All articles by this author
September 4, 2026
New York as shitty Vienna?
We have public housing, but it has never been as well designed, built, or maintained. We have limited-equity co-ops built by limited-dividend companies, but we built far fewer of them, and we allowed some to go private. We have inclusionary zoning, but whereas their model requires two-thirds of the development to be social housing, ours only demands that one-third be targeted to tenants under a certain household income.
What achievements, if any, will define Eric Adams’s legacy?
Adams will be remembered for his petty corruption, his self-mythologizing, and his ignominious dealmaking with the Trump White House; but he should also be remembered as the mayor who got New Yorkers to stop tossing giant bags of trash onto city sidewalks as if there were no alternative. You can laugh at a New York mayor who walks into a press conference wheeling out a trash can, beaming as if he invented the contraption, while “Empire State of Mind” blares triumphantly in the background. But truly, Adams’s proclaimed “trash revolution” represented a tremendous advance over abysmal past practice.
October 25, 2024
Donald Trump, prophet of neoliberalism
The Grand Hyatt may have been achieved through blackmail, but once Trump and his enablers set the precedent, it became the paradigm still practiced in this city and many others. In the 1970s cities needed money, and rather than pursuing revenue by taxing the rich, many mayors—sometimes grudgingly, sometimes enthusiastically—embraced the idea that it would be better not to tax them outright, and instead inaugurate a race to the bottom between cities for who could create the climate most friendly to the rich (and, almost by definition, most hostile to the poor).
July 21, 2023
What else was going on in the city, or the world, that might have enabled a figure like Moses to do what he did for decades?
Pinning the blame on Moses, or celebrating Jacobs, or vice versa is a way out of a big question that neither the political left or right in the United States has many clear answers to: how to resolve the tension between the benefits and pitfalls of large-scale planning and local control.
