It’s all true. We are very much obsessed with making the city better. That includes questioning Mayor Mamdani’s policy agenda, spotting issues and trends, and suggesting alternative (better!) solutions to the problems NYC faces. We are skeptical, but give credit when it’s due.

As MI president Reihan Salam told the Times:

“I vehemently believe that we are defenders of the beautiful mosaic,” he told the Times’s Eliza Shapiro and Nicholas Fandos of our vision for the city. “But it means that you need to not be an idiot.”

To the many new subscribers who read the Times story — welcome!

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This week’s focus is on welfare and housing, a bit on education, and groceries.

Our latest poll looks at how Americans think about welfare thirty years after the landmark 1996 reforms; Stephen Eide reviews a new paper from Notre Dame on the impact of the right to counsel for tenants on evictions and rents, and looks in depth at the recent migrant crisis and the role of the city’s generosity in shaping it.

On the education front, Jennifer Weber presents a framework on how to think about AI in the classroom. And Jennifer and Danyela Souza Egorov write in Searchlight (Citizens Union’s new publication) about the need for education reform.

That, and more, below.

Price Controls and Rationing at Mamdani’s Groceries?

This week, Mamdani announced that the city will set prices, monthly, at 30% below those at comparable groceries for the subsidized basket of goods sold at its five yet-to-be-opened groceries. The basket will include all fruit, vegetables, meat and fish, as well as some dairy and dry goods sold at the stores.

This raises the question of arbitrage — why would someone not buy out the store and sell the goods nearby at a profit?

“[W]e are looking to make sure that we target New Yorkers, whether it be [through] a sort of a library card-esque [system], and also, we manage who’s buying and that it’s focused on everyday New Yorkers,” the interim EDC head Jeanny Pak says. “So, we are mindful of that, and we’re going to make sure that we have all the things in place to ensure that that does not happen.”

It won’t come as a surprise that MI fellows don’t think public grocery stores are a good idea. As Nicole Gelinas wrote in the Times, the problem with public grocery stores is reality.

Data Dashboard

We are adding a Data tab in the navigation bar to allow for easier tracking of key measures of the city’s health — and potential early warning signs.

The number of individuals in the city’s Department of Homeless Services shelters is one such data point.

More than 82,000 residents slept in the city’s shelters on July 28; almost 28,000 of them — a third — were children. In fact, families with children account for 63% of all homeless individuals, a number that shot up during the migrant crisis. While it has been slowly decreasing, homelessness among single men and women is on the rise, keeping the total number high.

“New Yorkers should not make their peace with tens of thousands sleeping every night in shelter and a couple thousand more sleeping on the streets and in the subways,” MI’s Stephen Eide tells The Bigger Apple. “And history suggests that they will not. It’s only a matter of time before homelessness reemerges as a front-burner source of public controversy. This shelter tracking tool can serve as an early warning system.”

Related:

• New York City’s Migrant Crisis. “Immigration scholars have long debated whether, and to what extent, generous public benefits induce migration. The migrant crisis in New York City presents a case study of this “welfare magnet” hypothesis, demonstrating that certain benefit programs, in some situations, can indeed affect migration. The crisis also offers a case study in how state and local benefit programs can influence the movement of low-income people more broadly,” Stephen writes in his new brief.

• Free Eviction Defense Lawyers Don’t Prevent Homelessness. While being represented in housing court can delay evictions, Notre Dame economist Robert Collinson and his co-authors find that the right to counsel also raises rents.

• Funding Housing Isn’t Cheaper Than Shelter, because shelter is temporary, and housing is permanent. When CityFHEPS, the city-funded housing support program, was introduced as a cheaper alternative to funding shelter stays, families were spending an average of 446 days in DHS shelters. Once people secure permanent housing, however, they stay. NYCHA residents remain in their apartments for an average of 27 years, while NYC Section 8 recipients stay for 15. CityFHEPS may formally be a five-year program, but with a 90% extension rate for "good cause," it is hardly temporary.

Latest Polling: American Attitudes on Welfare, Crime, and the Political Environment

Our latest national survey is out, and Bill Clinton was right about welfare, MI’s Jesse Arm and Sean Speer write. Thirty years after the landmark 1996 welfare reforms, Americans across demographic and political lines overwhelmingly favor requiring welfare recipients to seek work (74%), prioritizing targeted aid for those in true need (67%), and providing dedicated benefits rather than unrestricted cash payments (80%).

Voters also strongly oppose radical proposals to abolish police, prisons, or borders while maintaining support for the death penalty for severe crimes. However, notable generational divides surface throughout the survey: younger voters express significantly more openness to universal basic income, unrestricted cash aid, and socialist identities than older Americans.

Read more

One Size Does Not Fit All: A Developmentally Appropriate Framework for AI in K–12 Education

For the past hundred years, schools have brought in new technologies like radio, television, and computers before really understanding how they affect children. By the time the impact became clear, these tools were already part of students' everyday routines. But this time it’s different, MI’s Jennifer Weber tells the Bigger Apple.

“Instead of just changing how students get information, generative AI can actually do the thinking and learning for them, taking over the tasks meant to help students build their own skills,” she writes. “Right now, most fourth-graders in New York are not reading or doing math at grade level, and those most likely to rely on AI instead of thinking for themselves are often the least prepared to handle it.”

In a new brief, Jennifer looks at AI in education through the lens of cognitive development, suggesting a framework for when and how AI should be used in classrooms, based on students’ developmental needs.

Read more

Talk to Tenants Trouble

By using its resources to help organize tenants through the Talk to Tenants initiative, the city is picking sides when its proper role should be a neutral arbiter, MI’s Nicole Gelinas writes. That aside, there is also a more practical reason not to.

As Nicole notes, tenant organizing in the 1970s and ‘80s was a genuine grassroots effort in deteriorating buildings, where residents themselves handled repairs, collected rent, and maintained safety:

“But if you can’t do the basic work of organizing yourselves, you likely won’t be able to do this much harder work. Few if any buildings are in this dire state today, and encouraging tenants to force fragile buildings into greater disrepair when they are unprepared to do the sweat-work themselves is irresponsible.”

Read more

Extra! Extra!

This was not a great week for our mayor.

• Mamdani’s Netanyahu gambit served no one, Ross Barkan writes in Crain’s, and he’ll be tested by protesters during the United Nations General Assembly in September. “Can the new mayor ensure there isn’t any chaos or violence? Will protesters feel aggrieved if the police exercise a heavy hand? We will find out soon enough.” (Mamdani’s address.)

• Outrage over Mamdani’s messy Pied-à-Terre list or Mamdani’s pied-a-terrible mess, as POLITICO calls it, and blowback over the lack of Jewish lawyers on a panel that advises him on picking judges, given the large number of Jewish lawyers in the city, were bigger than the city probably envisioned.

• Meanwhile, rent freeze goes to court, MI’s John Ketcham writes in City Journal, and the teachers’ union threatens “all out war” with the mayor over council-approved paraprofessional payments he’s yet to sign off on, the Times reports.

• But it was not all bad. The mayor’s “Open for Business” offers common sense changes to the city’s regulatory code to help small businesses comply with the city’s rules, a welcome move, though there’s much more to be done.

• So, Can Socialists Govern? Crain’s looks at Mamdani’s opportunities, and it seems he may have more durable support from the DSA than one may have expected.

• But I’ll leave you with Allison Schrager’s thoughts in Americans Are Richer Than Ever. Why Are They So Angry? According to her,

  “Much of the dissatisfaction has non-economic roots, and politicians are feeling pressured to respond with policies that purport to take control over the economy and provide a sense of safety — price controls, immigration restrictions, tariffs and so on. Americans should be wary. If these are the solutions, soon they will not only be unhappy, but poorer too.”

  Read the whole piece at Bloomberg.

Fed’s Penn Station Plan a Promising One

“New York City’s Penn Station is the ultimate transportation planner’s nightmare, dysfunctional on multiple levels and seemingly impossible to fix,” MI’s Eric Kober writes, with plans to improve the station stymied by “the eternal frustrations of cost, funding, and feasibility.”

While public attention fixes on how the station will look, a new Federal Railroad Administration report led by Andy Byford offers a positive plan for fixing how it operates, he writes.

Instead of moving forward with a politically toxic, multibillion-dollar plan to bulldoze a vibrant city block to the south, Byford’s plan seeks to optimize the current station to handle the influx of trains from the new Hudson River tunnels, which are scheduled to open by 2035, while floating “through-running” regional rail as a long-term goal.

However, converting this blueprint into reality will not be easy.

Read the full analysis

How the Internet Changed NYC

History suggests New York City is uniquely positioned to weather the AI boom, just as it survived the 1990s digital revolution, Stephen Eide writes.

When the internet emerged, Wall Street capitalized heavily as the ultimate backend financier for tech, funneling massive IPO windfalls into the municipal budget—a dynamic likely to repeat with AI giants.

However, AI won’t operate in a vacuum; its rise coincides with a rapidly aging population. Eide sketches out what that and more means for New York.

Read more

Special Education

For years, New York City has responded to its special education crisis by spending more money rather than fixing the policies that created it.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani's new preschool expansion that brings special education services inside the school system is a welcome investment, but it won't meaningfully change a system that now costs taxpayers nearly $1.5 billion a year in due-process settlements, also known as Carter cases, MI’s Jennifer Weber writes.

“Nearly one in four public school students now has an IEP [Individual Education Plan], and the numbers continue to rise,” Weber writes. Every new classification requires legally mandated services that the city has struggled to provide.

Her latest piece looks at how we got here, and what structural reforms would make a difference.

Read more

Who Are NYC’s 300,000 Chronically Absent Students?

New York City’s education debate remains obsessed with high-profile battles over elite high schools, but to improve its public schools, the city has to address the fact that almost 300,000 students are chronically absent from school.

Attendance is not the only reason for achievement gaps or the dismally low acceptance rates of Black and Hispanic students to the city’s specialized high schools. But it is the prerequisite for every other school improvement effort — students cannot benefit from stronger curriculum or better teachers if they are not in class. Kids in classrooms with high chronic absenteeism end up behind even if they do show up.

In New York, one in three public school students is chronically absent from school, defined as missing 10% or 18+ school days — almost a month of classes. Since the pandemic, the school system has lost about 100,000 students, while the number of those absent is up by 30,000.

Read more

More from MI

• Mayor Mamdani’s Relentless War on Landlords by Eric Kober.

• Mamdani moves to Help New York’s Small Businesses — But He Could Do More by Jarrett Dieterle.

• Mamdani and the Left’s Israel Fantasy by Charles fein Lehman.

• A new brief: New York City’s Migrant Crisis A Case Study of Welfare Magnet Effects by Stephen Eide.

Extra! Extra!

• The impact from the World Cup on local business seems to be positive, with hotels the ultimate winners. The cost of hosting the event is yet to be tallied, while the intangible benefits of bringing joy and unifying the city are priceless.

• Mamdani’s interview with the New York Times.

• Leaders and advocates in gentrifying neighborhoods fear that victories by the Democratic Socialists of America could mean political erasure, the Times reports.

• A battle in Albany over who should approve and regulate charter schools is escalating, New York Focus reports.

• Landlords are suing NYC Rent Guidelines Board over the rent freeze decision, Gothamist reports.

• Mamdani’s Commission on Government Efficiency approved the five questions that will be on the ballot in November. They include simplifying review and approvals for use of public space and street safety, like outdoor dining and bike lanes; simplifying government contracting and building permits; and setting contribution goals for the rainy day fund.

• Mamdani appointed Anthony Shorris and Lina Khan to lead the Economic Development Agency. Here’s what it may mean.

• In a new report, Hunter College and Open Plans, a street advocacy group, look at what lessons New York should take from California when it comes to autonomous vehicles. We had Sam Schwartz and Kelly McGuinness on our podcast not long ago to talk about autonomous vehicles in NYC, and I have some thoughts on this too.

Whenever debates over educational equity erupt in New York City, the conversation inevitably turns to the city’s specialized high schools.

But the much bigger crisis, affecting hundreds of thousands of students, is that of chronic absenteeism, which undermines children before they even finish elementary school, as my colleague Danyela Souza Egorov wrote in the Bigger Apple last week.

Attendance is not the only reason for achievement gaps or the dismally low acceptance rates of Black and Hispanic students to the city’s specialized high schools. But it is the prerequisite for every other school improvement effort — students cannot benefit from stronger curriculum or better teachers if they are not in class. Kids in classrooms with high chronic absenteeism end up behind even if they do show up.

Chronic Absenteeism Among Ethnic Groups

Since the focus of the SHSAT conversation has been on the ethnic and racial disparities, let’s look through the same lens at attendance.

In New York, one in three public school students is chronically absent from school, defined as missing 10% or 18+ school days — almost a month of classes. There are now more chronically absent Hispanic kids in NYC public schools (149,900) than chronically absent kids of all other races and ethnicities combined (140,772).

A big reason this number is so high is that Hispanic kids are by far the largest student group in the city, making up 43.2% of total public school enrollment.

But because the absenteeism rate within this group is also high, nearly 1 in 6 of all public school students in New York City (17.2%) is a Hispanic child who is missing more than three weeks of school a year.

Chronic absenteeism is a big problem across the school system, but it is especially high among Black students (40.5%) and Hispanic students (39.8%). The rates are lower for White students (24.6%) and Asian students (19%), but the gap in participation is still large.

Despite NYC public schools losing over 100,000 enrolled students (-10.5%) between 2018–19 and 2024–25, the total number of chronically absent children actually grew by over 32,000 (+12.5%), driving the citywide absenteeism rate up from 26.5% to 33.3%.

Hispanic students drove the majority of the absolute absenteeism surge (+22,418 absent children), Asian and White students experienced the highest relative spikes in absenteeism counts (+34.8% and +21.0%), while Black public school enrollment experienced a massive contraction (-22.8%), causing their raw absent numbers to drop even though their absenteeism rate remains the highest at 40.4%.

In short, the school system has shrunk substantially, but a significantly larger proportion of its remaining students is struggling with chronic attendance issues post-pandemic.

Structural Issues

Chronic absenteeism does not happen in a vacuum.

The pandemic disrupted attendance and appears to have left a lasting impact, changing the culture around attendance — that school is optional — across the board and nationally.

The recent migrant influx and increased immigration enforcement in NYC likely affected attendance among some immigrant students, but such data is not publicly available from the city’s Department of Education.1

Meanwhile, last year, 253,041 students living in poverty were chronically absent. Nearly half of NYC students in temporary housing—61,323 children—were chronically absent, and over 43% of students with disabilities missed weeks of school.

Tackling a crisis of this scale requires focused policy that builds partnerships across healthcare, social services, and the community. Schools cannot fix poverty or housing instability, but schools cannot hide behind external factors either, and there is much that can be done.2

“Chronic absenteeism will undermine all their other academic interventions such as NYC Reads and NYC Solves,” Egorov told me. “The Chancellor should set clear goals for District superintendents and principals to reduce chronic absenteeism. Elected officials should launch a public campaign to make sure that families and students understand that every day in school counts.”

The pandemic-induced change in the culture around attendance is a public conversation we should be having, and one where public messaging at all levels helps.

“When local leaders visibly support attendance in places of worship, at community meetings, in storefronts, and through local media, they help build a culture where school attendance is seen as both a personal and community responsibility,” Catherine Falconer of John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health writes.

Mayor Mamdani and his Office of Mass Engagement should get ready to start the new school year by setting high expectations and sending a strong message to kids and their families that attending school matters.

More by Manhattan Institute Fellows:

• An Education Agenda for New York City: NYC Schools Need Significant Change, Not More Money

• Chronic Absenteeism Is Hampering School Improvement Efforts in New York City: What Can Be Done About It?

• The SHSAT Crisis Starts in Kindergarten

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new $67.5 million Pre-K special education expansion is a welcome development in New York City special education policy. For the first time, the city is bringing specialized programs—Nest, Horizon, AIMS, PATH, and ACES— into 26 schools across 14 districts to serve 250 students starting this fall, while adding hundreds of new staff members, including 10 new preschool evaluation teams.

Building in-house evaluation teams rather than continuing to rely on outside agencies is something I recommended in a Manhattan Institute brief earlier this year. This investment is a step in the right direction, but it is a long way from solving the special education crisis facing the city.

The High Cost of Mandated Spending

New York City spent $1.3 billion on due-process claims in fiscal year 2025. These are commonly called “Carter cases,” after the Supreme Court decision affirming that when a school district fails to provide a free appropriate public education, families may seek payment for private school tuition and, increasingly in New York, for privately obtained services.

In 2005, these cases cost the city $47 million. Even with the savings projected in the mayor’s budget, the city expects to spend nearly $1.4 billion next year.

When Mayor Mamdani first revealed a $5.4 billion budget gap, his administration identified due-process spending as one of the major drivers of the shortfall. The average settlement in 2025 was $101,757 per student—roughly three times what the city spends on a general education student.

Explosion of Carter Cases

In 2024, New York State recorded 517 due-process filings per 10,000 students. New York City accounted for 98 percent of those filings. Since 2014, the city’s filing rate has risen from 106 per 10,000 students to 517—an increase of 384 percent.

To understand why so many families end up in due process, we need to look before kindergarten.

As the city rolled out Pre-K for All in 2014 and 3-K for All in 2017, tens of thousands of preschoolers in need of Individual Education Plans (IEPs) were identified. In 2024-2025, of the 94,537 3-K and Pre-K students, 31,945 received special education services—34% of all enrolled.

The city never built the public capacity to serve them.

Instead, preschool special education has operated almost entirely through private providers. Children with disabilities begin their education in small, specialized private classrooms. At age five, they are offered a DOE kindergarten placement that often looks very different, often with larger classrooms and less individualized support.

Between 2013 and 2025, the share of all public-school students identified with disabilities rose from 139 to 242 per 1,000 students—a 74 percent increase—even as overall enrollment fell by roughly 340,000 students. Nearly one in four public school students now has an IEP, and the numbers continue to rise. New special education recommendations increased by 55 percent between 2024 and 2025.

Many families respond to the lack of public capacity to provide special education services by filing due process claims to remain in private settings or continue receiving privately provided services.

Cost Drivers: Geographic Mismatch & Automatic Renewals

The mayor’s financial plan assumes $149 million in reduced Carter spending by serving families who would otherwise seek private placements.

But the geography of this latest expansion suggests otherwise.

Of the 20,051 due-process cases settled last fiscal year, 65 percent involved white students, who make up just 16 percent of public school enrollment. Eight zip codes, all in central and southern Brooklyn, accounted for 44 percent of all cases.

The expansion adds special education programs at only two schools across those 8 zip codes. The remaining 24 schools are in neighborhoods that have historically generated few to no Carter Cases, meaning the savings the budget assumes are unlikely to materialize.

Under Mayor de Blasio, the city began routinely renewing many of Carter case settlements from year to year without determining whether public schools could now appropriately serve the child.

The growth in Carter cases is unlikely to reduce without addressing the structural issues.

Three Barriers to Fixing NYC Special Education

While expanding preschool special education seats is a positive step, the system relies on models unproven in early childhood, fails to guarantee that children actually receive their legally mandated services, and leaves the underlying drivers of over-classification and rising costs unaddressed.

Programs used are unproven at the preschool level.

The city has highlighted impressive outcomes, including that 97 percent of Nest and Horizon students graduate from high school. But these figures do not come from rigorous evaluations of the programs themselves. They tell us that students admitted to the programs did well, not necessarily that the programs caused those outcomes.

Nor have these models ever operated in Pre-K. What works in K-12 does not automatically work in preschool. The city should commit now to publishing preschool-specific outcome data beginning with the first year of implementation.

Seats are not services.

To its credit, the city has opened more than 800 new preschool special education classes and testified this winter that the seat waitlist had been eliminated. This latest announcement also places programs in neighborhoods where children have long lacked nearby options; fourteen of the twenty-six new schools are in the Bronx.

But classrooms alone do not ensure that children receive the services required by law. Today, only 63 percent of preschoolers with disabilities receive all of the services required by their Individualized Education Programs.

The expansion does not address the underlying drivers of growth in special education or in Carter case spending.

A 74 percent increase in disability identification warrants scrutiny because each new classification entails legally mandated services the city has already demonstrated it cannot consistently provide.

Most states use tiered intervention systems in preschool, providing support within general education classrooms and monitoring children’s progress before referring them for special education evaluation.

New York City’s preschool system, built largely around private providers, has no comparable step. Identification moves almost directly from concern to evaluation and classification. The city needs to make sure it is classifying children accurately.

Federal law also requires annual reviews of student placements. The city largely stopped conducting meaningful reviews of Carter case placements a decade ago and should resume them.

The city deserves credit for investing in public special education capacity, but should ultimately be judged not by how many classrooms it opens or how many staff it hires, but by whether it addresses the structural problems that made it necessary in the first place.

New York City’s Penn Station is the ultimate transportation planner’s nightmare, dysfunctional on multiple levels and seemingly impossible to fix. At different times, the city, the states of New Jersey and New York, and the station’s owner, Amtrak, have developed plans to improve the station, only to be defeated by the eternal frustrations of cost, funding, and feasibility. Now, a new report from the Federal Railroad Administration, spearheaded by Amtrak’s special advisor (and former NYC transit chief) Andy Byford, offers a positive path forward.

Penn Station upgrade plans can be broadly divided into two categories: those focusing on the station’s appearance and public space, and those focusing on station operations. Both are important. The original station was one of the nation’s finest public buildings, replaced with a set of dingy, uninspiring underground passageways.

Planners have long sought to recapture a semblance of past splendor; most recently, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Amtrak announced the designation of a developer who will, among other improvements, “construct a grand entrance on Eighth Avenue to a new train hall” and “replace cramped, decrepit walkways with open, beautiful concourses.”

That ambitious vision awaits clarity on, wait for it, costs, funding, and feasibility. However, when choices invariably need to be made, improving the station’s operations is much more important.

The need for such improvements is long-standing. Penn Station, at its completion in 1910, was operated by one railroad company (the Pennsylvania Railroad or PRR) and functioned primarily as an intercity station. To minimize the acquisition of private land, the station was wedged between the north side of West 33^rd Street and the south side of West 31^st Street.

Within this 580-foot north-south dimension are 11 platforms and 21 tracks (see Figure 1 below). Because most of the platforms are unusually narrow, compared to a typical big-city railroad station, passengers boarding trains must wait on the level above until departing passengers exit. That increases the “dwell time,” or the amount of time trains spend between arrival and departure.

That problem is exacerbated by the growth of commuter services as the old Pennsylvania Railroad system was carved up among three entities, Amtrak, New York’s MTA and New Jersey Transit.

The station is at capacity for service from the west, where only a two-track tunnel crosses the Hudson River. The East River approach, with four tunnels, will be at capacity when new Metro-North service over the Hell Gate Bridge begins in 2030.

The railroads would run more trains at peak times if they could. An opportunity arises with the completion of a new two-track tunnel to New Jersey, expected to be completed by 2035, and the rehabilitation of the existing North (Hudson) River tunnels, to be completed by 2038.

That’s a way off in the future, but Penn Station improvements have long lead times.

Byford’s team offers two options for the shorter and longer term. The initial Operating Concept 1 (Figure 2 below) would take advantage of the new Hudson River tunnels to simplify traffic patterns within the station. Along with extending the length of the three southernmost platforms, adding more stairs and escalators, and removing pedestrian obstacles on the platforms, that would reduce “dwell time” and allow for more peak-hour service. A longer-term plan would combine two platforms in the center into one, much wider platform.

The new proposals represent a move away from an older Amtrak plan that would have expanded the station to the south to provide capacity for additional service. That plan was first proposed in 2011, as a component of the Gateway program, a series of service improvements between Newark and New York Penn Station.

The Penn South expansion would have constructed new platforms on the city block south of the existing station, bounded by Seventh and Eighth Avenues and West 30^th and 31^st Streets, known as Block 780. Additionally, it would have included the lots fronting on the east side of Seventh Avenue opposite Block 780, and a portion of the block on the west side of Eighth Avenue (see Figure 3 below).

Penn Station South was never going to happen. It involved the acquisition of substantial residential and commercial real estate at a prohibitive financial and political cost. However, Amtrak’s interest and the misguided support of elected officials placed a cloud over the area. The city has for years maintained obsolete manufacturing zoning that prohibits new housing in an area of high demand.

At a public meeting in Manhattan on July 14, Byford remarked, “ It would’ve been immoral to tear down a vibrant block of New York City before we had properly evaluated how to extract every ounce of additional capacity out of Penn’s existing footprint.” Now that his team has presented a credible plan to do that, one hopes that the development potential of this area can be unlocked.

While a big step forward for practical planning, the Byford team’s proposal has a long way to go. Future steps include getting buy-in from the commuter railroads and the New Jersey and New York governors, and developing cost estimates, an operating plan for expanded train service, and a financing scheme.

The report asserts that the plan offers increased opportunity for “through-running” — commuter service that carries passengers through Penn Station, rather than terminating there as New Jersey Transit and Long Island Rail Road trains do currently.

While theoretically more operationally efficient, through-running presents operational, financial, and labor issues and has long been seenby the railroads and some transit wonks as impractical.

Long-suffering commuters will yet wait a while for relief. However, Byford and his team have performed an important service by focusing on track-level improvements that are both practical and can be phased in as resources become available. Just as important is focusing away from a pie-in-the-sky scheme that has for years paralyzed real estate investment unnecessarily.

This week, much time was spent criticizing the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) after just 3 Black students were admitted to Stuyvesant, one of the city’s most prestigious selective high schools, with little focus on the many reasons why.

The media, including the New York Times and Chalkbeat, the outlet covering education in the city, also failed to give proper attention to the many reasons why Black and Hispanic students may be so woefully underrepresented. Among them are the large disparities in educational achievement before high school, compounded by attendance issues that start in kindergarten, and the fact that many of the high achievers are enrolled in charter schools or get scholarships to attend private schools.

While there are many characteristics of students that may hinder their academic success, such as limited English proficiency, a disability, or poverty, the city takes these into account when determining a school’s quality — its performance as well as its impact on students’ achievement.1

About half of Black students attend schools deemed less than “Good” by the city .2

To better understand what that means, I mapped some of the data provided by the city’s Department of Education on middle and high school quality, students’ elementary and middle school math proficiency, and the share of Black students as a share of a school’s total enrollment. The charts speak for themselves (and are best viewed on desktop).

The mayor acknowledges there are issues to be addressed and that rigor must be part of the solution. “[W]e know that there’s so much more work to be done,” Mamdani said at a press conference, before praising Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels for his “emphasis on addressing racial inequities and doing so while providing the strongest and [most] rigorous education that is possible for New York City students.”

In a comprehensive new brief on how to improve the city’s schools, released this week, the Manhattan Institute’s fellows identify the structural and operational issues in need of reform and offer pragmatic solutions to help the mayor in his efforts.

That and more below.

An Education Agenda for New York City: NYC Schools Need Significant Change, Not More Money

New York City’s school system faces deep structural issues—marked by falling enrollment, rising costs, and inconsistent academic outcomes—that cannot be solved simply by increasing funding, my colleagues Ray Domanico, Danyela Souza Egorov, and Jennifer Weber write in a new Manhattan Institute brief.

To achieve better results with its existing resources, the city must adapt to its smaller student population and focus on closing the achievement gap between its best and worst schools. They advocate for consolidating under-enrolled schools, redistricting school district boundaries, reinstating strict quality monitoring and accountability, and annually reviewing special education placements.

Additionally, the city should seek to improve student outcomes by prioritizing elementary instruction, expanding specialized and technical career pathways, and pairing restorative justice policies with structured, behavior-based discipline among many other recommendations.

Full Report

High Expectations

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler took to X earlier this week calling for “state legislation to modify the admissions process” at the city’s specialized high schools, writing that “A single test should never be the only factor deciding who gets in & who doesn’t.”

The city’s eight specialized high schools currently admit students based on the results of the three-hour SHSAT, blind to other criteria.

Bringing in holistic measures like middle school grades, extracurriculars, or interviews would do the exact opposite of promoting fairness, Manhattan Institute’s Wai Wah Chin writes in City Journal. Instead, it would “inject subjectivity and bias and favor those with economic privileges” who have the resources to polish their resumes.

Rather than diluting the standards, Chin insists that the city’s leadership needs to step up and build a system of “abundance, rigor, merit—and accountability.” In her view, the real path to equity is in raising the floor for everyone.

“New York City’s students would be far better served,” she writes, “by improved elementary instruction, expanded high-quality charters, honest grading, and an unapologetic culture of excellence.”

Read the full story

Attendance Matters

Part of academic success involves showing up for school in the first place. “Students cannot learn effectively if they are not present in school, and chronic absenteeism is reflected in test scores,” my colleague Danyela Souza Egorov writes.

While absenteeism is a serious system-wide issue, the high absenteeism rates among Black and Hispanic students should be a cause for alarm, since these attendance issues start in kindergarten and contribute to the great variation in educational outcomes among the city’s ethnic groups.

Read the full story

Extra! Extra!

• This week, the city released its Rental Ripoff Report, recommending 23 policy actions with the goal of protecting renters and modernizing housing oversight by formally recognizing tenant unions, requiring landlords to disclose the use of AI in rental listings, and upgrading building registration systems, as well as aggressively targeting repeat offender landlords through inspections, targeted programs, and litigation.

• Counterfeit goods peddlers vs Mamdani — 1:0, as the administration fails to clean up the notorious stretch of Canal Street. “Just 30 minutes after the raid, they [the illicit peddlers] were set up and back in business,” the New York Post reports. Nicole Gelinas, Rafael Malangua, and I discussed the situation on Canal Street on our podcast a couple of months ago.

• Westside homeless encampment by the Intrepid spans 12 blocks, with residents even tapping into utility poles as the city slow-walks enforcement, the New York Post reports.

• Governor Kathy Hochul announced a moratorium on data centers in New York, something MI’s Sean Speer calls a “huge mistake”, while Shawn Regan explains that it is not data centers so much as bad policies that are raising your electric bills.

• MI’s Stephen Eide looked back at how the internet changed New York City and what that might mean for the impact of AI.

• Benjamin Schneider writes about the future of New York’s historic preservation movement in Planetizen.

Each year, when the NYC Department of Education releases admissions data for specialized high schools, the press and elected officials highlight the low enrollment of Black and Hispanic students. Just yesterday, the New York Times published a story titled “An Elite N.Y.C. Public School Admitted 777 Students. Only 3 Were Black.” The focus was on the test and racial disparities, without addressing the underlying causes.

A Brooklyn city council member requested state legislation to “modify the admissions process,” while the Queens Borough President called for “a real, independent investigation into the admissions process.” A spokesperson for Mayor Mamdani said that the mayor “believes we must root out the deep racial and economic inequities that persist in our public school system, and our administration will be reviewing these results carefully.”

Headlines such as “Just 1 Black student gets into Staten Island Tech” or “NYC specialized high schools continue to offer few seats to Black and Hispanic students” are intended to shock, yet they often overlook that few Black and Hispanic 8th-grade students are adequately prepared to succeed on the admissions test. The articles also don’t mention the fact that these specialized high schools enroll a majority of low-income students, nor do they include the data on private schools’ scholarships for high-performing black and Hispanic students.

Absenteeism is a significant factor in these results and deserves more attention.

Among the ethnic groups of students in the city’s public schools, there are notable differences in attendance. In the 2024-25 school year, 13% of Asian 7th graders were chronically absent, compared to 36% of Black and 35.2% of Hispanic students. This issue begins early: in kindergarten, 27% of Asian students were chronically absent, while over 45% of Black and Hispanic students missed more than 10% of school days and significant instructional time.

Students cannot learn effectively if they are not present in school, and chronic absenteeism is reflected in test scores.

In grades 3-8, Asian students demonstrate high proficiency rates in math and ELA, at 80% and 74.9%, respectively. For Black students, these rates are 43% and 47%. Hispanic students have proficiency rates of 43.1% in math and 43.5% in ELA. Students who are not proficient are unlikely to perform well on a rigorous test such as the SHSAT.

Mayor Mamdani, who attended the private Bank Street School before enrolling at Bronx Science, has benefited from specialized high schools. During the campaign, he said that he would follow the advice from the 2019 School Diversity Advisory Group and “ensure that all high school admissions criteria are transparent and designed to reduce the racial and socioeconomic isolation currently prevalent in most high schools.”

To address the racial inequities highlighted by the admissions test, his administration should prioritize reducing absenteeism among Black and Hispanic students and ensure access to high-quality instruction throughout K-8. Efforts should also focus on decreasing the number of Black and Hispanic students in persistently underperforming schools, where more than half of students are not reading or doing math at grade level. This systemic failure contributes to disparities in SHSAT participation: 32.4% of test-takers are Asian, compared to 18.4% Black and 26.1% Hispanic students.

Mamdani’s first budget indicates no significant changes to the educational system responsible for these outcomes. It continues to fund underperforming, underenrolled schools and does not expand high-demand, high-performing schools. As long as these policies persist, SHSAT admission numbers are unlikely to change.

Expanding SHSAT seats in the borough with the greatest need would be a good starting point: students from Queens receive 32% of offers, but only 3.2% of seats are there. His administration could also publish both racial and income breakdowns of admitted students to highlight how these schools serve a majority of low-income students, so we can have an honest debate about the challenges and benefits of these schools.

Artificial Intelligence’s effect on New York City is uncertain. Maybe the changes coming are absolutely unprecedented. Or maybe past experiences with technological change can, at a minimum, inform speculation.

When the internet came online, New York’s manufacturing heyday was long past. The city had managed deindustrialization better than many other old, cold places, thanks to an expansion of the white-collar economy in the 1980s and 1990s.

By the same token, New York seemed more vulnerable than elsewhere. The city’s vast corporate back office and status as the nation’s media capital made it look primed for tragedy. What had saved the local economy would prove its downfall, thanks to the threat new technology posed to white-collar employment. Similar warnings are being voiced now with respect to AI’s threat to “knowledge-intensive white-collar work”; “this is a revolution coming squarely at white-collar workers”.

Technological Change Requires Financing

Back then, though, New York made it through. One reason was that massive technological change takes financing. Therefore, if you want your city to benefit from massive technological change and you can’t be Silicon Valley itself, your second best option is to be Wall Street. Issuing debt to hire talent and fund data centers, handling IPOs, structuring mergers and acquisitions: that all takes financial expertise on the back end.

The dotcom era was outstanding for New York. State Comptroller data on the Wall Street bonus pool show that 1999 and 2000 posted annual increases of 49% and 44%, respectively, the third and fourth highest annual increases over the last three decades. The Giuliani administration’s FY99 budget announcement heralded the “Largest [Surplus] in City History.” (Though one 1999 bond offering cautioned investors that “The year 2000 presents potential operational problems for computerized data files and computer programs which may recognize the year 2000 as the year 1900, resulting in possible system failures or miscalculations.” Between 1996 and late 1999, the city government spent $350 million prepping for Y2K, an impressive sum that itself speaks to that period’s budgetary cushion.)

Yes, the dotcom bubble would burst and intensify 9/11’s economic pain. The volatility of a Wall Street-centered economy, particularly when coupled with New York’s steeply progressive income tax, has been understood by everyone for a very long time. New York’s budget will benefit from the IPOs of SpaceX, Anthropic and ChatGPT, though state and local policymakers are already committed to mismanaging whatever windfall is realized. (Incidentally, Giuliani mismanaged the windfall in the 90s.^[1]) But the point for now is that New York squeezed more resources out of the commercialization of the Internet than most other cities, thanks to Wall Street.

The Age of AI Will Coincide With The Age of Aging

Another point to bear in mind is that AI’s not the only factor that’ll be shaping the economy of the future. The state labor department maintains a database of local employment data broken down by industry. Comparing 1990 to 2025, the data show that some tech job categories did indeed boom, but so did the health and human services, and the loss of manufacturing was another major change.

Trends in home health aide employment were at best indirectly related to the internet’s diffusion throughout society and the economy. The age of AI will coincide with the age of aging, which will push employment in the health and human services ever higher. Even if AI makes healthcare more efficient (quicker notetaking and diagnoses, chatbot therapists), that value will most likely be plowed back into more healthcare jobs. And perhaps retail employment now stands in about the same position as the garment industry did in 1990, set to fall farther.

The Internet Changed the Government in New York

The digital age’s emergence coincided with New York’s transition from notorious dysfunctionality to a city that other cities turned to for advice on how to whip their own municipal operations into shape. The phrase “the ungovernable city” was coined by Nathan Glazer in 1961. But New York reached its true governance nadir in the 1975 fiscal crisis. Writes Thomas Dyja in New York, New York, New York (2021) “[t]he City had lost control in the ‘70s not just because of debt, but because it couldn’t effectively manage its information.”

The internet—or, digital technology more broadly—helped the New York government come back from that brink. Compstat is the most important example; another would be 311. Compiling, organizing, and usefully analyzing government data had never been possible at such a scale before. And where the internet proper came in was really with transparency, by making all that information on municipal operations easily and immediately accessible. To the extent that transparency equates with accountability, the internet contributed to the cause of good government in New York.

The internet and related innovations also made the government’s job easier by making the drug and sex trades less geographically bound. Mobile phones eased tensions over crack turf, likely pushing down the murder rate. The virtual red light district that is the Internet helped drive traditional red light districts like Times Square out of business.

Of course, the internet giveth and taketh away. The decline of local journalism struck a blow to accountability that has not been offset by the increase in data-informed citizen bloggers. Further, while tech gurus recommend taking new technologies and building 100% new enterprises around them, that obviously can’t be done with government. Accordingly, ideas for how cutting-edge technologies can improve the public sector tend to be anti-moonshot stuff, small hacks for low-priority problems. In the 2010s, London-based DeepMind tried to help reform the UK’s NHS, a very high-priority problem. Results were mixed. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that he’s far more bullish on AI’s ability to advance science and medicine than democratic governance.

And the government can misapply technology. Recognition of that was reflected in Albany’s recent school phone ban. It was also reflected in community policing, which involved a certain walking back of the once innovative idea that moving cops en masse from foot patrols to radio-equipped cars, cut off from communities, was the future of policing.

It Takes Leadership to Make the Most of Technology to Benefit Government and Taxpayers

Michael Bloomberg was a sui generis mayor in so many ways, one being his status as a top-ranking technologist. Having made billions melding finance and tech, Bloomberg had an instinctual faith in the benefits of data and analysis to improve government.

New York’s current socialist leadership has a much more cabined notion of tech’s potential. While Mayor Zohran Mamdani pays lip service to “modernizing city government,” his hero Bernie Sanders calls for seizing control of the AI industry. At the time of Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s leadership believed sincerely that the managed economy would outperform capitalism on technological innovation. The modern DSA doesn’t appear to care about competing on such terms.

The DSA owes much of its rising power to old-school organizational abilities like door knocking. Mamdani’s recent primary successes, contrasted with the failure of Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt’s AI-viral-video-centered campaign, represent a win for the world of atoms over the world of bits. There are bigger problems with DSA governance than its minimal interest in technological dynamism. But let its minimal interest in technological dynamism be noted for the record.

New York’s Exceptionalism

It was different for New Yorkers in the 1990s to contemplate their digital future than it is for New Yorkers in the 2020s to contemplate superintelligence. The internet emerged during the ‘holiday from history,’ between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. Due, among other reasons, to the absence of great power competition, Americans then were more optimistic, more patriotic, and had more trust in institutions than now. The internet was less often likened to nuclear energy (or electricity or fire) than AI is. The debate over AI is more anxious. Concerns over great power competition shape every question, and the pace of development is breakneck. The AI industry—which already generates more than $100 billion in revenues annually—is growing at a faster clip than the internet did in its early stages.

What makes all this doubly uncertain for New York is that it’s always hard to know what the right benchmark is for New York. Cleveland, Dallas, San Francisco, London? New York’s uniqueness imbues every policy debate, including around technology, with special nuance. Ridesharing was a different debate in New York because of the taxi industry’s prominence and the imperative to manage traffic density in core Manhattan. Airbnb was a different debate because of a tourist economy no other U.S. city approaches and sensitivity around housing affordability. New York needs to worry more about all varieties of terrorism than Cleveland does.

Increased white-collar unemployment would be bad news for tax receipts. But many laid-off white-collar workers would simply leave the city if they don’t own property and aren’t dependent on a local benefit program. One reason why deindustrialization hit places like Detroit and Pittsburgh so hard is that many auto and steelworkers owned their homes, creating a long tail effect for those regions.

Speaking of long tails, the internet had one, too. Remote work, which for the time being may be shaping labor dynamics more than AI, was caused by the internet’s invention decades before remote work’s normalization during and following COVID. Even as New York contemplates how AI will shape its future, it’s still not done being transformed by the technologies of the past.

^[1] “Giuliani, after coming into office with a promise of reducing government, had opened the spending spigots during the boom of the late 1990s.” Fred Siegel, The Prince of the City (Encounter 2005), p. 296.

This week, the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs came under fire for its choice of ethnic neighborhoods featured in the World Cup guide called “New York City: A Cultural Map.” The guide states that locations chosen “reflect the richness of New York City’s cultural life and its extraordinary diversity, particularly in the many immigrant enclaves such as Little Senegal, Little Colombia, Little India and numerous others.”

On a map crowded with “Little” neighborhoods, the absence of Little Italy was hard to miss, adding insult to injury of Italy not qualifying for the World Cup. Following the backlash, Mayor Mamdani announced today that Little Italy will be added to the map after all.

The decision about which 30 neighborhoods to include on a map in a city that prides itself on translating official documents into 10 languages (one of which is Italian) and providing interpretation in over 100 others is ultimately political. Not every enclave can be put on a map, and to be mapped is to say that this community is part of the official story the city wants visitors to see. Being omitted risks being treated as culturally past tense.

Demographically, the neighborhoods that attracted massive numbers of Italians during the 20th century no longer do so, and while there are still many Italian-Americans in New York City, their share of the population continues to fall. Yet Little Italy remains a vibrant tourist destination, keeping the memory and heritage of the community that played a major role in shaping the city alive through institutions like the Italian-American Museum on Mulberry and Grand, and offering visitors a glimpse of a bygone era—exactly the kind of experience World Cup visitors might seek.

It is the public spaces, the streets, and the commercial strips that define ethnic neighborhoods for visitors. We do not know who lives behind closed doors, but we do notice when streets fill with people who speak a language we may not understand, when shop signs are in a language other than English, or when there is a higher concentration of ethnic restaurants, setting a neighborhood up as a destination for those interested in exploring its heritage.

New York is a city of ethnic enclaves that ebb and flow with waves of migration, but they do not fade as quickly in communal memory as statistics may suggest. In favoring some communities over others to showcase our diversity, the city would do well to remember how deeply those who have assimilated or left still claim the neighborhoods their ancestors passed through—and how tightly they hold onto those memories.

Bensonhurst in Brooklyn may no longer be Italian by the city’s numbers, and for the third of the city’s roughly 3 million foreign-born residents who arrived in the United States after 2010, only traces of the Italian neighborhood exist along 18th Avenue in cultural icons like the Villabate Alba bakery, Il Centro Community Center and the neighborhood’s churches. But Bensonhurst, like Arthur Avenue, like Little Italy, remains Italian in the hearts and minds of the descendants of the Italian immigrants who settled there, keeping alive the memory of the old neighborhood as it was, too soon to be erased.

City’s International Affairs in Spotlight

MI’s Adam Lehodey reports that Mamdani’s Commissioner for International Affairs was planning to meet this week with Iran’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations.

Good Economic News for Mamdani

Recent good economic news is buoying Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration: the job numbers are up in the key industries, office demand is strong, and housing starts are promising.

“Mamdani clearly intends, through his “Block by Block” plan, to make a significant further contribution to alleviating the city’s housing crisis, although the details will be important,” MI’s Eric Kober writes. “He has yet to articulate an economic development strategy, for which he has been criticized in the media. Despite catching a break from the city’s entrepreneurial energy, there is still much he could do, in particular to boost employment in the declining retail and leisure and hospitality industries, which are large sources of employment for less-skilled and less-educated workers.” Read the full story.

Related:

• Some of the biggest names in banking, law, and AI are expanding in Manhattan and Brooklyn. (The City Reporter)

• Anthropic plans to double its New York City workforce to 1,000 people this year. (The New York Times)

Buses & Residential Parking Permits

• The new “Next Stop: Fast Buses, Better Service” plan is the most recent attempt to overhaul the city’s slow bus system to deliver on the “fast” part of Mamdani’s campaign pledge to make the city’s buses “fast and free.” The plan targets a 20% speed increase across 50 priority corridors, proposes a high-speed Bus Rapid Transit-like network on five major avenues, and phases in system-wide all-door boarding via OMNY by late 2026. All with support from the state.

• Congestion pricing has not triggered the parking crisis critics feared. The Congestion Pricing Parking Study found that parking availability inside the toll zone remained stable, while double parking actually decreased by 10%. Neighborhoods just outside the zone saw no major spillover from drivers dumping their cars to avoid the toll, failing to make a “compelling case for the implementation of a Residential Parking Permit (RPP) program.”

Michael Harrington and the Democratic Socialists of America

MI’s Stephen Eide looks in depth at Michael Harrington and his attempts to make America socialist, observing that the current Democratic Socialists of America are unlikely to be more successful.

“The heart of early twenty-first-century socialism is urban college graduates energized by DSA messaging around ideas that cannot work nationally. The New York-based DSA is like the viral influencer who can’t make a living in the real world. Its record in America, past and present, shows that socialism can maintain either a broad appeal or a deep appeal—but not both,” he concludes.

Read the full story.

Related:

• Ed Kilgore ponders the conversation of whether Democrats are moving left rather than just rejecting the establishment in New York Magazine, and writes that “With the right tone, an “abundance” centrist enraged by bureaucratic and interest-group resistance to housing construction and infrastructure projects might strike some of the same anti-Establishment chords as a Democratic Socialist.”

• A Rhode Island DSA candidate is fundraising in Brooklyn, Gothamist observes.

• Frustration with the economy has been the most important factor in the surge in DSA membership, the New York Times reports.

• Plus an interesting podcast episode with Grace Mausser, Co-Chair of New York City DSA:

  Time To Say Goodbye

  How DSA Won with Grace Mausser

  Today we talk to Grace Mausser is Co-Chair of New York City DSA, the largest chapter of DSA with over 15,000 members. She has worked on dozens of democratic socialists campaigns in New York, building robust canvassing operations, creating broad left coalitions, and raising millions of dollars from grassroots donors…

  Listen now

  a month ago · 1 like · Time To Say Goodbye

More from MI

We have three education pieces this week you may be interested in.

• The teachers’ unions have filed another lawsuit aimed at limiting educational options for New York families by targeting the transfer of a charter school network to another provider, Danyela Souza Egorov writes.

• Looking at the approved education budget, Danyela observes that the city continues to “spend lavishly on underperforming, under-enrolled schools and invest in initiatives unlikely to reverse these trends.”

• The experiment to eliminate gifted programs and tracking to reduce racial inequalities has proved wildly unpopular, Neetu Arnold reports. “In a postmortem of the 2024 presidential election, Democratic pollsters found that the most unpopular K–12 education policy was eliminating tracking in public schools.”

Related:

• Since some PTAs raise more than $1 million for their schools a year, some think NYC schools need to redistribute PTA wealth. (Gothamist)

• Mayor has devoted his attention to childcare, with K-12 education plans unclear six months in. (Chalkbeat)

Extra! Extra!

• Mamdani administration’s officials are reaching out to local business owners to reassure them about the proposed public supermarkets, the New York Post reports, while The New York Times notes that national chains are slashing grocery prices in response to weakening demand.

• A NYCHA plumber made more than $465,000 with overtime, and the city is now investigating. (The New York Times)

• The vacancy rate of rent-stabilized apartments is increasing. In 2025, the citywide vacancy rate for rent-stabilized apartments was approximately 5.6%, up from 3.7% in 2016. (The City Reporter)

One piece of good news comes from commercial real estate brokers who track Manhattan’s office market.

The office leasing market has been in the doldrums since the pandemic, as work-from-home reduced businesses’ need for office space. Now that may be turning around. Colliers reports that office leasing volume jumped in the first half of 2026, compared with the same period a year ago, and represented the best first half since 2002. Manhattan’s average asking rent was the highest since July 2020, and the availability rate (which includes both vacant space for rent and space expected to become vacant) continued to fall, to 13 percent in June.

Colliers attributed some of the tightening of the office market to residential conversions, with over 900,000 square feet of office space removed from the stock in the second quarter of 2026. State legislation enacted in 2024 created a tax exemption for conversion of non-residential buildings to housing, known as “Section 467-m.” The most generous exemption period, 35 years, applies to buildings that commenced construction by June 30, 2026. That gave building owners an incentive to move quickly.

In addition, the office market is getting a boost from employment growth.

In the year to May, New York City gained 44,500 private jobs overall, a gain of 1.1 percent. NYC’s employment is dominated by services, and these can be divided between “key industries,” which are relatively concentrated in the city, compared to the nation as a whole, and those that mainly serve the local population.

The city’s economy depends on the fortunes of key office-based industries, which bring in income from the rest of the nation and the world and fuel the city’s tax base. These are broadly categorized in jobs data as “Information,” “Financial Activities” and “Professional and Business Services,” and “Management of Companies and Enterprises.”

In April, I noted that key office-based industries had broadly stagnated in 2025. Employment has now picked up in the largest of these groupings, Professional and Business Services, which gained 14,500 jobs, or 1.8 percent, in the year ending in May 2026. The office-using Publishing component of Information grew 4.1 percent, while Financial Activities grew by 1.6 percent. Management of Companies and Enterprises grew by 1.5 percent. Among the local-serving industries, Private Education and Health Services had by far the largest growth in the year to May, gaining 23,300 jobs or 1.8 percent.

The mayor’s Executive Budget in May included an Economic Outlook chapter prepared by the city’s Office of Management and Budget. That chapter anticipated the continued rise in office asking rents but was more conservative in its forecast of office-based employment. The new data will keep the city’s revenue forecast on track and, with more people working at relatively high-paying jobs, perhaps lead to unexpectedly higher income tax revenues.

New York City’s ability to continue adding jobs depends on the availability of housing for its workers.

Since the great majority of workers in the city also live in the city, that requires progress in alleviating the city’s chronic housing supply shortfall. Here, the news is more equivocal, but there are some signs of progress.

In March, the city’s Planning Department (DCP) reported that 38,682 new housing units were completed in 2025, the most since 1965. That is a consequence of the rush to vest tax benefits under the Section 421-a program, for which construction was required to commence by June 2022.

The 421-a expiration compressed several years’ permits into one year. The huge spike in permits in 2022, to 71,226, was followed by a steep dropoff. In each of the next three years, citywide new housing permits were well under 20,000. DCP reported that permits for 63,805 new homes were active but unbuilt at the end of 2025. It is unclear how many of these will ultimately be completed. The 2024 state legislation that created the residential conversion incentive also extended the completion deadline for the vested 421-a developments to 2031.

In 2024, the city approved the “City of Yes” zoning amendments. These were expected to accelerate the pace of housing development, and 2026 housing permit data indicates that might be happening. In the first four months of 2026, NYC issued building permits for 9,705 new housing units, mostly in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. If it continues, the increased pace of permitting, plus the large overhang of approved permits from 2025, implies that the city may be able to sustain an elevated level of housing completions, compared with the experience of recent decades.

Ironically, Mamdani, who has only been mayor for a few months, is responsible for none of this. However, he gets the credit, just as he would be blamed if the city’s economy went into a tailspin. In any event, the mayor’s avowed democratic socialism has not scared off a sizable number of business decisions to invest in New York City.

Mamdani clearly intends, through his “Block by Block” plan, to make a significant further contribution to alleviating the city’s housing crisis, although the details will be important. He has yet to articulate an economic development strategy, for which he has been criticized in the media. Despite catching a break from the city’s entrepreneurial energy, there is still much he could do, in particular to boost employment in the declining retail, and leisure and hospitality industries, which are large sources of employment for less-skilled and less-educated workers.

The perspective from mid-2026 is much better than that from last year, but much remains to be done to keep the better times going.

Mayor Mamdani had a very good June: the Knicks won, his endorsed candidates won the June primaries, and the Rent Guidelines Board this week approved a rent freeze on both one- and two-year lease renewals, helping him deliver on a major campaign promise.

What’s left is to reach an agreement with the city council on next year’s budget, due by July 1, which is being held up by differences over funding for CityFHEPS, the expensive housing support program, Politico reports. The mayor campaigned on funding it, only to change his mind given the city’s budget constraints.

The High Cost of New York’s Rent Freeze

Hours ahead of the Rent Guidelines Board vote, Christina Smyth, a member representing landlord interests on the board, abruptly resigned, calling the outcome predetermined. The board voted 7-1 to freeze the rent, with the lone dissenting vote cast by Arpit Gupta, an Associate Professor of Finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute, one of the board’s five “public” members.

Today, City Journal published his detailed piece on the high cost of New York’s rent freeze.

“The central argument for a rent freeze is tenant affordability. But it’s important to keep in mind that rent stabilization is not an antipoverty program,” he writes. “After the 2019 regulation changes, eligibility for rent stabilization in New York City has not depended on a tenant’s income or assets. The benefit is tied to the apartment, not the household, and goes to whoever happens to hold the lease.”

Gupta argues that “[e]xpanding supply is the only genuine way to improve housing affordability, accessibility, and building conditions. For households that still need help, means-tested vouchers can provide targeted assistance without granting broad subsidies to long-tenured tenants or gradually undermining the viability of the city’s existing housing stock.”

Read the whole piece.

Mamdani and DSA Won Big in Tuesday’s Primaries

Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America have emerged as the strongest organized faction within the Democratic Party as it heads toward 2028.

“The mayor’s endorsements broke with—and even double-crossed—party leaders who supported his rapid rise in last year’s mayoral race. His move opened a significant rift with Hispanic leaders, organized labor, pro-Israel Democrats, and veteran incumbents that ordinarily form an essential part of any Democrat’s electoral coalition,” MI’s John Ketcham and Christian Browne write in City Journal.

Read the full piece.

The Foreign-Policy Problem with New York’s Socialist Rise

The growing visibility of democratic socialist ideas in American politics raises important questions about the future direction of U.S. foreign policy.

Read the full piece in The Bigger Apple.

Who Speaks for Dominican New York?

Reflecting on the NY-13 primary, MI’s Rafael Mangual offers a thoughtful take on the growing divide between an immigrant community and its activist heirs in City Journal.

‘“[T]his contest is about more than Mamdani’s influence in such races. It was a primary fought in Upper Manhattan and the West Bronx, the largest center of Dominican political life in the United States, between two candidates of Dominican origin,” Mangual writes. “The more revealing question is not about how Mamdani’s backing affected the outcome, but what Avila Chevalier’s victory tells us about the changing politics of race, ethnicity, and class within that community.”

Read the full piece in City Journal.

Extra! Extra!

• The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and SUVs. A New York Times analysis links larger vehicle sizes to rising pedestrian deaths, estimating 200 to 400 fatalities annually could have been avoided if vehicles had not grown over the past 25 years. Taller hoods and expanded blind spots make pedestrians harder to see and more likely to suffer severe injuries, with visibility worsening substantially since the early 2000s. (The New York Times, gift link)

• The United Auto Workers, which primarily represents academics and workers in the arts in New York, won big by supporting long-shot candidates in an otherwise disappointing night for labor. (The City Reporter)

• Voter turnout was lower, but young voters and high turnouts in some districts boosted insurgent candidates. (Gothamist)

• Mamdani allies protest his NYPD policies. Several elected officials and dozens of political and advocacy organizations, including NYC DSA, protested on Thursday Mamdani’s decision to expand the NYPD’s headcount by 580 officers, as well as an ongoing police crackdown on quality-of-life offenses, in a major public split between Mamdani and some of his core supporters. (Gothamist)

I watched the results of Tuesday’s primary elections from the country I grew up in, Latvia, where NATO aircraft occasionally fly over my mother’s house. And while democratic socialism is traditionally seen in terms of left-wing domestic policy, I found myself thinking of conversations the New York Editorial Board, of which I’m a member, had with two socialists who beat other Democrats in their primaries — and how destabilizing some of their views on international security could be to this tense part of the world.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won over five-term Congressman Adriano Espaillat (NY-13), described the notion of nations having borders to us as a “militarized project” that is “deeply dehumanizing to so many people.” Out here, borders are a fragile guarantee against a bloody Russian invasion. When we asked her to apply her views to Russia and Ukraine, she expressed sympathy for the lives lost but said her real hostility is to “global systems where you have imperialist powers engaging in constant violence in a war machine.”

Democratic socialists won big Tuesday, likely increasing their New York state and assembly numbers to at least 15, and adding two new members to Congress – Chevalier and Claire Valdez, who succeeded Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez (NY-07). Both were supported by New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and both replaced solidly progressive Democrats.

The NYC DSA’s focus has vocally been on bread-and-butter populist issues, and many voters who backed these candidates were likely responding primarily to that message rather than to the full range of foreign-policy implications associated with the broader movement. The popular mayor campaigned for these candidates and his positions carried weight among voters.

But the broader stances of the National Democratic Socialists of America are far-reaching, and their platform essentially advocates for the dismantling of the post-World War II international order. Their foreign policy mandates include greatly reducing U.S. military budget, closing overseas military bases, bringing troops home, and ending all economic sanctions as part of their “Workers Deserve More” campaign, which my colleague Stu Smith reported on last week. NYC DSA’s own Anti-War Working Group is “dedicated to countering US imperialism and resisting US regime-change operations and interventions in foreign wars and conflicts.”

To someone who grew up in Latvia under Soviet occupation, concepts like “deterrence” and “sanctions” are not abstract terms. When you look at the current geopolitical landscape, Europe is experiencing the most serious security crisis since 1945. The only credible deterrent preventing a revanchist Russian state from expanding its borders into the Baltic region is the commitment of American military power and Article 5 of the NATO treaty. As democratic socialist candidates and their allies gain influence, the result may be an expanded isolationist bloc in the federal government.

The growing visibility of democratic socialist ideas in American politics therefore raises important questions about the future direction of U.S. foreign policy. A reduced emphasis on military engagement in favor of diplomacy and decreased military spending in favor of increased domestic spending, combined with skepticism of international borders and alliances, would make a fundamental shift in how the United States projects influence abroad.

While the rhetoric differs wildly, the goals of the populist Right’s “America First” isolationism and the populist Left’s “Anti-Imperialism” would produce the same result: unilateral contraction of American global hegemony. It’s all too clear out here what would replace that: expansionist authoritarians.

The United States is not on the verge of adopting democratic socialism. But in an era of narrow congressional margins, even relatively small blocs of legislators can exert outsize influence on foreign policy debates. As these ideas gain traction, their implications, especially for regions where security remains precarious, deserve careful scrutiny.

New Yorkers will vote in four truly contested Democratic primaries on Tuesday, an exciting election day in a city that’s usually dominated by incumbents.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a sign of a vibrant new reform movement. It’s more like the political trend that the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini illustrates in the chart below:

We have entered the “progressive drift” era of New York City politics, which may be supercharged by Mamdani’s political clout: the two most striking races pit established left-wing Democrats against a new crop of Mamdani-backed loyalists grown in Democratic Socialists of America labs.

In the DSA heartland of Queens, Polymarket gives Mamdani’s candidate, Assemblymember Claire Valdez, an 83% chance of winning against the hyper-progressive Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in NY7; in Upper Manhattan, Darializa Avila Chevalier is narrowly favored against the longtime incumbent, Rep. Adriano Espaillat in NY13. Meanwhile, Mamdani’s old rival turned ally, Brad Lander, is heavily favored against Rep. Dan Goldman in NY10, a district that includes Park Slope. In all three races, Mamdani’s candidates have gotten to the rivals’ left with criticism of Israel.

Mamdani is flexing his muscle in districts he won easily in last summer’s primary. If his candidates, and particularly the previously unknown Avila Chevalier and Valdez, both members of the DSA, win, the results won’t immediately change New York City policy. They’ll be backbenchers in Washington.

But their victories would shake up New York’s power structure. The lesson will be that Mamdani and the DSA can make or break your career — and that you’d better fall in line with the organization’s extreme left priorities broadly, and its hostility for Israel in particular, if you want a political future in New York Democratic politics.

“People often ask me what I think of the state of the Democratic Party. This slate here today is our answer. The Democratic Party must change,” Mamdani said while speaking at a rally for his slate of endorsees last night in Brooklyn.

One discordant note: The 4,000-seat theater was not packed, by some accounts, and early voting does not indicate a massive turnout by Mamdani’s young base. That’s New York too: with the World Cup and the Knicks, there are so many fun things to do in the city right now. Who wants to think about voting?

Making Frenemies

“It is a general rule of politics that newly elected leaders have only a limited amount of political capital and must be careful how they spend it. Mamdani is trying to use his to expand the role and power of the DSA in Democratic Party politics, even if it upsets putative allies,” David Freedlander writes in the New York Magazine. “It’s a gamble. Win and it cements the mayor as a national political figure heading into the 2028 presidential election. Lose and he has created a squadron of lawmakers with bruised feelings who will be looking for revenge.”

I’d edit that slightly: Win or lose, Mamdani is destroying the old machine to replace it with his own, creating deep resentment within the Democratic establishment.

But that’s the cost of a local political revolution. Mamdani and the DSA are on a mission to radically reshape that rather calcified and visionless Democratic Party from within and are flexing their young political muscle, which is impossible without damage. They have both a strong socialist vision and the momentum, and have fully embraced the Trump strategy of dominating the news cycle. But the city has not been progressive for that long, and Mamdani would do well to remember he won with just 52% of the vote.

Related:

• The Congressional Primary Tearing the Mamdani Coalition in Two (NYT)

• DSA vs. WFP: Who leads the left in NYC? (Michael Lange)

• The Democratic Socialists of America are leaving it all on the field in NYC (Politico)

• Embrace Left Wing Machine Politics (Hamilton Nolan)

Radically American

MI’s President Reihan Salam has an interesting take in Sapir on the parallels between some American Muslims’ move to the left and that of American Jews a hundred years ago. The driving force, he argues, isn’t political Islam but the global left-wing, anti-imperialist worldview called “Third Worldism.”

“Third Worldism is proving as seductive to today’s second-generation American Muslim radicals as socialism, Communism, and anarchism were to the second-generation Jewish radicals of the 1920s and 1930s. The parallel is closer than it might appear. Like today’s Third Worldists, the Jewish radicals of that era were largely secular. Their radicalism was a substitute identity rather than an extension of religious practice, a way of channeling communal energy into political commitment,” he writes. “Like Third Worldism, the Jewish radical movements of the early- and mid-20th century were not marginal phenomena; they shaped American intellectual and political life in ways that took decades to work through.”

DSA Mayors

“[T]he DSA’s electoral success should not be confused for policy success—much like the establishment Dems they replace, the DSA mayors are confusing class warfare for actual solutions to the affordability crisis,” MI’s Charles Fain Lehman observes in City Journal.

“[I]n embracing them, mainstream Democrats also risk welcoming in an organization that has quietly grown disturbingly radical, a fact that could prove politically disastrous in the long run,” he writes.

Related:

• What Spencer Pratt’s Defeat Tells Us About the American City (NYT)

• Mamdani Is Channeling Knicks’ Fans Euphoria. Will It Work? (NYT)

Workers Deserve More

Stu Smith explored the extreme new national DSA agenda, “Workers Deserve More” in City Journal this week. Plans include “scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” I hope voters will take one look at these proposals and decide they’re as crazy as they sound.

Read Stu’s account of what “Workers Deserve More” means.

Red Rabbits and National Uprisings

At least part of the answer to how the DSA plans to accomplish its radical agenda seems to be through preparing for increasingly radical conflict.

“The Red Rabbits Security Commission, a subgroup within the DSA focused on “community defense” efforts, is, according to its authorizing resolution, preparing for a “national uprising against federal agents and police brutality.”In practice, that means training cadres in tactics like armed and unarmed self-defense, blocking intersections, and fighting “fascists” with umbrellas,” Stu writes in another piece that will help you understand DSA and its agenda.

Blurring Governing and Campaigning?

Josh Code wrote in The Free Press about his shift canvassing, organized by the city, to encourage residents to testify at the city’s Rent Guidelines Board hearings, which will help determine if and by how much rents may be increased for rent-stabilized apartments in October. The mayor ran on freezing rent increases as a major campaign promise.

“Immediately, though, I could see how the line between nonpartisan engagement and campaigning might become blurry,” Code writes. “Two of my four fellow canvassers were former Mamdani campaign aides who now work for the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement. One wore a bracelet that said “SOCIALISM.” The other two said they had knocked on doors for Mamdani last year. Off we went.”

Extra! Extra!

• Your Uber driver may soon be unionized (Reason).

• Recently, MI’s Jack Santucci and John Ketcham published a brief on New York’s de facto multi-party elections and how proportional representation might lead to more accurate representation of voters’ preferences.

Public education already recognizes that some students need something meaningfully different from the standard curriculum. In special education, that premise comes with clear expectations: identified students receive defined services that come with measurable goals and ongoing review. Gifted education rests on a similar premise—students are identified as needing instruction beyond the standard curriculum—but it lacks similar accountability.

The debate around gifted education has focused almost entirely on identification: who gets the label, which tests to use, and whether to rely on IQ scores, teacher referrals, or universal screening. In places like New York City, this has expanded into a broader debate over whether gifted programs should exist at all.

What receives far less attention is what happens after students are identified. Gifted programs often become enrichment rather than accelerated instruction, with unclear goals and little systematic monitoring of student progress.

A recent New York Magazine article questioning ‘giftedness’ raises legitimate concerns about such programs. Identification systems are, in fact, inconsistent. There are racial disparities in gifted enrollment. A nationally representative study tracking students from kindergarten through fifth grade found that participating in a gifted program was associated with gains of just 2 percentile points in reading and 1 point in math.

But the article draws the wrong conclusion.

If the system never actually defined its goals for gifted education, then the lack of strong outcomes can’t be evidence that advanced learners do not exist or don’t deserve advanced learning opportunities. It is just evidence showing that nobody required the programs to prove they were actually working. 

Is gifted education worth it?

The gifted label covers a wide range of experiences, from rigorous acceleration to occasional enrichment, with little consistency and limited evidence on effectiveness.

According to the most recent national data, gifted and talented students in public school programs make up 6.1 percent or 3.3 million of students nationwide. What kind of education are these children receiving? Could it be better?

We do not know. According to the most recent State of the States in Gifted Education report, of the 35 states that require schools to identify gifted students, only 9 require reporting on what happens afterward, and just 6 publish annual reports on services. None track what happens at the student level.

In special education, meanwhile, federal law requires ongoing documentation and progress monitoring, as well as periodic re-evaluation. In 2024, 8.2 million students received special education services because of the federal law IDEA, each with a documented plan and measurable goals.

New York’s Admissions Obsession

New York City’s heated debate over who gets into a selective classroom is an admission that education in such environments and the associated outcomes are perceived as worth the effort and expense for students and their families to obtain.

But while the debate has centered on who gets a seat, the more important question is what students actually gain from occupying one. Which schools are offering enrichment rather than accelerated education? Which of the two should be the goal of the program? Which has a bigger impact on student performance?

We have limited insight into what happens when a student enters the classroom and whether they are getting more than someone in a typical general education setting.

State data on the individual student exists. What is missing is the requirement to use the data to determine and report whether and how well the program is working. Student performance as measured by state exams is not perfect, but it can be used to indicate that some students may not be doing as well as expected. However, we do not know why because the programs are not evaluated.

What Accountability Should Look Like

In special education, accountability is not optional. No comparable expectation exists for gifted education in most states. If schools identify students who need instruction beyond the standard curriculum, they should be held to the same basic accountability expectations.

The New York Magazine piece asks whether giftedness is a myth. But in every other area of education, we do not judge the existence of student needs based on poorly defined programs.

We judge the quality of the services.

Before deciding whether programs should exist at all, we should ask whether gifted education meets the same standard applied to special education: is it well defined, properly monitored, and effective?

New York City’s politicians spend most of their time talking about an “affordability crisis” for city workers — but a hard look at the workforce suggests something more like an opportunity crisis.

According to one recent report, just 35% of jobs in New York City require a four‑year degree. At the same time, New York has a larger pool of well-educated residents, and a pre‑pandemic city report shows that 17% percent of workers with at least a bachelor’s degree were employed in occupations that typically do not require one.

The troubling takeaway: a potentially large share of college‑educated residents — already bracing for the disruption brought by artificial intelligence — are either underemployed in roles that do not require their credentials, or struggling to find work at all, as non‑degree jobs continue to dominate the city’s employment base.

Nationally, about 5.6% of recent college graduates aged 22–27 were unemployed as of May, higher than the overall unemployment rate and not far below the 7.2% unemployment rate for young workers without a bachelor’s degree, narrowing the traditional gap between them.

Jobs that require a degree pay more and lead to greater upward mobility, yet most of the job growth within the city has been in the low-wage service and care sectors that, for the most part, do not require advanced degrees, a trend that New York State projects will continue.

Downward mobility and underemployment help explain the angry politics that produced Zohran Mamdani. Unfortunately, his solutions are aimed at softening the blow — not at fixing the underlying mismatch between workers’ education and their opportunities.

New York City’s Job Slowdown

NYCEDC’s May 2026 Economic Snapshot shows that New York City lost 5,400 private‑sector jobs in April, leaving a net gain of just 4,700 private jobs for the first four months of 2026. The city’s unemployment rate fell 0.1% to 5.6% in April and labor force participation fell 0.7% to 62.7%.

MI’s Eric Kober wrote back in April about what the recent trends in employment numbers mean for the city whose private‑sector job growth has slowed sharply compared with 2024.

The Need for Better Jobs Explained

ABNY’s Making Growth Matter report (by HR&A) offers a good starting point for understanding the city’s labor market, and what its dynamics mean for the residents, whether they can afford market rate apartments, or children, and how trends compare among various metro areas.

The bottom line: low-wage jobs in sectors like health care and social assistance are expanding quickly, high-end finance and tech jobs continue to do well. The result is a barbell-shaped labor market that deepens the tale of the two cities for many residents, with most of the new jobs paying poverty wages. Meanwhile, the scarcity of medium-wage opportunities makes it increasingly difficult to move up from low-wage work into a job that matches the city’s cost of living, even for people with experience or credentials.

The Job Quality Problem

In a recent piece in Vital City, Tal Roded looks beyond the impact on individuals to how the city should approach the economic challenges of its polarizing labor market.

City Hall should stop treating any job as a win and instead prioritize expanding “good jobs” as defined by the Comptroller’s four criteria: a wage that meets local living costs, basic benefits like health insurance and paid time off, predictable and stable hours, and safe, dignified working conditions, he argues.

“New York should think and act strategically to diversify job growth by nurturing and attracting employers that complement the growth in the care economy,” Roded writes. “At the same time, reforms should be pursued to make health care and social assistance jobs more desirable and financially rewarding.”

Class Size Law as UFT Jobs Program

New York’s rising per-pupil spending is driven less by student needs and more by using the Class Size Law as a de facto jobs program to preserve UFT teaching positions despite a sharp enrollment decline, MI’s Danyela Souza Egorov writes.

Full compliance with the law would require spending billions on new teachers and space that the system doesn’t have. So the city now pays bonuses of up to $8,500 to thousands of teachers in oversized classes, while also “holding harmless” school budgets even as students leave—effectively funding empty seats and union headcount rather than tying staffing and dollars to actual enrollment or learning results.

The Mayor’s Job

• The city, facing a cash flow problem, is considering delaying payments to non-profits, NBC New York reports.

• Between basketball and soccer, it’s showtime in NYC, and our mayor is ready. On top of being ubiquitous, Mamdani is trying his hand as a TV host of his own “Morning Pitch”, giving our local TV stations a run for their money with daily morning updates like this

Extra! Extra!

• We need shade! As we deal with yet another heatwave and the coming summer will probably be hotter than the last, we should work more on planning for shade beyond planting trees, Diana Lind argues.

• We need more street lighting! If crime goes up when the sun goes down, there’s now research from New York City housing developments that crime goes down when lights go up, and by more than a third, Vital City reports.

A common question from education professionals outside New York is how the city can manage to spend over $42,000 per student while roughly half of its students fail to meet basic reading and math benchmarks. The answer is that the city is wasting a massive amount of money because it prioritizes politics over the needs of students and families.

Let’s look at the latest data.

The number of students in the city’s public schools is falling. The Department of Education’s projections indicate a 4.2% decline in enrollment for the coming school year (excluding pre-K students in off-site facilities), down from 766,730 to 734,551 in SY 2026-27.

The School Construction Authority is also projecting a steady decline.

Despite this, the total education budget under Mayor Mamdani continues to rise, with a proposed 7.4% increase, and by increasing total funding while educating significantly fewer children, the per-student cost keeps rising ever more.

Class Size Law

A major reason for these soaring expenses is the UFT’s outsized impact on city and state politics, perfectly illustrated by the ongoing battle over the Class Size Law.

Passed by the state in 2022—with the support of Mayor Mamdani, then an assembly member—the law mandated strict caps on classroom sizes in the city’s traditional public schools to improve the quality of education.

But from the beginning, the law was built on a series of practical impossibilities.

First, the city lacks physical space in school buildings to create thousands of new classrooms. Second, due to a labor shortage, there are not enough qualified teachers to staff these new classrooms. Lastly, the price tag is billions for new construction and teacher salaries that the city can ill afford. All of this was methodically recorded in the Class Size Working Group Minority Report.

This terrible law should never have been passed and must be repealed, as some are also asking. Academic consensus indicates that the individual classroom teacher is the primary driver of student success, not class size.

The political motive behind the law is transparent: after the city’s public schools lost more than 100,000 students between 2019 and 2022, it was clear the they no longer needed so many teachers. Albany hurried to pass the law to keep the UFT insulated with an artificially preserved headcount of dues-paying members.

Fiscal Implications

This year, facing a massive budget gap and mounting costs to comply with the law, Mayor Mamdani and Albany negotiated a two-year extension, delaying the full implementation of the Class Size Law until the 2029–2030 school year.

However, to secure union approval for the delay, the city struck a side deal with the UFT to directly compensate teachers working in non-compliant classrooms. Under this arrangement, the union won additional compensation of up to $8,500 for teachers working in rooms that exceed the mandated caps. It is estimated that 2,463 teachers will receive this bonus. The city is now budgeting to penalize itself—paying extra union salary costs because it structurally cannot meet the law’s demands.

Enrollment and Compliance

The district has achieved compliance in roughly 64% of classrooms, but meeting the remaining threshold poses a serious dilemma.

Most non-compliant schools are highly sought-after, popular institutions with full classrooms and limited physical space. To comply, these popular schools will be forced to reduce enrollment and turn families away. As Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels recently noted, “when families don’t get their first option, they usually don’t come to the public school system.” By capping enrollment at its best schools, the city risks accelerating its own enrollment decline.

Instead of adjusting school budgets to changing demographics, Chancellor Samuels announced that schools that lost students this year will see their budgets remain completely intact for next year. This is an extension of the “hold harmless” policy instituted during COVID-19, which has already cost the city $1.6 billion. Decoupling funding from actual student enrollment removes accountability, giving principals no reason to care whether families and students are re-enrolling in their schools.

The outsized and growing power of the teachers’ union in NY runs counter to what is happening across the country. A new report from the Fordham Institute shows that union power is declining in most states, driven by the expansion of school choice and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which barred the mandatory collection of union dues from nonmember teachers.

But while other major cities right-size their schools to match demographic shifts, and other states empower families to make choices about how to educate their children, New York continues to spend billions to protect its institutions and appease the unions. The $42,000 per-pupil figure reflects funding empty classrooms and paying penalties for a law that can never be fully implemented.

Childcare for All?

In March, following essentially flat enrollment in the city’s preschool programs, which the Mayor worked hard to promote and expand, the city finally decided to ask parents what they actually want and announced a partnership with the left-leaning think tank New America and the Robin Hood Foundation to survey parents of young children on childcare.

While local results are yet to be released, we already know that parents want more time with their children and more money, as New America’s recent national survey found. No single work, childcare, or leave arrangement dominates their preferences.

I expect New York parents’ preferences will broadly mirror those nationally.

In NYC, 55% of married couples and much higher numbers of single mothers and fathers with children under 6 work, meaning children live in households where all available parents are in the labor force.

These working parents need flexible arrangements that accommodate their desire to spend quality time with their kids as well as work—work schedules vary and young children get sick a lot, something which no formal care setting solves.

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This reality is fundamentally incompatible with the standard school-day 3-K and Pre-K model, which dismisses children at 2:20 PM and shuts down for the summer, leaving parents scrambling to find additional care. The demand for these seats plateaued at about 100,000 combined this year, meaning that—if past years’ trends hold—over 15% of already funded seats will again remain vacant.

Simply funding more costly preschool seats will not solve NYC’s childcare affordability crisis, or necessarily improve the overall quality of care available. A city-contracted seat is projected to cost significantly more than a portable voucher and nearly double the market rates of home-based providers, according to the NYS Comptroller.

The program most in demand appears to be the vouchers that cover an average of $300 per week in care costs for low income working parents, enabling them to choose the specific care, hours, and flexibility their families need. It is popular with those who qualify, leading to a waitlist of about 25,000, in addition to the roughly 70,000 already in use. The city could reduce vacant childcare seats, use the money to match the state funding already allocated, and unlock more of these vouchers.

If Mayor Mamdani truly wants to support working families, he may need to acknowledge that his top-down ideology about expanding universal provision of care may turn out not to be what New York’s parents actually need. We’ll find out soon enough.

Pension Sweeteners: The Gift That Taxpayers Can’t Stop Giving

Thanks to Governor Hochul’s and Albany legislators’ pandering to public-sector unions ahead of elections, New Yorkers will have to pay tens of billions of dollars more toward public pensions—and they’ll have nothing to show for it.

New York lawmakers are celebrating passing a massive new state budget, but its costliest provision—retroactive “sweetening” of pension benefits for half of the state’s public employees—is hidden from the sticker price, MI’s Ken Girardin reports.

Weaponizing pandemic-era labor shortages to roll back common-sense fiscal reforms, the unions secured a deal allowing teachers to retire five years earlier at age 58 with full, taxpayer-guaranteed pensions the state Constitution prohibits from ever being reduced, among other concessions.

This capitulation will cost taxpayers an estimated $550 million annually, inevitably driving up local property taxes. It is hard to overlook the blatant hypocrisy of local mayors who are simultaneously begging Albany for emergency financial bailouts while endorsing these budget-destroying pension expansions, Ken notes, pointing out that yielding to this pressure will only fuel further union demands to completely dismantle past fiscal discipline.

“You can’t blame the public employee unions for asking,” he writes, “but you cannot direct enough scorn at the elected officials for constantly saying yes.”

Related headlines:

• Unions in New York now squeeze the public worse than any other mafia — with politicians’ help. (NY Post Editorial Board)

• Powerful UFT snags teacher pay bumps of up to $9.5K in compromise deal to delay NYC class size law. (NY Post)

NYC Charter School Students Spend Hundreds More Hours in Class. It Shows.

It is common sense, and research backs it up, that more time in class translates into better educational outcomes. MI’s Jennifer Weber wrote earlier this year that NYC public school students, as a result of labor agreements with the Teachers’ Union, receive 130 fewer hours of instruction than the national average.

Since charter school students in the city tend to massively outperform their local public school peers, Jennifer looked at how many more hours of instruction they get. The numbers are staggering.

While a public school student gets about 1,200 hours in class, students at Success Academy and at KIPP get more than 200 and almost 300 more hours of instruction a year. That’s more than a month of classes, which compounds over K-12 to more than 2 additional years of schooling.

Given that the student populations are roughly the same, it is one reason why charter school students do better than their peers in school.

MI Research: Understanding How Proportional Representation Might Work in New York City

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new Charter Revision Commission has an opportunity to fix NYC’s “democratic deficit.” Currently, the City Council fails to mirror its electorate: right-leaning voters face a “proportionality problem” that diluted their 2025 vote share by half, while left-leaning factions are trapped in bitter primary fights.

As MI’s Jack Santucci and John Ketcham point out in a new study, “New York City already has a de facto multiparty system. Despite reforms like RCV, its electoral rules channel political competition into lower turnout, intra-party factional fights, rather than contests between distinct parties in the general election.”

To break this gridlock, the study simulates switching to proportional representation (PR) using 2025 election data, proving the city can align council seats with actual voter intent without causing political chaos. My colleagues find that regardless of whether the city adopts multi-winner borough districts (OLPR) or adds 20 citywide seats to the existing map (MMP), both systems ensure the council finally reflects how New Yorkers actually vote while keeping nearly all current winners in office.

Related:

• Jack also wrote for The Bigger Apple about why New York’s multiparty politics feel so chaotic. You can explore the outcomes of various representative systems here.

Extra! Extra!

• Mamdani Is Under Pressure to Act Amid Slowing Job Growth in New York (The New York Times)

• Who’s Minding the Storefronts? An Analysis of Storefront Vacancies in New York City (NYC Comptroller)

• A Cheap Fix for Urban Crime — try improving street lighting. (The Atlantic)

• New York may be facing a crime trend even worse than deadly gang violence, MI’s Charles Fain Lehman writes in the New York Post.

• NYPD arrests another teen murder suspect amid surge in minors charged with gun violence. (Gothamist)

• NYPD Commissioner Tisch warns World Cup, NBA Finals will come with unprecedented security risks — and a giant bill, the New York Post reports.

City Journal Substack

D.C.'s Police Force Shrank. How Did It Get Safer?

Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has a staffing problem. Since 2020, the department has lost 17 percent of its sworn force. The current staffing level—3,149 sworn officers—is the lowest recorded figure since 1967…

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2 months ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Charles Fain Lehman

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This political pandering will cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars over the next few decades, with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and other teachers’ unions walking away with the sweetest deal of all. Under the new rules, teachers and other school professionals can retire five years earlier—at age 58 instead of 63—with a full, unpenalized, taxpayer-guaranteed, state-tax-exempt pension.

This wasn’t the first time Albany has fallen for this, and unless people start paying greater attention to their mischief-prone state government, it won’t be the last.

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Taxpayers Bear 100% of the Risk

As I recently detailed, public-sector unions have been waging a coordinated campaign for years to roll back Albany’s common-sense reforms, enacted during and after the Great Recession, to their pension systems.

For more than a century, New York has had public pension systems to which cities, state agencies, schools, and other public employers have contributed on behalf of their workers. Those contributions get invested, and then the workers get pensions in retirement.

Crucially, these pensions are guaranteed by the state Constitution, meaning they can never be reduced. When pension investment returns come up short, taxpayers have to make up the difference. That’s also been the story as retirees have been living and collecting longer than expected.

Pension rules are set by state law, and an individual’s retirement benefits reflect when they joined the pension system (or which “tier” they belong to).

That distinction, funny enough, has historically provided New Yorkers with a layer of protection. It kept benefits—and liabilities—from getting jacked up during closed-door local union contract negotiations, where elected officials want to avoid politically painful spending cuts or tax hikes by shifting costs to the future. Pension benefits, for more than half a century, have been prohibited subjects of bargaining in New York.

But that statutory system creates another opportunity for mischief: state lawmakers can hike pension benefits retroactively. In 2000, as stock markets were raging toward the top of the dot-com bubble, Albany allowed employees to stop contributing after 10 years on the job and goosed the benefits for people closest to retirement. But pension investments didn’t just fail to keep growing: in some years, they fell.

But there was no going back. The 2000 pension sweetening plus the downturn helped cause public employer pension costs to explode from about $1 billion in 2000 to $10 billion in 2010, driving a massive spike in school property taxes outside New York City.

Albany’s response was to enact two rounds of pension reforms in 2009 and 2012, colloquially referred to as Tiers 5 and 6. These changes were a recognition that pension costs were elbowing out other public services, that investments couldn’t be counted on to generate as much return as they had in past bull markets, and that retirees were living notably longer than they had been a generation prior.

The reforms required employees to work 10 years to vest, required them to contribute between 3 and 6 percent for their entire careers, increased the full retirement age to 63, based payouts on a five-year average salary instead of three, and cracked down on late-career overtime manipulation (“pension-spiking”).

These rules allowed New York to bend the cost-curve while remaining exceptionally generous: traditional defined-benefit pensions are increasingly rare in the private sector, where just 14 percent of employees have access to them, down from 20 percent in 2010. But the unions viewed this fiscal discipline as an unconscionable unfairness.

The Phony Case for a “Fix”

The coronavirus pandemic and the economic upheaval that followed handed the unions an opportunity to rewrite history. After state lockdown policies ended, the labor market underwent an unprecedented tightening. By fall 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly labor-market survey found that New York had more job openings than job seekers. In several months that followed, BLS found as few as 0.7 seekers per opening. (At the end of last year, it was back up to 1.2 seekers.)

The UFT and fellow labor outfits aggressively exploited this tight labor market, which was challenging both public and private employers alike.

The unions weaponized the situation and blamed the pension changes, saying they were harming recruitment and retention.

The evidence was not, at any point, on the unions’ side. For one thing, the New York state government had done more hiring in 2023 than in any year prior, a record the Hochul administration went on to smash the next year.

The unions, for all their concerns about recruitment and retention, maintained their fierce defense of various obstacles to hiring in areas ranging from the civil-service exam system to teacher licensure.

The first round of changes went largely unnoticed: Governor Hochul’s first budget in 2022 rolled back the vesting period for pensions from 10 years to five.

An October 2023 legislative hearing billed as an investigation into “recruitment and retention” turned out to be a choreographed airing of grievances for unions before sympathetic lawmakers. A parade of union officers complained about the lack of “parity” between pension benefits offered before 2009 and those after 2012—ignoring the change in how long retirees are collecting and how much taxpayers had been struggling to finance those retirements.

My Manhattan Institute colleague E.J. McMahon warned that rolling back the pension reforms would instantly cost New York taxpayers over $1 billion per year, and more than $2 billion annually by the early 2030s. He genially reminded lawmakers that people in very different tiers had worked alongside each other without incident for decades after Albany’s 1976 pension reforms.

But under the banner of “Fix Tier 6,” the unions next spring sought and got a significant change to how pensions are calculated, as Albany changed the formula to use a three-year average instead of five years. The seemingly modest tweak added about $380 million to annual taxpayer costs, a figure that will keep rising. About half of that price tag was borne by New York City, the state’s largest public employer, and meaningfully contributed to the budget gap that Mayor Zohran Mamdani faced earlier this year.

As the fiscal 2027 state budget was being crafted this year, the unions bused thousands of members to a stadium near the state Capitol for a rally meant to pressure Albany into grinding away even further at the pension reforms.

The most surprising attendee was Governor Hochul herself. While she was careful not to promise specific changes, her very presence was an endorsement of the unions’ grievances.

Keep in mind, every public employee who has complained about what they’re getting from the pension system decided that those benefits were adequately generous to accept their job. What’s more, many of them wouldn’t have been hired if it hadn’t been for the savings produced by the very pension reforms they now condemn. And again, the public employee unions have never presented compelling evidence that the 2009 and 2012 pension reforms actually harmed governments’ ability to deliver services.

The push against Tier 6 boiled down to the unions wanting something from taxpayers and believing that they had enough raw political power to get it. They were partially correct.

They also had another factor working for them: about one-third of state lawmakers are themselves members of Tier 6, meaning they stood to save more than $4,000 per year in pension contributions just from dialing back pension contribution levels to where they stood in early 2012. (Assemblyman Mike Fitzpatrick of Suffolk County has long pointed out this conflict of interest, calling the arrangement “fiscal carbon monoxide” and pushing a bill that would end it.)

News reports indicate the unions, with the blessing of legislative Democrats, demanded changes that would have cost taxpayers an additional $1.5 billion annually, and that Governor Hochul balked. In the end, the sides settled for two major changes.

Teachers with 30 years on the job could retire as early as age 58 without a diminished pension, a double hit for taxpayers who will fund longer retirements over fewer years of service. Non-teachers, meanwhile, would remit a smaller share of their pay toward their pension. For instance, employees making $75,000 per year would pay 3 percent instead of 4.5percent, and the maximum contribution rate would drop from 6 percent to 5.75 percent. In addition, uniformed employees would get to count more overtime pay toward their pensions.

The cost of the change will be approximately $550 million per year and will continue to rise.

Hypocrisy Abounds

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, as well as the mayors of Buffalo and Albany, simultaneously pled with Albany for emergency financial aid to solve their local budget crises while still aggressively supporting the latest round of pension-sweetening.

The New York State School Boards Association, constantly hectoring Albany for more aid for school districts, also endorsed rolling back the 2009 and 2012 reforms.

Meanwhile, many of New York’s “pro-taxpayer” Republicans have lent support to the unions’ cause. A few, including Long Island Assemblyman Doug Smith, the top Republican on the Assembly Education Committee, even attended the union’s Albany rally and gave special guest American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten a standing ovation.

Don’t expect the same enthusiasm when pension actuaries later this year tell school districts and municipalities how much their pension costs are going up as a direct result.

More Is Never Enough

It’s not clear which lawmakers sincerely believed the unions’ bogus claims that their demands were justified, and which ones simply chose to ignore the costs.

One thing is clear: the manner in which Governor Hochul and lawmakers acquiesced to the unions’ demands will guarantee that they are back next year demanding more. Why, they’ll ask, should some employees wait until 63 to collect a pension when teachers retire at age 58? How come, they’ll huff, teachers must pay 6 percent toward their pensions when people with office jobs are paying less?

Yielding to this pressure will fuel, not quench, the unions’ bellyaching about unequal treatment. The unions will not stop chipping away at Albany’s pension reforms until they are completely dismantled, and taxpayers are shouldering the massive burden that they avoided only thanks to those reforms. The UFT will keep pressing for the retirement age to be lowered all the way back to 55; other unions will press to slash employee contributions to 3 percent (or eliminate them altogether).

New York needs to scale back its involvement in the pension business altogether. Instead of expanding legacy liabilities, New York should be placing most new employees—and all new teachers—in the same portable defined-contribution plan offered as an option to (and picked overwhelmingly by) SUNY professors.

The ultimate irony is that the SUNY professors enjoying this flexibility are represented by the same union, the New York State United Teachers, that fights to keep K-12 classroom teachers locked into the traditional pension system. Merely offering a defined-contribution plan option would expand the pool of potential teachers by making mid-career moves more attractive.

Albany politicians have, in just three years, saddled New York taxpayers with upwards of $1 billion per year in entirely avoidable pension costs that will survive even the worst economic downturn or budget crisis.

You can’t blame the public employee unions for asking. But you cannot direct enough scorn at the elected officials for constantly saying yes.

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More than 150,000 NYC students attend charter schools, roughly 1 in 7 public school students in the city. On race, poverty, and geography, these systems serve many of the same students1. Charter schools do enroll somewhat fewer English Language Learners and students with disabilities. But other differences are structural: different calendars, different school days, different funding models, and dramatically different academic outcomes.

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In a recent piece for The Bigger Apple, I explained how New York City’s students spend fewer hours in the classroom than their peers across the state’s “Big 5” school systems, a result of labor negotiations with the UFT.

The NYC DOE 2025-26 school calendar begins on September 4, 2025, and ends on June 26, 2026. Under the UFT contract, the standard school day lasts 6 hours and 50 minutes.

Success Academy, the city’s largest charter network, began classes on August 11 for some grades and will conclude the school year on June 12. By the time DOE students arrive for their first day of school, some Success Academy students will already have spent more than three weeks in class. KIPP NYC begins on August 25 and runs through June 18, with school days lasting from 7:30 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. — roughly 100 minutes longer than the DOE school day.

A DOE student receives roughly 1,200 instructional hours annually. A Success Academy student receives closer to 1,400. A KIPP NYC student receives nearly 1,500. Over the course of a single school year, charter school students receive the equivalent of more than a month of additional instruction.

And those estimates assume perfect attendance. During the 2024–25 school year, one in three NYC DOE students missed at least 10% of the school year. (Data on charter school attendance is not readily available.)

Research shows that more time spent in the classroom leads to greater student learning. While many variables contribute to student outcomes, more instructional time in classrooms is associated with greater student gains.

How the Students Perform

On the 2025 New York State third-grade exams, 58% of NYC DOE students were proficient in English Language Arts (ELA) and 63.3% in math citywide. Across 29 elementary schools, 92% of Success Academy’s students were proficient in ELA and 97% in math. KIPP NYC students averaged 66% in ELA and 75% in math.

These differences are especially notable because many charter schools operate in districts where academic performance remains among the lowest in the city.

In District 5 in Harlem, where only 42% of DOE third graders are proficient in ELA, nearby charter schools posted substantially higher results: KIPP STAR reached 94% proficiency, Success Academy Harlem 2 reached 90%, Success Academy Harlem 5 reached 82%, and KIPP Infinity reached 66%.2

Not every charter school dramatically outperforms its surrounding district. KIPP Bronx III, for example, reached 48% proficiency in third-grade ELA — still five points above the surrounding DOE district average.

Across 37 charter elementary schools in the Success Academy and KIPP NYC networks, the average school outperformed its surrounding DOE district by more than 30% in both ELA and math.

The Differences Extend Beyond Elementary School

On the 2025 state exams, KIPP NYC eighth graders reached proficiency at rates of 7% in ELA and 70% in math. In the DOE districts where those schools operate, eighth-grade proficiency averaged 47% in ELA and 46% in math.

Success Academy and KIPP NYC are not the entire charter sector story. Smaller schools such as South Bronx Classical have also produced similarly stellar outcomes in some of the city’s lowest-performing districts.

At South Bronx Classical, third graders reached 92% proficiency in reading and 96.5% proficiency in math. Eighth graders posted 98% proficiency in reading and 99% proficiency in math.

Meanwhile, across the Bronx overall, only 44.2% of DOE third graders were proficient in reading, and 51% were proficient in math.

What We Pay

NYC DOE spending reached roughly $32,000 per-pupil in the 2024-25 school year, on a budget approaching $40 billion. According to audited financial statements, Success Academy spent $21,218 per student during the 2024–25 school year, while KIPP NYC spent $21,862 per student.

Both networks also received philanthropic support, though at modest levels: Success Academy reported approximately $216 in additional philanthropic funding per student, while KIPP NYC reported roughly $112 per student.

Conclusion

DOE students attend school roughly 130 fewer hours annually than the national average and several hundred fewer hours than many of their charter school peers located only blocks away. In many districts, fewer than 40% of students reach grade-level proficiency by third grade, despite the city spending almost twice as much money per student as charter schools.

By the time charter students graduate, they have had at least two years of additional instruction than their DOE peers.

Until instructional time and student outcomes become priorities in NYC’s labor negotiations, the charter sector will continue to do what DOE schools cannot, and students will be the ones paying the price.

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The result has been a mix of ideological ambition and politically pragmatic tactical improvisation without radical structural change. Mamdani himself tends to speak in terms of transforming how the local government serves the city.

“New Yorkers deserve a government that works as hard as they do—and a government as careful with their money as they are,” he said in announcing his new Commission on Government Efficiency this week. The goal, he said, is to cut through bureaucracy and deliver housing, transit, child care, and other services “faster, smarter and more effectively for working people,” restoring faith in government by proving it can produce results.

The emerging question, however — and the one that will define his mayoralty — is how he will balance the tension between a politically pragmatic, technocratic governing approach with his alliance with labor and his broader political coalition.

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As Stephen Eide observes, the administration has treated the city’s fiscal challenges less as a constraint to be managed than as an opportunity to advance a broader project of class politics—mobilizing support around taxing the wealthy while deferring harder questions about long-term spending, particularly in areas like pensions.

To look at his budget, you wouldn’t know it was put together by a socialist mayor, Nicole Gelinas notes. Mamdani has been successful at getting support from Albany, but otherwise it is more ‘business as usual’, shifting costs to the future without addressing the structural issues that make the budget unsustainable in the long run.

Mamdani’s NYPD has been successful in keeping crime down, including through quality-of-life policing. He is under pressure to keep disorder under control as the World Cup and New York summer descend on the city, while his supporters grow increasingly unhappy about the lack of police reforms. It remains to be seen what happens next.

He has been advancing existing transportation capital projects that have the potential to improve transit flow in the city while making it safer. Meanwhile, his ideological push to expand universal childcare is already meeting the limits of demand.

Whether in its approach to housing, labor regulation, or economic development, the emphasis has been less on expanding the city’s overall capacity and competitiveness than on restructuring who benefits from it.

At least in these early months, a big picture is becoming clearer: a version of municipal socialism that prioritizes small wins and redistribution over growth, while deferring the hard choices that would require real transformation.

Big Picture Socialism

Eide argues that, based on what we have seen so far, “the class war’s likely to be permanent, the promise of worker power remains dubious, and socialist New York will be a more inward-oriented place than the city it replaced.”

In Eide’s view, the Mamdani administration treated the budget deficit less as a fiscal management problem than as an opportunity to mobilize political support around taxing the wealthy and reinforcing class consciousness. At the same time, he argues that the promise of “worker power” is undermined by the fiscal record of union-influenced pension governance, where labor-led institutions have often struggled with long-term stewardship.

More broadly, Eide contends that Mamdani’s politics encourage an inward-looking governing style focused more on satisfying local activist coalitions than on maintaining New York’s broader economic competitiveness.

Read the full story.

Housing Plan’s Ambition Constrained by Ideology

Taking a closer look at Block by Block, the Mamdani administration’s housing plan that was released this week, MI’s Eric Kober concludes that the plan “may produce significant new construction and some useful reforms, but it remains constrained by ideological commitments that limit its ability to solve the city’s housing problems.”

Existing rent-regulated housing will remain financially distressed and dependent on public support, while NYCHA’s capital crisis will continue to exceed the willingness of any level of government to fully address it, he writes. Meaningful improvement would require policy and funding shifts beyond the current political consensus.

Read the full story.

Mayor Mamdani’s Budget Isn’t Socialist

New York’s budget is so burdened by legacy costs and institutional obligations that even a mayor elected to dramatically expand government ends up governing conventionally unless he is willing to cut, reform, or restructure the existing system first.

“It says a lot about New York City that in order to afford socialism, we’d have to cut spending first,” Nicole Gelinas observes in an excellent piece in the City Journal.

“Mamdani has proven politically pragmatic, preferring modest victories, relative to his campaign promises, to protracted fights with the ageless institutions, from unions to anti-poverty advocates, that make up New York City’s permanent government,” she writes.

As a result, his first budget is more of a continuation than a disruption.

Read the full story.

The End of Low-End Contract Work?

Council Member Tiffany Cabán, a Democratic Socialist, has introduced a bill that would require operators of last-mile delivery facilities to obtain a license and directly employ workers who sort packages and make deliveries, prohibiting the use of subcontractors or staffing agencies for these core services—continuing a broader trend of policies that make it harder to operate low-margin, high-volume services within the city.

MI’s Adam Lehodey writes that framed as a worker-safety proposal, the measure would likely eliminate thousands of city delivery jobs, push logistics operations to the suburbs, increase costs for consumers, and worsen congestion without meaningfully improving safety outcomes.

As with similar regulations affecting app-based services, the effect is likely to be less to build new economic capacity than to reshape existing activity in ways that favor organized labor and politically aligned constituencies—often at the expense of consumers and contract workers.

Read the full story.

Extra! Extra!

• Chicago Transit Authority revised its 2015 ridership up by 19 million trips after deploying a new automatic passenger tracking technology. The data also showed a significant increase in the number of riders “underpaying” the fare. (Streetsblog Chicago)

• After a deadly crash between a bicyclist and an e-scooter rider that killed both, experts and advocates are calling on Mamdani to focus on reining in illegal electric vehicles. (Streetsblog New York)

• What parents of young children want is more time and more money, a new national survey by the left-leaning New America think tank finds, while no single work, child care, or leave arrangement dominates their preferences.

  

• The Mamdani administration is also working with New America on a survey, paid for by the Robin Hood Foundation, of what parents of young children in NYC want when it comes to childcare.

• Utah is shifting from "Housing First," which prioritizes low-barrier shelters and permanent housing, to a strategy emphasizing mandatory treatment and enforcement. (Bloomberg CityLab offers a deep dive.)

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