I love the Tom Wolfe comment! It perfectly describes why I find Adams a fascinating character. He reminds me of someone who would have been around during my youth in the 1980s!
We need safer streets and better street design, but you will never get a large amount of people to abandon their cars in favor of mass transportation. People need cars, depend on cars and prefer cars, yes even in NYC. MTA will never make everyone happy nor will they ever have enough resources to provide service adequately so that the overwhelming majority of NYC residents will enthusiastically and willfully ride transit because they want to. The MTA needs to focus on three groups of people, the elderly or disabled who can't drive, those who are too poor to own a car, those traveling to the central business district. Making car ownership prohibitively expensive and making parking prohibitively expensive will only make driving cars accessible to wealthy interests (some of whom back TA, Open Plans, Riders Alliance) and it will be a self fulfilling prophecy of only wealthy elite driving cars. Meanwhile the city will piss enough people off to leave NYC and cause even more gentrification (along with having the poorest residents who can't go anywhere else).
"Blaming gun violence on criminal justice reforms is wrong because other cities have seen huge spikes in shootings and murders since the onset of the pandemic without any correlating changes to local or state law."
The whole world went through a pandemic without any correlating increase in violent crime. That was unique to the US, and the common denominator was the mass movement to delegitimize policing, based on a sensationalized, decontextualized, isolated event in a country of 330 million people.
And as far as bail reform goes, Jim Quinn had a good article in the Post recently about how bad it is looking so far, and how deceptive advocates have been about it.
The most innovative approach to mental health and it implications, was trashed by the media, the Post was unrelentless, the Thrive program was a boondoggle, in reality it was the exact program that pundits are calling for today .... maybe it was poorly implimented or maybe having Chirlene's name at the top of the masthead, it never had a chance.
Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, every large urban center is facing high incidents of gun-related crime, no one has an answer, and neither will Adams It will dominate the June Democratic primaries and the November general elections.
The "solution" is the calming of omicron, if the wave passes and jobs return (current 9% NYC unemployment rate) maybe crime will recede. What will not recede is the "nattering journalists" seeking the high click stories and right wing urging Adams to "lock 'em up," a synonym for less acceptable racist language.
One of NYC's most popular mayor was a Republican, Fiorlello LaGuardia, who raced to fires and was beloeved by the citizenry. Adams is looking like the Black LaGuardia
BDB cut 40,000 potential youth jobs in 2020, which really should be mentioned when talking about the prolonged youth unemployment coming out of the pandemic. That money was restored last year but Adams could chase a few less ambulances and propose a broader city jobs program as a way to address violence that could actually get support by other electeds. Instead he's digging in his heels over issues like bail reform, which clearly state officials, and many city council members, see no reason to move. Why does our swagged mayor not try and get some easy wins rather than careen from crisis to crisis without solutions.
I love the Tom Wolfe comment! It perfectly describes why I find Adams a fascinating character. He reminds me of someone who would have been around during my youth in the 1980s!
We need safer streets and better street design, but you will never get a large amount of people to abandon their cars in favor of mass transportation. People need cars, depend on cars and prefer cars, yes even in NYC. MTA will never make everyone happy nor will they ever have enough resources to provide service adequately so that the overwhelming majority of NYC residents will enthusiastically and willfully ride transit because they want to. The MTA needs to focus on three groups of people, the elderly or disabled who can't drive, those who are too poor to own a car, those traveling to the central business district. Making car ownership prohibitively expensive and making parking prohibitively expensive will only make driving cars accessible to wealthy interests (some of whom back TA, Open Plans, Riders Alliance) and it will be a self fulfilling prophecy of only wealthy elite driving cars. Meanwhile the city will piss enough people off to leave NYC and cause even more gentrification (along with having the poorest residents who can't go anywhere else).
"Blaming gun violence on criminal justice reforms is wrong because other cities have seen huge spikes in shootings and murders since the onset of the pandemic without any correlating changes to local or state law."
The whole world went through a pandemic without any correlating increase in violent crime. That was unique to the US, and the common denominator was the mass movement to delegitimize policing, based on a sensationalized, decontextualized, isolated event in a country of 330 million people.
And as far as bail reform goes, Jim Quinn had a good article in the Post recently about how bad it is looking so far, and how deceptive advocates have been about it.
The most innovative approach to mental health and it implications, was trashed by the media, the Post was unrelentless, the Thrive program was a boondoggle, in reality it was the exact program that pundits are calling for today .... maybe it was poorly implimented or maybe having Chirlene's name at the top of the masthead, it never had a chance.
Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, every large urban center is facing high incidents of gun-related crime, no one has an answer, and neither will Adams It will dominate the June Democratic primaries and the November general elections.
The "solution" is the calming of omicron, if the wave passes and jobs return (current 9% NYC unemployment rate) maybe crime will recede. What will not recede is the "nattering journalists" seeking the high click stories and right wing urging Adams to "lock 'em up," a synonym for less acceptable racist language.
One of NYC's most popular mayor was a Republican, Fiorlello LaGuardia, who raced to fires and was beloeved by the citizenry. Adams is looking like the Black LaGuardia
BDB cut 40,000 potential youth jobs in 2020, which really should be mentioned when talking about the prolonged youth unemployment coming out of the pandemic. That money was restored last year but Adams could chase a few less ambulances and propose a broader city jobs program as a way to address violence that could actually get support by other electeds. Instead he's digging in his heels over issues like bail reform, which clearly state officials, and many city council members, see no reason to move. Why does our swagged mayor not try and get some easy wins rather than careen from crisis to crisis without solutions.