Zellnor was in my class at Cornell Law School, and we hung out a fair amount. He's smart, well-spoken, hard-working, and absolutely magnetic in person. We all knew he was going to do well in politics. He leans a bit further left on social issues than most readers of this Substack, but then so do most NYC Democrats, and he's fundamentally a reasonable, well-meaning person. I'm thrilled he gets the Slow Boring endorsement.
I'm not sure most NYC Democrats are socially to the left of SB readers. NYC is a relatively conservative big city as big cities go, and there are a lot of moderate POC voters.
It's kind of fascinating that real estate developers are so hated. Both doctors and developers charge insane prices for things that are arguably universal human rights, but everybody loves doctors.
Doctors have insurance companies to blame for screwing patients over, and are often themselves being screwed over by their own hospital system monopolies.
Developers got demonized by Jane Jacobs before they could figure out how to demonize the realtors and mortgage lenders in their stead.
The entire homebuying process is so full of traps and pitfalls, I’d ban it on moral grounds alone if it weren’t, y’know, the critical engine of our economy.
Hospital and facility fees are sky-high. I pay my dentist out of pocket much more than I pay my internist out of pocket. Heck, I pay my plumber more than I pay my internist out of pocket.
I'm in a spot where availability is the pain point, but holy shit the specialists are out of their fucking minds with pricing and predatory shit like 'you need a schedule a separate visit for each individual issue you are having'. I'm going through this now. I pay extra money to a concierge physician to act as my PCP because it's a 6+ month wait for a PCP visit otherwise, and then the doctor I get referred to wants me to take two separate occasions off of work because they refuse to fucking look at two things in one visit, and they all want me to use different and shitty broken third party apps for scheduling and intake and one of them billed for an 'extended' visit because it took a long time to do paperwork in person because their fucking app is some Temu software they bought off the back of a truck on the edge of town.
Anyway doctors are fine I guess. Last against the wall.
Maybe you're already doing this, and maybe it's not an option, but I think you should try to seek care in an academic medical center. Academic docs are still somewhat profit-motivated, but often they're salaried, and their salaries are one step removed from how much they actually bill for a particular patient. That is, if they tend to bill more over the course of the year, their salary may (ultimately) reflect that, but they won't get an additional dollar for each additional dollar they bill you (as they would in a private practice). And I think academic docs tend to be more interested in teaching and knowledge and the abstract concept of patient care.
Medical software is heinous, and I think almost everyone agrees about this. It's so highly regulated that I think any little change requires layers and layers of bureaucracy. And, while it should in principle be directed toward decision-making and efficient record-keeping, its true purpose is to maximize billing; and these goals are disparate. The medical software I used looked like a Yahoo website from 1995.
My cranky opinion is that HIPAA should have been repealed when Obamacare forced insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions. If no one can discriminate against you based on your medical record, what's the big deal? Just use the same reasonable standard of privacy every other industry uses.
Maine Med is technically a teaching hospital, but they're really trauma focused and small. I would have to go to Boston, and that's not a better bargain unfortunately. If I had cancer I'd be there in a minute, but not for non-critical issues.
I would love to be given a link to a basic bitch web 1.0, text only website portal, nothing would make me happier. That's a sign of a professional IMO
It's app slop that's jumped up and buggy to the point of not functioning that I object to.
You really don't have to say much to persuade me that this guy is better than Andrew fucking Cuomo.
I mean -- I'm glad that there are lots of good things to say about Myrie, and I'm glad that he would be not only better but much better.
But on reading your headline, "New York City can do better than Andrew Cuomo," my reaction was to think, "yes, with the disease-ridden carcass of a dead subway rat."
Anyhow -- thanks for letting me know more about Myrie. I wish him the best of luck in the race.
Half my family is still gaga over him because of those damn press conferences. But he was actually terrible on policy during Covid! He ignored people with expertise and the whole nursing home thing was a disaster! I hate-read his whole memoir and came away more convinced than ever by his sorry excuses that he was personally responsible for hundreds if not thousands of deaths in nursing homes. And not to mention he’s a skeevy dude who was rightly drummed out of his last job.
Fortunately, we have RCV. It’s not just Adams vs Cuomo. We can find five better candidates and vote for them all!
Myrie should make the case to voters that if they’re afraid of wasting their vote on him, they can always give Cuomo or Adams their second-choice vote.
And he should start working on getting his name recognition up outside of the Slow Borer set.
That said, I’m excited that we can start backing candidates like this. They don’t have to perfectly align with Matthew Yglesias Thought to simply be a solid Abundance Democrat. Best of luck to him!
I'm a New York State YIMBY. I want to see my state build a lot of housing; I want to see it deploy lots of clean energy. I want NYC to be safe place to bring my family. I believe in the Abundance Agenda.
That said, why should I trust the NYS Democrat party?
In the past ten years, they've closed my local nuclear reactor, leading to both an increase in energy costs and carbon emissions. They've blocked local housing development on nebulous gentrification grounds. They've passed a wild bail reform bill that sparked outrage. Even when we do manage to build public infrastructure (like the 2nd Avenue Subway), we pay an exorbitant price for it compared to other states.
On the flip side, my friends who moved to Texas, North Carolina, and Florida seem to already be living in the abundance paradise Democrats are now hawking. I'd love for the NYC Mayoral race to be the start of an Abundance Democrat movement, but I can't shake the feeling that they're showing up a day late and dollar short.
I like Zellnor! I hope he gains traction and wins.
I'm also not very optimistic. He's polling in the single digit territory and has a long uphill fight. I commend Ben for boosting him here.
However, I suspect that actual pro-growth policies and reform are as popular with rank and file NYS Democrats as pro-choice policies are with Mississippi Republicans. At a certain point, abundance Democrats are chasing the same dream as pro-choice Republicans; they're both wishcasting that their party was something fundamentally better.
Democrats want affordable housing, but the Groups and various politicians have lied to them about how we can get more affordable housing (by pretending we can go after landlords/do social housing/subsidize stuff/do more rent control instead of just letting private developers bill lots more market rate housing). Democrats ought to be persuadable on this point if elite opinion can be moved because fundamentally it's about affordability rather than "growth." And if we can't get our act together on this issue long-term we're in big trouble.
However, I think you undersell the degree to which the lies about housing policy are comforting and easy while the truth is hard and inconvenient. Democrats love blaming Wall Street/land lords/capitalism; selling them on market rate housing is like selling an evangelical on birth control.
I didn't say it'll be easy. I just don't think we'll ever actually accomplish anything if we can't face facts. And as Ezra and Derek have said ideally there would be Republican Abundance faction so pro-housing Ds can do this as a cross coalition thing. Ideally it wouldn't be so partisan, which is necessary if cross-coalition work is to be possible.
Zelmore Myrie is everything people say – smart, charismatic, filled with ideas. He’s also never managed anyone other than his administrative assistant. Being New York mayor is, first of all, being in charge of 300,000 employees and $100 billion budget.
Zelnor has never done anything that remotely prepares him for that. His answer – I’ll hire good people. But how will he know who’s good ? How will he know how to manage them? How will he know how to handle conflicts among them?
As a thought experiment, imagine instead saying that Zelnor should be in charge of Goldman Sachs or the Coca-Cola company or another organization whose and complexity rivals New York. It would be unimaginable.
Oh, and New York is actually harder to manage than Goldman or Coca-Cola, because there you can use incentives like compensation, and there you don’t have to worry about politics, and there you can get real world metrics on how your programs are working.
Government is really hard – harder than private enterprise. It’s just madness to make a completely unexperienced 37-year-old – no matter how smart and magnetic – the CEO of such a large and complex place.
But beggars can't be choosers and New York voters don't have an option of a competent experienced candidate.
It would be better for everyone if there was a Cursus Honorium for executive jobs in the US but there isn't and also voters seem to like objectively terrible candidates.
When I say Cursus Honorium I mean it in a general sense rather than the specific Roman way. In France senior politicians will have passed a maths test, been a local mayor, legislator and minor minister before they have a big role, which prepares them better for complicated executive jobs.
Up until Marius and Sulla, the Cursus Honorum was mostly just a set of traditions that didn’t really serve any immediately practical purpose except to shape competition among the elites. Without it, Rome might have had some more instability in terms of ambitious young men trying to usurp their elders, but it didn’t make Rome any better at, like, managing the sewers or anything. The wagons didn’t run on time just because Flavius Stercocapitus had to put in a year as quaestor at 30 (which wasn’t even formalized until Sulla).
The real impact of the CH was just that it served as a set of norms to be broken in the later Republic, which the ultra-conservative Sulla stupidly imagined re-instituting them would magically set society aright again — news flash, that idea utterly failed.
The Roman Republic consistently produced decent-to-good generals - geniuses like Scipio weren’t common, but unlike in Rome’s rivals you almost never got a catastrophically bad one. Since the consuls were usually the chief generals and since about half of the cursus honorum was military in nature, I think you can credit it for this level of competence.
In the civilian domain… I mean, we don’t have a Roman McKinsey or JPMorgan to provide an alternate pathway into developing managerial ability, and all ancient states were tiny in their capacities by modern standards, but I think that Rome generally did well in terms of infrastructure and public order and all that compared to its rivals .
Most of Rome’s big infrastructure projects were done AFTER the CH was caput, because the collapse into Empire mooted having a CH.
RE the generals, the most famous successes were always either talented ingenues who just happened to luck into big opportunities because of a deep crisis in the Republic (Scipio, Julius), thus obverting the CH, or they were businessmen like Crassus who didn’t NEED the CH.
The prestige projects, sure, but the first aqueducts, sewer, grain dole (Annona) and above all roads were built/established under the Republic.
In terms of generalship, I’m not talking about the outliers, but more like the generals in the Macedonian wars. None were geniuses, but almost all were able to competently use Rome’s resources to win consistently.
Fair, but I just don’t see the CH as having been all that strong an institution at the time. The baseline requirement of ten whole years military service for all elites probably did more than anything else to make sure the elite ranks were well-stocked with competent generals, but I see that as nearly tangential to the CH’s main stated objective of pacing elite careers.
It’d be like crediting congressional review of our generals and civilian control with the fact that West Point produces a really fucking good officer corps. I mean, naw man, West Point may be the first phase of an overall well-run system of building general officers, but it’s wierd to credit one aspect of the system for all the good products that come out of a completely unrelated aspect of it.
Gaius Terentius Varro was spectacularly incompetent despite rising through the Cursus Honorium, I don't want to stretch a metaphor too far but he was a low born populist elected because he gave easy answers.
"The wagons didn’t run on time just because Flavius Stercocapitus had to put in a year as quaestor at 30"
Well with a name like Stercocapitus, that's about what you'd expect, but what about his good friends Sillius Soddus and Biggus Dickus?
In all seriousness though, I think it's a good idea to have some kind of prerequisites for running for office, not necessarily modeled after Ancient Rome.
And at the same time though, we should absolutely note Sulla’s failures.
He basically got every conservative Boomer’s ultimate dream opportunity: A moment to Make Rome Great Again under essentially absolute rule. His word was law; he retired to grow his fucking CABBAGE afterwards.
And then it all collapsed… well, the most generous adverb to attach to it is “anyways”, but one might expand that to “and most likely directly because of how stupid his notion of putting history back into a bottle actually fucking is”.
We should… learn from that. If I were running a conservative indoctrination camp, Sulla would be Lesson Number One in how you can still fuck up even when you get every wish granted.
I have no idea how it would be possible to approach the question of whether the experience being a Aedile made men more competent Consuls. It isn't easy to judge the competence of modern politicians and that is with lots of good data.
This is an excellent point. However, management competence is in the service of accomplishing something. If we don't support Cuomo or Adams's goals, they shouldn't serve despite their (arguable) claims of managerial competence.
Can’t agree more! Managerial competence is useful — Obama’s earlier years could have gone better, after all — but not the only valuable quality in an elected leader.
NYC’s enormous bureaucracy Conderet names is precisely THAT: an enormous bureaucracy, replete with leaders and committees and whatnot, all with their own agendas.
Ironically, FWIW, NYC would do better with a Trump-like figure going to war with these bureaucracies on a popular mandate, since higher authorities exist who would be more than capable of smacking him down when he oversteps the law.
But short of such an extreme scenario, Zelnor seems more than capable of driving a YIMBY agenda.
This is a valid concern, but I'll point out a couple of things:
(1) Your criticism applies with greater force to, for example, Junior Senator from Illinois Barack Obama.
(2) He's currently running a campaign for mayor of NYC, which is in itself a fairly major organizational undertaking. If his campaign bombs, that handily answers the question of whether he can manage people. If his campaign succeeds, it indicates at the very least that he picks good people and doesn't get too much in their way.
(3) He's been running a legislative office for a couple of years, and I would imagine that involves at least one staffer. He also ran student government at Cornell Law School during our time there (he never had any serious competition for the role of student government president).
(4) A lot of running a large organization is getting people to believe in and trust your leadership. Zellnor is very good at securing that sort of buy-in.
(5) By way of personal anecdote, I can tell you that Zellnor and I got drunk together several times--including once when he took a few of us who were in NYC for an oral argument class to his favorite dive bar in Brooklyn--and at least twice he promised me a job in his future office/administration if I wanted it, specifically (he said) because he knew I was skeptical and pragmatic in ways that would help balance him out.
Obviously no drunken job offer of that sort should be taken seriously, but I take his expressed self-consciousness and interest in surrounding himself with pragmatists seriously, and judging from his platform he *has* surrounded himself with (ambitious) pragmatists.
Imagine tomorrow you were mayor. Police, fire, schools, hospitals, sanitation, housing, the works. Ten times the demands on your time as availability. Everybody’s got priorities they want elevated. You’re not quite sure who you can trust. You have to hire 50 senior and 500 semi-senior people pronto. Doing the things you want means convincing a range of constituencies. You’re way short of money. Oh, and there’s a crisis every other day that blows up your plans for what to get done.
Garcia, Bloomberg, Marie Torres-springer, Cuomo — they are people who’ve done this. Zelmore has not — not remotely. Neither had deblasio, you say? Exactly.
Fortunately, nobody ends up mayor of NYC on 24 hours notice. If Zellnor wins the primary, he'll have six months to figure out his staffing plans before he takes office.
I agree staffing up an administration and getting it moving in the intended direction will be a huge challenge, and one that Zellnor will likely have a harder time with than several of the other options. But I'll note that Garcia and Bloomberg (by far the most appealing persons on your list) aren't actually options because Garcia isn't running and Bloomberg can't. Torres-springer doesn't seem to be running either.
Who's running that has actual managerial experience? Sclerotic, authoritarian arch-NIMBY Cuomo? Corrupt, authoritarian, Trump-curious Adams? There's the two former comptrollers running, I suppose, but they're both literally and figuratively as colorless as candidates get.
Even with my personal relationship with Zellnor, I'd probably still vote for Garcia over him for largely the reasons you identify. But against the current field? I think Zellnor's the best option.
We obviously don't want people's first major elected position to be president, but are we actually going to be against people getting their start as a mayor or governor?
I think it’s pretty clear that we should be skeptical of someone who claims they can be successful at running a large city or even a small state if they’ve never run anything before.
Skepticism of them doesn’t mean they are worse than the alternative, but you probably do want to show you can manage an organization of a few hundred before managing New York City.
Personally, I believe, as a manager, that being in a director type position, where you manage managers who manage staff, and being successful at it, is enough to show your ability, whether your overall responsibility is 10 people or 1,000. Being able to manage managers and get great results isn’t dependent on it being some magic number of folks.
NYC voter here. Voted for Garcia. Any Democrat who is competent and will deal with crime, disorder, quality of life, and public safety of all kinds gets my vote. I really hate that the only people who are taking those concerns seriously are also people I disagree with on other priorities or who are not great people on a personal level, but I am so angry that this has been gaslit, justified, and the other Democrats (besides Adams who is now compromised) STILL won't truly address it. I'm a middle aged woman who takes public transport for about 95-99% of my transportation and I'm becoming a one issue voter here. As long as it isn't a Republican, who are compromised in their own way, I will vote for someone like Cuomo. This will probably piss off a lot of people, but I don't know what else it takes to get someone in office who takes this seriously.
I'm with you on all of this (except that I'm a middle-aged man who doesn't personally feel unsafe on the subway but knows lots of women who do and therefore cares very much about subway crime). SF just elected a moderate pro-housing mayor. Why do our pro-housing candidates have to mostly be lefties? If I have to choose between housing and crime I'm going to choose to vote based on crime because people won't want to live in NYC if we don't address that. I guess I could rank Myrie first but that won't really matter if nothing else changes and my second vote, which will wind up being the meaningful vote, will begrudgingly go to Cuomo. But we could have done better than this (Ritchie Torres!).
Yup, I hate being in this position. I didn't want Cuomo to be the only candidate besides Adams who would address those issues, but the other candidates have decided that's how they are running. Agreed about Richie Torres.
The random subway assaults really get to people. You can cite all the status you want, but New Yorkers think crime is a problem and politicians need to take that seriously
So, while politicians indeed have to be solicitous to the concerns of voters, sometimes those concerns aren't wholly rational: prioritizing crime (again, NYC is super safe by US standards!) *over* housing (surely NYC's biggest problem) as a voter doesn't make sense for most residents (nearly 70% rent), even if it *does* make sense from the perspective of a politician.
I went to middle school and high school in Detroit and came to NYC in 1990 to go to college and stay afterwards. I’m aware of what higher crime looks like and I don’t want to go back to it. More importantly, at least back then, I don’t remember seeing people say that it wasn’t happening or that if it was happening, it was fine or that it was worse at some other place or time. I want someone to take it seriously and commit to bringing it lower as we go forward.
In theory, effective policing should complement the YIMBY agenda. Dense, walkable cities need more policing than suburbs, by their nature. If cities take away policing resources, then they are pushing families away from cities and into sprawling suburbs. Building more units anywhere will help drive down costs, but the aesthetic most city dwelling YIMBY’s have in mind will require active, effective police.
I live in Brooklyn and take the subway everyday. You are so right! I love the idea of growth but I don’t think my neighbors are totally focused on this like they are on crime and quality of life. There is so much housing going up in Gowanus right now so I’m sure there would be a healthy number who assume we’re actually tackling housing enough and need to focus on more pressing issues. (Not saying they’re 100% right but…)
I'm sorry but this piece is hideously off the mark. Myrie is a died in the wool progressive and is categorically opposed to almost all points of the common sense manifesto.
Most importantly, he would return to the ridiculous, permissive policies of the De Blasio administration, and the still-persistent crime and quality of life problems in the city would explode. He is a dogmatic progressive and all that Ben can muster is a pathetic "well he hasn't fully rejected his previous stances..."
This is a ridiculous puff piece that is way below the standards of SB.
I think this is a really good example of the type of reverse purity thinking that I'm worried could turn up more often in response to the excesses of the left. Myrie is the only candidate in this race with a real plan to build substantially more housing. Some of his public safety policies are literally the opposite of many NYC progressives.
To say "he's a died in the wool progressive that is opposed to almost all points of the common sense manifesto" is just not a statement born out in fact.
This piece's title is an unsubstantiated unendorsement of a candidate whose current platform it doesn't discuss. That alone makes it political hackery unworthy of this site's aims.
Zellnor's platform site discusses more rent control, more money for public schools, and celebrates his role in NYS's disastrous criminal justice reforms of the past decade. Nothing in his platform or - more importantly - his professional record indicates that he would govern as anything other than a doctrinaire progressive.
It's nice that he will tell you what you want to hear in an interview but a well reported piece would actually examine his record instead of making excuses for it.
I'm not sure it's reverse purity thinking so much as it is a reality check. If he disavowed his former positions and became a pro-housing moderate that would give him a much better chance of winning, as there are two more prominent lefty candidates in the race (Lander and Mandani) and issues with both moderates. Myrie's decision to mostly stay progressive is both anti-common-sense-manifesto and also a bad call if his goal is to win over reluctant 2021 Garcia-Adams voters like me who are probably leaning Cuomo at the moment and annoyed about it.
It's pretty accurate if you look at things he's said and done during his tenure as State Senator as well as most of his platform outside of housing. It doesn't appear he had any interest in YIMBYism or housing abundance until he started his mayoral run in 2024, instead focusing on tenant protections and rent regulation, which isn't necessarily bad, but those aren't the kinds of things that are going to get more housing built, which is ultimately what would lower rents and give tenants more power.
Even today, looking through his state legislative record, it doesn't appear he's done anything to try to get more housing built in the state. He's in a position of power currently and if he's not using that position to solve this very serious issue in NY, why should we believe he's going to be any different as NYC mayor?
All that said, it would be good to see someone have some electoral success running on YIMBY platform because then that might motivate other candidates to embrace YIMBYism.
This exactly. Ben is comparing an interview about potential positions compared to (at best) Cuomo's record. Why not ask the other campaign as well? It just reads like a PR plant from Myrie aides who want to capture some of the moderate vote.
Myrie is well positioned to actually do something about the public safety and housing issues in NYS, but he has done conspicuously nothing. It's a shame that Ben is covering for him.
Seems to be another example of the ways YIMBYs lose credibility: Pitch is: "Build more housing, your concerns about traffic will be mitigated by good public transport." Then they support making existing public transport shittier by allowing it to be filled with mentally ill homeless people:
He's also called for substantially increasing overall NYPD manpower and specifically for increasing police presence on subways. That seems relevant to your line of attack. I also suspect that Zellnor's position is somewhat more nuanced than a simple "no." I could be wrong, but I'd put money on him drawing distinctions between first-time, occasional, and habitual fare evaders.
Seems odd to make fare evasion always a criminal matter when, for example, speeding tickets are nearly always civil.
Civil / criminal distinction is fair, but for me at least he doesn't get the benefit of the doubt. Broken windows coincided with a drop in incidents, and it's rollback has coincided with a rise.
To your point, he's now dropped his prior BLM rhetoric and is calling for substantially increasing NYPD, but is also pushing policies that are known to increase attrition. When these commitments come into conflict, which do you predict are going to win?
Attrition with more overall hiring to counteract it is probably good. A really nasty bunker mentality has set into policing in the last few generations, and it’d be better to turn over the ranks.
It looked to me like you were arguing that ending QI would reduce hiring.
If so, I’d disagree — it would make *recruitment* more difficult, but not impossible to overcome with increased pay. And that’s not even necessarily guaranteed with every single recruit — not all of them are dyed-in-the-wool Blue Lives Matter-pilled, especially not in NYC vs literally anywhere else in the country.
A flatter pay structure is needed anyways. Ending QI would help flush out expensive bunker-pilled-dead-enders so that they don’t keep rigging the union contracts with such steep pay structures, and you could plow the savings into raising intro pay.
Yes, my argument is ending QI will both make recruitment more difficult, and increase attrition. To date, even with no discussion of ending QI, attrition is occuring far faster than hiring, and I don't think introducing ending QI will help matters.
Broken windows also coincided with a global drop in crime. It just happens that so much of American media is in New York that it first got reported as a New York story. (And I'm saying this as someone who wants more enforcement against fare evasion.)
Re civil/criminal: fare evasion is theft. From all of us. And the ancient NYPD program to arrest fare evaders produced dividends beyond reducing fare evasion. Turns out there’s a strong correlation between people who jump turnstiles and people who break other laws. So, lots of them had open warrants. And guns.
Depends on how they come into conflict and to what degree. What policies are you saying he pushes that will increase attrition? My best guess is that you're talking about his stance on qualified immunity, and that's simply not something the mayor has any power to affect. Is there something else you're referring to?
"Increasing oversight" is about as vague of a policy prescription as one can have. I expect he'll find some way to say he "increased oversight" while still hitting his NYPD recruitment goals.
I agree with him on QI, so I don't see how giving him a bully pulpit to talk about it would be a bad thing. I've seen first-hand how QI works when the rubber meets the road--or rather when the .pdfs meet the court's electronic filing system--and I just don't think it's accomplishing its goal in a remotely sensible way. Plus, it grows less effective every year as the body of caselaw on what cops can or can't do gets more and more fleshed-out, and their area of discretion shrinks as a result.
We need some new system, and I think the best one on offer is to treat cops more like other professions that regularly encounter potential situations of liability by making them carry insurance. Obviously municipalities would need to pay the entire premiums on behalf of the vast majority of officers, but anybody whose premium increases to, say, a standard deviation higher than average probably should be attrited out of the force.
Got it - yeah for me it's a matter of priorities. I would have likely been far more sympathetic to his campaign were he running on this platform in 2017.
You would think that if New Yorkers are paying 50% of their income on rent due to constrained supply, there would be a surge of public enthusiasm for building more and that ambitious politicians would be all over the issue.
Maybe that will happen sometime during the campaign, but any idea as to why it hasn't caught on with the electorate as yet?
Because the causal link between preventing developers from building new housing forty years ago and high prices today is hard for normal people to see. Plus, lots of people have spent lots of time and effort on convincing normies that developers are actually the bad guys responsible for the problem because they only build "luxury" housing.
It's not hard to see why good policy has such a hard time breaking through on this. It's just difficult to explain the problem to normies.
I agree with you, but even given these factors, it's also weird that supply-and-demand is the one thing everyone understands intuitively about economics, but somehow on the biggest part of everyone's budget, a lot of people refuse to believe it.
Yes, but I think they assume there are very short term solutions to things like egg prices because prices went up in such a short amount of time and prices are known to go down.
The challenge is that an honest discourse would confess that YIMBY policies probably won’t reduce rents by much, but should keep rent from rising as much in the long term. To which voters say “why are we even talking about benefits 5 years or a decade from now?” Because they are short term thinkers on the whole.
But what stops politicians from demagoguing the issue? I’m not saying I’m in favor of that (I prefer rational debate); I’m just trying to understand the apparent lack of outrage in the electorate when they spend half their income on housing. I would blow a gasket in their situation.
I think it's a few things, including (1) A lot of people sincerely do not believe that building more housing will lower housing costs. Economics is counterintuitive. (2) People who do believe that building more housing lowers housing costs often support building more housing, but not near themselves. So the "right thing" economically - letting the free market decide where new housing goes - doesn't appeal to them, because the risk outweighs the benefit.
I think you could mitigate (2) by engaging in a little central planning and saying "we want to build more housing and specifically we plan to build it here, here, and here, and not there, there, or there." Theoretically if 49% of the electorate lives in the "here" areas, and 51% of the electorate lives in the "there" areas, you might be able to win. It is not praxis, but sometimes politics requires a little bit of realpolitik.
What you say makes a lot of sense but doesn’t capture the dynamics of political beliefs. No one understands why egg prices go up (or down) or how the global oil market drives the price you pay at the pump. But people get angry and punish those in power and seek those who promise (however unrealistically) to ameliorate the problem. Sure, people don’t understand the dynamics of increased construction. But what prevents them from becoming mad as hell and saying they won’t tolerate it anymore?
Myrie is clearly the least bad housing candidate, but he’s far from a good candidate. His housing plan is filled with affordability poison pills; this post admits he’s emphasizing NYCHA expansion with no plan on how to make it not a money pit; and there’s no reason to believe he’s changed his mind on the disastrous 2019 rent control bill.
Combined with his left wing social views, this really seems like an election to sit out.
I am curious to look into Abundance NY, especially since Open NY is an outpost of the DSA and broadly ambivalent about housing.
Myrie seems good but when I hear him talk he sounds elite and not relatable to people who are not educated in elite high schools and colleges.
He reminds me of dem candidates of years past who suffered the same problems and get beat by guys like Adams and cuomo pretty consistently who whatever else know how to talk to all different types of people.
Zellnor was in my class at Cornell Law School, and we hung out a fair amount. He's smart, well-spoken, hard-working, and absolutely magnetic in person. We all knew he was going to do well in politics. He leans a bit further left on social issues than most readers of this Substack, but then so do most NYC Democrats, and he's fundamentally a reasonable, well-meaning person. I'm thrilled he gets the Slow Boring endorsement.
I'm not sure most NYC Democrats are socially to the left of SB readers. NYC is a relatively conservative big city as big cities go, and there are a lot of moderate POC voters.
It's kind of fascinating that real estate developers are so hated. Both doctors and developers charge insane prices for things that are arguably universal human rights, but everybody loves doctors.
Doctors have insurance companies to blame for screwing patients over, and are often themselves being screwed over by their own hospital system monopolies.
Developers got demonized by Jane Jacobs before they could figure out how to demonize the realtors and mortgage lenders in their stead.
The realtors! I had forgotten how much I hate broker fees until you reminded me.
The entire homebuying process is so full of traps and pitfalls, I’d ban it on moral grounds alone if it weren’t, y’know, the critical engine of our economy.
Hospital and facility fees are sky-high. I pay my dentist out of pocket much more than I pay my internist out of pocket. Heck, I pay my plumber more than I pay my internist out of pocket.
I'm in a spot where availability is the pain point, but holy shit the specialists are out of their fucking minds with pricing and predatory shit like 'you need a schedule a separate visit for each individual issue you are having'. I'm going through this now. I pay extra money to a concierge physician to act as my PCP because it's a 6+ month wait for a PCP visit otherwise, and then the doctor I get referred to wants me to take two separate occasions off of work because they refuse to fucking look at two things in one visit, and they all want me to use different and shitty broken third party apps for scheduling and intake and one of them billed for an 'extended' visit because it took a long time to do paperwork in person because their fucking app is some Temu software they bought off the back of a truck on the edge of town.
Anyway doctors are fine I guess. Last against the wall.
Maybe you're already doing this, and maybe it's not an option, but I think you should try to seek care in an academic medical center. Academic docs are still somewhat profit-motivated, but often they're salaried, and their salaries are one step removed from how much they actually bill for a particular patient. That is, if they tend to bill more over the course of the year, their salary may (ultimately) reflect that, but they won't get an additional dollar for each additional dollar they bill you (as they would in a private practice). And I think academic docs tend to be more interested in teaching and knowledge and the abstract concept of patient care.
Medical software is heinous, and I think almost everyone agrees about this. It's so highly regulated that I think any little change requires layers and layers of bureaucracy. And, while it should in principle be directed toward decision-making and efficient record-keeping, its true purpose is to maximize billing; and these goals are disparate. The medical software I used looked like a Yahoo website from 1995.
> Medical software is heinous
My cranky opinion is that HIPAA should have been repealed when Obamacare forced insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions. If no one can discriminate against you based on your medical record, what's the big deal? Just use the same reasonable standard of privacy every other industry uses.
Maine Med is technically a teaching hospital, but they're really trauma focused and small. I would have to go to Boston, and that's not a better bargain unfortunately. If I had cancer I'd be there in a minute, but not for non-critical issues.
I would love to be given a link to a basic bitch web 1.0, text only website portal, nothing would make me happier. That's a sign of a professional IMO
It's app slop that's jumped up and buggy to the point of not functioning that I object to.
How can we convince Ezra Klein to interview Myrie as part of his pro-abundance campaign?
I believe the Slow Boring editorial assistant is more than enough.
That sounds particularly flattering to the Slow Boring editorial assistant. 🤣
He seems like a chill dude.
Chill, yes, but I worry that he may be overly self-effacing.
You really don't have to say much to persuade me that this guy is better than Andrew fucking Cuomo.
I mean -- I'm glad that there are lots of good things to say about Myrie, and I'm glad that he would be not only better but much better.
But on reading your headline, "New York City can do better than Andrew Cuomo," my reaction was to think, "yes, with the disease-ridden carcass of a dead subway rat."
Anyhow -- thanks for letting me know more about Myrie. I wish him the best of luck in the race.
NYC voters, movers and shakers, etc. seem pretty resigned to Cuomo. So that's the impetus behind the title.
"NYC voters, movers and shakers, etc. seem pretty resigned to Cuomo."
Sure, but I feel like that could change with the right exposure to the political virtues of the disease-ridden carcass of a dead subway rat.
Andrew Cuomo was must see pandemic TV. That kind of charisma doesn't grow on trees, unless you were living at the Cuomo house!
Donald Trump is charismatic. Spare me.
Half my family is still gaga over him because of those damn press conferences. But he was actually terrible on policy during Covid! He ignored people with expertise and the whole nursing home thing was a disaster! I hate-read his whole memoir and came away more convinced than ever by his sorry excuses that he was personally responsible for hundreds if not thousands of deaths in nursing homes. And not to mention he’s a skeevy dude who was rightly drummed out of his last job.
Fortunately, we have RCV. It’s not just Adams vs Cuomo. We can find five better candidates and vote for them all!
Myrie should make the case to voters that if they’re afraid of wasting their vote on him, they can always give Cuomo or Adams their second-choice vote.
And he should start working on getting his name recognition up outside of the Slow Borer set.
That said, I’m excited that we can start backing candidates like this. They don’t have to perfectly align with Matthew Yglesias Thought to simply be a solid Abundance Democrat. Best of luck to him!
That's a great point. "Guys a leftist, but an abundant leftist" is a good example of growing the tent and not purity-testing.
Exactly. Tent-growing has to come from both sides.
No voter should rank either Cuomo or Adams at all - certainly not second place!
I'm a New York State YIMBY. I want to see my state build a lot of housing; I want to see it deploy lots of clean energy. I want NYC to be safe place to bring my family. I believe in the Abundance Agenda.
That said, why should I trust the NYS Democrat party?
In the past ten years, they've closed my local nuclear reactor, leading to both an increase in energy costs and carbon emissions. They've blocked local housing development on nebulous gentrification grounds. They've passed a wild bail reform bill that sparked outrage. Even when we do manage to build public infrastructure (like the 2nd Avenue Subway), we pay an exorbitant price for it compared to other states.
On the flip side, my friends who moved to Texas, North Carolina, and Florida seem to already be living in the abundance paradise Democrats are now hawking. I'd love for the NYC Mayoral race to be the start of an Abundance Democrat movement, but I can't shake the feeling that they're showing up a day late and dollar short.
It should comfort you that Zellnor appears to not be winning any popularity contests inside the party’s more dysfunctional spaces.
I like Zellnor! I hope he gains traction and wins.
I'm also not very optimistic. He's polling in the single digit territory and has a long uphill fight. I commend Ben for boosting him here.
However, I suspect that actual pro-growth policies and reform are as popular with rank and file NYS Democrats as pro-choice policies are with Mississippi Republicans. At a certain point, abundance Democrats are chasing the same dream as pro-choice Republicans; they're both wishcasting that their party was something fundamentally better.
Democrats want affordable housing, but the Groups and various politicians have lied to them about how we can get more affordable housing (by pretending we can go after landlords/do social housing/subsidize stuff/do more rent control instead of just letting private developers bill lots more market rate housing). Democrats ought to be persuadable on this point if elite opinion can be moved because fundamentally it's about affordability rather than "growth." And if we can't get our act together on this issue long-term we're in big trouble.
I mostly agree!
However, I think you undersell the degree to which the lies about housing policy are comforting and easy while the truth is hard and inconvenient. Democrats love blaming Wall Street/land lords/capitalism; selling them on market rate housing is like selling an evangelical on birth control.
I didn't say it'll be easy. I just don't think we'll ever actually accomplish anything if we can't face facts. And as Ezra and Derek have said ideally there would be Republican Abundance faction so pro-housing Ds can do this as a cross coalition thing. Ideally it wouldn't be so partisan, which is necessary if cross-coalition work is to be possible.
There definitely are some pro abundance Republicans, but I don’t think at this point they control the commanding heights of that party.
Whoah there, I don’t think the abundance paradise is premised on development of endless suburban sprawl in Texas, NC and Florida
Zelmore Myrie is everything people say – smart, charismatic, filled with ideas. He’s also never managed anyone other than his administrative assistant. Being New York mayor is, first of all, being in charge of 300,000 employees and $100 billion budget.
Zelnor has never done anything that remotely prepares him for that. His answer – I’ll hire good people. But how will he know who’s good ? How will he know how to manage them? How will he know how to handle conflicts among them?
As a thought experiment, imagine instead saying that Zelnor should be in charge of Goldman Sachs or the Coca-Cola company or another organization whose and complexity rivals New York. It would be unimaginable.
Oh, and New York is actually harder to manage than Goldman or Coca-Cola, because there you can use incentives like compensation, and there you don’t have to worry about politics, and there you can get real world metrics on how your programs are working.
Government is really hard – harder than private enterprise. It’s just madness to make a completely unexperienced 37-year-old – no matter how smart and magnetic – the CEO of such a large and complex place.
The same could have been said of countless leaders who’ve risen out of nowhere.
"The same could have been said of countless leaders who’ve risen out of nowhere."
Case in point: the Slow Boring editorial assistant.
But beggars can't be choosers and New York voters don't have an option of a competent experienced candidate.
It would be better for everyone if there was a Cursus Honorium for executive jobs in the US but there isn't and also voters seem to like objectively terrible candidates.
When I say Cursus Honorium I mean it in a general sense rather than the specific Roman way. In France senior politicians will have passed a maths test, been a local mayor, legislator and minor minister before they have a big role, which prepares them better for complicated executive jobs.
Up until Marius and Sulla, the Cursus Honorum was mostly just a set of traditions that didn’t really serve any immediately practical purpose except to shape competition among the elites. Without it, Rome might have had some more instability in terms of ambitious young men trying to usurp their elders, but it didn’t make Rome any better at, like, managing the sewers or anything. The wagons didn’t run on time just because Flavius Stercocapitus had to put in a year as quaestor at 30 (which wasn’t even formalized until Sulla).
The real impact of the CH was just that it served as a set of norms to be broken in the later Republic, which the ultra-conservative Sulla stupidly imagined re-instituting them would magically set society aright again — news flash, that idea utterly failed.
The Roman Republic consistently produced decent-to-good generals - geniuses like Scipio weren’t common, but unlike in Rome’s rivals you almost never got a catastrophically bad one. Since the consuls were usually the chief generals and since about half of the cursus honorum was military in nature, I think you can credit it for this level of competence.
In the civilian domain… I mean, we don’t have a Roman McKinsey or JPMorgan to provide an alternate pathway into developing managerial ability, and all ancient states were tiny in their capacities by modern standards, but I think that Rome generally did well in terms of infrastructure and public order and all that compared to its rivals .
Most of Rome’s big infrastructure projects were done AFTER the CH was caput, because the collapse into Empire mooted having a CH.
RE the generals, the most famous successes were always either talented ingenues who just happened to luck into big opportunities because of a deep crisis in the Republic (Scipio, Julius), thus obverting the CH, or they were businessmen like Crassus who didn’t NEED the CH.
The prestige projects, sure, but the first aqueducts, sewer, grain dole (Annona) and above all roads were built/established under the Republic.
In terms of generalship, I’m not talking about the outliers, but more like the generals in the Macedonian wars. None were geniuses, but almost all were able to competently use Rome’s resources to win consistently.
Fair, but I just don’t see the CH as having been all that strong an institution at the time. The baseline requirement of ten whole years military service for all elites probably did more than anything else to make sure the elite ranks were well-stocked with competent generals, but I see that as nearly tangential to the CH’s main stated objective of pacing elite careers.
It’d be like crediting congressional review of our generals and civilian control with the fact that West Point produces a really fucking good officer corps. I mean, naw man, West Point may be the first phase of an overall well-run system of building general officers, but it’s wierd to credit one aspect of the system for all the good products that come out of a completely unrelated aspect of it.
Gaius Terentius Varro was spectacularly incompetent despite rising through the Cursus Honorium, I don't want to stretch a metaphor too far but he was a low born populist elected because he gave easy answers.
"spectacularly incompetent... low born populist elected because he gave easy answers"
Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.
"The wagons didn’t run on time just because Flavius Stercocapitus had to put in a year as quaestor at 30"
Well with a name like Stercocapitus, that's about what you'd expect, but what about his good friends Sillius Soddus and Biggus Dickus?
In all seriousness though, I think it's a good idea to have some kind of prerequisites for running for office, not necessarily modeled after Ancient Rome.
And at the same time though, we should absolutely note Sulla’s failures.
He basically got every conservative Boomer’s ultimate dream opportunity: A moment to Make Rome Great Again under essentially absolute rule. His word was law; he retired to grow his fucking CABBAGE afterwards.
And then it all collapsed… well, the most generous adverb to attach to it is “anyways”, but one might expand that to “and most likely directly because of how stupid his notion of putting history back into a bottle actually fucking is”.
We should… learn from that. If I were running a conservative indoctrination camp, Sulla would be Lesson Number One in how you can still fuck up even when you get every wish granted.
I’m glad at least SOMEONE picked up on the joke.
"What's so funny about Flavius Stehwcocapitus?"
"It's a joke name, sir."
"I have a good fwiend in Wome named Stehwcocapitus!"
It's an awesome stealth insult. "Donald Trump is a Stercocapitus Maximus!"
I have no idea how it would be possible to approach the question of whether the experience being a Aedile made men more competent Consuls. It isn't easy to judge the competence of modern politicians and that is with lots of good data.
This is an excellent point. However, management competence is in the service of accomplishing something. If we don't support Cuomo or Adams's goals, they shouldn't serve despite their (arguable) claims of managerial competence.
Can’t agree more! Managerial competence is useful — Obama’s earlier years could have gone better, after all — but not the only valuable quality in an elected leader.
NYC’s enormous bureaucracy Conderet names is precisely THAT: an enormous bureaucracy, replete with leaders and committees and whatnot, all with their own agendas.
Ironically, FWIW, NYC would do better with a Trump-like figure going to war with these bureaucracies on a popular mandate, since higher authorities exist who would be more than capable of smacking him down when he oversteps the law.
But short of such an extreme scenario, Zelnor seems more than capable of driving a YIMBY agenda.
This is a valid concern, but I'll point out a couple of things:
(1) Your criticism applies with greater force to, for example, Junior Senator from Illinois Barack Obama.
(2) He's currently running a campaign for mayor of NYC, which is in itself a fairly major organizational undertaking. If his campaign bombs, that handily answers the question of whether he can manage people. If his campaign succeeds, it indicates at the very least that he picks good people and doesn't get too much in their way.
(3) He's been running a legislative office for a couple of years, and I would imagine that involves at least one staffer. He also ran student government at Cornell Law School during our time there (he never had any serious competition for the role of student government president).
(4) A lot of running a large organization is getting people to believe in and trust your leadership. Zellnor is very good at securing that sort of buy-in.
(5) By way of personal anecdote, I can tell you that Zellnor and I got drunk together several times--including once when he took a few of us who were in NYC for an oral argument class to his favorite dive bar in Brooklyn--and at least twice he promised me a job in his future office/administration if I wanted it, specifically (he said) because he knew I was skeptical and pragmatic in ways that would help balance him out.
Obviously no drunken job offer of that sort should be taken seriously, but I take his expressed self-consciousness and interest in surrounding himself with pragmatists seriously, and judging from his platform he *has* surrounded himself with (ambitious) pragmatists.
Imagine tomorrow you were mayor. Police, fire, schools, hospitals, sanitation, housing, the works. Ten times the demands on your time as availability. Everybody’s got priorities they want elevated. You’re not quite sure who you can trust. You have to hire 50 senior and 500 semi-senior people pronto. Doing the things you want means convincing a range of constituencies. You’re way short of money. Oh, and there’s a crisis every other day that blows up your plans for what to get done.
Garcia, Bloomberg, Marie Torres-springer, Cuomo — they are people who’ve done this. Zelmore has not — not remotely. Neither had deblasio, you say? Exactly.
Ideas are easy, very easy. — execution is hard.
Fortunately, nobody ends up mayor of NYC on 24 hours notice. If Zellnor wins the primary, he'll have six months to figure out his staffing plans before he takes office.
I agree staffing up an administration and getting it moving in the intended direction will be a huge challenge, and one that Zellnor will likely have a harder time with than several of the other options. But I'll note that Garcia and Bloomberg (by far the most appealing persons on your list) aren't actually options because Garcia isn't running and Bloomberg can't. Torres-springer doesn't seem to be running either.
Who's running that has actual managerial experience? Sclerotic, authoritarian arch-NIMBY Cuomo? Corrupt, authoritarian, Trump-curious Adams? There's the two former comptrollers running, I suppose, but they're both literally and figuratively as colorless as candidates get.
Even with my personal relationship with Zellnor, I'd probably still vote for Garcia over him for largely the reasons you identify. But against the current field? I think Zellnor's the best option.
We obviously don't want people's first major elected position to be president, but are we actually going to be against people getting their start as a mayor or governor?
I think it’s pretty clear that we should be skeptical of someone who claims they can be successful at running a large city or even a small state if they’ve never run anything before.
Skepticism of them doesn’t mean they are worse than the alternative, but you probably do want to show you can manage an organization of a few hundred before managing New York City.
"...you probably do want to show you can manage an organization of a few hundred before managing New York City."
Conversely, if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere.
You wanna wake up in the city that doesn't sleep, to find you're king of the hill, top of the heap!
Personally, I believe, as a manager, that being in a director type position, where you manage managers who manage staff, and being successful at it, is enough to show your ability, whether your overall responsibility is 10 people or 1,000. Being able to manage managers and get great results isn’t dependent on it being some magic number of folks.
NYC voter here. Voted for Garcia. Any Democrat who is competent and will deal with crime, disorder, quality of life, and public safety of all kinds gets my vote. I really hate that the only people who are taking those concerns seriously are also people I disagree with on other priorities or who are not great people on a personal level, but I am so angry that this has been gaslit, justified, and the other Democrats (besides Adams who is now compromised) STILL won't truly address it. I'm a middle aged woman who takes public transport for about 95-99% of my transportation and I'm becoming a one issue voter here. As long as it isn't a Republican, who are compromised in their own way, I will vote for someone like Cuomo. This will probably piss off a lot of people, but I don't know what else it takes to get someone in office who takes this seriously.
I'm with you on all of this (except that I'm a middle-aged man who doesn't personally feel unsafe on the subway but knows lots of women who do and therefore cares very much about subway crime). SF just elected a moderate pro-housing mayor. Why do our pro-housing candidates have to mostly be lefties? If I have to choose between housing and crime I'm going to choose to vote based on crime because people won't want to live in NYC if we don't address that. I guess I could rank Myrie first but that won't really matter if nothing else changes and my second vote, which will wind up being the meaningful vote, will begrudgingly go to Cuomo. But we could have done better than this (Ritchie Torres!).
Yup, I hate being in this position. I didn't want Cuomo to be the only candidate besides Adams who would address those issues, but the other candidates have decided that's how they are running. Agreed about Richie Torres.
New York City is one of the least crime ridden cities in America. Not saying it can’t be pushed lower, but still…
The random subway assaults really get to people. You can cite all the status you want, but New Yorkers think crime is a problem and politicians need to take that seriously
I'm under no illusions that crime "doesn't get" to New Yorkers. I was specifically responding to this statement of yours:
"If I have to choose between housing and crime I'm going to choose to vote based on crime..."
It's simply factual information that NYC is one of the least dangerous places in the country.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-09-16/why-is-new-york-city-so-safe-traffic
So, while politicians indeed have to be solicitous to the concerns of voters, sometimes those concerns aren't wholly rational: prioritizing crime (again, NYC is super safe by US standards!) *over* housing (surely NYC's biggest problem) as a voter doesn't make sense for most residents (nearly 70% rent), even if it *does* make sense from the perspective of a politician.
I went to middle school and high school in Detroit and came to NYC in 1990 to go to college and stay afterwards. I’m aware of what higher crime looks like and I don’t want to go back to it. More importantly, at least back then, I don’t remember seeing people say that it wasn’t happening or that if it was happening, it was fine or that it was worse at some other place or time. I want someone to take it seriously and commit to bringing it lower as we go forward.
In theory, effective policing should complement the YIMBY agenda. Dense, walkable cities need more policing than suburbs, by their nature. If cities take away policing resources, then they are pushing families away from cities and into sprawling suburbs. Building more units anywhere will help drive down costs, but the aesthetic most city dwelling YIMBY’s have in mind will require active, effective police.
I live in Brooklyn and take the subway everyday. You are so right! I love the idea of growth but I don’t think my neighbors are totally focused on this like they are on crime and quality of life. There is so much housing going up in Gowanus right now so I’m sure there would be a healthy number who assume we’re actually tackling housing enough and need to focus on more pressing issues. (Not saying they’re 100% right but…)
It should be noted that Zellnor, at 37 years old, is the canonical age of a Slow Boring commenter. That should qualify him for the endorsement alone!
I'm sorry but this piece is hideously off the mark. Myrie is a died in the wool progressive and is categorically opposed to almost all points of the common sense manifesto.
Most importantly, he would return to the ridiculous, permissive policies of the De Blasio administration, and the still-persistent crime and quality of life problems in the city would explode. He is a dogmatic progressive and all that Ben can muster is a pathetic "well he hasn't fully rejected his previous stances..."
This is a ridiculous puff piece that is way below the standards of SB.
I think this is a really good example of the type of reverse purity thinking that I'm worried could turn up more often in response to the excesses of the left. Myrie is the only candidate in this race with a real plan to build substantially more housing. Some of his public safety policies are literally the opposite of many NYC progressives.
To say "he's a died in the wool progressive that is opposed to almost all points of the common sense manifesto" is just not a statement born out in fact.
Nitpick: should be "dyed in the wool," unless he expired while wearing a tweed jacket.
Oh man my life's greatest shame! Thank you.
This piece's title is an unsubstantiated unendorsement of a candidate whose current platform it doesn't discuss. That alone makes it political hackery unworthy of this site's aims.
Zellnor's platform site discusses more rent control, more money for public schools, and celebrates his role in NYS's disastrous criminal justice reforms of the past decade. Nothing in his platform or - more importantly - his professional record indicates that he would govern as anything other than a doctrinaire progressive.
It's nice that he will tell you what you want to hear in an interview but a well reported piece would actually examine his record instead of making excuses for it.
I'm not sure it's reverse purity thinking so much as it is a reality check. If he disavowed his former positions and became a pro-housing moderate that would give him a much better chance of winning, as there are two more prominent lefty candidates in the race (Lander and Mandani) and issues with both moderates. Myrie's decision to mostly stay progressive is both anti-common-sense-manifesto and also a bad call if his goal is to win over reluctant 2021 Garcia-Adams voters like me who are probably leaning Cuomo at the moment and annoyed about it.
It's pretty accurate if you look at things he's said and done during his tenure as State Senator as well as most of his platform outside of housing. It doesn't appear he had any interest in YIMBYism or housing abundance until he started his mayoral run in 2024, instead focusing on tenant protections and rent regulation, which isn't necessarily bad, but those aren't the kinds of things that are going to get more housing built, which is ultimately what would lower rents and give tenants more power.
Even today, looking through his state legislative record, it doesn't appear he's done anything to try to get more housing built in the state. He's in a position of power currently and if he's not using that position to solve this very serious issue in NY, why should we believe he's going to be any different as NYC mayor?
All that said, it would be good to see someone have some electoral success running on YIMBY platform because then that might motivate other candidates to embrace YIMBYism.
This exactly. Ben is comparing an interview about potential positions compared to (at best) Cuomo's record. Why not ask the other campaign as well? It just reads like a PR plant from Myrie aides who want to capture some of the moderate vote.
Myrie is well positioned to actually do something about the public safety and housing issues in NYS, but he has done conspicuously nothing. It's a shame that Ben is covering for him.
Seems to be another example of the ways YIMBYs lose credibility: Pitch is: "Build more housing, your concerns about traffic will be mitigated by good public transport." Then they support making existing public transport shittier by allowing it to be filled with mentally ill homeless people:
https://x.com/CharlesFLehman/status/1877418353632878750
Why should we believe them about anything else?
He's also called for substantially increasing overall NYPD manpower and specifically for increasing police presence on subways. That seems relevant to your line of attack. I also suspect that Zellnor's position is somewhat more nuanced than a simple "no." I could be wrong, but I'd put money on him drawing distinctions between first-time, occasional, and habitual fare evaders.
Seems odd to make fare evasion always a criminal matter when, for example, speeding tickets are nearly always civil.
Civil / criminal distinction is fair, but for me at least he doesn't get the benefit of the doubt. Broken windows coincided with a drop in incidents, and it's rollback has coincided with a rise.
To your point, he's now dropped his prior BLM rhetoric and is calling for substantially increasing NYPD, but is also pushing policies that are known to increase attrition. When these commitments come into conflict, which do you predict are going to win?
Attrition with more overall hiring to counteract it is probably good. A really nasty bunker mentality has set into policing in the last few generations, and it’d be better to turn over the ranks.
I'd agree with that, but I would prioritize hiring police ASAP, and per above don't have faith that Myrie shares those priorities.
It looked to me like you were arguing that ending QI would reduce hiring.
If so, I’d disagree — it would make *recruitment* more difficult, but not impossible to overcome with increased pay. And that’s not even necessarily guaranteed with every single recruit — not all of them are dyed-in-the-wool Blue Lives Matter-pilled, especially not in NYC vs literally anywhere else in the country.
A flatter pay structure is needed anyways. Ending QI would help flush out expensive bunker-pilled-dead-enders so that they don’t keep rigging the union contracts with such steep pay structures, and you could plow the savings into raising intro pay.
Yes, my argument is ending QI will both make recruitment more difficult, and increase attrition. To date, even with no discussion of ending QI, attrition is occuring far faster than hiring, and I don't think introducing ending QI will help matters.
Broken windows also coincided with a global drop in crime. It just happens that so much of American media is in New York that it first got reported as a New York story. (And I'm saying this as someone who wants more enforcement against fare evasion.)
Re civil/criminal: fare evasion is theft. From all of us. And the ancient NYPD program to arrest fare evaders produced dividends beyond reducing fare evasion. Turns out there’s a strong correlation between people who jump turnstiles and people who break other laws. So, lots of them had open warrants. And guns.
Depends on how they come into conflict and to what degree. What policies are you saying he pushes that will increase attrition? My best guess is that you're talking about his stance on qualified immunity, and that's simply not something the mayor has any power to affect. Is there something else you're referring to?
Per this article we're commenting on, he's in favor of increasing oversight of NYPD.
Also giving someone a bully pulpit on reducing QI is not something I'd be interested in until we're back at 2019 NYPD police levels at a minimum.
I highlighted this trade off with the quote from Lehman.
"Increasing oversight" is about as vague of a policy prescription as one can have. I expect he'll find some way to say he "increased oversight" while still hitting his NYPD recruitment goals.
I agree with him on QI, so I don't see how giving him a bully pulpit to talk about it would be a bad thing. I've seen first-hand how QI works when the rubber meets the road--or rather when the .pdfs meet the court's electronic filing system--and I just don't think it's accomplishing its goal in a remotely sensible way. Plus, it grows less effective every year as the body of caselaw on what cops can or can't do gets more and more fleshed-out, and their area of discretion shrinks as a result.
We need some new system, and I think the best one on offer is to treat cops more like other professions that regularly encounter potential situations of liability by making them carry insurance. Obviously municipalities would need to pay the entire premiums on behalf of the vast majority of officers, but anybody whose premium increases to, say, a standard deviation higher than average probably should be attrited out of the force.
Got it - yeah for me it's a matter of priorities. I would have likely been far more sympathetic to his campaign were he running on this platform in 2017.
Yeah, criminal/civil is not the right question to ask.
Zellnor Myrie is the platonic ideal of a New Yorker name.
You would think that if New Yorkers are paying 50% of their income on rent due to constrained supply, there would be a surge of public enthusiasm for building more and that ambitious politicians would be all over the issue.
Maybe that will happen sometime during the campaign, but any idea as to why it hasn't caught on with the electorate as yet?
Because the causal link between preventing developers from building new housing forty years ago and high prices today is hard for normal people to see. Plus, lots of people have spent lots of time and effort on convincing normies that developers are actually the bad guys responsible for the problem because they only build "luxury" housing.
It's not hard to see why good policy has such a hard time breaking through on this. It's just difficult to explain the problem to normies.
I agree with you, but even given these factors, it's also weird that supply-and-demand is the one thing everyone understands intuitively about economics, but somehow on the biggest part of everyone's budget, a lot of people refuse to believe it.
Everyone immediately understands supply and demand when they're talking about Airbnb taking housing units off the regular housing market.
"Plus, lots of people"
see pretty much all of Hollywood
People seem to get mad about high egg and gas prices and demand politicians do something about them.
Yes, but I think they assume there are very short term solutions to things like egg prices because prices went up in such a short amount of time and prices are known to go down.
The challenge is that an honest discourse would confess that YIMBY policies probably won’t reduce rents by much, but should keep rent from rising as much in the long term. To which voters say “why are we even talking about benefits 5 years or a decade from now?” Because they are short term thinkers on the whole.
But what stops politicians from demagoguing the issue? I’m not saying I’m in favor of that (I prefer rational debate); I’m just trying to understand the apparent lack of outrage in the electorate when they spend half their income on housing. I would blow a gasket in their situation.
No obviously receptive audience. Progressives hate gentrification. Conservatives hate density.
I think it's a few things, including (1) A lot of people sincerely do not believe that building more housing will lower housing costs. Economics is counterintuitive. (2) People who do believe that building more housing lowers housing costs often support building more housing, but not near themselves. So the "right thing" economically - letting the free market decide where new housing goes - doesn't appeal to them, because the risk outweighs the benefit.
I think you could mitigate (2) by engaging in a little central planning and saying "we want to build more housing and specifically we plan to build it here, here, and here, and not there, there, or there." Theoretically if 49% of the electorate lives in the "here" areas, and 51% of the electorate lives in the "there" areas, you might be able to win. It is not praxis, but sometimes politics requires a little bit of realpolitik.
What you say makes a lot of sense but doesn’t capture the dynamics of political beliefs. No one understands why egg prices go up (or down) or how the global oil market drives the price you pay at the pump. But people get angry and punish those in power and seek those who promise (however unrealistically) to ameliorate the problem. Sure, people don’t understand the dynamics of increased construction. But what prevents them from becoming mad as hell and saying they won’t tolerate it anymore?
Excellent article!
Myrie is clearly the least bad housing candidate, but he’s far from a good candidate. His housing plan is filled with affordability poison pills; this post admits he’s emphasizing NYCHA expansion with no plan on how to make it not a money pit; and there’s no reason to believe he’s changed his mind on the disastrous 2019 rent control bill.
Combined with his left wing social views, this really seems like an election to sit out.
I am curious to look into Abundance NY, especially since Open NY is an outpost of the DSA and broadly ambivalent about housing.
Myrie seems good but when I hear him talk he sounds elite and not relatable to people who are not educated in elite high schools and colleges.
He reminds me of dem candidates of years past who suffered the same problems and get beat by guys like Adams and cuomo pretty consistently who whatever else know how to talk to all different types of people.