New York City residents have thrown in the towel. Gotham’s quality of life is plunging, but only 11% of registered voters turned out in last Tuesday’s local election. Nearly all incumbent members of the New York City Council skated to reelection.
New Yorkers are voting with their feet, abandoning the city instead of going to the polls to demand new leadership. Amazingly, more New Yorkers have fled the city since 2020 than turned out on Election Day.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The Big Apple could be a safe, thriving place to live. But our politicians have no vision of a better future, no priorities.
Last year, Mayor Eric Adams announced a plan, “Rebuild, Renew, Reinvent: A Blueprint for New York City’s Economic Recovery,” which includes 70 initiatives. Seventy priorities mean no priorities at all. It proposes a “hub for digital game development” and a “one-of-a-kind cultural district on Governors Island.” These are hardly essentials when the city is headed off a fiscal cliff.
Later last year, Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul rolled out another “Roadmap for Future” of the city. Forty more initiatives. Blah, blah, blah.
Here’s a four-point agenda to turn New York around:
No. 1: Deter freeloading migrants from coming to New York. Adams has warned that the huge and continuing influx of migrants seeking shelter and services will “destroy” the city. City services for New Yorkers are being cut, including even fire protection and sanitation, to meet the expense.
That’s unacceptable. The city’s “right-to-shelter” legal obligation is a magnet. New York is the only city legally compelled to house all comers. That obligation originated more than 40 years ago, in a 1981 agreement between the city and homelessness advocates. All elected officials should back Adams in a legal fight to get it overturned. The city will continue to take care of its own, but not an unlimited number of newcomers.
In the meantime, future migrants should be housed in tents or barracks, not upscale hotel rooms many tourists can’t afford.
No. 2: Stop the city from descending into lawlessness. Shoplifting and subway crime are the major problems, not murders and rapes.
Shoplifting in NYC has surged 64% in the last four years, more than in any other city. In 2019, the New York state legislature changed the law, ensuring that even repeat shoplifters would never be incarcerated. In 2022, newly elected District Attorney Alvin Bragg vowed not to prosecute them. But the city’s law enforcement brass must figure out ways to make shoppers feel safer.
The subways are twice as dangerous as they were in 2019, on a per rider basis, according to Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute. Mentally ill homeless people terrorize riders without being removed, and then ultimately push someone onto the tracks or commit another serious crime. Social service teams and police must coordinate to remove these mentally ill homeless people and get them into treatment.
Improving public safety will help New York rebound. Foot traffic in the city’s business districts is down 33% from pre-lockdown levels. Office vacancies are 18%, the highest since the early 1990s.
The Big Apple ranks behind 18 other U.S. cities, including quiet Boston and remote Boise, Idaho, in future economic and real estate growth. Only Chicago, Detroit and San Francisco do worse.
No. 3: Cut taxes. New Yorkers pay the highest combined state and local tax burden in the nation. Businesses here are also getting taxed to death. A whopping 158 Wall Street firms have moved their headquarters since the end of 2019, fed up with crime and high taxes.
Hotels here are losing business because a 5.875% occupancy tax and stiff property taxes make rooms here more expensive than in other cities. New York can’t tax its way out of decline. It must cut taxes to rebound.
No. 4: Protect New York’s Jews. New York is home to 1.6 million adherents — the largest Jewish community of any city in the world. Attacks at The Cooper Union, on the Brooklyn Bridge and elsewhere make Jews wonder if they will be safe here. Police and prosecutors alike must act decisively to deter more attacks.
This agenda of four items is as different as night and day from the confusion and lack of focus sinking New York City.
The same overpromising, overspending and lack of prioritization is dooming Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other cities.
—
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey. To find out more about Betsy McCaughey and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM
You cannot save blue democrat cities full of people bent on their own self-destruction. You can only watch them pathologically destroy themselves in American democrat run cities, just like Hamas is bent on destroying themselves in Gaza. How does one prosper by loving his neighbor who only loves you as he actually hates himself? Failure breeds more failure and enables the hate, envy and blame to grow. Trying to relive the pain of people whose self-chosen comfort zone is pain and negative self-emulation, is a waste of time and human life force. Government rewarding people who continuously vote criminals into power who reflect the self-hating liberals whose comfort zone is failure, in order to avoid the very pain they inflict upon themselves, is like giving drug addicts free drugs and needles thinking the problem will get better. Better to sit back and let them feel their self-made pain, until it either awakens their instinct for correcting self-survival, or removes them from the paths of sane successful people who follow the light. Stop creating rights that do not exist, like a right to shelter for people who would rather live and even die on drugs in the street, than work in jobs that protect and display integrity filled lives that do not result in violence, robbery and street death of the socially created perpetrators and victims alike. No government that fails to protect the safety and property of its people deserves to exist, nor their leaders be allowed to walk free.
SO true. NY Was in decline, BEFORE this latest Mayor got in.. THEY VOTED FOR it, as they voted for him.
Democrat “Blue City Decline: How To Save New York And Other Cities”
#1!! STOP voting for the treasonous, destructive, unethical, immoral, woke, socialist Democrat Party to mislead and lie to you.
BUT are there enough conservatives still there, to OUT VOTE THE DEMS that still wanna VOTE FOR SOMEONE just because they have a D in front of their name??
Unfortunately i don’t think so.
Gotham’s quality of life is plunging, but only 11% of registered voters turned out in last Tuesday’s local election. Nearly all incumbent members of the New York City Council skated to reelection.
They get the gov they deserve. As an Ex NYer I know even if 100% turned out to vote they would still continue to vote for the destruction of the city.
AND then they wonder, WHY NO ONE is willing to spend ANY MORE OF OUR federal tax dollars, to SAVE them from their OWN stupidity.