Mamdani understands neither economics nor New York
Why do the world’s poor make a beeline for New York City? It is now home to over 3 million immigrants, the largest influx coming from the Dominican Republic, China, Jamaica, Mexico, Guyana, Ecuador, Bangladesh, Haiti and India. How can these overwhelmingly poor new arrivals stay if no one can afford to live there?
Answer: They crowd into small apartments and work their tails off.
They’re largely there because there’s money to be made. Like it or not, rich people have the money and spend it in the city. That’s why the creative class also gravitates to New York. The rich can afford to patronize the theater and the arts.
Which brings us to mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his family. His father was a professor in Uganda and his mother a filmmaker. Both of Indian descent, they moved to New York, where his father became director of Columbia University’s Institute of African Studies. Columbia became a rich elite institution thanks to the wealthy New Yorkers who since the Gilded Age have bestowed the university with large gifts.
Zohran Mamdani lied on his college application to Columbia about being “Black or African American.” He thus took a spot intended for the Black descendants of slavery and Jim Crow. Perhaps the public City College of New York wasn’t good enough for him.
The Mamdanis were never your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. And Zohran was hardly the only privileged kid to accessorize with Socialist ideology. But modern Democratic Socialists in Europe would regard his views as naive. They are certainly foreign to the churn of the New York economy.
Take Mamdani’s idea of city-run grocery stores. They would compete with the bodegas now largely operated by Dominicans, Yemenis and other Middle Eastern immigrants. These little stores are the economic ladder on which generations of New Yorkers have climbed out of poverty and into the middle class. Their proprietors put in brutal hours, working harder than most any public employee would.
Mamdani, meanwhile, has never run a lemonade stand.
New York’s Social Democrats revere Sweden for its wide social safety net. “I don’t think we should have billionaires,” Mamdani said, perhaps unaware that Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the United States does. The rich in Sweden make the social welfare system possible. You can’t have one without the other.
Mamdani has plans to raise taxes on city residents making more than $1 million. Wealthy New Yorkers already pay some of the highest combined income taxes in the country.
The richest 1% of residents pay nearly 48% of all New York City personal income tax. That’s up from 40% in 2019. This doesn’t account for the property taxes on their co-ops, condos and brownstones. Nor the high sales tax on their luxury purchases and dining at the restaurants that employ immigrants, command of English not required.
Mamdani’s vow to raise taxes on “richer, whiter neighborhoods” is hardly a recruiting tool for willing taxpayers. None of the inhabitants needs a passport to lower their taxes by moving elsewhere.
Housing is very expensive, but Mamdani’s plan for extending rent control over a fraction of New York’s rentals, his among them, would discourage the building of new units. This is a problem of supply and demand. There are ways to ease the housing burden, but New York will always be an expensive address.
Without a doubt, the city is home to some stark contrasts between the rich and poor, but it also offers a conveyor belt between the two groups. Many who take the ride out of poverty leave the city for the suburbs.
That’s the way it’s always been. Mamdani understands neither economics nor New York City.
Are New York hospitals recruiting on Easter Island?
Photo: ThisEastSide
New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center can’t be knocked for quality of doctors, nurses or other medical providers. But its customer service borders on dismal.
First time I came to see a patient still in recovery after major surgery, the expressionless, charmless security officer at the visitor’s desk said “second floor” and nothing else. I was reminded of those stone heads on Easter Island but naively thought I had information enough. I found an elevator, which left me in a huge warren of long, poorly marked corridors, A, B, C, D and so on. I wandered around asking for the recovery room. The badged workers I accosted in the hallways tried to be helpful, but they had no idea. Finally, one suggested I go back to the visitor’s desk on the first floor and start all over.
I felt my way to an elevator going down and exited through the Emergency Room. OK. I went outside and walked back to the Main Entrance. I went to the visitors’ desk and demanded more details. Turned out, the patient was on the third floor, not the second, and this time I was given a corridor letter, G. I again wandered around corridor G, third floor but finally came upon the proper recovery room and visited a patient who wondered where I had been all this time.
Half hour waits just to get a visitor’s pass.
That night the patient was moved to a regular room. When I arrived the next day to take him home, the line at the visitor’s desk wound down the hall. There was only one officer at the desk, and it took half an hour to get to her. All we needed was a pass and a room number. I was not alone in my frustration.
New York hospitals, this one in particular, would do well to spend less money advertising for patients and more on basic customer service.
Finally, Congestion Pricing!
Here is the best explanation, and argument, for congestion pricing.
Below is a complaint in the front window of Sephora, on Lexington and 59th, one block into the zone.
We couldn’t disagree more!
Photo: Craig McLaughlin
Is Liberty Bagels that terrific?
We can’t help but note that every Sunday morning, and some other mornings, a long, long snake-of-a-line forms outside Liberty Bagels. The eatery is located on 58th Street between Madison and Fifth.
We asked a couple at the end of the line, “What is the reason for this line.” A German tourist observing the scene said she was also curious. The man answered, “It is a famous bagel store.”
I pointed out that there were a lot of bagel places nearby that they could walk right into. Didn’t matter.
Nothing against Liberty Bagel’s bagels. The place happens to be a few steps from the Apple Store, Central Park, hotels and other places tourists congregate. That, we guess, explains it.
Hochul is Misery
She couldn’t just honor the hard work city officials put in to ease the gridlock that has made pedestrian life in Midtown a misery. If it worked according to plan, congestion pricing would have reduced the number of vehicles passing below 60th Street while providing desperately needed funds for the subways.
But no. Hochul had to insert herself into a highly thought-out plan and muck it up. She “temporarily” froze its start planned for June. Most read the move as an effort to curry favor with New Yorkers in the suburb. The argument was that the $15 charge was a tax on drivers already paying stiff tolls on the bridges and tunnels to enter Manhattan. Funny, but despite those “stiff tolls,” Manhattan is perpetually clogged with traffic drawn to near standstills.
The video clip below shows what happens every single day. Note how the crosswalks are totally blocked while the “Walk” signs are lit. (Sometimes pedestrians can’t even see the walks signs due to blockage by by trucks.) Pedestrians having to squeeze between fenders to get across the street are a normal occurrence.
One of the dumber objections to congestion pricing was made by United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew. He held that congestion pricing was cooked up to benefit allegedly rich white Manhattanites at the expense of “people of color” elsewhere in the city. I suggest that Mulgrew compare the racial makeup of people driving cars in Midtown with that of the subway riders. By the way, only one in a hundred travelers into the congestion zone come via car.
The original congestion pricing plan was intended to provide the Metropolitan Transportation Authority with $15 billion in bonds to improve the city’s decrepit bus and subway system. The upgrades would have also created thousands of jobs.
And what about the psychic and physical costs gridlock forces on those crossing streets in Midtown? Could subjecting residents, shoppers and workers to this experience be good for business? Leading city-based business groups don’t think so. They have been backing congestion pricing, according to Politico.
Now Hochul has returned to the mess she created and given a green light for congestion pricing. She’s lowered the fee for cars to $9 a day from $15.
Had the original $15 fee gone into effect as previously planned, everyone would be used to it by now. If it did seem to hurt midtown businesses, the fee could have then been lowered.
And so congestion pricing should start early next month, just in time for the start of Donald Trump’s second presidential term. Trump has vowed to kill the program. Good work, Kathy!
December tipping season is here
This year, as every year, we must confront the matter of tipping supers, doormen, cleaning people, waiters and dog walkers who have served us through the year. We know this is a subject of anxiety. What do you give? CityRealty offers good guidance. We do want to emphasize the importance of being generous, not forgetting that inflation has made life more expensive for all of us.
One of our correspondents, Craig McLaughlin, recalls a former life as a waiter at the 21 Club in the 1980s and the importance of tips.
“For a waiter, the money at 21 Club was exceptional,” Craig recalls, “But you had to move. You had to really work hard.” And the tips were phenomenal especially during the December holiday season. To the servers, Christmas tips represented both a pat on the back and an essential part of their pay package. The management figured them into the workers’ compensation.
The guy who ran the coatroom concession told Craig that he could make $50,000 in December, though the rest of the year the pay wasn’t great. “The doormen would also make a lot of money. Those guys were getting limousines for people,” Craig recalls.
“My first year there I was handed envelopes with ‘Craig’ written on front. The first one I opened was 200 bucks. I said, ‘Holy shit!’”
Adjusted for inflation, $200 in 1981 would equal more $655 in 2024 dollars. Corporate customers would give $400. The fancy people in the triple-A section would typically gave the waiters $150 or $200.
December tipping season is upon us: Time to raid the cash machines.
If you spill coffee on your keyboard at 3 a.m.
The Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, between 58th and 59th, has become a major tourist destination, understandably so. It’s right across the street from the Plaza and near a main entrance to Central Park. You see lots of rolling luggage. You hear languages that, admittedly, could be heard elsewhere in the city but not necessarily in the same place.
We asked one of the salespeople, “Who comes here at 3 a.m., 4 a.m.?” That crowd is mostly New Yorkers, the Apple guy explains, night people who spilled coffee on their keyboards in the wee hours and need an emergency replacement.
According to Wikipedia, “The store is always open to customers, with no hours or days closed, an acknowledgement that after-hours New York is still going strong. It is the only Apple Store in the universe that is open 24/7.
Can we call a 34-year-old woman a ‘matron’?
The New York Times published a news item on December 9, 1946, about a “Park Avenue matron” who died suddenly. She was 34. Back in those days, “matron” was often paired with “Park Avenue.”
It connotes white glove, the right clubs, that sort of thing. And Mrs. Evelyn Morgan would seem to qualify.
Mrs. Morgan and her husband had apparently spent the evening at the Stork Club. Club goers back then tended not to hold back the drink, and it’s possible that a full night ending at 1:30 a.m., followed by sleeping pills to be not a healthy combination.
Starting as a speakeasy during Prohibition, the Stork Club was the place for celebrities, soignée socialites and other connected New Yorkers to be seen and talked about in the next day’s papers. It was there that Count Basie and Guy Lombardo performed with their orchestras.
“It was a shrine of sophistication in the minds of thousands who had never seen it, the fabric and pattern of legend,” wrote Lucius Beebe, a top-hatted bon-vivant who chronicled “high society” in mid-century Manhattan.
The Stork Club became victim of the go-go 60s. Dress codes had collapsed, and refinement had crumbled in an implosion of hippie slobdom. The swaying ballroom dancing of yore had morphed into couples free-form rocking on the clubs’ dance floor.
The original Stork Club closed in 1965 and the building was leveled. The site is now a Midtown pocket park, Paley Park.
As for the Morgans’ apartment at 277 Park Avenue, the building between 47th and 48th Streets was raised and is now an office tower.