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less-crowded suburbs or tax-advantageous states such as Florida. Perhaps this is an opportunity for the city to finally institute commercial rent regulations in return for federal and city subsidies to incentivize new small businesses to open in the emptying retail districts. Can we actually bring back, through targeted subsidies, “mom and pop” shops that the banks and drugstores and other large chains have chased out of our neighborhoods? Can we convert the overabundance of Class B and C commercial real estate to affordable housing
August 24, 2020
revenue-starved environment. But like the 1970s, there needs to be shared sacrifice. City government must do more with less; perhaps eliminating overtime in the NYPD and FDNY and other city agencies could avert mass layoffs. A freeze on both hiring and wage increases for government employees for at least one year may be necessary to stem the looming cuts to city employee headcount, which the mayor estimates to be 22,000 in October, almost 7% of the municipal workforce. Labor unions will have to get in a room
I suspect even our “progressive” mayor and his NYPD Commissioner would be forced to attack this problem more urgently than they have done in the past two months. Policing needs to be redefined and the scope of responsibilities shrunk to crime prevention and reacting to and solving violent crimes; for matters like penalizing traffic infractions or dealing with domestic abuse and mentally ill homeless people, we’d be better served by civilian employees who are specialists who will not walk around with a gun. This will start to deWith big chains fleeing the city, this could be an opportunity to bring back the “mom and pop” shops that have been driven out of neighborhoods by banks and drug stores that could afford astronomical rents.
and solve two problems at once? Gov. Andrew Cuomo joked that he’s inviting rich New Yorkers over for homecooked meals to persuade them not to abandon the city, and he more seriously argued that any tax increase would harm those efforts. But the budget gap must be solved, so there is no doubt that increased taxes on the wealthy are necessary. Perhaps, though, they can be enacted by the Legislature for three years and then sunset, to get us through the coming challenging period. If they are not permanent, then these wealthy New Yorkers will have less reason to flee. We can appeal to the civic pride of wealthy New Yorkers to hang in and do their fair share to get our weakened City back on its feet. And a “pied-à-terre” tax on those that don’t live in New York full time but benefit from its abundant services is a no-brainer in this
with business and real estate leaders like Kathy Wylde of the Partnership for NYC and Jim Whelan from REBNY, and devise ways to work together to get New York to the other side of this fiscal cliff. In the absence of leadership from City Hall, labor and business and real estate need to fill the vacuum like Victor Gotbaum, Felix Rohatyn and Lew Rudin did in the 1970s. There’s a playbook from that era that our current crop of mayoral candidates should be studying now. To combat the soaring crime rate, there are a number of fixes that need to be implemented in the coming months. The NYPD should use Compstat to flood the zone with undercover police in illegal gun hotspots and implement an aggressive gun buyback program to get guns off the streets. Much of the increase in crime is in poorer areas of the city; if shootings and violent crime were skyrocketing on the Upper East Side,
fuse the tensions that bubbled over this summer throughout the country – and led to protests and some looting in the city – because many New Yorkers are understandably frustrated with continued inaction on meaningful police reform. The NYPD needs more focused job descriptions, so that police are set up to succeed rather than to fail; we need to decriminalize many nonviolent crimes like drug possession, prostitution and petty larceny that have contributed to our shameful mass incarceration crisis. There are so many flames burning in our city right now that it’s easy to throw up your hands and say that the fire will consume us. In the city’s low point in the 1970s, the iconic slogan for New York was “the Bronx is burning.” Well, the Bronx made an impressive comeback the last two decades and our city will do the same in the next two to three years. To accomplish this, we need enlightened politicians who are driven less by ideology and performative leadership, but rather by pragmatism and the ability to creatively turn around failing policies and institutions. If New York is indeed one large corporation, then we need a turnaround artist who can roll up their sleeves to do the hard work of preaching shared sacrifice and can unite all interest groups in the city in a coordinated way to rebuild New York better, more equal and more just than it has ever been.
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Tom Allon is the president and publisher of City & State.