while lefty wunderkind Morris Katz struggles to pay $6,500 a month rent? (New York Post)

• Mamdani’s ‘Bro’ Culture in City Hall (The New York Times)

• This Preliminary Mayor’s Management Report provides a baseline for judging Mamdani’s performance.

• Congestion pricing did not improve air quality, city report finds. (Gothamist)

• More Subsidies for Groceries? The city is considering tax abatements and zoning benefits for grocers competing with city stores, Dan Rivoli reported for NY1.

• Newark’s food pantries look more like grocery stores. (Gothamist)

• Here’s how grocery prices work. (Vital City)

• For the first time in 100 years, a river otter has been spotted along the Bronx River (Gothamist)

• One to watch: A grassroots campaign called “Serve NYC, Afford NYC” is organizing around $30-per-hour minimum wage and 6.5% annual raises ahead of DC37 contract negotiations, which would have serious implications for the budget. Mamdani campaigned on a $30-per-hour minimum wage and DC 37 endorsed him before the primary.

The late-summer housing news is a new report from NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, setting a very ambitious goal of producing 700,000 new housing units over a decade to remediate the city’s severe housing supply shortage. The report, a draft “Fair Housing Growth Strategy” required by a 2023 local law, also sets out five-year housing goals by community district.

The targets are non-binding, and the report discusses the path to achieving those goals only in general terms, avoiding discussion of specific locations for new housing or the changes in zoning and other regulations necessary to achieve so many new units.

As a point of comparison, in the first six months of 2026, following significant pro-housing zoning changes enacted in the term of Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, New York City issued building permits for 14,714 new housing units, or just under 30,000 on an annualized basis. That’s a strong pace for the city by recent historical standards, but only a fraction of the annual average NYC would need to hit the target of 700,000 over ten years.

New York City did exceed 70,000 new units permitted in 2022, but that was a consequence of the expiration of the Section 421-a real estate tax exemption program; many years’ construction was brought forward to vest tax benefits.

NYC has long found that the best way to boost housing production is to take benefits away from housing developers. Unfortunately, such boosts are temporary, and housing production subsequently plummets. The prior 421-a expiration, in 2015, also led to a burst in permits, exceeding 60,000 in that year. Going further back in time, the “grace period” in which developments with permits under the pre-1961 zoning could complete construction after the far more restrictive 1961 zoning went into effect also supercharged housing construction.

To get 70,000 new units a year permitted consistently for a decade, or even a large increment over current production, would require that the city maintain a welcoming environment for investment in new housing, rather than periodically offering the last chance to build at a profit for years to come. We are far from that goal.

The Politics of Zoning

The main culprit is zoning. Back in 1961, with the city in decline and the suburbs booming, NYC instituted an entirely new Zoning Resolution. Based on a pessimistic view of the city’s future, the 1961 zoning allowed far less housing growth than the old zoning it replaced.

When the city’s economy recovered from the fiscal crisis of the 1970’s and the population began growing to new record levels, the 1961 zoning proved woefully inadequate. City planners have tried, with some success, to build the political consensus necessary to change the rules to allow more housing growth. Nonetheless, the draft fair housing strategy report indicates that on a community district basis, housing growth is strikingly uneven. As shown in the graphic below, “low growth” areas are found around the periphery of the city, as well as in some affluent parts of Manhattan.

The maps comparing high- and low-growth areas have a lot of overlap with the maps depicting areas that supported Mamdani and those voting for his principal challenger, Andrew Cuomo, in the 2025 mayoral election. Mamdani drew his support mostly from high-growth areas; that growth had produced changes to the demographic composition of the city’s electorate that worked in his favor, in particular the influx of college-educated young adults to growing areas in northern Brooklyn and western Queens.

Mamdani’s lack of political support in many low-growth areas combines with 2025 amendments to the City Charter to give him an opportunity to facilitate large amounts of housing growth.

By October 1, the Department of City Planning will designate the twelve community districts where the “Affordable Housing Fast Track,” a truncated zoning approval process cutting out the City Council, will apply for zoning changes facilitating mixed-income housing.

The designation is based on recent relative levels of affordable housing production, not overall housing production. However, an analysis using preliminary data by NYU’s Furman Center found that the likely qualifying community districts are, except for Manhattan Community District 5 south of Central Park, also low-growth areas using the city’s criteria (see map below).

The Affordable Housing Fast Track means that, in the low-density districts, the administration could effectuate, very quickly, zoning changes that could substantially change land use and result in significant increments of new housing. It would be harder in the Manhattan community districts; these areas are already dense, and there are few potential development sites. Building more mixed-income housing would require other changes that are not likely given current politics.

But the Affordable Housing Fast Track is not the only pro-housing-growth charter change.

In other community districts with low-density zoning, the city can apply a similar fast-track process, also cutting out the city council, to allow new housing up to four stories in height. There is also, throughout the city, a Fast Track Zoning Action where the Board of Standards and Appeals (BSA) can grant zoning modifications for 100 percent affordable housing, also without need for the council’s approval.

The combination of a mayor with substantial housing-construction ambitions, his lack of political debts to voters in the areas heretofore protected from growth, and the shift of land use approval power from the city council to the mayor inherent in last year’s charter amendments has made many council members angry and obstreperous. This accounts in large part for the council’s opposition to the mayor’s nomination of John Mangin to head the BSA, a largely technocratic position that is charged with implementing city policies already made.

The council is not without leverage here. I wrote last year, when the charter amendments were proposed:

The mayor’s power under the changed charter is not absolute; he will still need the city council’s support—not only on land-use issues still subject to ULURP but on the budget and other matters under the council’s purview. Many affordable housing developments will continue to require council approval for city-owned land dispositions and tax exemptions.

The Takeaway

What’s needed is clarity from the administration on where and how it intends to utilize the mayor’s new land use powers. It is probably unrealistic to expect council endorsement of these plans, but there needs to be enough of a working understanding with a majority on the council so that city government can continue to function, even with continual bickering. Until that happens, the council will continue to lash out, as with the Mangin nomination – and the tools that can get the city closer to meeting its housing needs will fail to fulfill their potential.