“Start spreading the news.”

New York City is in crisis. Only the financial crisis of 1975, when the “wonderful town” could not pay its bills, borrow, or avoid default, is comparable. Yes, crime is lower than in the graffiti-tagged 1970s and 1980s, and there is no singular horror befalling the city like the 9/11 attacks, but this is very much an emergency.

The city’s mayor, Eric Adams, is under federal indictment for corruption. Its last two police commissioners are under criminal investigation. The veteran government executives Adams brought in to stabilize his administration have resigned in protest over his liaison dangéreuse with Donald Trump’s administration, which tried to rescue the first-term mayor by dropping federal charges. The judge reviewing the case may wisely use his powers to keep the prosecution going. New York Governor Kathy Hochul is not using her statutory powers to remove Adams, a fellow Democrat, which is probably the right call, but the city continues to founder.

All of this is taking place against a mayor who ran as a tough-on-crime, tough-on-police-abuse veteran of the NYPD. It hasn’t worked out that way. City taxpayers shelled out $206 million last year to settle suits alleging police misconduct—the most since 2018.

Fear is deeply unsettling the city’s 8 million residents, nowhere more so than in its subways, which are dangerous and inadequately policed.

Wanton boys push riders off subway platforms just for sport with virtual impunity. And that’s not the worst of it. A woman sleeping on a subway train was doused with a flammable liquid and immolated. (My Washington Monthly colleague, Nate Weisberg, recently chronicled crime, immigration, and Democratic woes in Gotham. See The Democratic Panic in New York, December 31, 2024.)

While newly appointed Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced that 2024 concluded with a 3 percent reduction in index crime categories of murder, robbery, burglary, grand larceny, and auto theft, New Yorkers have the increasing sense that the city is unsafe as subway riders nervously await trains with their backs to the wall.

Tisch, only the second woman to command the 34,000 officers in New York’s police department, is a technocrat, the scion of a super-rich family. (The same perch was a springboard for another police commissioner from a wealthy clan—Theodore Roosevelt.) She has performed impressively, shaking up the NYPD and reacting swiftly to combat corruption among top officers. The New York Post wants her to run for Mayor, but it’s not just Murdoch conservatives who hope she might be the white knight the city needs. The interest in her only exacerbates her already frayed relationship with Adams, who is determined to seek reelection.

The mayor, a former police officer who the NYPD had abused as a youth, was supposed to make the city feel safer and put cops on a better path. Instead, dangerously violent criminals are released on bail. To send them to Rikers Island is to condemn them to squalid conditions and an environment of abuse by sadistic guards. A federal judge found New York in contempt last November over conditions in its city jails, saying the city had placed incarcerated people in “unconstitutional danger” by failing to comply with 18 separate provisions of court orders on security, staffing, supervision, use of force and the safety of young detainees. The judge ordered a conference to fashion a proposed framework for a federal receivership. This move would oust the city of its control over one of the nation’s most prominent and most notorious jail systems.

Midtown Manhattan streets have been snarled in traffic. Lanes are blocked by bicycles or construction. Newly instituted congestion pricing, with its $9 toll, has, according to The New York Times, reduced congestion and bequeathed a gusher of revenue for the parched coffers of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

New York spent roughly $555 million on the tolling equipment and technology to launch the program. This investment covered the installation of cameras, an electronic E-Z Pass toll collection system, and license plate recognition technology.

In addition to this equipment cost, there were significant unquantified expenses related to planning, legal and environmental reviews, and system integration. The politicians claim the overall program is designed to manage traffic and generate substantial revenue (projected eventually at up to $1 billion per year) to fund critical transit improvements.

No one doubts that vehicular traffic congestion is terrible for New York’s economy and its environment. The question that remains is whether, in the long run, the program will work as designed.

A congestion charge was imposed in London in 2003, and its proponents argue it has been successful. Its critics contend it has only succeeded in moving congestion to the city’s outer areas as drivers duck the tax. Just try to drive into Central London some weekday morning from Heathrow Airport, and you might think the naysayers have a point. The tax is also regressive, impacting lower-income drivers more heavily since the fee constitutes a larger proportion of their income, although there are credits.

In its first month, the program generated $48.6 million in revenue, with a net operating revenue of $37.5 million after expenses. 

The funds are earmarked for mass transit improvements to enhance public transportation infrastructure.

Politicos differ over the effectiveness of congestion pricing. The program has effectively reduced traffic in midtown Manhattan. Since its implementation on January 5, 2025, it has led to a 7.5% decrease in vehicles entering the congestion zone, equating to approximately 43,000 fewer cars daily. This reduction has improved travel times, with some river crossings experiencing up to a 40 percent decrease in travel duration. 

Although, as the late Speaker Tip O’Neill quipped, “all politics is local,” King Trump has entered the fray, threatening to deny federal funding to New York unless the governor repeals the congestion tax. There is much to be said about congestion pricing and the pros and cons. But it should be a matter for Albany and City Hall to hash out. As Brandeis said, the localities are our “laboratories.”

The city’s malaise is exacerbated by midtown office vacancies in a financial district still reeling from COVID and a general sense that things aren’t working.

Historic landmark buildings in New York have been sheathed in scaffolding for over a decade. The city appears aesthetically mummified. An investigation disclosed that in Harlem, scaffolding has covered part of 409 Edgecombe Avenue since 2006; at 360 Central Park West on the Upper West Side, it’s been there since 2008 (The building owners claim it’s only been there for six years). Even the Department of Buildings’ Broadway office has its lingering scaffolding issue, with part of the building covered since 2008. Local Law Eleven, passed in the City Council as a giveaway to building trade unions, requires the City to inspect and have repointed building facades every five years, leading some property owners to keep scaffolding up to avoid the cost of taking it down and rebuilding it every few years. Insanity runs riot.

 A hotel room averages $301 thanks to inflation, the crackdown on Airbnb, and using hotels as migrant shelters have driven prices sky high.

The city has long been evolving into a place for the rich and poor. Much of the middle class has moved to the suburbs, accelerating those trends. Many of the rich, who supported the economy and the New York tax base, have become “Florida residents” like Trump to dodge the Big Apple’s tax burden.

Mayor Adams is up for reelection. The real action will be in the June Democratic primary. Adams says he is running again, although if he’s denied the Democratic nomination, he could run as an independent, and while such a win seems improbable, the city doesn’t always choose Democrats as mayors. Michael Bloomberg ran as a Democrat for his final term, but the first two were as a Republican and an Independent. Rudy Giuliani won two terms as a Republican, and John Lindsay won one mayoral term as a Republican, but after losing the Republican nomination in 1969, he ran as an independent and won anyway, becoming a Democrat in 1971. Adams seems crippled by scandal. He is polling at a dismal 9 percent, but who knows?

As in 2021, Adams has the support of the unions and many in the real estate crowd, but he’s been denied public funding because of his alleged ethics breaches. (See this piece in the Washington Monthly, The Intriguing Role Public Financing of Campaigns Played in the Eric Adams Indictments by Ciara Torres-Spillacy.)

Adams’s best-known opponent is the much-maligned Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as governor in 2022 amid charges of sexual harassment and misrepresenting COVID-19 death numbers. Cuomo, who has yet to declare, has the muscle and the brash personality to stand up to the special interest groups, and he won significant pre-endorsements from U.S. Representative Richie Torres this week and his former political rival Carl McCall. He is the leader of the pack, polling 35 percent of likely primary voters. We will see how well he does against Adams and the other candidates. We are in for a scorched earth campaign.

Two decades ago, in February 2005, when Michael Bloomberg was mayor, millions crowded into Central Park over two weeks to visit Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates, a sprawling public art installation of 7,503 saffron-hued gates waving in the city breezes. The memories of 9/11 were still fresh, the Freedom Tower nowhere near replacing the World Trade Center, but they were headier times, making the city’s current woes even more apparent.

I am reminded of Shelley’s “despair” over a shattered statue in a desolate desert, symbolizing the fall of a once great empire:

Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.