Governing New York is hard enough, but can anyone fix its problems?

Times

4 days ago

Before Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York, as he tells it, the popular consensus was that the city was ungovernable. The impossibility of overseeing hundreds of thousands of employees and a budget of tens of billions of dollars while negotiating your every move past greedy unions, furious civil society groups and corrupt judges meant that Gotham City was doomed.
Like every other mayor, Giuliani thought he was the one to prove that idea wrong. And like every other mayor, he says he did.
'There's nothing ungovernable about New York,' Giuliani, now 81 and beset with legal woes, told me last week. 'Cities are not places beyond human intervention. They're created by humans. And if humans create a problem, they can fix it.'
Today New York is in the midst of a mayoral campaign dominated by a populist young left-winger who is the latest in a long line of politicians promising to fix the city. The question of whether the city is ungovernable, and the kind of experience needed to bring it to heel, is being debated from Long Island to the Bronx.
Last week Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old 'democratic socialist' who has promised to freeze rents and make New York City more affordable, won the Democratic nomination over the former governor Andrew Cuomo (who is now, like the incumbent Eric Adams, running as an independent). Mamdani's campaign was dominated by snappy videos of him speaking Spanish and Urdu, and occasionally recreating iconic Bollywood moments as he walks around the city.
Cuomo's critics say he ran a lacklustre campaign and has been tarred by the sexual harassment allegations that led to his resignation as governor in 2021 (and which he denies). Mamdani's critics say he is a radical without the political nous to enact his big promises and point out that as an assemblyman he has only been in charge of a staff of about five.
• Meet Zohran Mamdani, the man who promises to make NYC affordable
Whoever wins in November will take on a job that is as complicated as it is powerful. Being the mayor of New York involves managing a workforce of more than 330,000 people — from the Landmarks Preservation Commission to the housing authority and the fire department — and, crucially, the unions that govern how they work.
More than 30,000 acres of parks. Almost 800 bridges and tunnels. A police force of 35,000. A subway system with 665 miles of track. Sanitation. Public schools. The pension board. Appointing judges who handle criminal cases.
Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic political consultant, said: 'You have to battle with the state government all day long. You have to fight the feds. You have almost half the population on some form of public assistance that is managed by the NYC Human Resources Administration. It is a job unlike any other in the United States of America.'
To do it well, said Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist and Baptist minister who ran for mayor in 1997, was extraordinarily difficult. 'You have to have someone that can work with each of the departments that they run, that can stay on top of it, that knows how to administer. And it has to work with members of the city council that passes the laws and regulations that govern all of those bodies.'
On top of that, he said, to get anything significant passed, 'you need to get labour, you need to get civil groups that have influence, you need to get clergymen, you need to get activist groups that have a constituency like women's groups, LGBTQ groups, black organisations. All of them are influential because all of them support some of the city council people that are going to vote.'
• What Zohran Mamdani's win means for the Democratic Party
It is, as political strategists are fond of saying, the second hardest job in American politics. Stu Loeser, a longtime press secretary to the former mayor Michael Bloomberg who now runs a corporate intelligence firm, said that every decision made in office needed to be wrangled past endless barriers.
While he was working for Bloomberg in the early 2000s, and trying to pass a law to ban smoking indoors, he said, they had no sooner convinced bar owners that they wouldn't lose money from the measure (by arguing that people were coming to them to buy beer, not cigarettes) than they were besieged by angry dry cleaners who said they'd lose money because people's clothes would no longer smell of cigarettes after a night out.
'It is in many ways … a thankless job, and most mayors really have trouble with that,' Loeser said.
It was also, he said, a powerful one. Bloomberg, Loeser said, used to say that if he woke up one morning and decided to change the direction of traffic on Fifth Avenue, he could text the police commissioner and get it done.
Mitchell Moss, professor of urban policy and planning at New York University, said that the mayor had vast powers, including appointing the top deputy mayors and as many as 65 commissioners, who he could then sack at will, as well as deciding what the city spends its annual budget of more than $100 billion on.
He told me: 'We have a structure of government where the city charter gives the mayor enormous executive power. The city council has very specific powers to approve the budget and approve land use changes. But other than that, it doesn't have much.'
In the past few years New York, under Adams, has been beset with headlines that the city is unravelling under the pressures of migrants coming in and locals moving out, unable to afford to live in a city where a studio flat on the Lower East Side can cost $5,000 a month, and a latte is $7.
High-profile, though rare, attacks on the subway and a highly visible population of homeless and mentally ill people roaming the streets stoked fears last year that New York was returning to the bad old days of the 1980s and early 1990s, when the crack cocaine and heroin epidemic combined with economic decline to make parts of the city deeply unsafe.
When Giuliani came to power in 1994, he became a household name on both sides of the Atlantic because of his efforts to clean up the streets of New York by arresting people for minor infractions, a policy now much-criticised for disproportionately arresting black men.
Giuliani, who was disbarred from legal practice last year for allegedly making false statements while representing President Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, conceded in a phone interview that Mamdani, who he called 'dangerous' and 'evil', had a certain charm and for now looked likely to win in November.
When I asked what he thought of Mamdani's promises to bring reform to New York, he snapped: 'Stalin had a will to reform too.' Mamdani has denied accusations of radicalism.
Yet despite the enormous powers given to the mayor, Giuliani said, anyone in the office would always have a check on their plans: New Yorkers, who could turn against them in a moment.
'You're not Julius Caesar. You don't have power to do anything you want, because you won't be there very long if you do,' he told me. 'You have to learn that the politics of the city is a tremendous interaction with the people of the city.'