Mamdani Can't Ruin New York

WHEN I FIRST took a road trip to New York as a young teen, I was astonished by the industrial landscape as we neared the city on the New Jersey Turnpike. “Why would they put all this dirty stuff so close to the city?” I asked my parents. As a D.C. kid, it had never occurred to me to think about what cities were actually for. In Washington, we mostly make rules and big marble monuments.

- Katherine Mangu-Ward

That trip was the first time I saw a city driven by commerce and art rather than political power. In the mid-1990s, New York was well past its industrial and shipping heyday, but the signs were still all around. The city was grittier than it would soon be—we were right on the cusp of the major decline in crime that would sweep through nearly all American cities. It was so gritty, in fact, that my parents forbade me from applying to college in New York. They thought the city was too pricey and dangerous, even though they loved it.

Today, the city is much richer and fussier than it was. Parents are still fretting about its dangers and expense. Mayors come and go—remember when Rudy Giuliani was “America’s mayor”?—and New York remains fundamentally itself.

Zohran Mamdani won the 2025 mayoral election on a platform that included fare-free buses, city-owned grocery stores, and a rent freeze for rent-stabilized units, plus equity-centered education policy and an oddly status-quo policing plan for a onetime defunder/abolitionist. As this issue of Reason unpacks, there are many reasons to fear such policies will be ineffective at best and deeply counterproductive at worst. And as my parents’ diktat shows, when governance and policy get bad enough, that can scare off potential residents and visitors alike.

But a single mayor can’t ruin New York City, because New York City is not reducible to policy choices.