SANITY NOW!
NY’s disastrous progressives are paving the way for pragmatists to be swept into office
NEW York City is reeling from two crises the likes of which it hasn’t seen in decades.
The coronavirus pandemic has so far taken the lives of 21,000 New Yorkers and cratered the city’s economy.
The reaction to the horrific George Floyd killing delivered a second blow. The massive peaceful protests were unifying and inspiring for many. But the mayhem in some parts of the city — looting, arson and violent attacks on police — was deeply disturbing. In response to both crises, New York Gov. Cuomo and City Mayor de Blasio vacillated and squabbled. They’ve done little to reassure New Yorkers that the city has a future worth sticking around for.
The pandemic drove hundreds of thousands from the city. Many won’t return. Now, residents and businesses — retailers especially — have another incentive to leave.
Images of Times Square, Soho and Fifth Avenue sacked by looters could scare tourists away for years.
Park Slope resident Kay Hymowitz, who documented her borough’s stunning revival in her book, “The New Brooklyn,” now fears the opposite trend. “I’m afraid we’re seeing the beginning of de-gentrification,” she says.
Even before the pandemic, high rents and unreliable transit were making city life too tough for many. New York’s population peaked in 2016 and has been declining ever since.
According to a gloomy Moody’s Analytics forecast, pandemic fears mean that even the next generation of workers will likely bypass New York for “decades to come.”
What will it take to bring them back? First, people will need to feel safe.
Current and future New Yorkers must be convinced the city is not a giant petri dish. And they’ll need to trust that crime won’t surge out of control.
Those shouldn’t be impossible goals.
New York state now performs over 50,000 coronavirus tests per day. And as few as one percent of those tests are coming back positive. Continued frequent testing should help raise confidence as people head back to work and play. A coronavirus vaccine, likely to be available next year, will further calm anxieties.
Fear of crime will be a tougher battle. Over his two terms, Mayor de Blasio has dismantled Giuliani- and Bloomberg-era programs that helped make New York the safest big city in the United States.
Now crime is surging back. Murders are up 25 percent so far this year.
While some say “defund the police” is just a slogan, New York’s City Council took it literally, pushing to cut $1 billion from the NYPD budget.
There are valid arguments for investing in social programs along with traditional policing. But they aren’t likely to reassure New Yorkers worried that dialing 911 will yield a busy signal.
It didn’t have to be this way. New York came back strong from the 2008 financial crisis and enjoyed more than a decade of growing tax revenues. Those years could have been used to repair the city’s broken finances and out-of-control pensions.
Instead, de Blasio focused on progressive pet projects. The mayor’s $1 billion ThriveNYC mental-health initiative — spearheaded by his wife Chirlane McCray — has struggled to “identify concrete results,” said The New York Times.
Now the mayor has put McCray in charge of a new Taskforce on Racial Inclusion & Equity that will help supervise the city’s coronavirus response. For its part, state government failed to rein in soaring pension costs or bring financial discipline to the MTA. A 2017 investigation revealed it costs six times more to build a mile of subway tunnel in New York than in Paris. Meanwhile, mass-transit ridership fell by 90 percent during the peak of the pandemic. Federal coronavirus relief payments don’t come close to filling the gap in fares. The MTA estimates operating losses could reach $8.5 billion. With tourists gone and many businesses closed, tax receipts have plummeted. The city’s Independent Budget Office predicts a $14 billion shortfall over the next three years. Grappling with this financial meltdown will take leaders with the courage to take on unions and other powerful constituencies. There’s little evidence either de Blasio or Cuomo has the stomach for this fight.
New York has been here before. The city scraped bottom in the 1970s and ’80s, with collapsing finances and soaring crime.
By 1994, voters had had enough, electing the rough-edged prosecutor Rudy Giuliani, who made crime a top priority. Mayor Michael Bloomberg tempered but continued those toughon-crime policies, and the city’s economy boomed.
Today, New York risks careening back to the troubled ’70s and ’80s. Rather than continuing to support progressive agendas like de Blasio’s, it’s easy to imagine voters will turn to hard-headed pragmatists who promise to take on the chaos.
James B. Meigs is the co-host of the “How Do We Fix It?” podcast and the former editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics.