Saving the New York Project from Donald Trump
What it will really take in the long term.
On November 5, 2024, America voted into power a reactionary regime that seeks to destroy institutions that create a shared sense of understanding, cooperation, and purpose in this country. For this regime, the underlying thesis of New York — the idea that millions of people can be thrown together in extremely close quarters and, despite and because of their differences, create a uniquely desirable place to live — is the antithesis of the Hobbesian war of all against all they seek to bring about.
A disinhibited Donald Trump, unrestrained by Congress, has the tools to send an already fragile New York spiraling — by enacting policies hostile to our communities, by inflicting significant fiscal pain, and by perpetuating a dystopian caricature of life here, all of which together will have people and employers rushing for the exits. And so, therefore, along with the many people and aspects of national life that have been endangered by Donald Trump’s election to a second term, it is not an overstatement to say that the New York project itself is at grave risk.
As we consider the antidote, it is important to acknowledge that the New York project was already under strain. A combination of governance failures and forces beyond our control — pandemic upheaval and global migration, chief among them — have dramatically diminished New Yorkers’ sense that this is, in fact, a great place to live.
To put this in quantitative terms, the Citizens Budget Commission’s 2023 resident survey (taken between September and December 2023) found that just 30% of New York City residents rated quality of life in the city as excellent or good — down from 51% in both 2008 and 2017. This decline transcended demography, with a particularly steep drop among Hispanic respondents (presaging these New Yorkers’ outsize shift to Trump). The percentage of respondents rating government services as excellent or good dropped by half. So, too, did the percentage of respondents who said the City government spends tax dollars wisely. And New Yorkers in the survey said they felt substantially less safe than they used to, particularly in the subway at night.
Consistent with this, between April 2020 and July 2022, New York City lost 468,293 residents, or 5.3% of its population; while some of these city residents moved to the suburbs or upstate, the state’s population loss more or less tracked the city’s in raw numbers. Departures have slowed, and international migration is up, but the trends have not reversed. The following year, we lost another 78,000 city residents. Just last week, a team of researchers at Cornell released projections of population decline; the middle scenario has the state losing another million-plus people by 2050. Outmigration has enormous economic consequences — in decreased output, property values, tax revenue, and federal aid — and can feed on itself as the critical ingredient in a feared “urban doom loop.”
In the presidential election, what’s ailing New York helped drive a shift to Trump by New York State voters that was greater than in any other state. Comparing the state’s 2024 and 2020 election results, President Biden’s margin of 2 million votes and 23 percentage points dropped to 920,000 votes and 12 percentage points for Vice President Harris. This 11-point shift to Trump was driven by New York City’s shift of 16 points. Obscured by important and high-profile congressional wins, New York State’s overall shift to Trump constituted 11% of the shift in the popular vote nationwide — almost twice New York’s share of the national population.
I am not of the view that Vice President Harris’s defeat, nationally, was the result of a specific failure of her, her campaign, or the Democratic Party. I’m with Michael Berube, who observes that in recent elections across the globe, “every incumbent party in every wealthy democracy paid a political price for presiding over post-COVID-19 inflation, whether they deserved it or not.”1 But agree or disagree with this, something more is going on here in New York. Discontented New Yorkers had been voting with their feet, and now they are voting with their votes — for a president poised to take our fraying social fabric and tear it to bits.
And so the ledger of New York exceptionalism has two rather dark new entries: as a place especially vulnerable to damage by the Trump presidency, and as a place especially susceptible to Trump’s appeal. Needless to say, these two things relate to each other paradoxically and dangerously.
That is why Trump-proofing must encompass both anticipating and mitigating the havoc his administration will wreak and addressing a set of legitimate concerns about conditions of life in New York that translated into a jump in support for his candidacy. The former has been a rallying cry for progressives since Election Day, while the latter is the priority of New York’s centrists, technocrats, and the ruling class. These are not mutually exclusive — to the contrary, they are intertwined and essential parts of what it will take to save the New York project in the age of Trump.
Protecting New York from Trump Administration Actions
We must do everything we can to anticipate and respond to the violence Donald Trump will do to the laws, liberties, and diversity that are part of New York’s fundamental identity. Enshrining abortion rights and protections against discrimination in our State Constitution, as New York voted to do on November 5th, looks materially more important in light of our state’s sharp electoral shift to the right. The Legislature should continue to shore up access to reproductive healthcare, both for New Yorkers and for those elsewhere for whom our state may represent a last, best hope. Increasing Medicaid reimbursement rates for medication abortion seems like an obvious and necessary step. We will need continued creativity, by the State’s lawyers and by law enforcement, to stave off a proliferation of guns. And we should pass the New York for All Act, to protect New Yorkers, as best as we can, from what promises to be an incredibly cruel approach to Federal immigration enforcement.
With Trump assembling a team comprising, quite literally, some of America’s worst people to achieve, as quickly as possible, Project 2025’s stated goal of “dismantl[ing] the administrative state,” we should expand the legal tools and resources available to New York State’s Attorney General to stop corporate malfeasance, to our Department of Labor to stop worker exploitation, to our Division of Human Rights to stop discrimination, and to our Department of Environmental Conservation to stop the degradation of natural resources.
And we should be prepared to backfill cuts by Trump to federal funding streams we count on. Just as the first Trump administration’s repeal of the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction was a stroke of malicious genius — funding tax cuts for the rich disproportionately from the wallets of taxpayers in a few states with expansive public sectors, and thereby exacerbating a sense of division between the people in blue states who depend on the safety net and those who pay for most of it — we should prepare for defunding of programs that aid New Yorkers most in need, from Medicaid to public housing to child care subsidies. The State will need to step in.
But these actions, fundamentally defensive, will be insufficient to save the New York project from Trump if New Yorkers continue to move to his electoral column. Breaking this embrace before it takes a more permanent hold — or, I shudder to think, an intergenerational one — requires an agenda that swiftly and tangibly responds to the concerns of voters that we lost on Election Day in New York, one that begins to restore the value proposition of living in New York.
To be clear, this does not mean compromising on matters of principle. We should not — and need not — throw vulnerable people overboard in service of winning votes. It is by ending governance failures and solving real problems that we will deflate efforts to weaponize issues that have little actual effect on most people. We should also be better at placing the Democratic Party’s historic concern for abused and marginalized populations in the context of a big-tent approach to policy and politics, one that adds and not subtracts. Mario Cuomo’s brilliant framing, in 1984, of the difference between Republicans and Democrats is one we should return to more often:
“The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail…. We Democrats believe in something else. We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once.”
This should apply both to policy and electoral politics. But we have to show middle-class New Yorkers that they’ve got seats on the wagon train, too, and that we are competent to drive it. Only then will we move from a vicious cycle of election losses, distrust of government and each other, and strain on the New York project to a virtuous cycle of winning, unity and cooperation, and faith in government that can survive the Trump presidency.
Rebuilding Confidence in New York and Democratic Governance
A New York Times/Siena poll from October showed that New York City residents ranked the economy as their top issue in deciding the presidential race but crime as the most important problem facing New York City, prioritized by 27% of respondents. Voters understand, better than one might assume, the respective spans of control of federal, state, and local governments — but an agenda to win New Yorkers back to the Democratic column, from the top of the ticket all the way down, needs to engage with public safety, along with immigration and cost of living (which were ranked, respectively, as the second and third most important problems facing New York City).
On public safety, we Democrats need to speak about the issue in a way that bears some relationship to what New Yorkers see and feel every day. That begins with acknowledging cold, hard data that shows that crime, in virtually every category, is up from pre-pandemic levels — not as much as the right-wing echo chamber would have you believe, but significantly and unacceptably.2
Vital City, one of the most valuable additions to the public discourse in New York in recent years, has put together a great data hub on crime data. Summarized here in mid-2024, major crime was up 32.2% from 2019 to 2023. Violent crime was up 29.1%. Property crimes that are also major crimes were up 33.4%.
And, yes, this can be true at the same time: New York is a remarkably safe city compared to its peers, and much safer than it was 20 or 30 years ago. But when New Yorkers say they feel less safe, it is not simply that they have the New York Post on I.V. drip. They are less safe. I have been amazed, in the course of many conversations, to learn how many New York Democrats who are elected officials, operatives, and activists are simply unaware (and skeptical) of this incontrovertible fact. If we are so badly informed, in denial about what everyday New Yorkers don’t need data to tell them, why on earth should they trust us on this most critical issue?
More than acknowledging the problem (soberly, sans hellscape hyperbole), we must have something credible to say about what we are going to do about it. Democrats in New York have gotten uncomfortable speaking about the police even as an ingredient in stopping crime. This is lunacy — and it’s simply not how most people think or talk about public safety. Conversely, oft-repeated rhetoric about root causes and long-term community investments may have substantive merit but sounds hollow when voters reasonably demand safety in the here and now.
With all this in mind, it should be the immediate and vocal priority of city officials to rebuild the NYPD. The department is being run on overtime and morale has plummeted. Uniformed headcount is currently at a 20-year low, well below what the City Council-approved budget allows for. Without a blame game, the mayor — and/or those seeking to replace him — should articulate a plan to deliver for New Yorkers a fully staffed, better managed, and effectively deployed police department, one that New Yorkers see actively walking the beat and moving through subway cars. Part of this will undoubtedly involve lifting up wages and benefits that are far less generous than those of virtually every neighboring force. (I’ll put in a quick plug here for a program that Comptroller Brad Lander and I proposed, to help police officers and other city workers buy a home in the five boroughs.)
I start with this both because rebuilding the police force is a non-convoluted answer to elevated levels of crime, and because it is, in a sense, low-hanging fruit — by no means easy to accomplish, but far less substantively and politically difficult than resolving whether and to what extent criminal justice reforms passed in 2019 are contributing to the problem and merit further adjustment. Whatever one’s view on that question, reforms of bail and discovery laws were responsive to serious, longstanding, and racially discriminatory failures of the criminal justice system. But the conflation of these reforms with a blunt effort to starve and, in effect, break policing was self-defeating, both politically and substantively — and New York Democrats need to wash our hands of it.
Along the same lines, Democrats need to move closer to the perspective of the average New Yorker when it comes to addressing serious mental illness playing out on our streets and subways.
Advocates working in the mental health space will be quick to stress that most crime is committed by people who do not have mental health issues and that most people suffering from mental illness do not commit crime. This is true, and the mental health crisis demands comprehensive investment in the continuum of care.
But failing to speak about and address the connection between serious mental illness and public endangerment is a condescending insistence on ignoring the lived reality of New Yorkers, in which people who resist getting needed help — no matter how many field outreach teams we send their way — are a constant and distressing fixture of a walk down the street or a ride on the subway. Public support for the kind of investment we need to make in mental health care professionals and infrastructure will, I believe, depend on whether or not we are willing and able to move the most serious cases out of the public realm and into care.
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The influx of asylum seekers, and the political resentment it has clearly engendered, is to me the most difficult aspect of New Yorkers’ discontent to address. It is vexing because there are no easy answers (scale back the provision of shelter, for example, and you will increase the number of migrants sleeping rough), and because geopolitical instability and Federal policy are the drivers.3
It is facile to say we need to do more to connect newcomers to services, housing, and work so as to assimilate them as quickly as possible into life in New York. But I think this is right, and the only thing we can do. State and City governments should continue to expand and improve capacity in these areas, and as important, project confidence and competence rather than foment alarm. If we can do this while also responding to public safety and affordability concerns, I am hopeful that with the passage of time negative sentiment around immigration in this city of immigrants will abate.
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The question of why voters didn’t feel the economic gains of Bidenomics is a leading subgenre in the digital pile of election post mortems. Here’s one that struck me as clear-eyed; put simply, high prices more than canceled out any sense on the part of Americans of expanded prosperity. Again, New York was exceptional, and not in a good way. While the CPI for urban consumers nationally rose 2.6% over the last twelve months, the equivalent measure for the New York area was 4%. Shelter (housing) costs increased for urban consumers nationally by 4.9%, but 6% in the New York area. More starkly, economists from Zillow and StreetEasy recently found that “New York City rents are rising seven times faster than wages” and that the “yawning gap between median rent and average wage increases in New York City outpaced that of every other metropolitan region in the country.”
Over the long term, the most important thing we can do, by far, to relieve cost pressure on New Yorkers is build a lot of new housing. But there’s no fast way to make this happen: the political process to eliminate barriers to housing construction will itself take time, and then it will take time for a pipeline to develop (which will happen slowly until interest rates come down), and that’s before we even get to the building part.
What we need now, while working on more structural cost relief, is a crash program to target immediate financial assistance to middle-class New Yorkers who don’t get much help from our traditional safety net programs.
Peak out-migration occurs right around the time New Yorkers have their first child, and we are hemorrhaging families with children (leading to the largest decline in public school enrollment in America). We should prioritize a substantial expansion of the State’s Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, a narrowly confusing add-on to the analogue Federal credit. The State has significantly expanded our child care subsidy (nearly doubling income eligibility to 85% of area median income, the maximum level Federal aid will support), but families just one rung up on the economic ladder, who are getting crushed by childcare costs, receive no support. Expanding and streamlining this credit could be a game-changer that doesn’t break the bank.
We should find similar vehicles to provide deeper relief to New Yorkers on their property tax and energy bills. Relief needs to be significant enough to be appreciable, and we should shout about it from the rooftops.
We also must tackle property tax reform in New York City to reduce the disproportionate cost burden that currently falls on middle-class homeowners and renters. I’ve been back and forth on this over the years — worried about the fairness of changing the rules of the game in the middle, and about jarring financial impacts on those who will see their taxes rise. But there was no promise of immutability, and the rules are not presently fair. We should explore ways to phase-in increases, or defer them in part or full until properties change hands. But if we want to create lasting fairness and relief, it’s long past time for an overhaul.
Taking on the Biggest Structural Threat to the New York Project: Our Housing Shortage
What is needed in the short term — namely, rising to meet the intertwined challenges of protecting New York from the strain of Trump Administration actions and winning back voters from Trump’s column — is also what must be achieved in the long term to save the New York project for good. More than anything, this means remedying our decades-old failure to build sufficient amounts of housing to meet the demands of New York’s population. This issue, more than any other, represents a fundamental threat to New York, both substantively and electorally.
In the decade prior to the pandemic, New York City built just 27 new homes per 1,000 residents, a rate near the bottom of major U.S. cities. (By comparison, in that same period, Austin built 117 new homes per 1,000 residents; Seattle built 109; Washington D.C., 72; Dallas, 60.) Our suburbs have done even worse, with Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties each having issued fewer building permits per capita than all but one suburban county across New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. New York is creating a lot more jobs than housing for its workers; New Jersey and Connecticut are doing the opposite. Data emerging from the last several years shows no change in these trends.
The result of this in New York City is an incredibly low vacancy rate (1.4%) and skyrocketing housing costs (up 68.4% from 2011-12 to 2021-22). In the rest of the state, things are not much better, with home prices up 50%-80%, and rents up 40%-60%, in major upstate cities between 2015 and 2022. In every region in the state, more than 40% of renters are cost-burdened (paying more than 30% of household income in rent), with higher shares in Long Island and urban areas.
Both the progressive Fiscal Policy Institute and the centrist Citizens Budget Commission attribute a significant portion of our outmigration problem to the housing shortage. A study by McKinsey and the Regional Plan Association projects a shortfall of housing supply relative to demand of 935,000 units by 2035, and calculates that this shortfall will cost New York between $400 and $900 billion in cumulative GDP growth, 330,000-730,000 jobs, and $3.7 billion in state and local tax revenue.
That, in a nutshell, is the overwhelming substantive case for why New York desperately needs to jumpstart housing supply. The merits, unfortunately, have failed to overcome the politics of NIMBYism and the mantra of local control. I was proud to help craft Governor Hochul’s Housing Compact, which was proposed in her 2023 Executive Budget and crashed on the shoals of legislative opposition. It aimed to produce 800,000 new homes over a decade. The policies it advanced — housing creation goals for every locality, the creation of a state-level entity that can approve new housing when local officials consistently refuse, and multi-family residential development around transit hubs in which the State has invested billions — remain the right and necessary set of tools to dig out of the deep hole we are in.4
But if the idea of New Yorkers’ kids and grandkids being unable to afford to live in the state isn’t sufficiently compelling — if a picture of lost jobs, population, and money can’t persuade New York’s political leadership that this is a crisis that demands overcoming parochial opposition — perhaps the specter of electoral extinction can. That is the future that Jerusalem Demsas outlines in what is perhaps the most eye-opening post-election piece I’ve read, “The Democrats Are Committing Partycide.” Demsas’s central insight is to connect the failure of blue states to build new housing with the looming disappearance, through population loss, of so many congressional districts that it becomes far more difficult for a Democrat to win the Electoral College:
Remarkably, none of this happened by accident. A hostility toward population growth and people in general has suffused the politics of Democratic local governance….
In the days since Harris’s defeat, Democrats have defended Biden’s tenure by arguing that inflation was beyond the president’s control, or pointing to other economic accomplishments. But no Republican stopped San Francisco from building housing, and Trump is not responsible for New York City’s byzantine housing-permitting regime. (In fact, as I write this, New York is on the verge of watering down a proposal that would ease the construction of apartment buildings and smaller homes.) In the course of my work, I hear many policy makers and residents in blue communities lament their intractable housing crises, seemingly unaware that many places have solved a supposedly insurmountable problem. The only difference is those places are in states run by Republicans.
Demsas closes with a call to action:
It is not too late to reverse California’s stagnation—or that of New York and other expensive states. The cost of housing is quite literally a signal for how many millions of people would love to live in those places. Yet, in the aftermath of Trump’s reelection, as several Democratic governors have telegraphed their intent to act as bastions of resistance in the coming years, none has focused on the issue that has most hollowed out the promise of liberal America. Nowhere in these headline-seeking pronouncements is a plan to address the housing and cost-of-living crisis or even a reckoning with the failures that produced the status quo. In part, this is due to Democrats’ failure to understand the link between their anti-growth policies at the state and local level and the national viability of their party. For years, Democrats have gotten to represent the growing, vibrant parts of this country and have become complacent, presuming economic dominance even in the absence of good policy. But last week’s results should not have shocked state and local Democratic policy makers—people have been voting with their feet for years.
We must read the tea leaves and heed this call. The New York project will not survive permanent inaction on this existential issue.
Uniting Democrats to Save New York
What this rough-hewn agenda requires is for progressives and moderates alike to summon energy to do things that might otherwise feel unimportant or even uncomfortable, but not fundamentally at odds with their convictions.
Progressives must care not only about standing up to Trump directly but also about undermining the strength of his movement in New York by addressing issues like diminished quality-of-life and high property tax bills. We need not abandon data-supported, righteous efforts to reform our criminal justice system in order to acknowledge real problems of crime and disorder and embrace solutions that any New Yorker on the street will tell you make common sense.
Moderates must lend their muscle to protecting populations and programs Trump will target in addition to worrying about conditions on their block. Along with funding more than the bare minimum when it comes to our infrastructure (a subject not addressed here, but critical to New York’s future), this will be expensive, and the business community will need to set aside a reflexive hostility to any new or increased tax, with an eye to retaining the city’s position as an unparalleled attractor of talent and generator of innovation.
Some of that hostility has been well-earned: advocacy efforts in recent years that seemingly aimed to raise money, first, and figure out how to spend it, second, did not inspire confidence among taxpayers that their dollars were being thoughtfully deployed; demonization of wealthier New Yorkers, who foot a vastly disproportionate share of the bill, has not helped either. But it is a fantasy — for reasons both operational and political — to believe that efficiencies alone can pay for the public services we need to make New York function properly, much less at a world-class level, and particularly if Trump starts slashing Federal aid.
The reality is that New York has long been a high-tax state and city, and well-off New Yorkers have historically been willing to pay for effectively delivered public services in a place like no other. Mike Bloomberg made this exact point in 2003 when he described New York as a “luxury product.” His words were either misunderstood or mischaracterized by progressive critics who said they showed his elitist stripes; in fact, he was making the case for higher taxes.
And both camps need to start caring in a way they never have before about responding to our housing shortage with affirmative policy changes that allow and spur new construction — not just the capital-A “affordable housing” that politicians love to talk about, but housing that will be affordable because we build a lot of it. In doing so we can relieve pressure on the entire housing market, return to an era of population growth rather than decline, and stop giving up ground to red states in the Electoral College.
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For all the reasons Donald Trump may try to do us harm, the New York project is the most significant progressive project in America — even as it is also the birthplace of American capitalism and a testament to its power. These two pieces of our identity are far less in tension than they are mutually reinforcing.
My journey through politics and government has afforded me the unusual privilege of immersion in both leftist and centrist ways of thinking about public policy in New York. I have long been struck by how important it is to New York progressives and moderates, respectively, to distinguish their positioning from one other. In a place where Republicans have functionally little power, debates between these camps tend to be about how best to shepherd the New York project forward, with gaps of priority, approach, and rhetoric more than ideology.
This divide has long been a case study in the narcissism of small differences, and we can no longer afford it. The return of Donald Trump puts the New York project at risk, and an unprecedented unity of purpose will be required to save it.
I also wonder whether we are entering into an age of one-term presidents (and other executives). The last time a majority of Americans said the nation was heading in the right direction and not on the wrong track was in 2003; it was more or less at this same moment that Fox News surpassed CNN in the ratings and the percentage of Americans watching one of the three evening network news broadcasts dropped below 30%. With the fragmentation and politicization of news, and the dominance of social media, it is reasonable to ask whether the conditions will ever again exist for Americans to believe that things aren’t bad out there. Of course, an even darker view is that we will now be told exactly what the new president wants us to hear, regardless of the reality.
I should say here that I do believe our present information environment exacerbates people’s sense of danger. This Bloomberg piece shows the way that news coverage of crime, particularly of shootings, has outpaced actual incidence; this fascinating analysis of 2022 Congressional election results in New Jersey shows very different voter behavior inside and outside the New York City media market, which was at the time being saturated with messaging around crime. Meanwhile, social media, along with apps like Citizen, amplify within entire communities incidents that previously were only shared among the friends and family of participants. It may be that this means we will never again reach 2017 levels of perceived safety, even if we reach 2017 levels of actual safety. But shouldn’t we aim to test the proposition?
Advocates on the left and right selectively highlight far smaller pieces of the puzzle. Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s buses accounted for just 41,000 of more than 200,000 migrants to New York City since the spring of 2022. And while New York City’s right-to-shelter obligation came under attack as an invitation to come here rather than other, less generous jurisdictions (many of which saw the rise of tent cities that we did not), its impact was incremental at most. New York City has long been the top destination for newcomers to America, for lots of good reasons, and we should want it to stay that way.
Mayor Adams and City Planning Commissioner Dan Garodnick are on the five-yard line with City of Yes, a sweeping package of zoning reforms to increase housing production in New York. They deserve great credit. Projected to spur the creation of 100,000 new units, the enactment of City of Yes would be a tremendous breakthrough — and yet not nearly enough to meet the demand for housing in New York.