When people want their city back, they will do the unheard of. New Yorkers proved it

Miami Herald

5 hours ago

Editor's note: Welcome to Double Take, a regular conversation from opinion writers Melinda Henneberger and David Mastio tackling news with differing perspectives.
DAVID: You had to pity New Yorkers for their choices in Tuesday's Democratic mayoral primary. On one side you had a creepy groping politico of privileged pedigree — Andrew Cuomo — and on the other a joke socialist — Zohran Mamdani — who seems to have won, though with their ranked choice system, we won't know for sure until next Tuesday. If Mamdani wins again in November, he will ruin the city with harebrained ideas discredited everywhere except perhaps Pyongyang.
For a minute as I was thinking about how New York ever wound up torn between these two, I was going to make a cheap point: Sexual harassers like Cuomo can only hurt people at a retail scale – one at a time. Cuomo will only hurt women. The men and children of New York are safe. Socialist ideas hurt people wholesale, in this case by the millions with Mamdani's silly idea of freezing rent in the city. Everybody would pay a price for electing a socialist.
That doesn't work because when Cuomo was New York's governor he sent people sick with COVID 19 back to old folk's homes where they spread the disease. Cuomo hid the deadly results when hundreds died. Cuomo could hurt people at scale, too.
But the idea that rent control has such wide appeal to millions of New Yorkers really makes me despair that both our major political parties will fall victim to the populist disease. To find an economist or serious urban planner who thinks making apartment rental a money-losing business takes real work.
It isn't just property owners who are hurt by rent control. When rental units stop being built, newcomers to the city can't find a place to live. When rent increases stop money for upkeep and repairs to buildings and individual apartment units dries up leading to the squalid conditions once made famous by public housing, a related but slightly different stupid socialist idea.
I am embarrassed that the city of Wall Street, home of capitalism in its rawest form, has chosen to go down this dead end street.
Cuomo? No, no and absolutely not
MELINDA: First of all, I'm grateful that New Yorkers told Andrew Cuomo to please get over himself, though history says this will never happen.
The man seriously abused the public trust. He resigned as governor three years ago because an investigation by New York AG Letitia James found that he had sexually harassed eleven women during his time in office. To have brought him back now would have been to say that #MeToo, which cost so many so much, was really just a blip. That if you were not Harvey Weinstein, all was forgiven.
That it wasn't enough to have a president who was found liable of sexually abusing a woman in a department store changing room. But that the greatest city in the world should be run by someone whose treatment of women was as entitled as his ambition. No, no and absolutely not.
Choosing Cuomo would have signaled heavily Democratic New York's cultural and political return to behavior that was seen by those in charge as A-OK in the 1990s. Endorsed by Bill Clinton, of all people.
In Joe Klein's 'Primary Colors,' the Andrew Cuomo-flavored character Jimmy Ozio comes to Arkansas to see if his dad should endorse the Bill Clinton stand-in. 'Do you mind us talking business?' he and the boys ask the Hillary Clinton character played in the movie by Emma Thompson. Oh no, she says. 'How else will I learn?' The only problem with that scene being that it rings so true, then and now.
And if you wonder why I'm going on about someone who was crushed on Tuesday, it's because he's not done, and is reportedly still thinking of running in the general election as an Independent.
As repudiated as this avatar of everything that's dysfunctional, disordered and ineffective about today's Democratic Party was on Tuesday, he's still out there, looking for an opening. As is New York's last bitter disappointment, Mayor Eric Adams, who was facing federal fraud and bribery charges before Donald Trump's DOJ dropped the whole thing. Adams is relaunching his campaign as an Independent on Thursday. Curtis Sliwa, the talk show host and founder of the anti-crime Guardian Angels, will also be running in November, as a Republican.
So about Mamdani, the guy who did win this round: MAGA has pretty much taken the sting out of the s-word, socialist, by calling everyone who disagrees with them about anything this, regardless of their actual views. Now, Mamdani is a democratic socialist, which in this country means you want a strong social safety net, much like Europe's social democrats.
I want a safety net, too, so that doesn't give me the shivers. And freezing rent increases in stabilized units is not exactly seizing Trump Tower and letting people now living in the subway move in. Something has to be done to make New York and other cities affordable for non-millionaires again.
A lot more worrisome to me: the state assemblyman has no experience running anything. I also recoiled at his 'globalize the intifada' message, and then his defense of it. Criticizing Israel is one thing, but he has questioned its right to exist as a Jewish state.
But no, I don't see a pause on rent increases for certain properties as any reason to panic.
Rent control: You can't be for that!
DAVID: What? My normally sensible colleague is for rent control, too? Please explain to me why because I don't get it.
MELINDA: New York, like a growing list of other cities, has been unaffordable for normal people for a long time now, and its politicians are desperately trying to figure out how to solve that problem. Of course they are.
Admittedly, a rent freeze is a limited fix to the overall issue, since the only real solution to scarcity is supply, and I do see that this particular bandage could be a disincentive to potential builders.
So this may or may not work, but something has to if New York isn't going to keep becoming more and more only a place for the ultra-wealthy and the homeless. In which case, of course, it would no longer be New York.
Maybe it already isn't; my son recently let me know when we were in New York to see a show that the city I loved so much when I lived there — and which I still do visit multiple times every year — actually no longer exists. And on this I'm afraid he might be right; I just read a New York Times story about Black flight from the city, because of housing costs.
A friend told me the other day that her son recently rented a not-that-nice studio for $5,000. On the Upper West Side, but still. This is not just another issue, but an existential one for a city whose strength and beauty has always come from its if-you-can-make-it-here diversity. So they've got to try some different policies.
DAVID: I am used to spending my time writing about how awful and unserious the Republican Party has become, but if the New York mayoral race is any sign of where the Democratic Party is going nationally, they're not much less awful than Donald Trump and his imitators.
Let me see if I have this, right:
Establishment Democrats coalescing around Cuomo have no principles. Forget #Metoo, but vote for us because we let the women we harass have abortions!Progressive Democrats are completely unconnected to fiscal reality. Zohran has promised to make the buses better and free. He's promising to make day care better for everyone by making it free, too. Why he doesn't go all the way and make rent free, I don't know.And they don't believe in science either. We know how to get people access to good food – make it profitable to provide it. Instead, Zohran thinks the government should go into the grocery business. That will provide the same level of services as its, housing, subways, buses and schools.
To top things off, he's promising to fight crime with social services, psychological counselors and free medical care in unoccupied commercial spaces. Good luck.
And the serious centrist Democrats? You noticed they're for progressive cure-alls, too. Comptroller Brad Lander, your preferred candidate, wanted smarter, more flexible rent control. That's an oxymoron if ever I heard one.
The bad news for Democrats is that Trump has the problems of both wings of the Democratic Party rolled into one. He's the principle-free and fantasy-policy candidate. How are Democrats going to beat Trumpism if they can only offer half the deal?
MELINDA: I don't think you have any of that right, but I'm not sure where to start. Maybe here, with a small point: Did you know Kansas City has free bus service and we haven't fallen apart? I don't believe in cure-alls, progressive or otherwise, and don't know anyone who does. There are plenty of non-MAGA pols with principles and without fantasies.
But I think the answer to the first thing you asked, about how a socialist could ever rise to the top of the pile in the world's financial center, is something I learned in another great city, Rome, while I was covering the Vatican. The saying there is, 'after a fat pope, a thin one' — papa grasso, papa magro — meaning that we silly geese here on Earth are always acting in reaction to the last war or the last love or the last mayor. So in New York's case, maybe a socialist is the obvious response to a 'law and order' former cop who disappointed pretty much everyone.
Hunger for change — need for change — makes people willing to take chances. I very much hope this one works out for them.
I'm sure you know that there are people living in extreme poverty in New York and across the country whose most basic needs are not being met, so why would it scare New Yorkers to think that their city government going into the grocery business might be a partial solution? As the federal government is on the verge of cutting SNAP benefits and Medicaid, I get it.
I have my doubts about Mamdani, and also worry about what could happen in the General Election in November. But I think this happened because New Yorkers want their city back.