On 9/11, I was not yet a New Yorker, nor did I know I ever would be.
I vividly remember the morning; I was a foreign visitor in D.C. on a work trip. Along with millions of others, I watched in horror the second plane hit the South Tower on live television. But I experienced it as an outsider, not as a New Yorker and not as an American.
I remember sitting that night alone in a hotel room thinking about what was likely to happen next in the rest of the world. 9/11 was a horrific, foreign tragedy, and yet it was personal, for it was crystal clear it was about to affect all of us.
I moved to New York a year later, one of the more than 3 million New Yorkers — almost 40% of the city’s residents — who are foreign-born. Millions have moved through the city since the terrorist attack, and more than half of New York’s foreign-born residents in 2023 had arrived in the country after 2000.
When they came, they brought with them, as I did, a very different, global perspective on what 9/11 meant.
Our lives were shaped by the event elsewhere, in ways that other New Yorkers may not understand. We come carrying memories that were not formed here, into a place that was defined by the event. We live in a city shaped by its reaction to it, but we know no different life here than the one we arrived into. We belong to a different New York than those who were here before.
As Harry Siegel writes, more than three-quarters of today’s residents were not here on 9/11. People are born, die, come and leave. The city creates institutional memory — surveillance, safeguards, procedures, etc. — but, as Nicole Gelinas observed, life in the city went back to normal, if a new normal, remarkably quickly. The event shattered many lives, but the city survived.
The attacks on 9/11 changed the world; they were a watershed moment in New York, American and global experience. It’s also the defining day of the calendar in New York City: a day of remembrance that’s individually and communally brutally all of ours.
More:
September 11 and the Loss of Certainty by City Journal’s Johnathan Clarke
The Resilient City by MI’s Nicole Gelinas
A City Forgets. Maybe It’s Supposed To. (Vital City)
The First Rough Draft of 9/11 History (Free Press)
After 9/11, Documents Suggest, New Yorkers Were Misled About Air Quality (NYT)
And now to the rest of New York’s news.
Back to School
The first day of school for public school students was yesterday, September 10, which was also the launch date for the city’s new free, universal childcare program for 2-year-olds.
The launch was mired in payment controversies and the sudden departure of the head of the program at the Department of Education just weeks before launch. Not every parent was pleased with their assigned, mostly home-based childcare providers, choosing to keep the children in their existing daycare settings.
As for the city’s overall school system, enrollment keeps going down. According to late-August data, the city enrolled almost 22,000 fewer kids last school year than the year before, and total enrollment in the city’s traditional K-12 public schools fell below 790,000 from almost a million just a decade ago. Data for this school year will be collected in October.
Related:
NYC teachers were promised $8,500 bonuses for large class sizes. The details are murky. (Chalkbeat)
Mamdani’s top task to fix NYC schools: make kids show up (MI’s Danyela Souza Egorov and John Ketcham in the Post)
Education needs reform: the latest Gallup poll shows a rapidly falling satisfaction with the quality of education our schoolchildren are getting.
Housing News
In Why We Are Taking Mamdani’s Rent Freeze to Court, MI’s John Ketcham and property owner Gandolfo DiFiore explain their thinking and why MI is providing financial support and recently filed an amicus curiae brief in the case.
“We did so because we believe Mamdani’s repeated promise to freeze rents prejudged a decision that by law belongs to an independent Rent Guidelines Board (RGB),” they write, hoping the outcome of the case would result in a fairer process, one that includes the board justifying its decisions with a rationale.
“If the courts don’t nullify the freeze, mayors will obtain de facto control over stabilized rent increases, despite statutory text and structure designed to insulate these decisions from political pressure,” they write. “Rent freezes will become standard campaign promises, threatening the existence of privately owned, rent-regulated housing.”
Other:
The City Council confirmed Mayor Mamdani’s appointee John Mangin to the city’s five-member Board of Standards and Appeals after all. The position will allow him to weigh in on approving changes and overriding council objections to certain kinds of housing developments. MI’s Eric Kober and John Ketcham argued last month that Mangin is certainly “qualified to carry out the policies that the city has already chosen,” and that this was the wrong fight for the city council to pick when it came to housing.
Over 2,000 NYC buildings could be subject to the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), which gives city-approved nonprofits and joint ventures the first opportunity to buy distressed rental buildings, Crain’s reports. MI’s John Ketcham was blunt when he wrote about COPA earlier: “COPA is an attack on fundamental private property rights that will exacerbate the city’s housing crisis merely to benefit nonprofit allies of the City’s progressive leadership.” The revised and reintroduced bill is moving through council hearings.
Worker Power
“As Mamdani lauds ‘worker power,’ unions for NYC employees get a cooler reception,” Gothamist reports. When Mamdani announced the new Office of Worker Power, “he was flanked by hotel workers, Amazon delivery drivers, and home health aides as he signed the executive order. Teachers, firefighters and sanitation workers were noticeably absent.”
Ahead of Labor Day, I wrote about Mamdani’s Shadow Workforce — the 80,000 or so non-profit workers who deliver the city’s services under city contracts and who are increasingly unionizing, in part as a result of the city’s poor contracting practices. Read MI’s Stephen Eide’s piece on Mamdani’s NGO Model Army to understand how we got here.
Extra! Extra!
Gothamist took an in-depth look at the city’s vast private surveillance network.
MTA Flips the Switch from Electric Buses Back to Natural Gas, The City Reporter reports, with officials pointing to challenges in the electric bus industry.
Grocers file antitrust suit to block Mamdami admin’s plan for NYC-owned supermarkets: ‘Predatory pricing’ (New York Post)
Can you air-condition a city? (Bloomberg City Lab)
Quality of Life Comes at a Cost: The most desirable cities are the least affordable (Aziz Sunderji)