New York

New York is Becoming the Next London, Home Only to Immigrants and the Super-rich

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York – alongside the victory of similarly hard-Left candidates in other mayoral races – has left some predicting that urban America will inevitably fall into a “doom loop” of decline, with an exodus of the super-rich leaving cities in the control of a resentful lower class. Yet in reality, the socialist takeover will prove no great win for the working class. If anything, it leaves the haute bourgeoisie even more the masters of places like Gotham than before.

Contrary to many predictions, surging sales of luxury apartments indicate that New York will remain home to the ultra-rich – those with more than $50m (£37m) in assets. In fact, the evidence of the past few years is that, even as the overall population of the city has declined, the number of the super-rich has been growing. Rents, outside those under control, have continued to rise. Even if a few of the ultra-rich leave, New York is likely to remain comfortably the most popular city for the group, ahead of rivals such as Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and London.

With their massive fortunes, these rich folk, 21,000 in New York alone, are also reshaping the urban landscape. Increasingly, global cities like New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Miami are functioning less as centres of economic activity for the masses, and more as showcases for luxury brands such as LVMH, which continue to invest heavily in such markets. Even once powerful business landmarks like the Rockefeller Centre are actively reinventing themselves as destinations for recreation, tourism, and the arts.

Mamdani’s election also does not appear to have stopped developers and speculators from looking to transform former office buildings – places of employment – into yet more luxurious apartments. This reflects long-established national patterns. New US office construction has plummeted since the 1990s, while the number of residential high-rises has continued to surge.

This transition makes sense given that office vacancies, largely due to persistently high levels of remote work, remain elevated. Although less pathetic than many downtowns, New York offices are far emptier than they used to be, with midtown office occupancy at around 65 to 70 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. The rise of artificial intelligence is likely to make things worse.

Today, New York, once the world’s unchallenged financial capital, is shifting into an “amenity city” with a priority for building casinos and other tourist-oriented development. Despite the much ballyhooed construction of JP Morgan’s new tower in midtown Manhattan, finance jobs have declined as a proportion of total city employment, with jobs headed more to places like Dallas and Miami.

These shifts will change the world of many native New Yorkers. They are also likely to be exacerbated by the election of Mamdani. Working class and middle class families are already leaving cities. Socialist policies, which almost guarantee poor-performing schools and lax law enforcement, impact the hoi polloi far more than the elite bourgeois or young single professionals.

Some may think that Mamdani’s policies will turn the world’s capitalist capital into a First World version of Havana. But given the US federal system, Mamdani can’t expropriate fortunes by edict from Gracie Mansion, however he might like to do so. Instead, his biggest victims are likely to be among the lower social orders, not least the mostly minority owners of bodegas and small businesses. His rent control freeze, notes the perceptive analyst Nicole Gelinas, is likely to hit hardest small property owners, who own 30 to 50 per cent of all rent control units but may not be able to handle Mamdani’s proposed freezes.

Worse yet, Mamdani and his socialist cadre do not seem concerned about improving working class communities by creating better jobs; the emphasis is almost totally on free goodies, not people being empowered to improve themselves. As the analyst Martin Gurri has suggested, unlike past socialists, whether in Stalin’s Russia or among Sweden’s social democrats, today’s variety regards economic growth with “remarkable indifference”, a tough stance in an economy where good jobs are already headed elsewhere.

Despite all this, New York will not turn into the next Third World hellscape. It is more likely to end up like London. Under Labour, that city has become more global but can hardly seem British anymore, with many recent immigrants apparently reluctant to integrate into society. It also hosts post-national financial and cultural elites who often seem to mock the sensibilities of the British population.

In other words, London today seems less like the capital of the UK, and more like a refuge for people and capital from the rest of the world. Tourists drive much of the economy, including wealthy free spenders from distant locales.

This seems like the likely road for New York. Rather than following its commercial focus, a legacy stretching back to Dutch times, New York’s economy will become oriented to serving the rich, their offspring and tourists. In the new order, the city becomes what the University of Chicago’s Terry Nichols Clark has described as an “entertainment machine ”. The tourism industry also serves the new configuration by becoming a key employer of a largely poor, often immigrant, workforce.

Lost in the process is the notion of the city as an engine of upward mobility. The true mission of great cities, noted the late Jane Jacobs, “is transforming many poor people into middle class people... Cities don’t lure a middle class. They create it.”

Great cities with history and culture, like New York and London, may remain alluring for the young, the wealthy and for those immigrants who have yet to adapt to their adopted country. But with the road to opportunity blocked by their own policies, the socialists may end up leaving their cities ever more bourgeois, albeit under a red flag.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Mamdani for NYC, social media.

Ruth Asawa's Civic Imagination

Samuel J Abrams — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

On the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, Ruth Asawa's wire sculptures hang like breaths made visible, loops of brass and light suspended between earth and heaven, quiet reminders that beauty can still be a civic language. They sway almost imperceptibly as visitors move through the gallery, casting shadows that ripple across the white walls. The effect is serene and public all at once: a choreography of discipline, patience, and grace. Each loop of wire is hand-woven, continuous and unbroken. Step closer and you see the human labor inside the geometry - evidence of time and attention in a culture allergic to both.

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, jointly organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gathers more than 300 works spanning five decades of artistic production. The exhibition is far more than a historical survey; it is a civic revelation. In a moment when contemporary art often trades in irony, provocation, or despair, Asawa's work stands as a counter-tradition of constructive joy. Her art is not rebellion but repair. It embodies the conviction that beauty, education, and community are inseparable threads in the democratic fabric.

Formation and Discipline

Asawa's life story is as American as it is extraordinary. Born in 1926 to Japanese-American farmers in Norwalk, California, she was sixteen when her family was forced into internment camps during World War II. Her father was arrested by the FBI in February 1942; the rest of the family was first held at Santa Anita racetrack, then sent to Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. The experience could have produced bitterness. Instead, she found order and solace in pattern and repetition. In the camp she began to draw; after the war she enrolled at the legendary Black Mountain College, where she studied under Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller.

Albers taught design as moral formation. "Art is revelation instead of information," he believed - a philosophy that to see clearly was to live rightly, that perception itself was a civic virtue. Asawa absorbed that ethic completely. She would later write, "An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special." That conviction shaped her life and teaching. For Asawa, art was education, and education was the moral architecture of democracy.

The lessons of Black Mountain followed her west. What she learned in Albers's classroom - discipline, patience, respect for material - she transformed into an art that united craft and contemplation. Her San Francisco home doubled as studio and classroom; children threaded wire beside her while neighborhood students dropped in to learn. The line between life and art, between family and form, simply dissolved.

The Geometry of Community

Her signature looped-wire sculptures - those floating volumes of air and light - grew from a basket-weaving technique she learned in Mexico in 1947, during a summer trip while studying at Black Mountain College. Using ordinary materials - galvanized steel, brass, copper - she built intricate lattices that feel at once mathematical and maternal. Each loop encloses and releases space, creating inside and outside simultaneously. "I'm not so interested in the expression of something," she once said. "I'm more interested in what the material can do."

Standing beneath these forms at MoMA, one senses a rare harmony between intellect and humility. They are rigorous yet tender, abstract yet profoundly human. Their calm precision offers an antidote to the noise of the age. Where much contemporary art insists on confrontation or spectacle, Asawa's insists on coherence. She understood that art's highest purpose is not to shock but to order, not to dazzle but to dignify.

Some critics mistake Asawa's serenity for retreat, her discipline for decorum. Yet in her patience there is protest: a quiet refusal of cynicism, haste, and the hollow virtue of outrage. Each loop of wire is an act of faith that connection still matters, that emptiness can hold form.

From Studio to City

That ethic carried beyond the studio. After settling in San Francisco, Asawa turned her attention outward - to fountains, plazas, and public schools. Her Andrea Fountain (1968) at Ghirardelli Square, with its entwined mermaids and sea forms, invites children to play and touch. Her San Francisco Fountain (1973) near Union Square, covered in hundreds of cast-bronze reliefs depicting the city's neighborhoods and workers, transforms the everyday into civic monument.

In contrast to the forbidding monumentalism of mid-century public art, Asawa's civic works are intimate and participatory. They do not impose; they invite. Where Richard Serra's Tilted Arc divided Manhattan, Asawa's fountains bind communities together. Her art exemplifies what might be called a civic modernism of belonging; an art that joins beauty to stewardship.

MoMA's retrospective restores this dimension. Models, sketches, and archival photographs of her public commissions line the galleries, revealing an artist who saw no hierarchy between fine art and civic architecture. For Asawa, the city itself was a canvas of relation and, powerfully, a place where form could teach virtue.

Education as Civic Renewal

Of all her legacies, education may be the most enduring and this was featured potently in the retrospective. During the 1970s and '80s, as arts programs were disappearing from public schools, Asawa became a tireless advocate for creative education as civic necessity. She organized community workshops, wrote curricula, and lobbied the San Francisco Board of Education to establish a public arts high school. Her decade-long effort culminated in the founding of the San Francisco School of the Arts in 1982 - now renamed the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts.

She believed that learning to see was the beginning of learning to care. In an era when politics increasingly substitutes for pedagogy, her conviction that creativity undergirds citizenship feels newly urgent. A society that neglects the arts, she understood, erodes the habits of attention and patience that self-government requires.

At a time when art and music programs are again the first casualties of budget cuts, Asawa's legacy reminds policymakers that aesthetic formation is civic formation - that to teach beauty is to teach democracy.

Against Spectacle

The exhibition also offers a quiet rebuke to the art world's current obsessions. Where so much contemporary work aims for shock, Asawa sought equilibrium. Her practice rejects the assumption that seriousness demands despair. She built beauty, not irony.

Her fountains were not luxury goods for collectors but instruments of civic play. Her wire forms were not slogans or identity statements but expressions of shared discipline. The retrospective's curators, Cara Manes and Janet Bishop, wisely resist framing her as a rediscovered "outsider." Instead, they present her as a peer of Albers, Calder, and Eva Hesse - an artist who expanded modernism's vocabulary by rooting abstraction in the everyday.

Her legacy forces a question: what if public institutions embraced her ethos? What if beauty and stewardship, not branding and outrage, guided our cultural life? That MoMA, the most visible museum of modern art, now devotes its sixth floor to her work is itself an act of civic correction; a recognition that rigor and gentleness are not opposites but allies.

Transcendence in the Everyday

The quieter rooms of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective reveal the artist at rest. Watercolors of wilted poppies, contour drawings of her children, geometric studies in ink - all bear the same meditative rhythm as her wire sculptures. There is something almost liturgical in their repetition, as if each line were a small prayer for coherence.

The show's through-line is unity: between sculpture and sketch, between home and public space, between the hand that loops wire and the city that receives its pattern. "Art is doing. Art deals directly with life," she said. Those words capture the civic heart of her vision—an understanding that attention itself is a form of creation.

A Civic Vision for Our Time

Asawa's worldview was never narrowly aesthetic. It was civic, even constitutional. She believed that the virtues of making - patience, discipline, care - are the same virtues that sustain a democracy. Her life offers a model of citizenship rooted in creation rather than consumption.

That insight speaks directly to the crises of our own moment. Polarization has replaced participation; distraction has replaced devotion. Yet Asawa's example reminds us that civic trust is built the same way a sculpture is: one loop at a time, each joined to the next. When students learn to draw, weave, or fold, they are also learning how to see one another

The Republic of Beauty

In the film that concludes the exhibition, Asawa leads a classroom of children in a paper-folding exercise. Their faces brighten as flat sheets rise into complex geometries. "You can make something beautiful out of almost anything," she tells them in the film. It could be her epitaph or a creed for public life.

For Asawa, beauty was not ornament but ethic: the visible sign of care, the trace of faith that the world can still hold form. Her retrospective is more than an art event. It is a moral reminder that beauty is a public duty.

Standing in MoMA's final gallery, as the wire forms shimmer and sway, one senses not nostalgia but instruction. The work teaches us how to look, how to care, how to build. It suggests that beauty, like democracy, is not a finished product but a practice - looped, patient, participatory, and unbroken.

In the fragile republic of art and citizenship alike, Ruth Asawa remains our most luminous teacher - showing that to make something beautiful is to believe, however quietly, that the world can still be made whole.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Alexandra Courtis, via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

Zohran Mamdani's Bread and Circuses

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

‘Here our smart clothes are beyond our means, here in Rome. A little bit extra has to be borrowed from someone’s purse. It’s a common fault; here we all live in pretentious poverty. What more can I say? Everything in Rome comes at a price.’
From Satires, by Juvenal.

There was a time in Ancient Rome when many citizens could barely afford to eat, while slaves undercut their chances of work. And the solution from the imperium? The familiar panem et circenses – bread and circuses.

There are echoes of Roman times in a New York mayoral race that ultimately came down to the cost of living. That, in essence, is what New Yorkers (or at least a sizeable minority) voted for on Tuesday – the bread and circuses of Zohran Mamdani.

They may want to hold their breath as their new 34-year-old mayor, who easily beat former governor Andrew Cuomo, tests out his bag of tricks. He promises to halt all rent increases, impose a $30-per-hour minimum wage by 2030, and subsidise bus fares, daycare and even grocery stores. While Roman emperors once handed out bread, Mamdani plans to dispense free rides, babysitters, peanut butter and steak at discount prices.

Mamdani’s programme suggests an attempt to transform the world’s capitalist capital into a First World version of Havana. The biggest casualties won’t be the much-maligned rich but, as analyst Nicole Gelinas suggests, moderately affluent small property owners. They make up 30 to 50 per cent of rent-controlled landlords and some won’t survive a rent freeze. Similarly, mainly immigrant-run bodegas and small grocery stores will struggle against the city-subsidised competition, while bus riders will find themselves increasingly sharing space with the city’s feral youth and plain old crazies.

Of course, much of what Mamdani proposes may never come to pass. The state controls most of his taxation power, and many proposals will face legal challenges. Still, New York’s political shift shouldn’t be minimised. Mamdani may be more of a social-media performer than a policymaker, but his ascent has ramifications not just for New York, but also for the West’s other great cities and the nation at large.

Regardless of how daft his ideas are, Mamdani’s rise reflects a legitimate anxiety about the cost of living, especially housing. New Yorkers spend more of their income on housing than residents of any other major US city, while also paying among the highest taxes. It has the lowest homeownership rate in the country, standing at half the national average. And job growth has increasingly been confined to low-wage employment. Indeed, since 2020, New York has lost 76,000 middle-income jobs.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: screenshot from PBS YouTube channel.

Zohran Mamdani's Rise is Fueled by Generational Resentment

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The likely election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s next mayor reflects a profound shift in generational politics. As the era of boomer domination finally draws to a close, a new cohort is bringing fresh energy to an already polarised landscape on both right and left – with potentially devastating results.

Diminishing economic prospects for younger workers have played a key role in undermining faith in free-market capitalism, making the case for socialism seem viable again. Cast largely in traditional Marxist terms, many on the reinvigorated left see the ‘cost of living’ focus as a promising strategy for progressives otherwise out of step on cultural issues.

Yet it would be wrong to view Mamdani’s rise as driven primarily by the working class. In the primary, he lost in many predominantly black and Latino areas such as the Bronx, Brownsville and Rosedale, and traditional working-class districts like Canarsie in south Brooklyn, all of which backed his rival, Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani’s support instead came largely from the gentrified zones of Lower Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, particularly Williamsburg, where a cadre of educated young voters drove record turnouts. A recent New York Times poll shows Mamdani with 73 per cent of the vote among 19- to 29-year-olds, compared with just 32 per cent among voters over 65. Only a massive mobilisation of older New Yorkers, who generally favour Cuomo, threatens his momentum.

Whether he wins or not, Mamdani epitomises a youthful politics defined by the primacy of social media. His followers tend to be less conventionally literate and more prone to political extremes. Their politics – epitomised by the media-savvy Mamdani – is largely performative, based more on emotion than on even remotely practical policy. His candidacy is merely the latest cause célèbre, following a sequence of ‘progressive’ enthusiasms from climate change to transgender rights to the Palestinian cause.

Some young activists also display a disturbing acceptance of political violence. A YouGov poll in September 2025 found that among adults under 30, 19 per cent said political violence could sometimes be justified, compared with 11 per cent of Americans overall. In one survey, nearly 38 per cent of respondents – and more than half of progressives – said the assassination of Donald Trump would be ‘justified’.

In this new political configuration, gender now plays a central role. The existence of a gender gap in politics is nothing new, but, according to recent Gallup surveys, it is now five times larger than in 2000. Indeed, it is especially pronounced among Generation Z where Trump’s approval rate among young men hovers near 45 per cent, compared with just 24 per cent among women.

The left is increasingly dominated by women. Among Americans aged 18 to 29, 52 per cent of women identify as Democrats, compared with 35 per cent of men, while 38 per cent of young men lean Republican – nearly twice the share of young women. A similar divergence has appeared abroad. In South Korea’s 2022 presidential race, 59 per cent of men aged 18 to 29 voted conservative, while women overwhelmingly backed the ‘progressive’ candidate. Across Europe, 21 per cent of young men support right-wing and populist parties compared with 14 per cent of young women.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo credit: Eden, Janine and Jim via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

New York's Jews Fear a Mamdani Win

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

For generations, the Harmonie Club has served as a haven for New York’s Jewish elites. Founded in 1852, the club has since 1905 occupied an elegant eight-story building at 4 East 60th Street, a townhouse with lovely painted ceilings and a handsome Victorian facade designed by Stanford White. The names of its most illustrious members — the Bloomingdales, the Guggenheims, Alfred Ochs, founder of the New York Times Company — are intimately connected with the history and character of New York. Whatever persecution Jewish people faced elsewhere in the world, here was a place they could thrive.

Just recently, however, its members have been feeling considerably less secure. Zohran Mamdani — a socialist, a Muslim and a fierce critic of Israel — is the city’s likely next mayor. His emergence is eliciting palpable concern among the club’s members. “We are being erased in our own city,” says Sam Abrams, club member and prominent political scientist. At the Harmonie, as in various less illustrious Jewish institutions, the talk is of rising antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and an increased feeling that the city is turning against its Jewish communities. Elliot Cosgrove, rabbi at the generally liberal Park Avenue synagogue on the Upper East Side, sees Mamdani as a lethal threat. “If there’s a celebration of Israel and 10,000 people show up, will they be safe under Mamdani?”

New York’s Jews have suffered periods of exclusion, as they have elsewhere. Indeed, that’s one reason why the Harmonie was founded in the first place: Jews were largely unwelcome at the immaculately WASPish Union Club. But never before has New York had a mayor who is so apparently anti-Zionist; who has accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid”; who has defended the phrase “Globalise the Intifada”; and who has appeared to celebrate terrorists and their supporters. All this in a city that, for most of the 20th century, hosted the largest Jewish community in world history.

Not that New York has always been welcoming to Jews. The first to arrive came in 1654, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. They were a cause of consternation for Dutch colonial administrator of the time, Peter Stuyvesant, but the refugees had enough connections in Holland to force him into allowing them to stay. The first synagogue rose in 1682. The American Revolution brought full citizenship, while through the 19th century, New York welcomed thousands of largely German-speaking Jews: it’s no accident that the Harmonie was originally called Gesellschaft Harmonie. By the American Civil War, the city was home to 150,000 Jews, yet the largest influx came around 1900, when over two million Jewish migrants, including my own grandparents, arrived from Eastern Europe.

Having travelled the filth and stench of steerage class, these immigrants did much to shape the 20th-century city. It is frankly hard to imagine a successful, prosperous New York without Jews — just as it is hard to imagine New York culture without Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow; George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein; Barbra Streisand and Stephen Sondheim; Stan Lee and Diane Arbus; Woody Allen and Mel Brooks; the Beastie Boys and Lou Reed; Fran Leibovitz and Lena Dunham. Jews are critical players in the philanthropic structures of the city, from the Metropolitan Opera to the Philharmonic to the New York Historical Society near Central Park. They have been prominent among the big donors to the city’s great universities, notably NYU and Columbia.

It was New York’s Jews who, for better or worse, founded Goldman Sachs and the Lehman Brothers, and the modern mafia too. “In New York,” suggests Yeshiva University historian Jeffrey Gurock, “you could feel like the whole world was Jewish.” Even on the streets, the Jewish heritage persists: besides selling falafel and kebabs, the ubiquitous halal vendors also hawk knishes and kosher hot dogs. The essayist Milton Klonsky was only half joking when he called the Big Apple the “Ghetto of Eden”.

But New York’s Jewish character has been waning for decades. In 1950, the city was home to 40% of America’s Jews. Now, it represents well less than 15%. When I was growing up in the late Fifties, New York had some two million Jewish inhabitants; today the population is slightly less than half that. Much of that population headed to the suburbs through the Sixties and Seventies, an era of marked urban decline in New York as elsewhere.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo credit: Jörg Schubert via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The New York Line: Patience as the New Status Symbol

Samuel J Abrams — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 20:18:38 -0400

In a city that prides itself on speed, New York’s latest trend is all about slowing down. Lines now snake outside the hottest restaurants in Manhattan - Ha’s Snack Bar on Broome Street, Kiki’s on Division, Breakfast by Salt’s Cure in the West Village - filled with diners who could eat anywhere but choose to stand in the rain for hours. The New York Post recently reported that teenagers are crossing state lines for pancakes, professionals are camping outside bistros for pho-inspired soup, and parents from Italy and Connecticut are waiting shoulder to shoulder with their kids just to be part of the scene. In a culture obsessed with convenience, this fixation on delay seems paradoxical. Yet it may reveal something deeper about where post-pandemic urban life, and American social life more broadly, may be heading.

On the surface, this is about status. To wait at the right place signals taste, knowledge, and stamina. As longtime New York food writer Andrea Strong explained, restaurants have become stages for social ranking. The line itself is a badge of belonging. Sociologist Erving Goffman would recognize the performance: the queue has become a form of public theater, where patience stands in for exclusivity and endurance signals cultural capital. The most prestigious thing about dinner is no longer the dish, it is the evidence that you earned it.

But that explanation only goes so far. In a strange way, these lines are restoring something that New York - and much of the country - has lost: a sense of shared experience in real space and time. After years of isolation and digital substitution, people crave friction and proximity. Standing together, waiting together, offers a fleeting reminder that life is not all about algorithmic efficiency. The sidewalk line – like summer blockbuster movies during my teenage years of the 1990s - is now a small civic arena. It has become a space where strangers exchange glances, chat about the menu, and exist for a moment in the same rhythm. It may be performative, but it’s also real, shared, and commonly understood and represents authentic collective experiences.

This is not new to New York. Katz’s Deli has had lines for decades; so have Gray’s Papaya and Di Fara Pizza. What’s changed is the meaning of the wait. In the post-pandemic era, the line has become an act of participation rather than an inconvenience. People now see standing in public as part of the experience, not just the prelude to it. The anticipation itself becomes valuable. As one diner told the Post, “There’s something romantic about being crammed elbow-to-elbow in a tiny space. We spend so much time isolated; being human-to-human is lovely.”

Psychologists note that scarcity plays a role. When reservations vanish in seconds, standing in line restores a sense of agency. Waiting outside a restaurant feels democratic - you earn access through patience, not privilege. It also satisfies a subtle emotional hunger. As psychologist Deborah Vinall told the Post, people associate long waits with exclusivity and specialness, and equate that difficulty with value. It’s easy to sneer at that as consumer vanity, but it’s also an expression of the human desire to belong to something meaningful, however fleeting.

The deeper irony is that these lines emerge in a society built to eliminate them. Technology promises to deliver everything instantly, but that speed has stripped life of texture. The line offers the opposite: inefficiency as intimacy. For a city that once bragged about its impatience, New York is quietly learning to linger again. People are rediscovering the small pleasure of waiting: of earning an experience, of talking with strangers, of inhabiting the city’s rhythms rather than bypassing them.

That, in turn, says something about our civic recovery. When so much of public life has turned antagonistic or virtual, the humble act of waiting - of surrendering time to others - takes on new meaning. There is a thin line between performance and community, and New Yorkers are walking it in real time. What looks like vanity may in fact be a search for connection, an attempt to feel human again in a city that never stops moving.

The critic might call this another symptom of influencer culture, and in part, that’s true. But there’s also an undercurrent of sincerity here; a recognition that the shared moment, even when curated, still matters. Sometimes the new thing turns out to be something very old: standing together, waiting for something worth having. In a city that measures itself in minutes, the rediscovery of patience might be more than a fad. It might be a small sign that even in our hyper-individual, digitized age, people still long for shared presence, for the slow, collective rituals that remind us we are not alone. The meal, when it finally arrives, may be the least important part.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Juan Monroy, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Pause in the Rush: Rediscovering the Majesty of New York Through Mikko Takkunen's Lens

Samuel J Abrams — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

New York rarely stops moving. The rhythm of the subway, the honk of impatient horns, the relentless press of footsteps on concrete - the city demands motion. Most of us move through it in a blur, our attention fixed on the next destination, the next notification, the next task.

The result is a quiet tragedy: we stop seeing the city. Bridges, parks, ferries, squares, and many special spaces of gathering - the very things that knit our civic life together - become mere backdrops to our private routines. We rush past what was built for us and what we must care for.

That's why Mikko Takkunen's New York photo series feels like a revelation. The Finnish photographer and New York Times photo editor brings to the city the same eye that captured Hong Kong's hidden poetry. His images slow the city down. They strip away noise and distraction, showing New York not as a blur but as a series of deliberate, astonishing human creations. In doing so, they remind us that attention is the first act of stewardship.

We live at a time when images are everywhere- scrolling endlessly across our screens, popping up in our feeds, flashing past in seconds. We are bombarded with pictures designed to provoke or sell, but rarely to deepen. In this context, Takkunen's work feels almost radical. His photographs don't demand a quick reaction. They demand a pause. They ask us to look carefully, to ponder, to reassess what we think we know about the spaces we inhabit.

As philosopher Matthew Crawford argues in The World Beyond Your Head, attention is a form of agency. What we choose to notice shapes what we value, and what we value ultimately shapes our democracy. When we fail to notice our shared surroundings, when our eyes are perpetually turned inward or downward, we begin to lose the habits of care that civic life requires.

Takkunen's photographs push back against that erosion. They reawaken our capacity to see.

The Bridge as a Constellation

The Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, known to most as the 59th Street Bridge, opened in 1909. It is an essential artery, carrying thousands of people and millions of stories every day. Its purpose is purely practical: to move bodies and goods between Manhattan and Queens. Over time, it has faded into the background, a piece of infrastructure so familiar that it becomes invisible.

For me, the bridge has always been more silhouette than structure. I've never walked it. I've ridden my bike across it, passed beneath it countless times on the FDR, glimpsed its towers while crossing in a cab, felt its presence without really seeing it. It has been a backdrop, not a subject—useful, dependable, helping me arrive at a particular destination, but rarely noticed.

Takkunen changes that.

In one of his most haunting photographs, the bridge all but disappears. The entire field is black: no river, no sky, no surrounding city. Out of that darkness, a thin thread of white lights traces the suspension cables, fragile and precise. At the top of each tower, a single red beacon flashes softly, guiding aircraft overhead.

And that's all. The steel, the stone, the massive physical weight of the bridge—gone.

What remains is pure outline, a constellation drawn by human hands. It is at once functional and transcendent. In Takkunen's frame, the bridge becomes a floating idea, a quiet testament to human ingenuity. It reveals what I have missed in my own motion: that even the most practical structures can hold beauty and wonder, if only we stop to see them.

This is more than an aesthetic insight. As urbanist Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the physical design of a city shapes its social life. Bridges, parks, sidewalks, these are not just structures; they are stages for civic interaction. When we stop noticing them, we begin to neglect the relationships and responsibilities they sustain.

Takkunen's image of the Queensboro is a reminder that infrastructure is not neutral. It carries the weight of collective history and shared purpose and a city's ambition, poise, and vision. To see it is to begin to care for it.

Central Park and the Towers

Central Park tells a different story. It was never meant to fade into the background. Conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the mid-19th century, it was a radical civic experiment: a green commons carved out of urban chaos, open to all, free of charge, and designed to foster what Olmsted called "unconscious recreation."

When you stand in the park and look south, you see another kind of human ambition: the row of ultra-slender towers along 57th Street, the so-called "Billionaires' Row." These needle-like skyscrapers seem almost impossible, rising so high they appear to pierce the clouds. They are feats of engineering and symbols of global capital, inspiring both awe and unease.

In many ways, they are the anti-Olmsted: private wealth manifested in public view.
Takkunen's images capture this tension. In his photographs, the towers shimmer like glass blades while the park below sprawls organic and irregular. The juxtaposition is striking: the deliberate geometry of human construction set against the natural forms of trees, rocks, and rolling lawns.

Looking at these images, I am reminded of Robert Putnam's work on social capital. In Bowling Alone, Putnam argues that shared public spaces and institutions are essential for building trust across differences. Central Park was designed for precisely this purpose. The towers, by contrast, symbolize a kind of vertical segregation, spaces that only a few will ever enter, looming over a park that belongs to everyone.

Takkunen doesn't moralize. He doesn't need to. His photographs let the viewer sit with the tension: nature and ambition, public and private, the city we inherited and the city we are still building.

The Ferry and Rediscovering Wonder

One of Takkunen's photographs shows an East River Ferry gliding across dark water, an outline of passengers in tow, the city's lights scattered behind it like reflections on glass.

I take that ferry regularly. Most days, I barely look up and take even a moment to ponder the environment around me. My attention is on the tasks of the day ahead, but rarely on the river beneath my feet, the skyline around me, or even the color of the sky.
My son sees it differently.

When he rides the ferry, he runs straight to the rail, his face lit by the glow of the city. He leans into the wind, breathes in the salt air, and watches the towers and bridges slip past as if they were miracles. For him, every crossing is an adventure, a moment of pure discovery and wonder.

When I saw Takkunen's photograph, it stopped me cold. It captured my son's experience, not mine- the magic I'd forgotten. Through his lens, the ferry became more than transit. It was a reminder that this city is not just a place to move through, but a place to marvel at and be inspired by.

The Power of Photography in an Age of Overload

Photography has a power that words alone cannot match. It can make us pause, reconsider, and see the world anew. This is especially valuable now, in an age of relentless digital saturation.

Social media bombards us with images designed to shock or sell. As media critic Neil Postman warned decades ago, when everything becomes entertainment, we risk losing our ability to think seriously about what we see. Today, as Zeynep Tufekci has argued, our feeds are flooded with visual noise: outrage, envy, distraction, endless stimulation.

Most of these images pass through us without leaving a trace. They are consumed and discarded in seconds, forgotten almost as quickly as they appear.

Takkunen's work offers the opposite. His photographs are not quick hits of dopamine. They are sustained invitations to ponder. They slow our perception. They train us to look again at the world around us, to notice its textures, its patterns, its moral weight.

As Matthew Crawford writes, attention is the foundation of freedom. To see clearly is to choose freely. By helping us see, Takkunen helps us reclaim a measure of agency in a culture that often seeks to hijack it.

Seeing as Civic Duty

This is not just an aesthetic gift. It's a civic one.

When we stop noticing the city, we stop caring for it. A bridge becomes "just a bridge." A park becomes "just a park." A ferry becomes "just a ride." But these things are not inevitable. They exist because generations before us built them, maintained them, and believed they were worth the effort. They endure because we choose to preserve them.

Edmund Burke famously argued that society is a partnership between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born. Our public spaces embody that partnership. The Queensboro Bridge was built by people long gone, for the sake of people not yet born. Central Park was imagined as a democratic experiment to serve generations who had not yet arrived. Even the ferry routes we take for granted are the result of choices made decades ago about what kind of city we wanted to be.

My son's wonder is natural. Mine must be chosen.

If we want to pass on a city worthy of him, we must teach him - and ourselves - to pause, to notice, to appreciate. Seeing is the first step toward belonging. Belonging is the first step toward stewardship.

As Yuval Levin, my colleague at AEI, often reminds us, institutions thrive when we recognize them not as platforms for personal expression but as frameworks of shared responsibility. The same is true of the city itself. It is not a stage set for our individual performances. It is a common inheritance, and its survival depends on our willingness to see and to serve.

A Call to Look Again

The next time I pass beneath the Queensboro, glance south from Central Park, or step aboard the ferry, I will try to see as Takkunen sees and pause, if only for a moment, to let this remarkable built world move me. For when we lose sight of what we’ve created, we risk losing it altogether.

Photography alone cannot save a city. But it can remind us why cities matter. It can reveal how beauty and function, past and future, private ambition and public good are bound together in the places we share.

In a culture of constant motion and shallow seeing, that reminder becomes a quiet act of resistance and an essential one. By looking closely, we not only rediscover our surroundings, we remember that cities are living communities, held together by care and attention. Past generations built with this sense of stewardship, and it falls to us to do the same: to see clearly, build wisely, and protect what we’ve been entrusted to preserve.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: 59th Street Bridge, aka The Queensboro Bridge by Fraser Mummery via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Rauschenberg’s New York and the Problem of Seeing Only Surfaces

Samuel J Abrams — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

New York has always been a city of images. From the iconic skyline to the endless stream of photos on Instagram, what we see of the city often stands apart from what it truly is. In our digital age, this divide has only deepened. Much of New York today is curated and consumed as surface - restaurants staged for TikTok, neighborhoods branded like products, moments captured and filtered rather than lived. The regular sharing of photos in DUMBO of the Manhattan Bridge framed by old warehouses and a cobblestone street exemplifies this trend.

This present, mediated, and distorted version of New York came to mind as I walked through the Museum of the City of New York’s new exhibition, Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World. The show celebrates one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century, best known for collapsing the boundaries between art and everyday life. Rauschenberg famously sought to bring the “real world” into his work, incorporating humble materials, discarded objects, and photographs into his paintings and sculptures.

The exhibition, part of the Rauschenberg Centennial, is organized in three sections: Early Photographs, In + Out City Limits, and Photography in Painting. The museum describes Rauschenberg’s vision as one of capturing “the signs and symbols of human culture, even in humble or discarded remnants of the city.” It is an evocative framing and a revealing one.

For all the talk of “the real world,” what struck me most was its absence. Rauschenberg’s New York is a city of surfaces. His camera captures objects and patterns with undeniable skill, but the people who inhabit those spaces are missing. In photograph after photograph, we see signs but not speech, architecture but not civic purpose, remnants but not renewal.

Fragments Without Wholes

The first section of the show features Rauschenberg’s early experiments as a student at Black Mountain College, where he explored framing, light and shadow, and the flattening of the picture plane.” These images are witty and visually striking.

One particularly memorable photograph captures a classical statue of Venus surrounded by discount-store signage, kitsch figurines, and a small sign reading “SALE.” The juxtaposition of timeless beauty with disposable consumer culture is funny, biting, and clever. Another image focuses on a pile of framed paintings stacked haphazardly in a shop window, reducing them to shapes and reflections rather than works of art.

These photographs anticipate the irony-saturated world we live in now, where the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, collide endlessly online. Rauschenberg saw decades before Instagram how easily culture could be fragmented and remixed.

But this very strength is also a limitation. These early works excel at noticing surfaces, yet they offer little sense of what lies beneath. They revel in ambiguity without guiding us toward understanding. The viewer is left to appreciate the clash of images, but not the lives and communities those images represent.

The Urban Survey

The exhibition’s centerpiece, In + Out City Limits, extends this approach to the entire city. Created between 1979 and 1981, the series documents the physical remnants of New York at a time of profound upheaval. These photographs are filled with weathered storefronts, broken signage, and architectural fragments.

One image depicts the façade of a diner. Its neon sign is half-broken, the letters dark, while shuttered metal grates seal off the entrance. Below, trash bags are piled neatly on the curb. The composition is beautiful in its starkness; the textures of brick, metal, and plastic rendered almost abstract.

Another photograph zooms in on the stately columns of a civic building near Astor Place. The image emphasizes symmetry and shadow, stripping away context until the institution becomes pure pattern.

These works are striking, but they are also unsettling. They document a city in decline without showing the people living through it. We do not meet the workers who once staffed that diner, the congregants who gathered in that civic hall, or the neighborhood residents navigating decay and renewal. The photographs turn lived experience into aesthetic object.
This aestheticization of decline mirrors a broader cultural mood. In late-1970s New York, economic crisis and social unrest were visible on every block. By focusing on remnants rather than relationships, Rauschenberg recorded the city’s struggles but offered no vision for its renewal.

From Art to Algorithm

The final section of the exhibition shows how Rauschenberg combined his photographs with painting and other media, creating complex, layered works. By reversing, resizing, and juxtaposing images, he demonstrated the mutability of meaning itself. A single photograph could be endlessly recontextualized and transformed.

In the 1960s and 1970s, this was radical. Today, it feels prophetic. We now live in a world where every image can be manipulated, cropped, filtered, and recirculated at lightning speed. What was once avant-garde has become our daily experience.

Our phones are full of Rauschenbergian collages: fragments of news, entertainment, advertising, and personal updates competing for attention. This endless remixing has consequences. When everything is provisional and ironic, it becomes harder to sustain shared narratives. Civic life depends on more than fragments. It requires institutions, rituals, and ideals that endure.

This is where Rauschenberg’s vision, for all its brilliance, falters. By privileging surface over substance, his art reflects a cultural tendency to treat cities and the people within them as aesthetic material rather than moral and civic realities.

The Civic Counterpoint

Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economist and urbanist, has written in Triumph of the City that the strength that comes from human interaction is the very magic of cities. My own work has echoed and confirmed this sentiment finding that cities thrive when they are built on dense networks of institutions: families, faith communities, schools, local businesses, civic associations. These are the places where trust is built and responsibility learned.

When these institutions are weak, cities become brittle. The physical landscape may remain, but the human connections that give it meaning erode. A diner is not just a building; it is a gathering place. A civic hall is not merely columns and stone; it is a stage for collective decision-making and celebration.

Rauschenberg’s photographs show us what happens when those connections fray. His images are full of remnants and signs, but the communities they once served are absent. This is not just an artistic choice. It is a reflection of a real civic crisis; a crisis that continues today.

New York’s Present Tense

These questions are not abstract. In New York today, battles over public space are really battles over belonging. Debates about housing policy, transit, and policing are at their core debates about how we share the city and how we see one another.

Walk through neighborhoods from Queens to the Bronx and you’ll see scenes that could be straight out of In + Out City Limits: vacant storefronts, faded signage, striking juxtapositions of old and new. These surfaces tell part of the story. But the real challenge lies in the invisible: the strength or weakness of the relationships beneath them.

Consider the fight over a local park. To some, it is simply a space to be programmed or redeveloped. To others, it is a living institution, shaped by years of block parties, youth sports, and informal gatherings. The policy debate is about zoning and funding. The civic debate is about belonging and meaning.

Rauschenberg’s art helps us see the fragments. Our task is to connect them into a whole.

A Call to Rebuild

The exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York is a fitting tribute to Rauschenberg’s creativity and influence. But it is also, unintentionally, a mirror of our current predicament. We live amid surfaces - online and offline - that can dazzle but also distract.

If we are to renew our cities, we must move beyond surfaces. That means investing not only in infrastructure and development but in the relationships and institutions that make physical spaces matter. It means strengthening families, supporting local businesses, empowering community organizations, and fostering civic education.

Rauschenberg captured the fragments of a city. It is up to us to assemble them into a living whole. A thriving New York does not need more curated images. It needs the messy, vital work of neighbors meeting, building, and belonging.

As I left the exhibition and stepped back into the streets, I saw many of the same elements Rauschenberg photographed decades ago: broken signs, fading paint, architectural details caught in late afternoon light. But I also saw people: families walking home from school, small business owners sweeping sidewalks, friends gathered on stoops.

The real world is not just what we see. It is what we build, together

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Long Island City: When Density Becomes a Community

Samuel J Abrams — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 20:28:38 -0400

A decade ago, Long Island City was a cautionary tale. Glass towers shot up along the East River, promising a glittering new skyline, but the streets below were eerily empty. Walking through Court Square felt less like exploring a neighborhood and more like navigating a sterile construction site. There were no bookstores, no bagel shops, no places where neighbors might casually bump into each other. It was a place you passed through, not a place you belonged to.

Today, those same streets hum with life. On a recent Thursday morning, I watched a line of forty people snake down Jackson Avenue outside Utopia Bagels, a beloved Queens institution that opened its LIC location this spring. Next door, a small independent bookstore hosted a children's story hour. Across the street, young professionals took swings at Five Iron Golf's simulators while museum-goers spilled out of MoMA PS1, animatedly discussing the art they'd just seen. These weren't just busy shops and crowded sidewalks—they were signs of civic vitality, evidence that a once-sterile development had matured into a real neighborhood.

For years, Long Island City embodied the worst fears of modern urban development: density without soul, rapid growth measured in raw numbers rather than lived experience. Planners focused on building vertically - towers, unit counts, floor-area ratios - without giving much thought to what life at street level would feel like. By 2017, LIC had more new housing than any other neighborhood in New York City. The population surged from roughly 35,000 to 63,000 between 2010 and 2023, an astonishing 78 percent increase in just over a decade. Yet for all those new residents, there was little sense of community. The 7 train platforms at Court Square became dangerously overcrowded. Streets designed for trucks were unsafe and unpleasant for pedestrians. At night, you could see lights glowing in hundreds of windows, proof that people lived there. By day, the sidewalks were eerily empty. The towers housed thousands of people, but they lived side by side without truly sharing a neighborhood. It was proximity without connection; a physical closeness that lacked the civic fabric to turn residents into a community. Local institutions and everyday relationships give density its meaning. Without them, a place is just buildings and bodies, not a functioning neighborhood.

That began to change slowly, and then all at once. Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economist, has written argued many times in books like the Triumph of the City that the strength that comes from human interaction is the magic of cities. But that magic doesn't appear automatically. It has to be cultivated, nurtured through planning, infrastructure, and cultural choices. In recent years, three shifts in particular transformed LIC's civic ecosystem and made street-level life not only possible but vibrant.

First, transit reliability improved. By mid-2025, weekday subway on-time performance reached 83.7 percent, a marked improvement over pre-pandemic levels. Buses now exceed 95 percent reliability, and ridership citywide is up 10 percent from last year. These may seem like dry statistics, but they translate directly into lived experience. Without dependable public transit, density simply means congestion and frustration. With it, streets are freed from parking battles and cars, allowing them to function as public spaces rather than storage facilities.

Second, public parks became the civic living rooms of the neighborhood. The completion of Hunter's Point South Waterfront Park in 2018 turned eleven acres of industrial wasteland into a vibrant communal space where families picnic, kids play, and strangers become neighbors. Next year, The Baseline will add another acre beneath the bridge ramps, featuring art installations, play areas, and dog runs. Parks are not decorative extras. They are essential institutions, as vital to the health of a city as sewers or power lines. The fact of the matter is that shared public spaces build trust and social capital by creating opportunities for repeated, informal interactions- the often unseen but very strong glue of community life.

Finally, the ground floors of buildings came alive. Consider Sven, a 67-story tower at Queens Plaza. Its nearly 1,000 units might have been just another anonymous vertical stack of apartments, but its design prioritized the street level. Restaurants, retail shops, and the restored Clock Tower now line the sidewalk. Jane Jacobs famously wrote about the importance of "eyes on the street," and she was right: every open storefront adds safety, interest, and reasons to linger rather than rush home behind locked doors.

These changes didn't just alter the feel of the neighborhood; they altered its trajectory. Nowhere was this clearer than in the saga of Amazon's abandoned HQ2 plan. When Amazon announced in February 2019 that it was canceling its massive LIC campus after fierce local opposition, Governor Andrew Cuomo called it "the greatest tragedy" of his tenure. Many feared the neighborhood would stall without the tech giant's investment. But the opposite happened. Freed from the gravitational pull of one dominant employer, growth diversified. Small businesses, mid-sized firms, and local entrepreneurs filled the void. By the end of 2019, Modern Spaces reported selling 160 more units in six months than in all of 2018. Commercial interest didn't vanish; t multiplied.

This was an important lesson. Cities do not need a single corporate savior. They thrive when thousands of smaller actors make investments and take risks. Community strength comes from pluralism and diversity of contributors, not top-down dominance. The Amazon chapter taught LIC that resilience is built from the bottom up.

The arrival of Utopia Bagels this May captured this spirit perfectly. On opening day, the line for free bagels stretched down the block. People weren't just there for food - they were there for belonging. MoMA PS1 continues to draw over 200,000 visitors annually, and its Warm Up summer series fills the streets with music and conversation. Even Five Iron Golf, with its seven simulators, has become an unlikely gathering spot where neighbors meet for drinks and casual play. These institutions - whether cultural, culinary, or recreational - are more than amenities. They are the "third places" sociologist Ray Oldenburg identified as vital for civic life. They create the sidewalk ballet Jacobs celebrated, the choreography of daily routines that builds trust and connection.

But this success brings new challenges. Market-rate rents at Sven now range from $3,700 to $7,800 a month OneLIC rezoning could add 14,700 new units, with 4,300 designated as "affordable,"but in practice "affordable" often means out of reach for teachers, artists, and service workers. If working- and middle-class families are priced out, LIC risks becoming a monoculture of affluence; a vibrant stage set with no diversity behind the scenes. Infrastructure is also straining under the weight of rapid growth. Schools are overcrowded. The local police precinct was never designed to serve so many residents. Even the sewer system struggles to keep up. And some longtime residents feel displaced, not just physically but culturally, as the pace of change accelerates. These are not side issues. They are existential questions about what kind of community LIC will ultimately become.

For other cities grappling with similar pressures, LIC's evolution offers practical lessons. Link housing to reliable transit so density doesn't just create gridlock. Treat public space as essential infrastructure rather than an afterthought. Support local businesses and cultural anchors that give neighborhoods authenticity and character. Require active, human-scale design at street level and build housing that genuinely includes people across the economic spectrum. None of these ideas are radical. They were once the common sense of American city building. Somewhere along the way, we forgot them.

Last week, I sat in one of LIC's new pocket parks, watching children chase each other while parents chatted on benches. A street musician strummed his guitar as cyclists coasted past on a protected bike lane. Just a few years ago, this exact spot was a fenced-off construction site filled with rusting equipment. For a long time, I walked these streets with frustration, seeing only what was missing. Today, I walk them with hope and excitement, continually discovering new spaces and places that remind me how vibrant urban life can be when density is shaped by vision and care.

The Manhattan skyline still looms to the west, but LIC no longer feels like just another bedroom for Manhattan workers. It has its own rhythms, its own character, its own civic life. We've proven that density isn't destiny. With patience, planning, and the kind of institutional strength that comes from diverse stakeholders working together - local businesses, cultural organizations, and resident groups; even the most barren landscape can become home. Done right, density and community are not enemies, they are partners. LIC shows what is possible when a city remembers that it is building not just towers but places where life can flourish.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Graph: Joe Mabel Flickr, under CC 3.0 License.

Mamdani Doesn’t Care about CO2 Emissions

Randal OToole — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

In answer to critics of his proposal for free bus transit, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani posted the video below pointing out that the Staten Island Ferry is free. “Who said public transit can’t be free?” he asks.

Yet it isn’t really free for three reasons. First, taxpayers spent $154 million operating it in 2023 (plus $19 million on capital replacement costs to keep it running), which worked out to well over $10 per trip. In 2019, before the pandemic, ridership was higher but it cost more than $7 per trips.

That money had to come from somewhere. Mamdani apparently thinks he can tax the 1 percent highest-income people in New York City to pay for all his dreams, but they are already paying nearly half the taxes collected by the city. Increases in taxes will lead to some of them moving out, which will probably reduce total tax collections.

Second, the reason why it is free to users is that nearly all of the riders are expected to transfer to some other form of transit at one or both ends. In 1997, New York City implemented a Metrocard system to pay for transit rides, allowing users to pay one fare to ride, say, a bus and then connect to a subway. Rather than spend a lot of money installing card readers for the Staten Island Ferry that (since most riders would continue on a subway or other transit line) wouldn’t generate much net additional income, the city decided to let passengers ride the ferry for free.

While that seemed like a sensible decision at the time, it is due to such decisions that the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has driven itself so heavily into debt and expects to run $1 billion to $2 billion deficits each year for the foreseeable future. Mamdani proposes to reduce fares on the buses that connect to the ferry to zero, thus eliminating the reason why it made sense to make the ferry free in the first place.

The third reason why it isn’t free is the environmental cost. Ferries are notorious energy hogs. Operating the ferry in 2023 consumed 8,800 British thermal units (BTUs) of fuel and emitted 647 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile (up from 4,962 and 363 in 2019). The 2023 numbers are well over twice the amounts used and emitted per passenger-mile by the average light truck and three times the emissions of the average car and even the 2019 numbers are worse than an SUV. Apparently, carbon dioxide emissions are only a problem if they come from automobiles, not from expensive substitutes for those autos.

People are debating whether to call Mamdani a communist, Marxist, socialist, democratic socialist, or municipal socialist. That’s just semantics. Whatever you call him, it is clear that he doesn’t understand the relationship between revenues and costs or why prices make markets into a feedback system that works for most goods and services, including grocery stores and transportation. Judging from his videos, he seems like a nice guy that anyone would be happy to host for dinner, but not someone who should be put in charge of a major portion of the nation’s economy.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: Staten Island Ferry, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.